The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories (6 page)

Jason decided to walk to the temple. It was the only recognisably human element that he could see, and even that possessed a certain inhuman perfection. It occurred to him that he might be trapped forever in this beautiful but somehow threatening world. He did not think that he would wake up and find himself again in Fulham; he felt too alive for that. As far as he could understand it he had found his way into another dimension of existence; but whose?

It was an odd question, that ‘whose?’, because as long as he lived in one world—the Fulham world—such curiosity had not existed. The question would have been meaningless, because there was nothing else. Now it seemed full of significance, even though its answer was quite beyond him.

At each step he took, the view seemed to compose itself into another classical landscape. It was as if he had walked into not one but an infinity of pictures, each one a subtly varying depiction of the same exquisite but melancholy mood. No one scene in the Fulham world had the same monolithic intensity; a hundred moods competed for attention within it.

Sounds were slight and precious to his ears. The breeze fumbled at his skin and rustled the trees. No animal noises could be heard, beyond that one invisible bird. His own feet on the path were loud and jarring. When he stopped he listened intently and could just discern, behind the wind, another very faint sound. It was a twittering, that was the only way he could describe it, but he was sure that it was not birds. Could it have been bats or insects? A moment of synaesthesia gave him a mental image of thousands of tiny sparks of light, each of a distinct shape and colour, each with its distinctive tone, whirling in a black void. Then the moment passed and he could barely hear the twittering. He continued on his way to the temple.

In the declining sun the temple’s white crystalline marble shone almost like gold. It was of Roman design with an ionic porch attached to a plain rotunda domed with dull green copper which indicated the occasional presence of rain in this strange land. Jason could make out two bronze coffered doors standing ajar under the porch. The inscription on the cornice under the pediment was: ET IN ARCADIA EGO.

He mounted the marble steps and entered the cool portico. As he did so he was invaded by a strong sensation of loneliness, an intensification of melancholy so extreme that it was no longer pleasant. However something drove him on to penetrate the mystery of the place and he walked through the bronze doors into the rotunda.

The coffered ceiling had a circular opening at the apex which let in a slanted column of light from the sky above. At the very centre of the rotunda under the opening stood a gigantic sarcophagus of black marble on a granite dais. It was highly polished and its shape was that of a giant bath with a dome-like lid on top of it. The walls were of polished marble and, at eye level, around the inner circumference of the building there ran a circular frieze in bas relief, crisply and exquisitely carved. The stone from which it was carved was grey, delicately veined with streaks of silver that seemed to heighten details.

The scenes depicted at first made no sense until he found that it was possible to read the sequence of events starting to the right of the door and working round in an anti-clockwise direction.

It began with a naked man lying apparently on his deathbed. Around him men and women in classical dress stood or knelt in traditional attitudes of mourning. The carving had the decorous correctness of a Flaxman, except for a figure to be glimpsed behind the others who was half hiding a laughing mouth behind his hand. Standing apart from this group to the left, a tall veiled figure beckoned a bony finger.

In the next tableau the same man who had been lying on his deathbed was being dragged down a rocky path by the veiled figure now stooping. Its face, half hidden was sunken and skull-like, the eye sockets empty.

As Jason moved round the frieze he saw that the man had now reached the banks of a river where a number of other naked souls stood disconsolately, waiting for the boat. This vessel, punted by a misshapen giant, was propelled through the turbulent waters of Styx in which indistinct figures swam or floundered. One of these clutched at the side of the boat with a weak arm, but it was clear that one of the men in the boat was about to strike at the arm with a stone.

On the other side of the water stood Cerberus, the three headed dog with his tail of snakes, and beyond this a group stood before two masked figures on thrones carved with their names, Minos and Rhadamanthus, the judges of the underworld. One held a pair of scales, the other a sword.

Up till this point, the carvings had been expressive in a somewhat detached way, but the sequence of events seemed orderly and comprehensible. A propriety had been observed. About half way round the rotunda, events depicted became increasingly chaotic and bizarre, even though the classical style of execution had not altered.

Behind Minos and Rhadamanthus a tight mass of people were being pushed into a tiny aperture between two great blocks of dressed stone. The people were being moved by strange creatures, human in the composition of their limbs but so thin and elongated they looked more like insects. These same beings were pushing the blocks of stone together to crush the people they had driven into the aperture. In another scene a group of men and women, emaciated and hungry-looking, sat around a stone table, staring in horror at a single plate. On the plate was an amorphous mass, out of which projected something like an arm which waved a podgy mocking hand at them. Then came a grove of trees through which naked men and women were running in fear pursued by creatures with human heads that went on all fours. Other scenes followed in which people were apparently being forced to enact futile and repetitive tasks. A scene that struck Jason with quite unreasonable horror was one in which a man and woman were being measured by birds with long arms instead of wings. Every intimate part of their bodies was being inspected. On their faces was a look of agonised resignation and despair.

In the last quarter of the relief there was more tranquillity. It was signalled by the depiction of a field of long grass, each blade sharply delineated on the stone, as thin as threads. A few tall plants of asphodel relieved the monotony of the landscape, and the carver had cunningly managed to indicate infinite distance, despite the monochrome of his material. One or two figures were walking through this field though most sat or reclined.

The walkers, predominantly male, wore classical armour and carried weapons. They seemed to represent enthusiasts for the active life, and their faces showed vigour and determination as they wandered about, all in different directions. Those seated or reclining wore flowing classical robes. There were senators in togas, matrons with their heads decorously covered. Their features were serenely regular, but maintained a tenuous individuality. A little apart, a group of bearded men sat on thrones disputing with each other; while a similar collection of women span, sewed and embroidered. Some figures seemed sunk in deep thought while others gazed about them vacantly. None of those depicted had anguish on their faces, but none seemed actively happy. Resignation and boredom were the predominant moods. Jason found the scene so lifeless and oppressive that he almost preferred the depictions of torment and chaos which had preceded it.

At the very end of the frieze near the door was a final figure in higher relief than the rest of the carvings. It was the image of a man seated on a stone and facing the viewer directly. He was elderly and clean-shaven, with hair almost down to his shoulders. He was not in classical dress like the rest, but wore a loose shirt with a wide collar, baggy breaches and buckled shoes. He looked like a skilled artisan of the seventeenth or early eighteenth century. His stare was almost alive and Jason recognised a powerful similarity between it and the look of the figure on the path that he had met when he first entered the painting. In the man’s lap lay a scroll on which four lines of Latin were written whose sound and rhythm alone were like the tolling of a melancholy bell:

Omnes eodem cogimur, omnium

versatur urna serius ocius

sors exitura et nos in aeternum

exsilium impositura cumbae.

‘All of us are thither compelled. Everyone’s lot tumbles in the urn, destined sooner or later to fall out, and then we are bundled onto the boat of eternal exile.’

Horace,
Odes
, thought Jason, wondering slightly that he had remembered his long forgotten Latin so well. But at that moment a noise distracted him, so loud and violent it sounded like the whole fabric of the world being torn apart.

It was the grating and screeching of stone grinding against stone. Jason turned and saw that the lid of the great sarcophagus in the middle of the temple was moving. He ran to the bronze doors which, with a sudden gust of evening wind from the landscape beyond, blew shut. No force could open them. Jason turned to face the dreadful noise which re-echoed round the building, high pitched, almost like human agony.

The lid of the sarcophagus had slid far enough to reveal a small black hole, but not what was moving it. Then a thing emerged that looked at first like a great metal worm, then another, and another, until he saw that they were the fingers of a huge hand covered in some dull pewter-like metal. The hand pushed aside the lid of the sarcophagus which crashed onto the floor and shivered into great sharp fragments. One of them shot across the floor and stopped a few inches away from Jason’s feet. The hand seemed to feel blindly about the edges of the sarcophagus. Jason could see now that it was like the hand of a medieval knight in plate armour. It groped vainly for a few more moments, then withdrew into the dark interior of its tomb. Jason stood transfixed, hardly daring to think, let alone move; then he remembered the passage from Horace Walpole’s letters about dreaming of the ‘gigantic hand in armour’, and it reassured him. It meant that whatever he was experiencing, at least some of it belonged to his own subconscious. If he was living through a peculiarly vivid ‘lucid dream’ experience, then he could presumably control it. And yet the reality of what he had experienced so far had seemed peculiarly unsubjective. Perhaps this was insanity. On balance, however, Jason was encouraged and he contemplated the image of the great hand and the broken tomb with less fear. He even speculated on its Jungian archetypal significance, as the iron fist of Romanticism breaking out of the classical sarcophagus, and he remembered how during a brief period of his life when he was under the spell of Jung he had started to have Jungian dreams.

But it was hard to maintain complete calm because what he felt was so vivid. The thought that he might actually be dead occurred to him, and he was filled again with fear. What could have killed him then? You don’t die from looking at a picture.

There was a time of paralysis during which fear retreated, but also all hope. He felt overwhelmed by the strangeness of his situation and reacted to it by withdrawing into himself so that he began to feel like a tiny prisoner trapped in his own body. His legs started to shake and he wondered if he could stand up much longer. This was the turning point. He realised that he had nothing to lose by action, everything to lose by the despairing torpor into which he was drifting.

His first task was to get out of the temple. He tried the bronze doors several times, but they were irrevocably shut and had no handles on the inside. He tried the surrounding walls for secret entrances, or some concealed instrument to open the doors, but found nothing. Evening was coming on apace and the sky visible through the circular hole above the sarcophagus was turning to a star-strewn violet.

One world may have no meaning, but two must have, because a meaning is a relationship. The world in which Jason found himself was somehow contingent on the other one, the one which he still called, with increasing lack of conviction, ‘the real world’. There had been a way in; there must be a way out. At this point in his reasoning, Jason realised that he must try the only way out which was open to him and that was to enter the broken sarcophagus.

For a long while he paused, suspended in the classical calm of his surroundings, knowing that he must not stay, and not wishing to. Darkness was falling and soon he would be barely able to see where to go. The atmosphere oppressed him so that he knew he had to escape; at the same time it weighed him down and kept him from taking action. Fear held him too until he was able to detach himself sufficiently from his feelings to drag his body towards the tomb.

When he had climbed onto the broken sarcophagus he stared down into it. What he saw beneath him was a restless darkness, a blackness in which tides of even greater blackness were eddying to and fro. The air was full of shiftings and whisperings. He leaned over still further in an agony of indecision, then suddenly out of the black came the giant iron hand, seized him and dragged him down into the void.

After the initial shock, Jason became calmer. He was held securely, though not without some discomfort and he was moving. He could not tell in what direction he was moving, only that he was, because he felt a wind rushing against him and presently he saw tiny spots of light moving past, like the sparks of a bonfire on the evening breeze. They eddied and swirled slightly and seemed to be of all kinds of colours, sometimes, small as they were, of many colours together.

After a while he became aware that these sparks had sounds attached to them and that their tones mingled and blended together in a curious harmony whose shape he almost caught, but which remained elusive. Then it seemed to him that the spark sounds were not mere things but animated thoughts and that if only all these fragments could be bound together they would become one single thought. He heard them crying out together for unity, yet never achieving it in the hurrying dark. As he strained his eyes to focus on one of them it seemed to him that these sparks were not near to him but very far off and that the nearest of them had a shape. What shape he could not tell until one of them happened to come by close enough for him to see, no more than a mile or so he guessed. It had a human shape.