teenage girl called Annie Davies who claimed to have had a vision of the Virgin Mary. This vision accords with the published accounts of such experiences (see Seward: The Dancing Sun, 1993) in which the sun itself appears to gyrate or, in this case, to descend and resolve itself into a robed, female figure. The story was recounted to me by the aforementioned Marcus Bacton, publisher of that obscure journal The Phenomenologist, who lives at Ms Davies’s former home, Castle Farm, and is in some respects a most alarming person.However, I had found the tale of the unsophisticated country girl charming (I was surprised to hear that it had not been well received by the local people at the time) and determined to spend a night at Black Knoll, if possible, alone — for I have found that, having done this so many times, I now awake with a total recall of the dream experience.I waited until two a.m., when the center was silent. Adrian, Magda and I — the scouts and guides as Roger somewhat patronizingly refers to us — sleep in small rooms converted out of the lofts above the old stables, so it was easy for me to creep out of the center and make my way along the ancient trackway to Black Knoll.It was a three-quarter moon, so there was light enough, and I felt a pleasant sense of adventure as I approached the monument; it seemed more awesome by night, but I was not afraid, finding myself, as usual, attracted by the silence and loneliness of it. I wished, more than ever, to know its mysteries. It seemed to me that an obviously pagan site which could inspire a fundamentally Christian vision was a weighty argument for the theory that the hallucinatory experience was directly influenced by the geophysical nature of the site itself.What did make my flesh crawl, I confess, was a scuffling beneath the capstone suggestive of rats — of which, as you know, I am not overfond. There was no way I was going inside after that — probably wouldn’t have been able to squeeze in anyhow, the way the middle part of the monument has collapsed — so I spread my sleeping bag on top of the capstone. I was used, by now, to sleeping on stone and drifted off quite quickly.THE DREAM.I am walking to the Knoll. You have to cross a beautiful hay meadow. It is harvest time now and the bales are stacked in the meadow like small skyscrapers. As I wander through the stubbly canyons between the stacks of bales and find the footpath which takes me up into the hills, into the sparse, ochre moorland grass, I am aglow with anticipation. Will I, too, have a vision of the Holy Mother? My dreamself, I have discovered, is a firm believer; this shedding of normal academic skepticism I find oddly refreshing, like a holiday, like becoming you for a while. Jesus, never thought I’d say that.
Grayle’s eyes began to prickle. It was as if Ersula was reaching out to her.
Automatically, she closed her eyes, pictured Ersula with her efficiently cropped blond hair, more blond, more pure than Grayle’s, and her steady, watchful, almost cold blue eyes.
Slowing her breathing, reaching out for Ersula.
Nothing. It never did work, did it? Especially when your senses were swimming in three-quarters of a bottle of stale Californian white wine.I am not aware of it for a while but the temperature must have started to drop as soon as I left the meadow. Not only that but, in what I would guess was direct proportion to this decline, the colors are fading. Some people only ever dream in black and white. I guess my noticing this means that I have always dreamed in color.Visibility is also declining because of a thickening mist through which I can see the sun like a pale coin. Familiar clumps of gorse sprout from the otherwise bare hillside. The Offa’s Dyke Path which more or less marks the boundary between the countries of England and Wales is close, and, in my dreamstate, I can sense a converging of separate energies; I don’t know how else to explain this.I feel lonely. Suddenly isolated. A strange sensation, considering that the center itself is ten minutes’ walk away, that the towns of Abergavenny and Hay- on-Wye and the city of Hereford are all less than thirty minutes by car. And although my waking self relishes solitude, in my dream I wish someone were here with me, even that amiable buffoon Adrian Fraser-Hale, whose enthusiasms tend to be as nonsensical as your own.Upon the Knoll, encircled by a muff of most unseasonal fog, it is alarmingly cold. English summers can be capricious, but this is not the cold of summer. I bend and touch the capstone; it has a patina, like a hoar frost. I am feeling depressed about this as I know it was on such a summer’s day that Annie Davies had her vision and was enveloped in a kind of rosy warmth. There seems little prospect of warmth here now.I lie down upon the capstone. A curious sensation. Let me try to explain it.It is as if my dreamself is entering into my corporeal self, two aspects of me fusing together. There is a quite awesome sense of what I can only describe as hyper-reality. For example, when I touch the stone at my side I feel I am touching a living thing or, more exactly, putting my hand into a vortex of swirling, pulsing energy, as though I am being permitted to penetrate the stone’s molecular structure. And it mine.I open (in my dream) my eyes. My dream eyes. Oh yes, I am fully aware that I am dreaming.The air is hard with cold. I am naked, by the way.It is now that I sense the smell. It smells as if all the rats or whatever they are under the stone have died and rotted. It is a stench so utterly abhorrent that I push my nose into the crook of an elbow in disgust and revulsion.Of what I saw, I am still uncertain. Although, as an archeologist, I have been present at the excavation of several graves, some no more than two hundred years old, this is outside my experience and I can hardly bear to think about it.I wrote it down at once, describing in as much detail as I could what I thought I saw, but when I read it back it seemed stupid and nasty, and quite unbelievable, and I thought, what does this say about me, what kind of credibility would I ever have again? And I thought of you, the way you laughed and took it all so lightly when we were watching that filthy movie.OK. Here goes.Awakening (when you awake in a dream it becomes a lucid dream, remember?) with a stiff back. On the hardest mattress you can imagine.Lying on my back. Neck stiff; can’t move it.Although, my God, how I want to. I just want to turn my head away from the suffocating stench.The night sky is moonlit, but full of racing clouds. I want desperately to float up, into the wild, fresh night, chase the clouds rushing past the moon, torn like rags, lacy scarves of vapor. (Lift … lift … you can do anything in a dream. Lift … float.)Can’t move. Pain. Muscles knotted, twisted like old lead pipes.Stench of decay, corruption. Turn away.A night breeze gets in my hair and my stinking bedfellow rattles beside me.Finally. I am allowed to turn my head. Turn it — oh Christ — his way, into the stink and it fills my throat, and we are looking at one another and he’s grinning his savage grin. His gums have gone. His jaws are agape like a trap, strands of yellow skin overhang his green-filmed eye sockets and the white, fleshless tip of his nose appears beaklike under the three-quarter moon.And we lie there, side by side, shoulder to shoulder, his shoulder naked bone where it pokes through the ragged clothing ripped at by the buzzards and the breeze.He’s been dead a long time, I guess, my companion.And I cannot wake up.Presumably, the dream ends at some point but I do not wake up until morning and when I do I am trembling and drenched in a cold sweat so thick and glutinous it is almost like Jell-O, and I am virtually fused to that stone.Scary fun, Grayle? You tell me.
Grayle found it more chilling each time she read it.
What was worst was that you would expect Ersula to offer a scientific explanation involving hypnagogic hallucinations or some such — Ersula’s predictable answer to stories about people who woke up and saw ghosts in their bedrooms. There was no attempt to explain this away; its effect on her had been too corrosive.
Grayle picked up the copy of The Phenomenologist Ersula had sent. What a rag. Badly printed, cheap paper, no layouts to speak of. No wonder it was entirely unknown even to Holy Grayle.
Still, there had to be a phone number in there somewhere. She’d call up this Marcus Backhouse or whatever he was called.
When she was sober.
