The Heresy of Dr Dee

‘Tad? That’s what you called him, in the Welsh way?’

For years I hadn’t even realised it was Welsh. I said nothing.

‘Ah, you’re one of us more than you know, John Dee. Why’s the village dying?’

‘Weight of too much killing. The dead outnumber the living, and the dead are rising. It oppresses them. There were always priests of the old kind to help them cope, but now they’re told it’s their own fault for not praising God enough.’

‘My,’ he said. ‘You do care.’

‘I hardly know anyone here. My tad told them he’d come back, when he was rich. But he never was, not for long. And he never did come back. Tell me… do have any idea how practised Gethin believes himself to be… in the ways of magic?’

‘I doubt he’s read the books, John. But he’s said to have the Sight. And the desire. And what some might call the courage… and others the madness of—’

Thomas Jones breaking off because of a sharp cry from down by the river. He began to turn his horse.

‘He’s in the marsh?’

Twisting in the saddle, I saw the water’s glitter, sword-bright through a line of trees.

‘We should all have gone.’

I slid to the ground and tied the mare to the slender trunk of the oak. Aware again of that feeling of separation from the physical, a shudder going through me, like you sometimes get in sleep – as if I were snatched out of my body and then flung back. The mare flinched, as if she’d felt it, too.

‘He’s here,’ Thomas Jones said uncertainly.

I spun round, thinking for a fearful moment that he meant Prys Gethin, then saw Roger Vaughan fading up greyly from the riverbank, the shape of him imprinted on the night, but blurred in my sight, as if the ink had run. I moved towards him.

He was limping. Not looking at either of us, only at the ground, as if he might sink into it.

‘I’m all right, Dr Dee. I’m not hurt.’

His voice was cracked like old parchment. He was not all right. He was far from all right.

XLVII Orifice

VAUGHAN’S HORSE, QUITE a big grey stallion, was straining at his tether, panting and blowing, and I saw that the others were become restive, too, their eyes all aflare.

I said to Vaughan, ‘What happened down there?’

‘I don’t know.’ He clearly was shaken. ‘That is, I’m not sure. I think… I think there might be something dead down there. The smell. Might just be a sheep, but I… It don’t feel right in any way.’

He went to soothe the stallion, putting his hands on it, I’d swear, in search of warmth and life, but the horse sheered away from him. I looked down towards the river.

‘I’ll go,’ I said. ‘Find out.’

‘Leave it, John,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘We’re better moving to higher ground, where we can see anyone coming. If Dudley’s only been missing since this morning, it’s not likely that—’

‘His body will yet stink? That rather depends, doesn’t it?’

I knew not what it depended on, but must needs be sure. And I was weary of unexplained fears and shadowplay, nature’s marked cards and loaded dice. Before I could think better of it, I was scrabbling down the way Vaughan had come, over short turf which suggested the sheep had been here in profusion in daylight hours. The sheep which fled at sunset.

Divers trees sprang up around me, from half-grown saplings to old oaks with bloated, cankered boles and branches like fingers with the gnarling sickness. The river was no longer to be seen – too close, or the bank had been raised up against winter floods.

You might conclude that, on this hard moon-flayed night, I was not fully in my mind, and maybe I wasn’t. I’d experienced this in Glastonbury and other places where Christianity and old magic were interwoven – the air unsteady and full of sparks, and sometimes you thought you could hear it like the hum of bees or, indeed, smell it in a sudden rank, richness of earth.

… you’re one of us more than you know, John Dee.

I wondered now, if my tad’s evocation of Wales – the men bent like thorn trees, their skin scoured – had not simply been intended to keep me away from here, plant some deep revulsion inside me. Maybe some dark memory had lived inside him and the last thing he wanted was for his son to become one of us.

But now I was here, whether by destiny or conspiracy, an educated man grown weary of the pinches and taunts, the mists and flickerings. I wove between the trees, looking for the river, recalling my own drawing of the valley, a place given form by ancient ritual. But the river was hidden now by the earth, of a sudden, rising before me, all humped like a deathbed.

How our night-minds ever find the most sinister of likeness. It was only raised earth, an upturned bowl. Made bigger by enclosing shadows than it had looked by day, and the trees growing out of it turned into a conference of witches, one of them long-dead, naked boughs clawing for the moon. But it wasn’t the tree that stank.

In the windless night, it seemed as if the smell was all over the tump. A raw essence of decay, of corrupted flesh, sharp and hideously sweet. Stephen Price and Pedr Morgan had secretly buried a new corpse here, which by now would indeed be in a ripe condition, but… buried.

Under the moon’s lamp, I rounded the tump to where they’d dug and was driven back, as if struck, by a reek so insidiously putrid that I felt as if my own body were rotting in its blast. Was sent reeling away, a hand cupped over my nose, my feet slithering and…

Christ…

A blow – a battlefield blow. A bright, ripping pain in the back of my head had me tumbling, flung around and thrown down, my stricken head jouncing from the bole of the tree behind me, legs slithering into a bed of twiggery and stony soil.

I lay for long moments, benumbed, the night in spasm around me. I must simply have backed hard into a tree with a low and knobbled branch which had scored my skull and put me down. But it had felt like an act of violence.

Reaching up a hand, I hissed in pain on finding a flap of peeled flesh, warm blood flooding through my fingers, my hair already thick with it.

Embedded in tree roots, I stared through the pain into a blackness, as if into the cave where the children of Mat met – entrance so narrow that only one man at a time might pass through. And the devil. The hole gaped at me like an open mouth, and its breath was foul. No escape from the stench of bloating flesh from… not a cave…

…but it was an orifice in the tump’s flank, where none had been when I was here before. When I opened my mouth to call out for Thomas Jones and Vaughan, something at once rushed in, foul as returning vomit.

How can I tell you this? How can I describe the horror of closing my mouth on a mess of putrid flesh? Trying to retch, but finding no breath for it. Beginning to choke, the panic throwing me on my back amidst bone-hard roots, knowing full well that, although my throat and gut were tight with revulsion, there was nothing in my mouth.

Nothing anywhere. No air. The moon gone, darkness absolute.

Know that I like darkness. Nights when I can lie on my back, and planets and stars are laid out for me in strings and clusters like an intricate garden whose patterns I know with an intimacy as if I’d cultivated them myself.

This was a solid darkness, like stilled smoke. Should I have formed a prayer, holding it inside me, or inscribed a protective pentagram on the air? We don’t think, even those of us who’ve pored for years over the