John Powys - The Brazen Head

“I think I saw old Dod Pole’s Bet hurrying off home with Bailiff Randy’s daughter Crumb,” replied Colin rather wistfull; for he had a tender feeling for both these little maids, especially for the exquisite way Crumb’s hair would float on the wind when there was wind on which it could float.

“I can tell you whither those little birds are flitting!” threw in the unequivocal Clamp. “They’re off to take the news to Lady Val!”

The prediction of Clamp proved correct. At that familiar little postern, whence from her infancy, and before she had so much as heard of the formidable House of Abyssum, she had peered out into the forest, Lady Val was even now listening to the sound of horses’ hooves growing first nearer and then further.

And well indeed might the lady listen to those hoof-beats, for the horses were bringing, not only Roger Bacon and Brother Tuck to the gate of the Priory, but Lil-Umbra and Raymond de Laon to that very door.

“Don’t ‘ee cry, child! They will all be back soon!” whispered Nurse Rampant on her left hand.

“Not without having seen and having spoke to the girt Devil himself, every thumping one of them!” grunted old mother Guggery on her right hand.

Young John had remained standing alone after Lil-Umbra and Raymond had carried off Roger Bacon and Brother Tuck. He had heard that roll of thunder. He had seen that cloud like a giant’s head. And he was now staring at the closed doors of Lost Towers. Why he was compelled to stare at them he could not have told a living soul, not even his master Roger Bacon, for whom his devoted love went beyond all reason.

But suddenly young John saw those doors open wide and two human forms holding each other by the hand come forth, the forms of Petrus Peregrinus of Maricourt and Lilith of Lost Towers. Young John had always dreaded certain particular mental images, and the worst of all among these was the image of something different from the male organ of generation being thrust into a female’s womb. Another was the image of a fiery rod being thrust into a man’s anus.

Both these terrifying images now rushed simultaneously into young John’s mind and even seemed to incarnate themselves in the human figures of Petrus Peregrinus and Lilith.

But the moment Petrus Peregrinus began speaking, these horrible images vanished from young John’s mind — vanished forever, nor, until his death long afterwards, ever returned to trouble him. They did not even dare — although horrible images of this sort clearly possess devilish intelligencies of their own — to come near him on his deathbed.

“I am Antichrist!” were the words that Petrus was now shouting, and shouting in a voice whose appallingly penetrating tone none who heard it that day ever forgot to the end of their lives.

It was as if some power, far beyond the reach of any wanderer from Picardy, had spoken out of a hiding-place as old as the world. What young John did in the depths of his mind to drive into silence, not only the insane voice of this Antichrist from Maricourt, but the much less insane and for that very reason the far more loathsome voices of the treacherous and hypocritical and meretricious champions of a Christ with whom they had less in common than had His most shameless enemy; what young John did in the depths of his mind to overwhelm both of these was a very singular thing.

He gathered up all those wild and strange speculations about microscopes and telescopes and air-vessels and sub-marine vessels, of which Friar Bacon was always talking to him, and made of them in his mind a great mechanical shield which was so convoluted in its metalwork that it could repel any sound in the whole universe; and the echo it threw back when that Antichrist cry reached it was at once so rocky and aerial and oceanic and fiery that, as it rolled into space, it carried away with it both the pious hypocrisy that had been pierced by the voice of Antichrist and its own heroic recalcitrance to them both. In fact it carried everything away.

But when the echo from that shield he had mentally created from all those metallic elements died down, young John saw to his astonishment Lilith fling one of her long white arms about her companion’s shoulders and swing him round till they both faced the castle.

Then young John saw the girl raise up both her arms, and he noticed that she held in her hands a curious little object like an extra large pen or pencil or a leafless hog-weed-stalk or a small six-inches-long bull-rush.

This little object Lilith first lifted up towards the sky, and then, with an incredibly swift movement of her arm, turned it against the Castle. And at once, clear before John’s eyes, and before the eyes of all who were present, the whole structure of Lost Towers went up into the air, went up with the swiftness of a falling star, only it was a star that in this case was not falling but rising, until it vanished from sight in the blue depths of the empyrean. Then both those two figures turned to each other, each of them with raised arms. And it became clear to John for one blinding second that all four hands were clasped round that strange little object.

“They are pointing it at their own bodies!” he said to himself. And his vision of what they were doing was indeed the truth. Both their bodies now burst into flame and became one single fiery ball; and as John watched it, this burning orb became so dazzling as to shine in his eyes with the blaze of a sapphire, and he perceived that it was moving fast through the air towards the Brazen Head. At that moment he heard the Head speak.

“Time was ,” it said. “Time is,” it said. “And time will —”

But the burning meteor then fell upon it, and neither it nor what destroyed it was ever seen again.

John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) was born in Derbyshire, brought up in the West Country (the Somerset — Dorset border area was to have a lasting influence on him), went to Cambridge University and then became a teacher and lecturer mainly in the USA where he lived for about thirty years. On returning to the UK, after a short spell in Dorset, he settled in Wales in 1935 where he lived for the rest of his long life. In addition to his Autobiography his masterpieces are considered to be Wolf Solent, Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands and Porius . But his lesser, or less well-known, works shouldn’t be overlooked, they spring from the same weird, mystical, brilliant and obsessive imagination.