Colin Wilson - Ritual in the Dark

Looking up, he could see Callet's shadow move across the glass. He congratulated himself on his foresight. But the light disturbed him; it made him feel as if he was avoiding Callet. After a moment's consideration he went up the fire escape, to the landing outside the old man's room. This was the top of the fire escape. From there, an iron ladder completed the remaining distance to the roof. He pulled at it to test its solidity before grasping the rungs and climbing up. It curved over the parapet, on to the roof.

The parapet was a foot high; it enclosed two sides of the roof, facing north and east. On the west side, only a gutter divided the slates from the drop past five stories to the waste ground between the house and the church. The breeze was cold. He moved round the angle of the roof to shelter from it, then sat cautiously on the slates, his feet braced against the parapet. Towards Camden Town, the lights of the plastics factory that worked all night lit the sky. The exhilaration was still in him, relaxing into a sense of quiet and power. When the sound of a heavy lorry passed on the Kentish Town Road his mind moved ahead of it, through Whetstone and Barnet, to the north. The thoughts were controlled, clear-cut and deliberate. The feeling that drove them seemed to flow steadily and certainly. They moved towards an image of gratitude, of reverence, of affirmation; it became a cathedral, bigger than any known cathedral, symbol of the unseen. He thought: This has taken me five years. A vision of all knowledge, of human achievement in imagination and courage. Not the mystic's vision, but the philosopher's, freed from triviality and immediacy. I am the god who dwelleth in the eye, and I have come to give right and truth to Ra. But how many times? Half a dozen in five years. And now stimulated by a sadistic queer and an infatuated girl. Nunne succeeds where Plotinus failed.

He began to laugh, his back jerking against the slates, his feet braced apart. It made him realise that he was cold. He began to wish that he had thought of bringing an overcoat.

Never make a yogi. Not enough patience. Or need the warmer climates. Intensity of life. Monastery in the Himalayas. An old man stared into the dawn, his face lined with strength of will, unimpressed by the five-thousand-foot drop into the valley. Isaiah or Michelangelo. In tense hands, he holds the world's will, beyond tragedy. A faint pencil line of light along the eastern horizon.

To change. To change. To what?

An image of Caroline came to him, and he felt a momentary distaste. The unseen, the imaginative adventure, was just what she did not represent. Like Kay, the girl from the Slade School, it was an idealism she offended. The warm, predatory body, the desire to be possessed. Her animal vitality conducted the tension away, like an earthing wire.

To change. But no physical change. Only a constant intensity of imagination that would require no cathedral symbol to sustain and remind. Isobel Gowdie, big-breasted farmer's wife, sweating and curving to the indrive of an abstract darkness, the warm secretions flowing to abet the entry of a formless evil. To escape the dullness of a Scottish farm by daylight, the time trap. Symbol of the unseen. The unseen being all you cannot see at the moment. Until the consciousness stretches to embrace all space and history. Osiris openeth the storm cloud in the body of heaven, and is unfettered himself; Horus is made strong happily each day. Why the time trap? Why the enclosure? Invisible bonds, non-existent bonds, bonds that cannot be broken because they are non-existent.

Human beings like blinkered horses.

The cold had penetrated the thin coat and trousers until he felt naked. He stretched and flexed his limbs, then blew into his cupped hands. The iron of the ladder numbed his fingers. He lowered himself back over the parapet, feeling with his feet for the rungs.

Descending, he was afraid of the numbness in his fingers, aware now of the drop to the concrete flags below. He felt relieved as his feet touched the iron platform.

When he switched on the light, he saw that his hands were black with dust. There was a blur of grime on his cheek, where he had raised his hand to touch it. He went up to the kitchen, and found that the kettle was half full of hot water.

After he had washed, he set the alarm for eight o'clock. It was three-thirty. He was asleep almost as soon as he closed his eyes.

Pale December sunlight made him sweat as he cycled along Leadenhall Street.

The traffic in the City was heavy. He was aware that it irritated drivers of cars when he was able to steer in the narrow lane between a line of stationary traffic and the pavement, and it pleased him to do it. When cycling, he felt that the driver of every car was a personal enemy.

The mental activity of the previous night had left a feeling of freshness, and he felt no irritation towards the traffic. When a woman stepped off the pavement in front of him, forcing him to brake sharply, he only smiled at her and shook his head in remonstrance; he guessed her to be a foreigner from the fact that she was looking left instead of right.

It was shortly after nine-thirty when he stopped in Aldgate High Street. He leaned the bicycle against the wall outside the Lyons Corner House, and locked the back wheel.

The self-service bar was almost empty. He bought tea and two toasted buns, and sat at a table near the window. A middle-aged woman wearing a pink smock collected dirty cups off the table. He returned her smile, and felt as he did so a sense of anticipation that was like convalescence. The whole cafe with its food smells, the workman opposite reading the Daily Express, the heavy traffic in the street outside, all touched some mechanism of nostalgia in him. It felt like waking from a long sleep. He took the leather-bound notebook from his pocket, and wrote in it: 'Whitechapel, December 1st. I qualify as a modern Faust. Shut up in a room, thinking too much. Enter Austin Mephistopheles, twisting the waxed ends of his moustache… But who is Gretchen?'

He stopped writing, reflecting that Caroline or Gertrude might easily see the notebook. He had been about to elaborate the question. Instead, he wrote: 'Like Mephistopheles, Austin sells me love or life. My side of the bargain is still obscure.'

On the opposite side of the road a barrel organ began to play, tinnily, each note jangling like a rusty can dropped from a height. It aroused in him a memory that was also a sense of smell and colour. For a moment, it eluded him, then returned: the City office, the smell of ledgers, and the French tobacco of the belligerent Scottish clerk who lived at Southend. The last time he had heard it played, Man coeur s'ouvre a ta voix, had been on the Thursday afternoon, five years before, when he had walked out of the office without giving notice, the solicitor's letter carefully folded in his wallet, and had stepped into the traffic and sunlight of Bishopsgate, still dazed by the feeling of relief.

The memory reconstructed itself with a detail of sense and feeling that he found surprising; it revived the hot afternoon smell of dust and motor exhaust, and the damp smell of the entry below the office where he kept his bicycle. For a moment, he considered walking through Houndsditch to look at the office building again, then dismissed the idea, recalling the boredom and self-contempt that had accumulated there over a year.

Almost immediately the sense of reconciliation disappeared. He had remembered the pink cheeks and the wispy blond moustache of the Scottish clerk, and the memory stirred shame and anger. The Scotsman had professed a violent anti-Semitism: he referred to Hampstead and Golder's Green as Abrahamstead and Goldstein's Green. His arguments with Sorme had always finished with mutual declarations of contempt, leaving behind a taste of futility. These arguments, and an abortive affair with the office girl, were all that stood out in Sorme's memory of the year in the office. The girl's name was Marilyn; she was plump, not particularly attractive, and came from Stepney Green. But she was given to wearing semi-transparent dresses, with very little underneath them.