Water Theatre (41 page)

The track was steep and the ground rough. By the time I clambered the last few yards onto the road, I was sweating and short of breath. Hunger was driving me on, and all my senses were ablaze. Cicadas shrilled in my head. I could taste resin on the air and a hazy fragrance of rosemary and thyme. Clouds glowed in the evening sunlight.

After a couple of miles I came to a place where a stream trickled down the hillside. I knelt to drink, splashed my face and neck, and stood in green shade, thinking, while gnats danced around my head. If an armed sentinel had been posted on the road outside the village, then more guards were probably stationed at the gates to the drive. To avoid them, I would have to strike out across the hill and come at the villa from the cover of the trees. Checking my position against a mental map, I worked out that by following the stream up the hill, keeping my back to the sun, I should be headed in the right direction.

Half an hour later, I was leaning against a turkey oak, panting as I gazed down across the villa. Between my vantage point and the main house, a range of smaller buildings stood beside a large vegetable garden and a walled orchard. Smoke drifted from a slowly burning bonfire, but there was no one about. Nor could I see anyone among the large number of cars parked in the front courtyard of the house. It was well after eight. The light was starting to fail.

When I moved in closer, strains of music lifted across the evening air – a consort of stringed instruments playing a tune so melancholy that it might have been the sound of dusk descending over the hills. Then I saw some movement below – a stately procession walking in pairs by candlelight from the rear door of the house across the courtyard to the arched gateway of the water theatre. More and more people came out of the house, until around thirty of them must have passed
under the arch. All of them seemed to be wearing antique dress – high veiled hats and lace-fringed doublets with bulky sleeves, the men in capes, the women in full skirts, like people from another time. Was Marina among them somewhere? I could hear nothing except the music and the sounds of woodland under the setting sun.

It looked possible to edge round the orchard wall closer to the rear of the house, but as I stole quietly past the end cottage, the strains of music faded on the air and a dog began to bark. The coarse din echoed back off the darkening hillside across the whole estate. I froze for a moment, and then decided to make for the cover of the orchard wall before anyone came out. But then another dog answered the first from somewhere nearer the main house. Voices clipped the air, not loud but urgent. An iron gate squeaked open and a uniformed guard came out of the courtyard with a brawny mastiff held on a leash. A second man appeared behind him. I heard a radio crackling, but almost immediately the noise was drowned by a new sound from beyond the courtyard wall – the clatter of many torrents of water cascading among stones. Light from unseen sources illuminated the space beyond the wall. Instantly came the noise of a cheering crowd, then cries of “
Bellissimo!
” and “
Bravo!
”

I guessed that Gabriella's water theatre must now be in operation, perhaps as a grand opening to whatever occult ritual had been devised for the company.

A soft breeze carrying a taint of woodsmoke drifted from the vegetable garden. Then the mastiff by the gate began to bay more loudly. I backed away in the direction from which I'd just come, but the dog that had first raised the alarm was still barking there, and I was caught between them now. Another exchange was followed by a staccato command to the dog. Seconds later the skid of gravel crunched the air behind me. Glancing back, I saw the mastiff hurtling out of the gloom. There was time only to make a half-turn and lift my left arm for protection as the dog leapt, struck me on the side of my
chest with its massive paws and sent me flying. I hit the ground winded, scraping palms and knees against sharp gravel. When I turned my head, the dog's mouth was over my face, slavering as it snarled. Moments later the first security man arrived and I was shouting, “Get this fucking animal off me,” when he pointed the nose of a pistol at my head.

An hour or so must have passed, during which time I was handcuffed, thoroughly frisked, questioned in halting English, then taken to a disused tack room behind the loggia at the front of the house. I was held there in total silence. The room smelt of leather and dry timber, and was empty except for a table and a few chairs. A deck of cards lay splayed on the table next to a tray, on which stood a moka and four small glasses.

Despite my protests, I was handcuffed to the chair and kept waiting, watched by a guard who spoke no English. My ankles throbbed from where my legs had been kicked apart, my arms were stiffening behind my back. The guard passed the time playing solitaire until his radio spluttered into life. He listened to some brief instructions, then folded the cards away, crossed the room and went out, locking the door behind him. Several minutes later the door opened again, and a huge figure came into the room dressed in a black velvet doublet with slashed sleeves and matching hose, like a character out of Jacobean drama. His hands were gloved, his neck swathed in silk scarves beneath a plumed hat, and the face was entirely concealed behind a mask that shone with an ivory lustre in the light from the bare bulb. Its tilted eye slots and solemnly pursed lips held me for a long moment in a remote, implacable gaze.

“You can take the mask off, Larry,” I said. “Your weight's a dead giveaway.”

Sighing, Larry shook his head and sat down in the chair across from me. Sweeping off his hat, he placed it on the table, brushing the white ostrich-feather plume with a gloved hand, but not removing his mask.

I shook the handcuffs behind my back. “You might at least have told them to get me out of these bloody things.”

“Had to make quite sure it was you, old chum.”

“Well now you're sure.”

“Yes, and you've turned out to be exactly the sort of damned nuisance I anticipated. I can't think why the others were so insistent that you stay. Nor for that matter why you should choose to do so. I wouldn't have thought that this was your sort of thing at all.”

“But I can see why it's yours,” I retorted. “Occult hocus-pocus in fancy dress. Plenty of old money financing your production values! Not much mystery about what keeps
you
here.” I took in the sardonic tilt of his head. “But the rest of it – heavies with guns and dogs and handcuffs? That worries me. That makes me question just what sort of fascistic shit you and Adam have got yourselves into.”

Larry tutted ruefully behind his mask. “I'm sorry you should think so badly of us. And a little disappointed, I have to say!
Fascistic
indeed! No, my dear. Absolutely not. Occult we may be, fascists we ain't.”

“Doesn't the one tend to lead rather quickly to the other?”

“Only in wicked or stupid hands.”

“Then why the need for all this secrecy?”

“Some things shrivel in the light,” he sighed. “But this is Fontanalba, old thing, not Wewelsburg. I assure you my friends and I have nothing in common with Heinrich Himmler.”

“Are you sure your minions understand that?”

“My dear man, if you've been inconvenienced it's entirely your own fault. Adam did ask you to stay away from the villa until he sent for you.”

“And because I didn't, that gives you the right to set the dogs on me?”

“Yes, well we're sorry about that, of course. This is the first time we've had to put such measures in place. You merely happened to trip the wires.”

“So who are you protecting, Larry? “

Behind his mask, Larry glanced away across the room.

“There's someone here who brings his own security?” I guessed. Still he said nothing. “That's why you wanted to see me off, right? Because I'm a journalist? Because I might recognize someone in your little mystical coterie and blow the gaff on him? Who is it, Larry? A politician? A billionaire? Some celebrity or other? Royalty?”

“The real question,” Larry said, “is just what we're going to do with you right now. You've already mucked things up for
me
this evening. Can't have you wrecking it for everyone else.”

“Wrecking what, Larry?”

“Surely Adam's told you all you need to know? I thought the two of you had reached some sort of agreement? Not that I expected you to honour it.”

“Does he know I'm here?”

“Of course, and in the circumstances he's decided it's best if you stay. So let's get those manacles removed and we'll fix you up with a room for the night. We have a very full house, so it'll be rather basic, you understand? Gabriella suggested we install you
in faucibus Orci
.”

“Install me where?”

“
In faucibus Orci
. Have you forgotten your Virgil, old soul?”

“I never had your classical education.”

“The
Aeneid
. Book Six. It means, ‘in the Jaws of Orcus'.”

“I'm no wiser.”

“Orcus, one of the underworld gods. Another name for Hades, if you like. So don't be surprised if it's a bit hellish compared to your usual standards of comfort! But then, as I recall” – the mask concealed what I imagined must be a wicked smile – “you're not unused to basements.”

I was prepared for something simple, but not for the room that Larry ushered me into – a windowless, dimly lit vault with painted walls somewhere under the main house. A glass
and several bottles of spring water stood on a table no higher than a footstool. Apart from a large couch, there was no other furniture, so I assumed that the passage at the far end of the cellar must lead to a bedroom. Larry pointed that way. “The usual facilities are through there.”

I went into the passage, saw one closed door ahead of me and another to my right that stood ajar on a small white-tiled lavatory and washroom.

“The flush works on a sort of pump,” he said. “Makes a bit of a noise.”

I tried the other door and, when it didn't budge, said, “Is this the bedroom door?”

“There's no bedroom. This is it.”

“Just the couch? You've got to be joking.”

“However, you'll find a pamphlet of mine which might prove of interest, and you do have the wall paintings.”

Not an inch of the plastered stone was unpainted, but the single bulb in the room emitted such low wattage that I could make out no detail.

“How long do you expect me to stay down here?”

“Till we're ready for you,” Larry answered. Then he slipped out of the door, which clicked shut behind him.

There was no handle on my side of the door. I banged a few times, but only a hollow echo answered. I went back through to the far door and knocked on that one too, with no better result. The cellars were built of stone. No matter how much noise I made, it was unlikely that anybody in the rooms above would hear me. The security man had taken my mobile phone when he emptied my pockets – though down here it would have been useless anyway – so until someone came to fetch me, I was cut off from all human contact. Nor was I even sure what time it was. My watch too had been confiscated.

It occurred to me then that no one else in the world knew where I was. Raging that they should dare to lock me up this way, and thinking up all kinds of vengeance, I picked up the
pamphlet I found on the couch. Published by the Heartsease Foundation and entitled
KATABASIS: The Journey to Hades
, it had three epigraphs, one from Jung, another from T.S. Eliot, and the third – its presumption did not greatly surprise me – came from one of Larry's own works. It said: “Only a foolish mind fails to value reason highly among the instruments of knowledge; only a fearful one clings to it as though there was no other.” Shaking my head, I scanned the pamphlet's opening paragraph:

Let us begin by acknowledging that we are mysterious creatures inhabiting a mysterious world whose nature we do not understand, and where, if we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that, apart from the inevitability of death, there is nothing fundamental that we know for certain. Despite our best convictions, we do not know who we are, we don't know why we are here or what will become of us. This is, and has always been, the radical uncertainty of the human condition. Out of that uncertainty arise all the stories and stratagems by which we strive as best we can to connive at life and shape it to our purposes, to seek to make a go of things, to try to become what we believe ourselves to be, while attempting at the same time to make sense of the others around us who are caught up in the same marvellous and fateful game
.

I skipped to the next page, and was confronted by a lengthy disquisition on the name and nature of the invisible Greek god Hades, together with accounts of various mythological journeys to the underworld drawn from Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Sanskrit, Japanese, Amerindian, Classical and Christian traditions. Flicking quickly through a dozen more pages, I came to the concluding paragraphs:

Thus it can be seen that, whether we are conscious of it or not, our powerful culture is now far advanced on such a Hades
Journey. But as long as we continue to devolve the suffering on those less fortunate than ourselves, or to look for solutions in mere amelioration of the attitudes that precipitated the current planetary crisis, we will get lost on the journey and fall asleep in our own dark shadows. Yet to push on through will make severe demands on us. It will require a willingness to subordinate the ego's narrow ambitions to the wider claims of the compassionate imagination. It will demand more serious respect for those feminine – or lunar – values which, because they are not easily quantified or controlled, have been too long demeaned and neglected in our culture. It will involve a revaluation of the ancient wisdom of the ancestors, not only as found in surviving texts, but as a part of our genetic structure – the dead ancestors alive inside each of us, speaking through our dreams and genes. Lastly, and most comprehensively, it will require an honest responsiveness to the intelligence of the earth itself, of which each one of us is a living filament
.