The Paradise War Page 9

  “Upon reaching the glen, my guide and I dismounted and made our way into the hollow to the Cairn on foot. I found the ancient structure wholly unremarkable in size or proportion, and somewhat dilapidated in appearance. The only distinctive feature is an oven-shaped projection oriented west. Albeit, the farmers and uneducated folk of the glen consider the Cairn a Fairy Mound and accord it wide respect in their deliberations upon matters supernatural.”

  Nettles glanced up from his reading. “This document establishes Carnwood Cairn as a site of Otherworldly activity,” he announced. “Although the author did not find the entrance—slightly puzzling, that—still I have no doubt that the cairn described is the one you have seen. The hill, the hollow, the bulbous protuberance on the side of the structure, argue for precise identification.”

  I agreed. But the account was standard folklore stuff, and unremarkable at that. I had come across these same shreds and tatters of tales hundreds of times in my studies. It was the common grist of Celtic folklore, after all.

  “The chronicle continues,” Nettles said, “recounting several more sightings of wee folk, objects lost and found in the vicinity, and other benign disturbances. And then this . . .” He began reading again.

  “MacLagan also introduced me to a farmer living at Grove Farm nearby, Mr. E. M. Roberts, who affirmed the reputation of the Cairn as a Fairy Mound, insisting that his father had once hired a labourer by the name of Gilim, who, returning home one Samhain Eve, espied a Fairy Cavalcade issuing forth from the aforementioned hollow. Directly he hid himself and, when they had gone, hastily made his way down to the mound which he discovered to be standing open. He entered the Cairn and found it bright daylight within and himself in the midst of a green meadow of great extent wherein other Fairy Folk were at labour preparing a banquet. He remarked to himself that the Fair Folk were no longer small, but well above normal stature and beautiful to behold. The most handsome women he had ever seen approached him and offered him to eat of their food, which he accepted, remarking that he had never in his life tasted anything so delicate on his tongue. He remained the whole day with the Fairy Women until at sunset the Fairy Riders returned from their errand and the banquet began, whereupon the prince of the Fair Ones gave him a silver cup of wine and a long yellow coat and asked him if he would stay. The unthinking labourer replied that he was expected at home in the morning, to which the prince observed, ‘Then you must fly at once, my friend, lest your secret find you out!’ Upon the instant, the Fair Company vanished in a golden mist and Gilim found himself in a hawthorn bush hard beside the Cairn, wearing the yellow coat and holding the silver cup which he had been given. Gilim used oft-times to display this coat and cup as a proof of his tale.”

  At this, the professor closed the book and lifted his cup as one who has driven the last nail into doubt’s coffin. “What are you thinking?” I asked, already dreading the answer.

  “I am thinking your friend Simon has left our world for the Otherworld.”

  Though Nettles spoke with simple frankness, the sick dread I had been holding at bay for the last few days swarmed over me at last. The room dimmed before my eyes. The coat . . . the yellow coat . . . I had seen it—and him who wore it.

  “The Otherworld,” I repeated softly, naming the fear that had pursued me since Simon’s disappearance. I gulped air and forced myself to stay calm. “Explain, please.”

  “It is obvious that Simon manifested a distinct and lively interest in the Otherworld just before his disappearance.”

  “Lively interest—that’s all it takes?”

  “No”—Nettles sipped his tea thoughtfully—“not all. There would have to be some sort of ritual.”

  “There wasn’t any ritual,” I declared, snatching at the fact with a drowning man’s tenacity. “I watched him every second, from the moment we reached the cairn to the instant he disappeared. He didn’t do anything I didn’t do. I mean, I sat down on a rock and he just walked around the thing, asking questions. He was all of a sudden interested in cairns and what was inside—that’s true. But that’s all. He just walked around it once or twice, looking at it. He only left my sight a couple times—when he was on the other side of the cairn.”

  The professor merely nodded indulgently. “But that’s it. Don’t you see it yet?”

  “No, I don’t see it yet. He didn’t do anything I didn’t do,” I said flatly. I had invested so heavily in denying what had happened, I suppose I found it necessary to defend myself to the last.

  “He walked around it! Of course, he did. He circled it. But you did not.”

  “That’s right. So?”

  The professor clucked his tongue. “Someone has sadly neglected your education, my boy. You should know this.”

  Realization broke clean sunlight through my wilful fog. Of course, it was the oldest ritual of all: sunwise circles. Deosil, the Celts called it. “Sunwise circles,” I said. “You mean simply walking around the cairn a few times in the direction of the sun—that was enough to . . . you know, make him disappear?”

  “Precisely,” Nettles affirmed over the rim of his mug. “Representing the motion of the sun at an Otherworld threshold—at the proper time and under the proper circumstances, it is a very potent ritual.”

  “Proper time—like the time-between-times?”

  “Exactly.”

  “But we missed it,” I complained. “Sunrise was long past by the time we got there.”

  Nettles tapped his teeth with a finger. “Then the day itself . . . Of course! Late October, you said: Samhain!”

  “Pardon?”

  “Samhain—you must have heard of it.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard of it,” I admitted glumly. Samhain—the day in the ancient Celtic calendar when the doors to the Otherworld opened wide. “It just didn’t occur to me at the time.”

  “A day fraught with Otherworld activity. It would have fallen in the third week of Michaelmas term—on the day you viewed the cairn.”

  By now I was thoroughly distressed and disgusted. Distressed by Nettles’s matter-of-fact assertions and disgusted by my own ignorance. You’d think after a few years studying this stuff I would have learned something, but no-o-o-o! “Look, you said you were going to explain everything. So far, you haven’t explained anything.”

  Professor Nettleton set aside his tea. “Yes, I think I have all the pieces now. Listen carefully; I will explain.”

  “Good.”

  “First of all, you must understand about the way in which our two worlds are joined together.”

  “Two worlds—you mean the Otherworld and the real world?”

  “The Otherworld and the manifest world,” he corrected gently. “Both are equally real, but each expresses its reality in a different way. They exist in parallel dimensions, I believe some would say.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Now, then. The two worlds—or dimensions, if you prefer—are essentially separate, yet they do overlap slightly, as they must. It might help you to think about it in terms of islands in the ocean. As you know, the land mass beneath the ocean contains mountains and valleys. Well, where the mountaintop rises above the water, we call that an island.”

  “And the places where the Otherworld pokes through into our world—that’s the island. Is that it?”

  “For the purpose of our analogy, yes. It is, of course, much more complicated than that.”

  “Of course.”

  “Now then,” the professor continued, “this island, or point of contact, is called a nexus—as I read to you when you first arrived. Among other things, the nexus functions as a portal—a doorway through which one may pass from one world into the other and back again. The ancients were well acquainted with these portals and marked them in various ways.”

  “Cairns,” I said. “They marked them with cairns.”

  “Cairns, yes. And stone circles, standing stones, mounds, and other enduring markers. Whenever they discovered a nexus, they marked it.”

/>   “So that they could travel between the worlds,” I said, feeling proud of myself.

  But Nettles was not impressed. “Never! Oh, no. Quite the contrary, in fact. They marked the doorways so that people would stay away from them—much the same way as we might mark thin ice or quicksand. Danger! Keep out!” The professor shook his head. “This is why they used such large stones and built these structures to endure—they wanted to warn not only men of their own time, but generations yet unborn.”

  “I’m not sure I follow,” I confessed.

  “But it is very simple,” Nettles insisted. “The ancients wanted these places to be distinguished clearly because they understood that it is very dangerous for the unwary to venture into the Otherworld unprepared. Only the true initiate may pass between the worlds safely. Stories abound of unsuspecting travelers stumbling into the Otherworld or encountering Otherworldly beings. These stories served to warn the unprepared not to venture into the unknown.”

  “But Simon was unprepared,” I pointed out.

  “So he was,” Nettles agreed. “But there is more. I very much fear that there is a far greater danger involved. A peril which threatens us all.”

  Great. Really great. “What sort of peril?”

  “Unless I am greatly mistaken, I fear the plexus has become highly unstable. It may already be too late.”

  9

  THE ENDLESS KNOT

  Plexus? As in solar plexus?”

  Crazy old Nettles clucked his tongue disapprovingly. “You weren’t paying attention, were you? You didn’t hear a word I said when I was reading to you.”

  “Sorry, I was a little preoccupied.”

  “I will explain once more,” he sighed. “Please try to concentrate.”

  “I’ll do my best.” I centered my gaze on Nettles’s round, owlish face, so as not to be distracted—and found myself wondering if he ever combed his hair. His glasses needed cleaning too.

  “The nexus, as we have established, is the connecting point between the two worlds. Yes?”

  “Uh, yes.”

  “Now then, the plexus is the fabric of their interconnection. For the two worlds are not simply joined but woven together.” He interlaced the fingers of both hands by way of explanation. He spun around and snatched a scrap of paper from one of the stacks on the floor. “Recognize this?” he asked.

  I looked at the paper and saw a pen-and-ink representation of a distinctive intertwined lacework of Celtic design: two colored bands skillfully, dizzily interwoven; two separate lines, yet so cunningly conceived it was impossible to tell where one left off and the other began. “Sure,” I told him. “It’s the Endless Knot. Probably from the Book of Kells, I’d say.”

  “Not from the Kells, but close,” Nettles replied. “It is from a Celtic cross on the Isle of Iona. Surely you’ve made your way to Iona, Mr. Gillies?”

  To avoid disclosing the appalling shallowness of my education, I replied with a question of my own. “What does the Endless Knot have to do with all this nexus-plexus stuff ?”

  “I submit to you that it is a graphic illustration of the plexus. The Celts of old never tired of producing it. For them, the design represented the essential nature of earthly existence. Two bands—this world and the Otherworld—entwined in dynamic, moving harmony, each band dependent upon the other, and each complimenting and completing the other.”

  I gazed at the familiar design, following with my eyes the intricate patterns of loops and whorls and over-and-under crossings. “So that’s a plexus, huh?”

  “Yes,” replied Nettles. “That is the plexus. In our analogy of the island, if you recall, the plexus is the shore of the island. The shore is neither completely land, nor is it all sea. The shore is that territory which bounds the island and separates the sea from the land, but is part of both. When you stand on the shore among the waves, you are effectively in both places at once—you have a foot in both worlds, as it were.”

  “The ancient Celts revered the shore as a sacred place.”

  “Aha! You didn’t sleep through all your lectures!” Nettles cracked, and I reflected how poorly sarcasm suited him.

  “Not all of them, no,” I muttered. “As I understand it, the Celts venerated all sorts of plexus-type things: the seashore, dawn, dusk, the edge of the forest—anything that was neither here nor there, so to speak.”

  Nettles nodded approvingly. “Quite right. Still, we have been speaking of the Otherworld and the manifest world as quite separate places. The ancient Celts, however, made no such distinction; nor did they distinguish between the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary.’ The material and the spiritual were not separate or self-limited states: both were equally manifest at all times.

  “For example, an oak grove might be an oak grove, or it might be the home of a god—or both simultaneously. Such was their way of looking at the universe. And it inspired a great appreciation and respect for all created things. A respect born of a deep and abiding belief. The concept of one object or entity being somehow more real, simply because it possessed a material presence, would not have occurred to them.

  “Interestingly, it is only modern man who makes such rash distinctions. And having made the distinction, he then calls the nonmaterial universe ‘unreal’ and therefore unimportant and unworthy of his regard. Children, on the other hand, do not discriminate between the material and the nonmaterial in this way. They can tell the difference, of course, but do not feel the need to assign relative value to one over against the other. Much like the Celts of old, children simply accept the existence of both realms—opposite sides of the selfsame coin, you see?”

  “Okay, so where does that leave us?” I was beginning to grow a little impatient with all this philosophizing.

  “I am coming to that,” said Nettles in a tone that suggested he was not to be rushed. “Now then, while the nexus exists as a physical reality— albeit an invisible one, unless marked by a standing stone or a cairn or whatever—the plexus does not exist in the same way. It is, let us say, more the harmony created by the balance of the two worlds. Are you with me?”

  “Barely,” I admitted. “But do go on.”

  “Listen carefully. This is the crucial part: when the balance between the two worlds is upset, the harmony—the plexus itself, that is— becomes unstable. Like a strip of woven cloth, it unravels. Do you see?”

  I took an impetuous leap. “Unstable plexus equals cosmic chaos and catastrophe—is that what you’re driving at?”

  “Essentially, yes.” The professor rose and busied himself in a corner of the room. “In the light of this, it therefore becomes a matter of ultimate importance first to discover what has upset the balance, and then to set it right. Otherwise . . .” His voice trailed off as he began rummaging through boxes.

  “Otherwise what?” I prompted.

  He gazed into the air for a few moments and then said, “I greatly fear the Otherworld will be irretrievably lost to us.”

  “But I thought you said this was serious.”

  “It is serious,” Professor Nettleton maintained. “I myself can think of nothing more serious that could befall humanity.” He crossed to the other side of the room, opened a closet door, and began stuffing things into a faded canvas rucksack.

  “Well, how about a nuclear holocaust? How about AIDS? How about war and pestilence and famine?”

  “Those things are menacing, to be sure,” Nettles allowed, taking up a tube of toothpaste. “But they do not threaten humanity at its very pith and core.”

  “I, for one, happen to think being blasted to a thimbleful of glowing protons is pretty darn threatening to my pith and core. I can think of one or two others who would back me up on that.”

  Nettles waved the observation aside with the toothbrush he was brandishing. “Death is death, Mr. Gillies. It has existed since man was born, and will continue until the end of time. It is, after all, part of life. Disease, pestilence, famine, and war, likewise. They are all the same in that respect—part of human
existence.”

  “Spoken like a true academic. Here you are, snug in your little cocoon; the real world never touches you. How do you know anything about—”

  “Allow me to finish!” he snapped, shaking the toothbrush at me. “You are speaking of something about which you know nothing! Less than nothing!”

  My head ached and my eyeballs were dry and watery at the same time. I was tired and confused, and not in the mood to get yelled at. “I’m sorry. Go on; I’m listening.”

  The professor turned again to the closet and brought out a heavy wool cardigan. “Sometimes I wonder why I bother!”

  “Please,” I coaxed. “I mean it. I’ll behave.”

  He was quiet for a moment, staring at the cardigan. “What difference does a Japanese vase make?” he asked unexpectedly.

  “Pardon?”

  “Or a Rembrandt painting, Lewis? Or a Tennyson poem—what difference do they make to us? I am asking you for an answer.”

  Nuts. The man was utterly nutters. “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Art, beauty—stuff like that. I can’t say, exactly.”

  Nettles blew out his cheeks and huffed in derision, rolled up the garment, and stuffed it into the pack. “If Rembrandt’s paintings and Tennyson’s poems suddenly ceased to exist, the world would be the poorer, certainly. But there are other paintings, other poems. Correct?”

  “Sure.”

  “Ahh! But what if beauty itself ceased to exist?” he asked. “What if beauty—the very idea of beauty—ceased to exist?” He puffed out his cheeks. “Why, ten thousand years of human thought and progress would be instantly obliterated. The human race would have lost one of its primary endowments—the ability to see, value, and create beauty. We would descend to the level of the animals.”

  “Granted,” I agreed.

  “Very well.” He brought out a pair of long wool socks, which he held up to check for holes. “Apart from pleasure, beauty also kindles imagination, hope, and encouragement. If beauty ceased to exist, we would, in a very real sense, cease to exist—for we would be no longer who we are.”