Resolution
By James Wood
“We are a walking bundle of frequencies tuned to the cosmos. We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments, and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.”
- Albert Einstein
The dog started whining to go out. I stumbled downstairs half-asleep, feeling my way across the carpet in the dark, Billy’s furry legs wrangling round my feet.
Billy ran up to the back door, impatient to get outside. His brown-and-white coat shook with pent-up energy. As I opened one half of the French doors, Billy shot off into the blackness. I waited a few minutes, then called him. You know how it is: if you don’t call a dog back, you’ll be there ‘till they decide to come back. And that has an interesting effect on your ability to work the next day.
Another few minutes: still nothing. I headed back upstairs, threw on my dressing-gown and trundled back downstairs. I heard Billy barking, turned on my phone torch and stepped out into the cold.
Billy’s bark came from the forest. Gingerly, my light leading the way like a techno-talisman, I edged into the woods. Billy’s barking grew louder, more insistent. Straight ahead of me? To the left?
After I’d walked about three or four minutes, I caught sight of a long, shaggy tail. Billy sat on his haunches, barking to guide me. I walked through the damp leaves, my dressing-gown snagging on twigs and branches. When I got to him, I scratched him behind the ears as comfort. His tongue lolled around his chops and he was panting.
Now only one problem remained: how to get home. I didn’t have any lights on in the house. I must have been two or three hundred yards away, and the forest was too thick to see my house through the darkness.
I steeled myself to call Kate’s mobile and wake her up. I would not be the most popular husband in South Lincolnshire, for sure. But it had to be done, otherwise we’d be out here ‘till sunrise. I raised my phone, ready to speed-dial my wife.
Then Billy yipped and started, ears back and nose pointing to the right. He gave a low growl, like he wasn’t sure about something he’d seen, or smelled, more likely. I turned my phone’s light in the direction his nose pointed, and saw a path leading back towards my house through the trees. No doubt I’d hacked my way through the undergrowth for nothing.
Somehow I’d missed that path on the way in. The trees and branches around it had been cleared, or were at least less thick than the rest of the forest. I walked a few steps towards home, my dressing-gown snagging on branches now and then. At first, Billy didn’t want to follow and sat there, whining a little. So I grabbed him by the collar: only one of us could spend the next day sleeping, and it wasn’t me.
Ten minutes later I was back in bed next to Kate and Billy was on the floor, tail curled up and nose tucked into his forepaws. Soon we were all asleep.
The next morning, I made my way down the road to my old College at Cambridge. It was time for my annual visit with Rob Fass. A Fellow of the College, Rob’s a microwave engineer with whom I’d shared a “set” of rooms thirty years ago when we were undergraduates. Every now and again I hear Rob use words like signal dispersal, triangulation and frequency ranges. Then we change topic, pour another whisky or flip over whatever vinyl rock record we’re listening to.
Once a year, Rob invites me back to attend the Kenderdine Lecture. These lectures seek to educate the public about the latest thinking in science. This year’s iteration was invitation-only for 200 people, mostly journalists primed to reproduce the content for the wider world. This year, my invitation came with a nod to dine at High Table with Rob, the speaker and some senior Fellows.
I pulled my badly-beaten Audi into the car park a few hundred yards away from College and got out with my old overnight bag. I’ve earned my living, for my sins, as an Intellectual Property lawyer specialising in biological discoveries: while not a total dunce, I’m a bit off the pace when it comes to engineering and physics.
Thirty years since my first degree. Thirty years of marriage, children –- and establishing patents. A humdrum life, perhaps – but it meant that these trips to Cambridge were a real treat, a chance to cast off my responsibilities for a bit.
As I walked towards College, I noticed cake and coffee shops where once there’d been a gentleman’s outfitters, a bike shop. Change everywhere –- yet these buildings and their ghosts remained. Then I thought about the title of this evening’s lecture. A strange one, to say the least: “Fairer Still That Which Remains In Veil.”
The lecturer, Professor Andrea Morris of Oregon State University, was one of the world’s pre-eminent experimental engineers. She was also an activist, writer and campaigner. I turned the corner and walked under the fourteenth-century timbers of the College’s entrance, conscious of centuries of tradition. Rob Fass was waiting for me at the Porter’s Lodge, cracking jokes with the Porters in their dark suits, leaning against the front desk in light brown cords and tan leather shoes. Rob remains enormously fit thanks to his passion for mountaineering. He’s also a Patron of the University Alpine Club.
He turned to me as I pushed the monumental oak door to the Porter’s Lodge open, a broad grin splitting his weather-beaten face.
“Chris! Good to see you, buddy!” He shook my hand warmly, placing his other hand on my shoulder. “I’ll let you dress for dinner, then we can catch up over a pint before the lecture.”
There was a near-riot after what people heard at the lecture. The journalists attending shot up en masse to file their copy: I was reminded of old black-and-white reels of newspapermen dashing for phone booths. Only now they were on digital devices, fingers thumbing screens as they raced to be the first, by a few seconds, to report the news. Professor Morris’s lecture had so shocked the audience that the Master had to stop the “Question and Answer” session after half an hour, despite saying it would last for ten minutes.
As Rob and I walked the short distance to the Senior Common Room for dinner, I thought about Professor Morris’s main claim – she had proven that ghosts and spirits lived among us, and affected how we think, speak and act. No doubt, we’d see the first reports on the internet within minutes. Then the phones in the Porter’s Lodge would ring off the hook as news outlets hunted down Professor Morris like a wounded gazelle.
“So what did you make of that, Chris?” Rob asked.
“Interesting. I” –- but I was stopped by the rapid movement of the greeting line. After a few seconds of standing around, I mumbled my name in introduction and Professor Morris repeated it, then gave me a firm handshake. I noticed the twinkle in her dark eyes: if she weren’t so renowned as a scientist, I’d have called her a seer or fortune-teller with that questioning expression.
We shuffled past Professor Morris and into the Senior Common Room. I’d only been in here a few times before. Given the controversial nature of Professor Morris’s lecture, the College authorities had gone for a more discreet venue. Panelled in English Oak, the wood on the walls was near-black with age. Candles glowed at either end of the wide oval dining table, set with the College’s best silver and linen. To one side, salvers filled with rosewater and decanters of Port ensured conversation would flow after our meal.
To my surprise, we were only eight for dinner: Professor Morris, the Master, Rob and I, plus a man I vaguely recognised as Senior Editor for The Times in London. Our party was completed by Dr. Rivka Schicker, the Senior Tutor; the Master’s partner, Geoffrey, and a man I’d never seen before whom I took to be Professor Morris’s partner.
We sat down to the first course, uniformed staff pouring us glasses of Pouilly-Fuissé. The Master welcomed everyone and proposed a toast to Professor Morris “and her remarkable work.” I could tell from his tone he didn’t like what she’d presented.
I looked to where the newspaper Editor sat across the table from me, next to Geoffrey, the Master’s partner. Geoffrey was considerably younger than our Master, with a trim physique and dyed hair that spoke of a certain degree of self-regard. The Editor, a middle-aged man with a shaved head and round glasses, was making small-talk with Geoffrey.
The Master finished his welcoming remarks. “… anyway. I thought I might put one of our home-grown experts on the spot. We are fortunate enough to have Professor Robert Fass with us: though he wouldn’t say so, he is a world authority in some of the areas Professor Morris touched on this evening. Meanwhile, dig in – this salmon soufflé won’t wait, and nor will this excellent Fuissé. Rob, may I give you the floor?”
I looked at Rob, thinking I wouldn’t want to give the world’s first response to such a ground-breaking, controversial theory. No doubt the Master was counting on Rob to destroy Professor Morris’s outlandish thesis with logic. But if that’s what he wanted, he was to be sorely disappointed.
Rob cleared his throat and took a sip of wine. “Well”, he said. “I found it very interesting. Compelling. It matches my own experience - but not as a scientist. If you’ll indulge me for a minute, I’ll tell you what I mean.”
The party began to eat, so I picked up the outside fork and the fish knife from the ranks of cutlery on the table and pierced the delicate tower of egg and salmon on my plate. The soufflé was, as the Master said, impeccable.
Rob took a sip of wine. “Some of you may know that as well as being a scientist, I’m also a keen mountaineer. My wife isn’t here tonight in revenge for all my absences” –- a brief laugh of recognition from the other diners –- “but she’d tell you I’m obsessed with climbing. Anyway, the point is: I once sat two hundred feet below the summit of K2 in the Himalayas. For those of you who don’t know, K2 is the second highest mountain in the world. It’s a much tougher climb than Everest. “The mountain that kills you”, the locals call it. One in five people die trying. I wouldn’t do it now: I’m taking you back fifteen, twenty years to when I was fitter, and just a little bit insane.”
More laughter. Rob held the room. A log fire, set to warm us against October’s encroaching cold, twinkled in the blackened fireplace at the far end of the room. “I say ‘insane’, because I was trying to summit K2 alone without oxygen. You can count the number of people who’ve done that on the fingers of one hand – maybe a little more today, but back then it was something few had achieved, and I wanted to be among them.”
“I’d reached about two hundred yards below the summit just after noon. Given the time of year, I stupidly thought I’d have enough time to get up and back – at least to my then-current position, if not lower, before nightfall, but, of course, my prognostications were hopelessly optimistic. Human nature, isn’t it? A man never thinks he’ll fail, and all that. Still, I was lucky – because a wind picked up when I was no more than a hundred yards up the final ridge. For those of you who’ve never climbed, each and every step at that altitude is a nightmare. Your breathing is compromised, your limbs feel like lead and yes, you ask yourself every second why you’re doing this.”
“As soon as I realised the wind was getting stronger, I abandoned my attempt to summit and got halfway back to my original position. I shouldn’t have tried to summit in the first place since I had no tent – that day was meant to be a recce, with the final effort the next morning. But human stupidity: infinite like the universe, as Einstein said. Long story short, I was forced to sleep in a bivouac two hundred yards below the summit of the world’s second highest, and most dangerous, mountain, as a gale pounded the rocks all around me.”
“The point of my story is this -- and I’ve never told anyone this, not even my wife …”
Rob paused. Except him, everyone had finished their soufflé. The staff removed the other plates quietly, refreshing everyone’s glasses with Fuissé.
“My first thought, which I dismissed out of hand, was that I’d had a religious experience that night. I’d tried to rationalise it as delirium brought about by oxygen deprivation – but now I’ve heard Professor Morris’s theory, I believe I was being helped. Excuse me.”
Rob took a draught of wine and sliced at his soufflé a couple of times with a fork before nodding to a waiter, who removed his plate as he chewed frantically.
“Will you tell us what happened, Professor Fass?”
The Editor had spoken. Obviously he was thinking of an exclusive for his web edition, splashing it all over his home page: “Leading scientist says Angels exist: Cambridge expert confirms theory.”
Rob swallowed a mouthful of soufflé. He took another quick sip of wine before continuing: “I was trying to sleep. Not easy at eight thousand meters, thirty below zero and a gale blowing around your ears. Bizarrely, one gets so tired on these climbs that sleep becomes possible more or less anywhere. But I’m not sure I did sleep: it doesn’t matter. What matters is what I saw.”
Rob looked around the room. Even the staff were listening as they served plates of roast lamb to half the people at the table, including me. The others were vegetarian (including Rob, I noticed) and were served stuffed courgettes, roast potatoes and cauliflower cheese.
“As I lay there in a daze, I prayed. I prayed for my wife, my father, sisters, and friends. I prayed to survive. And no, I am not religious. But I had nothing else left. I was sure I was going to die. I lost feeling in my hands and feet, then up into my arms and legs. And then I saw them.”
“Who?” - the Editor again. He was clearly treating this as an interview.
Fass smiled thinly. “Not so much who. More what. Anyway, as I was losing consciousness I first saw dragons and a lake of fire. Yes, standard-issue deep memory stuff. I can already hear the psychologists protesting. But then I felt a light –- that’s the only way to describe it –- in front of my eyes. I must have turned and, against the outline of the ridge, I saw giant shapes that looked like they were fighting. They were fuzzy, shadowy, pulsing. Strange, to say the least.”
“The two fighting shapes, one red, one yellow, reached all the way up to the summit of the mountain. They looked like giant pixellated monsters. They had black spaces for eyes, holes for mouths, no noses, and badly-fashioned limbs. Like I said, they were fighting. And I had the impression they were fighting over me.”
Fass cleared his throat, then drank again. “As they fought, I noticed something even more bizarre. Their battle seemed to make no sound. I could hear the wind howling, but I wasn’t noticing that any more. Their struggle kicked up no snow; no rocks were displaced. In fact, if you pressed me, I’d swear I saw them pass through the mountain ridge, rock and ice and all, as they fought each other.”
“After a period of time, the yellow-orange one seemed to give up, or be beaten, and he (or she, or it) disappeared over the other side of the ridge. Then the red one came to me. I was immobile, incapacitated by fatigue, frostbite, fear – whatever. Then this apparition touched me, and I felt a warm glow. I remembered my mother, who died when I was eight years old. Then I saw her kneeling over me as she’d done when I was a little boy at bed-time. She stroked my hair and told me now was not my time. She said she’d summoned this thing to help me and it had been challenged, which explained the battle. Then I remember my mother kissing me goodnight and hugging me before she vanished. And the next thing I knew I woke up in hospital in Quetta.”
“So you hallucinated”, the Editor said. “So what?”
“That’s what I thought”, replied Fass. “Only wait ‘till you hear about my medical tests.”
Professor Morris took out a small notebook from her clutch handbag. She withdrew a propelling pencil from the spine of the notebook, opened it and began taking notes.
Fass continued: “Despite having been out in gale-force winds and temperatures that dropped to 40 below, the doctors could find nothing wrong with me. What’s more, we calculated I’d been exposed for around twelve hours, plus a long journey to hospital. When I woke up in hospital, my physical condition was better than when I’d started climbing. Actually, I’d had a bad case of shin splints before I started, and that was gone as well. From certain death to perfect health – inexplicable.”
“Right…” the Editor nodded. “So what are you saying? These were angels who came to save you?”
“It’s interesting that you immediately apportion morality to whatever it was Dr. Fass saw.”
Professor Morris put her pencil down. She’d directed her remark at the Editor. “It’s possible Dr. Fass interpreted what happened through his own lens. But his survival is remarkable and –- if I’m right –- then the charity the creature demonstrated is consistent with some of what we’ve seen beyond the human spectrum to date.”
“Oh, come on, Professor!” It was the Master this time, trying to turn on the charm. “You’re a scientist! You aren’t suggesting shapes of light have moral discernment, are you?”
I looked at the Master, saw his features somewhat flushed with wine. When he was a Government Minister, he’d been responsible for arts and culture – not science. Yet he’d still advocated “scientific” approaches to funding, despite having no background as a scientist. Riddle me that.
Professor Morris smiled sweetly at the Master. “Well, Peter. If I may call you Peter, Lord Taylor? Thank you. You probably saw recent reports from Japan about the collective intelligence of trees? How they feed water to each other via root systems? I’m sure you’ve had a pet. Is it really a stretch to believe that nature has intelligence –- even if you won’t credit my research? I think not.”
Professor Morris went back to her roast potatoes. I noticed she ate sparsely. Meanwhile, the Master relaxed in his balloon-backed dining chair, looking at her and nodding reflectively.
Rifka Schicker cleared her throat and spoke. She was a trim woman in late middle age, her near-white hair arranged in a huge bun. “All religious traditions speak of the unity of nature, from the Christian trinity through to the Hindu’s rule of Shiva”—
“I know, Dr. Schicker”, Professor Morris smiled. “You’re right. But the last thing I want to do is bring God into this. I’m talking about evidence.”
“Good”, the Master opined, reaching for his wine glass. “Quite so.”
He chuckled, and the newspaper Editor and Geoffrey, his partner, laughed with him.
“I know you don’t do God, Peter”, Professor Morris muttered. “So it’s just as well I didn’t reveal the rest of my findings. If people were shocked by what I said, then that’s a wet day in Cleveland compared to what I’m holding back.”
“Such as?” the Editor asked. Professor Morris sighed, looking at him.
“Really, Mr, ah, Foges, is it? Oh well. In for a penny, in for a pound, as you say in England. So: as you can imagine, we ran those spectroscopy experiments quite a few times in different locations before I was sure of our findings. But we also put the spectroscope in various environments alongside a plain old camera. And just to be triple sure of what we were doing, we added radar too.”
Morris paused and took a drink of water. She set the glass down carefully on the white tablecloth. “We found that activity in other planes affects the behaviour of animals. Creaking floorboards? Not always wood settling. Why would it keep settling after a few years, anyway? No: I have video evidence of cats, birds and squirrels responding to the movements of those shapes Professor Fass discussed earlier. Now, we don’t know what those shapes are, or how they relate to the presence of human spirits. But I can prove that spirits exist, and we’re the only living things to be unaware of their existence. Or we pretend to be unaware of their existence, even if we know inside ourselves, deep down, they’re real.”
“You will forgive me if I remain unconvinced of your claims, Professor Morris”, the Master said. He steepled his fingers and slouched in his chair, looking out into the darkness of the three-hundred-year-old First Quadrangle.
“That’s your perfect right, Lord Taylor”, Andrea Morris replied. “Rulers have ignored scientists since Gallileo. No-one likes it when their assumptions are up-ended.”
Professor Morris’s partner took her hand under the table. I saw him give it a little squeeze. Then Rob, who’d been eating his main course with considerable relish, spoke:
“Come now, Peter. At the least, we ought to give Professor Morris’s theories the respect of proper analysis. Even though you’re not a scientist, you are, I’m sure, familiar with the concept that energy is indestructible? It is never created or destroyed, but simply changes form. What happens to smoke when it disperses? What happens to our souls when we die? To my thinking, these two questions are similar. The difference between them is that we know what happens to smoke, but dismiss any discussion of our souls. What if Professor Morris has uncovered the answer to what happens to us after death – and discovered different worlds that live alongside ours? Is it all really so hard to credit? Physicists, and I’m sorry there are none here tonight, have been positing stuff like this for decades.”
Andrea Morris finished eating. She set her cutlery on the monogrammed college plate and nodded at Rob.
“Thank you, Professor Fass. I agree: this isn’t a stretch. But of course, it makes some of us uncomfortable to admit it might all be true. And please, let’s be in no doubt – I only announced cast-iron results tonight. I didn’t touch on our current experiments. Or the evidence I just discussed with you, which we’re more and more sure of.”
“Well, go on then” – the Editor again. I noticed a trace of Cockney in his accent now, his origins revealing themselves as he grew excited. He drained his glass of wine and a waiter stepped forward to offer him more. He accepted with alacrity, swilling the wine round his glass before taking a large swig and exhaling with relish.
Andrea Morris looked at her partner, who said, “Why not? They’ll never believe you anyway.”
“OK. This is Bill: my rock. And he’s a lawyer back in the States. So as they say where I’m from” –- and here she glanced at the Editor –- “our lawyers are watching.”
The company laughed, deflating the tension somewhat. Morris continued:“Encouraged by our spectroscopy results, we decided to patch a few volunteers up to scan their brain activity. We asked them to record their moods and thoughts at home for a week, scanning them regularly. Meanwhile we organised the same set up – spectroscopy, X and gamma scanners, radar and video – in their homes.”
Professor Morris paused, uncertain.
“What happened?” Rivka Schicker laid a hand on Professor Morris’s arm, urging her to continue. Morris looked at her partner, seeking courage in his air of calm authority.
“We found that people’s thoughts and moods were influenced by the activity of these beings on other planes. And reciprocally, their thoughts and moods influenced activity on other planes. That which they could not see or hear or sense was guiding them, and was guided by them.”
The Editor cackled. “Ha! So now you’re saying we all commune with spirits and can summon demons. Is that what you want me to write, Professor?”
Morris stood up from the table. “Well, I appreciate that much of your readership has only just mastered the alphabet – however” –
A Porter came in. I’d been hoping someone would clear away dinner: we needed to calm things down. Rob Fass turned to speak to the Porter. The Head Porter, to be precise. He had a worried, pinched look on his face. Like the other Porters, he’d been a serving soldier. So if he looked worried, something must be wrong.
“Everything all right, John?”
“Not really sir, no. We’ve had to close the main gate. There’s a riot going on in Sebastian Street. The news about Professor Morris’s lecture has broken, and people want to meet her. Hysteria, I’d call it, sir.”
The room fell silent. The Head Porter spoke to the Master: “Lord Taylor, I would like your permission to put the College in lockdown. I’ve got men on all the gates and they are patrolling the walls. Cambridgeshire Constabulary is kettling the rioters in Sebastian Street for now. I don’t think it’s safe for anyone to leave tonight, sir. I believe you’re all accommodated here tonight except Professor Fass – and I’ve found you a room, Rob my son, don’t you worry.”
I had the next day booked off work. I’d anticipated a hangover, which I didn’t get. But I did experience a world-changing event.
The next day’s newspapers and internet chat were full of Professor Morris’s claims. The media had gone wall-to-wall on her findings, including rebuttals and denials from scientists – and gleeful psychics bouncing up and down in their interview chairs with excitement. They said the churches were full to bursting that Sunday for the first time in decades. I wasn’t sure anyone understood the implications of her research – including me, and I’d been there when she presented it.
It was already supper-time when I got back to Holbeach St. Johns. I’d told Kate I was going to be late. So I went into The Plough and had a half of Guinness. And I wondered what ghosts were walking around among the slot machines and somewhat grotty bar area. I wondered what they made of us, if they were there at all: perhaps Andrea Morris’s theory was nonsense.
I had another half, then a pint. All the while I was looking for clues – a curtain moving, or Skyler, the Landlord’s mutt, behaving strangely. But I spotted nothing. Maybe the Master was right, and Morris was just a fraud.
By the time I got home with three pints and a double Irish whiskey inside me, Kate was in bed. There was a voice message from our son, Tom, on the answering machine. Like a communication from another dimension, I thought: the dimension of being young and deluded. Youth’s capacity to credit marvels, to believe in things experience tells us can’t be true. Most of the rioters outside my college last night were students. Of course they were. They just wanted to believe, to see Morris as some kind of guru who brought science and intuition together for the first time in our proof-obsessed age.
And yet what was there to believe? Professor Morris had been presenting evidence, not belief. It was all a matter of hard science, as a pharmacologist client loved to tell me given half an opportunity.
I went to bed and tried to sleep. Drowsy but not dropping off, I thought about our house, built more than two hundred years ago. Kate and I had ordered the original title deeds from 1798 digitised for posterity. The builder allowed this house to pass to his wife following his death shortly after he finished building it: he died “of a fit of ye apoplexy”, as they called coronary thrombosis. His wife had to sell this place to feed their children: the next family to come in kept it for three generations.
Who knows what spirits lived here with us, unseen because not looked for? What children lost to disease, what secret loves consummated in here, the kitchen, dining room or on our back lawn? I looked out into the night garden. Kate’s sleeping form breathed gently in bed behind me.
Then I noticed Billy on the floor, shaggy ears flopping over his brown face in repose, long nose tucked into his forepaws. Outside, the clouds parted and a quarter moon announced itself from behind a cloud. Shapes were half-visible in the garden, and I made out the forms of rhododendrons and azaleas I’d cursed and sweated over for fifteen years.
Then I thought about my Dad, and how he’d done similar work in his garden during retirement. Dad died a long time ago, and I hadn’t thought about him in months. I remembered him scooping me up as a tiny boy, lifting me into his scent of sweat and cigarettes.
Billy jumped up onto his paws, flobbling his chops to wake himself, nose and ears straining at the bedroom window. I touched the dog behind his ears gently to calm him, and followed where his nose pointed, peering out into the poorly-lit space beyond the house to see what had drawn his attention. But it was nothing: just some branches waving in the breeze.
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James Wood was born in Scotland and has lived in France, the US, Canada and the Czech Republic. One of his stories will be published in The Bookends Review in September, and another was published in May this year by the US Veteran's Association to commemorate Memorial Day for those who served in the US Armed Forces. He has also had short fiction published in Canada, and in the UK, where he was was a prize-winner in the Scotsman/ORION Books short story competition. He’s been nominated or shortlisted for eight literary awards, including the Bridport Prize and the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. You can find out more about him at www.der-jimmelwriter.com.
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