'It is just a thing that I use,' said Hermione, holding the bronze dagger by the top of its long blade. 'I was sort of drawn to it,' she said, placing it back on the round coffee table and picking up a hedgehog's skull which she offered to Jim. 'This represents the side of death, to balance this other side,' and she pointed to a rare Brazilian orchid on the opposite side of the table. The outer door into the corridor was open but nobody had passed for about fifteen minutes, now. The undergraduates had been away for a fortnight.
Robert looked a little uneasy. Jim began to regret that he had ever invited them over to meet Hermione. The rest of her lab was respectable enough but she seemed intent upon drawing their attention to this one area that even Jim wondered about. It was, after all, very unusual to have an expensive Chinese rug at one end of a laboratory with a shrine of some sort beside it. Carl stood impassively and it was difficult to know what he was thinking. 'Where are the devil's horns?' he asked suddenly, quite seriously. Hermione sighed.
'I am a witch,' she explained, 'not a Satanist. And the devil has no place in my belief. There is no devil; he is a construct of Christianity, a wolf to frighten sheep.' She turned and picked up the orchid, took it over to Carl and gave him the pot to hold. Reluctantly, he took it from her.
'Do you think the devil resides in that plant?' she asked.
'What about the skull on the table,' Carl replied, curtly, handing the orchid back to Hermione.
'The skull is there to remind us that there should be no fear of death, which comes to us all, but a looking-forward into your next incarnation, as well as a remembrance of your last,' she seemed to address this remark to Jim. 'Around in a circle, like this,' and she ran her finger around the edge of the table, from the orchid, which she had replaced, around to the skull and back to the orchid again. The gentleness and sensuality of her movement sent ripples of hypnotic pleasure silently down Jim's back.
Robert lifted the ring-pull of a can of lager and let a stream of froth and bubbles run down the can and onto the rug. Far from putting a hand under it and apologising, he just stood there, letting it drip. Jim was so shocked at seeing something so out of character that he could only watch. Ariadne took her opportunity. 'Come on,' she said. 'Let's go,' and she strode towards the door, stepping over the pool of lager. Robert turned with her and trod the bubbles into a pale stain in the deep white pile.
'Don't mess about with her,' implored Ariadne when she and Jim arrived at her new workspace in the Department of Classics. 'She is leading you on. She hasn't invited you anywhere has she?' Jim could tell from the tone of her voice that she suspected as much. He must have let something slip. But he had firmly declined the invitation when Hermione had offered to pay for them both to go down to see it.
'I mentioned that old disused railway tunnel to her that we went to see earlier this year. She seemed very interested when I told her what we had seen. Said she would like to go to see it too.'
'You are not going to take her?'
'No, of course not! We're going down together, the week after next, straight after I get back from Egham!' said Jim.
Fourteen days before, on the last Friday of the undergraduate year, a piece of equipment on the mass spectrometer had failed and the results of Carl, Jim and Ron's frantic efforts, in collaboration with the manufacturers over the space of a week, had been to redesign part of a vital assembly which would take three months to produce and replace. Jim had persuaded Ron to let him run one more sample and they had found a few days ago that there was some available time to be had on a spectrometer at Royal Holloway College.
·
The early July sun was shining when Jim arrived from Waterloo Station at about four o'clock in the afternoon and walked out of Egham railway station onto the road, with his rucksack on his back. He followed a route he had trodden many times before when he was an undergraduate, along some residential back streets of terraced and semidetached suburbia, past the house he had once shared with some friends, past the Foresters pub, past the University of London Depository Library and up a steep footpath onto the campus where some halls of residence stood like a celebration of concrete breeze block architecture. Some postgrads were enjoying a frizbee game on the lawns outside the halls now that the undergraduates were all away. At the top of a steep road stood an attractive steel and glass mock-Elizabethan building that housed on its upper story the Department of Geology and in its basement a working mass spectrometer.
Hermione had not seemed upset that he was going away for a few days, although she had done a strange thing; she had asked for a lock of his hair. It sounded like a very Victorian thing to ask and treating it as a joke, Jim had pulled a bit out for her. Ariadne was keeping on her flat in Guilford Street as she prepared for her own postgraduate work in the Department of Classics and seemed engrossed in ancient history.
At about seven o'clock, Jim found that the Union Bar was open, although mostly the campus was now the home of throngs of young Italian teenage language students. The bar itself was relatively quiet, peopled only by a handful of devotees of the games area. The noises from the pinball machines became a little tiresome so Jim found a table on an outside balcony that overlooked a concourse that linked the Chemistry building with somewhere else. The evening was clear and the air relatively quiet as he looked upon the paths, paved areas and litter tubs in a deserted quadrangle. A window on the second floor of the Chemistry building emitted a mauve fluorescent glow and the silhouette of a figure walking about behind it. Jim sat quietly with a chilled beer.
Later that evening, he began talking to one of the girls who was helping to look after the teenage Italians. She was short with long fair hair, quite stocky and with a habit of stretching the bottom of her nose and widening her eyes for an instant after she had spoken.
'They are even worse in the mornings,' she was saying, and punctuated this statement with a momentary widening of her eyes and a stretching of her nose. 'It is never certain whose room any of them will be in and it is impossible to know what they get up to. In fact, I am sure that it is all quite innocent, otherwise why would they go to the trouble of dragging their own mattresses into each other's rooms? Her eyes widened again. 'If you want to sleep with someone, you need to be on the same mattress, don't you?' She said this with a glint of her eyes in Jim's direction and his heart pumped a little harder.
·
Whole wings of the main Halls had been commandeered for the language students but this one echoed with solitude and smelt of floor cleaner and stale air. Jim walked along the stained green linoleum floor of a very long corridor, past a coin-scratched telephone and pushed open a pair of swing doors, the wire-mesh-glass dirty from the kicks of a thousand soles, to emerge again into another dimly-lit passage of grey breeze block walls. He arrived at a door with the varnish peeling off and a blue and red sticker glued near the handle with the name 'Liz' scrawled on it in wobbly ball point pen. Beneath it was an angular word scratched into the varnish. Home 'til the end of the week - he thought.
As Jim lay on his bed listening to some music, he began to feel unwell. Going to the window he threw the base of it open with a big swing and let in a great draft of air, then collapsed back onto his bed. A fear began to encroach into his soul, a fear of insanity, a thing of great enormity growing inside him, not a part of himself. It was like a sphere expanding inside his head, expanding relentlessly, and he was bound to its surface, being stretched - stretched. Stretched! In danger of his very mind! He fought it. Fought it hard, but at the same time dared to wonder what would happen if he relinquished the struggle and gave in. But he had not the courage. There was no question. He could feel his heart beating and he did not know what it could mean so he fought it, fought it with all his strength and willpower, enclosed it in a steel container, an immense steel container, so that it could not expand any more; then he retreated from it, far into the starry blackness of the universe, until by willpower alone the vastness, the enormity was far away, growing no bigger, stationary, controlled, and he was safe from it, by the strength of the steel box he had put around it.
The next day was spent waiting for authorisation and transferring software onto the operating system of the laboratory computer. It occurred to Jim that this was in fact a better way of completing his experimental work than doing it at Saddler's College, because if the results were the same it would rule out any bizarre possibility that both the mass spectrometer at Saddler's College and the one at Cambridge were producing identical systematic errors. Authorisation finally came at half-past four in the afternoon.
Having readied his software and not really wanting to prepare a sample that he would have to leave overnight, Jim walked along a path that twisted around the rhododendrons of the College gardens and up some wide steps to a vast, palatial building of red ornamental brick known a 'Founders', standing like a huge and beautiful mock French chateau amidst the low rush of Surrey traffic. Jim walked the length of this building, through two enormous quadrangles and emerged into a driveway that led into a busy main road. Following the road to some traffic lights, Jim spotted a light iron gate of a footpath on the other side, crossed, and immediately found himself in the peaceful woodland of Windsor Park.
As soon as he entered he found himself in another world. Great trees of oak and beech stood on a forest litter of brown leaves, twigs and nutshell cases. Some tree stumps, cut low to the ground, were surrounded by lush green saplings beaming arrogantly over the tops of their green sheaths of plastic netting. Rhododendrons appeared, lining a path that forced its way beneath branches of beech and oak, hanging in a lingering moisture that the afternoon drizzle had left. A beech tree proudly displayed a huge tear in its trunk to an oak sapling which, struggling through the protective embrace of a rhododendron, was clearly ignorant of the great storm of a few years before that had battered its sturdy forebears and torn them from the ground by root and earth, leaving the beeches maimed but standing. The sun began to brighten.
Soon the woods opened out into parkland as Jim approached a large lake, past a slender tree with large, brilliant yellow leaves, melting into pale green at the top, past some tree trunks made into seats by the removal of a quarter section, past a little white wooden bridge over a stream, as the green expanse before Jim widened towards a small causeway and to the glittering lake beyond. The sun was now warm and made the colours of the grass and the trees very intense.
The sounds of a family game of cricket accompanied the twitter of a bird nearby, although the ground was still quite damp. Trees lined the lake. The earthen causeway protected a small inlet where ducks swam beneath the shade of a tall evergreen and not far from this, and nearly matching it for height, was a totem pole, it's lower half painted white and decorated with carvings highlighted in red, yellow and black; figures standing and squatting, with grotesque, animal faces. The upper part of the pole was brown and at the very summit was a grey conical hat with a comical flat top
The water of the lake glistened almost white against the grassy foreground. A low rumble of distant traffic mixed with quiet birdsong and now and again the almost surreally loud call of ducks. But otherwise, silence.
'No Paddling or Bathing'. The lake swept in a great curve like a broad river, a broad white river, curtained by trees on the opposite bank and by bulrushes and water plants on the side where Jim stooped, momentarily, to tie a shoelace. A dog approached, struggling to carry a long branch in its mouth, then soon afterwards a young family, the children arguing excitedly.
When Jim imagined himself to be halfway around the perimeter of the lake, and had safely negotiated the termination of the path above a waterfall, where the stepping stones across the stream had been slippery, he came to the edge of the lake again and gazed at the ripples that the water birds made on the surface of the water. The trees on the opposite side shone brilliantly and the quality of sound had changed, everything seemed more intimate. Laughter. Evening games. Almost at once, Jim came upon the ruins of a temple.
The temple lay in a glade a little way away from the path, surrounded on three sides by trees. Two groups of three standing columns, each about twenty feet in height, faced another group and the rest lay all around, supine on the grassy earth. Jim thought he must have come upon a magic place. A part of ancient Greece in England's green and pleasant land.
A vehicle crossed a road bridge a little way beyond some black iron railings. 'These ruins were erected on this site in 1827 by King George IV, having been imported in 1818 from the Roman city of Leptus Magna, near Tripoli in Libya,' the sign informed him. No ambiguity there!
Rhododendrons began to get numerous again and Jim wondered if he was ever going to reach the furthest point of the lake. The trees were bathed in evening sunlight on the far bank, only a couple of hundred metres away as Jim listened to another loud chorus of ducks and a rumble of distant traffic and a low humming and rushing which became a grinding and a roaring and a whistling as another aeroplane passed low overhead on its way from Heathrow Airport.
A sharp noise to Jim's left startled him. A dog bounded out of a line of trees nearby, its feet caked in mud and with a ball in its mouth.
Geese were feeding on the opposite bank and the lake extended, Jim could see now, towards a bridge of regal stone with five arches. He walked along a broad arcade of beech trees and came at last to a road that crossed this bridge, past a rowan tree in feathery green foliage and a grey squirrel rummaging in last winter's dry leaf-litter near its base, walked past these to a broad area of parkland, a sand-gallop and heather. The path swept around towards the inner shore of the lake. How far had he come?
'Four and a half miles'. The lakeside path was four and a half miles in circumference, said the signpost. Another white sign pointed towards a steep incline and the 'Valley Gardens'.
'No Entry for Horses'. 'Cycling Prohibited'.
The lakeside path brought Jim into a more formal, tended landscape of evergreens, birches, holly and ornamental trees. Sitting on a solid, wooden seat surrounded by bracken, Jim saw the far side of the lake as a haze of sunlit trees and through the haze the water became almost invisible as though he was looking into nothingness. Two fishermen moved on the opposite bank, breaking the illusion and a duck replied to the call of another. Then the wind stirred the surface and caused white streaks and spots and lines of sparkling light to sweep across the water, giving the lake a feeling of movement that it did not have, as Jim sat enjoying the sun and planning the work schedule that would keep him busy tomorrow and for the next few days ahead.
Jim explored the Valley Gardens and drawn by the sounds of clapping and cheering, came to a sports field where a game of polo was being played. He watched for a while and then wandered back into the Valley Gardens, to where a large oak tree was standing amidst rhododendrons, yet more rhododendrons, and nearby some saplings protected within their sheaths of green plastic netting. Between them was a patch of large, very broad-leaved plants with tall green stems standing like giant rhubarb. At the head of the small valley that descended like a broad and sloping gully to this spot was a building that came into clearer view as Jim climbed the grassy floor of the incline; the small valley was enclosed on both sides by small trees and one or two much larger ones and by further clumps of the giant, broad-leaved plant. The building Jim found himself approaching was another temple. But this one was not a ruin, it was small and recently built with four columns supporting a pediment, standing within a grove of tall pines and looking directly down the narrow valley towards the lake. By now Jim felt it ought to be about nine o'clock and guessed from the light that it was probably nearer to ten o'clock; he wasn't wearing a watch and as he sat on the ground beside the temple, preparing to make his way back before the light began to fade any more, he became aware that the park had fallen into complete silence. All the family outings and dogs' exercises were long over. Even the birds were strangely silent.
A couple of aircraft lights appeared over the lake. Jim took no notice of them at first, expecting only that another low roar would become audible in a moment, but they seemed to hover in the sky. One was red and the other green. Jim knew them to be aircraft lights but oddly, they remained hanging above the lake and did not move; not advance, nor recede, as though time stood still. Jim got up and walked down the grassy slope and as he walked the lights passed behind the overhanging boughs of a tree and reappeared above the trees on the far side of the lake. As he approached the shore, they passed behind the branches of the oak tree near the water's edge but as he reached the flat ground near the shore and walked a few steps towards the clump of rhubarb-like plants, the sky over the lake opened out to his view again and there they still hung where they had been all along, unmoving. Puzzlingly unmoving. Then, as the strangeness of the situation began to sink in, how an aircraft could be so oddly stationary and yet be undeniably an aircraft none the less, the lights began to drift slowly away from each other. It was like a gestalt switch - a picture of a cube suddenly became a picture of the inside of a cardboard box! It was not an aircraft at all! And before Jim could take this in fully, and with an equal shock, the two lights descended and hung in front of the trees on the opposite shore. In front! Less than a couple of hundred metres away! A third light, a blue and white orb, descended through the clouds which had gathered and came to rest between the red and green lights. For a reason which Jim could not understand, he found the blue and white object particularly menacing.
Suddenly, a bright light shone into Jim's eyes and he could see nothing around him and could not look up because the light was so strong. It blinded him and seemed to last only for a short while and then the light dimmed and Jim had been standing all the time, very frightened and oddly light-headed, but found himself beside the totem pole. There was a seat nearby so he moved over to it and sat trying to regather his wits. It had suddenly become very dark and Jim felt nauseous and more than a little scared.
Jim found his way with some difficulty through the dark woodland, made navigable only by the light of a bright half-moon; it was an anxious journey and not the route he had come by. He came out at last beside a road. Guessing correctly that this road led back to the main A30, one thing went around and around in his mind. He could not remember walking from the lakeside near the temple to the totem pole. He was sure he had not.
Walking down the hill beside the main road, comforted by a few intermittent cars and surprisingly, even by the dazzling glare of their headlights, Jim soon reached the main entrance to the College. He was hungry and walked a little further down the hill towards the Royal Ascot pub, hoping to catch last orders and get a bite to eat. But when he arrived, it was in darkness. Jim cursed as he tried to decide whether to walk further towards Egham or to turn back, and then a small clock shaped like a beer advertisement caught his eye. It was half past one in the morning!
He had lost nearly three hours somewhere!