The Wolf of Whindale, page 6
‘The trick wouldn’t have got to be old unless it worked,’ said my comrade quietly, and then recommenced his tale. ‘China is what we who lived there called it, but outsiders called it Little Hell. That was a better name for it. Our first two children – two boys, Rees and Meyrick – both died of the measles before they turned three. And then we had a girl, Nest,’ and here the Iron Devil paused a moment. ‘If a child lived to be seven, then they were like to survive and get to be grown. You had to try not to hope too much before then. Nest lived to be six. When she died of the smallpox, it broke Gwen’s spirit. She died, too.’
I laid my hand on the big man’s shoulder and gave it a bit squeeze, but it felt strange so I stopped. Just letting the silence engulf us for a spell seemed the kindest thing. Something in the way he’d said that ‘she died, too’ made me think. He’d said it hurriedly, as you might say something shameful, to get it over with. There’d have been plenty of diseases for her to die from, of course, but I suspected that the fatal affliction in Gwen’s case was despair. But, just as a fellow can’t come out and tell you that his wife died by her own hand, a fellow can’t ask if that’s what happened.
This made me notice that neither myself nor the Iron Devil were the sort to talk around a thing, nor mutter to ourselves, nor address ourselves to nobody in particular – nor were we the sort to respond to such an address. Most people, it seems to me, speak in that manner twenty times a day, saying nothings-in-particular laced with approach and reproach, silly sallies that want to be made allowance for yet still expect to hit their mark. Such talk is piss and wind. No, it is better to be like the Iron Devil and me: talk directly to a body, or say nowt. So we said nowt.
And now I began to think. The strike had lasted barely three weeks, and failed. The blacklegs would be ‘let go’, as Jobsworth had put it, to return to China, presumably, or else to scrounge about for work where they could find it, and I’d be back with my workmates of old. All that day, I thought I could see the blacklegs reckoning up whether it had been worthwhile to travel all that way for so short a spell of work, and it was only at this point that I, too, started to consider the practicalities of my position. Only now did it occur to me that I’d cast off the bonds of friendship and kinship with every soul I knew, and that I’d done so for the sum of ten shillings, payable at year’s-end.
Truth to tell, I had not, prior to that moment, understood very much about the world. I had not understood the nature of men, anyway. Of how much dependence I could place on my allies and of how much resistance I should anticipate from my enemies, I was equally ignorant; and even in distinguishing the one from the other, I was as a child, beyond the guess of folly. Nor was this the only deficiency in my education, as you shall see. My life was beginning to shake loose, the great clew of yarn beginning to unravel, laying a trail that would make my desultory wanderings the clearer for any who cared to judge the matter. But at that time it was beyond me to grasp my predicament. For all my vaunting, I avoided self-knowledge as though it were the Devil.
Next morning, with the blacklegs all packed up and dispersed, when I met with my marras of old at the daisy, I was braced for threats and insults and maybes fisticuffs; but, strange to say, there was nowt of the kind forthcoming, only a surly silence and a refusal to look me in the eye. Green as I was, I thought at first that this seemed the better for me, and that they might be going to let bygones be bygones, and that we’d be able to rub along as we did afore. Such was my relief at this, I found myself smiling foolishly while I worked, though it was too dark for anyone to discern it. But as the day wore on very ponderously, and the miserable silence did not dispel, I felt the weight of my sentence gradually descend upon me. Never afore had I been so aware of the sound of the great wheel as it turned interminably down in the depths; never afore had I realised what a maddening sound it was, should a fellow find himself with nowt else to attend to: no stories, no songs, no craic – nowt but cluck-clunk, cluck-clunk!
At last, having had enough of it, I threw down my pick with a clatter and indicated my preference to have it out with them there and then, rather than act like a bunch of twisty bairns who’d took the ghee.
Cluck-clunk went the wheel; cluck-clunk went the heart of the mine.
As one, my workmates threw down their picks and hammers, and the sound fairly made me jump. I watched them as close as I could in the gloom, and thought I could make out that they were looking to Mr Muffin to speak for them. Aye, I thought, as gravity fills in a goaf, so Muffin has stepped into the space left by Playfair. He was their leader now, and would speak for them, as presently he did.
‘You think you’re better than us, Caleb, you ever did. With your queer fits and your visions, and your fancy talk …’
‘You’re nowt but a bastard scab,’ explained George Henry.
I ignored this, for George Henry was ever full of piss and vinegar, and turned to my old partner instead, Mr Crow, but he shook his head afore I could speak a word. He was wearing a patch over his left eye, because of our recent run-in with the candymen.
‘You say you want to have it out with us here and now,’ resumed Muffin. His voice was quiet, but in a way that sounded like he was choosing to keep it that way. ‘We can have it out here and now. Here and now’s as good as owt.’
They seemed to draw nearer to me at these words, and I began to regret having thrown my pick away so hastily. I implored, ‘Crow! For pity’s sake, don’t tell me you’re listening to these low-lived fellows. You know as well as I that Mr Muffin’s a hateful manipulator, and George Henry hasn’t the brains of a pony.’
But Mr Crow had gone over to their side and told me so in plain English. We addressed one another with a good deal of freedom after that, and it was intimated that I was shortly to sup on what I’d been brewing all my life. I gave as good as I got, I think, but I felt shaken to discover Crow felt this way, and had done so for quite a spell, it seemed.
Cluck-clunk went the wheel.
‘What about you, Heavens-Evans? You haven’t been persuaded by these filthy dreamers, have you? Vengeance is mine, so saith the Lord, and you know it’s prideful for men to go seeking it out for themselves on earth!’
‘Alas, Caleb, nothing I could say would change their minds. You have gnawed too much on the bridle, I think.’
‘Have you forgotten the story of the Good Samaritan? The Good Book says it is divine to intercede on behalf of your brother!’
‘Aye, and it also says that vanity is a quicksand, and a fellow will gang his own gait on his way to it!’ says Heavens-Evans, with rather more pluck than he could usually muster. That boded ill for me.
‘Heavens-Evans, you married the first lass you kissed, but you’ve been slow on the uptake ever since. I despise you, and heartily, you goat-faced Methodist shit-pot.’
Even at that he kept his countenance, and merely shook his head and said ‘So the fool returneth to his folly,’ or some such mewling platitude.
Cluck-clunk.
I couldn’t think what else to do then but try to put a bit more wind up George Henry, and see if it might split him off from the other fellows, so I said that his mind was plainly addled from his excessive self-abuse. But my words found no purchase, and I think I knew then that they had already agreed on what they were about to do.
‘Accidents are happening left and right down here,’ says George Henry. ‘It’s the reason we need to band together.’
‘Oh, aye, you band together, all right – in thuggish idiocy! Four against one: aye, I see why you band together!’
‘Aye, four to one. So it’ll be your word against all of ours, I reckon,’ said George Henry.
‘You band together like sheep! Like wolves!’ I spat out. I was a little delirious, I will admit.
‘Why, even so you used to say to Mr Plover,’ said George Henry, ‘all those many times you disagreed with him. We heard you heaping scorn and derision on his head so often, and now he’s dead, murdered most likely, and will they ever catch the guilty party?’
I think I staggered back at this. ‘You cannot mean what you are insinuating. It is impossible that you mean it …’ My heart was racing. I was so shocked by George Henry’s remark that I felt dizzy and yet horribly clear-headed at the same time. What did they take me for, these fellows I’d worked with close as brothers for so many years? What sort of a web was I caught in?
‘We’re at the ends of the earth out here, and we must make our own rough justice,’ said George Henry. ‘We don’t know that it was you who killed Mr Plover. Not for certain. Mind, if evidence should come before us, we’ll give you more than a rap on the knuckles …’
I was innocent enough to take some comfort from that last remark, as a rap on the knuckles didn’t sound so bad; but George Henry’s tone was the clue. Like a child that is given to cruel ways, he addressed the prospect of another’s suffering with unabashed relish. And then I saw with the tail of my eye how it was going to be, for he was still holding a poll-pick, keeping it half-hidden behind his leg, and the moment I spotted it, the other fellows rushed at me and wrestled me to the ground very roughly. I must have at least caught Mr Muffin with a good one, for I remember his nose was bloodied by the time he was kneeling over me, holding my right arm out at an angle. And now it was George Henry’s turn. He swung the poll-pick and brought the hammer end down on my hand. I screamed blue murder, but he repeated this action thrice more all the same, every blow triggering a sort of blast in my brain; I felt them in white flashes – the worst and brightest light I ever saw down a mine: a thrill of pure agony shooting along every nerve in my body; I was a pain-tree lit up by a lightning flash. The last blow was the hardest, as though he were warming to the task. I thought every bone in my hand must be broken.
‘There, now, Caleb,’ says George Henry very nastily. ‘You won’t be drawing a wage for a while, now, will you? And you’ll get no smart money, you know. We’d have to strike for that right, and what good would striking do when the valley’s crawling with blacklegs? It seems to me you’ll sharp lose all the pay you made scabbing. After that, well, it’ll be off to the Sill for you, old marra, won’t it! They’ll take anyone there, you know. Idlers, loafers, magsmen. Low types. The thriftless, the worthless, the very refuse of community. The residuum. Men of no account. Best place for a rat scab like you.’
George Henry was a surly, tight-lipped bastard, but once he’d got himself excited, he never said a word when fifty would do. I’d have told him so, but I was so winded by the pain I couldn’t breathe, and my eyes were already closing as merciful insensibility overwhelmed me.
4 an extract: op. cit.
[ … ] In one sense, ladies and gentlemen, Mithraic worship was regulated and restricted: it was the business of a carefully controlled mystery cult that existed within the Roman army; membership was only open to men. In another sense, it was a religion of principled excess: the Mithraists believed that all things, if taken to extremity, were good. It was an ecstatic religion: willed derangement, they believed, enabled direct access to the godhead, and we know their ceremonies to have been conducted under the power of wine suffused with hallucinogenic herbs, with many rituals culminating in outbreaks of violence, or sexual incontinence, or both.
The central motif of Mithraic iconography was undoubtedly the tauroctony: the slaying of the sacred bull. In every depiction, with remarkable uniformity, we see Mithras sitting astride a bull, plunging a dagger into its shoulder, while a dog and a snake lap at the blood, and a lion and a raven look on. A scorpion has attached itself to the bull’s testicles. Our bull, we must allow, is not having a pleasant day. It will be observed that each of these animals represents a zodiacal sign: Taurus the bull, Leo the lion, Scorpio the scorpion; and the less obvious constellations: Corvus the raven, Hydra the Serpent, Canis Minor the dog. But who is Mithras in this symbology? I believe him to be Perseus – whose constellation sits astride Taurus in the heavens – which would explain his curious posture, that is, looking away from the bull he is slaying. For a hero to look at anything other than his goal would be unexampled in the classical world; only Perseus is famous for conquering a foe, Medusa the Gorgon, without looking directly at it. All of this to say: the Mithraists possessed a uniquely accurate star map, and one that fixed a point in time as well as space, for the zodiacal signs correspond to the constellations through which the celestial equator passed on the ecliptic when the spring equinox was in Taurus and the autumn equinox in Scorpio. This is where the constellations would have been situated in 4000 BC, and this, we must suppose, marks the point in time when the entity that came to be called Mithras introduced itself to the human race.
The Mithraic cult, then, understood the precession of the equinoxes, and celebrated Mithras as the one who steered the earth on its axis. Thus, the sun was compelled to kneel before him, for Mithras was the true sun, the unconquered sun: Mithras Sol Invictus. These were weighty mysteries, and the cult went to extraordinary lengths to protect them. Initiation into the cult was difficult and dangerous. To join the order and advance through its seven ranks, the adept had to face a series of trials in a chamber of the Mithraic temple known as the Ordeal Pit. Trial by water, trial by fire, trial by combat and so on. Survival was not a given. One trial, for example, required the initiate to fight a bull, cut off a piece of its flesh, and eat it during the combat. Mithras was, in their mythos, simultaneously the one who slaughtered the bull and the bull itself, so this trial saw the initiate eating their god. The seven ranks were, in order, Raven (in Latin: corax), Bridegroom (nymphus), Soldier (miles), Lion (leo), Perses (the son of Perseus), Sun-runner (heliodromus) and Father (pater). Successful initiation into the community was marked by a handshake with the Pater, just as Mithras and the sun had once shaken hands, and so initiates of Mithras were called syndexioi, those ‘united by the handshake’.
There was a further, final trial, one only taken up by the most devout of Paters, which required the initiate to have his right hand cut off. This was intended to be a gift to Mithras, and a sign of the Pater’s courage, allegiance and faith in his god. As this was a god of contracts and agreements, the supplicant could expect his gift to be repaid – with special knowledge and with visions encrypted with wisdom. [ … ]
5 The Wolf of Whindale
I was lying on my back, unable to move, incapable even of turning my head. In the gloom, I could see – or I was somehow aware of the presence of – a figure standing by, carrying a lamp turned low and dim. This figure did not speak and remained in murky darkness so I could not tell its identity: guardian or captor, ministering angel or devil sent to torment me – I knew not. I wished to call out, but could not, so I lay still. Time was moving, so it seemed, very queerly – too fast or too slow, or somehow both at once, as when, in a panic, all around you seems to move thicklier, though this is but an effect of the celerity of your cogitations. I couldn’t fix the figure in any wise: one moment I thought it a malevolent being, and the next I decided it was on my side.
Presently, I became sensible that the figure was approaching me, and I strained once more to make them out. For a moment, I thought it was Mr Crow, come back to see if I was all right, and for another moment I thought it was my sister, Mop – a very ridiculous idea, to think of her down in the grove. And then I grasped the reason I couldn’t make out who it was. This was none other than the miner with no face. Long, long had he wanted to make my acquaintance, watching me make light of his existence and treat him as a jest to tell the young ones. Well, now I was to understand that he was as real as I. He crouched over me, and lifted his lamp to his awful no-face, that I might gaze upon its blank horror the more searchingly. I did so, feeling too terrified to breathe, and as I stared up into that vacancy, it, too, stared down into me – or so I fancied, for there was nowt to animate that face smooth as an egg, except the dancing of the lamplight – until presently he drew out a Barlow, which is a stubby little pocket-knife, and the way it caught the light bespoke how sharp the blade was, and he held it in one hand and with the other took hold of my chin. Of a sudden, I understood that he was going to cut off my face and wear it as his own.
I felt the blade – which seemed very cold, on account of how hot my blood was then, for though I couldn’t move, my panic-stricken heart was pounding – press down on the side of my face, close to my ear. He paused, and I felt the tip of the blade dig into my skin. I think he was weighing up whether he should take off my ears into the bargain. The blade pierced my skin, and a quick trickle of blood shot down into my lughole, and while he held my mouth closed I tried my best to scream through my nose.
But presently I was released, and my oppressor turned away: a second figure was drawing near. The miner with no face stood back in deference to his approaching comrade, and slowly, slowly, he lifted up his lamp. Out of the gloom the second figure came, and I perceived that it was not stepping like a man, but rather swaying and loping in so stealthy and creeping a fashion that I did not realise how nearly it had come until I felt its very breath on my cheek – at which time I realised that it was a great dog, or, rather, a great wolf, very massive in proportion, and sniffing at me now as a prelude to taking a bite.
A fresh panic swept me up, and I strained once more to shift my ponderous body or at least cry out for help. And now the great wolf was turning in a circle just above my head; and now it stood over me; and now it settled down so that its great hairy belly smothered me. All was fear and darkness, and my lungs were ready to burst; and now the wolf clamped its teeth on my right hand and began to tug and tear at the flesh.
Who knows how long I suffered thus – a few minutes, a few hours – but at last the seizure passed (for it had been one of my turns, of course) and I came to alone, emerging from the gloom of my dream into the pitch dark of reality, where there wasn’t a sound but the interminable drip-drip-drop of water moving unceasingly to find its proper level. My right hand felt like it was on fire – pain such as I’d never known, growing ever greater the closer I came to consciousness, bursting out like some sort of terrible blossom. When I touched it, right gingerly and that, it felt like some of the fingers were stuck pointing in the wrong direction, but, not being able to see, I wasn’t confident of which way to twist them to get them true again. The very idea made me feel coggly, so I didn’t touch it again.
