Last Chants

by Lia Matera

  Having earlier offered a premature bravo, Arthur sat quietly. We were like schoolchildren waiting for more story.

  Instead, Pan raised the pipe to his lips and played the smoothest, breathiest piece of music I’d ever heard.

  I watched him, trying not to be overwhelmed by pity. He was clearly an educated man, a brilliant tale-teller with a classically trained voice. He was also an exceptional musician.

  And yet he lived naked in the woods, convinced this myth was biographical.

  Arthur clicked off the penlight—something he should have done earlier, no doubt; we still had to find our way back to Edward’s cabin. But I assumed his motive was to give the piping center stage.

  We listened for five minutes, perhaps.

  Then we heard Edward calling for us.

  By the time Arthur fumbled the light back on, Pan was diving through the brush, moving as swiftly as any demigod I’d ever seen.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Arthur was on his feet, mouth open, arm stretched toward the spot where Pan had just been, when Edward came crashing toward us, flooding the area with lantern light. I jumped up.

  Edward was panting; he’d clearly been running. “God!” He stopped to catch his breath, bending so his hand was on his knee. “Heard it! Heard the piping. See what you mean about it being spooky!” He panted some more. “What was going on? You’re not hurt?” He straightened. “No, you don’t look hurt. Hi, Arthur.”

  Arthur turned to him uncomprehendingly, as if he’d never seen a clothed man before.

  “Was he here? Did he try anything?” Edward held the lantern closer to my face. “I thought you might be in trouble. I didn’t know what I was going to find.”

  I had to shake my head to clear it. “Pan” had completely pulled me into his story.

  “He was here. But we’re fine. I . . . I don’t know what to say about him.” I glanced at Arthur, hoping he was feeling more articulate than I was. But he had yet to close his gaping mouth.

  “Don’t know what to say about him?” Edward repeated. “What does that mean? He didn’t threaten you, right? You’re both okay, right?”

  “Yes. You don’t have to keep asking.”

  “Could have fooled me. You’re both acting drugged or something. What the hell happened?”

  “He just sort of appeared out of the woods. He talked to us awhile—”

  “No goat legs, right?”

  “No goat legs. He talked about Pan, though. He obviously thinks he’s Pan.”

  “Tell me you don’t.” Edward scrutinized my face as if searching for dilated pupils.

  “He has a British accent.”

  “Welsh,” Arthur corrected. “And then Oxford, if I’m not mistaken.”

  Edward’s brows shot up. “What is he, some crazy Greek myth scholar?”

  “I should think so,” Arthur said. “In a sense, though, he is Pan. Didn’t you feel it, Willa?”

  “Yes.” I wasn’t totally sure I knew what he meant by that. But I’d certainly been lulled by Pan’s tale, half-believing it, in a way. “He’s got that Shakespearean actor voice that goes from quiet to thundering. He put a lot of feeling into it, that’s for sure.”

  “More than feeling, Willa.” Arthur clamped a hand on my shoulder. “It was possession. The myth took him over and became who he was.”

  “Maybe.” I didn’t pretend to understand delusions. Neuroses were more up my alley.

  “One could almost say that type of quote-unquote madness is other-dimensional,” Arthur mused. “Shamans were thought mad by the Europeans who first encountered them.”

  “So this guy talked at you? Told Pan stories?” Edward seemed confused.

  “Yes,” I reiterated. “And played the pipes for us.”

  “It was so perfect, every detail,” Arthur stared at the stump Pan had occupied.

  “What a waste of talent,” I agreed.

  “No no,” he corrected. “I would guess it’s the reverse: that madness sharpened ordinary talent into brilliance. Who could play the pipes so perfectly, with such inspiration, without first believing he was Pan? Who could live naked in the forest, yet be so strong and healthy?”

  Edward snorted. “Let’s go back. Your cop boyfriend’s gone, so—”

  “He’s never been my boyfriend!”

  “In fact, that’s the very essence of the word ‘inspiration.’” Arthur continued as if we’d said nothing in the interim. “It means, to have the Spirit blown into one. And that’s exactly what happened to this young Welshman. He became inflated with Pan’s spirit. That’s why his words, his story, are so moving: To him they are real, so real he can pull us inside his vision with him.”

  “How long have we been out here?” I wondered. Mundane matters began competing with Pan for my attention.

  “Couple of hours,” Edward told me. “Not quite two and a half.”

  “Surgelato stayed this long?”

  “Just about—the man’s weird about you. He wouldn’t take my word for anything. Insisted on tromping all around, asking me a zillion questions. I couldn’t tell if he was worried or suspicious. Ten bucks says he’s in town right now asking people if I went shopping with a brunette named Alice today.”

  “In a sense . . .” Arthur completed his thought, “madness is only a kind of unsanctioned inspiration.”

  “Yeah, well, let’s go,” Edward replied. “We don’t want to be late to the Zelda Fitzgerald Fan Club.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  We recounted Pan’s story—with far less aplomb—to Edward over canned beans and toast.

  His reaction was, “He saw Syrinx here? Holding a knife over a rabbit hole?”

  “I thought he said slingshot.” But I wasn’t sure.

  “No no—unmistakably not,” Arthur contradicted me. “It leaped out of the narrative—why a knife, you see? It should have been a slingshot, and yet it was a knife.” Arthur pushed his beans away. He’d hardly eaten.

  I wanted to urge him to have more, but Edward had already laughed at my “Jewish mothering” once this meal.

  “Well,” I conceded, “you’re more used to oral histories than I am.”

  Edward stopped crunching his toast. “It’s probably a waste of time, but let’s take this Welsh guy at his word. Say he saw some woman with a knife. Who? Where?”

  “Over a rabbit hole,” Arthur mused. “I don’t know if one could characterize Bowl Rock as a rabbit hole.”

  “It’s a kind of hole,” Edward said. “For the sake of argument, say a woman with a knife was poised over the rock’s opening. Could this guy have seen her? There are hills above the clearing, but I doubt you can see Bowl Rock from any of them.”

  “You can,” Arthur disagreed. “From one of them. But it’s not simply that the rock is visible from Forty-eight Degree Point—”

  “Forty-eight Degree Point?”

  “I don’t know what local name it might have. But it’s roughly forty-eight degrees north, northwest of Bowl Rock, less than a quarter-mile distant. It has an excellent view of the rock.”

  “This is something people around here know about?” Edward sounded skeptical.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t think so. Billy and I were at great pains to map and document it.”

  “Document it? Why?” Edward sat back, picking up his bottle of beer.

  “Because the rock was clearly placed in that spot. It could not possibly have occurred there naturally.”

  “I’ve seen big rocks on the mountain,” Edward objected.

  “But what you call the mountain is actually a few neighboring mountains. And there are vast geological differences from one to another. Boulder Creek is part of Ben Lomond Mountain, which is within the so-called Salinian block, a sliver of land bounded by two fault lines. The Salinian is comprised of rocks completely different from the melange surrounding it, completely different from Santa Cruz Mountain to the east and the marine terraces to the west. In fact, the Salinian block, Ben Lomond Mountain, is utterly exotic to California.
That’s what lends credence to the myth that it was suddenly thrust up from some mystical distance.”

  “Like Olympus?”

  He smiled at me. “The geologists don’t offer that hypothesis. But the fact is, they don’t know why Ben Lomond Mountain rose out of the sea or why its composition is unlike that of the terraces beneath it or the mountain beside it. And with Bowl Rock, you have an isolated tufa—an unusual rock formation—in a part of the mountains where no other tafoni occur.”

  “A tufa?”

  He nodded. “Have you been to Castle Rock?”

  “No.”

  “It’s about fifteen miles away, on Santa Cruz Mountain, atop the San Andreas fault. You see dozens of huge boulders there, honeycombed with nooks and caves. These are tafoni, a type created by conditions occurring only in a few places on the planet.”

  I wasn’t in the mood for a geology lecture. “The point being, Bowl Rock shouldn’t be here, it should be there.”

  “That’s right. It undoubtedly came from the Castle Rock area.” Arthur nodded brightly. “The question is, why was it moved here?”

  “Well,” Edward demanded, “why?”

  “It may have been chosen because of its hollow egg configuration; we thought it likely. Why else move this particular boulder?”

  “Why move any boulder?” Edward persisted.

  “That’s what we were trying to determine. Whether it might be another Sun Dagger.”

  Arthur did have a way of making one feel undereducated. “What’s a sun dagger?” I asked him.

  He looked surprised by my ignorance. I was relieved to notice Edward didn’t jump in with an explanation; I’ll bet he didn’t know, either.

  “It’s the most amazing ancient device for tracking solar and lunar cycles. It’s in New Mexico, near Pueblo Bonito, but it predates the Navajo by centuries. Their oral history attributes it to a people—perhaps their forebears—they call the Anasazi.”

  “So this Sun Dagger is kind of a Stonehenge thing?” Edward’s tone said, Let’s move along.

  “More sophisticated than Stonehenge—it not only tracks the solstice and equinox, but also a nineteen-year lunar cycle. It’s a brilliantly precise alteration and adaptation of a natural butte.”

  “And you thought Bowl Rock might have been put here to track lunar cycles, too?”

  Arthur nodded. “But a vantage point of some type would be necessary. Unless of course the portion of the rock that acted as a marker has fallen off or been knocked off. Or unless there was once a piece that fit over the opening. We simply weren’t sure. We were checking various possibilities.”

  “When was the rock put here?”

  “I would guess before the arrival of the Spaniards. They were brutal in their eradication of anything pre-Christian. And it would have been a project of many months to move a large boulder down the side of Santa Cruz Mountain and part way up Ben Lomond Mountain.”

  I sipped the beer Edward had opened for me. I hated beer, but there wasn’t much else on the menu. I waited for Arthur to continue, but he didn’t.

  “So, anyway,” Edward prompted him. “You found a spot above Bowl Rock where the Pan guy could have been standing and seen what he said he did.”

  “Yes.”

  “And he said he saw a woman with a knife.”

  “A woman who looked to him like Syrinx,” I put in. “I don’t know if there’s a tradition about what Syrinx looked like, but Toni Nelson would be my idea of a dryad.”

  Arthur nodded his agreement. “Quite. Billy was extremely taken with the . . . classicism of her endowments.”

  Edward smiled. “I’ll have to remember that line. What the hell is a dryad, anyway?”

  “Naiads were water nymphs. Dryads lived on land.”

  “Were the two of them romantic?”

  Arthur looked bewildered. “Dryads and naiads?”

  “No. Billy Seawuit and Toni Nelson.”

  Arthur seemed a little shocked by the suggestion. “Billy was a guest on their land. I can’t imagine him treating his host so shabbily.”

  “Even if it made his hostess happy?”

  Arthur shook his head, unimpressed with the distinction.

  Edward pressed indelicately on. “Let’s talk about Seawuit. Are you sure he’d go for manners over lust?”

  “You’d like to hear about Billy?” Arthur’s eyes filled with tears. “He was the most powerful shaman of my acquaintance, and I’ve traveled the globe meeting many.”

  “Okay,” Edward conceded. “But what does that mean? That he could go into a trance? Heal the sick? Talk to voices in his head? What, exactly?”

  “He could enter nonordinary reality nearly at will, bringing back to this world whatever was needed from the other.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like answers and treatments, advice, perspective.” A tear traced a crevice in Arthur’s cheek. “Whatever was requested or necessary.”

  “So he had a direct line to the . . . nonordinary, you called it?”

  Arthur nodded.

  Edward looked at me. I’d tried to warn him.

  “Would you like to experience it?” Arthur asked. “It’s no secret how to get there. Our culture, our religions especially, try to bar the gates, but it’s quite accessible. It’s just that some people are natural shamans, they have a great soul capable of traveling far and remembering much.”

  Edward sat up. “Are you saying you could take me right now into nonordinary reality? Are we talking drugs?”

  “That’s certainly one path, with the requisite terror and uncertainty. But no. I was thinking of drumming.” Arthur wiped his tears.

  “Drumming? Mickey Hart, Ringo Starr, Buddy Rich—that kind of drumming?”

  “Shamanic drumming.”

  “Toni Nelson has a whole wall lined with drums,” I pointed out.

  “Well, I’m a little short of drums,” Edward said.

  “Do you have a thin piece of leather? And something circular, ring-shaped?” Arthur made perhaps an eighteen-inch circle with his hands.

  “I’ve got chamois in my Jeep. And I’ve got a scoop net. For fishing.”

  Arthur rubbed his hands together. “Perhaps. If you’ll get them for us?”

  A few minutes later, we watched Arthur cut the chamois, which I gathered was low-grade animal skin used for buffing cars. He stretched it over the net ring. Then he punched holes in the edges with a knife, lacing it with leftover strips. He pulled it taut, then tied the laces.

  He did it swiftly and expertly, saying, “It will lack resonance because it has no sides to generate an echo, but—” He tapped the skin: It definitely sounded like a drum. “If we could wrap a sock around a spoon for a striker?”

  When we were done, Arthur held the “drum” by the fishing net handle, tapping it with the spoon-and-sock striker. It wouldn’t have done for Buddy Rich, but it was almost passable.

  “Let me explain to you what we’ll be doing,” Arthur said. “We’ll turn off the lights and have you both lie down. I’ll beat the drum in a precise, repetitive rhythm—a little faster than three times per second. The rhythm is fairly standard throughout the world, around two hundred and ten beats a minute. Different cultures having no contact or common ancestors all arrived at some variation of it. That’s because it serves a purpose: It synchronizes the two hemispheres of the brain, making a trance state possible.”

  I was nervous. Reality was strange enough. Did I believe Arthur about the trance state? Did I want to enter one?

  “Your task, after I begin, is to relax, and to try to forget your body and your surroundings. Try to visualize an opening.”

  “What kind of opening?” Edward wanted to know.

  “Any kind that will allow you to enter. You’ll be going to the underworld, so a fissure, a rabbit hole, a hollow stump, a lake, even a manhole—anything that might lead you downward.”

  “We’re supposed to visualize jumping into a hole?” I didn’t think I could do it with a straight face.


  “Yes yes. Keep at it. If one hole leads nowhere, envision another. But you must keep at it, force yourself to burrow deeper and deeper. It sometimes takes a very long time and a great deal of determination to burrow to the tunnel,” he explained.

  “What tunnel?” I was having serious doubts—and I could imagine what Edward was thinking.

  “You’ll come to a tunnel. At that point, you’re almost there. Go through it. You’ll meet your power animal, your guide. It will take you for a tour. Let it talk to you. Ask it questions if you like.”

  “Are you telling us”—Edward’s tone was contentious—“that shamans jump into imaginary holes and tunnel down to meet talking animals?”

  “They also take voyages upward to meet their spirit teachers, which take human form. But yes, shamans across the planet have mapped two distinct realms, an upper and a lower—and their maps match. No one knows how many lifetimes it would take to explore it all, but some of it is charted. Healing and divinations are brought back. Power is restored to people, answers are provided to the worthy.”

  “You really believe this?” Edward wondered.

  “Ask any field scholar, anyone who has directly experienced shamanism, whether there’s a real power there, a real magic or whatever you want to call it. There’s no doubt. Only a priest would tell you otherwise.” He slowed down. “By priest I mean a functionary of a dogmatic religion. It’s a priest’s role to act out a ritual and to substitute his ritual for your direct experience.”

  “So priests bad-rap shamans, but scholars don’t.”

  Arthur nodded. “The aborigines in Australia are able to track movements of fellow tribesmen no matter how great the distance between them. They know when harm has befallen a kinsman hundreds of kilometers away, and they know his location. It’s not because they have maps or stick to particular routes. It’s because they have access to a shared shamanic reality in which these things are known to all.” His eyes were bright. “And I would defy you to find even one Australian anthropologist who disagrees.”