The Testament of Gideon Mack Read online

  ‘And what did he say?’ I asked.

  ‘“I didn’t make a mistake. It was definitely him.” So I said, “Then you saw a ghost.”’

  ‘And he said?’

  ‘He didn’t say anything for a while. I said, “Dr Tanner, are you still there?” “Yes,” he says, “I am. I’m thinking.” “What are you thinking?” I asked. “I’m thinking I’m going to go and pour myself a large whisky,” he says. And then he hung up. So much for breaking the ice. He wouldn’t pick the phone up again. I just got his answer-machine after that.’

  ‘You spooked him,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Harry said. ‘Aye, maybe. Something did anyway. He had no reason to lie. I think he saw somebody. He sounded pretty shaken. I don’t blame him for heading for the whisky.’

  Dr Tanner might have been a brilliant historian, but he didn’t sound to me like a very reliable witness. In fact, I said, the whole thing seemed a bit far-fetched. That, Harry said, was why he had contacted me. ‘You’re into ghosts and mysteries and all that stuff.’

  I felt obliged to correct him. ‘I publish books on “all that stuff”,’ I said. ‘That doesn’t mean I believe in it.’

  ‘Neither did Gideon Mack,’ Harry said, ‘until the stone appeared in the woods.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ I said. ‘The stone in the woods is where it all starts, and from there we move on to the Devil in the cave. Far-fetched, you see. Maybe Mack was just mad and that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Harry said, ‘but that’s no argument against publishing his memoir. There are lots of crazy people out there who’ll love it.’

  I asked Harry why he had sent the document to me. He said he owed me a favour, and I said he didn’t, and he said all right, but now that I had it, what was I going to do with it? I said I would think about it.

  I heard his smoker’s laugh down the line, and he proceeded to give me several reasons why I should publish Gideon Mack’s work. None of them, I should say, reflected well on his understanding of the higher motives of a reputable publisher such as myself. He jocularly suggested that I was imagining a full-page review in Life and Work, the magazine of the Church of Scotland. When I denied this he said that he thought it might become a ‘cult best-seller’, and when I again expressed doubts he said that at least it would be guaranteed lots of sales in and around Monimaskit. ‘It’s probably the biggest thing that’s happened there for a hundred years,’ he said. ‘Their minister wandering off to die in the frozen wastes after chatting with Auld Nick? Plus all the other stuff he was up to? It’ll go like snow off a dyke. Everybody loves a scandal.’

  He had a point: everybody, including any publisher worth his salt, does love a scandal. But that same thought prompted another concern.

  ‘What if someone sues me?’ I said. ‘There’s some fairly hot stuff in there if it’s not true.’

  ‘True?’ Harry said. ‘Are you kidding me? Do you think the Devil’s going to set his lawyers on to you? The Devil’s advocates,’ he laughed.

  ‘Very good, Harry,’ I said. ‘I mean what he says about real people. Real people still living in Monimaskit.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Harry said, ‘you live with the threat of being sued every day. You put information out there, knowing that some of it might come back and bite you. Can they sue you for printing the words of a dead man?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ll need to ask my lawyer.’

  ‘You’ve got the manuscript, or a copy of it: there’s no doubt that Mack wrote it. My understanding is that you can’t libel the dead.’

  ‘It’s not the dead that bother me,’ I said. ‘Sure, you can’t libel the dead, and you might not be able to sue them for libel, but I bet you can sue their publisher.’

  Harry said, ‘Who are you thinking about?’

  ‘The Moffats,’ I said. ‘Elsie Moffat, specifically.’

  ‘There’s been plenty about her in the papers already. I haven’t seen her sue anybody. I wouldn’t worry about it.’

  But I did worry. Those words of old Sir Walter were up on the wall just a few feet from me. And then there was Gideon Mack’s estate. Although I didn’t then know if his mother was still alive, there would surely be an estate, with all the possible complications that entailed.

  ‘Harry,’ I said, ‘if I go ahead with this, will you do something for me? I’ll pay you, of course. Cover all your costs.’

  ‘What is it?’ he said.

  ‘Will you go to Monimaskit and talk to people? Talk to John and Elsie Moffat. Ask them if they thought he was insane. He was their friend, after all. Talk to other people. Talk to Lorna Sprott. Find out what’s true and what isn’t.’

  Now it was Harry who hesitated. ‘It’s a bit out of my territory,’ he said. ‘My geographical territory, I mean.’

  ‘It needs to be done if I’m to publish,’ I said.

  ‘Why don’t you do it?’ he asked.

  ‘You’re the journalist,’ I said. ‘That’s your job. You’ll ask the right questions.’

  ‘The Moffats won’t like it,’ he said. ‘I might get something out of some of the others, but they’re the ones who really won’t like it.’

  ‘That’s why it needs to be done,’ I said. ‘They’re the crucial ones.’

  We knocked this back and forth a bit, and eventually Harry agreed to go to Monimaskit. His findings are recorded in the epilogue at the end of this book, which is the right place for them. All that is left for me to do here is to present this strange and original document, which I have taken the liberty of entitling The Testament of Gideon Mack. This is – almost – my only interference with the actual text. Except for one or two explanatory footnotes I offer no remarks on its contents, and in nearly every other way it remains exactly as it was written by its author. I make no additions, alterations or deletions other than those insisted upon by my legal advisers, and leave every reader to judge it for him or herself.

  Patrick Walker

  Edinburgh, June 2005

  The Testament of Gideon Mack

  ‘And they were offended in him. But Jesus said unto them, A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house.’

  Matthew 13:57

  ‘The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head.’

  Jonah 2:5

  ‘I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals, pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy notions on these subjects… Heaven have Mercy on us all – Presbyterians and Pagans alike – for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.’

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  I

  When I was a child I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: yet I was already, in so many ways, the man I would become. I think back on how cold I was, even then. It is hard to recall, now that I burn with this dry, feverish fire, but cold I certainly was. There was ice built around my heart, years of it. How could it have been otherwise? The manse at Ochtermill saw to that.

  I have walked and run through this world pretending emotions rather than feeling them. Oh, I could feel pain, physical pain, but I had to imagine joy, sorrow, anger. As for love, I didn’t know what it meant. But I learned early to keep myself well disguised. To the world at large I was just Gideon Mack, a dutiful wee boy growing in the shadow of his father and of the Kirk.

  As that wee boy I was taught that, solitary though I might be, I was never alone. Always there was one who walked beside me. I could not see him, but he was there, constant at my side. I wanted to know him, to love and be loved by him, but he did not reveal himself. He frightened me. I had neither the courage to reject him nor the capacity to embrace him.

  This is the hard lesson of my life: love is not in us from the beginning, like an instinct; love is no more original to human beings than sin. Like sin, it has to
be learned.

  Then I put away childish things, and for years I thought I saw with the clarity of reason. I did not believe in anything I could not see. I mocked at shadows and sprites. That constant companion was not there at all: I did not believe in him, and he did not reveal himself to me. Yet, through circumstances and through choice, I was to become his servant, a minister of religion. How ironic this is, and yet how natural, as if the path were laid out for me from birth, and though I wandered a little from it, distracted or deluded here and there, yet I was always bound to return to it again.

  And all the while this fire was burning deep inside me. I kept it battened down, the door of the furnace tightly shut, because that seemed necessary in order to get through life. I never savoured life for what it was: I only wanted to get to the next stage of it. I wish now I’d taken a little more time, but it is too late for such regrets. I was like the child in the cinema whose chief anticipation lies not in the film but in wondering what he will do after it is over; I was the reader who hurries through a 500-page novel not to see what will happen but simply to get to the end. And now, despite everything, I am there, and for this I must thank that other companion, in whom also I did not believe, but who has shown me a way through the shadows and beyond the shadows.

  I have not preached for weeks, yet I am full of texts. If I am a prophet then I have yet to be heard. If I am Jonah, then the fish has vomited me out but nobody believes where I have been: nobody except the one who saved me from the belly of hell. Who am I? I am Gideon Mack, time-server, charlatan, hypocrite, God’s grovelling apologist; the man who saw the Stone, the man that was drowned and that the waters gave back, the mad minister who met with the Devil and lived to tell the tale. And hence my third, non-Scriptural text, for what is religion if not a kind of madness, and what is madness without a touch of religion? And yet there is peace and sanctuary in religion too – it is the asylum to which all poor crazed sinners may come at last, the door which will always open to us if we can only find the courage to knock.

  Few suspected it, but all my life was a lie from the age of nine (when, through deceit, I almost succeeded in killing my father); all my words were spoken with the tongue of a serpent, and what love I gave or felt came from a dissembling heart. Then I saw the Stone, and nothing was the same again. This is my testimony. Read it and believe it, or believe it not. You may judge me a liar, a cheat, a madman, I do not care. I am beyond questions of probity or sanity now. I am at the gates of the realm of knowledge, and one day soon I will pass through them.

  II

  A misty Saturday afternoon in early January, cold heart of the winter, the start of this year of revelation. I am running through Keldo Woods on the forestry workers’ track, my mind tuned to the clean sound of my breathing and the slap of my trainers’ soles as they crack frost-veined dubs and spatter icy mud up my shins. I turn off the track and on to a narrow footpath that climbs slightly as it winds through the trees. After a few hundred yards it levels out, then divides in two. I go left, then at another fork left again. (I remember all this as clearly as if I had it on film. In fact, sitting by the fire, remembering, is a little like watching a film.) By now I am deep in the woods, where few people venture, but there comes an open area where the tall pines give way to tummocks of coarse grass and thick, springy moss-cushions that turn green in summer but are frosted and brown on this wintry day. And there it is. To the right of the path, in the middle of this space, a stone, looming in the mist like a great tooth in a mouth full of smoke. It brings me to a sudden and astonished halt.

  I remember my breath coming in hard puffs punched into the darkening air. The sweat began to run off my brow, stinging my eyes, obscuring my vision. I lifted the front of my sweatshirt and wiped my face and head on it, closed my eyes and pictured what I imagined I’d seen. Then I looked again. Twenty yards away, it was still there.

  I stared at it intensely. (Did I have some subconscious notion that this might make it vanish, or move, or speak, or make me come to my senses? I have no idea. Perhaps I just didn’t know what else to do.) Anyway, I stared for a long time, and the stone, not surprisingly, was quite impassive to my stare.

  I stepped off the path and crunched over the spongy, ice-laced ground to where the stone stood. It rose three feet taller than me, a lichen-blotched molar, a giant’s blunt pencil, a solitary petrified stob. I know very little about rocks; I knew even less then. I couldn’t have said with any confidence what it was, except that it wasn’t sandstone, the predominant rock of this area. (Later, I identified it from a geology text book as being, probably, metamorphic gneiss.) It was grey, mostly, but with streaks of other shades, and spotted with dots of dull glassiness. Centuries of rain and wind, it seemed, had in some places smoothed and in others wrinkled the surfaces. It looked as if it were made up of layers of stone melted and fused one on top of another, a fossilised ice-lolly with its stick long since rotted away. It looked as if it had been there for ever.

  But it hadn’t been there two days earlier, when I’d come that way for the first run of the year. I was sure of it. The first day and the first run. For fourteen years I’d been running the byways of the countryside around Monimaskit; I reckoned I knew them as well as anyone. It wasn’t one of my regular routes – in fact, when I’d run it on the Thursday, for the first time in months, it was like renewing a forgotten acquaintance, which was why I’d come again so soon – but I’d done it often enough to know that there’d not been a stone there before. There had never been a stone there. I was sure of it.

  I put out my hand and, tentatively, as if expecting an electric shock, let the backs of my fingers brush over the cold surface. Then I pressed my palm against it, leaning into it the way I did against the door-jamb when warming up, to stretch the muscles in the backs of my legs. What was I expecting? That it would shift a little, maybe even topple or crumble to dust?

  It didn’t even flinch.

  III

  I went running every second or third day. I ran not as a member of a club, not in training for competitions (although I have run marathons for charity), not even to keep fit (although it had that effect), but because I enjoyed it. Yes, running filled me with joy, contentment, as nothing else did. It took me out of myself. Also, it was how I released the energy inside me: as if the fire blazing away in there was my fuel. If I went four days without a run, I grew hot and tense and felt as if my chest was about to explode. I needed to run. It was how I got the heat out of my system.

  Running made me aware both of the countryside in which I lived and of my physical self. When I set off through the streets of Monimaskit, I could feel the disapproval of some of my parishioners boring into the back of my neck – there was something just no richt about a minister in shorts, and sweating. But once out of the town I left all that behind me. I avoided traffic-heavy main roads and ran on narrow, deserted unclassifieds, farm tracks, paths that led me through woods and alongside fields and over burns. I ran along the shore, I ran up into the low hills, I ran beside the crashing of the sea on sand and shingle and I ran above the roaring of the Keldo Water as it fought through the Black Jaws on its way to that sea. I loved the idea of myself – was this vanity? – running among the shadows of trees, against the backdrop of hills, in the echo of birdsong and bellowing cows. I could run for a couple of hours at a time if I chose, barely pausing at gates or stiles, sensitive to the different noises my trainers made when I went up or down a hill, or when I moved from hard road to soft path or grass. Usually I ran in the late afternoon, the dead time between daytime appointments and evening visits and meetings, and I seldom met anybody else. A woman walking her dog, perhaps, or a couple of lads on their bikes. Sometimes the woman would recognise me and say hello. Sometimes she’d recognise me but pretend not to, embarrassed by the ministerial knees. If the boys had a clue who I was, they never let on.

  I loved that time of day in all seasons and all weathers, the bright hot stillness of summer and the dark moody dampness of winter. I loved
it for itself, but running made it more special still. Running emptied my head of work, the Kirk, the world. Difficult issues and awkward individuals were repelled by the force of my energy, and their ghosts faded into the trees. In Israel young fanatics with explosives strapped to their bodies were wiping themselves and busloads of hated strangers off the planet; insect species were being extinguished every five minutes in the Amazon forest; military coups were being bloodily launched in Africa; dams were being built in China, making tens of thousands homeless; but in Keldo Woods, alone and immune and having slipped his clerical collar, Gideon Mack was running. Sometimes a line from a song or a hymn got trapped in my head and I ran to its rhythm, half-enjoying it and half-annoyed by it. Phrases from the Scriptures that became strange and mantra-like in the repetition: Nec tamen consumebatur; ‘The Lord is with thee, thou mighty man of valour’; MENE, MENE, TEKEL UPHARSIN. Sometimes I heard my own voice in there, bits of poems I’d read, things I wished I’d said at the right moment, heroic and true things I might say in the future – nothing, as it’s turned out, remotely connected with what I would actually say. Sometimes I saw myself as I do now – as if in a film, splashing through puddles to a soundtrack by Vangelis: when I run I feel God’s pleasure. But that was somebody else: Eric Liddell, the Flying Scotsman, a missionary, a kind of saint. The loneliness of the longdistance runner: phrases like that would enter my head and bounce around in there as I ran; but that was someone else again, a Borstal boy, a figure of fiction. I was somewhere in between – an escapee from my professional hypocrisy, a minister off the leash, a creature, neither wholly real nor wholly imagined, hurrying through an ancient landscape. Yes, even then I suspected what I now know to be true: that life itself is not wholly real. Existence is one thing, life quite another: it is the ghost that haunts existence, the spirit that animates it. Running, whether in the rain or sun, felt like life.