The Lamplighter (12 page)

Canavan snorted. “So you call the soul a voracious predator now?”

“Harboring a malignant demon.”

The terrier had slunk away through a sunless wynd, but Canavan knew it would not be the last. “Leaving aside original sin,” he managed, “I have trouble accepting the place of a demon in the soul.”

“I think we know instinctively that our imaginations—and our souls—are ravenous,” McKnight argued, as they approached St. Giles. “And the Church's whole mission might be seen as establishing barriers to regulate that appetite.”

“Comforting to know your anti-ecclesiastical ideologies haven't deserted you completely.”

“Oh, I don't seek to indict the Church in particular. It's in our nature to establish boundaries and restrictions. We consciously impose limits on our own thoughts and settle into an expedient system of simplifications and archetypes. We willingly stamp archetypes even upon ourselves, to fall into the world we have constructed out of easy recognitions and the disinclination for complexity. The unconscious, however, remains unsated and frequently rebellious.”

“Finding expression in dreams.”

“To the extent that it is able,” McKnight said. “For it is possible we have imposed boundaries even here.” They were well into the Old Town now, with its chaos of tilting tenements and hidden howffs, but the streets were eerily deserted and silent even by Sunday standards: no jingle of horse-drawn trams or clatter of carriage wheels, no coalmen or hawkers; even the combative Sabbath bells were unusually subdued. People gathered, where they gathered at all, in cautious groups, sparing wary glances to the left and right, as though fearing they might be attacked at any moment, and there was even, Canavan noted, a surprising dearth of strays, as though the canine world itself had recoiled. They turned onto the empty North Bridge.

“The parameters become visible in the spatial metaphors we use in reference to the mind,” McKnight continued. “‘Out of his head,' ‘buried deep in memory,' ‘put to the back of the mind.' But in truth the mind in its purest form has no spatial dimensions. Even our conviction that the mind is unable to interact directly with the physical world is a self-imposed restriction. Let me give an example. A destitute young girl owns a doll she adores. The doll is her only pleasure in life: her mother is dead and her father is a violent brute. A neighborhood bully, responding to the very affection she exhibits for the doll, seizes it, tears it apart, and distributes it all over the street. The girl is distraught and weeps for days. How would you describe such a story?”

“Heartbreaking.”

“Aye. The girl in her innocence has projected a personality onto something that is mere rags and ceramic. And certainly any competent doctor would be able to prove that the doll never had a pulse, that it was matter without mind, never a living creature and never a dead one. And yet the devastating emotions the girl experiences cannot be dismissed as entirely immaterial. In fact, we know instinctively that they are not, and the proof is in the metaphor you yourself have used—‘heartbreaking.'”

Canavan thought about it. “The same competent doctor who performed the doll's postmortem should also be able to prove no real damage was done to the girl's heart, or to my own, for that matter. Beyond a fluttering of the pulse, I'm sure.”

“Oh, I would argue much more than that. There are intense disturbances we are as yet unable to accurately gauge. I would argue, in fact, that the girl has been cut by a blade that, no matter how imaginary, is no less powerful than a butcher's knife, and inflicts wounds that might be even deeper.”

“This is the arena of psychology.”

“It might be if the girl were real,” McKnight said. “But in fact she is completely fictitious. A metaphysical figment of my imagination. Whose story, by your admission, had a physical effect on you. Now multiply that effect many times over and project it into reality. Apply it to some more sinister grievance and try to imagine the intensity of that anger. If the loss of a doll can cut through a girl like a knife, imagine the blades a fully developed adult might unsheathe.”

And now, piecing together all the Professor's previous words—about accountability for dreams, the dimensions of the mind, and the devil of the unconscious—Canavan at last thought he perceived a point. “You're not trying to suggest,” he said incredulously, “that three men were killed by an angry impulse?”

He expected a laugh, but McKnight was alarmingly silent.

“My God,” Canavan said, thinking about it. “It's the Irish lass, isn't it? The dreamer?”

No answer.

“You really suspect she's involved somehow?”

“Oh, I'm almost certain she's involved. It's just a matter of degree.”

“You're not serious?”

McKnight smiled. “I'm most decidedly serious.”

“But how?” Canavan asked, already oddly defensive. “How can you say this based on what little we know?”

But again McKnight chose not to answer directly. They were crossing over bloodstained Waverley Station, where Sunday train service had recently been introduced, but even the platforms were abnormally silent. “The world seems so solid and absolute. Stubbornly and intractably real. Yet I ask you to consider how much of reality is constructed exclusively in our imaginations.”

Canavan sensed he was being guided down another long and twisting path, and he decided to stand fast behind an indisputable statement. “No man can walk on water,” he said, “even if he doesn't recognize it as water.”

“Aye,” McKnight agreed, and snorted. “But only because he is bound inextricably to recognizing himself as a man.”

They turned past the General Post Office and headed into Waterloo Place. Having left the Old Town without having encountered another stray, Canavan now regarded himself as out of danger. But he was too distracted to dwell on his guilt, or even his pity.

“Care for a little climb?” McKnight asked, and without waiting for a reply digressed to the rock stairs of Calton Hill. They ascended swiftly and nimbly and soon were at the top amid the jumble of Gothic and Grecian monuments.

“Plato said that in all of us there is a lawless wild beast that peers out in sleep,” the Professor observed, looking at the Doric columns of the National Monument, the city's unfinished Parthenon. “And that the bridge between the worlds of mind and matter is the soul.”

“Which you've already equated with the imagination.”

“You know,” McKnight said, and paused to relight his pipe, “all my life I've wanted to find this bridge. I've wanted to believe in an imagination so powerful that it can break free of all the shackles and hurdle all barriers. It has always seemed like a profoundly beautiful thing, invested with all the power of God. But I remember the wild beast and now I wonder…”

They stood for a minute watching a devil's-head cloud yawn briefly across the sun before fragmenting and dissolving.

“Care for another climb?” McKnight asked.

Canavan looked pointedly at the vacant air. “To heaven?”

But McKnight was already heading down the stairway, and Canavan tried to conceal his dismay. If the Professor had some purpose in this stroll, it was still eluding him.

They rounded Holyrood Palace with its pacing sentries and gold-crowned streetlamps and set off across the empty Queen's Park. “The Salisbury Crags,” McKnight said, gesturing to their final destination. “The birthplace of geology.”

They spared a bracing glance at the forbidding cliffs—where James Hutton had first formulated his theory that igneous rock had a volcanic origin far older than any biblical calendar—and it finally occurred to Canavan that the Professor had led him on a calculated course through the history of the human mind, from the mask of modernity through the Middle Ages and Ancient Greece to the naked face of prehistory, in possibly the only city in the world where such was achievable in a Sunday stroll. They ascended the rocky path known as Radical Road.

“For all the layers of the mind we peel back,” McKnight said, fighting for breath, “we find more layers concealing the primeval soul. We search for God in our purest instincts, but in truth we are terrified we will discover only the devil.”

They stopped high above the sprawl of the city with their backs to the corrugated crags, and McKnight handed his bowler to Canavan so that he might mop his brow. But the Irishman's grip on the hat was tenuous, and as he passed it back to the Professor a fierce gust of wind blew up and wrenched it from his hand. The bowler took off like a bird.

Startled, Canavan made to scramble down the path in order to retrieve it at ground level. But McKnight clapped a restraining hand on his forearm.

“It's only a hat,” he said. “If God means us to find it, then we surely will.”

Canavan settled back, puzzled. “God again…?”

“Or the devil,” McKnight admitted ruefully, and they watched the hat, carried on a furious updraft, gallop far across the sea of Old Town church spires and chimney stacks and vanish into a drifting veil of mist. “The primeval mind…the philosophy of the Greeks…the discipline of the Church…the revolutions of modern philosophy…all this, and it still returns to God and the devil.” His voice had dropped to a marveling whisper. “I set out to discover the nature of good and evil…and in the fog I found them indistinguishable. I aspired to be a great philosopher…only to see my philosophies devouring themselves. I came to Edinburgh to separate reality from fantasy…only to discover that there is no city on earth more conducive to dreams.”

Cloud shadows sprang and dipped across the fields of turrets and crowstepped gables.

“If we're to succeed in this investigation,” he added, repocketing his handkerchief, “I warn you we must prepare ourselves for anything. We must look in the cracks of the unconscious, in the gaps under metaphors, in the dark spaces where imagination has pasted over inexperience. Where everything is questionable and all accepted laws are suspended.”

Canavan noted the implication that he had already been deputized. “Is it this you've been leading to all along?” he asked, vaguely disappointed. “A call to arms?”

“A call to arms, aye,” McKnight said approvingly. “For I cannot face these terrors alone.”

They discerned the discordant bellows of a practicing piper in the park below, and from a more distant quarter the flowering skirls of a more seasoned performer. The younger piper paused a minute and then, after a few stuttering attempts, tried to emulate the master with his own wavering pibroch. And in turn the more senior piper hesitated, considered, and then resumed his playing with a few encouraging bars, halting generously so that his unseen apprentice might duplicate his performance. And soon the younger piper had fallen dutifully into place, grateful for the assistance, and quickly, hoisted beyond his station in the urge to succeed, he was weaving sonorous threads around his tutor's promptings, the two of them defying age, experience, distance, and the wind to merge in splendid harmony. The Castle time-gun blew one o'clock with a thumping report and the filaments of mist slowly dispersed.

“You needn't worry about your dogs,” McKnight promised. “I'll find some scraps. The finest money can buy.”

Canavan was alarmed. “I'm…I'm not sure what you mean…”

McKnight had not raised his eyes from the smoking city. “I ventured up to Drumgate. I heard of your dismissal.”

Canavan sighed and looked away guiltily. “I did not want to tell you.”

“Nonsense, lad,” McKnight said, and added in a meaningful undertone: “Now neither of us has an excuse.”

When the full implication dawned on Canavan his face immediately slackened. He looked down upon the distant dome of the University, as though for confirmation, then back at McKnight, who nodded resignedly.

“Summarily suspended by the University Court,” he said. “‘Conspicuous lapse of commitment,' the good men judged.”

Canavan was dismayed. “For…for how long?”

“The council suggests that I might be able to resume duties in the summer. But I anticipate a somewhat longer penance.”

Canavan took a moment to measure his own despair.

“Fear not,” McKnight assured him, with a mirthless laugh. “I had a small bank account, which I liquidated. And I dispensed with a few unnecessary volumes.”

“You sold some of your books?”

McKnight waved away any gesture of protest. “It's more important, at this stage, that we are not distracted by anything frivolous, and certainly not concern for some hungry strays. There is much mental energy to be expended.”

But the Professor saw from Canavan's troubled expression that his friend was not convinced, and so he slapped him affectionately on the shoulder.

“Descartes had his famous dream in 1619,” he said with a mysterious gleam in his eye. “Twenty-two years later he identified the malignant demon in the publication
Meditationes de prima philosophia.
In 1647 this volume was translated from scholarly Latin into his native French. In it he speaks of some force, very powerful and cunning, that has tried to persuade him that there is no heaven and no earth, no colors, no matter, no minds—that he does not even exist. He called the force “this great deceiver.'
Ce grand trompeur
.”