Encountering the Otherworld

 Once upon a time, and not so long ago, there is a dreamer, dreaming. There is a house in the dream: an ordinary old wooden house, rather the worse for wear. In the house, the sound of people; in the foreground, a woman, quietly writing at an old desk. Suddenly, the screen door creaks, and something hurtles into the room where she is sitting. She hardly has time to see what has come in; only catches a glimpse of a tiny, triangular face, vivid in its vicious ferocity, red eyes ablaze; a tiny thing, but implacable, rushing straight for her throat. 

The dreamer awakes in fright, gasping, skin cold, hair on end, wakes to silence and quiet, friendly darkness, and thinks on the dream, but does not understand.

Now it is the next night, and another dream. There is a lake, a pool, fringed with green; a shimmering beauty of water, a waiting. Footsteps by the lake; voices, talking. Two travellers, a woman and a man, dusty, exhausted, coming to the lake shore, exclaiming at the water, but uneasy, somehow. One of them, the man, is impatient. He will not wait, he tells his companion. He strips off, advances towards the lake, reaches the shimmering water, starts to go in; and only his companion, transfixed, unable to move or cry out, sees what is truly happening. For as the water so beautiful rides over the man’s ankles then his legs, his shoulders, his skin is changing, turning to greeny bronze, becoming less human by the second, more and more, until at last he is fully in, and he turns towards her.

The dreamer wakes up again, heart pounding, skin clammy. Wakes into the softly-breathing friendly darkness, and still does not understand.

Now, it is the third night. Third night, as in the fairytales. The dreamer is asleep, the moonlight falls on the bed in stripes of shadow and silver. Suddenly, outside, there is a sharp, staccato sound: dogs barking. Not the bored sound of sleepless dogs barking at distractions, the wailing sound of dogs adoring the moon, the lovesick barks of dogs shut off from their romances; but the sharp, short sound that tells you their hackles are rising, their blood is freezing, that there is something … something out there. It is this sound that wakes the dreamer immediately, sharply awake, and getting up to look out of the window.

Outside, it is bright; not as bright as day, for not golden, but silver-sharp, white-cold and shadow-striped. And in the vacant lot next door, there is a man. Standing straight and glimmering in the moonlight, hair of black and silver, like the night, unremarkably dressed in what appear to be plain pale-coloured clothes—but exactly what colour are they? Grey, or silver? He looks quite solid, there is no translucence about him, yet somehow … somehow … He has one hand on his hip, the other held out with fingers parted, as if holding a cigarette. But there is no glow there, nothing in his hand at all. He is standing still, absolutely still: and his glance—oh, what a cold, direct, gaze it is, so strangely coloured and yet not coloured that the dreamer even afterwards cannot describe it perfectly—is fixed straight at the dreamer, standing there transfixed at the window, looking back at him.

There is no fear. Don’t think that. Just an eternal moment, suspended, the cold direct gaze, the silver glimmer. Dreamer and strange man gaze, and neither drops their gaze, nor seeks recognition. 

At last, the dreamer moves. The waking mind is rebelling, seeking to understand, pin down, explain. It is fluttering in panic. It is night out there; and there is an intruder. Something must be done. The dreamer runs for help, rouses the household, which stands there in its pyjamas staring bleary-eyed out at the night. Half-asleep, the household agrees there’s a man there, shouts at the dogs, making a noise to chase away the intruder. Then it rubs its eyes, looks again: “But he’s gone! Gone … Look …”

And there, in the vacant lot, the dreamer sees now no man but a tree. A small, stunted tree, a native eucalypt, its crown of leaves fuzzy, its struggling trunk grey. The dogs have stopped barking. The household goes back to bed, shrugging. The dreamer stands at the window and stares out at the tree.

A tree. A tree. I saw a tree? No, I did not. It was no tree I saw then, though I know this place, that tree’s always been there. I have looked how many times at that place over there, and seen that tree. Always. And the dogs are always barking, in their witless way. I’ve heard them before, and I’ve often woken up, gone to the window to shout at them, and seen that tree. But not this night. This night, the dogs barked differently, and I saw something else. Something I do not understand. Something I may never understand. 

For yes, you see, the story is mine. This happened to me. Really happened. Once upon a time … but it was only a few years ago. And not in some far-off, exotic, enchanted place. It was in Australia. In a very unromantic workaday western suburb of Sydney. 

Afterwards, I tried to explain it to myself and others, to analyse: that it was my mind projected that being out on the night. That it was a kind of vision of my animus, as Jung might have said. That it was a product of three disturbed nights. Whatever. But that does not stop me knowing, deep inside, that the otherworldly being I saw that night was every bit as real, body-real, independent-real as the tree. And that I was privileged to see it there, to see it in its mystery and strangeness. 

Always, I’ve known the mystery of the Otherworld, that the Welsh call Annwfn, the Inworld, was around me, I could sense its deep presence, within me, without me. At its heart was God and His enduring mystery; yet it was full of other presences, too. But this third night, it wasn’t just sensing. It was knowing—a destabilising knowing, in every chilling, thrilling pore of skin. 

There’s a Chinese saying, “Fish are the last to know they live in water”. Yes. We live in this mystery every day of our lives, totally naturally, because it is our natural element: but we hardly know it. Taken out of it, we die, inside—life loses meaning, the universe is emptied of its song, of the prickles within its skin that tell us the Otherworld is standing right by us, at our shoulder, that we are held within it. Children know it, instinctively—it is one of the reasons why I love writing for children, because they accept, they know, they don’t analyse; the Otherworld is there in the blink of an eye for them, and could erupt into their lives just by going to an unusual train platform, or going through a wardrobe, or staring too long into the mirror, or falling from sleep into a strange world. 

But the Otherworld isn’t always benign. It doesn’t always give you a sense of wonder, as that experience did, an experience that fed directly into my writing. Sometimes, it is sheer, freezing terror that you meet along the enchanted road …

A couple of years after the experience I recounted above, I am at a friend’s place, staying overnight. It’s a lovely house by the water in a northern suburb. I’m in Sydney to launch an anthology I’ve put together—a collection of stories called The Road to Camelot, which is about how the heroes and heroines of Arthurian legend became what they are: moments of destiny in the childhoods and young adulthoods of the knights, the ladies, the magicians and fairies that populate the Arthurian world. I’ve had a nice evening chatting with my friends and fellow authors, eating good food, drinking good wine. I go to bed happy, in the guest room that has a window on the garden.

In the middle of the night, I’m jerked out of sleep by the sound of voices. People are talking at the front door. I hear a woman’s voice saying, in surprise, “Why—how are you?” and a male murmur in return. I look at my watch on the bedside table. Two a.m.! No wonder the woman—my friend?—was so surprised to find someone visiting at that hour. I can hear the murmurs continuing for a little while, then the voices move away. I hear footsteps going up the path. They’re going into the garden to talk. I start to relax back into sleep, when suddenly—a burst of sound. 

A gunshot! A piercing scream! I know what a gunshot sounds like, I’ve heard it many times at home, in the country, where people sometimes go shooting kangaroos and feral animals. I jump up immediately, every hair standing on end, my limbs in a kind of dissolving freeze. I wait, breathlessly, hiding behind the bedroom door. Silence … Then, suddenly, upstairs I hear the balcony door sliding slowly open, and footsteps, very deliberate … They’re inside! They’ve killed my friend! They’re coming to see if anyone else is in the house!

I can hardly describe my feelings at this point. I feel as if I have no feelings. All I have are physical reactions—everything really is cold, and there’s water running out of my eyes (not tears), out of my mouth, I’m dribbling, sweating, it’s disgusting … And still, the footsteps. They’ll be here soon. I cannot just die like this, like a rat in a trap, a lamb to the slaughter. I need a weapon. Everything is very clear around me. I go to the wardrobe, get out a coathanger, straighten it out so at least I have something to poke into the eyes of whoever it is that will shortly come down here and open the door … I wait behind the door with my ridiculous weapon. I wait. No sound. The footsteps have ceased. I can only hear the windchime moving gently in the breeze, outside, in the garden. I listen, and I’m still in that strange state of utter terror which is oddly beyond fear, or what we normally understand as fear. Still no sound. I cannot bear to stand there any more. Very, very slowly, I open the door, and look out into the corridor.

Moonlight. There is only moonlight, falling quietly into the corridor. My friend’s bedroom door is closed; I can hear soft breathing behind there. Still gripping the coathanger—God knows what my friend would have thought if she’d seen me!—I prowl quietly up the stairs, and look out to the balcony door. It is firmly shut. The balcony is innocent of any intruders. There is no one else in the house. No one.

In a state of—I still don’t know what, exactly—I go back downstairs, back to the room, back to bed. I don’t even lie awake thinking about it, I just fall asleep. In the morning, I’ve got cramps all over. My eyes are glued tight shut with the stuff that came out of my eyes in my sheer terror, and it takes ages to uncrust them. I think, oh, that was a dream—then see, by the bed, the coathanger I’d twisted out of shape, last night, in my terrified search for a weapon. I get up slowly, numb. It’s bright sunshine on the balcony, breakfast is ready, and I spoil my friend’s morning for her by telling her what happened the previous night. She doesn’t say don’t be a fool, or you must have dreamt it, she can see I haven’t, she can see the twisted coathanger, and my terror. I ring my husband back home and tell him about it, sure he’s going to tell me I imagined it. He is not a credulous man. But no. He is quite matter of fact. “It was a ghost, of course,” he says. “That’s all.” That’s all!

I never found out if anything had happened in that house—if it was harking back to a murder—or whether it was a premonition, or something randomly weird, some malfunctioning part of the machinery of the universe. I don’t want to know. I used to think I’d be excited if I saw a ghost. Well, I didn’t see it, only hear it, and I can tell you, I never ever want to have an experience like that again. That’s all I really, really know, in the deepest fibres of my physical self as well as my heart and spirit. I don’t want to know. See, I discovered that my curiosity—which always had seemed to me boundless—actually did have a boundary. Beyond that terror lies not meaning, but madness. I know now just what it means to be frozen in terror—just how physically real it is. And I hope I will never be taken down that particular road of the otherworld again.

Sophie Masson’s next novel, The Understudy’s Revenge, will be published in the next few weeks
by Scholastic Press.