The Warlow Experiment

by Alix Nathan

  Still light when he gets to Moreham. Keep away from others. Them got him afore, didn’t they   John Warlow, what you doin here? Go back, you lunatic! Dodges, ducks, waits behind buildings, crouches. Oh, he’s tired! But them’s going home now, shutting doors.

  No gate in the wall. Wall of the big house.

  He’s in the garden, walks through dry stalks of dead dock, between great umbels of frosted hogweed. Which way? Dusk has come. Folds up the spectacles. House looms at him. No lights. Its doors, windows, eyes all closed. Where to go? He shudders. Can’t turn, too late.

  Powyss do…Big prick or small…

  Creeps up to the house. Doors shut, windows nailed with boards. Nobody there. Get in somehow. He’s tired, tired. Get in. Sleep.

  Stumbles round it, feeling for a way in.

  Door to the kitchen opens at his push.

  * * *

  —

  THE FIRE GOES OUT and Powyss has no idea how long he was asleep, no notion if it’s night or late afternoon, though he suspects it’s not morning. His bladder’s not full, he’s not hungry, the journal remains blank; the imperative is heat. He lights a new fire in the warm grate, packing it with more wood to last longer. A few birch logs burn with a fury, hot, brief.

  That must have been Warlow’s imperative, too, before and after he destroyed the place. And then, with a fire blazing, what? What next? For Warlow the next meal, that’s what punctuated time for him. That was something. But what about in between?

  He recalls that Warlow rarely changed his clothes or washed, a cause of much disgust on the part of Cook and Jenkins. But he himself has lived for two years unwashed, in the same clothes. When warmth and food occupy the whole attention, who cares for clean linen and soap?

  Books, organ he dismisses. Folly! And he asked him to write!

  Before the experiment, the man’s life had been an unchanging round. Why should he read? What could he possibly write? Perhaps he missed his children. Surely he missed Hannah, but possibly he didn’t. He lacked the company of fellow workers with whom he drank, though he’d said it wouldn’t matter to him.

  Once, the unchanging round had kept him alive. Provided an ordered year, an occupied day, the regular spectacle of life and death of animals, crops and trees. Irregular weather of course, but the absolute certainty of light following dark. Day never failed him.

  He thinks of his own time living in the shack. Two years of exhaustion, cold, pain, hunger, squalor. But day always succeeded night. There was always light, even in the worst weather. He had space, when he wanted it, occupation, relentless occupation. The beauty of hills and sky.

  He had deprived Warlow of all of this. Underground, Warlow’s world became a shrunken mental pulse. And then to have to leave the place in which, in the end, he had encased himself, a protective shell of destruction: of course he felt terror! My God, the poor man. The poor man!

  * * *

  —

  MOONLIGHT SPLASHES through the kitchen window. Sky’s clear again, that’s more frost comin. There’s the stairs. Recognises them. Soon he’ll sleep!

  Down and down. Becomes dark, has to feel his way. Sleep there. Sleep. All I wants now, in my place where I did live. Where I lives. My bed. In it. Under it, safe from devils.

  Reaches bottom of the stairs. Oh! Smells wood smoke. Light flickers through the doorway. Someone’s lit me a fire! That Samuel lit it afore. Hammered nails in the door. Flickers onto the heaps of wood, planks, doors, chair legs, drawers. Remember? What the woman Catherine said. What she say? Barrier were it? Some word like that. I’ll build it up again. Be safe. I were safe there. Were I? Catherine’ll bring me my food. First I’ll sleep. Then Catherine’ll…

  Somebody in there. In my place. Where I lives. Somebody’s got in. Where I lives! He sidles to the opening.

  Man sittin by the fire. Not movin. Be it that man who said John, Powyss do…?

  He pats his pocket. Still there. Remember? No scissors, no knives. She-devil did want me to stab myself. Cut your hair and nails. Stab yourself means go to hell straight down.

  The fire draws him.

  No, not that man. Can’t see the face, head’s behind chair back. Shuffles closer. Asleep. Don’t wake ’im.

  Sees small feet. Hears rasping breath. Him! Him!

  Waitin for me. Listenin to me now.

  Takes out scissors. John, Powyss, he do…

  ‘Powyss!’ he screams out, ‘you do…’, hurls himself at the prone man, who jerks round at the sound and Warlow drives the scissors hard into his side.

  ‘Aah! Aah! Warlow! Warlow, I was thinking about you. Ohh!’ Pain magnifies in his side as Warlow pulls out the thick blades and stands, struck.

  Is it Powyss? He stares at the man who’s hurriedly raised himself up and is pressing his hand over the bleeding wound. Beard, patched clothes, strange face. Is it?

  ‘Warlow, you’ve…’ Powyss vomits. Registers the whole reversal: Warlow, well fed, dressed in neatly cut clothes.

  ‘Warlow! What the…You’ve…’

  His voice. It is him. Powyss do fuck…Warlow plunges forward with the scissors again to drive them into the devil, but Powyss gets behind the chair that oozes its stuffing like an old man’s beard. How appropriate! His mind runs on. Two old men.

  Warlow cannot get near enough, fire’s on one side, dark the other. He throws the scissors at the head behind the chair. The head ducks. He bellows with fury. Pulls out the axe. Takes the dark side.

  Powyss feels blood pour through his fingers, staunches the wound hastily with his coat. Sees Warlow’s weak eyes, the man panting in exhausted, blind rage, moves away from the chair and with a sudden, new strength lunges at Warlow’s arm, grabs his wrist, forces him to drop the axe, then throws himself on the man.

  Finally to kill him! Finally to kill the foul creature he created! The energy he so often used to feel explodes in him. Oh Hannah! How always to fuck her was to destroy Warlow.

  ‘Yes. I did. I did!’ His hands are at Warlow’s throat, thumbs press the windpipe. ‘I’ll kill you, Warlow, you murderer. You killed her!’ He cries out in pain at that memory, in lust to kill, in passionate desire for Hannah: exhilaration surges through his body.

  Warlow, choking, pulls away out of his grasp, stumbles backwards. Tired. So so tired. In the firelight Powyss sees the large candlestick, reaches out for it, its heavy, weighted base uppermost, sharp-edged, fatal, and with both hands raises it high over the shaven head, the blinking eyes.

  Brings it down, straight onto the flagstones, merely brushing Warlow’s shoulder on its way.

  And he rushes up the stairs, dying flames lighting his path. Into clear moonlight and frost.

  Out of the depths, out, out. He coughs painfully, holds his side. Words come back that he, godless, has neither thought nor read since childhood.

  Out of the depths have I cried.

  He staggers through the gardens, retching, out into the field. I’ll go up the hill. Cold Hill. Look on my life.

  He’s losing blood. It’s soaked down his breeches and stockings into his shoe, his hands thick, sticky with it. The energy’s gone. He’s faint. Thinks he hears horses’ hoofs on the road, carriage wheels, shouts. Grew, surely. He starts up the gradient but it’s rough. His feet catch in brambles, he falls, rises up and stumbles on again.

  Now the death will come that once he’d longed for but no longer wants.

  Warlow will live.

  His attention is caught by coruscations of lightning in the east. A meteor like a brilliantly blazing ball passes from north-west to south-east very high in the sky. Will Catherine see it? He feels a savage spasm of regret. Will she point it out to the children? Of course she will.

  He sees its lone journey, disordering the pattern of the night, makes out a shower of red sparks that fall as it becomes extinct.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE


  I have volumes of the Annual Register from 1789 to 1814 and found this in the ‘Chronicle’ of the volume for 1797:

  Some time ago, a Mr Powyfs, of Moreham, near Prefton, offered by public advertifement, a reward of fifty pounds for life, to any man who would undertake to live for feven years under ground, without feeing a human face; and to let his toe and finger nails grow during the whole of his confinement, together with his beard. Commodious apartments were provided under ground, with a cold bath, a chamber-organ, as many books as the occupier fhould defire, and provifions were to be ferved from Mr P’s table; on ringing a bell the reclufe was alfo to be provided with every convenience defired. It appears that an occupier offered himfelf for this fingular refidence, who is now in the fourth year of his probation, a labouring man, who has a large family, all of whom are maintained by Mr P.

  I was fascinated by this account, though unable to find out anything more, especially how it ended. I wrote a short story in an attempt to understand Mr P., another from the point of view of the man underground, then realised that both deserved fuller consideration. The novel is entirely my reimagining of the episode.

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