The Color of a Dog Running Away

by Richard Gwyn

  At this point I heard a woman’s voice, and realised there was a third stranger in the room. Turning my head, which was an effort, I recognised (with no great surprise) the student of Kierkegaard from the Miró Foundation standing over Nuria, who was still lying on the bed beside me. The woman had just removed a hypodermic from Nuria’s arm.

  Then the second man approached. I was relieved, at first glance, to note that he was facially intact, although he had no neck, his head emerging like a boulder perched between massive shoulders. On closer inspection, however, I saw that this giant had only one operational eye, the other nestling motionless in its socket, a shiny black glass orb. Its black brightness was startling, reflecting the light from the bedside lamp. He moved to the woman’s side and lifted Nuria’s head from the pillow. Nuria’s eyes opened. She gazed towards me without seeming to recognise me. Then, almost immediately, I felt myself being raised off the ground and half-dragged, half-lifted out of the door, onto the street, and into the back of a large van. There was just enough light from a distant street-lamp to see that the van contained two long wooden boxes, or rather (and this was cause for consternation), not boxes but coffins. So this is what death is like, I thought: I must remember to do it with my eyes closed next time around.

  My arms were strapped to my sides, and I was laid on my back inside one of the coffins. The rear doors of the van were closed. Shortly afterwards, they opened again and the two men carried Nuria into the other box. She lay limp in the arms of the men. Once we were both inside our coffins, a lid was placed over me and I heard a soft, definitive thud as it slid into place. I was now in total darkness.

  Some holes had been drilled into the wooden lid of my coffin. I had no difficulty breathing, but it was not long before I felt the onset of claustrophobic panic, followed soon after by a pitiful despondency. I understood that I was entirely unable to act, and with that realisation of helplessness came a tremendous desire to sleep: more, to sink into oblivion. I drifted into a troubled and liminal zone of slumber, my bodily responses taken over by the movements of the van, its gear changes, acceleration and braking, an immeasurable distance covered in darkness.

  I felt a growing sense of violation at being driven through the night towards an unknown destination. Dipping in and out of a confused sleep, constantly waking to find that things were precisely as before, feeling the steady throb of the van’s diesel engine as it powered along the straight roads, and then its forceful chugging as we began to climb mountain roads which twisted into hairpins, straightening out for a while, only to repeat the process. Up and up. The movement of the van became a familiar extension of my own body, and its shifts of gears and little bursts of speed began to correspond to thoughts, or rather, became the extensions of thoughts. Every detail of ground covered succeeded in evoking a corresponding detail of my life, real or imagined, past or future. I had enough experience with narcotics to recognise this for what it was. I was, in junkie’s parlance, gouching out, tracking the fragile borders of consciousness.

  I suffered too a dreadful longing for Nuria in the coffin next to mine, and wanted desperately to hold her, to comfort her (and, no doubt, to be comforted). But Nuria might as well have been on the other side of the planet. Trying to make loud sounds through the tape across my mouth was more frustrating than remaining silent. I could only manage a sort of pained lowing, which did no more than convey a vocal expression of the panic I felt.

  I had no idea how long we had been travelling when we eventually came to a stop, having been conscious only for parts of the journey. The rear doors of the van opened and I felt my coffin being lifted out and carried smoothly across an even surface. There were voices, but I could not make out the words, muffled as they were by the wood of my box. I was carried down some steps, feet first, and my coffin was again laid down on a flat surface. There was more indistinct conversation, and then the cover of my coffin slid back.

  The first thing I saw was an arched ceiling, in ancient stonework. My eyes strained to either side, but I could not lift my head to peer out of the confines of the box.

  “Relax,” I heard a man’s voice say. “The drug will wear off shortly, and then you’ll be able to move. We’ll bring you something to eat and drink. You’ll be hungry. But in the meantime, try and rest. There’s no point in struggling. You aren’t going anywhere.”

  The voice was calm, beguiling and slightly husky. Its owner was leaning over me. His face appeared oddly convex and out of focus. He was middle-aged, had weathered brown skin, with marked crows’ feet to the sides of his eyes. He seemed to be in a state of controlled exhilaration. He had an easy but calculating smile, which he applied freely. His eyes were sharp and bright blue, his bronzed head clean shaven, as was his face. He was dressed in a black robe, and had begun to perform some kind of ritual over me, muttering words rapidly in what sounded like an obscure dialect of Catalan. He carried a small wooden bowl, which he dipped into with his fingers, dropping water over me.

  Although still unable to lift my head to see out of the coffin, I heard him move to my right, and he began the same dull incantation over what I presumed to be Nuria’s coffin. The ceremony did not last long. When the man had finished, a helper moved to my side and gave me an injection. I barely had time to register what was happening to me. I looked up and saw the first man’s face once more, peering down. He was gazing at me with an expression that approached compassion.

  As I drifted off to sleep, the image of the man’s face began to contort, the lines and furrows deepening until his face resembled a freshly ploughed field. Enormous red flowers, like giant poppies, sprouted energetically through the soil. I could hear the movement of earth, the crackling and shift of topsoil; could hear the sprouting of the green stems, the hum of insects in the air. I had a bug’s-eye view of the giant poppies as they swayed against a sky of cornflower blue. I closed in on one flower, and saw, halfway up, a field mouse holding tight to the stem, swaying back and forth. The mouse seemed real enough, but displayed obvious cartoon characteristics, first by winking at me, then by calling out, in a predictably squeaky voice, “Hey, mister, they’re everywhere, you know. You better watch your stepping.”

  When I next woke up the room had changed, and the coffin was gone. I was lying in a bed with clean white sheets. My hands and arms were no longer bound. I was dressed in a plain white nightshirt. This room too had bare stone walls and there was a single, small, barred window. On the bedside cabinet was a jug of water and a glass.

  I sipped some water, moved myself slowly to the edge of the bed and attempted to stand. I had to hold onto the iron bedstead to balance myself, and was dizzy at first, but then made my way over to the window. A mountain landscape showed in the frame, two or three wind-lashed trees and a distant forest, falling behind the nearer peaks. The sun was a deep red, low in the sky, but I had no way of telling whether it was evening or morning. The landscape was washed in a strange light, so that the grey rocks of the nearby mountain appeared to be rose-tinged. Despite the dramatic beauty of the setting, there was, it seemed to me, a sense of desolation to the country: the bent-over trees in the foreground, the spruce pines of the distant forest, the encircling mountains.

  A key turned in the door and the shaven-headed man, whom I thought of now as “the priest,” came into the room. He still wore the black robe and sandals. Alongside him came an extremely muscular attendant with cropped black hair, who was dressed in a leather waistcoat and brown cord trousers. The priest motioned to the attendant, who moved away to stand by the door. He himself took the spare chair, and sat facing me across the table.

  “Please,” he began, in English, “forgive the abrupt way in which you find yourself brought among us. My name is André Pontneuf.” He did not offer me his hand, fortunately. He smiled, though.

  “I owe you an explanation, I know. But before we continue, let me assure you that I have brought you here, both yourself and your girlfriend, in your own best interests.”

  I found this com
bination of gall and gentleness both unsettling and insulting, and could not summon up any immediate response to his words. It irritated me that he dressed like a monk. He appeared to me to be the very worst kind of pompous fraud.

  “Where’s Nuria?” I asked, weary before asking with the need to ask.

  “Your companion is safe, nearby. She has eaten and she is resting. You may see her tomorrow.”

  “I may see her?” I echoed, incredulously. “You sack of slime. By what right do you tell me that I may or may not see Nuria?”

  The priest looked at me with the expression of a man who had been called many things, none of which would test his composure. He had an urbane, moneyed feel about him, which I found hard to reconcile with his priestly outfit. I could easily picture him addressing the board of directors of a multinational corporation, rather than presiding over a remote commune of mutants and muscle-men in the Pyrenees, which was where I imagined we were situated.

  “Please, not so hasty. All you need to know will become clear to you in due course.”

  I restrained myself with a scowl. He continued. “What we have up here is a little community of like-minded people. You do not yet know that you too belong with us, but rest assured, you do. In fact you and your friend are the last two, and in many ways, the crucial elements in our entourage. But I can’t expect you to understand this, or even to concede it, at first. I am counting on your memory to do that for you.”

  He gave particular deliberation to the word “memory.” His English, although perfect, had been learned in the United States or Canada, and still had a marked French accent. I had the impression of a sophisticated aesthete with a dangerous sense of mission. I wanted to tell him that I resented being a part of his intrusive and offensive game, and to express my sense of outrage at these violations of my personal liberty, and of Nuria’s, but there was little point in me reacting so predictably at this stage. I wanted, more than I was prepared to acknowledge, to find out why we had been brought here, and what lay in store for us, so I conserved my energy and decided to hear what he had to say. I wasn’t going anywhere in any case, as he had pointed out; not with his henchman guarding the door and others like him no doubt employed in a similar capacity throughout his “community.”

  “Where exactly are we?” I asked.

  “We are in the mountains,” he answered, somewhat redundantly, with a nod towards the window. “Let’s not get bogged down in questions of time and location.”

  “Why are you keeping me under guard, assuming you’re a man of God? I couldn’t help but notice your uniform. Or do you simply have an overdeveloped sense of dress code?”

  Once again, I made a bad job of concealing my anger. I had to calm down. The priest certainly was not rising to this kind of provocation.

  “As you are aware, the law prohibits kidnapping. If you were to leave this place and go to the police, there would be a lot of unpleasantness. Not that I am without friends in the police, though it would be, to say the least, an inconvenience. But it is my belief that once you have listened to what I have to say, and weighed it against your own experience, and memory”—that word again—“you will make your own decision, and that decision will be not to leave us. If by some chance you do decide to leave, and no one yet has, you will be entirely free to do so. But by then, you will not, I am certain, consider reporting us to the authorities.”

  “You seem very confident of that.”

  “I have confidence in the truth, that is all.”

  “The truth? Your truth?”

  “Truth that has no affiliations to mere personality.” He now stared at me enigmatically, the guru-hypnotist’s stare. He was quite good at this, I had to concede. His bright blue eyes fixed on mine, as though casting down a challenge which he did not doubt he would win.

  “Can I get this straight?” I asked, pedantically. “Once I have heard your story, I will be free to go? Both me and Nuria?”

  “Precisely. We will, of course, be obliged to lock you in a windowless van for the trip back to Barcelona. But you will understand that, I’m sure.”

  “But no more unrequested drugs?”

  “No drugs. Last night was an unfortunate necessity.”

  I sat back in my chair. I suddenly felt vacant, drained by the events of the past twenty-four hours. But I was also strangely alert. There was, I had to admit, something undeniably interesting about Pontneuf. The man exuded a forceful clarity. He reminded me of one of those early-twentieth-century celebrity sages, in the tradition of Gurdjieff and Crowley, even down to the shaven head and the twinkling eyes. His was a pernicious presence, but also a compelling one. My immediate impression was of a paradoxical man; likeable and seductive on the one hand, evidently power-crazed and deluded on the other. I found myself intrigued at the same time as being repelled by him.

  Pontneuf placed a folder on the table between us. The cover was untitled.

  “I have had this drawn up,” he began, “as an explanation of why you have been brought here. Similar documents were prepared for every member of our community, after the appropriate research was carried out. Your companion will be receiving one also. They are all of a kind. You will discover that they are concerned with events which took place over seven hundred years ago. Do not let this deceive you into believing that I have constructed some kind of fairy tale for the delectation of an audience hungry for cheap thrills. The events I have laid down are based on established historical fact, and endorsed by the statements of numerous subjects under proper hypnosis.”

  I wondered in what sense he meant “proper” hypnosis.

  “My work has been going on for nearly two decades,” he continued, “and only now do I feel it to be nearing completion. All I ask of you for now is to read, and to take your time.”

  And with that, he left the room. The door was again locked behind him.

  I picked up the folder and opened it. It was neatly bound with green thread and printed on quality handmade paper. On the title page was a name, nothing else. The name was RAYMOND GASC. I can only summarise the story that it told from memory, since the original has long since gone, but I have retained the gist and tone of it, if not all the details, and attempted to retain the mix of inventive speculation and historical detail that pervaded the account I read that night.

  RAYMOND GASC

  On a spring evening in 1247, a shepherd named Raymond Gasc sat watching the horizon from his perch on a boulder. He was from the village of Mélissac on the northern slopes of the Pyrenees, in the region of France known as Languedoc. He watched the land with interest because smoke was drifting across the skyline above the neighbouring village of Caldes, a nucleus for followers of the Cathar faith. Soldiers had come from the north again, three years after the mass annihilation of Cathars at Montségur, and following the instructions of the crusade, were intent on purging the region of the last vestiges of heresy.

  Raymond was a Cathar, and he was, like his co-believers, deeply concerned about the events taking place in the area. Although the persecution of Cathars had been quite thorough in the centres of population such as Toulouse, Béziers and Carcassonne, the outlying regions towards the mountains had remained free to practise their beliefs, and villages like Mélissac had provided shelter for the small bands of perfecti, who acted as the spiritual guardians of the faith. For the past thirty years they had lived through turbulence, war and retribution. Now, it seemed, the rich and powerful Barons of the north had decided to extend their power southwards, and the best way they could accomplish this end was by working alongside a scared but homogenous Catholic hierarchy.

  Although Raymond was illiterate, he had a deep and perceptive understanding of many subjects. He could read these mountains, for example: he knew the weather, the sudden drops in temperature, the likelihood of every wind change. He understood the birds, the animals and the plants that lived there. He could make remedies from roots and flowers. He was reputed to have an ability to work beneficial magic, and had helped many who w
ere sick. He was a popular man in the village, and a lively debater on theological matters, as were many of his fellow villagers. Like all minorities, the Cathars had a heightened awareness of their own predicament in the wider world, and Raymond was no exception.

  The religious movement to which Raymond and his fellow villagers adhered held a dualistic vision of the world. God and the Devil had equal power in many respects. God originated all things in their pure sense, but the Devil had actually shaped the material forms that inhabit the world, including humanity. Since the ways of the flesh were all the work of the Devil, all creatures formed by coition were products of the Devil also; therefore humanity was burdened with an innate evil which could only be relieved by receiving the consolamentum, a form of ritual purification. Once one had received the consolamentum, however, one had to refrain from sexual intercourse, the eating of meat and all animal produce (because animals were the fruit of sexual congress), and follow a holy and rigorously ascetic path. Most ordinary believers never received the consolamentum, and were therefore excused from taking this path, at least until shortly before their death. It was left to the perfecti to lead the way through their immaculate lifestyles. They lived as wanderers and ascetics, often hiding out in the woods and in the higher reaches of the foothills. Villagers would provide for them (insofar as they required providing for, since their needs were few) and give them shelter if they passed through on their journeys. The journeying of the perfecti was a metaphor for the eternal journey of the soul in search of salvation. Many perfecti preferred not to stay for long in any resting place, both for their own safety, and for the security of the villagers who accommodated them. Their itinerant fellowship provided the backbone of the faith, and the frugality and humility of their lives acted as a touchstone against which ordinary believers might measure themselves.