At the Well of Night
by Mike Adamson
Beyond Potter’s Field
lies the Old Wood, and often have I been tempted by its
shaded byways. In winter it is a pageant of
gesticulating skeletons, frozen in their abandoned
motion and clothed in pure white, while by summer its
green bowers are the haven of bird and bee, and the fox
who trots with russet-hued grace. But at each cardinal
point of the year, in the endless turn of the seasons,
there are moments the wood calls to me with a voice I
almost hear with my waking senses; and invades my dreams
with a soft siren song that woos the hardest heart. Only
black legends keep me from walking into that wood and
never returning.
The drab doings of city folk do not
sit well with those who hear nature and are drawn to the
green places shunned by the hurrying throng. My years
among the tall buildings dulled my inner senses, yet
incompletely, such that when one night I awoke suddenly,
with childhood memories of rambling gardens, fields
green in their season, and the whispering woods where
badgers played beneath the moon, I could stand the city
no longer. I settled my affairs, packed, and made my way
home.
Autumn’s
breath was upon the land when the train deposited me
at a country station that had stood since the railways
were first built, and I smelled the damp air, took in
low sun over reaped fields where the last swallows
still darted, and my heart rejoiced, for I was free. The family had scattered
now, and I was lucky to open up the old house on the
outskirts of the village, which had stood empty for the
last year since my sister moved to New Zealand. The
family had considered meeting to discuss realizing the
old place and dividing its value, but as far as I was
concerned, it was my home, and all my future endeavors
would be pursued from the writing desk in the quaint
parlor, looking out upon gardens bright with blossom and
flowers in their season.
Over my back hedge lies Potter’s
Field, where in medieval times clay was gathered for the
making of vessels; and across that green undulation
rises the dark, hunched heights of Old Wood. That first
evening, I stood in the overgrown garden among creepers
run to briar and roses sharp with thorn to stare off at
the long mass, bright in its autumn colors, and heard
its call as ever I had as a child.
As I settled back into village life
and embarked upon new writings at the desk that had been
my father’s, the whisper of the trees became my
companion, and each day I would walk across the field,
with raincoat and walking stick as the days grew cool
and the wind cast the reds and golds of the tops in a
tumbling race. The dry stone wall bordering the wood was
full five hundred years old, pierced by a gate where a
path led to villages long lost, as it had since the days
of Lancaster and York. The antiquity of this land
touched my soul and coaxed me on to walk the woodland
paths, breathe the scents of nature, and feel the land
beneath me.
Come to me, lost son, it murmured in my
dreams, with visions of swirling leaves among grasping
boughs, of trackways turned to mud, of scampering
squirrels hoarding for winter, and the southward flight
of birds. Come home, come home….
I woke with a start in the middle
hours to the odd compulsion of this dream but stayed
between my sheets, yet when it returned, I felt it a
friend and saw in its hurrying dream-reality the way
across the field and through the wood, where the trees
seemed grander and more welcoming than ever before. And
my intent probing of its depths brought me to a grove of
old giants amongst which lay the stout stones of a
medieval well. I peered down from the brink and found it
free of intruding roots, and water glimmered, a black
mirror, far below.
The legends, though, give me pause.
I heard them at the knee of my old grandmother, in the
parlor adjoining, as she spoke of villagers long ago
swallowed up by the wild. In ages of wolf and brigand
many must have lost their lives, but something dark
swirled around Old Wood, such that the young were taught
to stay away by night, lest that darkness seep out from
beneath the rotting boughs of fallen trees, from out the
leaf mulch and teeming maggots beneath rocks, rise up
and bear away the innocent to places unimagined.
I scoffed as an adult, of course,
but so strong is habit that for a full month I resisted
the call in aught but afternoon light. But as the season
drew toward winter, sharp airs and rains accompanying
shortening days, I set aside my writings and walked at
last into Old Wood with no thought of return short of
whatever secrets it truly held.
Come home, lost son, it whispered, warm
breath almost upon my ear, and I hurried my stride into
the November afternoon. I passed the gate and made my
way among the crackling drifts of leaves, smelled hearth
smoke from afar, and heard the call of crow and raven in
the tops. Now I was home, I felt, truly home as I set
aside all preconception and let the arms of the woods
enfold me.
I could not have said how long I
walked as day ended in a flurry of orange and yellow,
and evening closed about me in purple gloaming, and the
ash and silver-birch, beech, and oak made ever more
imposing outlines against the first stars. It seemed I
moved in a dream, not feeling the ground beneath my feet
as I forged through thicket and briar, and at last came
upon the well of my dream.
The crumbling stone seemed permeated
with the breath of antiquity, a low parapet of blocks
cut by forgotten hands, yet the gaping maw to the earth
was now covered by a wrought-iron safety grille, to keep
the unwary from plunging to their deaths. Even this
addition, this intrusion of modern times upon the
ancient, was old.
The breeze did not penetrate here,
and it seemed the baring trees rose in convoluted
majesty I had not appreciated before, over-arching as if
to create a hallowed space. My heart thudded in
anticipation, for here, something told me, I had come
upon all my grandmother would have kept me from.
But she was long gone, and I had
come home, and I stood by the well, alone and yearning,
though I did not know for what.
It began as a gleam in those black
waters, a phosphorescence perhaps, a cold, greenish
radiance that built slowly, filling the shaft so the
slick, dank stone of ages shone with a sickly light. I
looked into it with racing heart, wondering what it
could mean, hoping it meant something, anything beyond
the tedium of the ordinary, and I was not disappointed.
My legs weakened and I collapsed to my knees at the low
rim of eroded stone, to peer into the well, as it
seemed, little by little, to grow deeper, vaster, until
my fevered vision stared down into a world, an entire
glowing dimension. Then, with the greatest ease, a grace
of submission to superior forces, I plunged, impossibly,
over the edge and raced down, down, down….
Yet there was no meniscus of cold
and foul water, and I streaked on at speeds unguessable,
falling through a space whose measure was delineated by
glowing filaments of blue and green, reaching past me,
scattered with dust motes and moonbeams, and after what
seemed an age I plunged into a warm and buoyant ocean of
gold-green radiance, and lost all notion of myself in
the wonders thus revealed.
Even the soul of a poet struggles to
describe that for which there are no words, and truly
language was inadequate to express the universe opened
to my senses. Did I look out-over to cosmic vastness, or
inward to the interactions of energy at the heart of
matter? I could not imagine, but was filled with the
wonder of the vision, not terrified, not desperate to
escape to the safety of the mortal realm, but reveling
in all I encountered, hungering for it as the balm to
one beaten down by remorseless, unremarkable reality.
I could have wandered a thousand
years, yet the visions faded too soon, and when I opened
my eyes, cold and stiff, slumped against chill stone
under the stars and flurrying clouds of an autumn night,
I could have wept to return. The iron grille was
ice-cold under my fingers, but I realized it had likely
saved my life, preventing me from joining those others
in the past who also were called by the whispers of the
world. And when I struggled to my feet, it was with a
renewed sense of purpose, for the mysteries of the
universe had been offered to me, as if I, a scion of
this ancient place, had a birthright to such knowledge,
and the veil was drawn back, to my edification.
Now the doings of mortal travail
seemed petty, the smallness of the blind, and I did not
fear the woods. I walked home with a joyous heart, for a
new life had opened wide before me.
I knew with a deep and satisfying certainty, I
would journey those realms again, and, just perhaps,
come to understand the magnificence gifted me.
THE END
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