Chapter 23: Promethean, The Unbound

Saturday, 21 June 1969

As soon as Wayne dropped the pouch, his ghostly companion nearly dove off the cliff trying to catch it. She looked at him strangely, then back at Rebecca kneeling on the ground below. Wayne pushed himself out of his resting place and scrambled upward. He felt a nudge as if impatient hands were pushing him upward and then he rolled away from the cliff. The Lady rolled beside him and glancing back at him in disbelief, she turned and dove off the cliff.

“So that was it. You weren’t interested in me at all, were you? Just like everyone else. You just wanted your trinket,” Wayne muttered. He’d grown quite fond of the ghost.

The voice caught up with him as he stumbled away from the edge of the cliff. It was no more than a whisper in the back of his mind. He was on his feet and running before it finally sank in. He pulled himself to a stop about a hundred yards from the crag and stood there panting, trying to catch his breath and comprehend what his ears had heard. It echoed, coming back at him from every direction. Rebecca’s voice, echoed by the voice of the Lady. She loved him.

She loved him! He hugged his walking stick to him in her place—their place??—and spun round and round, dancing them along with him. She loved him.

“Waltzing Matilda; she loves me; she loves me,” he sang as he danced in circles getting dizzier and dizzier as he spun. A stone dislodged under his foot and he came down on his butt with a crack, narrowly missing knocking his teeth out with the staff. The moon above spun in a lazy arc around the sky overhead. He couldn’t stand that. Fighting motion sickness, he rolled over on his stomach and scrambled to his hands and knees when he realized he was looking over the edge of a sheer precipice at rocks several hundred feet below him.

He collapsed back away from the cliff. He couldn’t believe he’d climbed it. He had to be crazy. Mustering his courage and mastering the dizziness and vertigo, he crawled back toward the edge and looked down. He’d nearly taken a dive off that and it was a long way out to the water from here. There was that other voice in his head. Why did he expect someone to be looking up at him where there were only rocks staring back?

Gather your senses together! Mari. You left her someplace behind. Why did she turn suddenly so cold and strange and then yell as you broke from the circle that she loved you? What did you do? You broke the spell, that was it. She’d been spellbound by the black kettle. If only someone had taught you what to do. What horrendous sight had she seen in its black depths? You must find her. She can’t go on thinking that you deserted her. No. You just broke the spell. You must find her now. No hordes are chasing you. There is only the brisk chill of the evening.

Wayne shouldn’t have tried to find his way out here alone. Spooks cropped up at every turning and each tree came alive. Each great standing boulder became a Titan fleeing from Olympian gods into the western world. He should have waited for Glenn.

More spirits occupied these Isles than any other place in the world. You didn’t notice them so much in the South where civilization had forced them into the sea with the arrival of the Saxons. The pagans were driven into seclusion. With the pagans had gone the dryads, the nyads, the faerie folk, and gnomes. And the Titans. But the Northern Lakes were a Tolkienesque environment. Spirits were far more likely to be restless around their haunted sidhes.

Scarce images of life, one here, one there,
Lay vast and edgeways.

He stumbled again and spun around, striking out with his walking stick at imagined armies of faerie spirits rising to attack him. Nothing. Just loose gravel and a path. If he wasn’t careful he would imagine himself in a dragon’s lair or on a stairway to the stars or some such other superstitious nonsense.

I know better. Some voice in my head keeps telling me ... showing me ... glimpses of a future ... or past ... so far separate, yet not so distant, not so foreign. But the knowledge that is gained is of such great proportion. Knowledge enormous makes a god of me. Pour me a golden goblet of it like some bright elixir that when I had drunk of it, I would become immortal.

The images that filled Wayne’s double mind were too much to be borne. Life becomes ever more beautiful. Later beauty overpowers the first. It was simply a cycle of life.

This must have been what the Titans felt when younger, more beautiful gods than they captured the savor of sacrifices sent heavenward. Such beautiful pain that he would, like Hyperion, fall to an Apollo who not only looked as bright as the sun, but sang as well.

And here, in his primitive body, he was trapped like Saturn without his scythe, with all the voices of his age, petrified.

Like a dismal cirque
Of Druid stones upon a forlorn moor.

Wayne was so lost, so completely caught up in the fantasy of another age playing behind his eyes that the sudden blast that rocked the earth like a giant treading on the ground beside him caught him unawares. He tripped and slid down a short embankment beside the path, then rolled with a splash into the river.

Damn! Must he always wake up with such an unexpected dousing? If he didn’t have pneumonia by the time he got back home it would be a miracle.

A laugh bubbled up from beside him as if it arose from the water itself. It was deep and rich and full and female. He struggled up onto the embankment and sat facing the river trying to see who had witnessed his ridiculous pratfall. There she was, out away from shore, her white shoulders glistening above the surface of the water in the pale moonlight.

“Rebecca?” he whispered, straining his eyes to see features in the wan half-light.

“Were you here to meet someone? Should I hide?” said the laughter filled voice. No. Not someone he knew. He had stumbled on a stranger out for a midnight swim in the middle of nowhere. How embarrassing. He’d pick up his gear and slip away.

“Come on in for a swim,” she said to him. “You’re all wet anyway.” That was true enough but he was also basically shy when it came to bathing with a complete stranger in the middle of nowhere. This was a discovery that he had just made. “Come on. Don’t be bashful,” she coaxed. “Lay your wet things on the rocks to dry and come enjoy the water like it was meant to be enjoyed.” The voice had taken on a different tone completely and he had his plaid cape and boots off before he had reminded himself that this was not Judith, either.

“Who are you? Do I know you?” He strained to see her face.

“Who would you like me to be?” she said with a certain provocative uplift to her voice and her body in the water. “I’m flexible.”

“You remind me so much of someone I should know.” Wayne was standing shirtless with his feet in the water. It felt like something else was motivating his body again and he stepped back deliberately away from the water.

“That’s it. You’ll want your pants to dry so you can wear them later. You know what they say. Swim naked, go home in your pants. Swim in your pants and you go home naked.” Suddenly there was another voice in his head and other eyes looking through his, just long enough to whisper a name. His pants were off and he was in the water before the word had passed his lips.

“Mari?” he whispered as he swam out to meet her. She laughed again and rolled to swim away under water. She came up again behind him. How could a ghost from two hundred years ago take this form? She seemed not to have stopped laughing the whole time. “It can’t be. Mari’s part of a dream I had about The Vagabond Poet.” He kept turning around in the chest-deep water trying to keep the woman in front of him as she swam circles.

“And if I were Mari, I’d be a hundred and eighty years old. Who would you like me to be? Judith? Rebecca? Or are you still thinking of Lissa?” He watched as each of the women she named seemed to come across her face. Then she was the young woman he had first seen in the water who looked so much like Mari of his dreams. “They are all illusions, you see? Like making an elephant disappear on stage. But this one’s the easiest and I can tell you like it.”

“Why is that one easiest?”

“Because it is me.”

“But you can’t be Mari. You said so yourself.”

“I could be a descendent of hers, though, couldn’t I?”

“Yes, but ... You’re such a chameleon. I can’t believe I’m...” Wayne paused. He’d just said something that rang a bell. “Chameleon? I had a dream about Chameleon.”

“I’m the stuff dreams are made of. You’ve been dragging me through your dreams. Now let me take you through one of mine.”

“What?”

“Isn’t it easier to imagine that you are asleep in bed and I was just a dream playing in your head? That’s what you’ve been doing. Believing it’s all a dream and you are safe in bed—no witches, no ghosts, no dreams-come-true.”

“It could be that,” he sighed. She was close to him in the water now. Their bodies slid sleekly past each other, brushing in the slow current.

“I know what kind of dream you’re having,” she laughed.

“What kind of dream is that?”

“A wet dream, obviously!” She splashed water squarely in his face, laughed and disappeared under the current. Wayne laughed, too, as he searched for her in the water around him. When she surfaced, she was behind him, her hands clamping around his chest, her dripping body pressed against his back and her head leaning on his shoulder. “You’re such a nice dream,” she said. He reached behind him and stroked her hips with his hands, turning his head toward hers as she nuzzled deep into his neck.

“I almost wish it wasn’t a dream. Does it have a meaning?”

“How about a purpose? Will that work?” she asked.

“What’s the purpose?”

“You’ve lost something and it has left you confused. I want to fix that. I want you to believe in magic, my young vagabond.” Her voice was so serious—so mournful.

“That’s a little primitive, isn’t it? I can only believe in what is natural.”

“But magic is natural. In fact, all of nature is magic. Magic, like turning a plain piece of wood into a beautiful art object. You understand that kind of magic, don’t you?”

“That’s just a craft, or an art,” Wayne argued half-heartedly. He knew how he felt about making things. She was right. It was like magic.

“Magic, too, is just a craft or an art. Do you know what night tonight is?”

“It must still be Saturday. Or Sunday morning.”

“It’s Litha.”

“Beware Litha,” he whispered, remembering a warning that he had interpreted as a joke. “It’s midsummer, isn’t it?”

“Yes. The shortest night of the year. The night when the faeries come out to play and almost anything is likely to happen.”

“Like Shakespeare.”

“I am your Titania and you are my Bottom,” she said, pressing against him and stroking his buttocks under water.

“Am I such an ass as that?”

“You’ve tried pretty hard lately, but no. It’s not all your fault. We all tried to help and ended up confusing you. We need to remove the blinders from your eyes so you can see.”

“Can you do that? I’ve been so confused. Just when I think I have things figured out, my head gets muzzy and it’s like the curtain has fallen before the final line.”

“Look. Look into my eyes,” she said turning him toward her. He gazed into the depths of her eyes and was captured there. “Look into my eyes and become The Unbound.” He knew those eyes. A peaceful calm swept over him and he moved to kiss her.

“Lissa. Chameleon,” he whispered. She kissed him back and as they kissed, a flood of memories came back upon him. A tornado. A wall of light as they made love on the rooftop. The cup that he carried in his shoulder bag.

“Believe in magic,” she said softly.

“To what end?”

“The end, my faerie king, awaits you there, at the top of that hill.” He looked up and saw the glow of firelight at the top of the hill, a few hundred yards away. His calm changed to foreboding. No matter where or how he ran away, he would end up under the geas of the same fate. And at the same time, through other eyes that had played so casually with his mind, he knew what awaited him there.

“I’m sacrifice?”

“I think not. You’re Vagabond. In these hills, the vagabond is a priest and messenger of the gods. You need only take that message to the ones who need it. They need it, Unbound. They need you.”

“I always forget what you’ve told me and think it is just a dream afterward.”

“Tonight, I promise, you will remember. I will be your Mnemosyne.” She laid her lips softly but not insistently against his, waiting for his response. And if he did respond? What difference would it make to his fate? There was still so much that was locked up inside him. But in his dreams, she had been Mari and he had been The Vagabond Poet. They had raised powerful magic.