“Developed? Ye mean yer memory’s better than it was before?”
“Yes.”
“After thirty-one years?” He leaned toward me, his face filled with skepticism. “Better? I find that hard to believe.”
It took me a moment to muster an answer. “Memory’s a funny thing,” I said. “Often it depends on the state you’re in, and sometimes it needs support from others. You can believe it or not, but I’m still uncertain about some of the things that happened in ’56. People will tell me about an unusual experience they had on a golf course, and I remember something like it that I had with Irons. Did you ever meet him?”
“No. I never did.” Leaning back, he cupped his hands in front of his face as if to mask his facial expression. “So people tell ye about their unusual experiences, and ye remember similar ones ye had in ’56. You mean—what?—that ye see the contours of a green more clearly? Or the splendor of a sunset? Murphy, can I ask ye this? What do ye do for a livin’?”
“I have a trust fund,” I said with a hint of embarrassment. “But mainly I’m writing a book.”
“Another golf book?”
“No. A study of supernormal experience, part anthropology and psychology, part religious studies, part psychical research. It would take a while to explain.”
“Like Frederic Myers and William James?”
“Yes!” I was startled that he understood so quickly. “In a way they’re mentors.”
“A modest enterprise.” He smiled with irony and unexpected warmth. “Ye sound like me tryin’ to explain what I do. At least ye’ve got words. All I’ve got is this!” He lifted an artist’s sketchpad covered with mathematical equations written in a small and elegant hand. “Where d’ye get yer material?” he asked.
“Libraries. Interviews. Stuff people send me, some of it in response to Golf in the Kingdom. You might be interested in this.” I took a letter from a jacket pocket. “It’s from a lawyer in New York who read the book, telling me he saw a ball marker the size of a dime on a green four hundred yards from the tee he stood on. His playing partners thought he was crazy, but when they reached the green, they found the thing! I believe this letter. You sense the guy’s telling the truth.”
Hannigan read it, then asked if I got many like it.
“One or two every month. Since ’72, the year the book was published, I’ve gotten several hundred. They’ve made me think that in the States, golf is a mystery school for Republicans!”
“Here it’s no mystery school. It’s a true religion. So, some of these reports help ye remember what happened with Shivas Irons.…”
“That one did.” I nodded toward the letter. “When I read it, I remembered that something like that had happened to me on the thirteenth hole. You might find this hard to believe, but I could see curtains in the windows of the Burningbush clubhouse. How far is it from the green? A mile, or mile-and-a-half, maybe? I remember the experience clearly now, but until I got this letter I’d forgotten it.”
“Completely!”
“Not completely. But a lot of it. Later that night, at dinner with Irons and his friends, part of it started coming back. They were talking about MacDuff, when suddenly—I remembered seeing him near the thirteenth hole. When I got this letter I remembered the visual acuity, and yesterday even more of the experience came back.…”
“Murphy, now wait.” Hannigan held up a hand to stop me. “How do you know you saw MacDuff?”
“Because a man was walking along the ravine. He was gesturing to me, trying to communicate, trying to tell me something. That night at dinner, Irons implied it was MacDuff. When I was out there yesterday, the memory was crystal clear.”
“Maybe it was an apparition.”
“It might’ve been. I’ve thought of that. Or it could’ve been something I projected, some sort of illusion. But standing there yesterday I remembered how solid, how lively, how vivid it was. I can’t believe it was just my projection, and if it was an apparition, it had some sort of consciousness.”
Hannigan rose, stepped away from the desk, and stood about ten feet from me. “Murphy,” he said, “there’s something you need to know. Some of the things in yer book are wrong. MacDuff was dead in ’56. He died in ’53, three years before you got there. If the thing you saw was a living person, it wasn’t Seamus MacDuff.”
“He died in ’53?”
“I’ve been studyin’ this thing, studyin’ it carefully. MacDuff didn’t live in that ravine, as you suggested in your book. Irons didn’t spend time in the Hebrides. And his mother wasn’t a priestess from the Gold Coast. But it’s all right.” He waved a hand in front of his face. “Ye got enough right to make a good book. I’m glad ye wrote it.”
“Where was Irons in the war?” I asked with dismay.
“North Africa, but it doesn’t matter. He had a vision like the one you described.”
“God, it’s awful I got those things wrong. Christ, it’s embarrassing.”
“Murphy, it’s all right. Irons and MacDuff were not yer normal gentlemen! No one knows what ’n the hell they were really doin’. But how about a drink? I’ve got a Scottish beer ye’ve never tasted. And a single-malt whiskey with a horse’s kick. Which’ll it be?”
“A whiskey.”
He crossed the room, took a bottle from a cabinet, and poured us each a glass. After handing me mine, he lifted his in a toast. “Murphy, we might be on to something here. Here’s to Shivas Irons!”
The single malt had an immediate warming effect, and a deeply penetrating aroma. But its warmth did not relieve the dismay I felt about the mistakes in my book.
But Hannigan had more surprises. “Ye might be interested to know that this whiskey was made on a piece o’ land that was owned by a certain gentleman named Seamus MacDuff.” I looked with astonishment at my glass, which had a remarkably prismatic amber glow. “While we drink, let me show you some pictures of it.”
Whether from the first effects of the whiskey or the impact of these revelations, I felt slightly disoriented. Sitting by his desk, I watched him cross the room, open a cabinet, and produce a large portfolio. “Look at this.” He opened it on the desk. “These are pictures of MacDuff’s highly unusual stretch o’ ground.” The case contained a stack of black-and-white photographs. The one on top, which was yellowed with age, showed a two-story stone country house surrounded by trees and hedges. On its back was the date “June 1940.”
“This was taken forty-seven years ago, during the Battle of Britain.” Hannigan picked up a second photograph, which showed the same house in disrepair. “But this is what it looks like now. For twenty years it was a distillery, but for the last four it’s been deserted. Now look at this.” The next photograph, which like the first was yellowed with age, showed MacDuff’s house from a distant vantage point surrounded by golf holes. “MacDuff had his own private course,” said Hannigan. “Not long. Just seven holes. But very interesting. Here’s a view of what must have been the first hole, taken from the front of his house.”
The picture showed a fairway running between two gentle rises that converged at a distant green. Beyond the green there was a hill, and to the northwest a mountain bordered with extraordinary light. “When was this taken?” I asked. “At sunrise or sunset?”
Hannigan took a drink of whiskey, then turned the picture over. On its back was the inscription: “Sunrise at noon. August 6 again, but 1950.”
I picked up the photograph and held it close to the lamp. “August sixth,” I said. “It could mean Hiroshima. Irons told me the day was important to MacDuff. What’s this a picture of?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. It was noon, all right. Look at the trees. They don’t have any shadows.”
“But with such bright light on the horizon, shouldn’t there be some?”
“You’d think so. But Murphy, that mountain is northwest of the place. There can’t be a sunrise or sunset beyond it.”
“Could the picture be faked?”
“It’s possible
. But for what? Why would Irons or MacDuff have faked it, and then written this inscription?” Hannigan took another photograph from the portfolio. “Here’s one I took last year from the same spot.” It showed the same converging rises, but instead of a fairway and distant greens, there was only a field of wild grass. “The golf course is overgrown now,” he said. “Here’s what the rest of it looked like in the forties and early fifties.”
By the look of the photographs, almost every hole had some eccentric feature. One, which appeared to be a three-par, required a tee shot to a green that was hidden in a glen far below it. “To play this one,” I said, “you’d have to be clairvoyant. It looks harder than the thirteenth at Burningbush.”
We were silent for a moment. “Maybe,” Hannigan said quietly, “the course was designed to practice the powers ye’re studying. Every hole required nearly impossible shots. Did Irons tell you he practiced on it?”
“No.”
“He might have, if you’d stayed a little longer.”
His remark brought a wave of regret. Yes, if I’d stayed longer in Burningbush in 1956, I might have learned something about this strange-looking course and the experiments conducted on it. I asked where it was located. “In the west,” said Hannigan. “Near Loch Awe, on the way to Oban, about a three- to four-hour drive from Burningbush, I estimate, when Irons spent time there in the ’40s and ’50s. With the new motorways, though, ye can get there from here in a couple of hours.”
“And MacDuff lived there how long?”
“From 1919 to 1953.”
“How did you track all this down? You’ve done quite a detective job.”
Hannigan sat at the desk across from me. “By nature and by habit, Murphy, I’m a debunker of claims for the paranormal. But because of my peculiar theories in physics I’ve developed a speciality in that field now commonly called ‘the study of anomalous phenomena.’ I came to know about this particular anomaly when one of the Scottish papers ran a story that the distillery was about to be closed. People wouldn’t work there because they felt the place was haunted. Look at this.”
From a desk drawer, he produced a page from The Herald dated “September 3, 1983.” An article near the bottom was headlined: “Ramsay Distillery closed by hauntings and medical cases.” An underlined passage read: “Several employees have reported mysterious marks on their bodies, and others have heard voices or music. Such reports have persisted for several years, baffling engineers, psychologists and physicians hired by the Ramsay family and their managers at the distillery.”
Holding up a photograph that showed MacDuff’s entire estate when its golf course was still intact, Hannigan traced an imaginary line. “On certain days after dark, everything in this perimeter, including MacDuff’s old house, the distillery building, the golf holes, and the fields around them, goes through extraordinary changes. Something remarkable happens. Something the people who lived there didn’t understand. Something I don’t understand. Something no one understands. From time to time the whole place—how to say it?—is filled with a presence, a feeling, a force that was finally too much for the people who worked there.”
“Is it threatening?”
“Not necessarily. Some people thought it was healing, even holy. Others thought it was menacing, like a big angry ghost. It scared almighty shit out of most of the distillery workers, and the caretakers the owners hired when the place was closed. No one lives there now.”
“And it’s been closed since ’83?”
“Closed and deserted. In ’56, a family named Ramsay bought the land from MacDuff’s estate and eventually built the distillery, but none of the family ever lived there. I tracked down the senior Ramsay, and found he’d bought the place in auction through a law firm here. It seems MacDuff had no heirs, no family at all, and left the proceeds of the sale to a retainer who’d lived with him since the ’20s. In ’83, the year I got onto this, there wasn’t much left in the law firm’s files except these photographs.” He paused. “But there was another lead. The senior Ramsay had met MacDuff in ’45, here in Edinburgh, at a lecture on psychical research, and had gotten into a long conversation with him. Learned something about his ancestry, that his mother was African—you got that right in yer book—and that his father was big in the Africa trade. She was part Fulani, part Tuareg—Ramsay remembered that somehow—and according to MacDuff was a real beauty. Ramsay said MacDuff had extraordinary looks. Striking, he said. Unforgettable. Dark brown skin, curly white hair, and deep green eyes that looked right through you. But here’s what I’m leading up to, Murphy. Ramsay also remembered the name of a golf professional whom MacDuff described, a young pro from Burningbush named Shivas somethin’. That was my first lead to Irons.”
Hannigan took off his glasses, closed his eyes, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “But I must tell ye, my friend, there are days when I think that Irons and MacDuff were trapped in the world’s weirdest folie à deux. Driven to it by golf, perhaps. They wouldn’t be the first to go bonkers from the game! But then—there’s MacDuff’s estate, the hauntings there, these photographs, some other leads I’ll show ye, and the picture that starts to emerge from Irons’s books.” He paused. “And from your book. What ye wrote encouraged me to think that others were on to this. Readin’ Golf in the Kingdom, I saw that I wasn’t alone. For example, look at this.” He took a book from a shelf, opened it, and pointed to a margin note. “Read it,” he said. “Ye’ll recognize the handwriting.” The book was entitled Phenomena of Materialization, and the note was written by Shivas Irons. It read: “Like S. last night. Step by step. Lasted for five or six minutes.” In the text beside the note, this sentence was underlined: “The special characteristic of Eva C.’s phenomena is that, not only does she produce complete materializations, but that she produces, step by step, the necessary teleplastic material, and forms it in successive stages.”
I had seen the book and knew that its author had been a prominent figure in the development of dynamic psychiatry.* “ ‘Like S. last night,’ ” I said. “Does that mean Seamus? And step by step? When did Irons write this? Before MacDuff died?”
“There’s no inscription to tell us. But we do have this.” Hannigan crossed the room and came back with another book. Evidence of Personal Survival from Cross Correspondences had Irons’s mark on the back of its front cover above the date “December 5, 1960.” Below the date there was this inscription: “Step by step. More and more visible. Last night, this morning, again at noon.”
“Nineteen-sixty,” I mused. “What was the date on that picture of his first fairway? Nineteen-fifty?” With a sudden sense of recognition, I found the photograph with MacDuff’s inscription. Between the tee, which stood in the immediate foreground, and the green at the end of the fairway, there was a barely discernible oval light. “What’s this?” I handed the picture to Hannigan.
“What d’ye mean?”
“This!” I traced the shape I saw.
“Some o’ these photos are faded,” he said. “This one’s damaged.”
“But look at this! It’s like something I saw around Irons.”
“Something you saw? I don’t see it!” He turned toward me, his jaw thrust forward aggressively. “Murphy,” he said. “I have to tell ye this. In yer book, some of your so-called facts are wrong, and a few of your experiences are impossible for me to believe. So you’ll have to forgive me if I question yer powers of perception.” He looked again at the photograph. “For Christ’s sake! I can’t see what ye’re pointin’ at.”
Dismayed, I studied the picture again. The luminous oval was as apparent as it had been a moment before. “Well,” I said with a shrug, “there it is. I see it clearly. I don’t know what to tell you.”
Hannigan took the photograph across the room, and held it up to a lamp that was brighter than the one on his desk. “Well, maybe there’s a smudge there, but no shape,” he said with irritation. “So what did ye see?”
I described the apparition on the eighteenth green. When I
was done, he picked up the photograph. “I still don’t see it. I can’t tell what you’re pointin’ at. A little smudge, maybe, but nothing like an apparition.”
But the luminous shape was apparent to me. I reread the inscription on the back of the photograph: “ ‘Sunrise at noon. August 6 again, but 1950.’ ”
For a while, we studied the picture in silence. “You hungry?” he finally asked. “It’s past seven. There’s a place around the corner.”
Ten minutes later, we sat for supper at a pub nearby. Waiting for our meal, I felt both excitement about Hannigan’s revelations and an elevation that was caused, I guessed, by the whiskey from MacDuff’s estate. But Hannigan seemed deeply troubled. “So you actually thought you could cut your golf club in two?” he asked in disbelief.
“The whole thing came in stages,” I said. “The round with Irons had put me in some sort of altered state. An exaltation, really. But on the eighteenth hole, it went to another level. Everything—the fairway, the clubs, the people around us—seemed to be penetrable, as if they were nothing but radiant patterns, as if they were made of light. In a way, the apparition I saw on the green, that shining space around him, was an extension of the state I’d been in for—I don’t know, maybe an hour, an hour and a half.”
“And ye actually thought ye could pass yer hand through yer golf club?”
“That was an illusion, of course. It came from the way everything looked. But it was strange—exceedingly strange—that the man who came up to me thought Irons had done it.”
“And ye’re absolutely sure o’ that? After thirty-one years, ye’re really sure? Ye don’t worry that yer memory’s playin’ tricks? Ye know we can embellish. Does it worry ye that yer story’s grown bigger through the years?”
“But people suppress unusual experiences as well as confabulate them. Have you heard of the San Francisco 49ers?”
“You mean the football team?”
“Yes, the football team. They had a well-known player, a quarterback there named Brodie, who read Golf in the Kingdom and invited me to their training camp in ’72 with the thought we might do a book together. My first day there, we’re drinking beer with some of his teammates. A big beefy guy, a defensive lineman, starts to tell us about a voice he heard during a game, a voice in his ear telling him what the opposing team’s next play would be. The other players started to laugh when he told us this, but he got real excited. He’d guessed the plays correctly, he said, because when they looked at the game films, they could tell he was making inspired adjustments before the ball was snapped.
The Kingdom of Shivas Irons Page 4
