by Mark Samuels
From one of them I learnt the name of the former tenant, for he had scribbled his signature in pencil on the flyleaf—Ambrose Crashaw—and he had dated it a half a decade ago.
*
And then came the day when I began to don his clothes. I had brought few of my own with me, and the large wardrobe in the flat contained a series of suits and shirts. None were brand new but all were presentable enough, with only occasional marks of fraying at the cuffs or slight wearing at the elbows or knees. They fitted me perfectly, as if I had worn them myself for years. About them there lingered some faint aroma of incense, or even of wild roses.
In addition to these items, I discovered, in a smaller closet, a navy blue felt trilby hat, and several pairs of brown and black Oxford brogue shoes. They, too, all fitted me perfectly.
I was so pleased with my new apparel that I discarded my old clothes. I put all of the fashionable jeans, t-shirts and denim jackets I formerly wore into bin liners and dumped them on the doorstep of a nearby junk shop.
When I went to work at the supermarket, wearing my new apparel, my colleagues regarded me with scarcely concealed amusement. One of them told me I was dressing like an old man, and my supervisor seemed actually put out by my appearance, as if I had chosen to dress in a manner injurious to his own authority, for I eschewed the employee uniform I was supposed to wear. Only management in the company wore shirt and tie, he explained, quietly yet firmly to me, after I had been summoned to his office. I am afraid that a scene resulted, since I had not yet worked more than a week of my probationary period. He decided that, because I felt I could not adhere to company guidelines (in so basic a matter as the dress code), I should seek alternative employment immediately.
I returned to my flat and sat around during the afternoon wondering what I was to do. Provided I was able to live frugally, I calculated that my money would last for another month. At the end of that period, I would either have to find another job or else apply to the state for welfare support.
Then again, it was possible that, before that fateful time arrived, I would have entirely transposed myself into the life of Ambrose Crashaw and such considerations would be superfluous anyway. As the afternoon passed into evening, I was roused into a fit of speculation, and began to see a strange connection linking the books that formed his library. Some of them contained his pencil notes in the page margins, and these insights into his thought processes took possession of my mind.
And when finally I put the books away, and turned on the radio set, I found that it must have been broken, for the faint signal drifted aimlessly back and forth between channels, moving across frequencies harbouring ghostly voices speaking in English, Flemish, Spanish, German and French—as if all the mighty dead of Europe were echoing the strange sentences that Crashaw had added to the margins of his books. I sat listening to the noise for an hour or more, and only towards the end of that period did I notice the gradual transformation that was taking place—for the voices and the static I heard slowly blended into and were then replaced entirely by the sound of the leafy whispering of a vast multitude of trees.
Shaken by the occurrence, and doubting my own senses, I flung open the window and leant out into the night air. In the distance, the woodland hill was alive in the wind, its vast mass of swaying branches and leaves all bathed in moonlight, with an aureole of silver at its summit, and it seemed the hill formed one of the primal sources of the unearthly sound that issued from the radio set like an echo.
And I thought how glorious it would be if the natural world, instead of men, had recourse to communication via machines, and if it finally occupied all of the artificial constructs of humankind, one by one, for its own purposes. If man’s dominion were over, weeds would overrun the network of roads and railways within a few months, ivy and vines would begin to strangle the tower blocks and skyscrapers, and all computers would be riddled with lichen, producing only spores.
Whole cities would be reclaimed by nature after a few years, leaving only ruins, as lost and vainglorious as those of earlier civilisations such as the Incas of the Andes, the Toltecs of northern Meso-America or the Mayans of the Yucatan Peninsula.
But some few men and women would linger on and tell tales by firelight of the horrors they had experienced before the newborn days of secret wonder had returned, back when they had looked grimly to the skies for stars but seen only the glare of electric lights blotting them out, when their souls sought for the sacred mystery and they were given instead the gruel of materialism, when ancient wisdom was drowned out by self-referential ideologies, when eternal truth was a matter thought fit to be decided by vote, when science ceased to be held to account for its part in the flaring of mushroom clouds, in gas chambers, in lobotomies, in pollution and the rape of natural resources, and when the value of a man was judged by his utility as a cog in the societal money-trading machine.
*
I believe that this alteration regarding my view of the world opened the door to another stage of initiation into Mystery. Whereas previously I had regarded the red-brick church opposite my dwelling as nothing more than a shell, now I began to suspect it harboured some secret whose profundity had been denied to me before now. Crashaw had written in his marginal notes of seeing a cup hidden in a secret church away from commonplace men, scrawling a series of stream-of-consciousness sentences in his notebook entitled Meditations on the Great Wen.
Crashaw had dwelt on the interior aspect of the Graal, and had come to believe that it only manifested itself when the beholder was infused by inner vision, in a spiritual reality transcending any material and historical survival. The Graal was the essence of the Holy Spirit and might take unto itself an avatar of the basest type—of a common vessel wrought in cracked wood—and its wonders would be apparent only to those who gazed upon it with eyes cleansed by the fire of divine imagination.
I cannot recall exactly at what stage it was that I first glimpsed the fantastic glow from one of the upper windows of the Neo-Gothic church, but I know that it was during a sunset of magnificent splendour, when the sky was aflame with crimson, purple and red hues, like a canvas by Turner, and the streets around me were suffused with an apocalyptic radiance, as if the very souls that dwelt therein were reflecting the luminance of their ultimate source. It was as the light of the sunset began to dim and the shadows of evening took hold that I saw clearly the glow gaining in strength. Like a beacon it blazed, in an iridescent mixture of unearthly hues, intensifying by the minute, as the intolerably beautiful colours streamed outwards from the hollow of a wooden cup of no especial design. I thought of the church’s stained glass window having been kindled into life, and of the sacred vision that no man might gaze upon and long remain of this world.
*
My dreams began to be affected. Previously when I slept I could scarcely remember them, and, even when I did so, they were merely a disordered repetition of commonplace events. But now they took on a fabulous character and I could recall them in vivid detail upon awakening. Moreover, they had none of the hallucinatory quality we associate with dreams but seemed just as real when I experienced them as seem the events of waking life. And yet, for all their clarity, they differed profoundly from this type of waking consciousness. Time had ceased to exist and my perceptions formed part of an indeterminate totality rather than part of a sequential process.
Imagine, if you will, that a man’s life is a hall of mirrors—reflecting all the states of consciousness, all memories, all hopes and dreams, and all of the thoughts one ever experiences.
And as night followed night, and dream followed dream, I became aware that my own reflection was missing. In this maze of intolerable magnitude, wherein not only the lives of all other men were housed, living and dead across thousands of centuries, but also the records of whole civilisations that have risen and fallen, the record of our own world, and even the stupendous gulfs beyond, nowhere was there to be found a glimpse of my own being.
My brain revolted at the sco
pe of such visions, and my recollection of them afterwards was fragmentary and disjointed, as if the organ itself was not capable of assimilating all the information to which it was exposed, as if I had partaken of the dreams of God.
And, when I awoke after these dreams, there were physical manifestations connected with them. At first these consisted of headaches, of a dizzying confusion, a dry mouth or else a sense of exhaustion. But they soon took on a stranger character, until I awoke with bruises, cuts or burns. Of course I initially put these down to somnambulism, though I had never sleepwalked before. But then the manifestations became stranger still, and I awoke with objects strewn over the bedclothes. A few examples of these were: flowers not native to this country; pages torn from books that I did not own and in languages I could not understand; a fob-watch a hundred years old but in such good condition it might have been purchased the day previously; a sepia photograph of a Roman amphitheatre; a seventeenth-century Knight chess piece carved from ivory; and a bizarre compass whose needle apparently pointed east, at least by reference only to the lettering on the circumference of its face.
*
After several nights of such phantasmagoria, I could sleep no more. My brain appeared to have taken refuge from the dreams by refusing to shut itself down. Insomnia took hold of me and I passed the nights in a daze, not mindful of time, noting the passing of the days only when sunlight gave way to darkness.
I would then sit for hours gazing at the upper window of the church, awaiting the first appearance of the glow from the mystical cup and being entranced by it thereafter. Its radiance streamed in celestial glory like the Aurora Borealis, reaching out from the hollow of the vessel into the night sky, and I marvelled as those who made their way past on the street below seemed not to see the incredible wonder.
Had then my vision been purged of the veil separating men from reality, while the rest of mankind stumbled blindly onwards in the common round of life? I knew that the dreams I had experienced had thrown open a gate to the fantastic, but had those dreams, now denied to me in sleeping, begun to shift into the waking world? The objects I had brought back from my sojourns in unconsciousness were quite real—even now they stood upon the mantelpiece, and at any moment I could pick them up. They did not fade into nothingness. What was dream and what reality?
Of course it had occurred to me before—why did I not simply cross the street, gain entrance to the church opposite and take possession of the cup? But, I thought, was any mortal man worthy to be entrusted with its keeping? And yet I reasoned to myself by way of an objection to that argument, what man alive had dreamed such dreams as I? What man had brought back with him from such dreams tokens of their being more than merely earthly dreams?
What had Ambrose Crashaw, the former occupant of these rooms, done? Had he seen what I had seen and taken the final decisive step in the process I myself was undergoing? Had he dreamed what I had dreamed and decided to try and approach the cup? Perhaps he had been entirely subsumed into the Mystery, and this was the cause of his complete disappearance from this world.
And yet, what place had I in this world anyway? I had not played its game according to the rules and had been expelled. I was a mere absence.
The end came after the night I slept for the final time, when days of insomnia gave way to unconsciousness and I found myself again in the hall of mirrors. For therein I discovered the reflection of Ambrose Crashaw and all the secrets were laid bare. He and I were the same person, and it was from his amnesia that I had suffered.
And clutched in my hand were the preceding pages, memories or prophecies written down whilst I was still asleep, a transcript from the impressionistic book of my existence.
*
Later, I went out into the night, crossed the street, and gained entrance to the church. Within the dusty confines of its labyrinthine passageways, in an upper room, the cup awaited my presence. Its radiance was like a blossoming rose of flame. I held it aloft, went back the way I had come, and bore it out onto the street, marvelling as night became day, as if within my hands I carried the rising sun.
All along the street, doors opened and the inhabitants poured forth from out of their homes, their eyes full of tears and wonder. The nightmares from which they had suffered were wiped away, and their souls freed from their prison of modernity. They had recovered their real lives and supernal purpose, and cries of delight at the release from their former bondage rang out like the fanfare of an angelic host. They skipped and danced for joy, forming a procession, as I led the way up towards the wood on the hill, the cup borne on high like a beacon.
And in the fragrance of the hollow of the ancient wood, at the summit of the hill, we learnt the secret song that the trees sang and the healing cup was passed round to each who thirsted in turn, and all men drank deep and gladly from its infinitely illumined depths, and the holy ceremony was concluded in glory and splendour, for all sorrow passed away and the mighty race of men that had once fallen, long ago, was lifted back up into the magisterial peaks of the supreme kingdom on high.
Publishing History
“The Other Tenant” was first published in The Eighth Black Book of Horror (Mortbury Press, 2011)
“My Heretical Existence” was first published in This Hermetic Legislature, A Tribute to Bruno Schulz (Ex Occidente Press, 2012)
“The Ruins of Reality” was first published in Sacrum Regnum 1 (Hieroglyphic Press, 2013)
“In Eternity—Two Lines Intersect” was first published in Sanctity and Sorcery, A Homage to Arthur Machen (Hieroglyphic Press, 2013)
All other stories first appeared in Written in Darkness (Egaeus Press, 2014).
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to: Reggie Oliver, Chris Conn Askew and Mark Beech
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