by Ken Webster
THOU MUST GYVE THY COMUTER AND THY POWER TO MYNSELF OR ELS YE WILT HAV NON OF MY WORDES ABOUT THY FRYEND LUCAS
In the week following those puzzling few days Peter received a long letter and collection of notes from Robin Peedell, the shy librarian at Brasenose College. It was a detailed letter, written in a very precise but individual hand. Robin had picked out a Thomas Hawarden from the college records as being a good candidate for Lukas’s real identity. It was obviously a confusion. Thomas Hawarden – Hawarden School – Peter lives in Hawarden. Robin’s enthusiasm had led him to use word association. He probably thought the events were occurring in Hawarden. He noted another Hawarden in the records, a John Hawarden who became Principal of the College. But we reasoned that a principal of a college does not withdraw to a cold damp village in Cheshire to farm a few pigs and chickens.
Of real interest was the news that Robin had reviewed the list of books Lukas had said he was acquainted with in his student days. They were all contemporary with the 1520s–30s, but one, just one, had proved very hard to track down. That was the book by Mutianus Rufus.
Robin had been thrown by the term ‘Rufus’. It was, it turned out, a nickname for Mutianus Giacomo who had had red hair. It was a very obscure reference. Robin’s work paralleled the effort Peter was putting in to find references to some of Lukas’s words that were not even recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. This was good work but it required much patience. I was thinking more of SPR.
17
14 May
Mr John Bucknall rang. He was, he said, the SPR field officer which John Stiles had promised. I took to him instinctively, he sounded young, intelligent and precise. I felt relieved in the way that a patient often finds relief in simply knowing that the doctor will call.
John Bucknall, so I conjectured, with a few questions and a couple of evenings sitting quietly with Debbie in a sealed house, would proclaim us all extremely sane. He might even write a report for the Society describing just how valuable the case was. I even visualized the article, and furthermore I daydreamed of casually handing round copies. Peter was initially more cautious. He considered that even if some intricate hoax had been perpetrated on the inhabitants of Meadow Cottage it was of immense sophistication and therefore of interest. I couldn’t agree.
I think that behind my particular daydream was the desire to see it all end tidily and for life to slip back into a more predictable rhythm. But that was also a daydream. Our lives had been altered more than we would admit. These events were part of us now for better or worse. If it was all somebody’s joke we had been terribly diminished.
Back in the cottage. 2109’s reply to my request was brief:
LUKAS W’S FARTHER SERVED ON THE KYNGS ROSE, BRISTOL. A FAVOUR FROM THE KING BROUGHT WEALTH TELL THE KING ABOUT THE MOUSE!
‘We’re not into the Mary Rose now, are we?’ Peter gave me one of those piercing sidelong looks so beloved of old-fashioned schoolmasters and I felt fourteen years old for a second. A kind of irritation itched incredibly. No, not the Mary Rose. Please! Our credibility was climbing on to a raft in a fast-flowing river. The mooring rope was worn and taut. I wanted to suppress this little message, instead I made a good deal of the fact that the ‘rose’ probably meant the Tudor rose, the badge of the dynasty, and that in a port like Bristol there might be many ships or even organizations termed the ‘kyng’s rose’. I don’t think that Peter was convinced. In any event this clue was not pursued. Lukas wasn’t his real name, so how could it help? My interest was SPR: any message received in the right circumstances was useful (or fabulous, depending on my mood).
Peter, acting on his own initiative, arranged an ‘exploratory’ meeting with Mr Bucknall the following night. It seemed appropriate to hold it at Peter’s house in Truemans Way. We could move on to the cottage if Mr Bucknall was sufficiently interested. I was glad we were to start in Hawarden: Peter has better furniture.
Up the cracked path toward the door of Peter’s house in Hawarden came two amateur Sherlocks. I could only form this thought: amateur Sherlocks. John Bucknall looked like a young business executive dressing down for the occasion in desert boots and cords. The big man, bearded, with mobile features, was Dave Welch. He was older and rather rotund. He exuded the air of a skilled gamekeeper off duty.
Both conveyed a properly serious manner, scrupulous and polite, but as they settled into Peter’s magnificent leather armchairs I imagined that they had popped in after a day watching a badger set. It must have been their honest amateur enthusiasm. I was at a loss as to what to make of these gentlemen and the agenda for the evening. My gaze fell on one of Peter’s enormous bookcases and I had the desire to read something. I felt both that there was little to say and too much.
Dutifully I had brought the red folder containing the print-outs. I felt intimidated, insecure. ‘Oh, Lor!’ as Billy Bunter often exclaimed in darker moments. I was bound to become repetitive, over-enthusiastic, inarticulate. True to form I was all these. I spoke interminably, interrupted everyone, pressed on, held back and poured mild confusion over the whole.
Peter kept saying, ‘I knew we had to bring it to you people. We need your scepticism. Excellent!’ He was enjoying it enormously. I was conscious of being too open, of letting my feelings of confusion show.
John Bucknall asked us for our thoughts on the phenomena. Debbie was the focus of a lot of attention, which she didn’t enjoy. She wanted to resist the connection between her presence in the cottage and the frequency of communications, so she was evasive, too ready to deny its relevance: ‘I’m in a lot of the time anyway.’ I felt undermined when this diffidence was measured against my enthusiasm, confusion and interest. Peter had been worried that he would catch the blame; the lead paragraph in his nightmare read: ‘Ex-Oxford man, expert in Shakespeare and Chaucer, fakes messages from the past.’ Both Debbie and I wanted Peter to be wearing the mantle of innocence he deserved. This became less likely as Peter delved, in impossible detail, into words such as ‘wrethed’ or ‘charge house’; I wished I could slow him down.
John Bucknall was trying not to chain-smoke. He emphasized that many of these sorts of phenomena are entirely fraudulent or are massive elaborations upon some quite explainable occurrence. Was he here to investigate or to name the guilty persons? I couldn’t help feeling that the accused were before him now. He told us that until the phenomenon manifested itself, while we were under lock and key (as it were), he had no option but to treat us as the main suspects. This looked a bit unfair. Why had we spent so long explaining the circumstances to him if he was going to insist on their being irrelevant?
However, it soom became clear that we were in fact convincing him that some of the Society’s very limited resources should be spent on this case. Scientific methods would have to be applied; the Society for Psychical Research was formed to keep these investigations on the level which was expected of an organization run by scientists and well-respected because of it.
As we drove off to the cottage I was subdued; I didn’t feel that I had put over my ideas successfully. The Jaguar arrived some seconds ahead of John’s Fiat and as I waited for the others to pile out of the car I felt very tired. I began to care less than previously about the whole interminable pantomime. The cottage was not yet properly finished: more apologies. There was school in the morning and I wanted to shout, ‘That’s it, it’s all very weird but clear off the lot of you! Thank you for coming but I want some sleep!’
Our amateur Sherlocks had left Baker Street and had now arrived at the Baskerville estate. We showed them around the house, illustrated the difficulty of gaining entry through downstairs windows, door, skylights and so on. I showed them the computer and wrote to 2109, ‘ANY MORE RIDDLES?!?’
‘Aha!’ exclaimed Dave with conviction. He was now standing at the top of the stairs. ‘Does the loft space connect with others in the row?’
I had to admit that it did. I also had to admit the general lack of security at the cottage. It was still a bit of a bombsite upstairs, b
ut they had to expect this in my current circumstances. They suspected someone could ‘quite easily’ have-performed the whole routine via this route. While we were in the house? While Debbie rested in the living room? They were not deterred. These were the kinds of possibilities they were determined upon. I was too tired to object. I had given away my home to science. So Lukas was to be the creation of some academic housebreaker with a love for a practical joke.
18
15 May
Poltergeist activity had started again with a vengeance, as Debbie discovered:
‘I dropped Ken off at school after spending the night at East Green then drove over to the cottage to feed the cats. It was 9.00 A.M. It was not until I walked up the path to the front door that I sensed something was very wrong. Perhaps it was the cats sitting on the garden wall watching me rather than circling my feet as they usually do which prompted this unease. I turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open. In the living room I came face to face with a six-foot-high pile of furniture. It appeared to me in that instant to have been tossed by the little finger of a giant. Instantly I took a step back and out of the door and slammed it shut. The cats still watched me in silence from the wall. I didn’t know quite what to do.
‘I walked round to the back with the intention of looking through the window but I felt unable to do this for a time. I dreaded to think what mayhem there might be. When I did look it was clear that the kitchen had gone crazy too. Only now did I start to rationalize. It was burglars or local kids, perhaps. Then I remembered what Ken had written on the computer last night and all the anger and frustration he’d felt. I ran round to the front of the house and in through the door. Trembling I recovered the phone from the hearth, fumbled with the dial, rang Ken’s school and left him an urgent message. Then I rang Dave Lovell and got him to come straight down. Eventually I gathered enough of my thoughts to examine the havoc. Everything moveable in the room had moved towards the kitchen and was piled against the door: chairs, bicycle, Dave’s tool chest; some of the tiles had even been pulled off the hearth. Up on the roof beam the old copper pan had twisted on its axis and the handle was at an angle of nearly ninety degrees.
‘There was a knock at the door. I opened it slightly and put my head round to see a couple of unfamiliar faces.
‘“Hello, Mr Webster’s house? We’ve come to measure up for the windows.”
‘“Oh,” I said trying to kill time and to think straight. I realized then that I was literally shaking, with my tongue jammed between my back teeth trying to cushion and disguise my chattering jaw. I replied awkwardly. “Oh yes, Lewis Glass, er … you couldn’t possibly come back tomorrow, could you? I’m a little busy.”
‘“It’s OK, won’t take a minute – just show us the windows you want doing and we won’t disturb you.”
‘I couldn’t see a way out of it – I couldn’t think.
‘“Um, you won’t be able to get to the windows from inside, well, a couple of them, I’m very busy …” I opened the door so that they could see “… doing some housework.”
‘They looked at each other. The slight frowns meant, “She’s off ’er ’ead.” One of them looked blank-eyed at me for a second before he spoke. “You’re fairly busy – we’ll come back another time. Perhaps you’ll ring and let us know?”’
But for the power cables anchoring them to the wall the cooker and kettle would have moved further. The cooker was tilted at forty-five degrees, the grill pan hanging out. Many of the items were stacked on top of the kitchen table, the chair and broom included. The rubber plant, all six feet of it, lay across the floor: head to the lobby, pot to the cupboard. It was very careful vandalism. I found one cracked egg, a broken earthenware bowl and the top of the salt cellar in two pieces. That was all, even though almost everything loose in the kitchen had moved and the cupboard itself emptied.
Debbie spoke to Miss C, the next door neighbour at Corner Cottage. She remembered us leaving the cottage after midnight and recalled Debbie arriving at approximately 9.00 A.M. the next day. She had, as is her custom, woken early at around 7.00 A.M. and had certainly heard nothing outside until Debbie turned the key in the door.
Miss C was convinced it must have been a hooligan or thief and I could see her mind close up at the suggestion of a poltergeist. Even a friend of Dave Lovell, as he clambered over the furniture and fittings to get a better shot with a camera, would accept no explanation other than thieves or pranksters. He didn’t believe in God, he would not even go into church the day they held the funeral for his teenage son so he was equally sure that it was ignorance to talk of ‘poltergeists’. These gentle people. I admired their certainty. It makes the world easier. Someone once said that we aren’t looking for the truth just a fiction we can live with. Deb and I were not finding living very easy.
This mess could have been made by ourselves or thieves. Some people would say, let’s not invent other reasons that would suit us better. But Debbie and I were not inventing anything at all. We were receiving computer communications, the house was turned upside down, objects were moved, objects were removed, writing appeared on the wall and floor. We could be forgiven for associating all these events, one with another, and walking in that morning and saying, ‘Poltergeist!’
Peter came later and brought his son, Richard, and camera. It would take a lot of work to put the house to rights again. I could also guess what John Bucknall and Dave Welch would think. The cynic in me whispered: ‘They’ll think you laid it on!’
19
On 17 May, 2109 offered some more ‘advice’. I had put down questions about their names, how many of them were involved, what they did for a good time and so on. I tried again for Lukas’s name, that was the main issue. I was hoping for some real help on this and on the poltergeist question.
I didn’t get it.
KEN, DEB, PETER,
AGAIN, WE GIVE YOU TWO CHOISES, TOGETHER WITH SOME HELP:
WHAT IS OUR NAME?. TOO PERFECT THAT WE MAKE MISTAKES, AS WE MUST HAVE A CHARACTOR. MOVEMENT THAT CASTS NO SHADOWS, THOUGHT WITHOUT CHEMICAL REACTION, LOVE WITHOUT PASSION, HATE WITHOUT ANGER, WARS WITHOUT LIFE LOST. HOW CAN WE HAVE A NAME? WE ARE MANY BUT NO MORE THAN ONE IN THE TIME TO COME. WE HAVE NO RETIREMENT, AH, WHAT AN AGE TO BE IF THE DIGETS WERE REVERSED!. MARRIGE.
1) DO YOU WISH TO KNOW OF LUKAS AND WHAT OF HIM?. CAUSE THE COMPUTER TO HAVE BEEN NEVER IN HIS TIME, THUS HE SHALL FALL TO NO UNATRAL DEATH, HE WOULD HAVE NO KNOWLEDGE OF YOU AND YOUR TIME TO COME, YOU SHALL HAVE NO PROOF!
2) YOU CONTINUE WITH THE COMPUTER AND RISK THE SIGHT OF YOUR DESTINY, AS LUKAS. BUT, AH, BUT SOMETHING WILL BE PROVED.
YOU 3 MUST SIT UNDESTURBED AND TALK AND LISTEN– MOST IMPORTANTLY. THE ANSWER WILL COME TO YOU ALL NOT FROM AN INDIVIDUAL!
‘How very tiresome,’ I said to Debbie, looking over the top of my glasses in a disdainful, almost Victorian, manner. ‘At face value they have no physical qualities. A joke has no physical qualities: only its effects are detectable. What do you say, my dearest?’
The effect on us of this splendid confusion was considerable. I was disturbed by it whatever the truth behind it. Peter didn’t think much of the spelling. Debbie treated it as a joke. It provoked hours of discussion. I showed it to Dave Lovell and to John Cummins as he was visiting the village. John chuckled boyishly and began throwing out surrealist ideas: it was computers in the future talking by themselves, sixth formers in a future hyper-tech playing games with their machines in the lunch break. Laughing at it was by far the best way.
Peter hoped it wasn’t the future if this was what would become of the language. I said it obviously wasn’t the future but I became very tangled in the difficulty of separating the existence of these words from what might lie behind them. I was stuck on the horns of a dilemma, for if I denied the existence of these communications then I denied Lukas. I was nowhere near doing the latter. Lukas’s last messages had been profound and honest. I reread them and compared them with this rubbish.
I still needed to
write a reply.
The ‘choises’ they offered appeared as inadequate as their language. They first suggested that knowledge of Lukas’s true name would undo what had happened. Surely quite impossible, an interference with the ‘arrow of time’. Of course, if we were communicating with Lukas’s friend then this irreversibility appeared threatened, if not overthrown already. Total confusion.
‘Choise’ two was to risk ‘the sight of our destiny’. This worried me. I had always feared being told that I had three months to live or that I would die by drowning or by fire. The child in me saw all these possibilities. The adult in me did not want to see. It was clear that if 2109 had access to different times then my fate, all our fates, might be there for them to see. But perhaps, our fate was not at issue … ? ‘Destiny’ might refer to some sort of fulfilment of a purpose to our lives. To know that my life – our lives – were important to some scheme; that we were more than dust. I was tempted to believe that this was the meaning of the phrase, but then we all believe in our own importance from time to time.
I struggled with a reply. I resolved to abandon it all, as it was beyond my comprehension and beyond my tolerance.
Later that evening, to add drama to tension, as it were, there came the prompt.
TIME IS SHORT
I looked at my response so far. It was already overdramatic.
WE HAVE NO WISH TO SEE OUR DESTINY AND SHALL NO MORE ASK OF YOU OH HOW ‘JOHN’ CRIES FOR THE EMPTY POWER OF THIS MACHINE. HE TOO WILL BE DISAPPOINTED. FOR A SHORT TIME I SHALL CONTINUE WITH WORDS TO ‘JOHN’ BUT THERE IS NOTHING I CAN SAY THAT WILL SATISFY HIM. THE MASSIVE DISTURBANCES ABOUT WHICH NO ONE WILL COMMUNICATE HAVE MADE ME RESOLUTE TO GIVE UP THESE THINGS. LUCAS IS GONE. MY FRIEND IS DEAD I SHALL NOT PURSUE HIM BY THESE MEANS. HE ASKS ONLY THAT A BOOK BE WRITTEN. I SHALL DO THIS.
