The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (20 page)

In places it looked as if the “horseshoe” had a split in it, suggesting a cloven hoof. It was the middle of the Victorian era, and few country people doubted the existence of the Devil. Men armed with guns and pitchforks followed the trail; when night came people locked their doors and kept loaded shotguns at hand.

It was another week before the story reached the newspapers; on 16 February 1855 the London
Times
told the story, adding that most gardens in Lympstone showed some trace of the strange visitor. The following day the
Plymouth Gazette
carried a report, and mentioned the theory of a clergyman that the creature could have been a kangaroo – apparently unaware that a kangaroo has claws. A report in the Exeter
Flying Post
made the slightly more plausible suggestion that it was a bird. But a correspondent in the
Illustrated London News
dismissed this idea, pointing out that no bird leaves a horse-shoe-shaped print. He added that he had passed a five-month winter in the backwoods of Canada, and had never seen a more clearly defined track.

In the
Illustrated London News
for 3 March the great naturalist and anatomist Richard Owen announced dogmatically that the footmarks were those of hind foot of a badger, and suggested that many badgers had come out of hibernation that night to seek food. He did not explain why all these badgers hopped along on one hind foot. (Five years later, he was to be equally dogmatic – and equally wrong – on the subject of Charles Darwin and the origin of species.) Another correspondent, a doctor, described how he and another doctor “bestowed considerable time in endeavouring to discover the peculiarities of this most singular impression” (the Victorians loved this kind of pompous language). He claimed that “on more minute examination of the tracks, we could distinctly see the impressions of the toes and pad of the foot of an animal”. His own candidate was an otter. Another correspondent, who signed himself “Ornither”, was quite certain that they were the prints of a Great Bustard, whose outer toes, he claimed, were rounded. Another gentleman, from Sudbury, said he had recently seen impressions of rats
surrounding a potato patch, and that they looked exactly like the drawings of “the devil’s footprints”. He thought that the rats had been leaping through the snow, landing with their full body weight and producing a roughly horseshoe-shaped impression. A Scottish correspondent thought that the culprit could be a hare or polecat bounding through the snow. These suggestions are less absurd than they sound. They would certainly explain the most baffling feature of the footprints – that they followed one upon another, as if made by a one-legged animal. But they still fail to explain why they continued for forty miles or so.

Perhaps the likeliest hypothesis is one put forward by Geoffrey Household, who edited a small book containing all the major correspondence on the matter.
³
He comments as follows, in a letter to the author:

This information is fascinating, and could well represent the solution of the mystery. But if so there is still one major anomaly to be explained. A glance at the map of the “footprints” will show that they meandered in a kind of circle between Topsham and Exmouth. Would an escaped balloon drift around so erratically? Surely its route would tend to be a more or less straight line, in the direction of the prevailing wind which, moreover, was blowing from the east.

The fact that it took a week for the first report of the mystery to appear in print means that certain vital clues have been lost for ever. It would be interesting to know, for example, whether the snow that fell that night was the first snow of February 1855. It had been a hard winter that year, and many small animals, including rats, rabbits and badgers, must have been half starved by February, and have been out looking for food. The letter to the
Plymouth Gazette
(dated 17 February) begins: “Thursday night, the 8th of February, was marked by a heavy fall of snow, followed by rain and boisterous wind from the east, and in the morning frost”. Small animals had probably been out every night, but it was not until that Friday morning, with its fresh carpet of snow, that their tracks were noticed for the first time. Such tracks would have sunk deep into the soft snow, and would have been further deepened by the rain before they were frozen solid. This would explain why they seemed to be “branded” into the snow.

But if the ground was already covered with snow before the night of 8 February, then one more plausible theory would have to be abandoned. And in any case it fails to explain how the tracks managed to wander over rooftops and haystacks . . . At this distance in time, the only certainty seems to be that the mystery is now insoluble.

13

Was Philip K. Dick Possessed by an Angel?

By the time of his death in March 1982, Philip K. Dick had become perhaps the most respected of modern science-fiction writers. The reason for this was expressed in an essay on Dick by Brian Stableford. “He has done more than anyone else to open up metaphysical questions to science fictional analysis”.
⁴

He was also, with the possible exception of H. P. Lovecraft, the most neurotic of major science-fiction writers, obsessed by the notion that human beings are trapped in a web of unreality. His persecution mania developed to a point where he could undoubtedly have been described as a paranoid schizophrenic. Yet, toward the end of his life, Dick became convinced that he had been “taken over” by a kind of super-alien, who went on to reorganize his life. And although Lawrence Sutin, in his full-length biography of Dick,
Divine Invasions
(1991), casts doubts on some of Dick’s claims, the case is too complex to be dismissed as simple self-delusion.

Philip Kindred Dick was an oversensitive little boy whose childhood was not designed to make him buoyant and optimistic. His twin sister died soon after his birth – as a result, he was later convinced, of his mother’s neglect. He was a lonely child; his mother was cold and, in Sutin’s words, “emotionally constrained”. She was often in pain and spent long periods bedridden – she suffered from Bright’s disease. Dick himself suffered from asthma and had eating and swallowing phobias. He was an introverted child who liked to retreat into daydreams of cowboys; he resisted all of his father’s attempts to interest him in sports. His parents divorced when he was five. When he was nine, he and his
mother moved to Berkeley, California, and Dick attended high school there. His relationship with his mother, who was slim and pretty, had classic Freudian overtones; when he was a teenager he even had a dream that he was sleeping with her. He finally left home at nineteen – he claimed his mother threatened to call the police to stop him – and moved into a bohemian rooming house populated by gay artists. From the age of fifteen he had worked in a local TV and record store and so was able to support himself.

At nineteen Dick was still a virgin who had never even kissed a girl. Then one of his customers – a short, overweight woman named Jeanette, who was ten years his senior – remedied the situation in a storeroom in the basement, and Dick decided to marry her; she was the first of five wives. When they had been married two months, Jeanette told him that she had a right to see other men; he dumped her possessions outside their apartment and changed the locks. His love life became sporadic and not particularly satisfying; one woman he fell in love with preferred his partner in the store; another went off with a lesbian. Another beautiful woman with whom he had an affair dropped him because he was so socially inept. A nervous breakdown – accompanied by agoraphobia – led him to leave the University of California a year later. “I managed to become universally despised wherever I went”, he later told an interviewer. This led him, he said, to identify with the weak and to make the heroes in his stories weak.

From an early age Dick was obsessed by pain and misery. He records that when he was four his father, who had fought on the Marne in World War I, told him about gas attacks and men with their guts blown out. And during World War II, when he was still a child, he saw a newsreel showing a Japanese soldier who had been hit by a flamethrower and was “burning and running, and burning and running”, while the audience cheered and laughed. Dick wrote of the incident: “I was dazed with horror . . . and I thought
something is terribly wrong
”. And in an autobiographical essay he wrote: “Human and animal suffering makes me mad; whenever one of my cats dies I curse God and I mean it; I feel fury at him. I’d like to get him where I could interrogate him, tell him I think the world is screwed up, that man didn’t sin and fall but was pushed”. Forced to kill a rat that had been caught in a trap in his children’s bedroom, he was haunted for the rest of his life by its screams. As a youngster, Dick had had an urge to cruelty, but after an incident in his childhood that involved tormenting a beetle, the urge suddenly vanished and was replaced by a sense of the oneness of life – what he called satori: “I was never the same again”.

Dick’s obsession with the problem of cruelty resembled that of the Russian writer Dostoyevsky, whose Ivan Karamazov confesses that the cruelty and brutality of the world makes him want to “give God back his entrance ticket”. It is unsurprising, therefore, that Dick’s first science-fiction story, “Beyond Lies the Wub”, concerned space explorers on an alien planet who buy a piglike creature called a wub, which is delighted to discuss philosophy with them – while their only desire is to eat it. A later wub story describes how wub fur is used to bind books because it is self-repairing, though the fur causes the texts to alter. Thomas Paine’s
Age of Reason
vanishes completely – an expression of Dick’s feeling that it is an absurd form of hubris for human beings to believe they are rational creatures.

From then on most of Dick’s work had a morbid, not to say paranoid, streak. In “Second Variety”, machines get out of hand and create duplicate humans to trap real people. “The Imposter” is about a man who finds himself subjected to the nightmarish experience of being suspected of being a robot bomb; the final twist of the story is that it turns out to be true. (Dick’s early stories were heavily influenced by the work of the older science-fiction writer, A. E. Van Vogt, who often chooses such themes – e.g., a hero caught in a nightmare world of apparently insane misunderstandings – although his basic outlook is optimistic.)

There is a Kafkaesque quality to Dick’s work, which often features individuals beset by endless complications that frustrate all attempts at purposeful action. Like so many modern writers – notably Arthur C. Clarke – Dick likes to play with the idea of computers developing their own intelligence and taking over from human beings. He is also inclined to experiment with the idea that the word “reality” is meaningless – that, instead, there are as many “realities” as there are living creatures and that the notion of “reality” is therefore purely subjective. This view, of course, leads easily to solipsism, the belief that you are the only person in the universe. After all, if the reality around us is “relative” and self-created, then perhaps other people are illusions we create to defend us from the recognition of our loneliness.

One of Dick’s early novels,
Eye in the Sky
(1957), encapsulates his views about “reality”; a group of people find themselves in an “alternative reality” where other people’s beliefs can become “reality”; a religious cult imposes its own views on everyone’s mind. They then realize that they are trapped in the insane reality of one of their own number. When they escape this illusion, they immediately find themselves entrapped in yet another. Their return to “reality” is a painful
process in which they have to escape the “individual reality” of every member of the group. But in this early work Dick at least believes that a “return to reality” is possible. His later work becomes more darkly pessimistic, infused with the underlying conviction that there is no overall “reality”, only our individual illusions. This could be regarded as a dramatized version of the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer and possibly that of Buddha.

In 1963 Dick finally achieved relatively wide recognition with a novel entitled
Man in the High Castle
, which won the Hugo Award for best science-fiction novel of the year. It is another “alternative reality” novel, about a world in which the Allies lost the Second World War, with the result that America is divided into a German zone and a Japanese zone. A character named Tagomi has flashes of an alternative reality in which the Allies won the war, but they seem absurd. Dick apparently plotted this novel with the aid of the
I Ching
, the Chinese book of oracles; the result is a certain arbitrary quality. A later novel,
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
?, concerns an attempt by “real people” to root out the robots that are trying to take over the earth and that are virtually indistinguishable from humans. (It was made into a successful film,
Blade Runner
.) All of Dick’s work seems to express his own sense of having an extremely insecure foundation in reality and his inability to cope with life. He wrote, “For us . . . there can be no system. Maybe
all
systems . . . are manifestations of paranoia. We should be content with the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile”.