OUT of my urgent need I found the way of working a new night magic. Out of the night-time magic I built in my head a small room as a sanctuary from the day. Phantoms might be my guests there, but no human could enter. Human beings were dangerous to me, like tigers prowling at large in the daytime world. Inside my secluded room I felt safe from the tigers I sometimes envied. Sometimes a savage beauty lured me into the sun and I would start to love the danger a little. On these occasions I felt the reluctant love drained painfully from me as blood drains from a deep wound. The tigers lapped my love’s blood and remained enemies. The inhabitants of the day laughed at the gift I wanted to bring them, and I shut myself in my inner room to escape the betrayal of their arrogant mouths.
SOMEONE IS running madly up and down stairs. What devilish torment can hunt the poor fellow like this? No sooner does he reach the foot of the staircase (it’s short, mercifully, but quite steep), than he turns and is off to the top as fast as he can go. Then down he rushes at once, almost tripping over his own feet in his crazy haste to get to the bottom and start climbing again.
So he keeps on, up and down, up and down, up and down, like a caged squirrel or a mouse caught in a treadmill. Such agitation is horribly painful to watch. One holds one’s breath in suspense, waiting for him to fall badly and break an arm or a leg: or else his heart must surely give out and he will have a collapse of that kind. Already he’s worn to a shadow, a wraith, whose features are too ghostly to be recognizable.
Each moment he grows more shadowy, more transparent. He’s getting smaller and smaller too, as the altering dream perspective banishes him to the distance where, finally, his frantic restlessness is no more disturbing than the activity of a spider within its web.
Are these clouds or mountains which now blossom like huge flowers in the glowing light of the sky? They might even be figures, solemn supernatural beings, archangels or gods, with faces masked in their own radiance. Light steadily fills the whole dream until there’s no room for anything else. Even the dis-embodied voice of the Liaison Officer can barely squeeze itself in, so that only fragments are heard of the lines he is reading about
the Blessed Genii who walk above in the light, gazing with blissful eyes of still, eternal clearness
The perennially clear eye of the Heaven-Born opens to a stare of shockingly bright moonlight. The eye is located at presumptive God height so that the terrestrial globe is seen as if from an airplane cruising over it at about three thousand feet.
A cold, steady review of night, moonlight, vastness, emptiness, loneliness, desolation, by the celestial eye. The bleak and enormous reaches of its vision swoop occasionally to focus detail at close range but never linger on anything. The eye is checking a record of silence, space; a nightmare, every horror of this world in its frigid and blank neutrality. The actual scope of its orbit depends on the individual concept of desolation, but approximate symbols are suggested in long roving perspectives of ocean, black swelled, in slow undulation, each whaleback swell plated in armour-hard brilliance with the moonlight clanking along it; the endless, aimless, nameless shoreline, flat, bald-white sand, unbroken black-tree palisade; the heavy and horrid eternal onrush of breakers sullenly exploding their madness of futile power, millions of mad tons piling, booming, collapsing, swirling in chain-mail mosaic of mad moon splinters; blanched mountain range a ridge of clenched knucklebones.
The eye sinks slowly to travel at tree height past clattering black slats of palm leaves knife-edged on steel;
and looks at a hideous fanged stone idol in front of which lies a hyena, gnawing away at a lump of half-rotted flesh; dips lower to inspect three strung human skulls dully ululating in wind; rises again to medium altitude and directs its impassive scrutiny towards death-white ice-caps; towards hopeless vastness of dreary continents crawling with pestilential rivers, scabbed with plains in the comers of which perpetual dust-storms are festering; towards blasted battlefields and ruined cities running with seared putrescence; over dead village roofs and poisoned gardens, broken walls bitter in snow or moon, blank windows black with nothing.
And so on, in regular and perfectly unflinching survey
which non-dimensional B from deep within its pupil coincidently shares
until a fresh manifestation gathers itself together, and focuses interest on:
the castle the sun
The sun is, in fact, just on the point of rising over the town. This is the precise moment when Day and Night are balanced before exchanging their spheres of influence. Low in the left segment of sky the full moon still shines white on steep gables and eaves, and glazes window panes behind which people are still fast asleep in their beds.
People are in bed too in the houses at the opposite end of the town where a faint preliminary pink is spreading fanwise out of the east. But it’s noticeable that the sleepers here are restlessly stirring, already beginning to break away from their dreams. The moon retires with graceful prudence, her blue train trailing behind, switching slickly over the horizon before the roguish rosy-fingered retinue has time to twitch at it. Up swaggers his majesty in the spotlight, adjusting the gilded curls of his peruke, tossing his daily largesse with elegant gestures of careless munificence, flicking the golden flakes from his laces like snuff.
As the first gold strikes the weathercock on the castle tower the sleepers waken, throw off the bedcovers, jump into their clothes. All in an instant the life of the morning’s begun: white smoke puffs briskly out of the chimneys beside which storks are tidying up their nests; eggs and bacon sizzle in frying pans; steaming coffee pours into over-sized flower-patterned cups; the cheerful clatter of breakfast things all over the town is punctuated by the double knocks of postmen going their rounds. In next to no time all these things happen: and then the school bells start ringing, children with satchels and apples come tumbling and chattering out of the many doors, crowding the narrow streets which are crowded already with people going to work, with market carts, with street-sellers putting up stalls, washerwomen carrying bundles of linen, dogs pulling handcarts, priests hurrying along with rosaries or small black books in their hands. The day’s well established before you can turn round. And now all the workers are busily employed: a drone of voices comes from the schoolhouse windows; housewives are knowingly prodding the provisions set out in the market or haggling with stallholders; in steamy washhouses, women up to their elbows in suds shout jokingly or crossly to one another; the dogs are panting in the shade of their little carts at the end of their task; the priests are closeted and anonymous in solemn confessionals.
From high up in the castle dominating the town B watches these activities somewhat dubiously. There’s a section of flat roof which forms a sort of terrace between two turrets, and it’s here that she’s standing looking over the parapet beside a clawed gargoyle which has melancholy human eyes in its pig’s face. It seems to be a whimsical, jolly, busy, toyshop scene that she’s looking at: except that, like all horror-dream backgrounds, it’s a bit too harmless to be truly disarming. It’s very innocence gives it away. Such emphatic innocuousness is bound to contain a submerged threat. The threat never comes completely into the open, but is concealed in isolated glimpses and incidents, trivial in themselves, yet generating a growing sense of tension, anxiety, apprehension.
For instance: