Elizabeth Hand: Wylding Hall

But he seemed — not exactly suspicious — but reserved, when it came to everyone at Wylding Hall. I don’t even think it was them so much as the fact that they were staying at the house. He and Will actually got on very well, Will told me after, and I saw that when the farmer dropped me off. Mr. Thomas, that was his name. Really just a lovely old man.

He told me they should be careful what they got up to at the house. I thought he meant they’d all been smoking dope or hash, which certainly they would have been. I told him not to worry, things like that were sure to be exaggerated, besides which cannabis wasn’t really a drug but a medicinal herb. See, I was ahead of my time in that, too.

“None of my business what they put in their pipes,” he said. “Or down their throats. But that lad keeps walking in the woods? He should be careful.”

I said, “The gingery one?” I assumed he meant Will. I was just starting to get very much into earth magic, and Will and I had talked about how much it tied into some of the older music he was tracking down.

But he meant Julian. “No, the tall lad, the one whose face you can’t see for his hair, the one won’t talk. I see him in the woods when I’m out after the milking, before sun’s up. Looking at trees and stones.”

“There can’t be anything wrong with that ,” I said. I was a bit surprised — I thought maybe Jon had gone off with a guy from the village or Ashton had brought in some girl, or they’d had a bonfire and been boozing and making a row singing. That sort of thing.

But the old man was adamant. “He should stay away from the wood. All of them. There’s old stone walls there and pits, they’ll take a fall and kill themselves. Get lost if the mist comes over.”

“Well, I’ll be sure and tell them to be careful.”

“Care won’t do it. Care killed the cat.”

There was no point arguing, so I changed the subject. He was perfectly friendly when he dropped me off. Will came running out, and Les and the rest of them, everyone happy to see me. Julian, too — he was very cheerful, laughed, and took the basket from Mr. Thomas and thanked him. Mr. Thomas didn’t say a thing, didn’t blink an eye or look askance. Everyone was perfectly cheerful and good-natured and loose; the farmer stood around chatting for a bit, and then he drove off in that claptrap truck.

As soon as he left, I could feel it. It was a beautiful day, bright sunlight and very hot, everything smelling of sun and roses from the overgrown bushes in front of the house‚ gorgeous blood-red roses; they hadn’t been trimmed back in years.

But I felt a sort of paralyzing cold. Not from the wind: it was as though it my body had suddenly turned to cold metal. I couldn’t move, couldn’t talk; just stood there staring out the drive toward the trees.

Yet the sun remained, and the butterflies hovering above the flowers, and Will and the rest all laughing and going through the basket to see what the farmer had brought them.

Yet it was so cold, I literally could not move. I couldn’t even shiver, or uncurl my fingers. You know the saying, “My blood froze”?

Well, this was far worse than that — worse than anything I could imagine. It was as though my entire body had frozen solid. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t blink. Couldn’t hear a thing, not them talking or the wind or the truck driving off or bees. Couldn’t scream out to Will to help me or to anyone else, all of them talking and going on as though I wasn’t even there.

And that was when I realized: This is what it’s like to be dead. No clouds or lights or bright tunnel, not even darkness: just the world turning and going on without you and you’ll never be part of it again.

I screamed then — really screamed, so loud they all jumped and Lesley let out a shriek and I saw her face go white.

“Nancy!” Will rushed over and grabbed me. I was sobbing and couldn’t talk, just gasped as I tried to catch my breath. “Are you all right, what happened?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know, I don’t know”—that’s all I could say. Will looked at the others, and they all stared at me until at last he walked me inside and sat me down in the front room. After a few minutes, it was clear I wasn’t going to keel over dead, and at that point everyone loosened up and began to laugh.

I did too — not a very convincing laugh, but I’d given them a shock and I felt bad about it. Lesley pulled over a chair and sat beside me.

“What was that, Nancy? A sort of fit?”

I shook my head, finally nodded. “Yes, no. I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Here.” She pulled out a flask of whiskey and handed it to me. “This will help what ails you.”

That was her answer to everything. But at that moment, I was glad to take it.

Will

Well, Nance fancied herself a witch in those days. Her and half the girls in London. She’s the only one I knew made a career of it, though.

Tom

I’m still angry about that. I blame her for some of what happened. Putting ideas in their heads, especially Julian. That’s why I wanted them down there, for god’s sake — to avoid outside influences.

And I think what she does now is shameful — taking money from ignorant people, people who want to believe in — well, whatever the hell it is they want to believe in. Like Harry Houdini getting duped by all those spiritualists because he was so desperate to get a message from his dead mother. I’m glad she’s in Florida or wherever it is she lives now. I wouldn’t trust myself if I ran into her in the street.

Jon

No one put any ideas in our heads. Not mine anyway. Certainly not Nancy. I know that Tom holds it against her that she came down that weekend, but really, what did that have to do with anything that happened later?

Truth is, there was something in the air back then. There really was. Things just felt different in those days, and not just at Wylding Hall, but everywhere. You could sense it, like a smell, or a certain way the light came down through the trees. Everything looked golden. Everything felt golden. Like anything could happen.

Wylding Hall intensified all that. It was like a lens: you focus the light through it, ordinary sunlight, but the lens intensifies it, makes it strong enough to start a fire.

We had a game we’d play sometimes at Wylding Hall, after we’d have a good day and night of rehearsing and smoked a few spliffs — Julian got very good hash from a bloke in Notting Hill. We’d all hold our hands and shut our eyes. Then, without speaking, we’d drop our hands, and one at a time we’d open our eyes. All without talking. We thought that maybe, just maybe, if we did it at the right moment, in the right place, with the right people, we’d open your eyes and we’d be somewhere else.

I don’t know where. Just someplace we’d never been. Some impossible place. It never worked. Not with me, anyway. I was never that stoned. Sometimes I wish I had been.

Will

I think what it was, Julian and Nance were the canaries in the coal mine for that place. They were sensitives — not sensitive , though they were that, but sensitives: people who can sense things that other people don’t. Psychics, I guess you’d call them, though that’s probably not the right term, either. Julian was certainly very conscious of any kind of emotional distress or tension between all of us in the band, especially once we were at Wylding Hall.

There was a sort of balance we tried to maintain, consciously or not, and I respect Tom for doing what he did, arranging for us to have that place to ourselves for three months. In retrospect, it wasn’t a good thing. It was a disaster.