Briefing for a Descent Into Hell Read online

  The moon held me, the moon played with me, the moon and I seemed to breathe at one, for my waking and sleeping, or rather, being wakeful and then dreaming, not the same thing, was set by the moon’s direct pressure on my eyes. And then, as it waned, by my knowledge of its presence, a dark orb with its narrowing streak of reflected sunlight, and then at last the two days of the dark of the moon, when the moon, between earth and sun, had its back to us and held its illuminated face inwards, to the sun, so that great Sun and minute Moon stared at each other direct. The sun’s light, its reflected substances, were reflected back at the sun’s broad face, and we received none, instead of being bathed in sun-stuff from two directions, immediately from sun, and reflected from moon. No, the moon had her back to us, like a friend who has gone away. In the few days when the moon was dark, when the earth was warmed and fed and lit only by the sun, only that part of the earth which was exposed to the sun’s rays receiving its light, I fell into a misery and a dimming of purpose. In the daytime I walked among the buildings of this city which was whole except for its absent roofs, and watched the turning of the earth in the shortening and lengthening of shadows, and at night I sat by the edge of the great square of stone where the circle lay glowing—yes, even by starlight it showed a faint emanation of colour—and lived for the return of the moon, or rather, for its circling back to where it might again shed the sun’s light back on us.

  As my head, when climbing the last part of the ascent to the plateau, had been filled with the din of falling water and the buffeting of mountain winds, so that I could not think, could only ascend without thought, so now my head was full of light and dark, filled with the moon and its white dazzle—now alas reflected out and away back at the sun, back at space—and my thoughts and movements were set by it, not by the Sun, man’s father and creator, no, by the Moon, and I could not take my thoughts from her as she dizzied around the earth in her wild patterning dance.

  I was moonstruck. I was mooncrazed. To see her full face I sped off in imagination till I lay out in space as in a sea, and with my back to the sun, I gazed in on her, the Moon, but simultaneously I was on the high plateau, looking at the moon’s back which was dark, its face being gazed upon by the sun and myself.

  I began to fancy that the moon knew me, that subtle lines of sympathy ran back and forth between us. I began to think the moon’s thoughts. A man or a woman walking along a street gives no evidence of what he is thinking, yet his thoughts are playing all about him in subtle currents of substance. But an ordinary person cannot see these subtle moving thoughts. One sees an animal with clothes on, its facial muscles slack, or in grimace. Bodily eyes see bodies, see flesh. Looking at Moon, at Sun, we see matter, earth or fire, as it were people walking in the street. We cannot see the self-consciousness of Moon, or Sun. There is nothing on Earth, or near it, that does not have its own consciousness, Stone, or Tree or Dog or Man. Looking into a mirror, or into the glossy side of a toppling wave, or a water-smoothed shining stone like glass, we see shapes of flesh, flesh in time. But the consciousness that sees that face, that body, those hands, feet, is not inside the same scale of time. A creature looking at its image, as an ape or a leopard leaning over a pool to drink sees its face and body, sees a dance of matter in time. But what sees this dance has memory and expectation, and memory itself is on another plane of time. So each one of us walking or sitting or sleeping is at least two scales of time wrapped together like the yolk and white of an egg, and when a child with his soul just making itself felt, or a grownup who has never thought of anything before but animal thoughts, or an adolescent in love, or an old person just confronted with death, or even a philosopher or a star measurer—when any of these, or you or I ask ourselves, with all the weight of our lives behind the question, What am I? What is this Time? What is the evidence for a Time that is not mortal as a leaf in autumn, then the answer is, That which asks the question is out of the world’s time … and so I looked at the body of the moon, now a dark globe with the sun-reflecting segment broadening nightly, I looked at this crumb of matter and knew it had thoughts, if that is the word for it, thoughts, feelings, a knowledge of its existence, just as I had, a man lying on a rock in the dark, his back on rock that still held the warmth from the sun.

  Misshapen Moon

  Tyrant

  Labouring in circles

  Reflecting hot

  Reflecting cold

  Why don’t you fly off and find another planet?

  Venus perhaps, or even Mars?

  Lopsided Earth

  Reeling and heaving

  Wildly gyrating

  Which is the whip and which the top?

  We have no choice but to partner each other,

  Around and around and around and around and around …

  The thoughts of the moon are very cold and hungry, I know this now. But then, enamoured and obsessed, I simply longed. I merely lay and let myself be drunk. But that cold crumb that waltzes and swings about us so wildly is a great drinker of men’s minds. By the time of the first quarter when the moon had again moved a fourth of its journey around the earth, and there was a week to the full of the moon and the expected landing of my crystal visitor, I was lunatic indeed. I did not sleep, oh no, I could not sleep. I walked or I lay or I knelt or I sat, my head sunk back into the muscles of my neck, gazing up and up and up and the cells of my eyeballs were ringing with light like a fevered man’s ears.

  This sound shrilled and grew, and late one night, when the half-disc was right overhead, I heard mingled with this another, an earth noise, and I knew that whatever it was was out on the plain beyond the ruins of the city, between it and the distant mountains. I walked through the ruined houses that had seemed so intimate with me, so close, but now they had set themselves from me, they had turned away, and when I came up to a jut of wall, or the corner of a building, or a threat of shadow, my hands clenched themselves, and my eyes darted of their own accord to every place that might shelter an enemy. Yet I had not once before, since making my landfall, thought of enemies or of danger.

  I walked down a broad paved street that rang out echoing answers to my footfalls, and reached the dwindling edge of the city, and saw, under the bright stars and the brightening moon, a mass of cattle grazing out on the plain. There were thousands of them, all milk-white or gently gold in this light, all large, fed, comfortable beasts, and there was no one there to herd them. They had all the vastness of the plain for their home, and they moved together, in a single impulse, a single mind, sometimes lowering their heads to graze as they went, and sometimes lowing. It was this sound that had brought me from the centre of the city to its edge. As I stood watching, there was a sudden frightened stirring on the edge of this ghostly herd, and I saw a dark shadow move forward at a run from a ruin at the city’s edge, and then crouch to the ground. Then one of the big beasts fell dead, and suddenly there was a strong sickly smell of blood on the air that I knew, though I had no proof of this, had not been made to smell of blood before.

  And now I understood my fall away from what I had been when I landed, only three weeks before, into a land which had never known killing. I knew that I had arrived purged and salt-scoured and guiltless, but that between then and now I had drawn evil into my surroundings, into me, and I knew, as if it had been my own hand that had drawn that bow and loosed that arrow, that I had caused the shining milk-white beast to fall dead. And I fell on my knees as the herd, alerted, thundered past and out of sight, lowing and shrieking and stopping from time to time to throw back their heads and sniff the air which was sending them messages of murder and fright. Soon I was there alone in the dim moonlight with one other person, a young boy, or perhaps a girl in men’s clothes, who had walked over to the carcass and was standing over it to pull out the arrow. And without looking to see who it was, though I knew that I could recognise this person if I did go close enough, and without caring if I was seen by him, or by her, I fell on my face on the earth and I wept. Oh, I’ll never know such sor
row again, I’ll never know such grief, Oh, I cannot stand it, I don’t wish to live, I do not want to be made aware of what I have done and what I am and what I must be, no, no, no, no, no, no, around and around and around and around around and around …

  I must record my strong disagreement with this treatment. If it were the right one, patient should by now be showing signs of improvement. Nor do I agree that the fact he sleeps almost continuously is by itself proof that he is in need of sleep. I support the discontinuation of this treatment and discussion about alternatives.

  DOCTOR Y.

  DOCTOR Y: Well, and how are you today? You certainly do sleep a lot, don’t you?

  PATIENT: I’ve never slept less in my life.

  DOCTOR Y: You ought to be well rested by now. I’d like you to try and be more awake, if you can. Sit up, talk to the other patients, that sort of thing.

  PATIENT: I have to keep it clean, I have to keep it ready.

  DOCTOR Y: No, no. We have people who keep everything clean. Your job is to get better.

  PATIENT: I was better. I think. But now I’m worse. It’s the moon, you see. That’s a cold hard fact.

  DOCTOR Y: Ah. Ah well. You’re going back to sleep are you?

  PATIENT: I’m not asleep, I keep telling you.

  DOCTOR Y: Well, goodnight!

  PATIENT: You’re stupid! Nurse, make him go away. I don’t want him here. He’s stupid. He doesn’t understand anything.

  On the contrary. Patient is obviously improving. He shows much fewer signs of disturbance. His colour and general appearance much better. I have had considerable experience with this drug. It is by no means the first time a patient has responded with somnolence. It can take as long as three weeks for total effect to register. It is now one week since commencement of treatment. It is essential to continue.

  DOCTOR X.

  I did not wait to see the beast cut up. I ran back to the edge of the landing-ground and tried to bury my fears in sleep. I didn’t know what I was afraid of, but the fact I was afraid at all marked such a difference now and then that I knew it was a new condition for me. I could feel my difference. Now, I was afraid of the moon’s rising and its rapid growth towards full. I wanted to hide somewhere, or in some way, but to hide in a perpetual daylight until that night of the Full Moon when—I was certain of this—the Crystal would descend to my swept and garnished landing-ground. But daylight was not a time to take cover in, to use for concealment. I piled branches over my head and lay face down with eyes blotted out and made myself sleep, when I had no need of it, but my sleep was not the sleep of an ordinary man. It was a living in a different place or country, I knew all the time that I was living out another life, but on land, very far from the life of a seaman, and it was a life so heavy and dismal and alien to me that to go to sleep was like entering a prison cell, but nevertheless, my new terror of the night and its treacherous glamourous sucking light was enough to make me prefer that landlubber’s living to the Moon Light. Yet I woke, and although I had not wanted to, and had decided to stay where I was, watching the skies for the Descent, yet I could not prevent myself getting to my feet, and walking through the now mocking and alien city. This time I went Northwards, and beyond the city I saw great trees, and somewhere under the trees a gleam of red fire. I walked openly, without disguising myself or trying to be quiet, through the patched moon-and-shadow of the forest glades, till I stood, on a slight rise, looking down into a hollow that was circled by trees, yews, hollies, and elms. There I saw them. They were about fifty yards away, and the intervening space was all sharp black shadows and gleams of brilliant moonlight, and the leaping running shadows of the fire played all around the scene, so that I could not see very clearly. It was a group of people, three adults and some half-grown ones, and as I leaned forward to stare and settle my eyes against the confusion of lights and shade, I saw that they were roasting hunks of meat on the fire, and singing and shrieking and laughing as they did so, and a terrible nauseating curiosity came over me—but that curiosity which is like digging one’s fingers into a stinging wound. I knew quite well who they were—or rather, I knew what faces I would see, though there was a gulf in my memory, blotting out the exact knowledge of where these people fitted into my long-past life. They turned, as the sound of my footsteps alerted them, and their three faces, women’s faces, all the same, or rather, all variations of the same face, laughed and exulted, and blood was smeared around their stretched mouths, and ran trickling off their chins. Three women, all intimately connected with me, alike, sisters perhaps, bound to me by experience I could not remember at all. And there were three boys; yes, the boys were there too, and a baby lying to one side of the fire, apparently forgotten in the orgy, for it was crying and struggling in tight wrappings, its face scarlet, and I rushed forward to pull the child out of the way of those hostile tramping feet, and I opened my mouth to shout reproaches, but Felicity pushed a piece of meat that had been singed a little, but was still raw and bloody, into my mouth—and I fell on the meat with the rest, pulling gobbets of it off a bloody hunk that was propped over the fire with sticks that sagged as they took fire, letting the lump of meat lower itself to the flames, so that all the forest stank of burning flesh. But I swallowed pieces whole, and at the same time laughed and sang with them, the three women:

  Under my hand,

  flesh of flowers,

  Under my hand,

  warm landscape

  Give me back my world,

  In you the earth breathes under my hand …

  Now we reach it, now now,

  Now we reach it, now now now,

  Now we reach it, now,

  Now now now now now now now now …

  and the three boys my sons who were as bloody-drunk and as crazed as their mothers kept up a stamping dance of their own and sang

  Now we reach it, now, now,

  over and over again. They were all laughing at me, laughing with malicious pleasure because I had joined this bloody feast, and later I saw that it was over, the women were walking soberly away, leaving the fire burning, and the piles of stinking bloody meat lying to one side of it. I looked for the baby, but it was not there. Then I saw that it was dead and had been thrown on the heap of meat that was waiting there, quite openly in the glade, all purply red and bleeding, for the coming night’s feast. The baby was naked now, a little reddish newborn babe, smeared with blood, its genitals, the big genitals of a newborn boy baby, exposed at the top of the bloody heap. I understood that I was naked. I could not remember when I had lost the clothes with which I had left the ship. Presumably I had landed naked on the beach off the dolphin’s back, but I had not thought once about being naked, but now I needed to cover myself. The bloody hide of the dead cow lay in its rough folds to one side of the glade, where the women and the boys had thrown it. I ran to it, and was about to wrap myself in it, all wet and raw as it was, when I chanced to look up and saw that the sun stood over the trees and the treacherous moon had gone. And so was the fire, the pile of bloody meat, the dead baby—everything. There was no evidence at all of that night’s murderous dance.

  I walked back through the forest, which was now full of a calm morning light, and then across grasslands, and then into the suburbs of the empty ruined city until I reached the central square, and I examined it anxiously to see if the past night had affected it at all. But no, there it lay, exposed and tranquil under the clean sunlight, and there was no sound but the invisible water’s running, and the song of birds.

  I was terribly afraid of the coming night. I was afraid of the laughing murderesses and their songs. I knew that when the moon rose that night I would be helpless against its poisons. It tried to think of ways I could tie myself, bind myself, make myself immune from the Moon Light, but a man cannot tie himself, or not with bonds that cannot be undone—can’t, that is, unless he kills himself. There is no way of making himself immune to the different person that may come to life in him at any moment—and who does not know the laws of bei
ng of his host. But I was already beginning to doubt that I knew who was stronger, which was host, what was myself and what a perverted offshoot.

  Finally, I worked out that if I walked as fast as I could away from the city, and kept walking until the moon rose that night, then it would be too great a distance for me to get back to the forest before the sun rose in its turn and banished the witches and their feast. While I was myself, the sun’s child, I would have the will to walk away from what the night would lure me to. And so I did walk, at a fast steady pace, away to the South, skirting the river by going between the great chasm and the cliff’s edge, across the dry riverbed, and then on across the savannah, all through that long hot day, and when the moon rose I was twenty miles away in a higher, dryer air where there were few trees and those stunted and meagre. I looked back over the plain where I could see the herds of cattle grazing, but from this height and distance, they were small clusters of light moving on the moon-green of the grass. I could see, too, but far away, the tiny dark that was the edge of the forest where the women must be. The moon was three days from its full. I was in despair. I knew that I should rather go on walking all night straight on, straight on and away from the tug of that forest, but I did not. I turned around and walked straight back, down off this rare highland where the air was so pure and so fine, down, and by the time the moon lay at my left hand, low over the mountains which I would have reached by now and understood had I not been waylaid by the ruined city, I was at the city’s outskirts, and I ran like a maniac through it, but skirting the centre of it, the square with its circle, because I did not want to see the reproach of that clean waiting landing-ground, and then I ran through the suburbs on the other side, and into the forest and there, exactly as I had seen them the night before, were the three women, the three half-grown boys, the baby, dead and festering on the pile of meat. But it was late, the moon was down, and the sun would soon rise. The women were about to move away. I had saved myself by walking so hard and fast in the opposite direction. They all went off into the trees without looking at me, and one of the boys leaped on a young steer he had tethered by its horns, and he went galloping on this crazed beast around the glade, kicking the embers of the fire, the piles of meat, the baby’s corpse, scattering them about. And then he rode off while the beast roared and screamed. And again the glade was empty and clean in a morning sunlight.