Last Chants (10 page)

What was he doing on Bowl Rock? Playing a musical farewell to Billy Seawuit? Was this some kind of New Age rosary?

Or was it a return to the crime scene?

I began backing quietly away. I hoped to God Arthur wasn't still lying inside the rock. I hoped this piper hadn't done something to him.

I was too unnerved to go find out. I turned and ran.

Moments later, I switched the lantern back on so I could run faster. I hadn't waited long enough: The music stopped abruptly.

The air was filled with the echo of a bellow, a vast release of air and emotion. To me it sounded feral, angry. I ran like hell.

I thought I heard crunching behind me. I turned the lantern off and continued running, hoping I could keep to the path and not crash into some sudden gully.

I got so frantic I started trying to scream. I expelled huge
sighs, somehow not able to put my vocal chords into it. I felt like I was in a nightmare, running through dark woods, trying and trying to scream without being able to.

By the time I reached the cabin, my calves were cramping, I had a stitch in my side, I was crying, and my lungs burned.

I finally remembered how to use my vocal chords when the cabin door swung open.

I thought for an instant that it would continue to be my worst nightmare, that I'd look through the lighted rectangle of open door and see the naked piper there.

I almost collapsed when I saw Arthur.

“Willa!” He came dashing out to meet me. “My dear! What—?”

“Behind me,” I bleated.

Arthur put a supporting arm around me, keeping me steady on my feet. He looked over my shoulder, scanning the woods.

“Hurry. Inside,” I begged.

“I don't see anything.” He made a startled noise when I broke free and dashed into the cabin.

“Hurry,” I begged again. But when I looked out beyond him, I didn't see anything moving, anything out of the ordinary.

Nevertheless, I beckoned him urgently, slamming the door after he entered. I slid the dead bolt into place and made a round of the windows, looking through each of them.

I could see no one out there. But I imagined the man lurking in the trees, and I started shivering.

And here I'd nearly convinced myself, based on facing down a scrawny cougar, that I was braver than I'd previously suspected.

I sat at the table, hugging myself while Arthur knelt beside me. I was, at best, a city girl, at worse, a wimp.

“There's a man out there,” I panted. “I think he was chasing me.”

Arthur looked troubled. “I came in not half an hour ago. I didn't see anyone.”

“Came in from where? Where were you all day?” I couldn't keep petulance out of my voice. If he'd returned sooner, I'd have been spared all this.

“Out at the rock.” His tone said,
Don't you remember?

“You spent all day there?”

“It hardly seemed a moment.” He smiled sadly. “It wasn't long enough, I'm afraid.”

“It was almost too long, Arthur. I went out to look for you, and I saw a naked man sitting there.”

My statement obviously shocked him, he rocked off his haunches, losing his balance.

“On Bowl Rock?”

“Yes. A wide, hairy, naked man playing a flute or something.”

Arthur cupped his head in his hands. “Oh, no. No.”

“Do you know him? Who is it? He scared the—”

Arthur sat up. “You're
sure
he was playing a pipe?”

“Of course I'm sure. Some kind of reed instrument.”

“Might it have been panpipes? Reeds cut to different lengths and lashed together? Did it have a rather high-pitched quality?”

“Yes. Reedy, high. You're right. It sounded like the Peruvian instrument.”

“Panpipes,” he confirmed.

“Only it wasn't a Latin American tune. It was more of a . . . lament or something. He was sitting right on top of the rock with his legs dangling into it.”

“I wonder.” Arthur looked pale and unkempt, none the better for his day inside a rock. “I wonder if he waited for me to leave.” His eyes filled with tears. “It would be too bad to have missed him by moments. After staying the day long.”

“You were waiting for him?”

“No, no. Not necessarily. But it would have been magnificent to encounter him.”

I scooted my chair back a few inches. “I didn't find it a bit magnificent.”

“But you don't know what a rare thing it is to see him, my dear.”

“See who? Who is he?”

“Pan.”

“Pan who?”

“Pan the demigod of Greek mythology. Billy stayed here in part because of the rumors.”

I shook my head, hoping I was hallucinating this conversation. “What rumors?”

“That Pan wasn't killed, as the myths imply, but that he was banished here, cast deep into the sea. Diana couldn't kill him, you see; that's what we think. There's been a rumor circulating
for a few thousand years that Pan pulled the ocean floor up with him; that he spent the millennia quietly husbanding it, mourning Syrinx. Forsaking revenge as his firmament of gods and goddesses faded from universal consciousness. He was marooned here, in a sense, by the changes in our mythology. By Christianity.”

“Are you crazy?” He couldn't possibly be suggesting I'd encountered the demigod Pan. Could he?

“Billy learned this is one of the few regions on the planet that fits the profile. It rose from the ocean bottom for no discernible reason, you see.”

“You're talking about a Greek myth?” If my tone didn't tell him I thought this was ridiculous, I'm sure my face did. “Are we really discussing this?”

“Not just Greek. Pan is the European emblem for the first shaman. Pan didn't belong in Olympus, the world of the gods; he was half goat, you know. Nor was he fully of the earth, but he chose to work his magic here. The parallel to Kwakiutl myth is striking. And Billy felt a presence, a powerful shamanic impulse in this land. A shaman generally feels that on his own land, the place of his own generational roots. So he was mystified—until he heard the rumors.”

“The rumors that Pan wasn't dead?” I'd been thinking of Arthur as merely overeducated and eccentric. Now this.

“Well, no. Those rumors date back to the Greek texts. I meant the rumors here, among the locals.”

“That a demigod hangs around in these woods?”

“Yes. There are many accounts of hearing his music, reports of sightings.”

“You told me yourself a lot of homeless people moved up here when things got tough.” I felt like I was explaining reality to an overimaginative boy.

“But the music and sightings go far back into the recorded history of the area. Costanoan Indian oral tradition also mentions it. According to Awaswas and Zayante legend—”

“Arthur, there are probably kabillions of legends about the woods here. That always happens, right? People tell spooky stories over and over because they're good stories?” Here I was explaining the origin of legends to the world's foremost
mythologist. “Maybe your work has kind of, I don't know, opened your mind a little too much? It's like lawyers who get so caught up they start believing law is the most glorious achievement of—”

“No no no. The interesting thing about myths, Willa, is that they come from a universe within us, yet they connect us to experiences far outside our ordinary reality. It's like the flying saucer mythology, you know. It used to be that people saw visions of nymphs and classical beings. Then, they saw elves and sprites and goblins. Later, they saw the Virgin Mary. Now, they see flying saucers.”

It was my turn to cradle my head. “Are you saying they're all equally imaginary or that they're all equally real?”

He crossed his legs comfortably, as if delivering a lecture at Esalen. “They all provide sensory proof that the establishment—science, now; the church, in earlier eras—can't explain everything. We simultaneously dread this and hope so. Today, for example, we have thousands upon thousands of reported UFO sightings each year. But if they are appearing so frequently, why do they always leave us with empty hands and blank film?”

My patience was stretched thin. But it did feel good to be safely inside, debating something as academic as UFO sightings. “Okay—why?”

“If you're not willing to dismiss thousands of contactees as liars, you're only left with one explanation. Not objects traveling impossibly fast through space—they couldn't
always
get away in the click of a shutter—but rather objects manifesting and de-manifesting out of another dimension.”

“Oh.” I couldn't keep all my scorn out of that syllable.

“We're probably dealing with an other-dimensional phenomenon that can manifest literally as anything—elves when that's what we are prepared to see, the Virgin Mary when that comports with our mythology, spaceships after all the nineteen-fifties movies. It pops out at us from its own dimension as whatever we expect to see, as our currently appropriate embodiment of other-worldliness. It thumbs its nose at the prevailing orthodoxy, prying open our minds as best it can.”

“That's what you think Pan is?”

“Here, yes. There's a tradition of believing him to be here.
There's a tradition of sighting him and hearing his music.”

“But I didn't know about the tradition. So why would I see him?” I shook my head. “He was real. And he wasn't a demigod.”

“Of course he was real. And it's irrelevant that you didn't know about the tradition. The other-dimensional, whatever it may be, is in the habit of taking material form here as Pan; not as the Virgin or as a UFO or as the Loch Ness monster. In these woods, when it appears, it appears as Pan. It's been doing so as long as anyone remembers.”

“Arthur, local legends aside, there's a naked man running around these woods. Maybe the police don't know about him and haven't questioned him.” I leaned forward in my chair, watching his haggard face. “And he's obviously wigged out, or he'd wear clothes at night. He might be crazy enough to have killed Billy.”

Arthur slumped, rubbing his knees as if they ached. And well they might, after a day inside a damp rock. “It could certainly have been a person you saw out there. It's not impossible that someone would be naked in the woods, playing pipes. But I offer this thought: Why is it more difficult to believe in something people have been seeing and describing for hundreds of years?”

“Because I personally have never seen a UFO,” I pointed out. “Or an elf, or the Virgin Mary.”

“You've never seen the wind or a magnetic wave or an electron, either. You have only indirect evidence and the word of those you consider better informed than yourself.”

“Well, I did see this man. And he didn't have—”

“Goat legs? But you didn't see his legs, did you? They were dangling into the rock. That's what you told me.”

“He was definitely a man.” It was a measure of how tired I was, no doubt, that “Pan's” broadness and hairiness should suddenly strike me as beastlike.

“And another thing: your reaction to him, Willa. Judging from how you looked when you got here, I'd say you panicked.”

“I thought he was chasing me.”

“But that's the very essence of the word, you see. Pan, panic. He gives rise to it. That surge of terror when one encounters him in the woods: That's the origin of the word.”

“Arthur, somebody got killed out there. It was dark and spooky. It doesn't take a demigod to make someone panic in those circumstances.”

“And the music? Was it something a man would play?”

“Yes.” But it was unlike anything I'd heard before.

“It's rare, you know, not to hit a false note on panpipes. They can be quite squeaky if you're not adept.”

“Let's change the subject.” I'd lost my adrenaline. I was getting cranky. “Why did you stay out at the rock all day? That might not be a good idea. People could be going there to check it out now that it's been in the papers.”

He nodded, looking away like a bad child.

“Tell me.”

“I came to briefly and saw a woman staring down at me.”

“Who?”

“Nelson's wife. Thea or Terry, I believe.”

“Toni. I met her.” I touched my nose, feeling for swelling. She hadn't mentioned seeing Arthur, not to me. But she might tell her husband. She might tell the police. “Damn. Did she say anything?”

He shook his head. “She looked in at me, then went away.”

“Do you think she recognized you?”

“My impression is that we were both in other worlds. That we registered each other's presence without squandering much consciousness on the encounter.”

I rose, crossing to the sink to pour myself some water. Damn Arthur and his unsquandered consciousness. I needed a straight answer.

“So you think she looked at you without necessarily realizing who you were?” I was trying to hope.

“I think she was as far away as I was.”

“Which was where?”

“I was journeying.”

I was almost afraid to ask. “Journeying where?”

“To the lower and upper worlds.”

It was all I could do not to walk over and slap him. I'd had about as much mumbo jumbo as I could handle. I came pre-saturated from living with my parents.

“You know about shamanism, Willa?”

“Not really.” Shamanism had few political overtones. Otherwise, no doubt, it would have been as much a part of my upbringing as Trotskyism.

“It's a surprisingly direct route to another dimension.”

I didn't respond.

“Perhaps another night, when you're not so . . . tired, I'll attempt to take you, shall I?” His tone was cordial, conversational.

“Take me where, Arthur?”

“On a journey. It's not difficult, you know. Most people never try it, they simply pooh-pooh it. It's ironic to live in a culture that scorns a personal experience of the supernatural while believing in the Eucharist.”