Adam’s Pilgrimage part 7: Daydreams and Nightmares on Bowland Fell, May 17^th

as played via e-mail

Thursday May 17^th:

Adam makes his breakfast of porridge and packs up his tent. Out of morbid interest, Adam makes a brief detour to the west of his tent to check out the territory of last night’s nightmare; it’s quite as boggy as he dreamed and he doesn’t go too far in case he falls in the very real bogs. One thing he does notice is that the genuine bogs are marked by grass with a reddish tinge.

The weather is the same as yesterday, very mild with occasional light showers. Once he’s walking, Adam’s spirits pick up. He returns to his previous course and hikes over Ward Stone (1839 metres and the highest point in the Forest of Bowland – by-the-by, this ‘forest’ is almost completely bereft of trees), heading northward.

Progress over Haylot and Caton fells is slow and arduous but Adam’s in great physical shape and has no trouble negotiating the vicissitudes.

However, somehow he can’t shake an ominous feeling that something is following him. He never sees anything clearly but he has a continual feeling of being watched and sometimes, out of the corner of his eye, he thinks he sees a shadow, of what he can’t say. Occasionally he catches himself daydreaming, thinking of the Shoggoth at Silbury Hill and the Dark Young at Alderley Edge.

Whatever it is, it’s malevolent, and Adam can’t seem to shake it.

Then, in the middle distance, he sees a figure in white. A woman in a flowing white dress; apparently oblivious to the falling rain of a brief shower. She’s off to one side, away from Adam’s set course. He can’t see her face but he’s sure she’s the same woman from the Uffington White Horse, his dream in the Bullring and his visit to Biddulph Grange. She’s watching him. As you stop to gaze back, she makes a beckoning gesture.

Adam will head over to her.

You alter course toward her. Presently your path dips down, hiding her from view, when it pops up again, she’s gone, of course. When you reach the hill where she was, you spy her further away. This goes on for the better part of an hour, by which time you have a nasty feeling that you’re lost.

You find yourself trudging along a lightly wooded gully beside a bubbling stream. You’ve fleetingly glimpsed the woman’s white-clad form several times over the last few minutes but you’re just thinking that she’s deliberately led you astray to get you lost when you stumble in to a clearing within the trees.

There are stones around the outside of the clearing, as if marking the boundary with the trees. The stones rise to between knee and waist height. They remind you strongly of the Rollright Stones. The woman stands in the centre of the clearing. As before, you are struck by her figure, her allure emphasised by her revealing white dress, but her face is very plain, rather horsey.

“Greetings, Pilgrim!” It occurs to you that this is the first time you’ve heard her speak.

Adam will reply "Greetings" and head over to her.

As you draw close, she sniffs once and wrinkles her nose. You wouldn’t have thought a single night without a shower could make you smell that bad in the open air, but perhaps she’s sensitive to these things.

“It is getting worse.” She comments, conversationally.

“And what should I do to make it better?” Adam replies.

“Until now you have been going about things the right way, but last night was a mistake.” She pauses for a minute to let this sink in. The way she says it, it’s just an observation with no criticism intended. “Tell me, what would you do to be rid of the taint?”

"Whatever is necessary."

She throws Adam a glance; he can sense that she thinks the reply glib. “But what might be necessary? Precisely what would you be willing to sacrifice to be cleansed? An arm? A leg? One or more eyes? Your…talent?...Your life?”

“My talent is useful but I'd be able to live without it. It is useful when my colleagues and I are battling the forces of chaos. I wouldn't choose to lose a limb but if one was lost in my quest for cleansing I would still be alive.”

She nods, as if what Adam says agrees with something she’s already guessed. “Do you understand exactly what is happening to you?”

“There is some sort of fight between the light energy and the dark/chaotic energy that infected me.”

The woman nods, “Essentially you are right, but it goes a little further than that. You know Silbury Hill was built to contain an ancient evil from deep within the Earth? It is a sorcerous construct that bleeds pure energy off the nearby ley-line with which to counter the unholy powers exuding from below.

“While in Silbury, while the defences were inactive, you took power from the hill. Unfortunately, because Silbury was not working properly at the time, the energy you absorbed came partly from the unholiness under the hill.

“Now you must understand the role of volition in all this. You took this tainted energy in to you entirely voluntarily; in essence, you surrendered yourself to it, thus granting it influence within you.

“Since then, like a disease, its influence has been growing, gradually subverting your soul. If left unchecked, eventually you would become like the thing you saw climb back inside Silbury.”

Adam goes a little pale - pretty unsettling news.

“It had been steadily gaining ground within you until you recognised what was happening and took action against it. While on your pilgrimage, while you were actively fighting to subdue it, it was kept at bay within you and in fact has been fighting a desperate rearguard action.

“However, last night it tricked you in to making an apparent choice between what looked to you like certain death and accepting aid from it. In effect, you once again voluntarily surrendered to it. In doing so, you saved it rather than the other way around. If you consider how you saw your dream of last night, you may understand the apparent changes in perspective.

“What you have to understand is that the taint is you (as indeed am I); that part of you that has been subverted by the taint. What you are attempting is psychic surgery, an amputation of the infected part of your soul. Like any amputation, you cannot help but lose part of yourself in the process. Also, as with any surgery, you may die on the operating table.

“What you must decide in light of this knowledge is whether you are willing to lose anything or everything, even your life, or whether you would prefer the shadowy half-life of the thing in Silbury Hill, or something like it.”

“I am willing to risk everything to cleanse myself.” Adam replies, and thinks to himself, ‘Must get a better grip on my dreams’.

[It is getting hard to distinguish dream from reality, isn’t it?]

“Now, let us meditate together here in this holy place within you.”

She settles in to a lotus position in the centre of the circle, beckoning to you to take a position opposite. The wind blows her flimsy white dress and suddenly you’re sure she’s wearing nothing underneath, though the fabric is quite opaque.

Adam will sit crossed legged opposite her. He will allow his thoughts to settle before starting his meditation. He'll have his hands on his knees and his eyes open but his gaze diagonally downwards so he will stay awake but not be distracted.

She commences chanting in a language you don’t recognise, though it sounds like a distant relative of Welsh. After a few minutes, it steadily moves in to a rhythmic repetition of what you suspect to be meaningless syllables, like ‘Om’ only more inventive, and you can feel it focusing your mind on your inner self.

Almost seamlessly, you slide in to an exploration of your own psyche. Slowly you begin to feel a deeper grasp of what exactly is ‘you’ and ‘not you’. You don’t know quite when the Woman in White leaves you but eventually you are moving around within your mind, trying doors and examining the contents of locked cupboards.

Finally you find yourself before the last door from which a foul stench emanates. Breathing deeply, you steel yourself and lift the latch. The unspeakable stench intensifies a thousand-fold as the door swings silently open to reveal a dark obfuscating miasma. Something stirs within the dark and gloom; horrified, you try to see what it is and dimly begin to perceive something squat, dark and hairy…

And then you wake up!

You find yourself sitting on the open moor with your back to a rock. There’s no ravine, no trees and no stone circle. Beside you lie the remains of your lunch. You must have dozed off, despite the occasional shower. Looking at your watch, you’ve been asleep for hours! It's almost time to set camp again.

Adam will set up camp, take a little light exercise, meditate and then go to bed.

Despite wasting half the day and so making little physical progress, Adam feels he’s somehow made a good gain in spiritual terms.

Perhaps because you’ve slept through most of the afternoon, you find it difficult to fall asleep now, especially with the light persisting so late in the day. However, not for nothing have you honed your meditative skills and one of the most practical uses for meditation lies in curing insomnia. As the stars start peeking out through occasional breaks in the clouds, you drift off to sleep.

But your body simply doesn’t need to sleep much so you’re not surprised when you wake up again in the dark. Your head is still poking out of your tent and the first thing you notice is that the stars are much more in evidence, the clouds are clearing.

Feeling wide awake, you decide to take a short walk; despite the darkness, you know the fell around your campsite is much dryer than that where you camped last night. In only five minutes, you’re dressed and zipping up your waterproof as protection against the chill breeze.

Your midnight stroll doesn’t feel as aimless as you expected. It’s strange! It’s almost as if you know where to go. Presently you find yourself climbing a shallow rise. As you crest the top, you find yourself unsurprised to see a stone circle, even though you are certain there are no stone circles anywhere near your tent.

You are not even surprised to see two people in the circle, the Woman in White and Victor, both dressed in loose ceremonial robes and holding things you can’t quite make out in the dark. Both stand either side of a tall stone, about five feet high and leaning drunkenly towards you.

As you walk calmly toward them, you realise both are gazing intently at your left arm. Looking down, you find your arm from the elbow is a slimy mass of rope-like tentacle. Now you recall that this was how it looked at the end of your dream last night.

Victor is hefting what looks like a prehistoric hammer, a head-sized lump of stone on a haft four feet long. He gestures to the standing stone and the Woman in White raises another stone, a beautifully crafted ‘hand-axe’ with a wickedly sharp edge. The meaning is unmistakeable. What do you do?

Offer the tentacled arm to be surgically (sort of) removed.

The tentacular appendage seems to realise its fate and starts thrashing violently. You have to seize it in your other hand to prevent it lashing out at the Woman in White. But with great effort, you manage to place your left arm on the leaning stone (which seems to be the perfect height for the job).

The Woman in White lifts the hand-axe with both hands and lowers it on to your arm, just above the elbow. It’s wickedly sharp and a trickle of blood drips on to the rock. You sense a movement off to your right as Victor hefts the maul and look away just before he brings it down.

The shock of the blow sends you reeling and you collapse to your knees. Blood fountains from your wound like something out of Monty Python. You force yourself to stand only to lurch to the right – you never realised how much your arm weighed before but now you’re distinctly lopsided.

Finally managing to stagger upright, you turn back to Victor and the Woman in White. She steps aside to reveal the leaning stone is now adorned with…a head, your head, or rather eka-Adam’s to be precise.

The head is still alive, still aware. It glares venomously at you. “Don’t think this is over,” it whispers hoarsely, “We’re not finished yet.”

The blood is still pouring from your arm but neither Victor nor the Woman in White move to staunch the flow. You can feel yourself growing faint and the sound of the gushing blood hitting the ground grows to a roar. Then blackness rises and you can feel yourself falling…

You wake up, of course. You find you can’t feel your arm.

Adam will check to see whether his arm is there or it's just a feeling of numbness. He will check that he's awake and if the arm is just numb then he will try moving around to see if he can get some blood flowing to the arm.

You can’t see your arm in the dark but presently the pins and needles announce that it’s still there. A few minutes later you drift back off to sleep.