Majestic (37 page)

Chapter Twenty-seven

I finally felt what I should have felt from the beginning for Wilfred Stone. My youth and arrogance had prevented me, though.

I looked at that old man in a completely new way. I reached toward him. He looked down at my hand, and then at me. In his eyes was an emotion I cannot name. It sent a jagged edge of fear through me, as if I had scented death.

"Turn it off," he said. I put down the tape recorder. He flipped the switch. He didn't actually tell me to leave out the material that follows, but that was the implication.

I do not feel that he was right, but out of respect for him - yes, respect - I took notes on this part of his narrative of the other world, rather than record it. The wise child walked quickly away, a chalky ghost in the gloom. She was the size of a three-year-old but her movements were mature.

Will called out.

She stopped when she heard him. When she smiled he sensed what he described as something almost vampiric about her. There was a sense of tremendous, overwhelming power, the night in the child.

He felt himself in the presence of tremendous wisdom. This was what it was like to be with somebody who had gone beyond the human.

His next words just popped out, as if formed from purest instinct. "Help us," he said.

The response was immediate. The next second he was back in his boyhood home in Westchester County.

The whole place was flooded with pure, sweet light. He could hardly believe it. And this was no illusion. Will says that he was there.

What's more, he remembers the event now from two different perspectives - that of himself as a little boy encountering a strange, shadowy man in his room . . . and also that of himself as the man.

The old red fire engine was there, standing against the wall opposite his crib.

He moved slowly around in his room. The wonder of it made everything seem jewellike and perfect.

Then he noticed movement in the crib. His own curly head, his blue eyes - the Willy Stone of thirty and more years ago rose up and climbed deftly out to the floor. Will could smell his baby freshness, could hear him, see him.

"Oh God, God," he told me, "Nick, my heart just broke in two. I was so little! And in that huge, shadowy, mysterious world, the courage in the eyes - "

The wise children, the others, had brought him home to the best and purest thing that he was.

He remembered a warm, huge hand that had come out of the dark . . . and suddenly the curtains blew and the moonlight came in and he saw a huge, terrible man, a nightmare man bending over him.

He screamed, a high bullet of a sound.

Feet pounded from downstairs. Will the man saw his father's balding head shining in the moonlight as he came up the stairs. Behind him his mother floated in her lace and silk.

He stepped into the shadows.

Will as child was terrified. "Daddy! Man! Man here!"

He saw his own father engulf him in himself and carry him like a limp offering back to the crib.

Then the room fell away, growing smaller and smaller until it was a dot of light in the air, and then was gone.

The vampire child was dancing slow turns around him. She stopped and smiled a dangerous smile. And he felt nothing but love.

At the far end of the oasis there was a tall arch, and beyond it a round, tumbledown building.

He wanted to go there, but she restrained him, pushing against his belly as a clown child might against her clown father.

Leaving him for a moment she ran to a small table. She pointed. On it there was a plain gray plate and three gray pancakes. Will realized that he was ravenous. He remembers still the taste of that food, the pure flavor of the buckwheat from which the cakes were made, the sense of a freshness he had never tasted before.

There was also a wide bowl of water. The girl came and scooped it up for him and he drank from her cupped hands.

Afterward she sang to him in a whispering voice, in a language he did not know. He began to feel sleepy and lay down on his side.

Much later he was awakened by a soft hand stroking his head.

He jumped to his feet. All the weight of his years seemed to have fallen away.

He walked, then, as his excitement rose; finally he ran to the ancient building. Where the blue-gray stones were intact their perfect fit reminded him of Inca work, but for the most part the place was cracked and crumbling.

He went up the steps and into a wide, cool hall. It was made of dark-blue stone worked with great intricacy.

When he tried to follow the labyrinth of these carvings his head began to pound. Finally he had to stop looking at the walls, the ceiling, and keep his eyes on the floor.

There was a circle of children sitting before him. It was all so very familiar. Words came to him: beyond fear there is another life.

Was this the place the dead went?

Had he been killed? Was that what this meant?

He went to the center of the circle and waited, standing quite still. He soon heard a drum beating out in the corridor. The sound stirred him, infected him, made him start to move.

The children began to chant in repetitive notes, wonderful notes.

He spread his arms and started to turn. The room whirled and the drum pulsed and chanting hypnotized him.

He remembered his own beginning.

He was moving swiftly and secretly across the sky of home. There were little flecks of cloud. He went past them and down into the spreading summer trees. He moved around a great, gnarled limb, his heart full of love and delicious with the secrecy of his coming. His movement was so stealthy that not even a grasshopper stirred from her rasping as he passed by.

Then he saw a window. The shades were drawn but he passed through them as if there was nothing there.

The room was dim and very quiet. A young woman lay on a bed, her head turned to one side. She was as fresh and lovely as new light, covered only by a thin gown. Brown curls spread over her brow. Her belly was huge.

He loved her terribly, and could not resist going closer to her. Then he began to drift downward. He could no longer float.

In an instant he was inside her womb, a glowing cavern. Her body was roaring, the heart fluttering like a tent in the wind, her whole self a bubbling, oozing bladder barely managing to contain its liquids.

He swam into the fluid of her and drank her and smelled her essential flower, and was filled with the taste and sense of her.

There began a dialogue between them, long speaking together of the days they would spend as mother and son.

He would love her as a boy, but when she grew old he would abandon her. His love for deception would replace his love for her and so she would die alone, her breast weakly shuddering, on a cot in the hallway of a public cancer ward.

He sat before me, his head bowed, tears streaming from his eyes. So this was what he didn't want recorded and why he never, ever mentioned his mother. I wanted to help him, to offer him some word of comfort but I could not. We are all betrayers, all of us.

To find true joy one must first accept true pain.

Once again he was back in his old bedroom, only not as a man. This time he was a little boy again. He was dancing and dancing. It was a moonlit night and there was danger in the air. Terrible things were happening.

He saw waves of ships crossing the highest air. They were gray disks and the streets below rang with screams.

But more people were singing than were screaming and chains lay abandoned that had weighted their shoulders.

"The lamb will lie down with the lion." The secret moaning is that the son will love the errant father, the lamb will welcome the hungry nuzzling of the wolf-mother, the rat will perish of love as the owl's talons pierce his heart.

Beyond fear there is another world.

Chapter Twenty-eight

The Final Testament of Wilfred Stone

I was still dancing hard when I realized that the magic had slipped away. The room was silent, absolutely dark.

I heard a click, saw a flash of sparks, a flame. The blond woman in the flowered dress was holding my lighter.

Around us there were dim, dancing shapes on the walls, crude old carvings. I did not recognize their origin -

perhaps they were Native American, or maybe even older. They were powerful, they spoke of dance, these flying red figures.

This was no ancient building, and the children's circle was gone. I was no longer a little boy. We were back in the cave. I felt as if I had been to death and back. I saw the brilliant thing they had done. They had stripped me of all except what was most essential, pure and true about myself.

"Will you take the flower?" she asked. In her hand I could see a little yellow blossom. "There's a field where the sins of the world are buried. The soil is forgiveness. These flowers grow there."

I wanted to take it, but when I held out my hand a terrible thing happened: I saw Sophie hanging in the Gestapo's basement, spinning slowly and urine spraying like rain from between her furiously kicking legs. A blast of hate exploded out of me and for an instant I thought that flower was the ugliest thing I had ever seen.

She laughed and dropped it to the floor. At once I had a change of heart. I wanted it. I needed forgiveness too, after all.

The way she was looking at me, her eyes so full of love and humor, I saw that the aliens, as I called them in those days, were not evil. It was us, we were afraid. "We shot at you!"

An almost quizzical look came into her face. "I know all about that." She opened her mouth to say more, but was suddenly stopped. It was as if a switch had been flipped in her brain. Her mouth moved but no words came out. "Hell," she finally muttered, "I can't tell you about it."

Then she shuddered, her eyes grew penetrating and terrible and I backed away from her. It was exactly as if somebody else, somebody much, much greater had entered her and taken over.

Knowledge seemed to pour out of her and the whole impact of my experience struck me like a great slap.

This was what mankind was seeking, this incredible state that I had entered. I was beyond the boundaries of reason and the prison of history.

It was as if I had been in the forest of Eden, but with a tremendous difference. No longer did I wish to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, for I had consumed the last of its fruit, and digested it all.

I was truly free, and this was what mankind was about.

"My God, what I've learned - "

"Have you?"

"I want the others to know. I've got to tell them. The President's gone to war with you! I've got to explain!"

"You have made your decision."

"No! This would be - it's terrible - we can't shoot them - you - are you - what are you, anyway? Are you part of them?"

"There is no 'them.' Only us. We are part of us, and so are you."

She was holding out what looked like a plain, ordinary glass of milk. "You're thirsty, you need a drink."

She was absolutely right. I took it and swallowed two huge gulps before I realized that it was incredibly bitter, so bitter my head was splitting. I spat milky spray but she grabbed the glass, before I threw it down.

Then she was on me, taking me in a headlock and forcing the rest of the substance down my throat.

I choked and struggled but she was like a creature of steel, not a living body. "You will forget," she said, "until the latter days of your life."

What did she mean?

Then I realized that I was getting dizzy. The wise child, the children's circle, the ancient school - it was all becoming distant and indistinct and unreal.

My memories - but I couldn't forget! I must not! Finally she let me go. "You've given me a drug!"

"Yes, so that you can forget."

"For God's sake, I've got to tell them!"

"They aren't ready."

"Give us another chance, for God's sake!"

"When the time is right, you will take your chance. Nothing will be given. You are charged with the task of keeping our secrets until man is prepared to hear the truth."

The milk of forgetfulness made the room turn slowly round and round. The last thing I saw clearly as I collapsed was that dress. In the flickering light it became a field of yellow primroses.

Then I was standing in the stream. I had just dropped a cast. When I drew my line back I found that the fly was gone. How strange, I tie good knots. Then I remembered, hadn't I cast into some swift water?

It seemed only a moment ago, but also ten thousand years. A woman had come up ... or a deer . . . yes, a deer had ruined my concentration.

I glanced at my watch. It said five-thirty. But how could it when I'd gone out at eight-thirty?

The light was very curious. Although the sky was cloudless there was no sun. In the western horizon I could see the pure stars of morning. The east glowed green and white.

I am not a fool in the woods: obviously it was dawn.

Just then I heard a bell down in Roscoe.

A trout slapped the surface of the pool I'd been fishing and I lost interest in the confusion of time. Knowing nothing of the style of the hatch that had drawn him to feed I simply chose a lucky fly and made a cast that turned out to be as soft as a drift of spider web.

My lure had hardly rippled the surface when I had a smart strike. He took me and ran for cover. My line shook with his life. I had always secretly loathed the wolf in me and loved the lamb. That was all changed. Now the wolf was my pride as the lamb was my joy, and I played that fish with skill beyond anything I had known before. My heart burst with love for him. I played my line and wept with the sheer beauty of it, the amazing goodness of the situation.

My reward was a phenomenal catch, a four-pound brookie struggling in my creel. To take such a large brook trout anywhere would have been marvelous. But from this stream in 1947 it was a miracle.

I stopped fishing then and returned to the club.

I was met with amazement.

One man reached his hand out, ran his fingers down my chest. I saw that my fishing vest was all torn. When in the world had that happened?