I received the summons on the twenty-first of December. “Summons” however, is not the right word. “Invitation,” in keeping with the holiday time of year, might be a better term. More accurately, it amounted to a conviction compounded of intuition and compulsion, a sort of calling, with all the urgency and election thus implied.
That the invitation, then, arrived on the day of the winter solstice did not of course escape my attention. To me, all liminal spaces have ever been a captivation, solstices and equinoxes included despite the circular logic of the seasons (posit summer without winter you cannot). The equilibration of the sun and the moon is indeed a terrestrial fact; yet to the observer’s eye one season leads seamlessly into the next with neither beginning nor end. Finally, there is only the turning of the wheel, and all our rational divisions and demarcations are as fabled and as fluid as the Titan river Oceanus, which the Greeks believed encircled the globe.
It came, as I say, with a sense of insight and obligation. I would take to the woods. I do not mean “take to them” in the sense of leaving civilization behind for good, not yet anyway. My wish was rather to plunge into those beloved groves and thickets with my customary zeal and devotion, to know again the waiting arms of oak, birch, and pine. My feelings were such as the prodigal son might have felt on deciding to return home.
I would thrill to the trail’s embracing shadows and spice. I would inhale the incense of the air, “mad for it to be in contact with me.” The deepening shadows would lead me by my hands past halfway visible faery rings, perhaps toward a quiet circular clearing full of twilight shadows and the first stars rising above the branches. The woods are not far from my home.
Although it was only late afternoon, by the time I arrived at the wood’s edge the sun was swiftly going down. Its last slanted rays sent elongated shadows skittering across the thin, crusty layer of snow covering the trail, pocked with traces of winter life, broken twigs, and scattered needles of ice and pine. In the chilling air I found the woods held less of enchantment and more of a cold clarity about them. Somehow, without even thinking about it, I knew to follow the lichen-stone trail.
The lichen-stone stands about three feet high and is gray, about a foot thick, and blunt, like a giant tablet or stele. It leans against the trunk of a tree that has grown around it for so long that the stone has become embedded in the bark, which is slowly closing over its edge like a lid. One senses a marvelous secret within the pale green scripts and arabesques with which the stone’s surface is inscribed, as if with a magical alphabet, penned by an ancient’s hand.
Only a dozen or so steps down the trail I stopped because there I saw it. The woods’ silence gathered, as if at once closer and stretching further away, and the shadows drew up near to lean over and look with me. It was the dead body of a rabbit. It lay stretched out like Saint Sebastian the martyr, about as long as your arm from wrist to elbow. Its fur was fantastically mottled, with white, russet, gray, ocher, charcoal, and umber with so much variety that one couldn’t say exactly what single color the creature was. Blood matted some of the fur. This, the slight wind in the cooling air seemed to say, is why you came.
Kneeling, I could better see the animal’s face, and within it, set like a precious stone on dark velvet, a perfect and perfectly open eye. Dark at the center, and vast, like a universe unto itself, the rabbit’s eye appeared to shimmer in the silent air. I took to dreaming then. I thought of kings of old, treasure hordes, black pearls, poison rings, wine. I mused upon my calling, on the lateness of the year, the darkness of the day, and most of all, upon the gleaming enigma of the eye.
Finally I had to stand, my knees felt so stiff. I stood and stretched, hands on my hips, staring into the canopy of branches above naked of leaves but thick with shadows. I took a few more steps down the trail and then turned back and walked a circle around the fallen rabbit before kneeling again at its side. Floating in the dusk, the eye was a jewel, a shadowy crystal, an alembic in which alien ocean waves crashed against ramparts and rocks and galaxies drifted among the eons. Far within, flickers of royal violet and midnight blue swam amid ink-black depths. And then, there it was: a thin but firm and sharp, flat twig right beside my hand, as if placed there by an accommodating spirit. I took it up, examined it to my satisfaction, and set to work.
That day was long ago. The poor excuse for a surgical instrument that the supposed wood-spirits afforded me did not serve as hoped. The work proceeded with difficulty and ended in disappointment. Nevertheless, I believe I have said I see a circular logic in such things. I know in nature there are no true divisions and all is One. Name it what you will: summons, invitation, compulsion, or call. It will come, as surely as the miracle of sudden sight to the blind.
Christopher Strath-Gordon is an artist and writer whose love of the occult, the grotesque, and the terrible has made his career a series of quests for strange horrors in literature and in life. He is the great-grandson of Dr. A.E. Strath-Gordon, an early 20th century writer and lecturer on mysticism, mythology, shamanism, ESP, and divination and founder of the Atlantean Research Society. Dr. Strath-Gordon was briefly associated with Aleister Crowley while a spy for the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS/MI6) in New York at the close of WW I. Christopher has traveled, taught, and lived throughout the U.S. and Europe before settling permanently in northern New England, a region he considers deeply haunted by the dark forces spawned and suppressed by America’s founding. He leads a secret second life as a surrealist painter and poet somewhere east of the Tasmanian Sea.
