Prelude
The Wellspring is a real place. I have concealed its location.
Only one who seeks with a true heart will find it.
Part One: Strangers Sara
On either side of the river run great long gardens where houses are hidden from the casual glance by clever planting of shrubs and trees and smooth lawns run almost seamlessly into the fast flowing waters. The fields of waving wheat are long gone and no one remembers when barley was last grown in this area and most of the farmland has been eaten up by greedy housing estates. But these houses are beyond the pocket of most, with their vast gardens sloping gently to the river; many have a boat or two moored on little private jetties. One or two even have an unobtrusive boathouse, filled with expensive toys. You could probably build a small housing estate in most of these gardens, but only a fool would want to; the river is unpredictable and has risen once in recent years and lapped at the doorsteps of the houses set back least far from its encroaching floods. Unprecedented it might have been but it shook people living here and most have sandbags stored now in garages, just in case, even though those coffee- coloured waters didn’t spill over many thresholds. What has happened once can happen again, people think secretly and take out flood insurance while they still can. Since that flood, house prices here have ceased to rise at the same rate as other premium sites.
There’s one house that would catch your eye if you were to fly low along this river. It’s the closest to the water of any of these buildings, and if you’re fanciful you might even smell the remnant of the river mud left outside the back door when the flood receded. There are other smells only a psychic might sense too, but the mud and mess were hosed away long ago. Follow me now and come closer. It’s a little smaller than the other houses (some of which are mansions really), and the word modest somehow springs first to mind. If an Englishman’s home is his castle, then this castle is decidedly bijoux; solidly built, foursquare and strangely blind-looking. The windows are slightly smaller, giving the look of someone narrowing their eyes. Most of one whole wall on the south side has been removed since the flood and fitted with massive glass sliding doors. From a distance, set between the meanly sized windows on either side, this one huge window does not look at all like an eye but rather like an immense mouth, gaping wide in a scream or a yawn. It’s unsettling looking at the house like this, so let’s go inside. The occupant isn’t here, so there’s no danger of us being seen.
The whole house has an atmosphere of expectant silence; almost of brooding you might say. Some houses are like dogs and while they wait for their owners to return, they remain alert to clues like car doors and footsteps, ears pricked even in semi-sleep but it’s like this even when the occupant is here. The house is newly decorated, walls painted that shade of creamy white so beloved of builders; it’s a boring colour but it serves as a brilliant background for the masses of huge pictures that line the walls with so much colour and life that each seems a window onto a strange world beyond. Let’s take a quick tour of the house. Not much to see in the kitchen; aseptically clean and ascetically arranged, it’s a station for refuelling and nothing more. You can’t imagine a domestic goddess tolerating this for a day; it’s no frills cooking for someone who eats to live and nothing more.
There are four bedrooms, two with en-suite bathrooms, but except for one they are all empty. I mean empty. There isn’t a single item of furniture in them and the floorboards are bare of all but a little dust. The one bedroom in use contains little more than a futon with a heavy quilt, a desk lamp on the floor beside it and a heap of books. If you were to ease open the doors of the fitted wardrobe, all you’d find would be the kind of clothes you can buy from a catalogue or a supermarket. There are few bright colours, few items that would decide clearly what gender their owner is. None of them is much more than two years old. This room has no en-suite bathroom; it seems curious that the occupant should choose a room that doesn’t have one when the choice was there. The bathroom down the landing is as stringently clean as the kitchen and apart from the lack of shaving tackle, there are as few clues to the occupant’s gender here as anywhere else. The toiletries are all the kind you can buy at any supermarket and while they aren’t automatically the very cheapest available, the whole impression is they were chosen by someone who simply aims to keep clean and doesn’t require promises of eternal beauty, extra-sensory experience or designer brand names to do it. But the locked medicine cabinet, the key in the lock at all times, is testament to the power of hope beyond reason, and is a treasure trove of every potion to promise inner changes and healing. Homeopathic remedies rub shoulders with flower essences, tinctures made from soaking gemstones in spring water wait in blue glass bottles, and there’s even a hag-stone awaiting the next bath to endue the water with its healing powers.
Downstairs again and have a glance into what was once a dining room. High tech equipment, thousands of pounds worth of it stand next to packing cases and unframed canvases wrapped in sacking to protect them from knocks. There is a smell of inks and solvents here that would make you light-headed if you stood here when work was going on.
Go along the hall now to the room with the sliding doors. Normally they would stand a little ajar but now they are shut and locked. There isn’t a lot of furniture here either, but there is a computer, silent and dark now, and there is a mountain of magazines on the floor beside the computer desk. The chair is probably the most luxurious thing in the house; deeply padded and leather-covered, it would hold its occupant in a warm embrace. You would guess rightly that the occupant of this house has spent a lot of time in this chair; there are signs of wear even though the chair is a few years old and cost a lot of money to begin with. The computer isn’t brand new but it was top-of-the-range not long ago. There’s a very expensive sound system installed in the house too that has speakers in almost every room. It’s a good thing there are no neighbours nearby; some nights the music is loud enough to send most neighbours (if there were any) storming off to call the police.
You might have noticed by now the six-foot long canvas standing on a huge easel angled to catch the best of the daylight. It isn’t finished yet but it’s shaping up well. If you look closely, you will notice that the images that almost blind the eye with their vivid colours are not painted at all but rather are cut out from magazines with infinite care and patience and pasted onto this canvas. On the floor nearby is a row of boxes each containing pocket files, each labelled meticulously with what it contains. The labels are enigmatic: blue fish, green fish, shoes, metals, gems, trees (large) trees (small) leaves (red) and so on. Take one file out at random and you’ll find that each file contains images cut from magazines, classified by subject colour and size by a mind that is starting to sound somewhat obsessive if not also compulsive. You get the feeling that the artist knows pretty well what is in each and every file and spends hours each day riffling through the magazines and harvesting images, only to file them neatly away until needed.
Collages like this incomplete one cover many of the walls on the house and they’re about the only colourful thing here. Even the cover on the duvet is a dull grey. The china in the kitchen cupboards is creamy white and plain.
It’s as though all the colour in this little world has bled into the canvases alone and they hold all the life and brilliance of the mind that created them.
The late summer sunshine leaks into the room, catching the sheen on the cut-out images and making them vanish like reflections in a still pond when the sun’s rays strike it at such an angle that all you can see is the sparkle and dazzle of the sunlight on the water. You’ll have to go and study one of the finished pictures elsewhere before you have a chance of understanding what this artist is trying to convey; if you wander round and look, you’ll quickly understand that this artist has a lot to say and much of it is dark and disturbing, even while it is undeniably beautiful.
If you go back to the main room and glance around, you’ll see something else too. There isn’t a single ornament, or photo or memento anywhere to be seen. There isn’t even a lot of clutter, despite the massive amount of magazines stacked up in corners. If you want you can look at the magazines; there’s everything from wildlife magazines, gardening magazines, magazines on archaeology, others on anthropology, such classics as National Geographic, specialist magazines for pagans and shamen, and the usual women’s interest magazines as well as the high fashion glossies. Every day, new ones arrive through the letter box, thudding onto the unused welcome mat and creating a new stir in the mind of the artist who never reads much beyond captions but gazes avidly at the myriad images and reaches at once for the scissors.
By now, you’re aware that this is the home of someone very orderly but more than a little disturbed. I wouldn’t want one of the pictures on my walls, even though some are almost pretty, but I can see both the skill and the pain needed to produce them, not to mention the endless patience and planning it must demand. None of the originals is for sale but photographic canvases, somewhat smaller than the originals, sell extraordinarily well. It’s hard to be sure they’re collages at all. Some think they must be computer generated because no one could possibly actually do so much cutting and sticking, not to mention the actual planning. But as any preschool child might demonstrate, cut and pasting pictures is absorbing in the extreme and can become addictive. If our artist is anything to go by, it has become addictive. But that’s probably the very least of her problems.
Oh yes, if you hadn’t already guessed, our artist is female and right now she is sitting in her car, parked as close as she can possibly get it to the entrance to the hospital, and she’s sweating visibly about the prospect of leaving the safe confines of the car for the twenty or so yards of endless open space between there and the main door of the unit. Sara had the same problem getting from her home to the car, parked as near to her own front door as she could get it, but the anguish is cumulative. On the return journey it may take her as much as an hour before she can make herself leave the car and sprint to her own door and unlock it. At least leaving here, one of the staff may take her arm and escort her kindly to her car, knowing how hard it is for her to do this. Or maybe they just don’t want her cluttering up the lobby mentally climbing the walls until she finds the courage to leave. I wouldn’t like to speculate too deeply on the motives of others.
On this occasion, she stared at her shaking hands for ten minutes, fighting the raging panic with such tools as breath control and Rescue Remedy until the precious moment of stillness came and she could surge from the car, clutching her handbag like a buckler against her body. It wouldn’t be so bad if she didn’t know from bitter experience that this agony was the easy bit.
The waiting area with its fixed plastic chairs in neutral colours was a limbo, a no- man’s land of uncertainty and after she’d spoke briefly to the receptionist she found a chair and tried to sink into it and vanish from view. The magazines here had the crinkled, slightly greasy softness that was deeply unattractive, and they seldom had new ones to tempt her, so she stared at her shoes and tried to think of nothing. The man on the other side of the room coughed thickly and she shuddered, hoping first that he wasn’t infectious and second that he wouldn’t speak to her. But she had discovered that the waiting area here was unlike any other hospital waiting area. It was all very well saying that mental health issues were not shameful, and that one in three would suffer from such problems, but the fact remained that here, no one spoke to another patient, in case they proved to be offensively mad after all. The hospital had tried the usual piped music but that had been discontinued due to complaints. You just couldn’t please everyone after all. So the waiting area was full of the noises of people trying to be quiet; pages turning, a little cough, a little throat clearing, feet shuffling and the passing of orderlies and nurses, and distantly the sound of the door opening and closing.
The actual consultant, or whatever he was supposed to be, was short to the point of being abrupt. What made it such agony was the feeling of being a number in a queue, a nonentity, a nobody. It went pretty much the same each month.
“And how are you today?” “About the same.” “Still taking the tablets?” “Yes.”
“Still having trouble with going out?” “Yes.” “Well, you’re on the waiting list for treatment. These things take time, you know.” Considering the initial furore, it seemed absurd and insulting that the care had dwindled to this. She made the agonising effort of coming here each month and telling them what she could have told them down the phone. The psychiatric nurse was supposed to visit her once a month and was assiduous in doing that much at least, but nothing, not the tablets nor the occasional chat with a very inadequate counsellor seemed to do much. She’d stopped bothering with the counsellor when it became clear that she was herself far too disturbed by Sara’s story to be of any use. She had become like a rabbit in the headlights, mesmerised by the horror of it, dwelling on particular points as if deriving some weird thrill out of hearing the same details over and over again until Sara began to suspect that the world of counselling had its fair chair of rubber-neckers and this woman was one of them. Since she was herself paying for this experience, it became evident that she was wasting her money; she’d found that the small measure of improvement was down to following the advice in various self-help guides. It was ironic that her very minor improvements had been the very factors that had effectively shunted her off a kind of priority status. Once she had been driven to appointments by cronies or lackeys of her father, her head covered with a coat while she hyperventilated her way in the arms of her companions to and from the consultant. Now she made herself drive there alone. She knew it didn’t mean she was cured or even very much improved at all but the consultant seemed to take it as a massive step forward and had demoted her. Even in the ranks of the mentally unstable there is an undeniable hierarchy.
“If you’d agreed to go private...” her father had once said irritably but that in and of itself was a disincentive.
I will pay my way as far as I am able, she had thought but she had never said it aloud to him.
“Make an appointment on your way out,” said the consultant and she was released from her ordeal.
She made her next appointment and then looked to see if there might be anyone there who could walk her to her car. There was no one around and the last time she had asked the receptionist she had been less than polite. There was more than just panic filling her mind as she forced herself to head alone to the door; there was real anger and something like despair.
I’m never going to have a normal life again, she thought bitterly as she froze at the door, unable to push it open and go out into the bright sunlight of the car park and head home. I’m never going to do all those normal ordinary things I once did, like shopping, or go for a walk, or meet friends at a pub, or go to the library or.... I’m utterly stuck now and nothing is ever, ever going to change it. I might as well have died when Mother did.
She shoved hard at the door and with a lurching feeling in the pit of her stomach and a rushing of vertigo she launched herself out into the open, much as she might have hurled herself off the top of a tall building and ran unsteadily to her car. Inside, she didn’t cry, but simply sat there, trying to subdue her ragged breath, to still her pounding heart and stop her mind from racing into blackness. When her hands stopped shaking too badly she turned the key in the ignition and began to drive home.
She could never quite see it as home, not even when life had been relatively normal, living with her divorced mother and going to and from school with the blind oblivion of the average teenager. The stillness seemed even then to be a curse. Nothing ever happened here, no life, no joy, and no sorrow. Nothing. And then something did. She’d been asked to a party. It had never happened before. The quiet one in the class, colourless to the point of invisibility, she’d somehow been excluded from every party at primary school, either by sheer carelessness even by mothers who made it a policy of having each and every child in the class invited, or deliberately by the callous and unheeding disdain.
“Oh not her! Not boring old Sara! She’s never any fun!” The words had been said aloud, though the speaker thought she was out of hearing and had the grace to blush and look ashamed when Sara’s stricken face came into view a few seconds later as her mother escorted her through the school gates to the waiting car.
They were right, Sara the adult thought now. I am not any fun. I never will be.
She sat motionless in the car for ten minutes before a mixture of irritation and panic made her lurch from the driving seat and onto the path, firing her zapper behind her as she ran to the front door and fumbled for her keys. Back but not home. Home had vanished when her father left. His had been the personality that had filled the house with light and hope and fun and he was a stinking traitor for leaving. In her most secret and honest thoughts, she understood why he’d left. Her mother’s stifling and increasingly erratic behaviour had driven him steadily away but she knew she would never quite forgive him for leaving her with her mother and going off with his glamorous and boringly sane mistress. For there was something inherently exciting about madness, at least for the casual observer. Living with it close-up was different. The unpredictability made life like living on an earthquake fault line. You never knew when it’d just be a little tremor that rattled the cups in the cupboard, making the crystal glasses tinkle gently like bird-scarers in the garden, or when the big one was coming, making solid rock ripple and churn like boiling toffee and creating rents in the earth and reducing everything to pounded rubble. The big one had lasted almost a year and was one reason why life would never be normal again.
The other problem with madness was the ingrained belief in nearly everyone that it was somehow hereditary. In anyone else, Sara’s life might have been viewed as eccentric or Bohemian. She might even have been accepted as an artist by the loose affiliation of amateur and aspiring professionals in the area; her work was by far the most commercially successful of any of them. But that success plus the very public nature of her recent life drove an impossible barrier between her and them: both her art and her history made it impossible for an ego-ridden group to take to her. They were both afraid of her and of her work, and so they publicly despised her. It made no difference to her sales but it did isolate her still further and drove her deeper into the belief that she was fundamentally doomed to be alone and unloved.
The silence of the house as she lurched inside enfolded her like a cold cloak and she shivered and headed for the kitchen, suddenly painfully hungry. She ate dry white bread, unbuttered and as tasty as sawdust until the hunger went away and then went to her computer. She was a great lurker on many forums, reading posts and seldom ever saying anything. She checked her emails, deleted any that were not direct enquiries about sales and forwarded any that were to her father’s secretary. There would be a delay of a few days and then an email would come back saying that the picture would be collected by the parcel company on such-and-such a day and could she have it ready. The money would be in her account a few days before dispatch. She never replied to any emails that were not directly linked to sales. There were always people who wrote to her to ask her about... well, anything to do with the flood and her mother’s death and her own terrible life for that terrible year. She had read the letters and emails once, but never replied. What could you say anyway? There were also ones from people, often critics and art dealers wanting to know more. She forwarded those again to her father’s secretary who dealt with them accordingly. There had been a number of very successful exhibitions that she had not attended but had been thronged with people hoping or expecting her to be there.
I’m a freak and a sideshow but I will not be complicit in my mother’s madness and exploit the notoriety, she had told her furious father and he had been forced to accept that she would remain a recluse.
It made the interest even greater that she would not even come to her own launches. “If you’d just do one interview, they’d lose interest,” her father said pleadingly. “They wouldn’t,” she said and shut the door in his face. Alone in front of the humming computer, she felt tears burning behind her eyes,
behind her mind and she shut them both, hard and returned to her work. She trawled the internet, following trails as fine as spider webs; news stories, websites, blogs, seeking ever seeking something ill-defined and elusive, allowing shapes and images to take gradual shape in the back of her mind until the outlines became harder and unalterable. Then she would go to the blank canvas and stare at it until the outline became mentally emblazoned on the white emptiness. When the shapes were there, invisible on the canvas, she would begin to place the cut-outs, scavenged from magazines and books and newspapers, in an initial pattern, growing ever more complex and disturbing as the real picture birthed itself from deep in her mind. Today, one picture was almost complete, and new ones were forming slowly in her mind and she flitted from one website to another, following a single word or image halfway round the world and back again, beating a cyber path through the mass of information. A word took her fancy and she chased it across hours or even days of references until the chase changed and she found another quarry. It was an utterly haphazard procedure to anyone watching, but apart from phantoms like us, no one saw her as she worked. Other than Sara herself, no one would see some of the creations; it was not so much that she felt she had failed to capture what she chased. It was rather that with some pictures she had come a hell of lot closer to capturing what she chased halfway round the world and back again. Sometimes when she finished a canvas, she would stand and stare for hours, as if the static images crammed and glued were actually moving like cine film, seeking inside the images those themes and words and nebulous nothings she sought through dark nights and light days alike. If she were to actually trace and find what she tried to catch, then no one would see the finished picture. It’d be far too much like showing strangers pictures of your own naked body.
A great deal of Sara’s soul was in these pictures. So far, no psychiatrist had publicly analysed her through them, but the imagery points to a vast underground sea of anger and frustration, hot and sharp and somehow hopeless. Images of caves and prisons, tunnels and portals, gates and grilles flood the eyes with colour and depth, somehow disturbing without the viewer being able to quite put a finger on why it makes the hair on the back of the neck stand on end.
Sara followed a train of thought that took her through wedding images, a parade of white fantasy dresses with airbrushed perfect women smiling ecstatically at the camera. Wedding cakes, sugar almonds, rings and flowers, impossibly handsome grooms in penguin suits and top hats all rushed through the ether to her screen and she skimmed through it all, mentally putting aside thoughts until she had reached the end of this train of thought. Even as she made tea, the frills and the flowers seemed to flow through her mind like a mad conveyor belt. The irony was not lost on her; that she was unlikely ever to wear one of these fashionable concoctions herself and her contempt for those who would was only moments away in her hidden thoughts. The images in her mind were of brides with skulls for faces and grooms with the faces of demons.
In a distant part of the house a clock chimed the hour and she glanced up at the uncurtained window with some surprise. The square of glass was filled with the dark blue of deep night and when she checked her watch, she saw it was now three in the morning, and her neck ached. Holding the mug of tea in cold hands she sat in front of the computer screen and felt tears burning at the back of eyes and nose. The last website was still up and she felt the mockery of the beauty depicted there, of the synthetic bliss and plastic smiles, all mocking her lonely, dried up, bitter life.
My heart is broken.
The words came unbidden to her mind and she snarled at herself, almost spilling her tea. The wordless snarl was animal in nature, a reversion to an ancient archetype. How can my heart be broken? That’s the stuff of romantic novels and all that crap. No one has ever loved me like that and I have never loved anyone so how may my heart be broken, pray?
My heart is broken.
Again those silly words came again, stronger and louder in the small-hours silence of the heartless house. The humming computer, the only light in the dark building seemed an eye, a window on the outer world, seemed to be singing along to itself, oblivious of her pain.
On an impulse she typed those stupid words into her usual search engine and hit Go. She would have expected snippets from romantic lyrics, film quotes, lines from books and plays, perhaps even biblical references and yes, all those were there. But so was something else, unexpected.
My heart is broken and I am dying inside.
She could scarcely believe her eyes. Her words and the ones she had not even dared to think were on the screen in front of her, waiting for her to click onto the link. A thread of ice ran down her spine as the fine hairs all over her body stood up on end. She has the oddest feeling that the whole world was going to change, turn itself over and remake itself if she clicked on that phrase, like the poles switching. A Rubicon moment: one more step and she could never go back. Her hand on the computer mouse was shaking; she lifted it up and gazed at it in wonder, her eyes seeing the ink stains and the clipped nails and barely recognised the hand as her own.
There was a fluttering feeling in the very depths of her stomach that might have been hunger as she fought with the suddenly wayward mouse to click on those words.
There was the tiny cyber delay while the link connected and there it was, on her screen:
The House of the Wellspring. It was not one of the glossy, professionally designed websites. It had a kind of sparseness and simplicity that was oddly refreshing after the myriad sites she’d trawled through for materials. There were no pictures to distract her and not really many words either. After the title came those words: My heart is broken and I am dying inside. Then it continued:
“If this is how you feel, if you have tried everything else to heal you of your grievous wounds, if nothing has worked and you are ready to give up on living, take a moment to consider this. There is a wellspring that exists to heal the unhealable wounds life can inflict on us. The healing is freely given but will cost you everything. Only those who have reached the end of all other healing may apply. The Warden’s decision is final.”
There was only an email address to apply to and nothing else. No location, no phone number, no brochure, no testimonials. Nothing. It was utterly bizarre. Part of her mind told her it must be a scam. Freely given but would cost everything, now how did that make any sense whatsoever?
And yet, she couldn’t take her eyes from it and somewhere she could hear birdsong in the background though it was hours yet till dawn. She’d felt a kind of lifting of her inner darkness when she saw those words, a queer kind of jump of excitement like she dimly remembered feeling as a very small child at Christmas. She scribbled down the email address on a piece of paper, scared suddenly that her computer might suddenly crash and the website mysteriously disappear from cyberspace.
What can I say? This might be my only chance and I don’t want to screw it up. How much does this warden need to know right now?
In the end she decided that simplicity was the best way and wrote simply,
“My heart is indeed broken and I have sought to be healed and yet have not healed. Where is this wellspring and how may I come there? If it costs everything then I will give everything.”
She hesitated about how to sign it and then just typed in her first name and sent the email. It felt rather like lobbing a pebble into a huge still lake and watching the ripples widen and spread until the first on them hit the shore with soft waves. She waited a few minutes and when nothing happened, she sighed. It seemed stupid to expect an instant reply but somehow she’d expected just that. It was the middle of the night and unless this House of the Wellspring was the other side of the world then the mysterious Warden would probably be fast asleep. She was filled with sudden doubt that the House might indeed be not just distant, but in another country. She could barely leave her house as it was; maybe they would send her a bottle of this magical water from the wellspring and she might not need to leave at all. She waited another ten minutes and then shut down the computer and went to bed.
The following morning she woke in a way she had not woken since she was very young; she drifted out of a gentle but vague dream and into wakefulness and into a feeling she almost didn’t recognise at all. She tested the feeling with her sleep-ridden mind, like a sore tongue testing for sweetness in tea and her mind drew back with pleased surprise. A feeling that strongly resembled happiness laced with a dash of hope, seemed to recede as she struggled to wake fully, and she sat bolt upright. It felt as though music had been playing in the room as she slept and the last strains still echoed beyond hearing. It felt like the first fragrance of spring had sneaked in even while the snow on the ground was hard and white. The world felt green and fresh and she found a melody was playing in her mind as she showered, and the words of a song or a hymn maybe she had once sung at school or at Brownie parade came back to her: Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.
Dressed and awake, she turned to her computer, cold hands cradling a mug of coffee. Her inbox was crammed but she scanned through them all till she got to the one she wanted. Warden@wellspringhouse.co.uk.
Dear Sara (wrote the Warden) Thank you for your email. I appreciate that this may feel daunting but please could you tell me why and how your heart is broken and what so far you have done to seek healing? This is essential. The Waters of the Wellspring work when nothing else will; therefore I must be sure that you have truly tried all you can as there can be only one visit to the House of the Wellspring. With love, The Warden.
Her hands were trembling and she began to reply, missing keys and hitting the wrong ones in her haste to tell her story. In the end, after ten minutes of writing what was almost gibberish, she made herself stop, drink her coffee and compose herself before continuing. It took most of the day before she was happy with her reply. But even when she sent it, she had a sudden desire to call it back again and add more and more details to her tale. He’ll think me stupid and weak-minded, she thought. Around midnight, the reply came back and as it appeared in her inbox, she felt such a lurch of fear that she would be rejected for this last ditch attempt to find healing that she almost couldn’t open the Warden’s reply.
Dear Sara (wrote the Warden) Thank you for your email. You have indeed suffered terribly and have worked very hard at healing yourself. I have read your story with interest and compassion and now I must step back and spend some time in prayer. Please do not be concerned if this takes some time; I will be in touch again as soon as I can with a reply. Rest assured that if it does not seem right that you come to the House of the Wellspring now, other paths will undoubtedly open for you. The House of the Wellspring is the Last resort of the damaged soul; if you are not truly at your last gasp, it will be fruitless to come here. Be patient. With love, The Warden.
Tears prickled at her eyes and spilled down unchecked. It wasn’t an outright “no” but it still wasn’t the answer she’d hoped for. She’d hoped for an outpouring of sympathy and understanding; this was just so... business-like and brisk. For the first time she had some very real doubts. Her forays into alternative medicine had come across some extraordinary claims that she’d never had the chance to explore fully as they involved going to new age clinics and workshops. Her father had been scathing about the few that she had got close enough to going to; he had refused to spare one of his staff to drive her to and from what he called Snake Oil merchants and so she had never gone. She’d paid for one appointment and spent the whole day by her front door trying to gather the courage to go out to her car. She never made it. Perhaps this Warden was another snake oil merchant. It was a great story after all, saying that the wellspring only worked as a last resort. If it failed to work he could simply claim that the client (if that was the right word) had not tried other things first. Limiting it to one visit only mean there would be no chance of a second try later that also might fail.
Over the next few days, Sara waited for further communications and battled with the compulsion to try and push for a reply. Her doubts about it being a bone fide place grew with every day and in the end she wrote an angry email.
Dear Warden, (Sara wrote, her fingers stiff with fury and anxiety) If your wellspring is so good, why have I never heard of it before? I’ve trawled all the sites about healing springs, all the sites about retreats and so on and there has never been any mention of this place. I am beginning to wonder if this is a scam. Freely given and costing everything? Perhaps you are the kind of sicko who gets off on other people’s pain? I might be desperate but I am not a fool. Sara.
Once it was sent, she couldn’t call it back and she wept some of her bitterest tears over this. But a corner of her mind that remained tear-free said simply, if this place is real and not a scam, then the person who runs it will surely understand caution and concern.
A day after she sent it, there was a reply and it might have been her imagination but she could almost feel gentle laughter through the words on her screen.
Dear Sara (wrote the Warden) I very much understand your concern. There are a lot of frauds and scam artists out there. You are wise to be aware of this. I cannot set your mind completely at rest with one email but I can tell you the reason you have never heard of this place is that one of the conditions of a visit to the House of the Wellspring is that you cannot speak of it to others later. This is one of the costs. We do not need the publicity. Many people believe they need the healing the Wellspring offer and would come here before they had tried other things that might heal them. People are always seeking shortcuts and easy ways. This is neither a shortcut nor is it easy. It will cost you everything. Our visitors must be aware of this before they come here. This is no quick fix. If you come, you may be here for at least a week. Everything will be provided for your comfort, but you can have no direct contact with the outside world while here. I am still considering your visit but please believe me, your last email has not prejudiced your case at all. It is refreshing to hear from someone who, despite pain and suffering, has retained her survival instincts enough to question things so courageously. With love, The Warden.
Despite herself, Sara found herself grinning with amusement. The man (assuming the Warden was male, that is) was clearly over familiar with people who clamoured for help without concern that their rescuer might be worse than what they were escaping from. Naivety might be a terminal condition in some cases, certainly to the bank balance.
The next days passed with a kind of lightness and expectancy that felt akin to happiness. Something had changed; like the moment after the Winter solstice where you know that the darkest time has past and even though it will be months before you can see anything change, the tide has finally turned and a minute a day, sometimes two, of extra light is seeping back into the world.
He might still say no, she told herself firmly. And if he does, that means there are other things I can try, came her own inner voice in response.
It was a month before it occurred to her that if she were accepted to go to the House of The Wellspring, she would somehow have to conquer her terror of leaving the house. If I can drag myself to that wretched hospital, then surely I can make myself go that bit further, she thought. And I don’t even know where it is yet. It might even be close.
She’d almost begun to believe that the whole thing had been a fantasy, or even a dream when another email appeared from the Warden.
Dear Sara (wrote the Warden) Many apologies for the time it has taken to think and pray about your application. I have come to the conclusion that you will find the healing you seek here. But I must now tell you what this will cost you. You must let go of your heart’s desire utterly. Whatever that may be, you must let go of it. Maybe you will find the cost too great. If this is the case then I wish you well in your search for wholeness and must bid you farewell. Consider this carefully before you respond. I remain your friend, The Warden.
Sara stared at the words. When he’d spoke about cost, she’d assumed he had meant money, cash, dosh, boodle, whatever. She’d been prepared for thousands of pounds to be asked of her; she’d even been prepared to pay it. But this? She didn’t even know what her heart’s desire was. How could she give up something she didn’t even know about?
She spent a miserable and frustrating few days wrestling with this question and in the end decided to be honest with the Warden.
Dear Warden (Sara wrote slowly) I have tried to work out what my heart’s desire is and I cannot identify it. Please believe me I have tried. But whatever it is, I would give it up for this chance to be healed. Is this enough? Sara.
There was a delay of some days that had her biting her nails and hourly tempted to just email again with something else before the reply came back.
Dear Sara (wrote the Warden) I think that your offer was sincere. The visit will help you identify and understand your heart’s desire. The House of the Wellspring will be your home from the 30th of October. I will send you a map and instructions nearer to the time. Your friend, The Warden.
Sara burst into tears.
