C S Lewis and the Country House Murders (C S Lewis Mysteries Book 2) (11 page)

‘First: it allows for the human soul, or mind, to be immortal—not to be extinguished with the death of one body. That fits in with Socrates and Plato as well as your Christianity. Secondly: Vishal claimed that there was psychological evidence—the loves and fears of early childhood, he said, reflect our previous life or lives. And I read an article in one of the Sunday papers last year about people who remembered past lives under hypnosis. Thirdly: it makes the universe a just place. People carry a load of what Vishal called
karma
, meaning the good and bad deeds they’ve done in this life, and the form of their rebirth either rewards or punishes those deeds. That metes out justice in the universe, and catches even the criminal who escaped the law during his lifetime. There you are—there’s a list of three.’

‘None of which, I’m afraid, stands up. First: the immortality of the soul, or mind, could operate in any number of ways—disembodied existence, for example, as the Spiritualists believe; or resurrection in a new, perfected body in the New Heavens and the New Earth, as Christians believe. Immortality does not, of itself, logically imply reincarnation.’

‘That’s probably fair enough. My second point?’

‘The psychological evidence is remarkably weak. Infant fears, such as fear of the dark, fear of separation from its parent or fear of sudden loud noises, simply come from being human, not from being reincarnated. And a great many so call “recovered memories” have been exposed as false. Investigation has revealed many to have been implanted or suggested by the hypnotherapist. There was that housewife in Brighton a few years ago who claimed to remember living in London during the Great Plague. It turned out that she was just recycling stories told to her in the nursery by her aunt. No, the psychological evidence is feeble.’

‘So what about justice? Doesn’t reincarnation make the universe a fair and just place?’

‘In fact it makes the whole problem worse. Reincarnation wants us to believe that when the innocent suffer they deserve it—they are being punished for something they’ve done in a previous life. Someone who is born with a serious disability is assumed to have been especially wicked in their last life. The result is disabled beggars on the streets of India. I hope I don’t sound too harsh when I say that it’s Christians, not Hindus, who found hospitals and charities because Christians believe we are our brother’s keeper and we must love our neighbour as ourselves.’

‘Still . . .’

‘My dear Morris, reincarnation is, in the end, profoundly anti-humanitarian because there is no room for forgiveness. There is no grace in
karma
, simply relentless, unforgiving punishment. I heard Christmas Humphreys speak at the Oxford Union on Buddhism once. What was interesting was what happened afterwards.’

‘Afterwards?’

‘As I came out of the Sheldonian, I saw your friend Vishal on the corner being cross-examined by a group of students. Under their questioning he said that anyone who helps a person born with a disability heaps bad
karma
on themselves and on the person they’re helping. God’s grace is better by far than the cold, unforgiving
karma
of reincarnation.’

I didn’t like where this argument was heading, so I said, ‘I think the rain is starting to ease.’

‘Before I let you off the hook entirely, young Morris,’ Jack responded with a deep-throated chuckle at my manoeuvre, ‘here’s one more thing to think about. The basic idea of a cycle of one rebirth after another is that human beings learn from each life cycle and slowly become morally better. That’s what Vishal’s idea of
karma
is supposed to be doing: teaching us to do a little better in each subsequent lifetime. But look at human history—there is no evidence of that happening. I don’t know how many thousands of generations of humans there have been in total, but I lived through trench warfare in France, and I see no signs that this generation is morally superior to every preceding generation.’

‘So the alternative is . . . ?’

‘Immortality without reincarnation. As the Bible says, “It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment”.’

‘That sounds even grimmer,’ I complained. ‘But we can leave that for another time—the rain really has stopped. We should get back to the village.’

Getting back to the village was certainly what we tried to do. But things didn’t work out quite as we intended.

I stepped out of the shelter of the spreading branches of the box tree. The rain had stopped completely. It hadn’t just eased off, it had stopped. Not a drop was falling. The problem was those thick storm clouds still filled the sky from horizon to horizon. The sun had set and the moon was buried somewhere in the clouds. Not a single star was visible. The night was as dark as a dungeon.

‘Which way back to the road?’ I mused out loud. ‘We need to retrace our steps.’

‘You are my guide,’ said Jack. ‘Lead on, young Morris.’

So I led on. In, as it turned out, entirely the wrong direction. What made me so confident I have no idea. Some people, I know, are born with an inner compass that always points them in the right direction. I am the exact opposite: no sense of direction at all (turn me around three times in the kitchen and I can’t find the door). I have about as much sense of how to track through the English countryside in the dark as a penguin has of doing algebra. So where my certainty came from I have no idea.

‘I’m sure this is the way we came,’ I announced, displaying a gift for creative fiction at short notice.

Jack may have been doubtful, but if so he kept his doubts to himself and set off beside me trudging across the damp moors. So deep was the darkness that I could see nothing of my companion. I only knew he was there by the steady splosh of his footfalls on the sodden field.

After about ten minutes—or perhaps fifteen, or possibly even twenty, my sense of time being in the same non- functioning category as my sense of direction—I discovered a low stone wall. When I say ‘discovered’, what I mean is I collided with it, making a loud ‘harrumph’ sound and almost falling over as I did so.

‘Careful, Jack,’ I said, ‘there’s a stone wall here’—thus earning myself five points in the Extremely Obvious category. I earned another five by announcing, ‘We’ll need to climb over it.’

Jack courteously did as I suggested, then he stopped and looked at me. I could faintly see his smiling face in the dim, red glow from his pipe. The more uncomfortable circumstances became, the happier Jack seemed to be.

However, he did lay a hand on my shoulder and say, ‘Are you quite sure this is the way we should be going?’

‘Well . . .’ I admitted, ‘we do seem to have been plodding on for rather a long time.’

‘Surely we should have hit the road by now?’

‘If we were going in the right direction, yes, we should have. And that leads me to confidently announce that we are now thoroughly lost. Where we are in relation to the road and the village I haven’t a clue.’

‘That does pose a bit of a problem, young Morris. What do you suggest?’

‘The ground beneath my feet seems to be rising up a slope in that direction,’ I said, pointing with an arm invisible in the darkness at an equally invisible horizon. ‘I suggest we keep going up the slope. If we get high enough we might spot a light from a farmhouse . . . or something.’

‘I do have the feeling,’ said Jack, ‘that we are competing in Lewis Carroll’s caucus race—but your proposal is as good as any, so lead on.’

Once again I led on. But this time without any of the confidence I felt when we left the box tree.

Perhaps five minutes later we reached what might have been, judging from the ground beneath our feet and the faint breeze we could now feel, the top of a ridge.

‘Down there,’ said Jack, once we had caught our breath. ‘Below us and a little to our left, behind those trees—is that a light from a window?’

‘I believe you’re right, Jack. Come on, let’s head straight towards it.’

So we did. Keeping that dim light from a curtained window in view meant climbing over another low stone wall, clambering down a steep grassy slope and pushing through occasional bushes and brambles, but we kept on track.

As we drew closer, the clouds parted a little and at least half of the moon appeared. The dim light was enough for our dark-adapted eyes to make out the shape of a small cottage looming ahead of us in the darkness. We hurried in that direction.

‘That’s too small to be a farmhouse,’ I puffed. ‘I had no idea there was an isolated cottage out here on the moors.’

‘Since we have no idea where “here” is, your ignorance of its existence is hardly surprising,’ suggested my companion. ‘Besides which we seem to be at the bottom of a deep, narrow fold in the hills—this place is probably invisible from anywhere up on the moorlands, even in broad daylight.’

A low picket fence surrounded the cottage. We found the gate and swung it open. As we did so, sounds could be heard from inside. There were low voices and the sound of people moving. Then came an anguished cry followed by a heavy crash and a thump. Jack ran ahead of me up the path and knocked vigorously on the cottage door.

The sounds within ceased. Jack knocked again, but silence was the only response. As he knocked a third time, I began to grope my way around the rough stone walls of the cottage. I got to the curtained window we had seen from the ridge top, but the curtains were drawn to the very edges of the sash. There was no gap giving me a glimpse of the room within, only the dim glow seeping through the curtain fabric. I continued my circumnavigation but found no other sign of light, and no other entry point.

I rejoined Jack at the front door as he knocked yet again. The silence inside the cottage was now total.

‘Hello,’ Jack called. ‘Is there anyone in there? We’re lost on the moors—we want some directions.’

Faintly the silence was broken by shuffling sounds from inside the small cottage.

‘I think someone’s coming to the door,’ I whispered, although why I whispered I don’t know—we were not trying to hide our presence. Perhaps it was the heavy air of mystery that hung over the dark cottage that made me lower my voice.

Then came the sound of not one but several bolts being slid back, and the door creaked open a few inches. The face that confronted us was startling: it was a heavy, masculine face, as brown as walnut, with deep-set eyes and strange tattoos on the forehead and both cheeks. It was surrounded by long black hair hanging almost to the shoulders.

‘Sorry to bother you, old chap,’ said Jack in his hearty, confident way, ‘but we’ve managed to get ourselves thoroughly lost. We’re looking for the road that will take us back to Plumwood village. You can’t help at all, I suppose?’

A suspicious look passed over that exotic face, then the man swung the door open a few more inches and leaned out. He pointed with a gnarled and knuckly brown hand in the direction of one corner of the cottage.

‘That way,’ he almost grunted. ‘Straight. You go straight.’

‘Is it far to the road?’ I asked.

‘Ten minutes,’ said the stranger, ‘no more. You go straight.’

‘If you don’t mind my mentioning it,’ said Jack, ‘we did hear a cry and a fall as we approached your cottage. Is your friend inside all right?’

‘No one here,’ said the man, with a note of alarm in his voice. He stepped back and began to ease the door closed. ‘No one here.’

‘Are you quite sure . . .’ Jack began.

The stranger thumped himself on the chest and grunted loudly, ‘Just me. Just me.’

Then the door closed swiftly and firmly in our face, and we heard all those bolts being slid back into place.

Getting back to Plumwood turned out to be tiresome but fairly straightforward after that. Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly ticking off all the unpleasant surprises as having been delivered on cue and was now leaving us to our own devices. The clouds broke up a little further, scattering moonlight and starlight on the landscape, and we were able to make a straight track across the fields in the direction the stranger had indicated.

Sure enough, he had put us on the right path, and we soon came to the hedge that bordered the road. We searched until we found a small gap in this and pushed our way through onto a familiar narrow country road.