Sacrifice of Fools (11 page)

Not last time he saw him.

The country bus dawdles by B-roads, through townlands with names longer than their main streets, past endless hacienda-style bungalows raised on plinths of barely grassed soil so that all may appreciate the wealth and taste of farmers. Cathedrals couldn’t be more incongruous. God’s own country, the devil’s own architecture, with satellite dishes. At every stop old people and mitching schoolkids get on. The schoolkids sit at the back. It’s mandatory. They’re headed for Larne to hang around shopping centres. Urban boredom beats rural boredom. The bus fills up in Larne, passengers for the Antrim coast villages. The bus service has been cut to ribbons, two up, two down. Gillespie reassures himself that if he misses the last one Eamon’ll find him a bed for the night. The bus winds in and out of the bays and headlands of the Antrim coast road. As it swings out on to one headland, he can see the blue Ford in the bay behind. Following. Nice day for it. She’ll be getting a big mileage cheque at the end of the month for this. Scotland is clear across the water. If you can see Scotland, it’s about to rain. If you can’t see Scotland, then it is raining.

The bus drops him in the centre of Glenarm village. It’s mile walk up the valley; the day is bright, there’s warmth in the sun. After half a mile Gillespie takes his jacket off. The land smells green; maybe there will be a spring this year. Eamon’s invitations, which Gillespie had ignored, until now, said a mile up the Ballintubber Road and you’re at Peace in the Valley. The Surreptajongseng Nation originates from the central south of the Great Continent; their customs are different from the northerly, coastal, Harridis; their Holds are diffuse, houses and lodges spread over the whole of the demesne. There are five hacienda-style bungalows, three farmhouses and two converted barns to choose from. Start with the closest. Which is another bloody hacienda-style bungalow, thoroughly Shianized.

Two kids from it take Gillespie on the back of a tractor to a late nineties mock-Georgian farmhouse with a big stable block further up the valley to see Genjajok Surreptajongseng, the closest thing to a head of household in Peace in the Valley. His Narha title translates as
Facilitator of Guest’s Questions.
Always a problem for humans dealing with Shians: who’s in charge here? It never bothers the Shian.

For some reason there are two Group Four security vans in the stableyard.

‘Mr Gillespie, it is good to meet you at last,’ Genjajok the Facilitator says. He shakes hands the human way. He smiles, the human way. It doesn’t look right to Gillespie. ‘Eamon Donnan speaks of you with great affection. You were most close in jail.’

‘Everyone’s close in jail,’ Gillespie says.

‘But you were closer than most,’ Genjajok says, leading Gillespie into a large awning-cum-room the Peace in the Valleyers have tacked on to the ugly house. There are human wicker chairs, and Shian stools. ‘Eamon has told us about the Maze.’

‘All about the Maze?’

‘All. Might I offer you some tea?’ Genjajok whistles, a piercing shrill. A Shian appears and Genjajok asks for Earl Grey tea for two in Narha.

‘I’m glad he’s found a place here,’ Gillespie says, listening to the rising thunder of a kettle boiling in the kitchen. It’s the mundane humanities, like kettles and tractors and God-awful hacienda bungalows that lull us into the seduction that they’re really just people in silly costumes. They’re not. Don’t fool yourself. ‘When he got out, you know, after what happened, well, he was a little crazy. I suppose we both were. He wanted nothing more to do with human society. Anything could have happened to him; he could have ended up anywhere. I’m glad he found you, and that you took him in.’

‘We loved him very much. But you also have found a place.’

‘And lost it.’

‘Had it taken away, do you mean? It is a severe business.’ The tea arrives. He knows it’s barbarous, but Gillespie takes his with milk. Genjajok piles in six sugars.

‘You’ve heard.’

‘I think it was before even the newspapers got the story. Word travels quickly in our community. Bad news has big wings and a strong wind.’

Gillespie blows on his Earl Grey and watches the Group Four people. There’s a lot of coming and going from the stable block.

‘What does Eamon make of it?’

‘I would not know,’ Genjajok Surreptajongseng says. ‘He is not a member of our Hold any more.’

For a second, one second, a hideous, hideous suspicion thrashes in Andy Gillespie’s mind like a gutshot dog.

‘What’s happened to Eamon?’

‘I recognize a tone of concern in your voice, Mr Gillespie. He left Peace in the Valley happy and healthy in mind and body. His life-hunt is taking him on; in a sense it is his
gensoon.
His childhood is over, and now he has embarked on the journeys of adolescence.’

What kind of seduction has gone on here, Eamon? What have you let them do to you?

‘Do you know where he’s gone?’

‘I do. Before he left on his
gensoon,
he had been expressing an interest in the
hahndahvi.
He had been experimenting, unsuccessfully, with psychotropic substances to try to simulate the effect of the dreaming. He felt he could not properly be a member of our community without being able to dream; therefore we advised him to go to a sacred space and place himself under the tuition of the warden. We have heard that the human nervous system is susceptible to sacred space architecture; this might have the effect of stimulating Eamon into the dreaming state.’

The Shian religion makes eminent sense to Andy Gillespie. If something with no gods, no theology, no ritual, can be called a religion. Belief system. Except you don’t need belief for this. No faith, either. It comes to you out of the unexplored regions of your head every night when you click over into dream state. Every culture that understands the importance of dreaming has made up systems of interpretation, but the Shian have purified it into a language. The Narha of the unconscious. Learned in the womb, like Narha: foetuses curled up among the words and spirits. Freud, Jung, all those interpretation of dreams, collective-unconscious people, they would have loved it. The Shian dream the same dreams. They see the same things. They speak a common tongue of archetypes and dream landscapes and symbols. Signs and signifiers. While they are still folded in the womb, they have ten thousand of these archetypes folded into their skulls: the
hahndahvi,
the Guiding Ones. Like casting the bones, or reading the leaves, or that Chinese thing that means whatever you want it to mean. Something Ching. You have a problem, you sleep on it, the right
hahndahvi
comes out of your collective unconscious and gives you the answer. No pissing around with coins or yarrow stalks or genuine plastic runes, no rituals, no smells or bells or making yourself pure and good and holy. Clear, unequivocal, the right answer. Every time.

What’s most sensible to Andy Gillespie about the Shian dreaming as a religion is that no one is ever going to kill anyone else because they have a different dream.

‘So you sent him to a sacred space?’

‘Yes. I can tell you exactly where he is gone. There is only one in this part of Ireland. It is in the Queen’s Island Hold, in Belfast, where you have just come from. He is under the tutelage of Thetherrin Harridi, the current warden of the sacred space. I regret you have had a fruitless journey, Mr Gillespie. A simple phone call would have saved you time and wealth.’

Gillespie recognizes the root of the expression, it’s a Narha idiom; the fruitless journey, the unlucky hunt. No prey. All covert, tucked down in the undergrowth. Gone to earth.

Yeah, that’s about it.

‘What I need to say to him, I need to say face to face.’

‘Then you will have to go to Queen’s Island to say it. Do you wish to stay and take an evening meal with us? An intimate friend of Eamon Donnan’s is a most welcome guest at Peace in the Valley.’

Gillespie recognizes another Narha thought underneath the words ‘intimate friend’. He means ‘lover’. But not in the human sense. In the Shian sense, of love without sex.

‘Thanks, but I’ve got a bus to catch.’

‘I will have one of the tractors take you down into the village, Mr Gillespie.’

In the stableyard the Group Four people are getting ready to go. They’re wearing a lot of heavy armour for a Shian Hold way out in the glens of Antrim.

‘What are they at?’

‘Oh, that is one of our profit-making operations,’ Genjajok says. ‘It seems that self-sufficiency is not enough to be a member of human society, we must subscribe to the profit economy. Thus we are manufacturing stasis coffins, which we keep in the stable block. There must be over a hundred now.’

Gillespie finds the image of eight million Shian sleeping away sixty years objective/six subjective (and relativistic time contraction is just another thing about the World Ten Migration he takes as read) in stasis coffins chilly and sinister. As if they really were dead and have come back to life like vampires, an invasion of the undead floating down upon the earth. Step off the space elevator, find your coffin, in you get. Feeling like a little doze, and you wake up thinking, that was the best sleep I’ve had in years and all the people you left behind are sixty years older. Or dead.

‘What do you do with them?’

‘We lease them to Group Four Securities to keep prisoners in.’

‘You what?’

‘It is a most efficient system. It is vastly cheaper to keep a criminal in stasis than in prison, it ameliorates overcrowding, as your Joint Secretariat seems intent that every human male under the age of thirty spend some time in prison, and there is no possibility of escape, nor are there any problems of discipline, or of drug trafficking or prisoners being corrupted by others. Or rape, Mr Gillespie. Would you like me to show you?’

‘Urn, no. Thanks.’

Jesus. That’s protecting society with a vengeance. But they couldn’t do it to long-sentence offenders. They’d go under and come out to find they hadn’t aged but the world was ten, fifteen, twenty years older. Their wives, their girlfriends, their parents. Their children. Childhood wiped out in a single sleep. Jesus, that’s cruel and unusual. But they wouldn’t be a day older. Everyone else would be old, but they’d be young, strong. Is that a punishment or a blessing? It’s a shit world where the crims needing protecting from society. And how would it have been for you, if instead of taking you in the big blue van through the gate of HMP (Cellular) Maze, some private security clowns in paramilitary uniforms had brought you up to this farm and stuffed you into a box and sent you to sleep for two years? No Eamon. No Narha, no great gift of language. But the bad thing wouldn’t have happened either. You’d all have slept in your cold boxes and woken up no different from when you went in. Eamon Donnan wouldn’t be trying to turn himself into a Shian; you’d just be another unemployable ex-con, orbiting in towards the gravity of the old boys, the old ways, the old places. But someone that no one saw, some invisible killer, would still have gone into the Shian Welcome Centre on University Street and killed five people with five maser shots and then cut up their bodies with a knife.

‘Whole new meaning to “suspended sentence”,’ Gillespie comments.

The Peace in the Valleyers turn out to wave Andy Gillespie off in the tractor. They all smile the human smile. They have it very good, but he’s not convinced. Truth is in the chemicals. I can smell it in the wind. I can smell it off you like sex. You’re as scared as the rest of them.

The taxi drops him under the third light on Queen’s Quay Road. It’s as close as the driver will go to the sacred space. He gives Gillespie a look, like he’s a transvestite, or a terrorist of the wrong colour, or a celebrity he personally doesn’t find particularly entertaining.
I don’t like you. I don’t like what you’ve paid me to bring you to.

He doesn’t like Gillespie’s money.

‘Don’t take animal money.’

‘They haven’t had animals on since it went decimal. That’s Dun Scotus. Ancient Irish scholar.’

‘Don’t take punts.’ He exaggerates the Irish word into a small mockery.
Phunts.

‘We got joint authority, haven’t you heard?’

‘Not in this taxi we don’t.’

Gillespie opens his wallet like a mouth.

‘Dun Scotus or fuck all.’

The driver takes the Irish twenty. Tips of fingers, like it’s printed in liquid shit. Gillespie asks for
all
the change. Thank you. Fucker. The taxi throws a U-ie inside the cone of light from the third street lamp. Gillespie turns up his collar against the cold drizzle. His jacket is silvered with fine droplets. They float and eddy in the sodium light like spirits. Dreaming is all around. You move through two worlds as you walk along this wide, wet, empty road towards those white arc lights. Every step sends clouds of
hahndahvi
twisting away, like the veils of mist that swirl in behind you as you pass. As real, as touchable and touching to them as this physical world. Ordered dreams; places and faces that you can visit night after night because you can trust that they will remain the same. Not like human dreams, where people you love wear bodies that are strange but familiar. Trustworthy dreams. Faithful dreams. How would that be? Dreams that don’t lie when they whisper you the way to success and the path of fulfilment, and when you wake up you find that the golden key to the universe is
pancakes should not be pissed on by robins and wolverines.

And this place, under the white arc lights, where waking and sleeping meet. Unseen is seen. A building for meeting God. A holy place that works, every time, without fail, or faith. A divinity machine.

Gillespie breathes in the cold, damp air through his nostrils. It’s beginning. He can smell it. A faint, salty tang. A little jizz in the atmosphere, a little jolt of pheromonal electricity. Like a change in climate, the season is coming.

The sacred space is on the edge of the Shipyard Hold, a disused Harland and Wolff loading dock with its front open to the water, like an old man taking a slow piss in the river. It doesn’t look very holy on the outside. True holy places never do. Holiness is always within. Outside holiness is no holiness at all.