Fire in the Abyss Read online

  For Luke & everyone at Hinman Lane

  With love and Thanks.

  Introduction: Equinox

  The spare, greybearded man awoke soon after sunrise. The windows of the small flinty moorland house were rattling in the spring gale, fertile storm was running in from the west, banks of dark windwracked cloud came spilling by with watery sunlight breaking through from time to time. The rattling had been drumming him from his dreams, gradually, but it was a pale bright sunray, casting through the uncurtained upper window and falling on the man’s face, that actually awoke him.

  Abruptly, shocked, he sat up straight from his sleep. With a lost look, his lips moving, he stared at the again-misted eye of the sun. Red, it swam warningly through the silhouette firs at the bottom of the yard, above the pearly two-dimensional layers of wooded sodden pasture and bare sodden hills. “Strange light!” he muttered, tugging at his moustache, at his neat sparse goatee, his voice dubious and slightly wild, “and stranger night!”

  Even as he watched the appearances changed. The sun and its direly delicate radiance were swallowed by a great onrushing dark whale of cloud, and heavy penumbra returned. He nodded. His lean and high-coloured face grew firm as he drew himself together. Briskly naked he got up from the cool bed and went to the window, impetuously pulling it wide open, breathing deep as the fresh wet blast gusted in, stretching, gasping, his body cracking all over, vociferously shocked now wide awake. He shut the window quickly, shivering and rubbing his slender, calloused hands as he went and pulled on a warm flannel dressing-gown. Then, after hunting and finding separated slippers, he went quickly down the twisty stairs to the stone-flagged kitchen, talking to himself. “Yes!” he told himself sharply as he stoked up the Raeburn, opened the flue, filled the kettle, and put it on, “Yes! Today’s the day! The humour’s right. It’s a hawkish day. If I don’t begin now I never will. And when did I dream of her last? Oh yes, it’s a sign, begin it, why not? I’m harebrained already, so why fear the Moon?”

  Tall, with his proud, preoccupied, lined face, he took his tea to the bathroom behind the stove. He ran hot water then lay in it, his mind faraway, and he was silent save once when adding more water, he stopped himself as he turned the tap.

  “The lost can seek truth. But what truth do dogs chew?”

  He dressed in boots, dungarees, a thick white cableknit sweater. He ate a breakfast of porridge and toast. Then, excited, putting on coat and knit cap, he went out into the wild invigorated day.

  The house stood on its own in a shallow dip. An unpaved road, overgrown, ran out west past two ramshackle sheds through a gate to the alder marsh lower down, and past this unhealthy place, round a hill, to Gwernacca Farm and the way to the outside world. He walked halfway to Gwernacca before cutting over a fence and up winter’s faded fields to the top of a rocky bare mount. There he stood some time by an old standing stone, attentive to the moods of the swift vital weather, to the alternations of sun, rain, mist, rainbow, light, and shade, to the birds winging like bullets above, and to the white dots of shaggy blackface sheep at their perpetual munch-munch-munch on the steep slopes. A few early lambs braved the weather to frisk, but as yet there was little new growth. Not yet. In England, yes, but not yet in these parts. He turned to the old stone, wonderingly ran his long weathered brown hands over the rough quartzite surface. “Heretic,” he murmured, “Once I’d have been burned for what I hold now. Heretic, more pagan than Christian. If Tari was pagan, then so am I. What would Dee have said? I cannot put it off any longer. Pagan, heretic, Christian, ancient, or modern or whatever, I gave Michael my word. Yes!”

  With reluctant eagerness he turned back to the house even as a fresh storm came billowing in, obscuring the day-with heavy rain. And it was with uncertainty that, once back and out of his wet clothes, he set the ream of paper on the wide oak kitchen table, and the sharpened pencils alongside. For some time he did not sit down, but busied himself with trivial tasks.

  Finally there were no more trivial tasks. Keyed up, he sat and picked a pencil, and pulled a sheet of paper to him. Chewing his lower lip, he thought for a while, then wrote:

  “THE JOURNEY OF HUMPHREY GILBERT, KNIGHT”

  Part the First

  1. Humf’s Declaration

  When I was first in this age, shocked and shaved and imprisoned at Horsfield, it was Herbie Pond who had the gall to call me “Humf.”

  Over five years have passed since nine of us escaped that fearful place, and it may be that now I alone am left alive of all the Eighty-Seven of us plucked from the sea by the U.S. Navy in the aftermath of Project Vulcan.

  Yes, I am Humf, and sometimes John Loomiss, but I started life as Humfrey Gylberte, or Humphrey Gilbert—spell it as you wish: we had no fixed convention in such matters. That was long ago, and here and now I begin my account of Project Vulcan and the DTIs, a matter which certain agencies have tried to keep secret ever since it happened. Their methods have included denial and worse; nonetheless our existence has been rumoured internationally. There have been books, movies, questions in the U.N.; there have been innumerable claims and counterclaims that we do exist, we don’t exist, we can’t exist; or that we are hoaxes, part of a Communist conspiracy to undermine the U.S.A. With chrononuttery; or that we were sent by the Illuminati to dupe and discredit the U.S. Government in some convoluted scheme for world takeover. So, how tall can tales get?

  It is more than hoax or dream, though.

  Professor Michael Greene has persuaded me here to this small house he rents, alone in the north part of Wales. He says I must write this account to reveal the truth of Vulcan and win justice for the DTIs. I tell him he is an optimist. “Then,” he says, “do it to lay your ghosts!” Yes. But I have been full of objection. How to tell what I do not clearly remember? Why expose what has already been exposed and successfully denied? Why cause myself needless pain, why court more danger? I am tired. I want peace and quiet.

  Yet what’s to lose? What’s a little more danger now? For words may knit webs that dreams and understanding will cling to, and without our dreams we’re lost. As for Michael, he wants to pin down that butterfly, Truth, and since the Regis Clinic results and our day at Compton—in fact, since he began to believe me (unwillingly: he said as much)—he has pressed me to start this. So, a week ago he won my reluctant agreement and drove me here from York, leaving me with supplies, promising to return after a month. I know he fears I’ll be gone when he returns, that I’ll have slipped away on my wanderings again. I have seen it in his eyes. Perhaps at heart he hopes I will decamp. God knows we have strained each other; I make him doubt his own sanity as well as mine; I threaten his position and reputation; his good wife Ursula fears what I’m doing to their lives. Perhaps I should slip away. But there is a bond of honour. I gave him my word I would do this, and that is that.

  It is problematic. For a week I have hemmed and hawed. Yet last night, for the first time in years, Tari visited my dreams. She showed me a book with my name on it, but the pages of the book were empty. “What’s so sad as an empty page?” she asked—then I awoke with a weird sun in my eyes, to the blast of fresh spring gale; and I walked up the hill with the pagan stone at its summit, and I looked over the ancient ageless land—and as I looked I felt a new force birthed in me! The Fire of the Ram! Today is the first of that sign under which I was born, the first day of spring—what better day to begin?

  But how to begin? With Truth? A fine word! Let us begin with Truth, by all means! The truth is that my memories are tangled, my mind confused and multiplied into many warring points of view, like scattered fragments of a jigsaw puzzle, each fragment blindly claiming to be “myself.” Truth is hard to find. Then, what of Fact? It seems to be a fantasy of this age that Truth is measurable by F
act alone, so let me join in the game. Here is Fact: It is seventy-five months since the Eight-Seven of us were snatched from our various ages by Project Vulcan; and, as I said, over five years since a few of us escaped the secret New Jersey jail at Christmas of 1984. Since then I have been fugitive, and most of the time on my own. And it is hard to believe what I remember. Sir Humfrey, the Queen’s man, seized from 1583 to 1983 by Vulcan-fire? How can the heart accept such a thing? How can I believe that others can believe it? In their place I would not. The world is trouble and amazing enough without events like this. But Truth! Fact! Believe it I must, for here I am, uniquely, four centuries out of my proper time. How can I understand? Tari said there is meaning in it, and tried to convince me, often, but we were ambushed in Denver and I forgot all she said, being shot nearly to death. I never saw her again. Later I heard she was killed, but I lack proof of this. Yet what’s the meaning in murder? And what of the others? I know what happened to Herbie and Utak, yes, and the Dancer may be alive: he had the power. But Jud, Lucie, Clive, Jim? And all the rest of our friends we left at Horsfield? I know nothing.

  Yet Tari has returned to my dreaming.

  Nefertari Mery-Isis was wise. She warned me not to let my heart grow sour, yet I grew hopeless after our bloody separation, and in the mirror it is still a stranger who sees a stranger. For how can Humf be that man who lived and moved four hundred years ago? What am I now but a mass of undigested meals? Like a babe I’ve sponged up all I can, I’ve intoxicated myself with modern image and media, I can use gadgets and turn off the TV. But I am not modern. My emotions refuse the present as my reason rejects the past. So I stay split.

  But Michael presses me, and Tari shows me the blank page.

  Fact. It is near two years since I left San Francisco in a hurry and reached England with a U.S. Passport in the name of John Anthony Loomiss. Fact. It is nine months since I crawled bleeding into the parlour of Michael and Ursula Greene, seeking refuge from the troops. Fact. Since then there has been food in my belly, and a rebirth of hope, but still my dreams are dire. Often I burn in the fiery furnace of Vulcan, awakening electric and confused, pins-and-needles tingling through me. Must I awaken the past? Yes, I begin to see I must, for it roosts uneasy in me: I’ll never rest again if I cannot admit it and marry it to the present. Last night I dreamed of Tari, which is good, but lately the nightmares of Anne have been terrible—Anne as pretty as the day we married, calling to me from a green hill on a sweet summer’s day. I hasten instantly to her as I never did then, I who ruined her purse and affection with my enthusiasm for Discovery, but always I get there too late, to find summer turned to winter, the green hill concreted over, no warm wife to greet me, but instead a crow-picked skeleton, a grinning skull that hisses, “Too late!” Then in my dream the horrid skull takes on the faces of my enemies: haughty Mendoza who intrigued against my New World expeditions; that cunning man who foretold my sea-fate when I was at Eton; the immunity-suited Horsfield doctors who emptied us of History and filled us with Interferon. Yes, Michael. Sometimes at York, amid our tests to prove I am who I was, I have awoken from these dreams with utter hate at this modern world: hate like a poisoned robe, with anger for a staff and nothing under my feet at all.

  But I tire of hate and anger. I have seen too much. Honni soit qui mal y pense. If I hate the fools who cracked us with Vulcan’s whip, I must also hate the face in the mirror. I too thought myself righteous in the Sight of the Lord; I too advised piracy as patriotic duty, advocating England’s seizure of other lands and peoples; I too despised others not like myself. Now I find myself done to as I did, living in a society created by God-fearing Christians like myself. What is hate but blinkered vision? “…A defect of memory is the origin of opinion…” wrote Macrobius long ago. Exactly. Much has changed, much has not. My age was better and worse than this, the same and different. Now buildings rise higher, more folk move faster, plague is replaced by cancer, and the Devil we feared in loins and bowels and hell of our guilt is mutated into The Bomb that hangs over the world. Science is wonderful at materialising what was latent in us. It was in my time that Doctor Faustus homed his way up, full of hunger to know and control, whatever the cost. Now he thinks he owns the world because of the bargain he made, but the joke’s on him, for still the world’s a bewildering maze of terror and joy, like an infinite onion. Yes! For every layer of ignorance we peel away we find another, more profound and mysterious yet! The human heart is no bigger or smaller; every year still has its dark nights, its sunny days, its May time and its winter! Yes, still we dance on the bridge we dream out of Abyss, though the WHY of it remains a mystery.

  Tari said this present age is a womb in which History comes together in a mating. She said an egg is laid from which the Phoenix strains to hatch and burst forth, more gloriously than ever before, flaming in Manas, Mind, the Eternal Thinker; and in Manus, Hand, the Doer; which two, joined together by Heart and Courage, make Man.

  Who can tell? Not I. Yet I may do my best, and so now try to light my own small phoenix-fire, telling my tale in tribute to dear friends departed, hoping that my wit and memory may improve in the telling, and that some will read it who find it good.

  2. On His Ancestry, Habits, & Name

  Most of all I remember that terrible night, the first half of which was September the ninth of 1583. My tiny Squirrel foundered in the Atlantic storm and we were all cast into the sea with the witchfire eating in our bones, to our drowning, as I was sure. Yet for myself at least the fire proved stronger than the water. It was the fire of Time unhinged, of Project Vulcan, that ate me up and delivered me through, maddened, to night and sea again, to the early hours of December the twenty-seventh, 1983. And I brought with me not so much as a shred of clothing, not even a flea.

  But I am not yet ready to speak of it, nor is this the place, for I knew more than forty years of active life before it happened.

  It is most probable I was born in April 1539, though there is no sure proof of it, my mother being most curiously vague about such things as dates and numbers, reckoning instead in seasons, events, and circumstances. She told me I came “on a wild spring night about a week after the chimney caught fire,” and when I pressed her for greater precision, she would say, “Oh, a year or so before that whipjack Cromwell went to the block, as he deserved,” or, “About the time Coverdale’s Bible was brought me to read, though it might have been before that.” As for my father, he had no notion of such things, he was more interested in the hunt, and anyway, he died when I was quite young. So, my chart and date of birth are speculative, though the cunning man at Eton Fair said I am of Aries, and much later Doctor Dee affirmed that choleric nature is in many ways typical of the Ram. You may ask: why no record in a register? Well, parish registers were often kept by incompetents, or not kept at all, and much was destroyed during the years of turbulence and reform after our break with Rome. Yet, this is when I was born: sixty years after Caxton, forty years after the Brothers Cabot made their first English landfall in the Americas, twenty years after Luther’s rebellion and Magellan’s circumnavigation, and about twelve after the sack of Rome by the Imperial troops. I was born at the end of the decade in which King Henry declared himself Supreme Head of the English Church, dissolved the monasteries, divorced one wife, beheaded another, and had Thomas More executed too. Now they say it was because he was mad with the pox. Well, perhaps, it is how history proceeds. But never mind that. I was born Protestant at the time when Calvin published his Institutes, when Copernicus was about to declare his new theory, when that damned Cromwell pioneered Machiavelli in England. I was born, most important, in a time of ferment and change and Discovery, with Spain stronger every year from the gold of America.

  Yet then in England there was no mad fever for search in the Unknown World. Elizabeth was still a bastard babe; we were a small poor land on the edge of the world, and had need of every man and woman and child at home. None of us could come and go as we pleased. Emigration was not allowed, permission was ne
eded to travel or study on the Continent, patriotism lay in staying at home and diligently tending the land, as my older brother Sir John did, all his life. It was not quite yet time for the great broadening of our horizons. There was no money for great expeditions. People were more concerned with the revolution at home, in their hearts and souls.

  But I was born in Devon, near Dartmouth, and grew up among men of every class who were sea-rovers like their fathers before them; bold and skillful men who seemed like giants to me. Especially I admired the fishermen who went out to the Newfoundland Banks where the codfish teemed. Every summer, some went out, and every autumn, some returned, their tiny barks wallowing with dried and salted fish for the profitable new markets. And those who returned brought their tales of the strange New World, so that from an early age my mind was naturally turned outward. I was drawn by the fabulous tales as much as by the more sober seafaring discussions always to be heard—but in particular I was drawn by the mystery of the empty ocean horizon. It was not often, when I was young, that I was allowed to Berry Head or Dartmouth Castle to spend hours gazing out over the sea, but many times in summer I would go down where the lawns of my father’s Green way estate met the fringe of the placid Dart, which there was more like a lagoon than a river. There I would stretch out to watch the boats going down to the sea, or close my eyes to dream of the marvelous discoveries I was sure to make one day. I was always a dreamer, lured more by the invisible than by the already-known, and so I was not old when in my own mind it was decided: when I grew up I would be the first Gilbert to explore the New World.

  My father Otho had the same name as his father and grandfather before him. He was a man of position in the West Country, with the Castle at Compton, and manors at Greenway, Galmeton, Sandridge, Brixton, Hansford, and elsewhere, all by inheritance of land we’d held for generations. For my family, being Norman by the male line, (and still in our time we had close ties with our Huguenot cousins), was already set in Devon by the time of Edward the Confessor. When the Conqueror came in 1066 we supported him vigorously, to our advantage, so that in Domesday Book, by which he registered the land, the entry under Gislebert is considerable. But soon the name “Fitz Gislebert” was discarded, we came to write our name “Jilbert,” “Gelbert,” “Gylberte,” or “Gilbert.”