Titus Awakes

3

Sacrifice. Behold

LIGHT FLOODED THE barn. There were sounds outside. Sounds that Titus began to discern as voices, although still distant. Titus felt half-mad from a slumber so numbed by cold, the sound of bells pierced his ears.

He could not speak.

He could not make out what lay some yards away from him; was it a hummock or a being?

The bells continued to plague him, making sounds he should understand, but could not.

Through his swollen lids he saw shapes moving. Hidden behind his frozen swaddling, which was beginning to drip, he could hear again what he remembered as voices. Yet the language was not what he could understand as language. Noises – and in his mind they were like the sound a mother lulls her child to sleep with.

The sounds were still distant and the hummock rose, but not of its own volition. A huge shape stood over him. He was insulated, yet engulfed. He was in a dream and he was not in a dream. He felt a trickle of water make its way into a stomach aching for sustenance, but fearful.

If he had had words with which to think he would have said to himself: ‘That is a dog, and those other shapes are men.’ Without words he understood faintly what he saw, as a feeble light made its way across the carnage to where he lay, he felt his body being lifted with the gentleness of a lepidopterist pinning his captured beauty to a board, before enclosing it in its glass case.

Voices came and went like the tides; no rough seas here, but rhythmic and peaceful. He knew that such peace might never be his again. His thoughts came and went with the tides and he floated, a piece of flotsam back and forth, into voices and out again.

The cargo that had been jettisoned in his barn was gone. Now, he – Titus – was going to follow.

There was a light, not of this world: pink, rosy, gleaming, brilliant. There was still the murmur of voices.

No roughness. Sometimes a gliding, and sometimes a sliding, and the uncanny sound of a mountain horn, not a warning as that of a horn in a sea mist.

It was to occur to him, very much later, that he was the cause of danger to the intrepid men with their mountain dog, and it was only then that he could begin to think of repayment. But how?

* * * * *

HE OPENED HIS eyes and felt himself. His legs and arms were there. He could see and, as he shouted, he knew he could hear. He could make noises, and he repeated to himself the names of the people who had been his childhood, and those who had been his youth, and those who had come and gone again like ghosts in his young manhood. He called up the rooms he had known – he counted the dead. He called and called for his sister Fuchsia, and as he slowly held out his arms and found an emptiness, he knew that he was alive.

‘I am awake,’ he shouted. ‘I am Titus Groan – where am I?’

An old woman swam into his vision. She smiled and shook her head. She pointed her finger to the further corner of the room.

He saw a shape. He thought, perhaps I cannot see, or what I see is not there. He looked again. This time there was a little more comprehension. It was the face of a woman. He called out, ‘Fuchsia?’

His violet eyes sought out the shape across the room. Something came into focus, but what it was he could no longer tell. There was an echo of something familiar, but it was hidden beneath the layers of memory as delicately poised as mille-feuilles. He dared not enquire yet into the mystery, which lay as inert as he himself.

The return of sentience is so slow and so painful that there are those who wish to delay it, and others who wish it never to return, but Titus had, for all the pains he had endured in his own home and out of it, clung to life.