I would have given a great deal to read Katarina’s replies.
I also found myself giving more time than I should to several small diaries in handwriting similar to that of the photocopied pages left to me by Rupert, which I now thought of as the work of the unnamed child in ‘The White People’. The first volume was solely text, but from the second on drawings began to appear—little watercolours delicate and quite well drawn. Gentle views of Gwent, altogether charming, like those in Rex Whistler’s An Anthology of Mine, if a little less accomplished. It was possible to recognise, in the small vignettes in the corners, or in the middle of the text, definite landmarks such as Netherwood, the Black Mountains, a certain ring of stones on a hill that overlooked the distant Severn. Sundials, gravestones, wall fountains and a stone head set into a wall. She favoured a dark and muted palette.
The text was even more remarkable:
Yesterday, before the storm broke, it was hot, and the sun was the colour of old brass, with a fume around it as if it was burning the flesh of the sky. Nothing moved; even the trees looked as if they were stamped out of tin, and I said aloud, “This is just like deep Dendo.” Mother looked at me strangely, and Nurse told me to be quiet, and told Mother that I was not well. Nurse says that I must be careful, and not say things like that, but it was so like Dendo, where everything is still and even the clouds never move, not ever, and though the air is warm the deep pools are always very cold. The light there looks as if it had been turned inside out, and things only pretend to be the shapes they are to trick you.
It continued in this vein, very familiar to any reader of Machen. She wrote of the tall, thin Dols, who spoke the Chian language, which she understood because she had learned it from her nurse, who they referred to as “half-sister”. There was mention, too, of a carved head called The Brute Stone that could be made to speak, and open the way to deep Dendo, and even awaken something called the Jeelo.
She wrote of the “Voorish domes”, where they sang “the hidden songs” that could be tasted and felt. She hated the “smooth, snaky songs”. When the Jeelo was angry, it could sing songs that could be seen. They frightened her most of all.
One of these faery creatures was described as a white lady with big eyes and long, long fingers, and “a big stone like an emerald growing out of her flesh”.
I thought at once of the drunken, frightened Nicola Ottoway, and what she claimed to have witnessed in Youlden’s basement studio: a vision so alien she could not grasp what she was looking at, save that it was the colour of marble, very thin, and with a greenish stone embedded in its chest.
Gradually the drawings changed. Monstrous figures began to predominate, some with the same shifting, protoplasmic character as the protagonists in Youlden’s Chapel and Marriage pictures.
During these days I would see Katarina only at dinner, swathed in ornate shawls and muffled about the shoulders with the half-sleeping form of Cath Paluc.
Conversation was unpredictable. On one occasion she suddenly blurted out: “Someone asked me once if Phillip was out of his mind! We were hardly ever in our minds! Have you any idea what a meagre, narrow prison of perception the normal concept of ‘the mind’ is?”
The random, disjointed nature of Katarina’s monologues seemed all of a part with her old persona, the incantatory Priestess whose art had served strange gods. I only briefly suspected that her eccentricity might actually be mental illness on being awakened one night and descending the stairs to find her crouched before an ancient radiogram that Youlden had decorated so the speaker that issued its sound was transformed into the open mouth of a grotesque face. She seemed to be trying to tune it, but there was something wrong with the reception, producing nothing but shrieking and rasping, interspersed with shrill explosions of metallic sound. She was rocking on her heels, staring intently at the apparently howling face as though mesmerised by its streams of gibberish, muttering to herself and laughing. I leant in and caught the manic flood of her words.
“Black Hell. Those who dwell under the water. Shadowland. Family of the deep…”
Later I examined the radiogram dial, and found Youlden had personalised that, too, by replacing the station names with a strip of parchment marked at intervals in exquisite script. When the dial was turned to them, the band selector picked up nothing but some decidedly odd interference. Cyhy raeth resulted in groaning sounds; Ufferndu produced roaring, like thousands of voices in agony, while Gwragged Annwn offered unpleasant gurglings. Plant Rhys Dwfen seemed to be a badly tuned talk channel, and Aderyn Y Corff nearly deafened me with blood-chilling shrieks. When I tuned to a station marked Coblyanan, it produced only voices chanting the same vaguely Middle Eastern-sounding words in a never ending round: “Nashtaraan ashgraak shamash ossaam reechmaak…“
And suddenly a memory came back to me, like a bubble of foul gas released from something better left submerged to burst on the surface of consciousness. Night in a bed-sitting room on the top floor of a massive old house; a gathering of hippy friends, all stoned and mellow with mesmerising music and dope, utterly entranced. Suddenly a girl screamed, got up and ran crying hysterically from the room.
Taken something stronger, we thought; having a bad trip. Her boyfriend, who ran after her, later swore that she hadn’t.
Then someone went down to the toilet on the next floor, and said something he couldn’t see had reached up out of the stairwell and gripped his leg as he came back up the stairs.
And later, when everyone else had crashed out, and I was slumped against the boarded-up fire place, a weak clawing began, and a dry, evil little voice began to whisper from the enclosed space right behind my resting head. Something about the monotonous, repetitive nature of that voice reminded me of the chanting from the radio.
Retreating to the farthest end of the room, I had spent the dark hours listening to the sounds as they gradually subsided into faint scraping, and with the first light of dawn, silence.
The mesmeric music that had been playing when the evening turned bad had been an LP by Eva Malas called The Separable Soul.
Plas Gwyllion was like Prospero’s island, full of noises. At times the corridors seemed filled with shuffling footfalls. Tapestries shifted when there was no breeze to move them. Something other than Cath Paluc seemed to be abroad in the passages and stairways, but I could never get a clear view. One room had at some time been given over to the storage of fruit, which had been left to wither and rot, filling the air with a tainted sweetness. Moth-eaten banners hung everywhere, too faded to decipher.
The same desolate strangeness reigned outside. At night no light was visible outside for as far as the eye could see. We might have been on the edge of the world. Shaggy, ancient-looking ponies wandered, apparently wild, in the grounds, grazing among outcroppings of stone that reared like monoliths from a wilderness of weeds. There was a wooded mound in the woods on which carvings, like larger versions of the stone that Rupert had left me, stood half-buried in the earth. Some were leaning over at odd angles in their holes like decayed teeth. Strangely, someone had marked the loose stones with the initials A.M. which could have stood for “Adam Midnight”, but might just as easily been some kind of tribute to Arthur Machen.
Once I came upon a forlorn gathering of very fine classical statues in an outhouse, crammed together behind wire mesh like forlorn prisoners of war.
Aside from the maid, the only other servant seemed to be an elderly Jack-of-all-trades, who looked haggard, distracted and careworn enough to be an old “roadie” hanging on from better times. These two were not always present, and in any case hardly seemed capable of the work necessary to serve even our modest needs, but although there was no sign of activity, tables were always laid, food cooked and crockery cleared away like clockwork. On this matter Katarina was characteristically gnomic.
“They come and help.”
One night I awoke to the sound of an old clavicord echoing through the house. She was playing John Ireland’s ‘The Scarlet Ceremonies�
�. Of course, it had been written for piano, but the silvery, metallic sound, glittering like showers of “sparks from the afflicted flint”, was somehow right in that house, bringing a resonance of trance-like gamelan to the piece.
When I got closer, I could hear that she had tuned the radiogram to one of those non-existent channels and was accompanying the indescribable noises with rippling accompaniments that sometimes quoted Ireland and sometimes went off on their own, punctured by her harsh, guttural vocalisations, until it became impossible to separate the strands of classical quotation and crazy invention, of droning voice and monstrous radio noise.
Once, for a while, before necessity forced me to part with it to Rupert, I had owned a lovely edition of the De situ orbis of Pomponius Mela, and would dream for hours over my favourite passage until it had become fixed forever in my memory:
All day heavy broods the silence. Hidden terrors abound. But with the fall of night, firelight flickers, the incantations of Aegypans resound on all sides. The shrill sound of flutes and the clash of the cymbals of the Bassarids resound all along the desolate shore.
That was what Katarina conjured up that night: wind-ravaged beaches, funeral pyres, the Bakcheia, or Dionysiac frenzy of the women called Khairei, the Deerslayers.
If Eva Malas was mad, it was akin to Plato’s telestic madness, or Mirandola’s “divine frenzy”. It was the pneuma enthusiastikon of the Pythia crazed on laurel leaves and the fumes of Hades.
Her songs had always been that for me, spells and incantations. This was how Sirens entranced, and sibyls prophesied. I remembered all the inner journeys her music had launched. How could anyone claim to be oblivious to the dark sorcery of such maledictive psalms?
She greeted my appearance with regal indifference, but when she stopped playing and turned off the radio, a verbal flood burst out of me. I told her of my love for her music, all it had meant to me.
It could have been disastrous, of course: the tedious fan inviting the humiliation of the cold shoulder. But artists who have ploughed a lonely and unappreciated furrow without full recognition often harbour a great longing for informed praise and true understanding. I went in seconds from being a tolerated presence to a dear friend.
At first our conversation was like a collision of two torrents, my memories of concerts and treasured albums half-drowned by her accounts of the sources of certain inspirations, the challenges of recording them. Some old myths were debunked, others even more jaw-dropping took their place. She had, it turned out, been with Brian Jones on the trip to Morocco to experience the 700-year-old invocation of Pan performed by the master musicians of Jajouka. After days of trance invoked by the weird hypnotic wail of their flutes, Bou Jeloud had manifested to them, filling the camp with the overwhelming stench of he-goat.
He was the king of the satyrs, she said, who was revered as Azâzil, ruler of the ancient goat-legged djinn, called se’irim in Arabic lore.
That night she had seen what Machen called “the Great God Pan”, and had devoted her life to his service.
I learned of her early life with Bentliff in the 1960s, and of the appearance of Youlden, not in his youthful persona of the black-clad “Adam Midnight”, but that of a man entering old age, though still vital and charismatic. They were thrilled that he had once actually met their hero Machen, and had come so close to illustrating his works.
It was clear to me that a ménage à trois had developed early, though I resisted prying too deeply for fear of stilling the flow of reminiscence. She was adamant that they had all been happy together, and that it had been a time of great creativity for them all.
An image of Shelley, Byron and Mary at Villa Diodati sprang to mind, to be followed swiftly by the thought that I was flattering Bentliff.
There could be no doubt, though, that this distinctly Anacreontic arrangement was also bound together by a shared love of the works of Arthur Machen. Their talk, like that of the girl in the diaries, was always of the Aklo letters, the Chian language and the nature of the Jeelo.
Youlden was revered not just for his art, but his status as a living link with the great man, though this had not precluded some heated arguments about Machen’s views on the nature of the faery realm. Bentliff favoured the ancient pygmy race theory most often referred to by Machen himself. Youlden was equally committed to a belief in them as supernatural beings, though he believed that a “squat, hissing race of pre-humans” had co-existed with them.
Katarina had sided with Youlden, perhaps an early glimpse of the way things were going. The exact parallels between the faery lore of Britain and the djinn lore of Arabia, experienced so pungently at first-hand in Morocco, had, she said, convinced her of their reality.
The rift had widened as time went on.!!!!
Bentliff, for instance, believed that the girl in ‘The White People’ had poisoned herself to escape a “worse fate” that had befallen her as a result of “The Marriage Beneath the Shade”. Youlden and Katarina, on the other hand, favoured the view that she had not regretted her actions, and that her death had been an accident with a “Sabbatic drug”, such as belladonna, which was traditionally used to assist passage between worlds.
For many, such matters would have been abstruse literary discussions of little moment. I got the impression that things were going on at Plas Gwyllion that made the subject central to their daily experience.
If access to the library had been a huge leap forward in relations with Katarina, it was nothing to what happened a few days after.
She led me to a door which I had always known to be locked, and down a flight of stairs into a huge basement room dominated by a spectacular doll’s house, in the form of a perfect scale model of Plas Gwyllion, on a table in the middle of the floor. Behind it ran the console of what must have been her recording studio in years gone by. A host of exotic instruments still lay scattered around the floor among low couches and beaded cushions. There was a massive animal horn, resembling a Jewish ritual shofar, but of fantastically contorted shape, and of unnaturally vivid colour. I could not imagine what animal it came from.
Against the wall opposite the console stood a large picture, clearly a Youlden, its sombre colours painted onto a massive piece of slate the size and shape of a door. The rough surface had been used brilliantly to give selected features in the picture a three-dimensional depth. It depicted a night landscape, strangely stylised so the hills seemed drawn up unnaturally into steep pyramidal mounds crowned with misshapen obelisks. The valleys between were choked with weird vegetation, and there appeared to be many small moons in the sky.
Katarina could see my fascination.
“One of his earliest works. This was his studio at one time, and he always had it with him. He called it The Dweller on the Old Hill. We always called it The Silver Screen.”
That was such an odd choice for so dark an image, for there was nothing silver about it at all. I said as much, and she just smiled thinly.
Perhaps it was because we had been getting on so well that she chose that moment to open up, in a roundabout sort of way, about Youlden’s disappearance.
“You’ve heard the tales about people who ate faery fruit, or picked a faery flower without permission, and suffered a terrible punishment. The Twlwydd Teg are like children in some ways. Dangerous, powerful, but children. Their laws sometimes make no sense to us, but break them and the consequences can be terrible.
“There’s a steep little hill in the grounds, with figures that look like stone carvings all over it. Oh, you’ve seen it! Well it’s a place sacred to them, and the figures aren’t sculptures. They somehow form themselves, grow like mushrooms in the night. Some solidify, others are constantly moving and changing. They are sometimes called ‘serpent stones’.
“You must have wondered about Phillip’s disappearance. Something terrible happened here, something personal that I can’t talk about, but Phillip was badly affected by it. He became depressed and couldn’t work. The ability to draw and paint just left him. It
was dreadful for someone as creative as him.
“He dug up some of the serpent stones and brought them into the house. A visitor saw them and mistook them for his work. He said nothing to correct them. Then I found his initials cut into some of them. He said they stood for ‘Arthur Machen’, as a tribute, but it was a lame excuse.
“I don’t believe he ever planned it, it just happened. He was trying to pretend he could still create, I suppose. I convinced him to have them put back on the mound, but the damage was already done.
“To move them had been bad enough. To claim them as his own work was a kind of blasphemy. It was inevitable that he would be made to suffer for it.”
“You think he killed himself because his mind was disturbed?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Phillip didn’t kill himself. They punished him.”
“Like the Furies you mean? His own guilt destroying him subconsciously?”
“Is that what you really think? God, you people can be so blind. And what makes you think he’s dead?”
“Wait, are you trying to say that Phillip Youlden is still alive?”
“Not exactly. Well, yes, he is, but…”
She paused and strode around the room, then stopped and faced me.
“Yes, perhaps it’s time. There’s only one way I can make you understand.”
She took off a heavy pendant, hung it around my neck and muttered some words.
Crossing the room, she switched on a tape machine, and the swirling incantations of The Separable Soul began to pulse and boom.
Lighting a massive brazier, she cast powder on it until the room was full of an unpleasant smelling cloud that made my head swim. Katarina breathed deeply of the vapours for some seconds, and began to chant.
“I am the goddess who kindles the senses with sacred smoke.”
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