Piranesi(29)

When she was a teenager D’Agostino told a friend that she wanted to go to university to study Death, Stars and Mathematics. Inexplicably the University of Manchester didn’t offer such a course, so she settled for Mathematics. At the university she quickly stumbled upon Laurence Arne-Sayles and his lectures; that encounter shaped the remainder of her life.

Arne-Sayles’s talk of communing with ancient minds and glimpses into other worlds answered all her cosmic longings – the ‘Death and Stars’ part of her. As soon as her Mathematics degree had concluded, she switched to Anthropology with Arne-Sayles as her supervisor.

Of all Arne-Sayles’s students and acolytes D’Agostino was by far the most devoted. He assigned her a room in his house in Whalley Range where she became his unpaid housekeeper and secretary. She had a car (Arne-Sayles did not drive) and part of her duties consisted of driving him wherever he wanted to go, including to Canal Street on Saturday nights to pick up young men.

In 1984 she gained her doctorate. She did not seek out academic or teaching work, but stayed at Arne-Sayles’s side, taking a string of menial jobs to support herself.

She was an only child and had always been very close to her parents, particularly her father. At some point in the mid-80s Arne-Sayles instructed her to quarrel with her parents. According to Angharad Scott, this was a test of loyalty. D’Agostino cut off all contact with her parents and they never saw her again.

Scott describes her as a poet, an artist and a film-maker and lists the magazines in which her poems were published: Arcturus, Torn Asunder and Grasshopper. (To date I haven’t been able to find any copies of these magazines.) The editor of Grasshopper – a man called Tom Titchwell – was also a friend of Eduardo D’Agostino. He (Titchwell) kept in touch with Sylvia and relayed news of her back to her parents.

Two of her films survive: Moon/Wood and The Castle. Moon/Wood is a unique and atmospheric piece of film-making admired by critics and fans outside the usual circle of Arne-Sayles conspiracy theorists. It is 25 minutes long and was filmed on moors and in woods around Manchester. It was shot on Super 8 in colour, but the feel of it is almost entirely monochrome – black woods, white snow, grey sky etc. – with occasional splashes of blood-red. In the film a hierophant of ancient times holds a small community in thrall. He dispenses cruelty to the men and abuses the women. One woman opposes him. To show his power and to punish her, the hierophant casts a spell. The woman crosses a stream. She takes a step and her foot comes down in the moon’s reflection. She is caught in the stream; she cannot move from the moon’s reflection. The hierophant comes and beats her where she stands helpless. Still she cannot move. Left alone, she asks a wood of birch trees to help her. As the hierophant passes through the wood, he becomes caught in the tangle of birch trees; they bind him and pierce him. He cannot move and eventually dies. The woman is released from the moon’s reflection. Moon/Wood contains very little speech and what there is is incomprehensible. The woman and the hierophant speak their own language which has nothing to do with ours. The true language of Moon/Wood is simple, stark imagery: moon, darkness, water, trees.

D’Agostino’s other surviving film is even odder. It is untitled, but usually referred to as The Castle. It is shot on Betamax and the quality is very poor. The camera meanders around various enormous rooms, presumably in different castles or palaces (we cannot be seeing one building; it is simply too vast). The walls are lined with statues and puddles of water crowd the floor. According to the people who believe such things, this is a record of one of Arne-Sayles’s other worlds, possibly the one described in his 2000 book, The Labyrinth. Other people have tried to establish the locations in order to prove that it is not a film of another world, but to date none of them has been conclusively identified. Notes in D’Agostino’s handwriting were found with The Castle, but these are in the same peculiar code as her last diary and remain impenetrable.

D’Agostino seems to have kept a diary most of her adult life. The early volumes (1973–1980) were kept at her parents’ house in Leith; these are written in English. Another diary, current at the time of her disappearance (spring 1990) was found in the doctor’s surgery where she worked. This diary employs a weird mixture of hieroglyphs and descriptions of images (possibly dream imagery?) in English. Angharad Scott made several attempts to decipher it but got nowhere.

In early 1990 D’Agostino was working as a receptionist in a doctor’s surgery in Whalley Range. She struck up a friendship with one of the doctors there, a man about her own age called Robert Allstead. At this point she seems to have been distinctly less enamoured of Laurence Arne-Sayles than before. She told Allstead that her life was one of drudgery, but that she would always be grateful to Arne-Sayles because he had opened the way to a more beautiful world and she was happy there. Allstead did not know what to make of this. He later told police that he was certain she was not on drugs. If she had been, he would never have allowed her to work in the surgery.

When Arne-Sayles learnt about her friendship with Allstead he threw one of his peculiar jealous fits and demanded that she leave the job. This time D’Agostino refused.

In the first week of April she failed to turn up for work. After she had been missing for two days Dr Allstead called the police. She was never seen again.

Poor James Ritter

SECOND ENTRY FOR THE TWENTIETH DAY OF THE EIGHTH MONTH IN THE YEAR THE ALBATROSS CAME TO THE SOUTH-WESTERN HALLS