Evil Water and Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  I made my way to the window to check; but the heavy curtains were closed tight without a chink.

  I saw Eternity the other night

  Like a great Ring of pure and endless light. …

  There was no other glimmer in the room itself. No movement of mine dimmed or shadowed the ring of pearly light. Thoughts of Mrs Mott as purveyor of phosphorus soup flew out of the window (or would have done so, had the window offered any way in or out). I could pretend no longer. I knew what I was seeing.

  Above John’s head, as he slept, hung a halo.

  A halo such as saints wear in paintings.

  Not so bright, perhaps! Not a radiant glory. A modest halo, which wouldn’t even be visible if other light competed. But a halo nonetheless.

  John’s head was snuggled in a fat pillow. The halo was tilted across his face. I stretched out a cautious finger to touch the apparition.

  Perhaps this was foolhardy of me, but I suffered no consequences. I felt no buzz, no shock, no warmth. The thing couldn’t be an odd form of ball lightning, or St Elmo’s fire.

  I swept my hand right through the halo, without effect. Then I shook John’s shoulder.

  “Wake up, old son! Wake up, will you?”

  Eventually I roused him.

  “House on fire? Burglars? What’s the time?”

  “No, no, no. None of that. Sit up.”

  As he sat up, the halo shifted position so that it was poised above his nightcap.

  “What’s up, Morris? Where’s my torch?” (John’s bedroom was equipped with nineteenth-century carriage lamps.)

  I gripped his wrist. “No—no torch! Is there a mirror anywhere?”

  “Inside the wardrobe.”

  “Will you show me?”

  Grumbling mildly, John got out of bed—the halo accompanying him—and soon he was pawing a wardrobe door open.

  Now there were two haloes: one above John’s head, and the other in the full-length mirror.

  “Goodness, what’s that light? I haven’t got my glasses.”

  ‘I’ll fetch them. Where are they?”

  “Table by the bed.”

  I retrieved his spectacles and he put them on.

  “Goodness!”

  “Goodness indeed, John—by the looks of it! You’re wearing a halo.”

  He stepped to and fro. He swung his hand across his head. He pulled off his nightcap—as though I might have attached that ghostly glow as a joke.

  “Oh dear me,” he said. “My eyes aren’t much use—but I can see it. Dear me, I always thought there was something frightfully priggish about haloes. …”

  “You must be becoming a saint, eh old son?”

  “What, me? A saint? Don’t be silly. Besides, saints never had actual rings of light over their heads! That’s just an artistic convention. A way of picturing saints.”

  “Maybe some saints had actual haloes—ones which people could see? But not in recent history.”

  “I think a halo would need to be brighter than mine, for people to notice!”

  “Maybe yours is just a baby halo. A young one.”

  “Meaning that it’ll grow stronger? As my eyes grow dim? Let’s light some lamps.”

  My friend located his torch and went through the rigmarole of getting carriage lamps to work. As the illumination in the bedroom increased, so did his halo fade away to a faint shimmer.

  I sat on a chair; John perched on the bed.

  ‘This is quite embarrassing,” he said. “It’s preposterous! I can’t possibly be a saint in the making. And what could conceivably cause a halo?”

  “Grace, perhaps, my Lord Bishop?”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  “Any more than you believe it? I want to ask you, John: did you write that book of yours to debunk radical theology? Is the book a kind of holy offering—of everything you cared deeply about—so that faith may be sustained?”

  “Gracious me, I don’t think so. Morris, I’ve told you that I feel an evil darkness spreading its shadow inside of me. If I’m sprouting a halo, I assure you this is at the expense of my soul! It isn’t a spotlight to illuminate saintliness.” He mused a while. “How nice it would be to imagine that it’s some lamp of goodness. How nice to visualize certain dim monasteries of the past as being genuinely lit by sanctity—with a saint’s head as a light bulb! How lovely if cities of the future could be cold-lit by our own purity, should mankind perfect itself! Heaven would be radiant on account of its saints. Hell would be dingy-dark because of its sinners. That is emphatically not how I feel as this blindness eats up my vision.”

  Eats up.

  “Your halo is eating your eyesight … what could that mean? That the halo is some kind of organized energy? It needs energy to sustain itself; to grow … ? Certain luminous deep-sea fish need to eat luminous plankton or else they stop glowing. And by glowing they attract their prey.”

  “What are you trying to say, Morris?”

  “Maybe this halo is some sort of creature—an animal not of blood and bone, but of energy. It’s eating the photons that enter your eyes; or the electrical impulses in your optic nerves. That’s why you’re going blind. Your brain can sense it feeding inside you; consuming light, to produce light.”

  “A parasite? Why should it generate a halo? Hmm, famous saints of the past haven’t been noted for their blindness. …”

  “So haloes can’t be the work of parasites, presumably.”

  He shook his head in puzzlement. “You mentioned luminous fish attracting prey. What prey would a saint attract to him? Why, the faithful. The credulous. Some sinners ripe for conversion. People who are religiously inclined. A halo might be God’s fishing hook. It might be an angel that takes up residence, in order to angle for souls. And it drinks photons from the saint’s eyes, to power the halo? I don’t know, hagiographically, of many saints who had impaired vision!”

  “Maybe there have only been a few true saints—whose haloes became legend? You’re the next saint. The miracle for a godless age.”

  “Are you trying to canonize me, Morris? You should be devil’s advocate.”

  “I’m only looking at the possibilities. Here’s another one: maybe in the past there were more conduits to the divine light? The halo-angels didn’t need to suck the vision from a saint. There were other sources of energy.”

  “In that case why should I sense that my blindness is evil? Why should I feel such a lack of Grace?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When I become blind as a bat, does my halo glow with glory? Whose faith is being tested? The world’s, or mine? Is this a test of faith at all—or is it the work of some vile parasitic creature from elsewhere, with its own motives? Is that what a miracle is: something you can’t ever prove, but must take on trust, like God Himself? Even though you feel that you yourself are damned! Possessed!” He stretched out his hands towards me. “If I beg you to cure me, Morris—God knows how!—do I damn myself? Should I let my halo strengthen and thus confirm the faith of millions of people—while I lose my own belief, sunk in my personal deep dark pit?”

  “Maybe the thing will go away,” I said feebly. “Maybe it’ll fade, and your eyesight will improve.”

  “Will you stay with me a few more days?”

  “A week. Longer, if need be. Of course I will.”

  He sighed. “Thank you, Morris. Now you’d better go back to bed. And so shall I.” His bishop’s authority suddenly blossomed. “Be off with you, Morris! I shall extinguish the lanterns. I shan’t toss and turn, or lie brooding.”

  A week later I was still staying at the palace; and the halo was intensifying. I could see the ring of light above John’s head in daylight or artificial lighting. My friend’s eyesight had worsened drastically.

  There was no question now of rushing him to an optician’s or to hospital. Moreover, John and I were in full agreement that Mrs Mott should be kept in the dark regarding the halo. I carried the meals she cooked to John’s room on a tray, and cut up mea
t for him.

  The Bishop was ill, incapacitated, and I was treating him—that was the story. He had a serious infection, though nothing dangerous or fatal. Mrs Mott only accepted the situation when John told her firmly, from the other side of his door, that this was so.

  The business of the diocese was dealt with likewise. John’s secretary took umbrage somewhat; he also wanted a “genuine” doctor called to examine the Bishop. Through the wood of the door the Bishop overruled him loudly; and I witnessed an aspect of my friend which made me realize how he also had a tough streak—he hadn’t become a bishop simply through a combination of good works and nepotism.

  John’s mind remained keen. The halo-creature which had infested my friend had no apparent ambition to speak through his lips, whisper words in his head, or influence his dreams.

  But it brightened; how it brightened.

  “Even when I become stone-blind,” John said to me, “I’ll not really be blind. It’s just that all the light will be stolen to create my halo. And it won’t be long till I’m stone-blind. Should we phone the television people, do you think? Tell them to rush here for a news conference? Should I display this miracle to the world? Should I say: here is God’s lightning? It doesn’t strike the transepts of cathedrals. It circles about my head calmly and brightly—while I dwell in a pit of mud for evermore, as if in Dante’s Inferno.

  “Should I say: behold the cold light of the future, of the next age of belief? I bear it as my cross—or rather, my circle, my ring of Peter, my annulus angeli. Yet I know that my angel is dark. It only glows by theft, by a vampirism of light. So how can it be from God? This has destroyed my faith in God as surely as it has destroyed my sight. If this thing is God’s punishment, then maybe I should damn God! If it His blessing: likewise! And if it’s sent by the Devil, why then the world will never be perfected. We will never be enlightened.”

  “Maybe,” I suggested, “you need a spiritual adviser rather than a homeopathic vet?”

  He shook his head brusquely; the halo remained steady. “I … must … decide. Only I know what it is like to be me at this time.”

  And decide he did—in the most gruesome manner. …

  A distant cry clawed me out of sleep.

  I flipped on my own bedside torch (absolute prerequisite in this palace where lighting systems varied from the latest to the least of technologies!). It was five-thirty am by my watch. The world was still deep in darkness. Had I heard an owl screech in the frosty castle ruins?

  “Morris!”

  My friend’s voice came from far away.

  I found him in the chapel. All the candles were lit. He knelt before the little altar. By him on the flagstone lay a bloodstained bread-knife. Blood ran down his cheeks—down a ghastly empty face. On the altar cloth, staring at the silver cross, perched his two eyeballs.

  In moments of horror it’s odd what petty details you notice. I noticed that John had used a bread-knife—with a sawtooth edge and a rounded end. The rounded end, to spring his eyeballs loose. The saw, to sever the optic nerves.

  Maybe this wasn’t such a petty detail. It proved how much forethought had gone into his mutilation of himself.

  His blind, unblinking eyes stared moistly at the sign of Christ. Above his head in the light of so many candles the halo could hardly be seen.

  “Is that you there, Morris?” His voice spoke pain.

  “Yes.”

  “Has the damned thing gone yet?”

  “I think it’s fading. Oh John, John!”

  Fading, fading fast. By the time the ambulance arrived no halo was visible.

  Needless to say I accompanied him to the hospital. By the time a doctor could assure me that John was resting comfortably, sedated, a detective inspector and two other officers had arrived at St Luke’s anxious to speak to me. The ambulance men had radioed a report; the police had hurried to the Palace, arriving shortly before Mrs Mott. They had seen the bloody bread-knife and the eyes perched upon the altar. It must have looked like a sadistic crime performed by a madman, me.

  Fortunately I hadn’t touched the knife.

  During the hours of questions until John recovered from sedation I learnt how the thought processes of the police resemble those of our more disgraceful tabloid newspapers. This should hardly have surprised me, since to a large extent both share the same contents. The Detective Inspector spent ages pursuing the notion that Bishop Ingolby and I, both bachelors, might have been homosexually involved since college days; thus the atrocity was the product of a vicious sexual quarrel, possibly with aspects of blackmail attached—the Bishop was a famous man now, was he not?

  Even after John woke up and exonerated me the Detective Inspector was loath to discard his suspicions. After all, the Bishop might be trying to cover up for me; and for himself as well. My fingerprints weren’t on the handle of the knife; only John’s were present, and Mrs Mott’s beneath. But I might have worn gloves.

  Perhaps I oughtn’t to blame the police. They must have been well aware that I was lying—and later that John also was lying about a motive for the mutilation.

  The one “sure” fact relayed by Mrs Mott—namely that the Bishop feared he was going blind—seemed not so sure in view of John’s doctor knowing nothing of this; nor the diocesan secretary either.

  And in what mad emotional equation did fear of impending blindness lead to the wanton gouging out of one’s eyes?

  In a sense it was the gutter press which came to our rescue. Tipped off either by police or by ambulance men, newshounds descended on Porchester. To them the vital fact was that the eyes of John Ingolby—sceptical author of Religion and the History of Lighting—had been placed on the altar of God. What else could they be but an offering?

  Thus the press added two and two together and made four. Whereas the real answer was some entirely irrational number. Or maybe a zero: the mysterious zero of the halo.

  “Why did you really put your eyes on the altar, John?”

  Two weeks had passed. John was back home in the palace, convalescing. He wouldn’t remain at the Palace much longer; the Archbishop’s personal assistant was pressing for John’s resignation, rather urgently, on compassionate grounds.

  By that hour Mrs Mott had departed. So had John’s doctor who had called to inspect the eye sockets and change the dressings. We were alone in the palace together, John and I. How like the evening of my arrival; except that John wore a blindfold now. Except that we had eaten an ordinary dinner of brown beef, green cabbage, and golden roast potatoes.

  “Why, John?”

  “Well, what do you think? I’ve always been a tidy fellow. Where else should I have put them? Down on the floor? I didn’t want anyone to stand on them and squash them!”

  “That’s the only reason? Tidiness?”

  “I had to tidy up, Morris. I had to tidy up more than merely my eyes. You know that.”

  “I suppose so. … Will you accept artificial eyes? Glass, plastic, whatever?”

  He laughed wryly. “From artificial lighting—to artificial eyes! A logical progression, if an unenlightening one. Yes, I should think that glass eyes would be harmless enough. If not, they’re a lot easier to get rid of! Just flush them down the toilet.”

  “You’re a brave soul, John. A true saint: a gentleman and a martyr—an unacknowledged one.”

  “Let’s hope I remain unacknowledged.”

  Yes, he was a gentleman—of the old school of English gentlemen who produced many Anglican parsons and bishops in the past. In common with such he disliked hysteria, enthusiasm, and excess. He had performed that savage operation of optectomy (if that’s the word) to root out a hysteria which was alien to him, but which might have spread outward in shock waves from his halo. He had carried this out in the cold light of dawn (almost), and certainly he had applied the cold light of reason—so that the future might be reasonable.

  For sanity’s sake he had denied himself any future glimpse of light, natural or artificial.

  In my eyes
this truly made him a saint. And a martyr too, even though he hadn’t died. I alone knew this; yet how could I ever tell anybody?

  John Ingolby had written a final, definitive, unpublishable chapter to his life’s work—using not a pen but a bread-knife. Every time I sliced a loaf of bread in future I would feel that I was performing an act of anti-communion. A refusal to accept the unacceptable.

  I felt that more than a mere bishop was on the point of retirement in Porchester. So too was an enfeebled diluted God, whose last miracle had been rejected because it would harm the world, not help it. Just as it had harmed John.

  “I’m donating my collection to Porchester Museum,” he told me. “After I’ve moved out of here there’ll be thoroughly modern lighting in every room.” He sounded as if he was choking.

  “Are you all right, old friend?”

  “I’m weeping, Morris. And I can’t ever weep. Except inside.”

  “Maybe God had nothing to do with any of this!” I spoke to encourage him. “Maybe the halo-parasite was something else entirely. A visitor from elsewhere in the universe. A life-form we know nothing of. You felt it was evil, remember? It might have been natural—or devilish. Aren’t angels supposed to announce themselves?”

  “I felt it was evil,” he replied, “I did. Nobody else who saw my round, benevolent face with a lustrous halo perched above could possibly have imagined evil. They would only have seen the light of goodness shining forth. Mine was the evil, don’t you see? Don’t you see?“ And tearlessly he wept.

  Or at least I suppose he was tearless. He hadn’t actually carved out his tear ducts. But no welling tears would leave his cheeks. Tears would drain into the empty sockets. I didn’t press for details of how an eyeless man weeps.

  I did my best to comfort him.

  There was I, sitting in a convivially lit room; whereas he was sitting in darkness. Darkness, always. Forever haunted by the night which had overtaken him.