Time of the Beast (7 page)

But soon the darkness returned to blot out this brief ray of light. Each day I continued with my struggle, as my torments grew worse, and slowly I felt the demons of my doubts gnaw ever deeper into my soul, while God continued to turn the light of His countenance from me. Yet now, late each afternoon, I would emerge from my chapel and go with my daily loaf to sit beside the stream, hoping she would return. Until one day soon, as I rested on my spot by the water’s edge, I heard her voice somewhere distant, calling out my name. I saw her on the opposite bank, dressed now in a garment of animal hide, and she carried over her shoulder a stick, from which there hung by its mouth a good-sized fish. I smiled as I walked along level with her, the stream between us, until she came to my bridge, crossing over it and coming to stand before me, while she held out the fish as an offering.

She sought to make me a gift in return for the bread I had given her. I made an extravagant gesture of thanks, then gave her another poor offering of my bread; and we sat together for a while, attempting to communicate as we exchanged shy glances. I was much touched by her gift and had not the heart to refuse it, although I was sworn to eat only plain bread here, and I buried the fish untouched later that night.

After this she began to visit me often, always around the same time, and together we devised a game in which we would exchange our different words for all the things we pointed to around us; and soon a kind of rudimentary language, a jumble of words from both our tongues, started to develop between us. I began to like Ailisa more than I could say – not just for her pale skin, dark eyes and her ready laugh, but also for her quickness to learn, as in our games she soon proved sharper than me. I knew well that my masters in the Church would have denounced my friendship with her and doubtless suspected my motives for it. But I truly could see nothing wrong in it, innocent as I knew it to be. I was aware by now that this distraction and respite from the gloom of my solitary existence could only be beneficial for me. And also for Ailisa, living somewhere nearby with her small family of exiles, as I suspected her own life could be barely less lonely than mine. In fact I knew now that Ailisa had become the single spark of light in all my darkness, and I did not care even to imagine existing there without her.

But the day quickly came when I grew troubled by our companionship. It was as we played and laughed together at our word game that our eyes met, and there was a moment of sudden intensity between us, as she moved closer to me, and I was stricken by an overpowering urge to reach out and take her in my arms. In that instant I could feel that love was growing between us. But I held back with a sense of shock as I knew this could not and must not be. I was a monk vowed to celibacy, who stood upon the brink of damnation, locked in a daily struggle to redeem my soul. Yet how could I explain these things to Ailisa? How would I ever make her understand them? I saw then that the admonishments of the Church were wise. How might I tell her I could never be her mate, nor offer her that love which is natural between woman and man?

In the nights that followed I began to suffer the onslaught of oppressive dreams, which came upon me in suffocating waves of sensual horror: the secret creeping urges of restless and illicit desires, the imagined intimacy of soft and sultry flesh, of something faceless in the dark, and hands which stroked and clung to me, and gave thrilling caresses which overcame all my strength and resistance, to draw me helplessly into their deeper embrace. And I would awake with such a burning in my flesh tormenting me that it was as if I were already lost within the fires of Hell. Once I dreamed a vision of Ailisa, as I had first seen her, rising up naked and gleaming from out of the water; but here it seemed she was subtly transformed into something unlike herself – something lustful, and brazen in her nakedness, her mouth soft and wet as she ran her tongue lazily over her full lips, her dark eyes provocative and coldly wanton as she stared at me. And in the daytime, when next she came to me, and I looked into her face – sweet, smiling and wholly ingenuous – I knew that her image in my dream was only a wild phantasm from the wicked depths of my own imagination, a corrupt and unwholesome inversion of all that was real and true. Then I began to fear that perhaps after all Ailisa was unwittingly one of the Devil’s subtlest snares.

I realised now that I must find strength and courage to end our friendship. It would be hard to do. Indeed it would be terrible. But there was no other way, for it would be deleterious to me and unfair to Ailisa to let this matter continue. I wondered if perhaps this was a trial God had set for me as a test of my faith.

My conduct in all this only gave me further cause to suffer and reproach myself. I had thoughtlessly allowed this situation to occur, and now in seeking to correct it I feared I must hurt Ailisa terribly. It was all as a consequence of my own selfishness. But finally I became reconciled to what must be, and in the late summer I determined that when Ailisa visited me the next day, I must tell her she should come no more.

It was fittingly a chilly dismal day, and the rain had been falling relentlessly when I stood beside my bridge – soaked and dejected – to await her arrival.

But that day she did not come.

Unsettled and frustrated, but secretly relieved, I wandered back to my shelter; and I thought at last to eat my ration of bread. I found that only a few loaves remained in my store and told myself absently that I must make some more. But when I took out a loaf I saw that it had started to spoil from the heavy peculiar dampness which often rises to pollute the atmosphere in the Fens. On the crust there had formed the beginnings of a black mould. I carelessly took my knife and scraped away the worst of this, then softened the bread in my cup of water before eating it. Then I lay on my bed to reflect miserably on my expected meeting with Ailisa the following day and the extinction of my life’s only happiness.

But instead I fell asleep almost at once. Yet I awoke again soon after in the realisation that something was wrong – that something was happening to me. My head felt light, and I could not think clearly, as the room appeared to spin about me. I wondered vaguely if I might have contracted a marsh fever. But I was suddenly transfixed when I looked across at the dim glow of the dying fire in my hearth. For it seemed to my eyes that the tiny flame assumed a life of its own. Golden and red streaks appeared to rise up from it, waves of vibrant colour that shimmered astonishingly in the dark. Then the surrounding blackness itself seemed to join in these wild motions, swirling and weaving into the light to create a myriad of drifting, shifting patterns. I cannot say how long I lay there, entranced by this amazing vision, which seemed to me to be purely angelic, before I drifted back into sleep.

When I awoke the next day I seemed fully restored to my normal state. There were certainly no signs of any fever or sickness in me. Yet I regarded my nocturnal vision – or was it a half-sleeping and half-waking dream? – as an encouraging sign, for its beauty had seemed to be an omen of the light. But then my thoughts turned to Ailisa, and the vision was quickly forgotten. The rain had stopped and the day looked mild, and I knew that later she would come. I found I could not concentrate my mind on anything that day, for I dreaded her coming and what must be our final meeting. And I anticipated with bleak despair the prospect of my future life, spent here alone without ever seeing her again. I could barely imagine what was to become of me.

At the usual time she arrived, waving her hand to me and smiling in greeting. But as she crossed the bridge and approached me, my troubled state must have been apparent to her, for she began to regard me with concern.

‘No bread?’ she said with surprise, for it had been my usual custom since our first meeting to give her such an offering when she came, as my only available token of friendship and welcome. I shook my head dully, and her face grew sad. It seemed she thought I had no food, and must go hungry that day.

We sat together on the grass, and at once I was at a loss. I did not know how to begin to explain the matter to her. My message would have been a difficult one to convey even to someone who shared my own language and understanding of the world. But to speak it here, to this innocent girl who had spent her whole life in these wild Fens, and in the crude parlance we had barely started to construct together, seemed an impossible and devastating task. Seeing my distress, Ailisa reached out to place a comforting hand upon my arm, and gave a smile to encourage me, utterly disarming me and making all my sorrow and irresolution still worse.

Then, as I began to attempt to speak, I was interrupted by the sound of several harsh voices that rose from somewhere distant to break the silence over the fen. Ailisa’s response was immediate, her body stiffening as she sprang to her feet, gazing out into the direction from where the shouts had come, seeming almost to search the air itself. She turned to me, clearly alarmed, and reached out to clutch at my hand. We had not yet devised a common word for danger, but it seemed now there was no need for one.

‘Go! Go in house!’ She spoke urgently as she pointed to my shelter. ‘You stay. Stay inside. This night you go
ssh!
’

I stood staring at her, a little confused by her excited state, since the voices had seemed to me to come from somewhere far away. But I knew that bands of outlaws sheltered in parts of this great wilderness: violent and dangerous men who went out to raid the villages by night. Clearly Ailisa had learned to be cautious. With a final look at me, and another frantic gesture towards my refuge, she turned and ran back over the bridge, and I watched her go until she disappeared amongst the trees. Then I did as she had urged me and went indoors.

I heard no further sounds from out in the fen. So I sat in weary disconsolation, turning my awful predicament over and over in my thoughts. Until finally I noticed that the night-time shadows had fallen, and I remembered I had eaten nothing. I had no appetite, but almost without thought I took another loaf from out of my depleted stock – I had been too preoccupied to think of making any fresh ones. But I noticed at once that this loaf had become far more deeply infested with mould than the bread I had eaten the day before, to the extent that I could no longer scrape or cut it away. But this was the least thing to concern me, and I considered that it had not previously harmed me, so I simply ate it quickly, ignoring the bitter taste, then washed it down with a draught of water.

I sat for a short while, then looked out through the half-open door at the dim beams of moonlight that faintly penetrated the rising mist. And as I watched the shafts of glowing light they seemed suddenly to greatly increase and brighten with a strange and remarkable sharpness. I was feeling light-headed, then positively dizzy, with an incredible and heightened awareness of myself and of my surroundings as this new intense world of increased vision emerged from out of the greyness of the one I knew.

It was happening to me again. A realm of altered perceptions was opening before me, a wondrous place of elevated sight and realisation. It seemed then that the light I had long prayed for had come to me, and a wave of pure euphoria swept through me as I dared to hope that at last my long path of darkness and doubt had led me to this: to walk in the brightness of a heavenly place where I might be cleansed of the dross and mire of my earthly life. In that moment I felt certain God held out His hand to me.

I rose and stumbled to the door, going out into the night, entranced by all I saw about me: a shifting swirling landscape of interweaving moonlight and shining silver mist, becoming threaded into the night shadows to form fleeting transitory shapes ahead. I staggered after them, as if to catch them, unable to keep my steps in a straight line as I moved unsteadily through this rising forest of enchantments that would not stay still but appeared to alter and reshape itself constantly in ever-deepening shades and hues of vibrant colour.

Somewhere in my mind I remembered Ailisa and that there was something I must tell her, but I could not recall what it was. As the sight of my log-bridge swam before my eyes, I decided irrationally that I must go out into the fen to find her. Unsteadily I managed to totter across it and wandered away among the trees, which began to spin about me in a kind of mad and twirling jig. I was dimly aware that I had roamed beyond the woods, and I stumbled about on the edge of some marshes, and the noise from the tall reeds as I brushed through them seemed to scream out in my head. But now I came to realise that my delirium was becoming ever more violent and wild, and what had seemed at first to be subtle and intriguing was growing into something uncontrollable and frightening as the earth and the sky began to lurch and reel crazily about me. I was almost lost to all physical feeling, and I sensed I was about to crash helplessly to the ground when I saw through the rushes far away the glow of a great shining light. And by some force of will I kept moving towards it, convinced that the distant stirrings of fear and alarm in me must surely be a sign that I approached a manifestation of the divine – as the Lord had called to Moses from inside a burning bush.

As I went on and the light grew nearer, it became ever more overwhelming to me, flaring outward in great fiery waves and colours, shooting sparks and flames that filled the earth and the sky, and whose heat I could feel burning upon my skin from far away. Until at last I came before it, seeing it clearly as I stood enraptured, my gaze fixed adoringly on its blazing beauty. Then my eyes grew wider still, as my nostrils were suddenly flooded with the overpowering smell of roasting flesh. There were noises now, rising up from the gloom beyond the firelight – a horrible chorus of harsh laughter and guttural cries, cracked and growling voices whose words I could not comprehend. At once I saw several shadowy forms, black and sinister figures creeping forward to surround me, and I felt a jolt of confusion, then of panic and terror. I flung myself away from them, stumbling backward, uttering a loud cry as my arms flailed and I tripped, falling to the ground at their feet. There came from them a further burst of vile, coarse laughter as they stared down at me, and I looked up into their faces in horrified disbelief.