"You have been in the cage. She has you. You cannot leave unless she allows it. Even with your power, I doubt it can be done."
"Who? What cage? My power?" To John's left, the trees had vanished, replaced with a solid wall, painted white. There was an image on the wall, but he couldn't make it out. From all sides, carpet was growing like grass, fibres pushing up through the soil and replacing the forest floor.
"The spell I cast on you had no effect. You drank the mead and didn't pass out. You're a riddle, a conundrum, an impossibility. You have power. Which must be why I'm here. I can help you. Teach you. Otherwise, she will destroy you. She tried this before. Lured a clueless virgin into the cage, bound him to her with sex magic. Somehow, she failed. The kid got away." The noone winked. "He looked a lot like you, John Aviemore. Which means you've either aged badly recently, or, more likely, time is being distorted by the cage."
John stared at him in astonishment and tried to prioritise his thousand questions in order of importance. "What does she want?"
"What does any prisoner want? To escape."
A wooden desk was taking shape a few feet in front of where John was standing. He saw a bookshelf above it appear inch by inch, taking on more definition every second. The area around Gai was darkening.
"Who is Ash?" shouted John. "Who is she?"
"Astarte," said Gai. John looked blankly at him. "Ishtar. Ashtoreth."
"Am I supposed to know what that means? What am I dealing with here?"
"She needs you. You must find out why."
Gai was still there, but he was fading at the same rate that the room was appearing. John looked at the wall on his left. The image was clearer now. It was a poster, the top right corner hanging loose, revealing the blutack beneath. A drawing of a two-headed man looked back at him. Theatre Clwyd's 1980 production of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. The poster had been on John's bedroom wall during his second year at university. He looked at the jagged words, Don't Panic, and did the opposite.
Gai had gone. John shouted anyway.
"Is she a ghost? A demon? What?"
Gai's voice came to him as if he were at the far end of a long tunnel.
"Worse than either. She is a god."
Twenty-Four
John's student accommodation in Bristol was on the top floor of a three-storey building divided into six flats. There was a communal kitchen and sitting room on the ground floor, and a bathroom on the second floor. In John's room, there was enough space for a bed, a desk and chair, a bookshelf and a sink. The other room on his floor was occupied by Chris and—more often than not—Alison.
He looked at the fold-up travel clock next to the single bed. 06:48. Perfect.
John smiled as he unfolded his legs from the narrow bed, which was three inches too short for him to stretch out in. He was thinking of the nights he had spent in the enormous double bed a few miles away in Leigh Woods.
John put on a striped dressing gown. His feet were in slippers. The slippers in question, which were fluffy, were at the top of a list of clothing items Chris had suggested he throw out if he ever hoped to get laid. John now wore them with pride.
There was a reason he liked to be up early these past few weeks. The post arrived just after six-thirty.
As he turned the corner of the last flight of stairs, he saw a pile of flyers and bills on the mat, but no letter. He bit back his disappointment.
After that first night, Ash had taken his address and promised she would write to him. His absolute confidence that she would, after the amazing night they had spent together, had taken a knock when he heard nothing for three days. After six days, he had become convinced that Ash had found his performance inadequate and embarrassing. He recorded a mix tape featuring the music of The Smiths and prepared himself for a self-indulgent weekend of misery. When the first letter arrived a week to the day after that first night, he revisited his re-evaluation and decided he was, in fact, a rather impressive lover for someone with so little experience, and a sensitive and attentive companion to boot.
Another letter had arrived a week after the first. Seven days had passed since then. John reminded himself that there was a second post in the early afternoon.
He made tea in the least stained mug, struggling to get the kettle under the tap without knocking over the tower of dirty dishes. There was no milk other than the unopened bottle at the back of the fridge, which had been there since he'd moved in. His housemates claimed it had been there a decade and had christened it Nigel. Someone had put a tiny hat and scarf on it. The liquid inside was grey. John drank his tea black.
At the foot of the staircase, he saw it, just the tiniest cream-coloured corner visible underneath a two-for-one pizza offer. With the toe of one furry slipper, he slid the other envelopes aside and saw his name and address, blue ink on the thick cream envelope. The looping handwriting made his heart beat faster.
Upstairs, he shut the bedroom door with his shoulder and leaned against it, as he carefully tore open the envelope. The heavy, old-fashioned stationery and the use of a fountain pen might have suggested a long romantic epistle, but Ash's letters were brief and unromantic. The latest was the tersest yet: Tonight? A.
John glanced at the clock again 07:12. Better get downstairs for that shower. He picked up his wash bag. When he opened the door, Ash was standing there.
John looked at the washbag, but it had become a bottle of wine.
He was standing outside Sally Cottage..
John handed Ash the bottle. The transition from his bedroom to the door of the cottage twelve hours later had been instant, but undramatic. John knew it had happened, but, following Ash—naked as usual—into her front room, his memory of the missing hours was perfectly clear and perfectly mundane.
He had tried, and failed, to finish an essay on whether Dickens could be accused of misogyny in Great Expectations. In the afternoon, which had dragged, he had gone to the cinema for an early showing of Witness, which he was sure he would have enjoyed if he had been able to focus. One scene affected him although he didn't realise why until later. He had eaten the last portion of frozen chilli, since Ash never ate anything, or offered him any food.
Now he was following Ash upstairs, unbuttoning his shirt as he went, his breath coming fast and shallow. He could understand why lust was classified as one of the seven deadly sins. Every nerve end was alive and singing with anticipation. He felt bloody fantastic.
Later, waking beside her in the dark, he knew it wouldn't last. He and Ash would never be together, not properly. John had avoided thinking about it because the whole affair was so exciting, mysterious, even dangerous. He thought back to the only scene in Witness that had stuck in his lust-addled brain. Harrison Ford's character walks in on Kelly McGillis taking a bath, and she allows him to see her naked. For a long moment, they look at each other, then Ford walks away. The emotional heft of this scene had stayed with John. Now he knew why. He related to the lust of the characters in the film—they were from very different worlds and could never be together—but there were deep emotions underpinning that lust. It wasn't like that with Ash. Theirs was a relationship built on horniness. The craving he felt for Ash was that of the junky for his fix.
It hadn't stopped him becoming obsessed with her. A few days earlier, Chris and Alison had staged what they rather grandly named an intervention. They had taken him down to the Trowel and Hammer, put a pint of bitter and packet of crisps in front of him, and asked him what was going on. At first, he said he was a grown-up and that his love life was none of their business. They were not satisfied with this, and they told him why: slipping grades—John had received his first C ever that month—a patchy attendance record at lectures, and a complete disengagement from his friends.
Chris was blunt. "You look like shit."
John had noticed the darkness under his eyes, and there was no getting away from the fact that he was finding it hard to concentrate for any length of time.
"I'm fine."
"You're not, mate, so stop talking bollocks."
After Chris's attempt at diplomacy had failed, Alison took over.
"Tell us about this girl. Why all the secrecy? When do we get to meet her?"
The answer to that was never. John suspected that such a meeting was impossible, like asking someone to see something in ultraviolet or hear a frequency outside the range of the human ear.
Looking at Alison and Chris, seeing their concern, he was ashamed at the way he had allowed himself to drift away from them. He told them about his nights with Ash. Not in detail, which left little to say. He knew nothing about her other than her name. He could describe every inch of her body, however, and had an impressive knowledge of her favourite sexual positions and variations. He admitted as much, with a little of the pride he had felt after their first night together.
Alison, whose father was a vicar, deadpanned her reply. "As it says in the bible, man cannot live on head alone."
A few drinks later, and they were back to their usual unforced intimacy. John promised them, and himself, that he would, as Chris put it, "stop being a nob."
Now, awake again as Ash breathed beside him, he admitted that his obsession with her was derailing his life. Whatever this relationship was, it wasn't healthy. It was time to break away.
Around the window frame, he could see the first hints of the approaching dawn. He would tell her when she woke up.
He must have dozed himself, because the next thing he knew, he woke from an erotic dream to find Ash's head between his legs. His body didn't consider itself bound by the decision he had made only hours before. As she moved her mouth, she started humming. In a summer full of new experiences, this one would make the top three.
"Oh," he said. Perhaps it would be better if he told her next time they met.
Twenty-Five
John woke up with an erection so insistent it was almost painful. He considered taking care of it in time-honoured fashion, but his stubborn streak won out over his penis, which was, possibly, a first. He had been dreaming—however inadequate a word that might be for it—about Ash, and he wouldn't let her presence taint the real world - if this was real, and he was actually awake.
He sat on the sagging sofa and waited for the tumescence to subside. He thought about the memory-dreams. There had been details in his recollection of his student house that he hadn't thought about for years. Nigel, the out-of-date milk bottle. The particular pizza takeaway whose flyer had obscured the letter from Ash. A lingering smell of drying clothes, stale beer, and dope. The corner of his Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy poster that always detached itself from the wall.
During the dreams, the replays, he could change nothing, not even the banal thoughts that popped into his mind. But he was there, too—the older John—an observer in his younger self's mind. The replays were immersive, as real as the ripped floral fabric of the sofa.
It was an exquisite form of torture, John concluded. He knew the event towards which his younger self was heading, but there was no way of sparing him the pain that was coming.
In those days, a psychotic break was still referred to as a nervous breakdown, a hangover from the days of Victorian medicine. Nerves were not involved, and breakdown suggested something mechanical. Cars break down, washing machines break down. If you know which bits to oil, which holes to weld, they could be fixed. John had once overheard a friend refer to him as 'having a screw loose'. It was comforting, he supposed, to imagine that fixing a person's mind might be as easy as finding the right screws to tighten. But John's mind didn't break down, it shattered, violently. When it exploded, he sank into the white nothingness from which he thought he might never return. If there was no John, who would return anyway? And when he came back, when he had opened his eyes to find his mother holding his hand, John wasn't the same boy who had run from Ash that night. He couldn't be. That boy, who loved the mysticism of William Blake and wrote poems he hoped one day to publish, was missing too many pieces.
He knew, months before he told anyone, that he could never go back to university. The classics of literature were dead to him, the words on the page resolutely remaining there, sparking no answering cry of recognition from his battered mind. It would be years before he would read for pleasure, and he never found himself entirely transported to a fictional world again. He needed solid, boring mundanity, not fantasy.
To look out at the world from the mind of his twenty-year-old self broke his heart, knowing the fate that awaited him, and not being able to change it.
It was still dark in the cottage. John didn't need to look at his watch to know it was long before dawn. His erection had gone, and he felt sad. Not depressed. He knew how depression felt, and this wasn't it. This was an ache of sadness for crushed optimism, for unwritten poetry, for the secret language of close friends.
He thought about making a cup of tea. As he stood up, he realised he wasn't scared anymore. He was trapped in the cottage with some sort of malevolent presence, and he wasn't afraid of it.
In an exquisite demonstration of timing that surely wasn't coincidental, a sound came from upstairs; the kind of sound an old iron bed makes when someone sits up in it. His mouth went dry. He swallowed with difficulty. Right. The fear was back. Despite the hairs on his neck and across his shoulders prickling, he walked towards the kitchen and the kettle. He was awake now. There was no one upstairs. He knew that.
Then she laughed.
He gasped, unable to stop himself. He forced himself to walk out of the kitchen and stand at the bottom of the stairs.
"Hello? Hello?"
Pipes. Old water pipes could make strange noises. It was a very old cottage. Very old indeed.
Pipes. Definitely pipes.
He sat on the sofa, an empty mug clutched in his right hand, until dawn flooded the room with summer light. Then he opened the back door and set out into the morning.
Twenty-Six
Evie,
The Between cannot be defined by what it is, only by what it is not. There's a branch of theology—via negativa—which takes the same approach to describe God. Or rather, to not describe her, or him, or it, or none and all of these things. See how quickly it becomes a mess? Still, it's the best we can do.
The Between is not a place, but you must go there. It is not a mental state, but you can only reach it with your mind. It does not exist, but it is there. To find it, you must look for it, but if you look for it, you will never find it.
Does all this make you want to slap someone? Me in particular? Good. You're starting to get it.
To reach the Between, you begin with intent, with a desire to be there, but as soon as you have summoned up that desire, as soon as you have focused utterly on getting there, you must let go of it completely. If this sounds difficult—impossible, even—then you are ready to start.
In Zen—a wonderful spiritual practice, I'd highly recommend you try it—there's a concept called beginner's mind. Have you ever learned a musical instrument, Evie? In Britain, children are often taught to play the recorder, much to the distress of their parents. You may have the same tradition in America. If so, I want you to remember the first time you were handed the recorder. You may not have known which way round to hold it, which end to blow into. If you had never seen someone play a recorder, you might not even have known you were supposed to blow into it at all.
Do you remember when your teacher showed you how to place your fingers over the holes? Do you remember your first attempts- probably blowing too hard before you learned to regulate your breath? And do you remember the wonder you felt when you produced your first musical note?
Good. Now rewind all that. Go back to that moment when the teacher handed you the recorder. At that precise moment, you have beginner's mind. Children are good at this. Adults have some unlearning to do before they can achieve the same state. The mind is receptive, open, non-judging. Very young children bring no mental baggage to the situation. They are detached, disinterested. It's a powerful sta
te of mind. When you hand a three-year-old an object, she doesn't file it in a particular category. That comes later. For a baby, a wooden brick can be many things: something for emerging teeth to chew on, something for chubby fingers to grasp, a way to get attention by throwing it. For a three-year-old, that same block might be a car, a spaceship, a drum. But for all of us, at the moment before we make judgements, that wooden block, or that recorder, is a pure expression of reality. You need to find that sliver of time between encountering something and labelling it. Beginner's mind. That's where the Between is. Except, of course, it isn't.
If it were easy to find, everybody would go there.
Luckily, many centuries of Adepts have found their way to the Between, and their wisdom is available to guide us. The starting point of that wisdom can be distilled very simply: if you want to learn how to find the Between, take a nap.
I've already mentioned how important naps are. I wasn't joking. They are crucial for anyone studying the craft of magic. It's imperative you get in the habit of taking naps as soon as possible. Or, almost taking naps. I don't want you to fall asleep. You will, the first few times. It's not easy. I'm just going to give you the method that has helped your forebears.
You need to do this during the day. At night, you're more likely to nod off. Find a comfortable chair. A bean bag is perfect. I wish they had been invented when I was learning to access the Between. I used to take the pillows off of my bed, pile them up in the corner and sit there. Eyes half-closed is best. If they're closed, you'll fall asleep. If they're open, there are too many distractions. With eyes half-shut, familiar objects become strange as your field of vision is reduced. Tiny scratches on your eyeballs float in front of you.
If you're going to find your way to the Between, it needs to happen fast. If you're not there in five seconds, open your eyes and start again.
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