I am a rational man. I know well the answer to the question “If a tree falls in the forest when no one is present to hear, does it make a sound?” Similarly, I understand that if I hear a sound and five others hear nothing, then my experience is probably traceable not to a molecular wave entering my ear canal but to some other, possibly pathological, cause. Furthermore, I understand neither the stigma attached to mental illness nor its distinction from physical illness. If my brain neurons misfire, such that I perceive a sound when no pressure wave is reaching my ears, then the cause is no less physical than that of the electric shock that follows my grasping a live wire—in my view, an action more deserving of societal opprobrium than merely “hearing things”. Consequently, when Dr Widmarsh suggested that I might be “hearing things,” I took no offence.
I was pleased to discover that Dr Widmarsh was also a rational man, although I was surprised that he agreed to go with me to Twilight Gorge to see whether he also could hear the injunctions of the nymph Echo. Why he considered it appropriate to accompany his patient there, I cannot say—perhaps youthful eagerness not to be bound by convention or by what senior members of his profession might consider good practice. We went in his car, which is a blue Audi RS3 hatchback, with a 2.5-litre turbocharged five-cylinder engine that generates about 400 brake horsepower. So, you can imagine that we arrived quickly at Twilight Gorge.
Few people visit the gorge on Tuesday mornings in February. For those without eyes to see or ears to hear, there is little to notice. The trees’ trunks are mossy and wet, their boughs dark brown, and only a few snowbells and crocuses are pushing through the soggy leaf litter underfoot. The sky is grey and often it is windy. Cold water babbles from multiple springs and in the brook below. I am from the north of the world and like it well enough, but how could poor Echo not feel lonely, bereft even, when she compares this gloomy prospect to her dry Hellenic ravines, where the warm and gentle breeze is redolent with the scent of pine and wild thyme, or to the bluff where she would sit on a boulder among evergreen oaks and gaze at the azure Aegean? Only bitter disappointment could have led her here.
Dr Widmarsh and I walked through the kissing gate and down the descending path. Rowans, birches, and hawthorns people the high ground. But it is not until the ravine floor that you feel that Twilight Gorge belongs to the trees. There, by the cold brook, are the ancient Twilight Yew and her offspring. Around them, other trees with supernatural associations—hazels, hollies, hornbeams—stand like acolytic stalagmites. Not that, as a rational man, I believe in the supernatural. All that exists, whether we understand it or not, is natural, and nature encompasses all that exists.
The county council has installed a timber humpback bridge over the brook. I reached its crown first and watched Dr Widmarsh walk towards me carefully, trying not to slip on the wet leaves.
“Where was it that you thought you heard something?” he said.
“In this exact spot,” I replied.
He nodded and smiled at me; initially, he looked into my eyes, but then his gaze flitted to my fine, bushy eyebrows, which contrast strikingly with my bald head.
“I shall kill,” I said.
“Beautiful place,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard me.
“Shhh,” I hushed at him, my right index finger on my lips.
A ripple in the air had just touched my pinnae and been funnelled into my ear canals. I felt a distinct vibration of my tympanic membranes, almost indistinguishable from the rocking of my mallei, incudes, and stapedes bones and the transit of the newly liquified wave through my cochleae to the stereocilia. Consequently, I heard the nymph’s clear voice. And in the same moment I looked up to the ridgetop.
“Did you hear?” I said to Dr Widmarsh.
“Only the wind in the tree-tops,” he said.
He constituted a sample of only one, and therefore I saw no a priori reason to believe that my auditory experience was any less valid than his. Even so, I might have given him the benefit of doubt and concluded that I might be “hearing things”—had I not seen her peek from behind a silver birch, her jet hair and violet eyes vivid against the white tree trunk. To propose that my brain might have been affected by simultaneous misfiring of both visual and auditive mechanisms seemed fanciful.
“What did she say?” he said.
She said, “You shall kill.”
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