Read Online In Too Deep by Billy O'Callaghan - Free Book Online

technical or scientific term ‘Syzygy’; I had no idea what such a word actually meant, but standing in my yard, feeling the mystery of the day unfold around me, I found myself speaking it aloud over and over and delighted in its buzzing cadence and jagged lack of vowels. ‘Eclipse’ explained what was happening but ‘Syzygy’ went closer to truly defining this imminent celestial alchemy. I savoured the word and sang it in between long whistling breaths, until a little after half past two, at which point the thin darkness of a false night had more fully fallen.
    Once it started, the eclipse quickly engulfed the sun. As such, there was nothing to see, not with the bank of cloud obliterating the magic, but then there was no real need to see. Over the next few minutes, the light was gradually sucked out of the day, and the air tingled. Whatever was happening kicked awake some sort of primal instinct, in me just as much as in the animals, and I made a conscious effort to focus on the details, on the reaction of the dogs, now whimpering and circling one another in a frenzy of confusion, on the bleached and then slowly dusky hue that overtook the colours of the world, on the rise in my own pulse rate and the stirring of something in my stomach that wasn’t fear exactly, but wasn’t so far off that either. The dying day, plunging from its apex, carried a genuine sense of event, marking this out as an occurrence of significant magnitude and, really, one quite beyond comprehension.
    The ancients would have been mesmerised. They’d have been on their knees, worshipping and wailing, howling as the animals howled now, and those who had dared to look, the hooded druids or those of the warrior class, would have witnessed their godly sun devoured by a creeping blackness, eaten down to one final flash of desperation before all was lost. It was easy enough, at least for me, to picture the scene, to bear witness in mind if not in body to the wails climbing headlong to crescendo until there was no more hope of salvation except through prayer, or prayer and promise, the divulgence of a blood sacrifice, perhaps. Nowadays the mathematicians, astronomers and astrophysicists have a way of using a slew of formulaic babble to explain away every wonder known to mankind, their numbers over numbers multiplied by letters that allow their own gibberish brand of logic to prevail. But back when time was measured at different speeds, wasn’t it possible that the survival of the whole world rested on some phrase uttered either by accident or with intent, or with a single pleading word dropped in amongst the veritable throng of assurances and incantations, even a word as spine-twisted and apocryphal as ‘Syzygy’, one hyped to the very brim with witchery and import? If we are asked to believe in such-and-such a chemical or the atomic balance of water, sand or salt, why can’t we allow ourselves to believe that somewhere out in all that empty space there was and maybe still is something sufficiently godly and almighty just waiting for one word, one precious word or any word at all, to awaken its slumbering mercy? The ancients believed it, and by design or happenstance prayed the word that slowly, ever so painfully slowly, brought their sun bulging out through the darkness once again, their golden god renewed and reborn.
    Today turned out to be a day of two dawns and after a few breath-held moments of weighty darkness, the eclipse began to wane. Any affinity that we might have shared with our aeons-gone ancestors was lost as Syzygy proved to be no more than a fleeting wonder, there and then gone, a life lived and lost in the span of a heartbeat. Maybe it served its purpose, though; maybe the almighty of the universe had heard me utter the magic word and had deigned, yet again, to comply, to let the sun have another chance at life. Or maybe, as the scientists said, this was merely a natural phenomenon, a temporary