What Manner of Man: Chapter 23 🦇

Starting to notice some things around here (sky is blue, water is wet, etc.)

• Scattering thank-yous like rose petals at the feet of my patrons, whose life-giving support flows through the veins of What Manner of Man. 🥀

• You descend upon me in floods of joy, pyroclastic flows of love, grain silo entrapments of delight.

• (If you noticed the typo in the subtitle of last week’s chapter — shh.)

JOURNAL ENTRY

Undated.

I’m grateful to Danny and Sylvia for lending me these sheets of writing paper, since it seems that the practice of regular journaling has become necessary to me. Due to the unplanned nature of my departure from Whithern Hall, I have washed up on their doorstep this time with nothing but the clothes on my back (hardly even that, in fact — for, now I call it to mind, I do not know quite what has become of my tattered cassock.)

How strange it is to be back here. St Silvan’s Head seems at once familiar and profoundly changed (though how much of the change is in the village, and how much within myself, I cannot tell.)

The atmosphere of contented reserve that colours all my memories of this place is gone; replaced with a tense foreboding that is quite as palpable. In spite of the green hills and the cloudless sky, the whole visible world seems dimly veiled. The sun shines without warmth or brilliance. The villagers have a hunted look; seeming to hold themselves in readiness for some fearful reckoning. I cannot help but feel responsible, and it pains me to look on them. They glare and shy away from me, as they did not before. Can I blame them? Death is here; a heaviness in the air that stifles unto suffocation. Even Turnip, once so friendly, now bristles at my approach.

I happened upon the creature napping this evening at the door of the boathouse. He stirred as I approached, lifting his biscuit-coloured head to blink at me with luminous eyes. I reached down to stroke him and he hissed violently before darting off into the brush. I’m sure he would have sunk his teeth into me if I had been at all slower. It has all been very unsettling.

JOURNAL ENTRY

Undated.

It seems that some barrier between myself and Sylvia has lifted. This morning she presented me with my cassock which, unbeknownst to me, she had cleaned and mended. The white collar-band itself seems not to have been on my person when Danny found me, and I do not regret its loss.

From the corner, Danny looked on in silence, pipe between her teeth. I held the garment in my arms, turning it over as if seeing it for the first time. In the place where it was torn across the breast there is now a braid of scarlet embroidery. Sylvia has transformed the damage into something quite beautiful. I put it on at once, unbuttoned, over my borrowed clothes. I am more than pleased by the effect. It may no longer be fit for worship but it makes a very handsome garment.

There are things in St Silvan’s Head that I remember encountering with a terror I can scarcely now comprehend, and other things I saw but did not observe. Simply — the people of this island give and take love without regard for regard for mores or proprieties. They have no preconceptions. The concept of sexual deviance seems quite irrelevant to them.

Much that I was once blind to has become transparent as glass to me. In observing some trivial gesture of affection, the true nature of Danny’s and Sylvia’s relationship was instantly borne in upon me. How obvious it seems to me now! Obvious — and natural.

I am fortunate to have found myself in such a place surrounded by men and women who live unoppressed by fear of a tyrannical god and beyond the reach of narrow-minded laws. They do not seem at all aware of the kind of reprisal their actions would face on the mainland — the threat of prison or hard labour, social ostracism and professional death. If they can be so unencumbered, then perhaps so can I.

Long-ingrained instinct cries out that all the present misery is due to the failure of my mission, but I know too well that there was no other possible result I could have achieved. I held back, restrained my heart from the harshness and self-recrimination I have come to believe is beneath me, and held myself quiet and still. In the space that opened within me, I found room to observe.

I only wish this newfound clarity could aid me in answering the questions that seem to press upon me on every side. There is something here that even Sylvia does not understand; some mystery at the heart of this strange curse. I refuse to accept that Alistair is simply doomed, and that my death would merely postpone the inevitable.

I sensed that there was something, by what power I did not know, that broke momentarily free of the rules and strictures by which we seemed to be bound. The storm that swept over us, the touch that burned Alistair’s hand, these were the outward signs of some unknown influence that lay beyond Sylvia’s reckoning. It may, of course, be beyond of mine as well. Spiritual and divine influences from a cosmology utterly different from that of the Church should not seem as plausible, even natural, as they do to me now. There is some influence at work here — neither good nor ill but simply what is — which sets the tune to which we all must dance.

Yet — though the spiritual connection between myself and the Church has been broken beyond repair, am I not still an ordained minister? My primary concern is with how to do the most possible good in my present circumstances. There is more to my role than belief, it is not something that can be taken on and off as easily as the collar itself. It is what I am, it guides my every action. Is there enough within to survive, once all of that is stripped away? If I am still a priest, then what do I serve? Certainly not the God I have served heretofore.

I believe I must go through a sort of resurrection. That boy of my youth had capacities that I, as a grown man, can only recall with longing. Perhaps it was my cowardice itself, my fear of my own nature, that led to Monty’s death. Since that day, I have allowed this fear to overtake my life. Never again.

JOURNAL ENTRY

Undated.

I woke with a start in the early hours of the morning, today, when the sky had only just begun to brighten. I should have written the dream down then, when its cobweb gossamer had not yet been disturbed by the activity of my mind. I will recount it as best I can, though I retain only shadows.

I was running and climbing along a mossy path, spurred forward by some urgent sense that I must keep some appointment. Were there marble columns around me? Or is that something I have inserted in the wanderings of my waking mind?

I feel a strange urge to return to the place that Lord Vane brought me in the early spring, the ruins of that Roman temple on the far side of the island. Perhaps it is merely a longing to return to a time when the future did not seem so black and my relations with Alistair were simpler, but I cannot shake that sense of another presence with me. I am not sure what to make of it.

P.S. FROM 2024:

Hello! 👋 What you’re reading is a draft version of What Manner of Man. This section of the book has been completely rewritten! This chapter has been re-imagined from the ground up and combined with Victor’s arrival at Danny and Sylvia’s house, so it sort of no longer exists (though all major events contained within still happen.) The whole section is overall a lot tighter.

(You can get the complete, edited and expanded novel DRM-free on Itch.io or at the retailer of your choice.)

The official Substack team is absolutely never going to promote my newsletter for perfectly obvious reasons. I see no reason, therefore, to be polite. Isn’t the pace at which this thing is deteriorating incredible? Every week something else. It’s like they’re falling over themselves to make both mobile and desktop as unusable as possible. All hail King Marl, etc.

-St John

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