Herald of the Hidden (12 page)

Ralph shook his head and paced around the studio silently, leaving the question in mid-air, unanswered. It had grown more fully dark as we talked, and the high, narrow, thick-glassed windows gleamed like polished jet. The only illumination was from the few candles placed upon the impromptu shrine we had made of Robin’s natural sculpture.

Our faces flickered in and out of the wan glow as we moved nervously around.

After we had waited and wandered restlessly for some while in the gloom, there was a sudden surge of rustling outside as if the rising wind had gathered up a war-band of detritus to throw against our creaking shelter. It lunged in bulging gusts several more times, then settled to a low roar. Inside, the darkness seemed to intensify dizzyingly.

Then it seemed as if the flagstones beneath my feet rocked as I tried to feel my way cautiously around, as if they had been thrown into odd angles to trip me up, force me to the floor. At first I thought it was my confusion and clumsiness due to the unaccustomed denseness of the dark, and cursed myself inwardly. But then I began to feel there was a sly, subtle purpose in the movement beneath my soles. I called out to the others, lamely—

‘What’s happening?’

Ralph held up his hand for silence, and I saw it lit fleetingly in the feeble glimmer of the candles. Then there was a soft, fitful scrabbling at the high black windows.

I glanced up and thought I saw shards of darkness clustering there, which peeled away from the panes quickly, vanished, then plunged back again, soaring jagged stars of gleaming black. These shapes, the droning wind, the lunging floor slabs and the oppressive sense of a brittle, active descent of night, all harried my consciousness. I had the overwhelming impression that the whole place had become a vessel of living darkness, which moved, swayed to unseen currents of force. It was as if we were swept up in some vast ethereal procession of night, surging to some distant destination beyond, while we were unpityingly harried by the storm, betrayed by the very ground beneath our feet, and implacably guardianed by the fragments of black battering at the windows. And around us I caught tantalising echoes of companions in the vortex: other forms, molten faces, dissolving figures, smeared shadows.

As I tried to anchor my thoughts and hold desperately onto where I knew I was, I craned my attention outwards with a clenched effort and heard Ralph’s voice hoarsely urging, through the assault—

‘Concentrate! Look at the altar! Offer! Offer!’

I tried to do as he demanded, focusing my eyes on the simple things dimly seen in the sputtering candleglow, the pools of light glancing from the fruit’s sheen, the wineglass’s glint, the pale glimmer of the flowers, and imagining with grave solemnity that I kneeled and rendered these up to some high, honoured visitor.

For what seemed like a great space of time we all regarded the stone altar intently, warring with our thoughts to keep them attentive to the offering we were making to whatever was master of the living, seething darkness around us. Within the great train of night that seemed to have taken possession of our refuge, I began to hear Ralph declaiming solemnly a chant of brief, clarion-like exhortations as he moved around the makeshift altar, his hand appearing like eerie amber lit from within, as he touched each offering. I watched him intently and it seemed as if my own lips moved somehow in accord with his recitations, though I had no idea what words they were framing.

With a vast sudden sinking, the sounds, the fleeting shapes, the utter depth of darkness and most of all the sensed presence of strange companions, seemed to recede, to be replaced by a bright silence, crystalline, tingling, rarefied. Ralph stood thoughtfully, hands by his side, still eagerly contemplating the stone monument. Then he stepped backwards from it, slowly and ceremoniously, and ushered us towards him. We strode swiftly out of the creaking doors into the coolness of a star-sown night, breathing quickly and gazing keenly around us to let our eyes feast on the ordinariness, the stillness of the scene. One lone shape glided swiftly overhead, a dark spasm against the blue brilliance of the sky.

We bundled into Robin Palmer’s cottage and he busied himself with fixed determination in stoking up a good glowing log fire, while I made black coffee and Ralph paced around thoughtfully. When we were all gathered in armchairs around the hearth and had contemplated the prancing golden flames for a while, Ralph spoke up.

‘Step by step, Robin, you have experienced emanations from a being I think must once have been worshipped here, or at very least to have been fervently and intensely evoked. I have only a glimmer of a notion as to why such allegiance was manifested here, but I am quite certain what form it takes.’

He slumped back in the armchair and gazed thoughtfully at the fire.

‘Think of it. First wafts of something like incense, then distantly heard sounds like chanting and perhaps something percussive. A ritual, clearly, dimly reconveyed to you. But of what? Next, when you do not respond to these signs, there is a far more direct demand upon your attention—the dark snakes at each end of the lane, strangely alert and invested with intelligence. Still, this yields no response from you, except numbing fear. What are these? Some familiars, some outer expression of a being, a force that once was attended by rituals and now has none. Then, at last, the highly numinous, powerful presence you experienced, the great figure advancing from the mist, aureoled: the figure I believe was not horned, as you thought, but . . . well, winged. Wearing a winged helmet, in fact.’

The young sculptor shot a sudden glare at him, recognition jolting into place.

‘Yes,’ Ralph resumed. ‘Quite so. Mercury. Hermes. The twin serpents made it seem a possibility: you recall his sacred thyrsus. And he was the god of roads, where he would sometimes appear to travellers in a flowing radiance. Your house, I think, must originally have been called “Hermes’ House”.

‘After many years, this provenance was forgotten and the very isolation of it made “Hermit’s House” the more natural rendering. So it became. But, long before then, somebody here was the god’s devotee, so passionately preoccupied with the ancient Greek deity that the force of their allegiance has stayed here. There have been adherents of Hermes amongst writers even in our own ultra-modern century: Santayana, Forrest Reid, Thomas Mann. My surmise is that no-one since the original Hermes-worshipper has stayed in this house long enough—or had the necessary sensitivity—to feel the presence as you have. And I think one thing in particular may have prompted that. . . .’

Ralph leant forward, holding his hands out to the fire. ‘You used some stones from the top of the road for your sculpture: you thought they were from some broken-down old wall. But there is no sign of a wall just there, and not enough stones anyway to make a span of any length. And then, curiously, when you came to reconfigure them, something inspired you to do so in exactly the shape I think they always had—that of the hermaion, the little wayside altars to Hermes. . . .’

Robin nodded, slowly.

‘Perhaps half-consciously,’ Ralph continued, ‘you had implied by this that you too were a worshipper of the god, and yet you were not responding to the signs and presences presented to you. As I thought about what had happened to you, I could not see what the ultimate outcome would be, but I thought it likely that there would be some further high emanation, greater even than the vision you had already been vouchsafed.’

‘But what was it?’ I interrupted, impatiently. ‘Why were we caught up in that—living darkness? Is that how it seemed to you? And did you see—other things?’

Ralph cleared his throat and his gaze seemed to retreat within. ‘I—think it was Hermes Psychopompus—guide of souls. That is how he is called when he is seen thus. The leader of the procession to the underworld.

‘I don’t know what would have happened if we hadn’t made our allegiance and respect so abundantly clear. The force that someone once summoned under the name of Hermes wanted your spirit, Robin, one way or another, freely—or . . . otherwise.’

Robin rose and stirred the fire with the pewter tongs, urging it into life again. Turning back to us, he looked wistful.

‘And I thought I had struck out on a new way all on my own. Instead, it seems I was being led. But it feels right, all the same. I believe I shall continue to work as a servant of Hermes. There are possibilities . . .’ he tailed off, pensively.

Ralph rose, yawning, and made to go to his room, but paused and took from his jacket pocket a battered book. ‘You may need this. You remember? It was in your wood store. Constance Naden, the author, was a noted philhellene—she wrote the
Pantheist’s
Song
of Immortality
—one of the high Victorian neo-pagan classics. In one of the essays here she quotes a fragment from a hymn to Hermes—that’s what I was reciting at your altar. I’d guess it’s not the first time it’s been chanted here.’

Robin took the volume curiously. ‘A clue to the original Hermes-worshipper here?’

Herald of the Hidden

A large, creased map lay upon the table at 14, Bellchamber Tower. It depicted the lonely south-eastern part of our shire. At first glance, this seemed to possess a singular geographical feature: a deep, curving brown canyon running through one corner. This, however, proved to be no more than the ringmark left by a coffee cup. The map was also, though, dotted with little ink marks made by my friend Ralph Tyler, and he was staring at these when I visited one cold November day.

It had been a long time since he had gained any new clients for his researches into supernatural incidents. Possibly, word of his somewhat unorthodox methods, which often left his patrons feeling dissatisfied, had spread. The proceeds from the cheques some of these had once reluctantly written had begun to diminish. As a consequence, Ralph had needed to cut back on the rank cigarettes he liked to smoke, and was now hand-rolling—not very deftly—a reeking compound of a cheap botanical mixture, with a few strands of his preferred brand of Greek tobacco. The miasma from a recent taper of this formula still lingered in the air of his bare, cubic flat.

When no-one came to him for help with troubling and inexplicable incidents, Ralph’s restless spirit could not remain still. So he would instead review what he liked to call his ‘files’. These were toppling piles of cardboard folders containing an array of press cuttings, extracts copied from books, notes of local folklore, and any other stray ephemera that caught his eye. Several of these were sprawled on Ralph’s second-best armchair —the one that, in addition to being very worn (like the best one), also had a sagging arm. He scooped up one of the dog-eared, dingy documents and passed it to me.

‘Read that,’ he said. It was better than the greeting I sometimes got when I visited. If he was immersed in his work, I was often lucky to get a grunt, or a sharp nod of the head.

‘ “Cow did not need rescue”,’ I recited. Our local paper, the
County Mercury
, was known for its thrilling stories. ‘ “Firemen were called when a passer-by noticed a cow seemed to be stranded in the river near Whittlingham, and unable to get out. But by the time rescuers arrived, the cow had found its own way out. Local farmer Mr George Furtho said . . .” ’

‘No, not that,’ interrupted Ralph, ‘the one underneath.’

I turned my attention to the presumably even less eventful report below. I was about to start declaiming this aloud too, when its very curiosity made me halt, and begin reading it carefully.

It said simply that lights had been seen in the forest of Solsey at night. They were hovering above the ground. There appeared to be several sets, in pairs, and the witness—a watchman cycling to his round—had stopped to look at them for quite some time. He had not heard very much, but they would be a distance from his vantage point, at the top of a rise in a minor road, and he admitted to the paper that there might have been a low drone in the background. And that was the full report. There was a sense that the witness was steady and cautious. But that hadn’t stopped the
Mercury
from headlining the piece, ‘UFOs Seen Over Forest’. It was typical of the paper, though, that this startling evidence of possibly extraterrestrial invasion of our obscure shire had still been relegated below a cow that wasn’t in difficulty in the river, and farmer Furtho’s remarks on the same.

Ralph beckoned me over to the map.

‘These marks,’ he said, ‘represent similar sightings of strange lights in the forest.’

Across the country, reports of unidentified flying objects had become quite common. Sometimes they came in clusters, which the experts called ‘flaps’. One report generated another, more people kept an eye on the skies, or even went out intentionally looking for them, and soon a dossier of sightings could be compiled. But there had been no such cascade around our area, as I knew from my keen reading of the indispensable
Mercury
. I said as much to Ralph. He sighed.

‘No. I’ve put these together from clues scattered across the centuries. From the beginning of the first clandestine presses in the early seventeenth century, to now. They all describe different things, according to how the people of the time interpreted them. Just after the Civil War, they thought the end of the world was just around the corner. So omens and prodigies were much in the air. There’s a bare record, in a list of these, that a fiery serpent had been glimpsed in Solsey. Or, take this incident in Edwardian times: some picknickers say they’ve seen fairy lanterns hovering above a glade in the forest: they think there’s some sort of fête going on, but when they try to make their way to it, there’s nothing. But they do report a feeling of being observed, and say they did not like to linger there. In our day, as you see, it’s flying saucers that are thought to be the cause. But if you look at the reports carefully, they are all in essence saying the same thing. There are lights, often a couple together, at night in the forest.’

‘Poachers,’ I suggested, ‘or stories spread by poachers to put people off.’

‘Brilliant,’ said Ralph. ‘Poachers being well known for advertising their activities with a light display. And the stories didn’t put people off: they made them curious.’

‘All right,’ I conceded. ‘Then, what? And why not leave them alone?’

But I knew this last was an unwelcome suggestion. It was not in my friend’s nature to leave a riddle of this kind unsolved, especially one that seemed to have been lurking, in fits and starts, across hundreds of years. Ralph left my remark unanswered, and returned his attention to the scuffed map.

There was a dull thud in the hallway of his flat, caused by his broken door-bell.

‘Get it, will you?’ he asked.

His visitor was already known to me. Ralph spent a great deal of his time at the county library and archives, in his researches. He seldom started a case without first gaining as much background as he could from these. There he had made the acquaintance of Percy Bozeat, a tawny-haired young man who had for some years been compiling a study entitled
The Herald’s
Garden
, the name given to our shire because of the many country houses it possessed, each with an ancient and armigerous family. The work, however, progressed slowly, because Bozeat was always being led down ever more obscure byways of his subject. He had even less means than Ralph, but was always attired in a neat, if patched, tweed suit, and wore a golden monocle, which glinted at one like a fragment of the sun. He was apt to use this as an aid to mulling things over: polishing it with a silk handkerchief when especially thoughtful, or swinging the eyeglass perilously on its loose black ribbon when his ideas were more freewheeling.

He greeted me affably, then strode up to where Ralph was still poring over the map.

‘Ah, Tyler,’ he observed, ‘I see you’re already scouring Solsey. Good. You got my message. Want to hear what I’ve found?’

I had adroitly installed myself in the ‘best’ armchair. Bozeat gathered up the papers cluttering the other one, and deposited them unceremoniously on the floor.

Ralph perched himself on the table, and began to roll a cigarette.

‘Go on,’ was all he said.

It was Bozeat’s turn to be the master of ceremonies. He produced from the pocket of his tweed jacket a square object wrapped in a scarlet silk kerchief. This he removed with a flourish, and revealed a book, bound in well-rubbed leather, with delicate gilt emblems. He opened the covers very carefully. Inside, there were pages in ink faded to the deep brown of elder-wood, with sketches of shields, and other illustrations, and many very finely-written notes.

We admired the book.

‘Yes, it would be very handy for the Great Work,’ said Bozeat, referring to his unfinished book, ‘Except for one thing. I’ll come to that. First, do you know what it is?’

Both of us disclaimed any such knowledge.

‘It’s a trickery,’ he said.

‘What, a fake?’ I asked. This was evidently the question Bozeat wanted. He allowed his monocle to drop from his eye, as if in astonishment.

‘Certainly not. Oh, no. I got it from a reputable auction house, you know. Sale of the effects of Western Lodge—that’s on the edge of Solsey, see? Chap there shuffled off. His stuff was put on the market by some distant cousin or other. I had an idea there might be some heraldic material, often is in these lonely old houses. But I didn’t expect this. I . . .’

Ralph lit one of his misshapen cigarettes. Fumes of a most curious colour—and odour—drifted across the room.

‘No,’ he began, in reply to me, ‘a trickery is . . .’

But Bozeat was not to be forestalled.

‘A notebook kept by a herald on a visitation. If they had no time to compose a complete blazon of arms, they used a form of shorthand, called “tricking”. That’s what this is. Late eighteenth century, probably. Nice item anyway. But also, this one is rather unusual. . . .’

With a pale hand, adorned with an intaglio, he wafted away some of the rank smoke emitted by Ralph’s cigarette.

‘Because this Herald has also made a sort of map.’

‘Showing where the families are, with all the shields and things?’ I suggested.

Bozeat winced. ‘Arms, you know. Not shields. They are just part of it. There’s also a helm, mantling, supporters, a motto, a—’

‘He knows,’ put in Ralph, ‘he’s just drawing you on.’

His visitor glowered for a few moments.

‘Anyway, no, not that. Something odder. He’s laid his trickery onto a sketch map of the forest of Solsey—as if, for example, parts of the forest had their own arms.’

Ralph drew on his cigarette. ‘That’s rather a quaint fancy.’

‘Isn’t it? And yet it’s a lot of work to do just for a whim.’

‘Ever seen one like it before?’ Ralph asked.

‘No.’

‘You’re quite sure he’s not just showing the arms of the landowners? You know, this timber belongs to . . .’

Bozeat sniffed. ‘Heralds aren’t surveyors, you know. But anyway, I did look at that. No—none of the arms bear any relation to the local families at all. They just aren’t known. That’s why it’s so exciting for my book, you see. He’s delineated six or seven entirely unheard-of emblems. Except that—I’ve no idea who they belong to.’

‘Very curious,’ murmured Ralph. And he looked again at the map on the table.

‘And frustrating,’ said Bozeat. ‘Because the arms aren’t quite complete. Where the supporters should be, there’s been vigorous erasures. It’s not unusual in these records for them to be so roughly sketched that you can’t make them out. But these have been deliberately obscured. I can just about make out a few details. But not enough to reconstruct them.’

‘I see,’ said Ralph.

There was a silence.

‘Well,’ he said, at length, ‘there’s only one thing to do. I’d like to go to some of these places this Herald has “tricked”, and walk around them a bit.’

‘In case we see the arms he’s recorded—on a gatepost or something?’ I enquired.

‘Yes,’ said Ralph, ‘as you say. On a gatepost—or something.’

**

Our shire possessed four royal forests. It had been prime hunting ground for a succession of medieval kings and their successors. Not all parts of the forests were heavily wooded: when a place was designated as a forest, this simply meant it was the king’s preserve (though parts might be granted to favourites and supporters). It might include heath, moorland, even marsh. But in the case of Solsey, a great part of it was indeed densely overgrown with trees. There were some clearings, and rides, broad lanes, but these were often found together, in focal points: and in much of the forest there was nothing but narrow animal tracks to provide a way through. It was perfectly possible that some parts of this sprawling domain had been unvisited by a human tread for many centuries, since they were so thickly-grown, and far from any reasonable path.

At Ralph’s insistence, we started our exploration at Western Lodge. This was a tall, turreted house in grey stucco, which turned its back to one far end of the forest. Its contents might have been auctioned off, but evidently no-one had yet bought the house. A lop-sided ‘for sale’ sign still hung from rusting poles, and the gate of spiked iron palings was sagging on its hinges, barely held together by a padlock. This was purely symbolic anyway, because where the gates leant away from their supporting pillars, there was a gap quite wide enough to enter: and the crumbling walls also gave plenty of opportunity to scramble over them. We wandered around the shuttered place, where shattered urns spilled soil and dead flowers onto the ochre moss of the ground, and jagged roof-tiles were strewn in strange angles, like fallen, charred stars. But nothing seemed to offer us any clue, and the gate-posts indeed had no device of any kind—no badge cut into the stone, no carved head rising from the plinths.

Later, Bozeat took us in his decrepit car as far around the circumference of the forest as it was possible to go. He even coaxed the reluctant machine up a few of the rutted tracks leading into its depths, but we never got very far before things became too rough. We got out, and looked vaguely around. A deep silence pervaded the scene, touched by brief bursts of birdsong, which only made the silence seem even starker. At one point, when we had gone right round to the opposite side from our starting point, and ventured a little way in, Ralph stood with us in the hushed grove, then wandered around a little, regarding the trees and undergrowth carefully, looking at the twisting of the trunks and bare limbs, and even lifting up a few leaves to examine them more closely. I stopped looking too closely into the forest. My gaze kept trying to find shapes there, formed of the interplay of the bare branches and the cold white Winter sky.

We returned a bit crestfallen. There was nothing obvious on the ground to account for the emblems drawn in the heraldic notebook Bozeat had shown us. If they had belonged to some hitherto unrecorded old family line, they had left no visible trace of their arms. Ralph Tyler said he would spend the next day in his usual habit of steady research in the county library and archives. I heard nothing further from him until the middle of the day after that. Then I got a message to join him in his flat around dusk. Percy Bozeat was already there when I arrived.