Darkhenge

by Catherine Fisher

  They snatched a few muddy sandwiches at about noon, and Jimmy brought mugs of tea out. Drinking it, Rob felt himself come back from somewhere; when Clare and Marcus spoke he had to listen hard to understand the words, as if their sounds held meanings only slowly recognized.

  Was this how it felt to come out of a coma? To awake, months, years, centuries later? He frowned, tipping the last drips of tea onto the mud like an offering. It wasn’t like him to think like that. Archaeology gave you too much time to think.

  By three o’clock the henge timbers were higher than his head. All afternoon the muggy heat thickened, the sky grew overcast and heavy, zigzagged with midges and flying ants. His skin crawled and prickled with heat rash and itches. Surely the prehistoric ground level must be close now. Thinking of what Vetch had said, he glanced at Marcus, who was dreamily scraping in the center. “Found anything there?”

  The man looked up, startled. “No. Clean as a whistle.”

  “What might there be?”

  Marcus shrugged, and Jimmy stabbed his trowel in the soil and stood, stretching, as if the words had broken a spell. “Possibly a foundation burial. It’s usually a child, or young woman. Or there may just be a deposit, some antler, those weird chalk balls.”

  A rustle disturbed him. Birds fluttered down, small birds. Jackdaws. They were coming from the trees in the next field, a flock, swooping, and as Rob turned his head he saw that they were landing on the henge timbers, a pecking, flapping circle, rising and settling, never still. The men watched, amazed, in a ring of birds. Marcus jumped up, but the jackdaws didn’t take fright, not until Clare clanged the metal gate and came up to the henge, and at that moment the whole flock rose into the air like a cloud, circling, chattering, screeching.

  Then they flew away.

  “God,” Jimmy said. “This place is weird.”

  Close, toward the downs, thunder rumbled.

  “We’re going to have to stop.” Clare’s face was set, her blond hair streaked with mud. She shook her head irritably. “Everyone’s on the phone. The Trust, English Heritage, the papers, my head of department. They all want in. Our cover’s blown.”

  She sat, disconsolate, on the wet soil. “If I ever find out who leaked this—”

  “Will they sack you?” Rob asked quickly.

  “I don’t think so. But it won’t be my baby now.” Thunder rumbled again; she looked up. “Weather’s closing in anyway. We’ll shut down for today. There’ll be full security here overnight.”

  Jimmy whistled. “Expensive.”

  Marcus picked up his trowel, crouched, looked carefully, scraped with it.

  They all watched him. His body had suddenly become intent. Even Rob recognized it.

  “What?” Clare hissed.

  “Not sure. Looks like the central deposit.”

  “Oh bloody hell! What a time to find it.”

  They knelt beside him. He scraped twice. Mud unpeeled like the pith of an orange.

  Under it, a snake of wood curved into the soil.

  “A carving?” Rob asked, astonished. Whatever he had expected, it wasn’t this.

  The trowel opened another. And another. A tangle of wooden writhing, black ridges.

  “Branches,” Marcus muttered, cutting quickly.

  “No.” Clare had her face close to it, her fair hair falling onto the buried mystery. “Not branches. A tree, yes, but not branches. Roots.”

  “Roots? But you mean…”

  She looked at them, her face white in a crack of lightning. Her answer was a whisper, almost drowned by the roar of thunder. “A tree. Upside down.”

  Q. QUERT: APPLE

  The trees were so angry; their anger was terrible. It was mine and it was all toward him. When he turned I was already half out—he yelled and grabbed me around the waist, hauled me back, and I screeched and kicked. Powdery lichened branches held me; my hands slid along them; nuts and leaves snapped and cut me. I dug my nails in. I saw willows, blackthorn, oak reaching out to rescue me.

  “Help me!” I screamed. “Mac! Can you hear me?”

  The trees had my hands. They pulled me through the window.

  I was the designer

  who built Nimrod’s tower.

  I spent three lifetimes

  In the dungeons of Arianrhod.

  THE BOOK OF TALIESIN

  “I could come with you.”

  “It’s fine. It’s fine. I told you.” Running into Dan outside the pub just at this moment was a nightmare. Squeezed into the porch out of the pelting rain, Rob moved aside to let a group of tourists by. “I’m… Someone’s giving me a lift.”

  “But you usually only go on Fridays.” Dan folded his arms, looking past Rob at the suddenly crowded bar. “There’s nothing wrong, is there? There’s no change?”

  “No change.” Rosa’s car would arrive any second. “Go back to your illegal pint.”

  “Oh, I get it. It’s a girl! Who is she? Come on!”

  “Not … not a girl.”

  It was too late. The blue car pulled up by the drenched picnic tables and the door opened. Rosa waved. Vetch said, “Ready?”

  Rob nodded. Then he mumbled, “This is Dan. This is Vetch. And Rosa,” and got in without looking at Dan, without even hearing him say anything, though he felt his disbelief as if it was a stinging radiation in the air.

  Then they were driving, out of the ring of the great stones, through the gap in the green bank, steady, toward Swindon.

  “A friend?” Vetch asked quietly.

  “The best.” He turned, glaring at the man in the front seat. “Was it you who told the papers?”

  “Of course not.” Vetch’s calm eyes held his steadily. “You know very well it’s the last thing I want. Everyone will be crawling over the site. The security will already have been increased. That’s so, isn’t it?”

  Rob’s lips were pressed tight. He didn’t want to believe him, but he did. He breathed out and said, “New fence. Guards everywhere. She’s livid.”

  “She. That will be Clare.”

  Rob remembered. “She’s seen you. She blames you.”

  Vetch turned to gaze out through the rain-streaked glass at the green blurs of the downs. “I knew she would,” he murmured. “Her anger with me is as deep as the forest.”

  Into the silence Rob said, “There’s a tree in the center. An upturned tree.”

  Rosa swerved the car. “What?”

  Vetch didn’t flicker. “Of course there is.”

  In the mirror Rosa’s eyes met Rob’s. She looked astonished.

  “How do you know?” Rob snapped, rebellious. “You couldn’t know.”

  Vetch closed his eyes. He didn’t answer.

  At the nursing home Rosa pulled into the parking lot and turned the engine off. “I can come back if—”

  “No need. We’ll find our own way home.” Vetch sat up and smiled at her. “Have a good evening.”

  Outside, he watched the car drive off.

  Then he turned and looked at Rob through the rain. “I’ll try my best, Rob,” he said quietly, “but as things are, I don’t know how much I can do. Don’t get your hopes up.”

  “I haven’t got any hopes.”

  Vetch was silent. Then he nodded, and turned toward the lighted entrance.

  Sister Mary was in the hall. She was surprised, Rob knew, but she covered it well. “Rob! We weren’t expecting anyone tonight. Your mum phoned earlier—”

  “I told her I’d come instead.” He said it quickly, because it was a lie. “The filming’s taken longer than they thought.”

  Sister Mary said, “Such an exciting sort of life!” But she was looking at Vetch.

  “Can we go in?” Rob said.

  “Oh yes. She’s had her hair washed today. Such lovely hair.”

  In the lift Rob said, “She gushes.”

  “She has great compassion.” Vetch folded his arms, as if he was nervous. “I could feel it. She was also a little doubtful of me.”

  “She hasn’t
seen you before.” Rob was nervous too, feeling the dread that always invaded him in this lift, as if it was a shadow that lived here, waiting to enter him, because it left him here too, on the way out. Fear of going in. Of seeing her.

  The room was dark, with one lamp lit. Outside the open window the rain had stopped, so that only a line of drops dripped from the swiveled pane.

  Vetch went up to the bed and looked down at Chloe. “She looks very much like you,” he murmured.

  Rob shrugged. Chloe’s hair was fine and fair; it shone, and he could smell the faint clean smell of shampoo, the one she always used. She wore new blue pajamas he hadn’t seen before. Vetch pulled the chair closer and sat. He picked up Chloe’s hand, his delicate fingers as white as hers.

  Rob bit his lip. “Do you have to do that?”

  “It helps. But if you—”

  “No. It doesn’t matter.”

  And yet if she was aware somewhere, she’d be furious. So he said aloud, “This is Vetch, Chloe. He’s … all right.”

  “High praise.” Vetch put Chloe’s fingers down on the white sheet and rubbed the back of his hand over his mouth. “This room makes it difficult. All these machines…”

  “For God’s sake! We can hardly turn them off!” Rob suddenly had no idea why he’d come. Why either of them had come.

  Vetch nodded. “No.” Then he said, “I suppose I just hate hospitals.” He reached into his coat and pulled out the small bag.

  “What is that?”

  “The crane-skin bag. It contains words. All a poet needs.”

  He opened the drawstring neck and tipped out some small sticks onto the bed. Rob came closer.

  The shaven twigs were about three inches long, and looked like hazel, because some of the bark was still on the back of them. Each had one side sliced smooth, and into its edge were cut a series of stiff, angular lines. Some horizontal, others leaning.

  “What are they?”

  Vetch glanced up. “Letters. The alphabet is an ancient one, called ogham.”

  The room had dimmed. Now Vetch moved the pile of Mum’s red knitting, switched off the lamp, and it seemed black. “Open the window all the way,” he said. “And stay over there. Don’t come closer until I tell you.”

  Rob hesitated, then did it. When he turned there was a new sound in the room. It lay behind the quiet regular beeps of the monitors, behind the sound of the breeze in the trees outside. It was a whisper, a murmur of words.

  He leaned back against the windowsill, sweating. Anxiety was tight in his chest; he was breathing too hard, and yet there seemed to be no air. Something was sucking the air out of the room.

  It was the words. They were in no language he knew, and there were so many of them. Small shadows fluttered and crackled and landed on the bed—moths, he thought, or maybe not, maybe letters, the stiff letters coming alive, crawling, unfurling, flying. And yet there were real moths in here too, blundering through the open window, their shadows distorted as they banged against the lit glass panel over the door.

  Vetch leaned forward. He touched Chloe’s forehead, her closed eyelids, her mouth. His fingers were thin and damp, and Rob felt that touch and shivered. But Chloe didn’t move.

  Vetch said, “There are many ways into the Unworld. A door opens, a bird sings. Someone invites you, someone takes your hand. You go in, you listen. It only seems like seconds. Out here, lifetimes pass.” He had glanced around the room; now he lifted the vase of flowers and took the circular woven placemat from underneath. He placed the mat on the bed, took one of the small sticks, and pushed the base in, so it stood upright.

  Very slightly, the murmur in the air modulated.

  “Once you’re there, you must not eat or drink. If you do, you may never come out.” He looked up. “Do you understand?”

  “It’s… That’s old stuff. Legends.”

  Vetch slotted a second notched twig into the base. “Yes. These days people would say the pathways of her brain have been altered, that some cortex or node has been damaged. Each time cloaks its knowledge in imagery. As the men who built the henges did.”

  A third twig stood upright. Rob felt the darkness gather; behind him curtains drifted, a soft touch on his arm. Sounds whispered and crisped like wings.

  He took a step closer.

  “Stay back.” Carefully, listening intently, Vetch put in another twig, then another. They had begun to make a tiny wooden circle around the circumference of the placemat, the notched shaven wood close together, the words a rampart.

  He was re-creating the henge.

  As each new sliver of wood stood upright, the echo and murmur in the room coalesced and strengthened. Syllables began to form, whole phrases in the air, a chanting.

  “Who’s saying it?” Rob whispered.

  Vetch didn’t answer. He was concentrating, his fine fingers adjusting the pegs of the henge, swapping them, turning them, as if it was some musical instrument he tuned, and with each addition and movement the poem—because it was a poem now—seemed nearer, though it was coming from very far away, distorted and scrambled, as if a radio wasn’t quite on the station.

  Rob was stiff with tension.

  “There are seven fortresses in that world.” Vetch’s voice was strained. “Seven caers, each stronger, deeper inside. She may be too far in for me to reach her. He would take her from castle to castle.”

  The circle was half formed. The music lost static, became a single voice. Miles and eternities away, it sang.

  A bulb in the corridor flickered. Somewhere in the building a window banged. Rob moved instantly, across to the door, but there was no lock. He stood with his back pressed against it. “Hurry,” he gasped. “Hurry.”

  “I can’t.” Vetch’s hands were shaking; sweat gleamed on his forehead. “Can’t hurry this.”

  Three parts of the circle were formed. As the poet’s long fingers slid the twigs in, he seemed to be pushing against great pressure, as if the tiny henge resisted formation; then the poem swelled and receded, a burst of nonsensical, delirious words. “Shining bright star… I fight, I struggle … grass and trees are hastening, hurrying; see them, far traveler, wonder at them, warrior, call upon your god, on the saints of your god…”

  A chant like a spell, beating and rhythmic. Other sounds were wound in it; he realized they were the bleeps and beats of the monitors, Chloe’s pulse and heartbeat, forming the syllables.

  “Save us from rage … from the anger of the trees, the onrush of branches, a thousand princes, the hosts of the enemy…”

  Vetch pushed the last but one twig in. The circle was black. It sang in electric pulses and a girl’s voice, high and clear.

  “The enchanted trees, the magic forest, its battle-line comes, we fight it with the music of harps…”

  The last sliver. He held it tight, moved it down. It touched.

  All the monitors spat.

  Rob gasped.

  Chloe’s eyes flickered.

  Instantly all around the room, alarms screamed. A gust of rain billowed the curtains. Rob flung himself forward. “She moved! I saw her move!”

  “Help me!” Was it Vetch who said that? There were leaf shadows all over him, on the ceiling, the walls. The wires of the machines were curling like roots.

  Rob grabbed the poet’s shaking hands. Together they held the sliver steady, brought it back, guided it into place, forced it down. The circle was closed.

  Chloe jerked. She gave a great gasp. Outside people were running, shouting; the door burst open.

  “Keep them back!” Vetch yelled in fury; grabbing her arms, he dragged her up, off the pillow. “Chloe! Climb out! Climb out to us!”

  “Willows,” she breathed. “Blackthorn…”

  The henge slid to the floor, rolled. “I summon you,” Vetch commanded. “I call you back! Chloe!”

  “Oak … the King…” Over his shoulder, she looked at Rob.

  The light snapped on. “No!” Rob howled, but he was shoved aside by frantic nurses, a doctor, Sis
ter Mary.

  “No! She’s waking! He’s waking her!”

  A great hand held his shoulder like a clamp. “What in God’s name is going on here?” Mac whispered furiously behind him.

  Vetch was held tight by a security guard. He looked haggard and worn out.

  Half off the bed, Chloe lay crumpled, eyes closed, her shining hair a mess.

  The doctor turned. “Get out of here,” he raged. “Before I have you thrown out! Father, do you know this man?”

  Mac glanced at Vetch. Then he growled, “Yes. Calm down. He hasn’t hurt her—”

  “He could have killed her!”

  “She was waking!” Rob was shivering with anger and despair. “She was almost awake … she looked at me—”

  “Impossible.” Hurriedly, the doctor checked Chloe’s eyes, her breathing.

  “You heard the alarms....”

  “The monitors must have been disconnected. I think we should call the police.”

  “There’s no need for that,” Mac snapped.

  Vetch smiled wearily. “Do what you want,” he said, his voice hoarse. Then, as if it was a great effort, he lifted up his left wrist. “But if nothing happened,” he whispered, “how do you explain this?”

  Chloe’s fingers were curled tightly in his.

  She was holding his hand.

  M. MUIN: VINE

  “Why?”