The Buried Circle

by Jenni Mills

  If only I could see his face…But all I have is a view of the carpet, and the soft northern voice, the warm, damp breath on the side of my face. I picture him gazing dreamily over my shoulder into the embers of the fire, seeing his Goddess visions and all the other bonkers stuff he’s piled up in his head as his barrier against the world. And, oh, my God, did he–?

  ‘Did you mean to hurt Frannie?’ The words are choking me. ‘You said the Goddess had to be held, didn’t you?’

  ‘The Crone shifts shape in your arms,’ he says.

  My stomach clenches. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning I love the Goddess.’

  His voice sounds a million miles away, through the throbbing in my head. I’ll kill him, I swear I will. I’ll–

  His arm tightens on my throat the moment I pitch myself back in an attempt to break his grip. He’s as steady as a rock behind me as he whispers: ‘And you, Ind.’

  Another long, long silence in which that idea turns and spins in the candlelight. My breath scrapes through my constricted windpipe, making me more and more panicky. Eventually he slackens his grip enough to allow me a normal breath, still keeping a tight enough hold to remind me that these are carpenter’s arms, strong and muscled and capable of snapping a neck as easily as a discarded length of dowel.

  ‘I want us to be together,’ he says. ‘Here, in the Goddess’s place. In the circle.’

  ‘Keir…’ Better to call him Bryn? Are there two personalities, one rational and the other not? ‘Bryn, I mean…Was that what your foster-parents called you? You were fostered, weren’t you?’

  ‘Adopted, eventually. They didn’t like Keir, so they called me Dean,’ he says. ‘Chose Bryn for myself, when I left. More Celtic, like.’

  ‘Thing is, Bryn, we can’t be together here. This cottage isn’t mine. I don’t live here, I live with Frannie, outside the circle.’

  ‘I know that,’ he says. ‘We can still be together here, though.’

  And everything goes distant and breathless again as he shows me the knife.

  It’s a strange old thing, dull and nibbled by time. ‘Bronze Age,’ he says.

  ‘Where’d you find that?’ I’m trying to push my terror down, keep talking as naturally as I can.

  ‘Walking on Easton Down, with Cynon. He went nosing round the side of an old hump where rabbits’d been diggin’. There it was, half buried in the soil.’

  He’s allowed me to sit up now, though he’s still behind, with an arm across my throat. He turns the dagger in the lamplight, somehow more malevolent than a modern knife would be.

  ‘You give me the idea, Ind,’ he says. ‘Was you told me about Avebury bein’ the place of the dead.’

  I try to summon up everything John ever taught me about yoga breathing, meditation, calming the self for whatever purpose, and not one damn bit of it works. Or, rather, it won’t come back to me.

  ‘The ancestors,’ I say, at least an octave up on my usual pitch. ‘Not the dead in any…active sense.’ Not sure what I mean by this, except it would be good to disabuse him of the notion that people went around committing mass suicide in the Neolithic.

  ‘Thought a lot about the woman in the ditch,’ he says.

  ‘What woman in the ditch?’ My voice is tiny.

  ‘The one you talked about. Buried in the ring of stones.’

  ‘That was thousands of years ago.’ Not that I imagine for a second now that rational discussion will save me. This is a man who believes beings from Sirius make crop circles and the government is trying to stop us finding out about it.

  ‘Do I scare you?’ he asks abruptly, like he’s reading my mind.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Well, yes, a bit, because it hurts, and you won’t let go of me.’

  ‘No.’ The pressure of his arm eases slightly, though. ‘You have to win my trust back, see?’

  The log on the fire has turned to glowing charcoal and collapses with a sigh. A small yellow flame leaps up and dances, as if it wants to partner the candle flame on the hearth, then flickers out.

  The candle flame flickers in sympathy, bends…

  There’s a draught. The door. The front door of the cottage is still open.

  If I can somehow persuade him to relax more, if I could make a dash for it…

  ‘Keir,’ I say into the silence. ‘I’m really, really sorry about what happened to you. Must’ve been so hard…’

  ‘They kept her away from me,’ he says. ‘My real mother. She’ll have tried to fetch me back, but they wouldn’t let her.’ The same amorphous They, in Keir’s mind, who lie about crop circles, who send sinister black helicopters to hover over them and release radiation to poison seekers after truth.

  ‘Yes, probably.’ Humour him. If I can make him let go altogether, if I say I need the bathroom, or something? I don’t want to think about how the Goddess might have become twisted up in Keir’s head with the mother who abandoned him, or for that matter the woman who won’t let him see his son, the woman whose face was scribbled out in the photo Martin found buried in the circle, because intuition tells me Bryn was the person who left it there.

  It’ll only work if I catch him off guard, when he takes his arm from my throat.

  ‘Can I look at you?’ I say.

  The arm relaxes, in surprise, and I lash out with every iota of energy I possess, driving an elbow into his stomach, twisting out of his grasp, pain tearing across my scalp as he makes a grab at my hair. I arc backwards and drive the top of my skull up under his jaw, hearing the click of his teeth as well as his grunt of pain. Then I’m rolling over and trying to get to my feet, feeling huge and clumsy like in a nightmare, because he’s caught my foot and is dragging my leg from under me, so I lash out with the other foot and my heel connects with something hard, maybe the side of his head, sending a shock right up my leg, and pushing another grunt out of him, and I’m shouting, yelling as loud as I can, hoping someone’s going to hear, someone’s going to come and save me…

  The point of the old, nibbled knife pricks the underside of my chin.

  ‘Lie still’ he snarls, pushing the whole of his weight down on top of me, the way he used to when we played as eight-year-olds, so that the side of my face is squashed against the scratchy hessian carpet. He adjusts his position so he’s kneeling on my back, my ribs threatening to crack under the pressure

  Then there is no breath left, all I can manage are small, terrified gasps, and the knife plays with the soft skin around my jaw and the side of my neck, while my body’s forced so hard into the floor that the pressure seems to turn inside out, and instead of being pushed down I’m dangling, again, floating over an immense void that opens up beneath me, feeling the suck and swirl of the dark greedy vortex…A bird is singing somewhere far away, and now I’m leaning right over Steve’s face, his eyes huge and black and blank, the oozing blood from his wound giving off a metallic stink that makes my nostrils tingle, then the red rises to drown me as I fall into his eyes…

  Cold on the back of my neck. My shoulders and arm are chilled too. The smell of chalky earth in my nose, crumbling soil in my mouth, a hard, knobbled surface under me.

  Buried alive…

  Everything spasms and a thin stream of acid pours out of my mouth onto the damp ground. But the unbearable pressure forcing me down has lifted. I can breathe. That’s cold air, not cold earth, on my back and shoulders. My eyes open, and instead of pitch darkness, there’s light, of a sort, a strange electric-blue rippling.

  Somebody is moving around, not far away. I’m lying on my side, legs bent, knees drawn up, in a wide, deep depression. The ditch? No, not that deep, and this is bare soil, not grass. More than bare soil: ground so hard it feels like bedrock. Turning my head cautiously to look upwards, over the lip of the depression I can see the dark, wavy line of the henge banks, some distance off, and above them, curious ripples of light that are like ribbed sand glistening on a beach as the tide retreats. It’s a sky like none I’ve ever seen before, beautiful but chilling because I
don’t understand what’s causing it.

  But when I shift my head a fraction of an inch further, at the corner of my eye, the rippling light is cut off abruptly by a huge shadowy bulk.

  And now I understand exactly where I am.

  In the stone pit.

  Above me is the massive megalith the students raised last week. Keir must have taken boltcutters to the padlocks on the metal barriers Ed and Graham put up round the excavation, then carried me into the trench where the stone lay buried. He must be nearby, though I can’t see him, because I can hear movement, rustling. It sounds like he’s behind the stone, where something is rubbing and creaking and–

  The ropes. The hawsers made of twisted honeysuckle. He’s trying to saw them apart with that horrible little knife of his. Every muscle tenses, screaming at me to get out of the pit as fast as I can, but something’s constricting my arms, something rough and chafing. He’s already cut at least one length of rope from the stone to bind me. I try to pull my wrists apart, but the honeysuckle is extraordinarily strong. It doesn’t give at all. Are my ankles bound too? No, I can move both feet independently. I stretch one leg gently, and the ball of my foot touches something hard. It’s too dark in the pit to see what it could be, but my eyes are gradually acclimatizing to the lack of light. There’s a glimmering greyish shape not far from my face…

  He’s laid a ring of stones around my body.

  I have to get out of here right now, while he’s the other side of the stone…

  But it’s too late, he’s already moving round this side, sawing away at one of the honeysuckle strands with–

  It’s not the useless little Bronze Age knife. This is the real McCoy, reflecting the weird light from the rippling sky, a gleaming, wicked, sharp hunting knife about three times the size of the other.

  Fuck.

  The thin, dry sound of sawing seems to double in volume, the knife hissing back and forth against the woody fibres. The light from the sky falls on Keir’s face, and now I can see the boy under the skin of the man, the soft features under the leaner planes, the bruised eyes that are the same, I remember now, too bloody late, as they always were, uncertain, trying to stifle panic, a child permanently on the verge of tears. Now that my eyes have adjusted to the darkness, the honeysuckle trusses stand out against the pale stone as a set of crisscrossing lines. The note of the sawing becomes harsher, the knife grating against the stone, and then snap, one of the lines parts and whips away under the blade. I flinch, expecting to see the megalith above me topple or at least jerk forward, but the dark bulk remains steady.

  Keir jumps down into the pit beside me, outlined against the silvery ripples of cloud, a length of honeysuckle in his hand to bind my legs, leaning over me so I can no longer see the reflection of the sky in those teary eyes.

  But he can see it in mine.

  ‘You awake, Ind?’

  I come up so fast he doesn’t have time to react, smashing the side of my head into his nose. Keir goes over backwards, landing with an oof against the side of the pit in the shadow of the bound megalith, and I’m glad, hope he’s broken his fucking neck, the bastard, for what he did to Frannie. The knife clatters against stone, somewhere at the other end where, with luck, I won’t have to worry about it. He still has the bronze dagger on him, but I can’t think about that–my head’s ringing, dizzy from the impact with his. Thunder inside my skull is building and building until I can hardly stand it. A tiny chip of waning moon slips over the shoulder of the stone, so like a knife in the blue shivering sky that I instinctively raise my bound hands to reach for it—

  —and she pours out of the sky into me, all glistening power and thunder so that every nerve in my body jolts at the same moment and the ripples in the sky run up and down my skin in a tingle that will never, ever end, scalp to fingertip, toe to groin, my heart exploding, the blood fizzing along the veins because I am me but I am also the Goddess, this is real, this is what they mean by magic, this is drawing down the moon and taking the vortex and running it in swirls round the boy so he can’t move, the thunder pinning him to the ground—

  —because the thunder’s out of my head and in the air. Felt as much as heard, the beat of wings–no, rotors. Above us is a dark, bulbous shape, two flashing lights, one red, one white. The helicopter arrives overhead so fast it seems it’s risen straight up over the henge banks, out of a pit of hell located under the trees of Tolemac–but, no, that must be an illusion created by the strange things a bowl-shaped landscape does to sound.

  Keir is cringing as it sweeps over us, so low I instinctively duck and he presses himself against the ground. It’s a huge black insectoid beast that has erupted from nowhere, a dark creature that flies over circles in cornfields, attended by men in black and unmarked vans. But it’s also Ed, only Ed, on his way home with a payload of tired and emotional racing trainers and owners. The whump-whump-whump is making my innards vibrate, shaking pictures from the memory crystals: Frannie on the hall floor, my mother dancing against the sunrise, the windscreen smashing and poor bloody Keir-as-he-was picking glass out of my hair, our van on fire and the smell of all my toys burning, Steve’s dead eyes under the red-lipped dent in his head. The sound is destruction. It’s the dinosaur bird, overhead, claws unfurled.

  ‘Back off,’ I yell, over the cacophony. There’s no way Ed could see us, surely, but he seems to know we’re underneath, and is holding the helicopter in a tight hover. It’s not him I’m shouting at, though.

  ‘Go away,’ I snarl at Keir, sprawled on the ground. ‘I’m not your goddess. I KILLED YOUR DAD.’

  You keep your mouth shut, darlin’

  I was the one who told where those boys were camping in the derelict farmhouse.

  Where’s the party, Ind?

  Riz, who came to my bunk in the van.

  Don’t know

  You must know. Your mum’s shaggin one of the boys running it. Where’re they hidin’ out, Ind?

  I can’t…

  Want me to tell John what she’s up to?

  They’re the other side of the Ridgeway A skanky old cottage behind some trees…

  Mum knew it must have been me. That without me the men with the sledgehammers and shotguns would never have come to Tolemac. I’m bad luck, I’m widdershins, I’m not safe to be near. I’m the destroyer, wrapped in thunder.

  On thy belly thou shalt go

  The huge force of the helicopter’s downdraught blowing around us, somewhere behind the megalith, a half-sawn strand of honeysuckle parts, the stone jerks forward, heaving against its bonds, coming alive, another rope snaps, a peg lifts from the earth, the stone twists and topples and Keir starts to roll across the floor of the pit, panic in his eyes, scrabbling on hands and knees to claw himself out of its way, too late, it’s coming for him, he’ll never do it…

  I reach out my bound hands for him to grab and somehow get a grip on his wrist, and heave, pull as strongly as I can, but it’s not enough and I’m losing my balance and falling backwards, trying to haul us both out of the path of the stone and someone’s shouting (me?) and another voice is screaming (him?) while the thunder rolls over us and the vortex has caught us, spinning, whirling–

  Then a terrible ground-shaking impact throws us out into silence.

  Above the dark line of the henge bank, the northern sky is still doing that strange electric-blue rippling. Something presses against my hip: the phone in my pocket. Except this is Avebury. No sodding signal, is there?

  I’d give anything to see a lantern among the stones: be-antlered Trevor and his beaming wife Michelle, conducting a midsummer ritual. I wouldn’t even mind if they were sky-clad. But there’s nothing, not so much as car headlights on the main road.

  The sound of helicopter rotors is fading in the distance, almost indistinguishable now from the wind in the trees. Under my hands, a finger trembles.

  ‘Ind?’ A croak, so low I can hardly hear it. ‘Hurts.’

  He’s lying full length, in the shadow of the stone, which has t
oppled halfway into the pit. Too dark to see how much of him is under it.

  ‘Can you move at all?’

  His shoulders heave. His other hand is digging into my leg. He makes a noise somewhere between a sob and a scream.

  ‘Fffff…’

  I can’t make out what he’s saying.

  ‘Fffffoot…caught.’

  ‘Only your foot?’

  ‘Hard to tell. Whole leg’s on fire.’ His eyes plead. ‘Don’t leave me.’

  ‘Keir, I have to go for help, OK? I have to leave you. Sorry, can you let go my leg?’

  His fingers slacken and I ease upright, wincing at the sharpness of the ground underfoot. For whatever reason, Keir must have removed my shoes before he carried me out of the cottage. I shuffle backwards, looking for the hunting knife. It’s landed against one of the small sarsens Keir had arranged in an oval ring round me. I manage to wedge it, blade uppermost, between two of the stones, so I can saw the honeysuckle cord against it. There is one way I could make use of the phone…As soon as the strands part, I shake it out of my pocket and flip it open to shed some light, crawling over to Keir and running it along the length of his body. Thank Goddess, only the foot is caught under a corner of the stone, but I catch a glimpse of something jagged and white, and a dark stain is spreading up the leg of his jeans. I shut down the screen quickly, feeling sick.

  ‘I’m going now, right? Back as soon as I can.’

  No reply. Perhaps he’s lost consciousness.

  My toe stubs against one of the small sarsens, sending jolts of pain up my jangled nerves. A small, wicked voice tells me I could lift it and smash it down on his head…or the knife, the sharp, gleaming…

  But rage has faded. Whatever possessed me has gone. Someone else will have to deal with the confused, damaged child under the stone.

  I heave myself out of the stone pit, and set out across the damp grass, barefoot. Immediately the soles of my feet start to burn: a patch of nettles. I start to jog on rubbery legs towards the back of the houses, which seem an extraordinarily long way off.