Iain Sinclair - White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

Gull had contrived that certain obstacles should be disguised in this thatched stooping labyrinth. Bend! Or tear open your haircap. There were man-traps, bearpits, mummified, or wrapped figures, chained among the trees. Owl-heads grafted onto the bodies of cats. Trip wires ignited sudden flares.

The coachman and the painter were then blindfolded and set loose, zones of the wood were fired. They ran through their terror, screaming, bumping against trees, clutching at the shapes most likely to wound them. They mutilated themselves — until they learnt to navigate their own fear-traces, to scale down the star map onto a computed ground.

The training continued for many months; now the dark was abstracted, the spine’s eye quivering and sure in its judgments. Netley the coachman, and the other one, the painter, were invited to sit in the library, back to back, street plans spread in front of them, arms strapped to a board — so that only the hand and the fingers could stretch, could direct the well-inked pens. They read aloud, in synchronised voice, from a Latin text that they did not understand, while their hysterically sensitised fingers guided the nibs through the highways, Old Montague, Finch Street, Heneage, Chicksand, Hanbury, through alleys, Angel, Green Dragon, Lion, courtyards, through the secret city that Gull’s will was enclosing.

He could then allow his own vision to fail. He had no further use for it. His eyes could be burnt to the root, their interference countered. He could be wheeled out, or borne on a litter, stretchered, face upwards, freely, among the stars. Beyond the human, involuntary, down paths of merciless light. Connecting the sparks, a child, joining the numbered dots on his slate to reveal a hidden face. Helpless, like the Old Ones, searching the darkness of memory for their gods.

An attendant, on Gull’s unspoken order, wove into his hair the lead weights that fishermen use. His hair was already ash, now twisted into dread; the weights rapping against his stiff collar. The load was imperceptibly increased till his skull tipped and his throat tightened. He was removing himself, by degrees, from the grounded creature: the aggressor, the mucksnuffling beast. His face was forced to the sky, opened. His anatomical skills were tabled to murder all that was not mind.

This has not happened — but as you think it, it is happening. Diseases are the dreams of the body. In our diseases we study our future.

While walking alone in the grounds of the Hall, Gull was seized with paralysis. He did not lose consciousness, but fell on one knee. The servants did not discover much difference in his looks and manners, but he said that he felt another man. He walked away from himself, through the orchard and out of the gate. He subsequently had three epileptiform attacks, from which he rapidly recovered; was suddenly seized with an apoplectic attack, fell into a state of coma, and gradually passed away.

Sir William Withey Gull left behind him £344,000, with lands and possessions. An estate unprecedented in the history of medicine.

Awaking to sleep, the same dream. His brain had burst, no boundaries. Catatonic. Wax Lazarus. Sleep of initiation. He runs the edge. Lies on the blade. No colour. Moving in lucid patterns, unhindered, through the labyrinth. As if carried on water: the outline of Mary Matfellon.

His dream was the nightmare that Hinton had lived. He absorbed Hinton’s death into his own. The nurses noted a foetal light emanating from his navel, a specific fear. He saw the houses slide into dust.

His ghost, between a drowned consciousness and the tree, frosts the window. His swollen bearded length covers the branches. Dead breath on the glassed skin: imageless. A yew dripping with earth. The years are wands. Wet clay on his varnished boots.

At night the weight moves from his throat across the damp grass, and above it, a chain of righteousness. The unpeopled garden. Drooping stocks and heavy lidded plants concealing their cannibal instincts.

Himself. Facing himself. Looking in. Looking at. And without pity.

No longer Gull, nor Hinton. No longer contained by those descriptions. A table of fish. It is his mother, unharmed, loading fish from her raised skirts onto the bare table. Shimmering bright water stream. From the bell of her skirts she draws fish. He must swallow this abundance.

He must kill with fish daggers. The fish are weapons to stop the mouths of women. His hand alone would prevent the Dark One from seizing the gentle sisters. Then cut it off! The seven daughters, the escaping brides. He is Orion, mover of the unnumbered. What he has to do, he has to meet his mother in Hell. Stop up the mouths of women, they have shattered the jar of secrets.

Now he sleeps, once more outside; his length stretched on the grass. The skin of a heifer, soaked with urine. Blind man turns, twists, looking for the sun’s track. Where is his mother?

He spills his semen into the grapes. He is cunning. The white grapes are fat with his seed. From this bowl his mother must eat. The taboo is broken. She will bear his child.

On the eastern horizon the seven stars announce his coming. They are doves, also called suicides. Announcing rain. They guard the Water Door, the place of Entrance. Beware now of the scorpion at your heel.

Is it a fish in his closed hand? Juice, unwholesome stickiness; blood. Gull bleeds between his legs. He is smooth. The third son. Boasting of the death of all wild creatures, performance of sacrifice. He menstruates. He holds a beheaded fish between his thighs. He soaks the grass.

Gull’s acts described what he can now dream. He enacted the myth. He rehearsed, but did not perform. Now he is smooth. He is his own mother. Old Star, White Star.

She went through the Water Door, she became the Pleiades.

I will carry my womb to the river. An affinity with Rainbows. Day of sun behind showers. Once again at the White House, the cottages. Over sedge and canal. Among cattle. Water track. In a split of land; face to Horsey, to Hedge-end Island. A path over the water.

I can see the man walk out of the woman. Voiceless, steps onto a beach of tongues, live fish; slides. The dead man walks over. He crosses and does not look back. Under the bow of lights.

When the double departs, there are only three days to live.

The water is become a tent; it climbs above the island, a red mountain, then a sheet, then a sheet of white. And behind the sheet the shadows of his father and his mother; they are making love.

Gull felt in his belly a stirring, a movement, something that he could not name, unknown, too slight to name; unstoppable. A child. Who would not be stopped by any force or blade. Beyond will.

His breath was now the tide. And was held.

February 1985, a Friday. It is with ever increasing difficulty that he sustains the illusion of dealing in books; out of Colchester with empty bags, once more down the Clacton road, once more breaking at Weeley and going back into the previous; so many times he has concentrated on that sign, Thorpe-le-Soken. A cold day, settled into its own ambiguities. Everything beyond the road has been cancelled.

He begins to understand, in dread, that beneath this text also is an uninvited shape, denying his notional control; a snake with two heads that he is straining to force together, venomous fangs bared.

He takes the left hand path and settles for the Crown Hotel. A guinness and a cheap cigar, red notebook stays in my pocket. I don’t invoke the ‘MANAC’ anagram which has just occurred to me, ‘JACKS MEN CAME.’ It is no solution.

The eyes avoid you; they stare at your knees and hands. No room here for irregulars. Threat spreads over the tiles like a blood stain.

A clatter of wheels and hammers inside the fruit-machine. See the purple grapes spin with the pears. ‘ Across the Pleiades ’. That is the name of the machine. A farm worker, in suede boots, tries to pull its arm out from the socket.