Weirdtongue (34)
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Continued from: HERE
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Glistenberry sat, on one side, within the shade of the Tor-on-the-Hill, and beneath the sun of an over-hot British Summer, on the other. The animal zodiac was snoozing, next to invisible … it was never awake unless in rain or cold. Indeed, only a few people believed in the landscape containing or representing an animal zodiac at all. You needed to go up in a helicopter so see it plainly. And, even then, there were doubters. And people scared of flying.
When the seasonal fairs and festivals and circuses and markets came to settle with their sails upon the ocean of green and earthy-compartmented farmland – one wondered whether that was a metaphor at all but, rather, the intrinsic truth about inward voyages to the self itself. But, even in the bright sunshine, one found thoughts turning to darker visions that went above the heads of the jollifiers and holiday-makers and music-lovers and sight-seers. Rudiments of myth and melancholy.
Today, carts and wagons and tent-carriers dotted the trunk roads towards this part of Summerset, building up in volume as the traffic cycles revealed their propensity to rhythmic jamming. Together with henge-dwellers and romanies in caravans … plus ready-made canvas conveyances that were none of these vehicles but their own very special breed of transport particular to the ethos of the Glistenberry Romance.
John Cowper Powys House was, however, a dark stone building lurking quite close to the Tor area (or as the locals called it, Torus) where the scratchings of the first animal sign could be discerned in the loose contours of scrubble underfoot. An animal sign that belonged to no sane horoscope or natal chart.
It is that house to which we must later divert our attention. New, as yet unnamed, protagonists are about to open the house’s shuttered gloom and take root there – not as squatters, as such, but, rather, as budding contestants in some form of race that had not yet been defined (both in margins of eligible track for racing and the race’s rules). They had been given permission to camp out in the derelict, dark, damp house free of charge. In the sun of daytime, the drawbacks didn’t seem to matter so much. It was only at night or in gloomy weather that the darkness, dampness and dereliction crept back. A 'Big Brother' house with no audience or other ways of spying on them … except by us.
[b]'Weirdtongue' continued HERE.[/b]
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