Orkney Twilight

by Clare Carson

  ‘We are gathered here,’ he intoned, ‘to bury the dead.’

  His voice was eaten up, engulfed. And then it bounced back out of nowhere, a delayed echo: ‘Bury the dead. Bury the dead.’

  Tom tried again, shouting this time. ‘Bury the dead.’

  ‘Bury the dead, the dead.’

  Sam joined in, yelling at the shadows. ‘We are here to bury the dead.’

  ‘Bury the dead, the dead, the dead.’

  They cupped their hands around their mouths and hollered into the blackness.

  ‘Tom.’

  ‘Sam.’

  ‘Bury the dead.’

  Voices filled the tomb, reverberating around the stones, bouncing back at unexpected angles, noise from every side: clammy walls, cold slab roof, side chambers. A cacophony of voices chanted in her head. Bury the dead. Bury the dead. Bury the dead. She turned this way, that, trying to catch the direction of the cries. Her head started spinning. Giddy. Disoriented in the noisy darkness. The voices calling her. Pulling her down. Reaching out to drag her to their underworld. Damp fingers clutching at her neck, clasping her mouth with their silt-filled hands. She tried to catch her breath but the reek of claggy soil filled her lungs, the pungent stench of putrid kidneys, piss, fungus, decay, death choking her. She opened her mouth wider. She couldn’t pull in any air. She was suffocating. Her chest was tight. Her stomach ready to heave.

  ‘Stop,’ she screamed. ‘Stop.’

  ‘Stop, stop, stop,’ the echo said.

  ‘Please,’ she whispered.

  ‘Please, please,’ mocked the tomb.

  The voices subsided. She listened for her own breathing, felt her rib cage expanding, forcing dank oxygen into her nostrils, through her trachea.

  ‘Are you okay?’ asked Tom.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘The torch is flickering.’

  ‘I have to get out of here.’

  She cast the fading torch beam around the walls and locked it on the passage, dived, crouched on all fours, ducked her head under the lintel, pushing forward to the square of silver light, crawling towards the day. She reached the end of the tunnel, pushed against the metal grill. It gave an inch, then resisted. She pushed again. It didn’t budge. The chain was wrapped around the gate and post, joined in a loop by the closed hoop of the padlock. She reached through the bars, grabbed the padlock and tried to yank it open. No movement. It was locked.

  ‘Give me the key,’ she commanded, trying to suppress the panic.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Give me the key. I want to unlock the padlock.’

  He paused. ‘I don’t have it. I left the key in the padlock. It isn’t locked though.’

  ‘It is locked.’

  ‘Well, take the key out and unlock it.’

  ‘The key isn’t there.’

  ‘It must be.’

  ‘It’s not.’ She felt the tears welling.

  ‘Look on the ground. It must have fallen out.’

  Her eyes searched, flitting around frantically. She spotted a metallic gleam, the key lying on the grass three feet in front of the gate. She pushed her arm through the sheep grille, stretched her hand out but she still failed to touch it with her fingertips.

  ‘Shit. I can’t reach it.’

  ‘Let me try.’

  He squeezed past her, jamming her painfully against the wall, stuck his arm awkwardly through the bars of the gate, stretched, pushing his shoulder against the metal, just managed to reach the key with the tips of his fingers, scrabbled, slowly drew it towards the cairn’s entrance, picked it up and unlocked the padlock.

  Sitting on the sheep-shortened grass in front of the cairn, she breathed deeply, gladly gulping brackish air.

  ‘It must have been a kid mucking around,’ said Tom.

  The Watcher, she thought miserably, a reminder, in case she needed one, that she was under surveillance. The shadow of a high-flying bird slid across her face, raced along the sunlit ground; she looked up and saw a hen harrier gliding low over the hillside, searching for a creature to kill. She shuddered. Impending death everywhere. She looked back at the cairn, their prison, their rock coffin, feeling the long entrance tunnel drawing her in. Down. She blinked. Shook her head.

  ‘I wonder whether the passage is aligned with the midwinter sun,’ she said.

  ‘Is that likely?’

  ‘Well, the entrance passage at Maeshowe ,’ she said, ‘is positioned so that the rays of the dying midwinter sun shine through the tunnel and illuminate the central burial chamber.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, midwinter is the point of rebirth. Midsummer is the time of death.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing.’

  Nothing except the obvious, she realized then. The really obvious. The obvious time to visit the Ring of Brodgar was midsummer’s night, when the final rays of the longest day hovered on the horizon, in the endless twilight.

  Later that day, much later, she stood in the kitchen slurping tea, listening to the backbeat of the ticking clock. Nearly eleven; it was late already. They were heading out the door as the Renault appeared in the courtyard. The car door slammed. Jim seemed agitated, over-animated.

  ‘Had a good day?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes thanks,’ she said.

  ‘Going out again to celebrate the solstice?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Good idea,’ he said. ‘Make the most of the midnight sun.’ But he wasn’t looking at her as he spoke. He was focusing far away.

  The Cortina pulled out of Nethergate, up the hill.

  ‘Where are we going then?’ Tom asked.

  ‘The Ring of Brodgar.’

  He sighed. ‘Haven’t you had enough of ancient monuments?’

  ‘It’s a stone circle. Nobody can lock us in.’

  She directed the Cortina on a noisy loop round the top of the hill before doubling back on to the main road and heading west, chasing the sinking sun. She checked in the rearview mirror at the road stretching away behind them. No other cars in sight. Nothing but sun-bronzed fleeces on the golden hillsides.

  ‘This way.’ She signalled right with her hand. Northwest. And then they were surrounded by water, floating on a bridge of land between two lochs stretching away on either side, waves rippling silver.

  Twenty-nine, thirteen: the Ring of Brodgar, its stones peaked in an ancient weathered crown. The car park was deserted. The southerly wind buffeted them from behind, pushing them across the springy turf through the ditch, skylarks rising as they passed between two megaliths. The sun was balanced on the horizon now, its rays a dazzling starburst blasting through the stones. A black streak caught her eye; a raven arcing and wheeling, turning somersaults in the air before it dived and disappeared among the heather. At the circle’s centre she was calmer, forgetting the melancholia, the anxiety, the anger. Absorbing the eternal present.

  ‘What do you think they used this for then?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Marking the seasons I reckon. Asking the ancestors to make sure the sun returned.’

  She pivoted slowly around on her heel, scanning the purple hills. She checked the stones in her head as she rotated.

  Tom asked, ‘How many?’

  ‘Count them.’

  She had performed exactly the same ritual ten years before with Jim. It had been supernaturally bright then too; the clarity that comes after the storm. They had skived off together to avoid a day shopping with her sisters and Liz in Stromness. He had told her the stones were sleeping giants, ancient guardians of the islands. And on clear nights, when the moon and the stars bathed the earth in silvery light, they woke and danced, and if you looked out of the corner of your eye, sometimes you could catch them moving. She had twirled around, counting the strange stones while Jim distracted her with his stories. She couldn’t reach the same number twice. ‘See,’ said Jim. ‘What did I tell you? They are alive, they dance when you’re not looking.’ They had strolled around the ring and she had spotted a stone with dar
k lines etched on its face. Strange runes. She had traced their twiggy arms with her fingers and felt a connection with their carver, the long dead rune-maker.

  ‘Nobody knows what these runes mean,’ Jim had said. ‘Indecipherable.’ He had gazed wistfully at the rock and then he had added, ‘The dead like to hold on to their secrets.’

  She surveyed the ring now looking for the rune stone and, as she searched, she wondered whether Jim believed the stories he told, whether all spies ended up believing the stories that they told, whether he could see the dark forces rising as he patrolled the desolate borderlands between life and death. Or perhaps the dark forces really did exist. She closed her eyes and conjured up an image of a towering magus, brim of his hat shadowing his face, cloak wrapped around his shoulders, hunting horn clenched in his hand. Odin, his dark presence haunting her. She opened her eyes again and stared at the unmoving stones and there, in the distance at the point where the sun had dazzled five minutes previously, she discerned a tiny amber flame flaring and writhing before it fizzled away. The Watcher: he must have followed them; he was lying in the heather waiting, smoking, surveying. But then another flame appeared, and another, reaching higher and brighter, licking the sky, and she realized it wasn’t the Watcher after all. It was a midsummer fire.

  ‘Twenty-seven,’ Tom said. ‘It’s trickier than you might think.’

  ‘That’s because they move. They dance.’

  ‘Of course. They would.’

  He slumped down on the turf and she squatted next to him, feeling the damp grass beneath her palm, tasting the acrid scent of burning wood blowing in the wind, watching the swirling patterns of bonfire smoke.

  ‘Maybe we should be lighting a fire in the circle’s centre and dancing naked around it to mark midsummer,’ she said into the breeze. She waited for the withering riposte.

  ‘I’ll give it a go if you fancy it,’ he said. ‘Might be a laugh.’

  It might, she thought, and she almost forgot why she was there, almost let go of her reasons for distrusting him. A gust of wind brushed her face with its iciness and reminded her that she was waiting.

  ‘It’s too cold,’ she said.

  He shrugged. ‘Don’t say I didn’t offer.’

  She wanted to reply, say something. What? She wasn’t sure. She said nothing instead. Let the moment slip. She glanced at her watch. ‘Eleven-fifty. Nearly midnight.’

  As she spoke, she caught sight of a movement through the stones on the north side of the ring, a shadow flitting across the heather, growing larger, solidifying. She blinked – surprised as she recognized the figure.

  ‘It’s Avis,’ said Tom.

  Of course, it would be. Now she understood. Avis was Jim’s courier. It was Avis who had left the book with its coded directions in the Battery, and now she had come to the meeting spot: twenty-nine, thirteen, midsummer’s eve. Timed drop. Philby’s guide to twilight tradecraft. Avis was here to pick up the envelope and deliver it to the Commander.

  ‘We keep bumping into her,’ observed Tom, unperturbed by the coincidence, obviously pleased in fact, that their paths had crossed again.

  They walked towards her, met at the northern side of the ring. Sam glared at Avis and Avis glared back. Avis couldn’t quite hide her edginess.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Avis asked Sam, bluntly.

  ‘The same as you, I would imagine,’ Sam replied. Avis’s mouth twitched. Sam watched her making a rapid assessment, repositioning herself in this unexpected situation.

  ‘We were just making the most of the midnight sun,’ said Tom.

  ‘Yes, the solstice is quite an event here,’ Avis said.

  Sam watched Avis’s eyes flitting around the ring.

  ‘Twenty-seven,’ Sam said.

  Avis wasn’t listening. Her face had frozen. Her eyes were fixed on the far side of the circle. Sam followed her gaze and saw that Avis was staring at a broken megalith, cracked and lightning-burned. The slipping rays of the sun exaggerated the shadows of the branched carvings on the stone’s flat surface.

  ‘The rune stone,’ Sam said. ‘Viking graffiti.’

  She ran over, stooped, traced the lines with her finger, felt again the connection with the carver as she tried to crack the secret code. The age-softened edges of the runes filled her with a strange melancholy; the passing of so many years.

  ‘Winter trees,’ Sam said. ‘They are not letters at all. They are pictures of midwinter trees. Reminders that life springs out of death. Signs of hope in the face of bleakness.’

  But even as the speculation filled her with an inward calm, she felt Avis standing over her, scouring the ground just beyond the ring. Sam automatically searched too, and quickly pinpointed the focus of Avis’s fury. Near the foot of the rune stone, a neat rectangular slab lay oddly out of place. It was resting on top of the grass, as if someone had accidentally dropped it on the way to do a bit of crazy paving. And on its rough surface, the faint scrawl of chalk was visible. A tiny zero. She pictured Jim at the Battery, chalking a sign on the doorframe of the scout hut. She stared at the cipher on the stone at her feet. It had to be a message from Jim. His sign for a failed drop. An empty dead-letter box. He was supposed to pass his information on, but for some reason he had aborted the operation. Sam recalled Jim’s odd edginess as she had left Nethergate earlier that evening. Did he know that she had clocked the folded pages of The Orkneyinga Saga? Had Jim realized she had worked out the coordinates of his drop? Had he decided it was safer, after all, to deliver the envelope to the Commander himself? And then she wondered what she would have done if Jim had left something under the stone. If the envelope had been lying there, would she have taken it?

  ‘Well, I don’t want to interrupt your celebrations.’ Avis said briskly, a touch of iciness slipping into the deep south of her tone. She gave Sam a toxic glare, turned to face Tom. ‘We should stay in touch. Perhaps you could help me out with this travel guide I’m writing. Draft one of the introductory chapters. Here, take my contact details.’

  She dug in the back pocket of her jeans, handed him a business card. Sam craned her neck, checking out the address before Tom had time to snatch it away. Avis Chance. Ventura Enterprises, 196 Westminster Bridge Road, London SE1.

  ‘Ventura Enterprises?’ said Sam. She knew she should keep quiet, but she couldn’t stop herself. ‘I thought you said you were a freelance writer.’

  ‘Ventura Enterprises is a company I set up with a couple of other freelancers,’ Avis replied coldly. ‘For tax purposes.’

  Tom nodded. ‘That’s what freelancers usually do.’

  She felt an urge to kick him and his stupid bluffing.

  Avis flashed a final smile at Tom. ‘Please do get in touch,’ she said. And then she retreated, gliding away through the stones, across the ditch, over the heather, south towards the car park, the wind caressing her diminishing form. Sam stared at Tom, trying to catch his attention, but his foggy eyes were glazed, indifferent to her. He yawned.

  ‘You don’t know enough about Orkney to do a travel guide,’ she said.

  ‘That’s not the point. It’s about the writing skills.’

  ‘Let’s go home.’

  ‘Fine by me.’

  They marched back to the car park in silence.

  Jim wasn’t there when they reached Nethergate. It was almost two. Tom went straight to his room; he needed his eight hours. She stretched out on top of the candlewick bedspread and closed her eyes.

  She heard a noise, checked her watch in the gloom. Four. She must have been asleep. There was the noise again, a rustling of fabric perhaps, coming from the other end of the cottage. She sat up. Jim? Unlikely. He had said he wouldn’t be back until the morning. Now she heard a scrape, the scrunch of a drawer being closed carelessly. Not very professional. She exhaled slowly, stealthily paced across the floor, peered circumspectly into the dimness of the hall. Tom’s door was ajar. His bed was empty. She entered his room. The beige rectangle of his notebook was lying open provoca
tively on the pillow. What a jerk. She grabbed it, jammed it into the back pocket of her jeans, turned and accidentally kicked a mug dumped on the floor by the bed. Half empty. She picked that up too and quietly crossed the front room carpet, pressed herself against the wall by the entrance to the kitchen and waited.

  The bedroom door creaked. Footsteps crossed the tiled kitchen floor. A toe touched the bottom step from the kitchen to the front room.

  ‘Gotcha!’

  She chucked the cold tea dregs down into his upturned face. He spluttered. Yelled. Thrashed. Arms flailing wildly around. She stepped backwards, avoided his uncontrolled punches. He recognized his attacker. Folded his arms. Mouth still gawping, chin and shirt dripping with brown tea.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ she demanded.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What do you mean, nothing? You were ferreting around in Jim’s room.’

  ‘I wanted to help you find out what he was up to.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  He pulled his dismissive expression, tried to push past her. She jabbed him hard in the chest. He stumbled down the steps.

  ‘Well? Did you find anything?’

  ‘No’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, of course I’m sure.’

  ‘What’s in your pockets?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Turn them out.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Turn them out or I’ll tell Jim you’ve been snooping in his room and he’ll make you do it.’

  He glared at her, incredulously.

  ‘Do it,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve cracked. You’re a nutter. You’re as bad as Jim.’

  ‘Do it.’

  He sulkily emptied his trouser pockets on the floor. Pocket litter. Folded five-pound note, pencil stub, jagged Hobnob fragment, an ‘It-pays-to-increase your-wordpower’ page ripped out from the Reader’s Digest.

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She reached over to check. He pre-empted her move and stuck his hand into his shirt pocket, produced a torn scrap of paper, shoved it into her outstretched hand.