The Kingdom of Shivas Irons

by Michael Murphy

  “What about the clubs?” I asked. “Do you want me to hit some shots?”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “But you told me to bring them.”

  “For tomorrow. After the sun comes up.”

  “But this is a good time to hit some.”

  “Oh, Christ!” he swore. “Then bring one.”

  “Which one?”

  “For Christ’s sake! I don’t care. Bring your sand wedge.”

  “No, I think I’ll bring my driver.” I reached over the seat to pull the club from my bag. “And balls? Won’t we need balls?”

  “Oh, fuck! If ye’re going to hit some shots, ye’ve got to bring yer balls. So bring ’em!” Without waiting for me, he headed into the dark.

  With my jacket, driver, and practice balls, I hurried to catch up. The house was a ghostly silhouette about a hundred yards away and twenty or thirty feet above us. I put on my jacket. The temperature had dropped, I guessed, from about seventy to fifty degrees Fahrenheit. “What’s made it so cold?” I yelled.

  But Hannigan seemed not to hear me. “Look!” He pointed up the hill. “Look!”

  “Where?” I called back. “What are you looking at?”

  “There.” He gestured emphatically. “Right there, around the house!”

  Enveloping the entire building like a second sky, there was a barely visible luminescence. But as I reached him, it faded and then vanished.

  “Look!” he whispered. “Ye can’t see any stars through it.” To my astonishment, the aura reappeared, blocking starlight above and to both sides of the old stone house.

  Hannigan started up the hill, and I followed slowly. Again the aura disappeared. Was it static electricity? Suddenly I was struck by the absurdity of my balls and driver. “Let me hit a shot from here,” I said to break the tension. “Hannigan, you were right—I should have brought the sand wedge.”

  The aura was pulsing now. Was it an impression caused by my rapid heartbeat? When I stopped, the oscillations subsided. But the aura remained, clearly visible against the sky, a faint but definite envelope that extended some eight or ten feet beyond the sides and top of the old stone house.

  A moment later, we stood at the top of the hill. Towering in the dark some twenty-five feet above us, the building was taller than I’d expected.

  “It’s stronger than I’ve ever seen it.” Hannigan waved me on. “Hurry! Something’s going to happen.” I jogged after him, past an oak tree and a shed, to find the vista depicted in the photograph with MacDuff’s mysterious inscription. The abandoned first fairway stretched through the deepening shadows between rises that converged at a two-tiered elevation some three hundred yards away.

  “Look!” I pointed at the house. “The aura’s gone!”

  “Quiet down,” Hannigan said sternly. “Something’s going to happen.”

  Though the temperature had dropped, there was little wind. In the distance, a dog was barking. Suddenly I remembered Shivas Irons, sitting as he had after our rousing night, eyes half-closed, lost in ecstasy. I tried to picture him more clearly.…

  “Murphy!” Hannigan whispered. “Look! See what’s happening!”

  The building’s luminescence was expanding outward, reaching down the stretch of land that once had served as MacDuff’s first fairway. In the illumination it provided, I could see the distant rise upon which the first green had stood.

  “Christ!” said Hannigan. “It’s alive. The goddamned thing’s alive!” The aura was condensing to a pearly light, and he walked toward it, swearing and shaking his fist defiantly. But I was immobilized. As if it had arms, the light was reaching toward me and seemed about to lift me up. Transfixed, I felt myself tightening.

  Then it was gone. Suddenly the land, the air, the buildings were dark. “Murphy!” cried Hannigan, who stood about twenty yards from me. “Come here! It left marks.” With a wave of dizziness I sat on the ground. “Come here!” he yelled insistently. “You’ve got to see this!”

  Cold sweat had risen on my forehead. My arms felt weak. My knees were shaking. Lying supine in the grass, I felt the tenuous pleasure that comes after you’ve come close to fainting. The stars seemed brighter, more numerous, and closer now.

  “Murphy!” Hannigan shouted. “Come here! There’s another mark.” But I couldn’t summon the strength to stand. A profound silence filled the land. Everything was effervescent. The afterglow of shock was turning to a deep and sensuous pleasure.

  “Did you hear it?” Hannigan came jogging toward me. “Did you hear the sound it made?”

  “What sound?” I asked weakly. “I didn’t hear a thing.”

  “That rushing sound. You must’ve heard it. Are you all right?” He stood above me, his jacket unbuttoned, his glasses reflecting the starlight. Again I was struck by his uncanny resemblance to James Joyce. “I’m okay,” I whispered. “I’m okay. But let me rest. I don’t have your energy.”

  “When you get up, look at the marks over there by the door. I’m going to see what else it did.” He disappeared, and I lay for a moment in silence. Though the hairs on my hands stood erect from the cold, heat was spreading through me. Impulsively, I stood and took off my windbreaker.

  The air and the land seemed to sparkle. Everything was freer now, more elastic, and filled with new life. Again I thought of Shivas Irons.…

  He’d been sitting erect in his armchair, eyes half-closed, with an expression that suggested both serenity and ecstatic arousal. His cataleptic body seemed to provide a stabilizing frame for a potentially shattering flight of his soul. This impression was reinforced by the energy flowing through him, which was also flowing into me. The presence I’d felt in our golf round was spreading now throughout the room, like fuel for an inward journey. His exquisitely balanced physique, the energetic structure suffusing it, and his consciousness were aligned for ecstatic release.

  Then a subtle presence wrapped around me. It stretched the muscles of my spine, prompting me to sit erect. It gently brought my shoulders back so that my chest expanded. Step by step, an invisible force had reached from him to me, opening a vista, preparing me for a voyage …

  The state I’d experienced three decades before was close to what I was feeling now. There were uncanny similarities between the two moments.

  And at the heart of the stillness I felt, there was a commanding impulse. A subtle presence—a force—was impelling me to swing my arms. To turn my shoulders. To pivot. As if guided by invisible arms, I swung an imaginary golf club. The pattern and rhythm of the swing came from somewhere or something beyond my normal volition.

  “What are you doing?” cried Hannigan, striding toward me from the house. “Damn it, I feel energetic!” He lowered himself to the ground and started doing one-armed push-ups. “I’ve never done more than five. But look—seven, eight, nine, ten.” He collapsed in mid-sentence and lay gasping for breath. Turning away from him, I picked up my driver and swung it. My muscles and joints had new elasticity, which allowed me to swing with extraordinary arc. The driver felt weightless. The swing was happening by itself.

  Stretching away into the night, MacDuff’s first fairway beckoned. I teed a ball, aimed toward the rise, and swung with a power that amazed me. The ball sailed high against the starlit sky, then vanished in the darkness. “Hannigan!” I cried. “It went about three hundred yards!”

  But he didn’t hear me. To my astonishment, he was again doing one-armed push-ups.

  The distant rise still beckoned. I hit a second ball, and watched it sail beyond the first. For a long moment, it hung in the sky like a planet or satellite. “Holy Jesus, it’ll never come down!” said Hannigan, who lay some ten feet from me. “If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t believe it. Hit another!”

  I hit a third ball—and a rock that caused sparks to fly in all directions.

  “Try it tomorrow,” said Hannigan. “We’ll have all day.” A wind had arisen, and clouds had appeared above us. “Let’s go!” He jumped to his feet, and gestured for me to follow.
“Maybe a storm’s coming up.”

  I put on my windbreaker and followed him. Near the house he stopped, searched the ground for a moment, then pointed to a stretch of scorched grass.

  “But it could’ve been there already,” I said. “How do you know it just happened?”

  “You’re right.” He nodded. “It could’ve been there before we got here.” The burnt grass formed an oval about five feet long and three feet wide. Conceivably, it could have been caused by someone who’d dropped a cigarette.

  We started toward the car. “Some people would think a UFO just landed,” I said.

  “Tonight they would’ve,” he answered quietly. “People who worked here thought they saw just about everything. UFOs, brownies, fairies, ghosts, even demonic possessions. Everyone had such different stories, there’s never been agreement. But let’s go! There’s a place down the road to spend the night.”

  * One such margin note is written in the hand of Shivas Irons on a map of French West Africa. Its first sentence reads: “S.’s mother dowsing in Mbout, Kaedi, Aleg, St.-Louis, Dakar, Nouakchott.” These cities and villages are located in present-day Mali, Senegal, and Mauritania, and were presumably the places in which MacDuff’s mother searched clairvoyantly (or “dowsed”) for the elder MacDuff.

  The notation’s second sentence reads: “Fulani-Sufi clairvoyance good for finding European bull. Fulani-MacDuff genes good for producing flesh of the gods.” Hannigan guessed that “flesh of the gods” was a term from either Fulani shamanism or Sufi lore to signify the “luminous embodiment” that Seamus MacDuff and Shivas Irons were exploring.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE WINDOW SHADES of the little room were drawn so that I could sleep past first light, which on a June day in the Western Highlands comes between three and three-thirty. But sleep did not come easily. At ten- or fifteen-minute intervals, I woke to images of the presence that enveloped MacDuff’s estate. Twice I sat up, sensing that it was entering the room and reaching to embrace me. But this tension was not entirely uncomfortable. Eventually it produced a state that some call lucid dreaming. As if in a theater of the mind, viewing images that were vividly three-dimensional, I relived my day with Shivas Irons.…

  We were walking down a narrow street after our golf round. “Standing by the eighteenth green,” I asked, “what did you mean when you said that the body is the tenderest part of the soul?”

  “That this flesh is our most fragile part,” said Shivas softly. “That it’s passing every moment. How did the Greek philosophers say it? That the body is the densest part of the soul? It’s also the tenderest part, the part of us soonest to go. ’Tis the part of our soul that’s closest to death. ”

  … and then by a fire in the dark ravine that borders the thirteenth hole. “Swing with the inner body.” He helped me make an arc with my arms to hit an imaginary golf ball. “Swing from the part that’s full o’ new life, the part of ye nearest the light of yer soul. That part’s smarter than this flesh. Has more power, rhythm, music.” He leaned closer, and I could see my wavering reflection in each of his large blue eyes. “It’ll serve ye longer than these arms,” he whispered. “It’s played this game a long, long time. It was there before ye were born.”

  Sitting up with a start, I saw that it was eight o’clock, the hour we’d agreed to have breakfast. A few minutes later, I found Hannigan reading a paper in the inn’s little dining room. Bacon, eggs, scones, and jam were generously spread in front of him. “We said seven,” he said brusquely.

  “I thought we said eight.”

  “Seven,” he said from behind his paper. “The lady’s bringin’ coffee. Or do ye want tea? She’ll give ye haggis if ye’d like.” A merry-looking woman who appeared to be in her fifties poured us both coffee, and asked in a broad Scots burr what I wanted to eat. “The same as I,” said Hannigan. “Not the haggis, or spotted dick.”

  “Not the haggis!” she said. “What a shame.” With a slightly sinister laugh, she went back to the kitchen.

  Through latticed windows, I could see a thick stand of silver birch and the silver blue water of the loch. We were the only people in the room. Hannigan asked how I’d slept, his Scottish burr more pronounced than it had been the day before. Did it grow stronger as he got farther from Edinburgh? I told him I’d dreamt about Shivas Irons.

  Before he could answer, the lady returned with a plate of scones. “Where ye headed?” she asked. “Comin’ in so late, were ye lost?” Without thinking, I said we were looking for a nearby distillery. Did she know its whereabouts? “D’ye mean the Ramsay place?” she asked.

  Lowering his paper, Hannigan shot me a look warning me to be careful. “That’s the one!” I pretended ignorance. “Is it still operating?”

  “Been shut for years,” she said. “There’s nothin’ left but some sheds and a deserted house.” A look of suspicion came into her face. “But ye must have some very old bottles. Are ye members o’ the Ramsay clan?”

  After glancing at Hannigan, I said that we weren’t Ramsays. It was just the whiskey we wanted. “Well, there’s no distillery left,” she said. “And I don’t think ye’d want to go there. Some people ’round heer think the place’s haunted.”

  “Haunted?” I pretended surprise. “What makes them think so?”

  Holding a coffeepot in one hand and an empty plate in the other, she looked around the room to make sure it was empty. “There’s no consistent story,” she whispered. “Some say banshees, some say ghosts, some don’t know wha’ to call it. There’s a Mr. Haig who lives down the road. Says his body was changed by the place. Used to run sheep there after the distillery was closed, and says he’s not been the same since.”

  “His body changed?” I glanced again at Hannigan, who pretended to be absorbed in his paper. “How was it changed?”

  “Ye’d have to ask him.” She leaned closer to me. “He told me once that none of his parts work the same anymore. None of ’em! Says he was taken apart by the place, and reassembled badly.”

  “Is he in pain?”

  “I don’t know about that. Said he felt strange in his body. That he was ‘out o’ joint,’ that one part wasna’ connected the same to this part, or that part to the other part. But I really don’t know. Ye’d have to ask ’im.”

  “Some coffee, please,” Hannigan interrupted, glancing sternly at me. “Murphy, do ye want another?” It was clear that he wanted me to end the conversation.

  Motioning the lady to refill my cup, I said that we wouldn’t go looking for ghosts. When she left, I asked why he’d wanted me to stop. “We want the place to ourselves,” he whispered. “It’s a village out here. Everyone talks to everyone else. Let’s not get them thinkin’ we’re up to something.”

  “But what about the man she was talking about? Shouldn’t we talk to him?”

  “I have. Three years ago. He couldn’t tell me anything more than she just did.”

  “But I’ve been talking to people for years about this sort of thing. If you ask the right questions, it’s amazing what they remember. I know what to ask.”

  “Murphy, I talked to ’im. Ye’re not goin’ to learn a thing if ye do. Remember”—he tapped his chest, “I’ve been following this for more than five years. Believe me, I know what I’m doin’!”

  We ate in silence for a moment, until the lady came bursting into the room with a plate of eggs and bacon. “I just talked to Mr. Lauder, the owner,” she said exuberantly. “He has some bottles o’ Ramsay’s whiskey, can ye believe it, and is willin’ to sell ye one!”

  “Well, thank you,” I said. “What a favor!”

  “Damn it!” Hannigan whispered when she’d left. “Now we’re in for it. In a minute, they’ll want to go out there with us.”

  A broad-shouldered man came into the room and proudly placed a bottle between us. “So yer lookin’ for Ramsay’s whiskey,” he boomed. “Have a look at this!”

  “But you shouldn’t,” I said. “That bottle’s too precious to sell.”

&nb
sp; “It’s different, not precious.” He winked. “It’ll kick ye to the moon, and there’s no guarantee ye’ll get back. Lauder’s ma nemme, what’s yers?”

  “Murphy.” I shook his hand. “That’s Hannigan.”

  “Ye’re an American,” he said. “Where’s he from?”

  “Edinburgh,” Hannigan said coolly.

  “But ye look familiar. Have I seen ye heer before?”

  Hannigan said that he’d stopped for dinner once.

  “Well, good to have ye back,” said Lauder. “But heer, I want ye to have this bottle. Consider it a gift o’ the house!”

  “No,” I protested. “Let me pay.”

  “Not on yer life. I’ve got more, and ye can’t drink much at once. It’s not the best whiskey, mind ye. Too much o’ it does funny things to the brain. ’Tis the source o’ the rumors about Ramsay’s distillery, I think. But take it to remember us. I’m glad to let ye have it.”

  Hannigan disappeared again behind his paper, but Lauder didn’t seem to mind. “Well, thank you,” I said. “When I drink it, I’ll think of this wonderful place.”

  “If ye don’t drink too much.” Lauder winced. Then a smile appeared on his broad ruddy face. “I suppose ye know this, havin’ drunk it before; but with more than two shots, ye’ll forget yer name, and the difference ’tween up and down. Once, after three shots, I drove to Oban and took the ferry to Mull—for no reason at all—and thought I’d gone to heaven.” He was a robust presence, with an energy that seemed younger than his weathered features. I could see that he wouldn’t leave easily.

  But I couldn’t resist another question. “What gives it such a kick?” I asked. “What did they put in it?”

  “Old man Ramsay never knew. Some thought it was barley fungus; others, the water they used. There’s an old lady down the road thinks it’s mushrooms! But ye want to know my theory?” He glanced around the room. “I think it was the place, the land out there, the air itself. It’s not a normal piece o’ ground.”