The Dumb House Read Online Free PDF Page A

else you choose to call it, seems to me to consist of a glimpse of the world as a patterned and limited whole. Or to put it more simply, order comes from without; it is not imposed, not forced. All I wanted was to accommodate that guiding energy, to let its undercurrent work, as if it were a shadow in my body, at a physical, nerve and bone level.
    Things rarely happen by chance. That afternoon, on my drive home, I stopped at Silbury Hill to look at a new crop circle that had appeared in a field, directly to the south of the mound. Itwas a clear day; the path to the hill was narrow, overgrown in places with tall grasses and wild geraniums. I walked around the base, looking for a gap in the fence where I could get through. Then, slowly, I climbed into a new region of wind and light. It was amazing how different it was up there: swifts wheeled and turned overhead; even before I had reached the halfway point, the world below had dwindled and flattened, like the country on a map – cattle and jackdaws wandering in the grass, the cars on the road small and distant. People were sitting in twos and threes on the summit, smoking and drinking orange juice or beer. Most were New-Age travellers, but some were ordinary passers-by, who had stopped on their way to somewhere else, intrigued by the possibility of a new intelligence. One man had driven that morning from Port Talbot. He started telling me his hypothesis about the circles, a mixture of chaos theory and arcane beliefs. The figure itself was intricate and mysterious – not a circle at all, but an elaborate design, like the pattern in old Celtic jewellery or rock carvings. At the head was a large, perfect ring, surmounted by a crescent shape, like the horns of a bull, or a pagan god; to the west, this form was joined by a fine straight line to another structure, composed of four identical circles in a round, and completed by a long, incurving tail. The travellers were calling it The Scorpion.
    I was at ease there. I understood what those people wanted; they were tired of the world they had been obliged to accept, a world of facts and limits. They wanted something that was open to interpretation. Each one probably had his or her explanation of the circles, like the man from Port Talbot, but there were no certainties, there was always a space for mystery. That was probably the explanation for the fanciful or incomplete nature of their theories – it was a game they were playing, and part of the game was to avoid the factual, to flirt at the edges of the absurd.While I was there, I felt there was nothing to stop me from getting into the car and driving away, back towards the west, moving from one crop disturbance to the next, pretending I was solving the mystery, growing into it, vanishing from the world I had inhabited all my life. I could have become someone else as easily as that; maybe I could even have become the person I had suspected all along, less clearly defined, but also less contained. I could make a game of my own life, like those people I had read about in magazines – the woman who disappears on her way home from work; the man who steps out one summer morning to buy a newspaper, or a loaf of bread, and never returns. He is an ordinary man, quite sane, no known problems – or nothing serious at least. He cannot have gone far, dressed as he is in a shirt and a pair of jeans; he only has five pounds in his pocket, but nobody ever sees him again.
    That was when the idea of the experiment began to form in my mind. For the first time, I understood the possibility of making something abstract into a real event. I had no clear plan, but the sense of freedom was unexpectedly powerful. It was like a religious conversion: suddenly the hypothesis, the shadow, the distant image, had become a presence, as tangible as flesh and bone. It would have been easy to mistake this sensation for a thing of the moment, a sudden and spontaneous decision, but the idea of the