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followed. I had no experience of this sort of prowling, but it seemed simple enough so long as the pursued made enough noise, however slight, to cover the sound of the pursuer. Of that there was little, for I kept to the soft grass in the middle of the ride and was ultra-careful where I stepped.
    It was soon plain that their destination was not the river but somewhere deep in the Forest. They stopped in an open space between the oaks where the young green bracken was thick over the brown mat of last year’s fronds. Marrin used a powerful flashlight to satisfy himself that there was no one in the immediate neighbourhood, but omitted to search behind tree trunks. It looked as if an open-air ceremony was about to begin. That did not surprise me. I had thought all along that the commune was very secular – plenty of casual discussions and meetings but, apart from the hours of meditation, no set ritual. I had expected from that druidical inner circle robes, invocations and other impressive mumbo-jumbo.
    Now I got it, and in that setting it was indeed impressive. The trumpet was not a trumpet but the torch of old times. When stuck in the ground and lit, it threw a steady, smoky red light over the proceedings, allowing me to see that Marrin was clothed in a long blue robe. He opened the casket which I had seen in the laboratory and took out the golden cauldron, lifting it high above his head by the two handles with the gesture of a priest. Its weight was obvious, and I was again convinced by its triumphant simplicity that it was ancient. While one of his seven tonsured acolytes chanted in a low voice some language that I think was old Welsh – as near as one could get to the vernacular in which British seamen and miners would have prayed to Nodens if they had no Latin – Marrin passed the cauldron to another. A third who carried a covered pot lifted the lid and poured the contents into the cauldron. A strong, intoxicating scent of herbs and honey came downwind to me. Meanwhile the remaining four stamped out a circle in the bracken with Marrin in the centre. When it was complete, one of them passed the cauldron back to Marrin across the circumference.
    The object of the rite, so far as I could guess (and since the language of gestures is universal one tends to guess right), was to propitiate or help the spirits of the dead. I don’t wonder that Marrin had called a conclave of adepts. I’m going to need quite a lot of propitiation. He did not of course mention my name. To him alone the ceremony had special meaning.
    The seven adepts appeared to see and to bless some sort of apparition in the air above the bowl. The curious thing is that I saw it myself: a diaphanous, moving figure like a pencil of mist rising from the ground. My brain of course was affected by the brew in the bowl and mistranslating the message from the eyes. I have no doubt that Marrin saw it too. He was not play-acting this time. He believed so absolutely in himself and his rite that he created the illusion for the rest of us, perhaps by telepathy and the hypnotic effect of the drug. Proof that it was illusion? First, that I wasn’t dead at all and only he thought I was. Second, that all the codswallop of solemnities could produce the desired effect on a profane, sceptical outsider, unclean ritually and in fact.
    They spent about half an hour on the In Memoriam service and returned to Broom Lodge as secretly as they had set out. I followed, in order to see what door they used in case it ever came in handy, and then walked home to my den – myself feeling a ghost wandering among trees and tracks, for on the way I did not pass man or sheep, partly due to the late hour and a slight drizzle which had started.
    Tucked up in my outside lavatory with the major’s rug over me and a good swig of his whisky inside me, I thought over the curious scene. Was such liturgy at the heart of Broom Lodge? I thought not. It was confined to the druidical drop-outs – a vulgar