The Matrix Read Free

too early to return to my old life. But I could not go back to Glasgow, and I knew I could not face the long winter on Lewis. I applied for the job and was interviewed that August. In September, I arrived in Edinburgh with a small suitcase and a bag of books.
    I remember that, for a moment, as I stepped from the plane, I thought there was someone waiting for me, just out of sight. It was a fanciful notion. I knew no one in the city, and I had no desire for company.
    Finding accommodation from a distance had proved difficult, and I spent my first two weeks in Edinburgh with a friend of the family, Dr Ramsey McLean. He knew all about Catriona and the circumstances of her death, and I talked with him at some length about how hard I found it to cope with my loss. An Aberdonian, red-faced and jovial, he had known my father at university and spent frequent summer vacations on Lewis. I had last seen him there two years earlier.
    He helped me find my feet in the city, introducing me to friends in the university, where he worked in the health centre, and providing me with bearings. Towards the end of the first fortnight, he told me that he had found an excellent flat for me. I moved in two days later.
    The house in which he had found rooms stood towards the bottom end of the Royal Mile, in Bakehouse Close. Known as Deacon Laing’s Land, it was a six-storey tenement built in 1658 by a wealthy landowner turned Covenanter who, in the Duke of Rothes’s phrase, ‘glorified God in the Grassmarket’ when he was hanged there for his beliefs. It had known vicissitudes, but when I came to live there showed no signs of the slum from which it had been transformed not long before. I had a small flat on the top floor, a series of oddly shaped, low-ceilinged rooms full of wainscoting and rambling plaster decoration, tastefully furnished.
    In the meantime, I had been settling in at work. My head of department was James Fergusson, the newly appointed Professor of Social Anthropology. You may have read his work on urban renewal in the 1960s. He has served on more than one government commission and is believed to have ambitions, I could not tell you precisely of what sort.
    We met the day after my arrival at his office in Buccleuch Place. Before long, he made it clear to me that my appointment had been made against his wishes. Some of the theologians at New College had expressed a wish for some hard information about the city’s reputedly numerous occult and magical groups.
    There was a fear of Satanism in the air, a mood of unease. Those of a fundamentalist persuasion within the churches argued that devil worship was alive and flourishing, that Satanic abuse was on the increase. The more responsible thought this hyperbole, but found it hard either to deny reports of actual occult practices or to distinguish readily between simple New Age woolliness and more disturbing forays into demonism or black magic.
    ‘Dr Macleod,’ Fergusson began almost as soon as I had stepped through his door, ‘I have to tell you that I have the most severe reservations about your presence here. I run a department founded on rigour. You will find this an empirical establishment, not a haven for half-baked beliefs and mumbo jumbo.’
    I tried to reassure him. It was not easy, he was not an easy man to reach.
    ‘I agree with you entirely,’ I said, ‘as far as the empirical approach is concerned. I’m not interested in these beliefs myself, I’m not a believer in any sense. But I do think it makes sense to study the irrational, to understand what social factors create groups like these. Don’t you think that’s worthwhile?’
    ‘That’s not what the men in black suits at New College are looking for. Or their chums in the Kirk. They want evidence of devil worship. Witchcraft. Demonic possession.’
    ‘I can’t give them that, not if what they mean is evidence that any of those things is real. They already believe in a devil, in powers of darkness – they