Mystical Paths - Susan Howatch

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Being – to touch the transcendent Creator who sustained the universe – whatever words one chose to describe the indescribable – was GOOD. And I knew that, I just knew; it was ‘gnosis’.

      I did accept that when one was in a state of altered consciousness one had to be careful about warding off the dark forces in the unconscious mind, but I’d never found that a problem. Flipping the switch short-circuited them and the Light just blotted them out. I might suffer an attack by the Dark in other circumstances, but not when I was flipping the switch which Father Peters had so stuffily dismissed as a psychic snare.

      ‘Oh, bugger Father Peters!’ I said crossly to myself that morning as I lit the candle, stared into the flame and flipped the switch.

      The candle went out.

      I was so startled that I just stared open-mouthed at the smoking wick. Then I realised I’d left the window open and there was a draught. Closing the window I relit the candle, resumed my cross-legged position on the floor and switched on again, but now something had gone wrong with the switch. The Light was marred by a sort of cloud, or maybe it was mud – I mean, it was nothing I could see, but ‘cloud’ and ‘mud’ were the words which came closest to describing it. I felt as if I were driving a car with a dirty windscreen through thick fog.

      Nasty. This psychic pollution meant I was overstrained and that in turn meant it was one of those occasions when I was unable to dispense with the mantra. I needed to have my conscious mind calmed by the constant repetition of words. Off I started. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner …’ I kept that up with no problem for several minutes but then realised I was thinking of Tracy’s breasts. I kept on reciting – that’s very important with the mantra, one should never stop before the allotted time has finished – but I found myself wondering if I needed to do some special breathing exercises. In the end I broke off the mantra – bad practice but I was getting nowhere – and lay full length on the floor so that I could relax all my muscles in turn. My quest for a direct experience of God – a quest which should have resulted in the automatic elimination of all distracting images, even the sexual ones – looked now as if it might fail completely. I couldn’t understand it. The switch in my head never let me down unless I was in a bad state, the sort of state I had been in as the result of the witch-doctor mess, but at that moment I was normal and well-balanced.

      Or so I thought.

      I was just taking my third deep breath and trying to kill the suspicion that what I really wanted to do was masturbate, when the intercom buzzed.

      I sat up and grabbed the receiver. ‘Yep?’

      ‘Marina Markhampton’s here to see you, Nicholas,’ said Agnes, the bossiest member of the Community.

      I can still remember the exact quality of my relief as I realised I was being diverted from my attempt to pray. ‘Okay, I’ll come down.’

      When I saw Marina she called me Nick instead of Nicky. That made me realise how far we had travelled since that innocent night six years ago in 1962 when I had commandeered her punt on the Cam. I was now twenty-five; she was twenty-six and had been engaged to Michael Ashworth since the previous autumn. When she called at the Manor that day to see me she was wearing a powder-blue mini-skirt, a clinging black sweater and a silver zodiac medallion. Her legs were encased in black stockings and her face was smothered in trendy make-up: white lipstick, black eyeliner and so much mascara that her eyelashes seemed to droop. Her natural blonde hair was very long and looked as if it had just been ironed.

      We got on better now that we were older and could regard each other as people rather than accessories. When I started seeing her again after Christian’s death it occurred to me that our friendship had endured because of a certain ineradicable compatibility, even though we had at first been too immature to do more than strike poses in each other’s presence. I found her intelligent and pragmatic; beneath all the society gush there was something tough about Marina, the toughness of someone determined to survive no matter how adverse the circumstances. From a material point of view survival was hardly difficult for her. She was rich. But not all deprivation is financial.

      I think she liked me because … well, why was it? Perhaps I represented reality amidst the phoniness of her society life. Or perhaps I represented safety in a world where most men were panting to bed her. Or perhaps I represented nothing at all but appeared to her as someone who (on his good days) could be just as intelligent and pragmatic as she was, one of those rare people in whose presence she could cast aside her affectations and be herself.

      ‘Nick, I’m terribly worried about Katie,’ she said as we sat down with our mugs of coffee. ‘She’s gone so peculiar.’

      Automatically I murmured: ‘The effects of a bad bereavement –’ but Marina interrupted me.

      ‘It’ll be three years this summer since Christian died and she’s not getting better, she’s getting worse. She’s started dabbling in spiritualism.’

      This did indeed sound tricky. ‘Dabbling?’

      ‘Buying books about it. Seeking out people who go for it in a big way. Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not particularly anti-spiritualism, there may well be something in it, I don’t know. But what I do know is that it’s a field stuffed with con-men who’d think nothing of exploiting a young widow who’s slowly going crazy with grief.’

      ‘Obviously she needs professional help. Perhaps her doctor could recommend –’

      ‘My dear, we’re well past doctors, she’s turned against anything orthodox, she’s way out there on the nutty fringes. Now look, Nick. She’s determined to try to contact Christian at a séance – and don’t tell me I’ve got to stop her because I know damn well I can’t. That’s why I’ve come to you for help.’

      My heart sank. ‘But Marina –’

      ‘You’ve got to be the medium, Nick, got to be. You’re the only psychic I trust.’

      I opened my mouth to say: ‘I don’t mess around with my psychic powers any more, it’s wrong, it’s dangerous, it’s asking for trouble,’ but the words which came out were: ‘Okay, where and when?’

      I needed to be shaken till my teeth rattled.

      The Christian Aysgarth affair had begun.

      ‘[Man’s] failing has been the pride and egoism with which he aggrandizes himself, using his powers with aggressive or complacent self-assertion instead of using them in humble dependence.’

      MICHAEL RAMSEY

      Archbishop of Canterbury 1961–1974 Canterbury Pilgrim

      I

      I should never have involved myself in Marina’s plan, but I felt so sure that for once I could use my powers with benign effect. After all, I was no longer an undergraduate messing around with ouija boards – or even an innocent abroad locking horns with a witch-doctor. At twenty-five I thought I could give myself credit for some degree of maturity, but what I could never acknowledge was that in psychic matters I was no better than a precocious child who could recite the alphabet but who had never been taught to read and write.

      There are basically two problems with séances. First, most dead people can be assumed to be at peace with God, in which case efforts to contact them are futile, and second, if the dead people aren’t at peace with God, the most sensible thing one can do is to leave them well alone because lingering shreds of discarnate spirits, as my father had often told me, are either trivial or demonic. I had no doubt that Christian was now at peace with God. It was true he had died ‘unhousel’d’ and ‘unanel’d’, cut off from life by a violent death when he was possibly not in a state of grace, but during his life he had been a good man – or as good as most men can hope to be – and I had no doubt that

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