by Carmel Bird
The two horses stood statue still; the three human beings shadowy effigies, tranquil, tense, paralysed, hypnotised, waiting for a sign, a gesture from the stars. The child in the woman’s arms stiffened, threw back her head and screamed, then she fell silent, and the loss of sound was like a dark, dark gap, a monstrous mouth, opening in the air. In time another helicopter. And another. These two came across the Strait from Victoria. Black, white, red and yellow flies, dragonflies—the helicopters hovered in their sinister heavy way, looking for places to land on the open heath.
Guns are here, and the searchlights and the cameras. The lights slice through the smoke. Caleb does not move. From above in the choppers they can see, through wisps of smoke that have drifted here, parts of the flattened scene—the man in black on the stallion, gazing out to sea; the woman in white on the chestnut mare, the child in red before her. The child appears to be asleep, the two horses with their riders resembling wooden toys in a paper landscape. The searchlights from the helicopters swoop across the open rough and ragged heath, slicing, intersecting, godly rays, cold, sharp blue, piercing the frozen picture below. Now and then, by a trick of the darkness and the light and the smoke, a haze, a nimbus of pale gold surrounds the man on the horse. The group is set for some voice to say: Camera! Action! Everything is poised as if on a hair between reality and dream.
Cameramen hang from the sides of the helicopters. The glossy machines land with ease and elegance on the open ground, and from them stream armed men—police and media, hunched over as they run, both in the familiar uniform of emergency. The images of the horses and their riders are now translated into footage that will fly back to base in Melbourne and then flit invisibly through the air to be seen in airports and hospitals and jails and cafes and living-rooms all over the world. An electronic message. A newsflash. A documentary. A tragedy. A mystery. An image. A commodity to be swallowed like an oyster by a world greedy for horrors. An image to play and play over and over again until it doesn’t hurt any more. Animated cartoon.
Balanced on that hair between reality and dream, dream and reality merge, and the result is safe forever after on video. It is still possible to shock and hypnotise people for a moment with those swift bright violent pictures and a rat-a-tat-tat on the screen. The guns and the cameras; the cameras and the guns—twin technologies at work. In a couple of hours the ground truck will arrive, and live footage will be broadcast to stop people in their worn, familiar and fragile tracks, to awaken the sleepyhead, to appal the innocent, to inspire the lunatic with the story it will tell. Live footage, like a live wire, will spurt the information round the globe. Miles and miles of moving pictures telling living stories even as they happen, can be flashed from anywhere to anywhere else, keeping the world at large informed about the things that are happening right now in the world at large. For a few strange moments in 1992 all lines lead to Cape Grimm. The burning beacon that is the Meeting Hall at Skye can be seen anywhere you happen to be, and you will, for a minute or two, be transfixed by this torch of living human beings, and you will listen in horror and amazement and dumb wonder as a steady voice explains to you that this fire was visited by the preacher on his flock. The leader of the community put his community to death, and good people everywhere ask why and how this happened, and why wasn’t he stopped long before it got to this. Until the questioning voices die away, and the story fades, and new stories flow from all corners of the earth, and a new magic carpet of moth-bright images rolls out.
There is a need, a lust, a love in the world, a longing to be provided, fed, nourished with strange dark wild terrible images, more and more, over and over. Even little children long to hear their mothers read them the stories recorded in Germany by the Brothers Grimm, the Nursery and Household Tales where the boy searches in the trunk for an apple, the mother shuts the lid and slices off his head. Later the mother cooks him in a casserole and serves him up to his father and his sister. What an astonishing and disturbing thing. The TV screen can deliver, at any minute of the night or day, moving pictures of such stories in real life, stories that are unfolding in the attic-of-torment just around the corner from the house where anyone might be living. These stories can be taped, stored, and played, played over and over. Play and rewind and fast forward and play, until the stories lodge in the heart. You can visit the nightmare again and again, as you have power over the images in your videos, stopping and starting them at will. And you are insatiable, filled with the need to know and see, the lust, the love of the darkness and the horror and the abject. The need, the lust, the desire and fascination. Every skull can be a casket of monstrosities, every heart a chamber of uncanny flying fish.
CHAPTER SIX
Word
‘The flow pattern around Cape Grim is complex, particularly at low levels where the vorticity in the upwind profile is significant, and causes elevated stagnation points.’
BUREAU OF METEOROLOGY, Baseline
A perfect stillness, silence prevailed at the centre of the dramatic flourishes and rasping clatter of choppers and cameras in the swirl of smoke up on the heath. The man on the night shift at the weather station was hunched behind a window, binoculars sweeping the scene before him. He had put through a call to the office in Smithton, but was waiting for it to be returned. He needed to report what he was seeing, needed to receive instructions. It seemed to him that the scene outside was something out of a dream, some incomprehensible clash of medieval horsemen and modern warfare. He imagined, in fact, that they must be shooting a movie in the area—that’s what he thought, and it was a reasonable thought and he figured he should have been told about it. Nobody had told him about any movie. This is government land and the operations at the weather station are top secret and you can’t just come here in the middle of the night and set things alight like that and start flying helicopters around the place. What about the air? This place is all about the air, after all. Yes. The smoke—was the smoke real? This would play hell with the instruments, the readings. The business out there on the clifftop—well, part of the point of everything here was supposed to be—well—the isolation and the quiet and the silence. The air, the lovely sacred air. They were out there on the heath polluting the beautiful air. This place is for Atmospheric Research, answering to the Bureau of Meteorology, Department of the Environment, Sport and Territories. It is the Baseline Air Pollution Station which engages in highly significant Climate Monitoring. It holds a Certificate of Merit from the Keep Australia Beautiful Council, and you can check it out at www.wunderground.com
The man on the night shift could see the fire across in the distance, and he thought it must be some terrific bloody movie. He should ring somebody about this. Then as he thought about it, the phone rang. With one hand he reached for it, his gaze still fixed on the fantastic play on the hill.
‘Len? Len? Are you OK, Len?’
‘K. Yeah. Is that you Darron? Yeah. But I tell you…’
‘Stay where you are and check the locks. There’s a maniac up there somewhere. The nutcase from that place down the road at Skye. Something’s happened there. A fire. People are dead. People are dead, Len. Are you with me?’
‘You mean—Christ—you mean this is real? I figured—well, doesn’t matter what I figured. There’s a hell of a lot of action outside. Police everywhere. Cameras. But—it looks like some movie or something. Are you sure? I figured there was a mistake. We should’ve been told about this. So long as it’s not aliens or whatever.’
‘Aliens?’
The line was crackling and spitting. The words dropped out behind some of the static.
‘It’s for real. Like I say, check the locks and don’t go outside.’
‘But can’t I do something? Are they going to set the station alight?
‘Calm down. No. It’s just the loony from Skye. He finally flipped. Sit tight and keep calm.’
‘It’s all very well for you to say. Can you hear that, for chrissake? Can you hear what they’re saying?’
The
magnified calls of the police officer in charge of the operation were blurred and distorted. The man in the weather station kept his binoculars trained on the scene, and the figure on the dark horse appeared not to hear or understand the words that were flung at him. The police closed in, but he sat there, he sat, his gaze stonily fixed on the far horizon. They closed in also on the woman and child on the chestnut mare, the child asleep, the woman shadowy immobile, a statue, dazed, drugged, who knows.
Then with sudden and shocking energy the man on the horse raised his arms and shouted to the sky. The sound did not carry to the weather station, but was heard around the world in due course, played over and over and over, edited, re-edited, played and played again. He screamed:
The Word! The Word of God is scarce and it is precious.
The whole scene stilled as if lifeless for a few seconds, then the police moved in to surround both horses, forcing the riders to dismount. The cameras tracked the scene as the police bundled all three figures across the stubble and rocky surfaces to a van. Then the van was locked by sudden magic, and it began to move forward, it nosed, sailed, crawled off into the night. Some helicopters stayed for a few minutes; others were off, chasing the van.
‘God, they’ve gone. They took the three of them in the van. One of them was a baby. Now what’s going to happen? It still looks like hell out there.’
‘I reckon you don’t open the door to strangers, unless it’s the police. There could be more psychos out there in the dark. And those media guys will want a comment from you, because you’re the eyewitness, the innocent bystander in the weather station. But you know, well, rules are rules. They can’t come in, no matter what. They’ll have to do their job without any help from you. They’ll probably find out where you live, though, and come poking around. I seriously reckon you shouldn’t talk to them. Ever. They’ll be round at your place tomorrow, I guarantee it. Keep quiet, I reckon. I always knew that guy was crazy. It was only a matter of time. But we don’t need to get mixed up with this. You never know where it’ll end. So don’t talk to the media—is all I am saying to you. Don’t talk to the media.’
So Len and Darron never spoke to the media, but they spoke to everybody else, family, friends, blokes down the pub, and the stories multiplied. And the night Len watched the scene from the window of the station went down in family, pub and local legend. A few years on there was a website dedicated to Caleb, and there were a couple of pictures of Len.
‘It doesn’t even look like me.’
‘Well, it does a bit.’
‘Bullshit, I never looked like that.’
‘You did you know.’
On the site there were pictures of everything. Pictures of the Meeting Hall before it was burnt and after. Pictures of Caleb as a preacher boy in a silver suit. Pictures of Caleb’s dog, also called Caleb—the name means ‘dog’ the text cutely explained. In one place there was a little typo, and instead of ‘Caleb’ it said ‘Caliban’. There were pictures of the sadly charming and nostalgic, not to say very strange, Temple of the Winds. On www.CelebrityMorgue.com there were also some interviews with Caleb, one of them by myself, although I have no idea how it got there, since I have never released such a thing.
People, fascinated by the events, wondered to each other about Caleb’s sermon on the cliff.
‘“The Word of God is scarce and it is precious.” What’d he mean? What d’you think he meant?’
‘Buggered if I know what he meant. He’s mental, remember.’
‘Right. Mental. But it sounds—well—it sounds like poetry or something. It’s probably in the Bible. You get religious nuts that do those things sometimes, don’t you, and they base it all on stuff in the Bible.’
‘Yeah, the Bible. Probably.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
Secret Chronicle of Virginia Mean I
‘The story of the People’s Temple is old, a matter of flux and reflux, of eternal returns.’
ITALO CALVINO, ‘Suicides of the Temple’
Note: In my work I have access to much material that is classified as private. Throughout this story I will quote extensively with full permission from the author, from the diaries of Virginia Mean, and will also qualify some of what she says with further explanations, particularly of the historical background to her story. The diaries first came to my attention when I was contacted by Father Benedict Fox from the Catholic Welfare Office. He sought my opinion as to the state of mind of the writer, knowing me to be one of the team of doctors working with Caleb Mean. In the first instance I received photocopies of the diaries without the knowledge of the author, but as time went on I was able to establish contact with Virginia, and entered into an informal therapeutic correspondence with her. I have attempted to preserve Virginia’s particular style of writing, which readers will see is somewhat old-fashioned in both vocabulary and syntax, owing to the strict and formal system of education under which she has been raised, and the isolation of her family over several generations in the religious enclave of the village of Skye in the far northwest of Tasmania. The words and sentiments are essentially those of Virginia herself, however in the interests of clarity I have, occasionally, needed to edit the text. She began writing the chronicle at the end of the first year after the fire at Skye, in 1993. Her courage in trying to heal her own life, and her devotion to her daughter, are remarkable examples of the resilience of the human spirit, and the ability of human beings to recover and to move forward with hope in the wake of the most devastating and traumatic events, events that are largely beyond the comprehension of many readers. Virginia’s life has been extraordinary and highly unusual from the outset, yet ultimately, I believe, she will make a full recovery from past damage, and will offer her own valuable and distinctive contributions to society. What form such contributions will take remains to be seen.
The following narrative is Virginia’s story.
Paul Van Loon
I am unable to speak, unable to bring myself to open my mouth and utter, give voice, explain the progress and significance of the events of which I have found myself a part, or in which I have found myself to be a player as well as an observer. There was a time when I sensed that I was outside myself, watching my life unfold, stand still, unfold again. Unable to use my voice, I therefore write this chronicle, this diary, in which I seek to document my observations, my thoughts, my feelings. Silence is a shield, a defence; it is also a weapon. In truth I am unable to analyse the source of my mutism, since I know I wish to communicate the story of what happened—but my vocal cords are silent, silenced for reasons of their own following the shock of the events of that terrible night. The words I write are gathered into fragments, short sequences with which I hope to record my own history, the narrative of my daughter’s life, the tale of how I have loved, how my life has undergone changes so swift and so dramatic that my mind reels before the memory of them, and my tongue is stilled. I believe that the strands of my narrative may resemble the short sad lines of a medieval lament, although there lie, within this history, moments of joy, moments of pleasure, times of illumination and ecstasy. My mind has been unable to absorb and process all that I have seen, all that I have experienced—and therefore I am mute. It seems the words have died even as they make their progress from my heart. I find myself repeating this, over and over as I put these words down, telling myself that I have no sound in my throat, not a word in my mouth, not a single phrase of song on my tongue, nothing that will trill within the dome, the seashell pearly hull of my breathless skull, my secret, hornbone skull. I expect there is a name for the condition from which I suffer, if indeed suffer is the word I seek. I have given my voice to Caleb, and I will not speak again until I see my own true love. And now all I know is that although I can not speak, I am able to write, to take up my pen and fly across the paper with a freedom I have never before felt with the written word.
If there were times in the dead heart of the night when I sensed myself coldly retreating down the spiral staircase of li
fe towards the bottomless pool of death, the jasper waters of endless and eternal oblivion, I am now freed from them, those times, and I am able to ascend, step by winding step, towards the light, guided only by my pen as I fill the furling leaves of this book, this warm and loving book with its creamy paper surfaces and its dear dark cover, raspberry red. Beloved book of hours and days and months and years.
I recall wistfully the hours, the months I spent with my teachers, with Caleb, reading aloud the music and poetry of the Bible, and the magical cadences of many of the great works of literature of the world. After due reflection upon what we had read, we would discuss the beauties and the meanings of the works, and from my years of drinking from the fountain of the words, I believe I have at my command a certain skill with the language, and a longing to express myself on paper. It is with profound relief and gratitude that I apply the pen to the paper, scratching the burdens of my spirit across the surface, for my silent mouth can only kiss the air. For much of this ability to free my thoughts I am grateful, grateful to Caleb for he taught me to read and to write. Caleb—how I love the sound of his name. I have always loved him. I believe I will always love him. I am Caleb. We are Cathy and Heathcliff. Dante and Beatrice. Paul and Virginia. Petrarch and Laura. Lancelot and Guinevere. Romeo and Juliet. Abelard and Héloïse. I am thinking aloud my flailing thoughts and making an attempt to interpret and characterise the bond of love that exits between us. Caleb and Virginia. Is it possible to say ‘I am Caleb’? I wonder often about that which I have written. It is so exaggerated, that I doubt I really understand what it means. And yet I do, I do understand, deep in my own heart, I know love’s meaning.
Gentle, innocent, affectionate—these are some of the words that I would choose to describe Caleb, yet I have heard others celebrate only his power, his intellect, his vision, his charisma. His great beauty and his strength. He was extremely tall, some would consider him almost a giant. Others would revile him, this I know. But I remember so many different things about him—the way he played the fiddle and the bagpipes, the way he swam like a beautiful fish in the river. His favourite sport was cricket, and he was a fearsome bowler in the rare matches the Skye team played against church groups who came in sometimes from Smithton and Stanley. It was many months after the fire before I could begin to relate my story, many months of shock and bewilderment and sorrow. Many long months of icy stillness. As I write now, I imagine I whisper, with the voice I have lost, whisper the story to a stranger. Listen, Stranger, listen to my story.
