God, Grayle, I’m so sorry. Time just goes so fast when you’re absorbed in research. I looked at the calendar and I just couldn’t believe it was six whole weeks since I wrote … Can you forgive me?
This never happened.
The only message tonight was a fax from her sometimes-friend, Rosita, New York’s number one New Age public-relations consultant, scrawled around an invitation to the opening of a new store called The Crystals Cave …
… where our experts will unite you with the mystic gemstone that’s been waiting for YOU, and YOU ALONE, since the beginning of time.
Grayle crumpled it.
There were crystals on the bookshelves, a crystal on the TV, two crystals by the phone. Quartz and amethyst for opening the psychic centres. Tiger’s eye for confidence in health. Onyx for concentration.
There was the tree-of-life wallchart above the sofa, a poster of the Great Pyramid at sunset behind the TV. A small Buddha served as a doorstop. And under the window, a three-foot-tall plaster statue of the Egyptian dog-god Anubis wore a diamante poodle collar.
Hey, just because you believe in this stuff, Grayle would tell visitors, you don’t have to be too serious about it. The principle difference between Grayle and Ersula, five years and several epochs apart.
Tonight the crystals looked dull, there was a chip out of the Buddha she hadn’t noticed before. Also, Anubis looked so resentful in his poodle collar that she took it off.
Detective Olsen. Well screw him.
Grayle finished off half a bottle of Californian sparkling wine which had gone flat in the refrigerator, drinking it from the bottle, like beer. Figuring that, by now, the entire NYPD must have been officially notified that Holy Grayle Underhill was a doped-up neurotic who should be handled with iron tongs.
So the prime theory here, Ms Underhill, is that your sister’s been kidnapped. Do we have any kind of ransom communication? No?
OK, let’s consider the other option. Murder. Do we have a body? Let me, in the first instance, ease your mind on this score. I persuaded my lieutenant to allow me to call up three police forces around the area you say your sister was last seen. I faxed them all a description, plus the photograph you gave us, and none of them appears to have a Jane Doe bearing any physical resemblance whatsoever to this person.
So where does that leave us? It leaves us with a highly educated, independent and apparently headstrong twenty-five-year-old woman who, for reasons unknown, has failed to communicate with her family for a period of just over one month. Ms Underhill, do you have any idea how many women in this city have been on the missing persons register for over one year…?
What Grayle, in her desperation, had done next, had been to show Detective Olsen the letter. Even the final pages, which Lyndon had not seen.
Big mistake.
Let me get this right. What we are suggesting now is that your sister has succumbed to an insidious, mind-possessing force emanating from some Stone Age burial chamber. Do I have this right, Ms Underhill? Tell me, have you discussed this with a priest? Have you attempted to contact your sister telepathically? Or, maybe, enlist the assistance of some of the people you’re always writing about and like beam down into her next dream, tell her to come back home at once? Have you tried that, Ms Underhill?
In the refrigerator, Grayle found another bottle quarter full of stale sparkling wine and she drank that too.
On the old wine crate she used as a coffee table lay Ersula’s last letter, creased up and stained with doughnut jam from Guardi’s. Except for the last pages, which Lyndon hadn’t handled.… Grayle, do you have smells in dreams?Perhaps you do. Perhaps the olfactory element is commonplace in the dreams of others. I just know I do not recall ever being aware of a smell before. Certainly nothing so horribly powerful as this stench, this nauseous, all-pervading stench of corruption that made my insides contract until I was sure I was going to throw up. Can you throw up in dreams? Probably. I didn’t. I sure sweated, though…
Grayle sighed. In all fairness, what else was the guy supposed to say about this? In a city drowning in drugs, a homicide every hour on the hour, he has to get the woman who disappeared into a dream. Even if he believed in this stuff, taking it any further would be putting his precinct credibility so far on the line as to seriously damage his career prospects for years to come.
It occurred to her that if she were an ordinary member of the public the next person she would probably turn to for advice would be the city’s premier mystical agony aunt, Holy Grayle Underhill.
Just as, in a way, Ersula had done.The events of the past few weeks have given me, I suppose, an insight into your continued need to explore the phenomena of the New Age.I still believe in psychological answers, that the truth lies not Out There, as they say on your beloved X-Files, but In Here. But I confess that my belief system has been sorely tested on this trip. I keep telling myself how glad I am that you are not here, but the truth is I often wish that you were. I suspect that none of this would faze you. I recall how, some five years ago, both rather drunk, we watched some stupid old late-night Dracula movie together, and I saw an all too human sickness in it and was repulsed. While you just shrieked with laughter at the gorier excesses and delighted in the possibility of someone actually being Undead.Sober by then, we argued well into the night about the validity and the morality of horror movies, most of which you kept insisting were scary fun but also basically religious. Well, I still do not believe in Dracula, or the possibility of being Undead. Only in the power of the Unconscious.And you know something? That scares me a whole lot more.The dream experiments both excite and terrify me because, while I am prepared to accept and be fired by the possibility that the abnormally high incidence of lucid dreaming at ancient sites may, in some part, be caused by external geophysical stimuli, I know that the substance of those dreams still comes from within, and that is what makes me afraid. I am afraid of what the Unconscious can make us do. I am afraid of liberating aspects of ourselves that we are unable to control…
Grayle shivered in the damp heat of a September night in New York City and thought about Dracula. Sure, vampires were scary fun which also held out the promise of some kind — OK, a very degraded kind — of immortality. Like werewolf stories illustrated the possibility of human transformation. I swear on my mother’s grave he has to shave twice … three times…
So many people who believed this stuff believed Grayle Underhill had a hot line to the source. Seventy-three letters last week. Grayle read them all; a few would always lead to stories.
Stories. Scary fun.
Maybe this reflected her level of spiritual development: keep an open mind, don’t go too deep, have scary fun.
Grayle drained the bottle. Turned to the next page.We’re instructed not to discuss our dreams, for very sound, scientific reasons. All the recorded dream experiences, thousands of them, are being fed into a central database for future analysis. Only then will any correlations be considered. It is crucial to the experiment that any influences should be as a result of the geophysical properties of the sites themselves and not from each other’s dreams.As the place where this experience occurred was not one of the specific sites earmarked for the project, I approached Prof. Falconer and asked if I could discuss it with him. He was reluctant — he said a dream symbol could spread like a virus if not controlled — but eventually he agreed and we discussed it over dinner at a local pub. I was disappointed with his response but appreciated his reasoning. He said that because I went alone to the site — no therapeute — the experience was inadmissible. He also seemed angry that I had checked out the history of the site with a local historian (Marcus Bacton — I sent you a copy of his magazine) without his permission.Nevertheless, I regard this dream as the most significant so far and have enclosed my description of it. As a connoisseur of Scary Fun, you will no doubt appreciate it, although rest assured that if it comes to my notice that any reference to this has made an appearance in your scurrilous column, I will toss sibling tolerance to the winds and sue your ass.OK. What is remarkable about this dream is that it is the first which, for its entire duration, directly concerns the site itself.The site is Black Knoll (also known as High Knoll) in the Black Mountains, just under a mile from the center. It is a Neolithic burial chamber in a modestly spectacular setting atop a promontory affording a wide view all the way to the Malvern Hills where the composer Elgar found his inspiration.The only person recorded as having found inspiration here at Black Knoll, about three-quarters of a century ago, was a
