Cloud

PROLOGUE

It was in La Verdad that I came across the book.

I’d flown down there from Canada for a mining conference and had just attended a meeting that finished around midday. My walk back to the hotel, along the Avenida del Sol, wasn’t too pleasant. July’s a steamy time of the year, especially in an inland city like La Verdad, built where there used to be nothing but jungle. The sidewalks were almost empty, for by this time of day even natives of the city look for shade. My northern body was unused to the sticky heat, making it all the worse.

The sky turned suddenly black and a drenching tropical downpour began. I ducked under the awning of a used bookstore I’d noticed on my way to the meeting. According to its stencilled, fly-by-night sign, it was called the Bookstore de Mexico. From the hybrid name, I thought it might have some books in English, though in the window I saw only worn-looking paperbacks with Spanish titles.

Since I couldn’t really go anywhere else till the lashing rain let up, I went through the open door for a look around.

No one else was in there except for an old Mayan woman in her traditional dress with its geometric patterns. She was sitting near the front at a table with a blue metal cash box on it. The store behind her was narrow, not much wider than a corridor, with warped, pressed-board bookcases along the walls and filling the space between. The only lighting came from some dangling electric bulbs without shades. A number of small lizards, as still as gargoyles, were clinging to the ceiling. In spite of everything, the smell of old books made the atmosphere not unpleasant.

As I strolled through, I could see that the books were indeed nearly all paperbacks. I glanced through the pages of a few of them, trying to figure out, from my smattering of Spanish, what they might be about. Some of the books were in poor condition and contained nests of silverfish. Others looked as though they’d been nibbled by rodents of one kind or another.

From experience, I handled them all gingerly. Years before, browsing through an old book in a store in northern Australia, I felt something soft moving under my fingers. I dropped the book and from it a scorpion the size of my hand scuttled away into the shadows.

I’D BEEN IN THE Bookstore de Mexico for maybe five minutes when I noticed the sky outside was lightening and the rain was letting up — it was now barely pattering down on the awning. I started to move towards the front door.

That was when I saw some hardcover books low on a shelf. One of them in particular caught my eye. It was a thin, oversized volume that didn’t fit properly amongst the other books, and it was lying flat on top of them. I leaned over for a closer look. It seemed to have an English title, so I lifted it out for a quick inspection.

The book gave off a musty smell. The print on the spine was of faded gold, so even close up all I could read was part of the title: The — dian Cloud. The cover was made of brown leather and the pages were so big and thick it was hard to separate them. There weren’t many of them — maybe a hundred, blotched with mildew and dampness. But I did manage to pry them apart at the title page:

Duncairn!

Seeing that name again so unexpectedly here, in another hemisphere, took my breath away. Duncairn was a little town in the Uplands of Scotland where I’d stayed for a brief time when I was a young man. Something had happened to me there that changed the whole trajectory of my life. It was a thing I’d never been able to forget. Or understand.

WITHOUT TRYING TO pry open any more of the pages of the old book, I took it over to the Mayan woman at her table. I wasn’t all that interested in what this “singular occurrence” might be that had taken place in Duncairn. But that familiar name made me want to have the book. I asked the woman for a price.

Her long hair, streaked with grey, was tied back. Her eyes were brown and unreadable.

“Dos mil pesos,” she said without blinking.

The price was ridiculous and probably meant for haggling over. But I paid her what she asked and she put the money in her metal box. She slid the book into a plastic bag and handed it to me in silence.

I thanked her for the shelter.

She nodded slightly, though I’m not sure she’d any idea what I’d said.

I LEFT THE Bookstore de Mexico and picked my way amongst the steaming puddles along the Avenida Del Sol. When I eventually got back to my hotel room, I settled down on the vinyl armchair with the book. Even the air conditioning couldn’t quite conquer the stink of mildew that arose from it. I lingered again over the title page, marvelling at the coincidence of seeing that name, Duncairn, and thinking back with a mixture of sadness and bitterness to my time there.

Then, carefully separating the thick, oversized pages, I began reading.

THE OBSIDIAN CLOUD seemed to be a factual account of what we’d nowadays call a “weather event.”

It began on a windy July morning. Just after ten o’clock, the wind shunted a wedge of low, dark clouds from over the North Sea onto the Scottish mainland. By the time the clouds reached the hills of the Southern Uplands, it was early afternoon and a particular grouping of them had melded together so smoothly that it had become just one very big cloud with a black underbelly.

At two o’clock, the wind died completely and the black cloud stalled directly over the high valley where the little town of Duncairn sits. The sky above the town, from hilltop to hilltop, north, south, east, and west, was so black and so smooth it resembled a mirror of polished obsidian, reflecting all the countryside beneath. Astonishingly, Duncairn itself was visible up there, with everything inverted: its streets and square, church and spire, surrounding fields and cottages, even the streams that would become the River Ayr worming their way down the hillsides and valleys.

Numerous reliable eyewitness accounts of the occurrence were given by those who lived in and around Duncairn, amongst them a greengrocer, the town clerk, a kiln operator, a tailor, a brewer, an apothecary’s assistant, the town constable, the lawyer, and even an itinerant dentist who was in the town on his quarterly visit. They all signed their names on affidavits.

The black cloud was so low-lying that some of those with acute eyesight swore they could make out their own tiny reflections up there, looking back down at them. “I could see my goodman rounding up the sheep in the east pasture,” the wife of a local farmer reported. “I could even see myself at the door of the cottage, and my cat Puddock sitting on my shoulder.”

Two lovers lying in a bracken-filled cranny high amongst the hills got quite a shock at seeing their activities reflected in the sky above them. They were willing to state what they’d seen but, understandably, since they were each married to someone else, asked not to be named.

One of the eyewitnesses, Dr. Thracy de Ware, a well-known naturalist and astronomer, added scientific weight to the testimony. He happened to be travelling in the Uplands that day, engaged in research. When the black mass approached overhead, he saw squadrons of panic-stricken birds darting for cover in the hedgerows and woodlots: they perched in the thousands in the boughs, motionless and silent. The mirroring effect of the cloud itself inspired de Ware to a rather poetic-sounding comment: “Through that vision I comprehended that our tiny, rotund earth, the merest particle in the great silent reel of the firmament, is also a garden of the most profound beauty.”

After an hour or so, the inhabitants of Duncairn were already getting so used to the phenomenon overhead that they returned to doing what they’d been doing before the cloud arrived. The lawyer went back to writing his writs, the kiln operator to baking his clay pottery, the brewer to stirring his vats of frothy, strongsmelling Upland beer, the various farmers to hoeing their rows of beets and potatoes, and the housewives to preparing the thick, chewy kale soup, as usual, for dinner. The children “resumed their childish games, playing peever and ring-around-the-rosy, with scarcely a glance at the strange sight above them, as though it were an everyday event.”

As it turned out, the phenomenon was about to end. The account concludes in this way: “The kirk belfry chimed the hour of three, the wind began to gust with unwonted violence, black hailstones crashed down on Duncairn, and on the faces of the few brave souls who looked up. Others, from the shelter of their abodes, witnessed the final dissolution of that obsidian mirror in the skies. The black hail turned to black rain that ran like ink down the gutters of Duncairn then turned into plain water. By five minutes after three, the rain had ceased and the Upland sky had returned to its wonted grey aspect.”

A mottled blank page was followed by a section entitled “Appendix.” It was only a few pages long.

AS I SAT THERE in that uncomfortable chair in my hotel room in La Verdad, I felt puzzled by what I’d read. I knew The Obsidian Cloud must surely be fiction. Yet it was all done in that factual way, with not the slightest hint of irony, or parody, or any of the usual signs to indicate it was made up. Since the author was a clergyman — the Rev. K. Macbane — I wondered if it was meant to be some kind of spiritual or religious parable. If so, its meaning wasn’t at all clear to me.

I got up out of my chair for a moment to clear my head and went over to the window to check the aftermath of the rainstorm. The Mexican sky was now a clear, killing blue, not a cloud to be seen. The streets and sidewalks below my window already looked bone-dry. If I hadn’t been out in it an hour ago, I’d never have known there’d even been a storm.

Such a transformation in a subtropical climate wasn’t miraculous. It was a daily, commonplace phenomenon in the rainy season and easy to understand. Certainly, it was quite unlike the book’s “obsidian cloud.”

So I went back to my chair and began reading again. Maybe the Appendix would give me some indication of what was going on.

MACBANE OPENS THE Appendix with a significant confession: he himself did not see the phenomenon. He was “acting only as an historian,” relying exclusively on the eyewitness accounts: “I have faithfully recorded those things that were told to me and leave the reader to pass judgment on their credibility.” In fact this Appendix was needed because of “two new testimonies” about the phenomenon that had only come to his notice some weeks after the main text had gone to the printer. Like any historian, he felt “an obligation to the complete truth” and was passing along this latest information.

The first testimony had come from the provost of the little mining village of Glenmuir, a few miles east of Duncairn. There, the four children of the Mitchell family — two boys and two girls — were staring up at the black cloud. All at once, so their horrified mother told the provost, their eyes burst, making little popping noises that she likened to “soup bubbling on the hob.” A moment after that, each child vomited forth a stream of blood and fell down, quite dead. The provost himself could attest to the emptiness of the eye sockets of the four children where they had been laid out on the floor of the woman’s house.

Gruesome though that first testimony was, the second really caught my attention. It was an extract from the journal of a local poet, Meg Millar, about her various inspirational rambles in the Uplands. She records that on the day of the phenomenon, she was halfway up the Cairn Table, the highest hill in the region, collecting the little yellow saxifrages which grow only on the southwest side. She was thus a thousand feet higher than anyone down in the valley when the cloud stopped overhead, and thus had the closest view. “I at first believed the cloud was reflecting the earth beneath. But then my own eyes revealed something other. What I beheld was not this world but another planet slowly whirling its way past. The inhabitants were staring right at me, their eyes glittering red in such a way as I have never before seen and never wish to see again. Their arms were stretched out as if to seize me if only they could come near enough. I left my precious saxifrages where they were and scrambled like a mountain goat down the Cairn Table into Duncairn.”

Meg Millar’s observations, if true, were certainly astonishing enough. But for me, the very sight of her name stirred up other memories of Duncairn. When I was there, I’d been given one of her books. The gift of it would turn out to be an ill omen, though I was too innocent to understand that at the time.

After these final testimonies, the Appendix concludes with a personal reflection by Macbane himself. His response to everything he’d heard about the strange matter of the obsidian cloud seemed to me so full of common sense, I quote it here in full:

As a rational man, my first inclination is to dismiss the story of the obsidian cloud over Duncairn as yet another instance of mass delusion, such as the many Apparitions of the Virgin, or bleeding trees, which the more superstitious of human beings have allowed to be imposed upon them, or have imposed upon themselves, from the Dark Ages up to this very day.

Yet, as to this black cloud, I cannot help but wonder

at the many reports from persons still living, with no trace of any mischievous collaboration or apparent motive for perpetrating a deception upon the gullible.

I have, in consequence, thought it best in this book merely to compile their attestations, without passing judgment. For it is a truism that we who live now in a changeable and perplexing world are like ancient Archimedes: we lack any stable ground from which to wedge apart the illusory and the real. Perhaps some future scholar looking upon this history of the obsidian cloud may be able, with a more justified confidence than I now possess, to distinguish the one from the other.

A FEW DAYS FOLLOWING the discovery of The Obsidian Cloud, my business was over and I flew back to Ontario with the book in my bag. I was going to find out what I could about it when I got home to Camberloo.

And indeed, once I’d settled back into my routine, I spent a few hours in the local university library leafing through encyclopedias and literary histories, thinking I was bound to come across some reference to such an extraordinary piece of work. But I could find absolutely nothing on The Obsidian Cloud, or on any comparable natural phenomenon, or on the author, Macbane.

I soon realized I didn’t really know what I was doing, and that this kind of research would be much better carried out by an expert.

Someone knowledgeable in these matters was even more logical.

“Don’t ask just any old expert,” he said to me. “Why not a Scottish expert? After all, Scotland was where the incident was supposed to have happened and where the book was published.”

So I ended up phoning the National Cultural Centre in Glasgow and managed to talk to the rare books curator. After listening to my request for help (I hinted I’d be sending a substantial cheque to support the centre’s efforts), he asked me a few brief questions about myself and about how I came into possession of the book. He then asked me to mail it to him so that he could examine it and see whether it merited any kind of serious research. He’d be in touch with me when and if he found anything of note to report.

It would be fair to say he didn’t sound very enthusiastic.

THAT WAS THAT — for the moment — so far as my own efforts at trying to find out something about The Obsidian Cloud were concerned. Coming across it in the Bookstore de Mexico was the highlight of that trip. Like any book lover, I was curious to know whether there was even a grain of factuality behind it.

If I’d been a credulous man, I might almost have believed that The Obsidian Cloud had singled me out, lured me into that bookstore to seek shelter from the tropical downpour, so that I might discover it and attempt to resolve its mysteries.

I wasn’t that credulous. But my heart really did leap at the unexpected sight, in such an alien setting, of that familiar name— Duncairn — and with it, the recollection, for the thousandth time, of a thing that happened to me in that little Upland town when I was barely twenty-one. Comparing that boy with the man I’ve since become is always disorienting for me — as it must be for most people thinking back to when they were young — like watching two movies overlap in some dizzying way. But I still feel a great sympathy for that earlier version of myself, who spent only a few ecstatic months in the little town, then slipped away on the train at dawn one foggy morning, broken-hearted and mystified.

I’d told the curator that after graduating from Glasgow University I’d lived in Duncairn a short time and that I’d travelled quite a bit around the world since. I didn’t confess to him that I sometimes felt the ups and downs of my life were just about as baffling as the connection between dreams and reality. That may have been what caused me to react to this particular book in such an intimate way — as though the book and I were, somehow, intertwined. Isn’t that the way it is for all readers, when it comes to certain books? But I certainly hadn’t the slightest notion that in attempting to solve the riddles The Obsidian Cloud presented, I’d find the answer to the great mystery in my own life.