Empire Dreams (13 page)

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EXTRACTS FROM THE REPORT OF DR. HUBERT ORR, ROYAL COLLEGE OF SURGEONS, DUBLIN.

PHYSICAL EXAMINATION OF
the patient revealed her to have indeed suffered some form of sexual ravagement, resulting in pregnancy, undoubtedly upon the night in question. However, it is not the physical aspects of this case which are so intriguing as the psychological ones …

The recent works of the Viennese Dr. Sigmund Freud have aroused great interest in the subliminal processes of the mind, particularly in the field of repressed sexual feelings. In the patient’s case I feel this to be a significant contributing factor. The repressive regime of the teaching sisters at Cross and Passion School has been well testified to in the girl’s diaries, and, coupled with her hints as to juvenile dalliance in illicit love with its consequent fear of censure and punishment, would certainly drive her sexual longings deep into what Dr. Freud terms the “subconscious” and seal them there under layer upon layer of guilt. On her return to the romantically idealised home environment, these restraints would be loosened, the patient’s sexual imagination permitted full play, generating hosts of hysterical delusions: faeries, goblins, warriors, kings, druids, lovers. It is significant that many of the patient’s fantasies are unconscious recapitulations of her own earlier imaginings: her poems, the works of W. B. Yeats, the stories of the locality told to her by the cook, Mrs. O’Carolan: the seeds of hysteria had been sown and only needed the proper soil to germinate.

… The role of the father is most interesting. It is clear from her early diary entries that the patient idolised her father and his work, yet at the time of the “Craigdarragh incident” she was quite hostile both to him and to his work. Why should this be? Perhaps a clue lies in the patient’s response to her sixteenth birthday. She clearly considered herself to be a woman in the fullest sense of the word, but her father refused to see her as anything but a little girl, immature and dependent, and it is quite likely that such a hysterical retreat into superstition and mythology was a subconscious backlash against her father and his scientific work. Through her fantasies, the patient was attacking her father.

… However, I am utterly at a loss to explain the photographs of the faery folk: it is not within my sphere of professional competence to proffer any authoritative statement concerning them, though I think it likely that they may have been cleverly falsified and that it was vital for the patient’s desire for them to be true that she lie even under hypnosis …

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Glendun
Blackrock
Blackrock
County Dublin
September 20, 1909

My dear Mr. Yeats,

I have studied all the material pertaining to the Craigdarragh case with the greatest scrutiny, and though I find Dr. Orr’s conclusions interesting and far-sighted, I do not feel they quite adequately explain the remarkable events to which we were partly privy.

Recent research has uncovered a close relationship between emotionally (read sexually) disturbed adolescents and bizarre psychic activity, such as poltergeists, phantom noises, and strange lights in the sky. The admirable Dr. Orr has applied Freudian theories in one fashion; I would now apply them in another to suggest that in the Craigdarragh case, the patient’s repressed sexuality was lashing out from the subconscious in paroxysms of supernormal activity, including the electrical failures, the moving furniture, and, ultimately, the faery manifestations.

With regard to this last point I must warn you that I am engaging in the purest speculation when I wonder if it is possible that at a deeply subconscious level, far beyond any yet tapped by hypnosis or theorised by Dr. Freud, the human mind is in direct contact with the underlying structure of the universal all? What I am thinking is that in certain individuals, or under certain circumstances, the barriers between this deep preconsciousness and normal consciousness may be lowered, even abolished, allowing the nature of reality itself to be changed. The power of mind over base matter, the power of generating material objects by force of will, has indeed been long maintained by certain Eastern mystics. What I am proposing here is a scientific rationale for this phenomenon.

By now my reasoning should be obvious to you, my dear Willie: in the Craigdarragh case it could indeed be that the faeries were real, generated out of the patient’s frustrated sexual longings touching upon the ancient reality-shaping consciousness at the core of her psyche, and that power in turn taking the form of her fancies and fantasies. That she mentioned the Morrigan, the Celtic Shifter of Shapes, is highly significant in this respect: it was the very shape of reality itself that was being shifted!

At first I was convinced that these manifestations were purely subjective; it being a simpler matter to shape a person’s perceptions than obstinate matter. Then I paused to reconsider. The evidence of the photographs is compelling, also the golden torc which Dr. Hanrahan of the National Museum has authenticated, and the tragic conclusion of the Craigdarragh episode is proof that the apparitions were sufficiently real to turn on Emily and ravage her. Her guilt never left her and in the end it was the guilt that took hold of her reality-shaping ability to punish her for her sins. Such, I fear, may ever be the penalty for dabbling in powers too mighty for men. We are vessels too weak by far to hold the power of God.

One final observation, and this, my dear Willie, is the most outrageous of all. If Emily could generate a host of the Sidhe (possibly out of the electricity stolen during the power failures?) she could have as easily generated the astronomical object Dr. Desmond maintained was an unearthly space-vehicle. It is only a matter of scale and projection…. Forgive me, Willie, if these words sound like the ravings of a lunatic; I rather fear that some of the implications of this case frankly scare me. But there are too many co-incidences between the faery and the astronomical for any other conclusion to be tenable. The alien craft’s signal, in Morse code, in English, is meaningless unless interpreted in terms of Emily’s reality-moulding imagination; indeed, any other explanation is impossible. Emily created both faery host and Wolfii, and at the moment of her sexual completion, her guilt, her fear, her ultimate destruction, shut the door between merely subconscious and preconscious and burst her power like a bubble. The faery host returned to Otherworld, and the alien star-crossers and their incredible vessel dissolved into the nothingness out of which Emily’s mind had called them and imbued them with their brief phantom lives.

In so doing, Emily has made Dr. Desmond the laughing-stock of the astronomical fraternity: I hear that both he and the Marquis of Claremorris have been severely financially embarrassed by this episode; nevertheless, it is a fitting punishment for a daughter to visit upon an inadequate and inattentive father. As the saying goes, my dear Willie, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” and I feel that that small word, “woman,” lies at the heart of the whole Craigdarragh case. Emily wished to be a woman; now she is a woman, more woman, perhaps, than she desired. I am reminded of another proverb, one of our Chinese brethren’s sayings: “Beware what thou wishest, to thee it may be granted.” The power of the preconscious mind is too mighty, too lofty, too terrible a thing to indulge in irony, yet perhaps the saddest thing of all this sad chapter of events must be the child Emily Desmond carries in her womb. For be it mortal or be it god, it will forever stand before her as a haunting reminder of the Otherworld she glimpsed, just for a single, searing moment, and which she has lost forever.

Yours sincerely,
Hannibal Rooke, Esq.

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Craigdarragh
Drumcliffe
County Sligo
September 5th 1909

Dear Mother Superior,

Just a brief note to inform you that Emily will not be returning to Cross and Passion School in future. Alas, the poor child has recently suffered a major breakdown of health, and, after a spell in Dr. Hubert Orr’s renowned Harcourt Street clinic, will be convalescing at some length here at home in Craigdarragh. It will be many months, I fear, before Emily regains her health fully. However, her education will not suffer; a governess is being hired to school her in a style I feel is more suited to her particular disposition. Therefore I take this opportunity to thank you, Mother Superior, for what you have done in the past for Emily: education truly is a gem beyond price in this modern world, and I know that Emily’s private tutor will build soundly upon the solid foundation you have laid at Cross and Passion. In parting then, I would ask for your prayers for Emily’s safe and full recovery; as ever, my own thoughts and prayers are all for my misfortunate daughter,

sincerely,
Caroline Desmond.

(OUR LADY OF THARSIS)

“COME ON, LAD,
come …” you hear a voice call, and, peering through the crowd for its source (so familiar, so familiar), you see him. There: past the sherbet sellers and the raucous pastry hawkers, past the crowds of hopeful Penitential Mendicants and Poor Sisters of Tharsis who press close to the dignitaries’ rostrum, past the psalm-singing Cathars and the vendors of religious curios; there, he is coming for you, Naon Asiim, with hand outstretched. Through steam and smoke and constables wielding shockstaves who try to keep the crowd away from the man of the moment, here he comes, just for you, your grandfather, Taam Engineer. You look at your mother and father, who swell with pride and say “Yes, Naon, go on, go with him.” So he takes your hand and leads you up through the pressing crowd and the people cheer and wave at you but you have not time to wave back or even make out their faces because your head is whirling with the shouts and the music and the cries of the vendors.

The people part before Taam Engineer like grass before the scythe. Now you are on the rostrum beside him and every one of those thousands of thousands of people crushing into the station falls silent as the old man holds up the Summoner for all to see. There is a wonderful quiet for a moment, then a hiss of steam and the chunt-chunt of rumbling wheels, and like every last one of those thousands of thousands of people, you let your breath out in a great sigh because out from the pressure-shed doors comes the Greatest of the Great; the fabulous
Catharine of Tharsis
at the head of the last Ares Express.

Do you see pride in Taam Engineer’s eye, or is that merely the light catching it as he winks to you and quick as a flash throws you into the control cab? He whispers something to you which is lost beneath the cheering and the music, but you hear the note of pride in it, and you think that is just right, for the Class 88
Catharine of Tharsis
has never looked as well as she does on this her final run. The black-and-gold livery of Bethlehem-Ares glows with love and sacred cherry branches are crossed on the nose above the sun-bright polished relief of the Blessed Lady herself. Well-wishers have stuck holy medals and icons all over the inside of the cab too. Looking at them all leads you on to realize that the cab is much smaller than you had ever imagined. Then you see the scars where the computer modules have been torn out to make room for a human driver, and you remember that all those nights when you lay awake in bed pretending that the thunder of wheels was the Night Mail, the Lady was far away hauling hundred-car ore trains on the automated run from Iron Hills to Bessemer. Since before you were born
Catharine of Tharsis
has been making that slow pull up the kilometer-high Illawarra Bank. You have never seen her as she is today, the pride of Bethlehem-Ares, but your imagination has.

Now the people are boarding: the dignitaries and the faithful and the train enthusiasts and the folk who just want to be there at the end of a little piece of history; there they are, filing into the twenty cars and taking their seats for the eight-hour journey.

“Hurry up, hurry up,” Taam Engineer says, anxious to be off. He pours you a sherbet from the small coldchest and you sip it, feeling the cool grittiness of it on your tongue, counting the passengers, eighty, ninety, a hundred, still a bit dazed that you are one of them yourself. Then the doors seal,
hsssss
. Steam billows, the crowd stands back excited and expectant, but not as excited or expectant as you. Down the line a red light turns green. The old man grins and taps instructions into the computer.

Behind you the drowsy djinn wakes and roars in fury, but it is tightly held in its magnetic bottle. Just as well, you think, because your grandfather has told you that it is as hot as the center of the sun back there.

The crowds are really cheering now and the bands are playing for all they are worth and every loco in the yard, even the dirty old locals, are sounding their horns in salute as
Catharine of Tharsis
gathers speed. The constables are trying to keep back the crazy wheel-symboled Cathars who are throwing flower petals onto the track in front of you. Grandfather Taam is grinning from ear to ear and sounding the triple steam-horns like the trumpets of Judgment Day, as if to say, “Make way, make way, this is a
real
train!”

The train picks up speed slowly, accelerating up the long upgrade called Jahar Incline under full throttle, up through the shantytowns and their thrown-together ramshackle stations whose names you have memorized like a mantra: Jashna, Purwani, Wagga-Wagga, Ben’s Town, Park-and-Bank, Llandyff, Acheson, Salt Beds, Mananga Loop.

Now you are away from the stink and the press of the shanties out into the open fields and you cheer as Grandfather Taam opens up the engines and lets the Lady run.
Catharine of Tharsis
throws herself at the magical 300 km/hr speed barrier and in the walled fields by the side of the track men with oxen and autoplanters stop and look up from the soil to wave at the black-gold streak.

“Faster, Grandfather, faster!” you shriek and Grandfather Taam smiles and orders “More speed, more speed!” The fusion engines reply with a howl of power,
Catharine of Tharsis
finds that time barrier effortlessly and shatters it, and at 355 km/hr the last ever Ares Express heads out into the Grand Valley.