Hector was enjoying meeting the dead in their ornate stone blocks. Great names were here under the tons of the poised cathedral. He was soberly dressed, the new strands of hair concocted into a much less elaborate arrangement than before, and it made his head feel light and strangely fresh. He respectfully visited John Donne. Eventually he found clever, subtle Wren tucked into a modest cleft in the far wall. He shuddered under the sealed black polished marble bath of Admiral Nelson and the Duke of Wellington’s impregnable sarcophagus of Cornish porphyry. He pondered on the brief tablet to the absent Blake. Nicholas’s obscure words sung in his memory. The voice detached Hector’s vision from the vast window in the Bethlem Royal Hospital, a vision of the angel shuffling his ol’ man through the streets of London, pointing ahead towards the gigantic cathedral. But the words would not attach to that vision; they preferred to cling and render to Nicholas’s description of holding the old poet’s head to the curved wall of the whispering gallery and demanding him to recite his last poem into the abstract depth of the stone’s surface. Hector looked up, knowing that somewhere its implacable mass encircled the area above him. He dismissed himself from the company of the famed dead, many of whom he did not know. The good, the mighty, and the honoured barbaric, whose gritty bones formed a webbed foundation to strengthen the mud and hold the gigantic white cathedral aloft.
In the nave he felt a little lost. The size and the skidding echoes of human bustle shrank him. He sent fleeting glances into the dark corners and long perspectives, seeking Nicholas among the shadows. He had been looking for more than an hour now and wondered if he had understood Solli’s oblique words about when and where they were supposed to meet. There seemed to be no service planned, so he walked gingerly into the great circle of the nave. The coolness was pleasurable, an escape from the surprising heat of the spring sun that had been dominating the streets outside for the last four days. Under the massive dome, he looked up into its hooded vastness and felt some trepidation about the amount of containment suspended above him. He was turning his head, bent on his twisted neck, when the first whistle sounded. A long, thin strand of sound blown from practised lips. In tune and wistful. He looked harder to trace its origin. From above, he thought, but he could not be sure. For a moment it was here or there, then it was everywhere, filling the entire dome. And now it was gone, only its memory sounding in the resonance of his head.
There were silhouettes of visitors up in what he knew must be the Whispering Gallery. Their heads and shoulders dotted the great ring of its railed-in walkway: a halo of a path, gated in stone, rimming the base of the great dome. He crossed towards the altar, still looking up. Another whistle sounded out, and as it happened, somebody waved from above. Were they waving at him? The raised hand moved until the sound faded and then dropped. It must be Nicholas, thought Hector, and made a feeble half response, his hand flapping just below his chin.
The steps leading up to gallery were mercifully shallow and wide, designed for a horse or an old man, he thought as he ascended. Two hundred and fifty-seven steps later, his heart pulsing sensibly in his throat, he arrived through the wooden door into the gallery. Its great O immediately engulfed him in the peculiarity of its size and alarm of its perspective. How could any architect ever conceive of such a space? Surely it was a by-product of the vast dome rather than a specified identity. How could any man live with this precipitous edge in his consciousness or, worse, in his dreams? Hector walked to the metal balustrade, gripping it severely, and peered over and down its high scrolled rail. The volume below seemed greater than its reverse when he looked up. A monstrous gulp of space, a concavity of dread. He shrank back from the vast hollowness to the low seat that ran around the gallery and pressed his back against the reassuring solidity of stone. A flutter of sound came off the wall, the famous ring of whispers. He looked quickly at the few other visitors to see which one was testing the weird audible phenomenon, which couple was spinning sweet nothings to each other along the ghostly curve. None of them were near the wall. They were all engaged in peering down into the sculptured abyss or craning their faces up to peer into the dome. Who was making the sound? Where was it coming from? He put his warm ear closer, nearly touching the chill stone. Out of nowhere the skidding centrifugal whisper said, “We will sleep together again to keep it tight, to make the plural, to keep it right.” It was a singsong man’s voice, and the words were clear and unmistakable.
Hector snatched his head back from the wall, outraged and blushing. Looking around to see who was playing this distasteful prank. He strained his eyes to look across the void to see if anyone was talking to the wall, expecting to see Nicholas somewhere on the other side of the circle. None of the other people dotted around the ring paid him any attention, even though he thought that his head must have been signalling violently, like the new orange flashing globes that were being erected all around London. “Belisha beacons,” the workman had said. The ridiculous name had stuck in his mind and kept repeating like an indigestible pebble of food. For some reason it now seemed to merge with the distasteful nonsense from the wall. He shook his head to dislodge the words from his ears with a horrible feeling that it was too late. The obscene utterance was already ringing inside. It must be Nicholas, playing a trick. They had never slept together that night, never shared his bed, even though they were both exhausted. He had been alone. Playing jokes like this was dangerous. Other people might hear and think him unnatural, even perverted. He would talk to the Erstwhile about the jeopardy in this sort of thing. The whistle sounded again, but this time it was dropping in pitch, seeming to go lower than he thought possible from human lips. Then a vibrato strangled its linear directness. A quiver entered the air. He moved back against the wall for solidity and it shuddered too, and all the light in the cathedral flickered out, including the damp daylight that had nudged the windows. Time turned inside out, spilling pitch-blackness. Then a gaunt sharp flash seared every window and threw the giant statues of saints into horrid spotlight. An enormous explosion rocked the air inside the cupped dome and the hollow beneath. The orange of the Belisha plumed into the magnitude of the sun and a totally black combustion wrecked his ears and hammered his face through his skull. He was lifted off his feet and sucked through the sharp, broken iron ribs of the balustrade into the night rubble and falling sightless volume of whirlwind shrapnel. Then it stopped, instantly cut short by normality before reaching its deafening, destructive crescendo where his body would have been torn apart. Turned off mid-blast by wet sun and the hum of people below. The unaware murmur of visitors, the hush of prayer, and the timid bustle of the choir taking their place, ready to sing God’s good praise. People moved quietly around and past him on the rim of whispers. A rhythmic pulse of near words chanting him towards death or life.
Hours, days, or years later Hector broke out in trembling, giddy perspiration, fearing the worse for his sanity. His back stuck wetly to the cold stone. His sensible mind climbed out of the rubble of phenomena, adjusted itself, wiped off the dust and cinders, and took stock of his body and the distrustful solidity of the building that surrounded it. He was in one piece, nothing had actually happened. The metal and stone halo of the handrail was still intact, the dome unbroken. This event had been another of the abnormal experiences that had so punctuated his recent life. So why should he be so terrified by it? It was only an illusion, a waking dream. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply to let all the images and sounds settle into a proper and unalarming place.
Then again the whistle sounded high, long, and thin above him. He slowly, resentfully opened his eyes, and bent his weary head upwards to look into the cupola. At its centre aperture there was a glimpse of another much smaller gallery sitting tightly above the dome. His eyes were still bruised by the frightful vision and he rubbed them hard to see if the sound came from there. A single figure was looking down at him, the whistle swimming about its head. Hector stood up to look more closely, and then it waved and beckoned. The tune of the whistle calmed him like warm milk, shushing and coating the jagged violence in his head. Removing shock and hurt. Replacing the trauma with a model of its meaning; white and rounded as if memory itself had been sculpted and smoothed by hands, gloves, and sponges soaked in tepid, discreet balm.
St. Paul’s Cathedral has two domes. One inside the other. A brilliant contrivance to give exterior grandeur and interior closeness. Between the domes there is a great supporting cone of bricks pierced with oval windows, spiracles to let the dark and music breathe. To circulate with the gone-astray prayers that still drone in the unseen masonry hive. Sir Christopher’s years of sucking the stars and the heavens into his eye through a tube inspired him as much as his dissected mappings of the human brain. The calculations of orbits unscaffolded in the limp tissues is reversed here. There is not a trace of flaccidity in the heights of London’s most dominant church. Smoke, cloud, and the London particular are banned entrance, and even gravity holds its tongue in the space between the domes that is belted and braced against all options and opinions. Hector knew some of this. He had of course read about the building in advance of his visit, being the first customer outside the public library on that warm morning.
Dark locked doors punctuate the Whispering Gallery. A few are open to let visitors circulate to other viewpoints. Hector found the one that led to the next staircase up to the stone gallery, which is a stone balcony on the outside of the dome. He mistakenly ventured there and was quickly repelled by the hot gusting wind. He found his way around to the next ingress upwards. It was a very different matter, for now he was in the space between the great outer dome and the dynamic cone of bricks that rose up like a hidden, polished, smoothed-out Tower of Babel. The voices that swam around it came from below and outside, a litany of whispers pummelling and washing the dark air. An iron stair wound its way up to the Golden Gallery that ringed the base of the lantern and crowned the outer dome. But this was not his target. Somewhere in between lay the entrance to the Ornamental Gallery that sat on the top of the eggshell of brick and plaster of the inner dome. The iron stair sullenly rang with his footfalls as he corkscrewed his way upwards. His birdlike weight shook the iron and suggested a rhythmic sway to its length, which was mercifully broken by jutting cantilevered landings that perched gauntly like so many forged crows on the corbels that extended from the cone.
Hector did not look down nor did he look up. So that when he stopped to get his breath and saw the door open on the landing’s extension, he did not know how far he had climbed. The whistles that came out from it were clear and touchable. He approached it across the squeaking iron. He gained its landing and bobbed through the door in the cone onto timber stairs that creaked at a lower and vaguely more reassuring pitch, turning to set foot onto the floor surrounding the ring. Nicholas was there leaning over the cast-iron fence, the resonance of a whistle in the air, hanging in the gritty atoms around him. The platform Hector now stood on felt the most unstable yet. True, it sat on the top surface of the inner dome and it was securely attached to the walls of the cone, but it felt thin and delicate, no more than a membrane over the long fall that he had already seen crumble in his nightmare vision into black wrenching nothing…His feet tried not to convey his timid weight to this floor that sounded under him, and he could not help thinking that he was walking on a stone circle balanced like a halo on the thin eggshell structure of the blind side of the dome. He held the railing as if it were the last thing on earth. He stepped forward towards the grinning nonchalance of Nicholas, who waved him on.
“Professor Schumann, how wonderful to see you, and looking so well,” Nicholas said with great enthusiasm.
Hector knew he was shivering and that his pallor must be ghastly in the extreme, but he did not have the breath to debate the Erstwhile’s friendly greeting.
“I am so glad to meet you here in little Christopher’s great folly. Have you been enjoying the view?”
Hector was now fighting for a reply, edging around the circle towards Nicholas.
“We are very privileged to be here, the Ornamental Gallery is not normally available to the common public.”
“There is nothing public or common about you,” Hector spat out in a wheeze.
Nicholas beamed even more, taking the old man’s venom as a compliment.
“Did you know that there are more stairs up to the Golden Gallery on the outside? From there you can see across the entire city, even to where the river tastes the sea, where we will be. And then there is a wonderful stair farther up into the lantern itself. In the old days you could even climb a ladder and put your head inside the golden ball.”
The talk of ladders and further heights was making Hector nauseous. He had heard enough and wanted to find a safe way down to dogmatic terra firma.
“Why are we here, Nicholas?”
“Come closer. Look down from here, see how tiny the people are, like ants,” said Nicholas, his long body leaning over the rail, standing on tiptoe.
Hector felt frost in his spine and a giddy hollow in his bowels.
“I don’t want to look,” he said between clenched teeth.
“Oh, but you must look, it’s respectful to do so, just for one minute.”
A fury was joining the frost.
“Respectful?” he snarled. “What respect is there in saying obscene untruths for all to hear, of playing tricks, and…and…and whistling in a church?”
Nicholas turned his attention from the ants below.
“Oh, that wasn’t me,” he said, his beaming head turned to one side like a petulant bird’s.
Hector looked openmouthed into the lie.
“Who else could it be? There is nobody else here.”
Nicholas shrugged and opened his hands in a sign of unknowing. They stared at each other, locked in their gestures as the organ began to play seventy metres below.
“Whistling isn’t bad. There was lots of whistling in the Vorrh.”
“In the what?”
“The Vorrh, the forest that holds the garden of par—”
“Oh, that,” said Hector nastily. “Have I climbed up here to talk about myths?”
“The Vorrh is more real than you. But you are right, let’s not talk about it here, let’s talk more about whistling. It’s all foible, I think you call it. Did you know they used to have horse races in the nave here in the good old days? Between the services, of course.”
“That can’t be true,” said Hector, outraged by the speed and change of direction in Nicholas’s jabbering and yet another lie.
“It was the wooden days before the burning pies,” laughed Nicholas, convulsing, taking his hands off the low rail and bringing up his fluttering fingers to cover his lips, in what Hector saw as a suspiciously effeminate gesture. The choir joined the organ and the twisting strands of sound rose towards them.
“I want to go down,” said Hector flatly.
Nicholas continued to titter.
“I have had enough,” Hector said, a great sadness beneath his voice.
Nicholas stopped giggling and turned his head violently backwards, his teeth snapping at his collar. Hector had seen this before and it made no sense then. He assumed it was a kind of nervous spasm but of little interest to him now as he turned towards the small wooden door.
“Sorry, Hector, the bombos must have scared you.” The loose grin was gone and replaced by a sensitive caring smile. Nicholas crossed the resounding floor and loomed over the confused man, putting his arm around his little shoulder.
“Was it more semblance, is that why we are here?” said Hector again, more to his shoes than to the looming Nicholas.
“If you want to see afar it must be from high, is it not so? If you wanted to see the past it must be from below, underneath.”
Hector looked dumbfounded by such an obtuse answer.
“Now you can start your undoing proper.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” said Hector wearily.
“There are no words yet. Except what William told you from the wall.”
“It was difficult to hear and understand. It was a poem or a hymn about a celestial wood. A great forest that covered the earth and healed all sins. He sang about the two kingdoms that I think mean earth and heaven. There were many names that I did not know.”
Nicholas frowned and said, “No, Professor, you got it wrong. The two kingdoms are the multitude that live here. One kingdom of sap, the other of blood. That’s what my ol’ man’s song was about. The healing of the great mistake, putting all of Adam’s tribe back in its place or wiping it all away. The forest covering over the scars and ideas that were not supposed to happen.”
“This is really difficult for me to understand. Is Blake saying that all of humanity was a mistake?”
“Not God’s mistake in making it. The mistake was that it escaped from the garden and grew abnormal in one direction. Those clever thumbs were given for the tending of plants, not making cities, machines, and endless ideas of how things work, most of which are wrong.”
“But Blake’s song is quiet and hidden. What good is that?”
“My radio is quiet when the wires are not attached, but the voices and vibrations are still there. The tellings of the past and futures bubbling in the space around things. His song works like that, it saturates and surprises the growing wires and when his little church is laid to waste it will spin out across everything.”
“Is that what the whistling and the explosion were?”
“It is important that you understand it. He heard the whistling too. I am sorry if what you heard and saw scared you, but that bombos was only a tiny part of what will be, if we don’t make the plural in the river together. There will be much deviation and hesitation, many will be burnt alive.”
Now Hector was completely lost, having no idea what this lunatic, angel, or reanimated corpse was talking about. Nicholas tightened his grip on Hector’s shoulder in a friendly way and for a moment Hector thought he heard the whistling again, this time coming from below, somewhere inside the stairwell. But it could have been a discordance between the great organ, the choir, and the architecture. Or the wind disconnecting all three. He looked up at what now was pretending to be his guardian.
“Shall we go down?” said Nicholas.
Hector nodded.
On the sloping turns down Nicholas started talking again.
“Have you noticed any difference since the malgama, any changes in the old soma? Any improvements? The yoking will do it, you see.”
Hector was just about to run out of patience when he thought he understood what Nicholas was trying to say. He stopped mid-stair.
“Improvements. Do you mean my health? Do you mean my hair?”
“Ah-ha, the old barnet.” Nicholas laughed.
That’s what those foolish boys had said, Barnet, Professor Barnet. There was obviously somebody else involved in all this, another senior academic that he had not yet met. Perhaps someone who might make some sense.
“Who is he?”
“Who is who?”
“Professor Barnet.”
“Who?”
“What do you mean, ‘who’?”
Both men stopped talking while Nicholas thought for a while, cocking his head in a studious fashion, stroking his chin. In profile Hector thought he looked like the Sidney Paget illustrations of Sherlock Holmes from The Strand Magazine and was surprised he had not noticed it before. He brightened at the likeness; then the tall man answered.
“Too-wit too-woo,” he said energetically and was very pleased with himself.
Hector’s mouth sagged open before it puckered into a livid snort. “Hundsfott,” he spat out and stomped off, away from his imbecile protector, downwards towards the sanity of the noisy street.
In his temper he hammered the pavement, walking fast, his velocity powered by mutterings and curses on his way back towards Whitechapel. Passersby cringed and flinched out of his way: a small angry tweed cannonball parting the waves. He stopped somewhere in the hub of Threadneedle Street, a little lost but more surprised by his speed. His irritation with Nicholas had been burnt off, its vapour trail snaking through the old streets. He had suddenly become conscious of his actions and the effect of them on the crowds around him. He had not stopped to take a breath once and was now ready for more. His body felt lithe and wired by adrenaline. But this is impossible, he thought. He should be wheezing, panting, and fatigued. But every muscle said the opposite, they were just warming up. He gazed about him finding his compass point, and decided to test this phenomenon. What was there to lose? He had already given himself up for dead or dying years ago. Better to be extinguished by a heart attack while enjoying the gleam of health rather than rotting away in a bed somewhere or being blown asunder in one of Nicholas’s future explosions. He turned his head towards the east and reared up into an expansive strut. Again the crowded pavement cleared and in his wake he left dozens of mystified strangers. By Aldgate he was trotting and had lost his hat, spinning below the dynamic wedge of Gardeners Corner under the hissing tram wires. The wind tore at his head, dragging at his unwoven strands of hair, pulling them behind him, trailing out like an imaginary heroic mane. In Whitechapel Road he was running full pelt, the faces and shops flapping past him, exhilaration burning oxygen brightly. A woman at a costermonger’s stall screamed as he passed, dropping her paper bag of shocked bouncing oranges. Others called after him without anything to say. One of Solli’s khevre was loitering outside the Pavilion when he thought he saw the hirsute Hector barrelling past. “Don’t be silly,” he said to himself and turned back to his halted conversation. Such general amazement is often accompanied by a sense of goodwill and innocent pleasure, but not in Whitechapel, where running had a very different meaning. It was outside Lord Rodney’s Head that a police constable attempted to halt Hector’s progress.
“Oi, stop!” he bellowed, stepping in front of what looked like a manic, ancient wereferret.
The bulk of the blue-clad man was brushed aside, leaving him tottering on his hobnailed boots to the great entertainment of the crowd. Hector did not even slow at the base of his stairs but ran straight up, leaping the flights, eventually breaking only at the normality of his own front door and his need to find a key rather than just crashing through it.
Inside he peeled off his coats and shirt and stood by the sink looking into the meagre mirror at a panting creature that he had never met before.