“Devo Nodenti Silvianus anilum perdedit demediam partem donavit Nodenti. Inter quibus nomen Seniciani nollis petmittas sanitatem donec perferat usque templum Nodentis,” she rattled off under her breath. She knew the inscription by heart. Looking up at the blurred stars, she mulled over the incontrovertible truth that neither Silvianus’ loss nor hers mattered a jot to them.
*
Sitting in her kitchen with a slice of buttered toast and the mug of tea she’s been longing for since waking, Peggy catches herself wondering why these memories are coming back to her today. It must be something she dreamt about last night, she thinks. Something about the dig, so that all the old scab is picked off and the raw memories exposed to the air again. It’s not as if they are ever far from her consciousness – Eustace is an ever-present reminder of that night in 1965 and all it led to – but she does try not to brood. What good does it do, after all? She made her bargain and she’s paid the price ever since.
As if hearing his name spoken, Eustace drops down from the central light-fitting he’s been clinging to and crawls across the floor to settle in the shadows under the kitchen table. If she moves her foot slightly she could touch him, she realises, and she wonders what that would feel like. She feels his weight on her chest nightly, but has never voluntarily touched that skin. It’s slightly sheened, as if oily, and she imagines he’ll feel cold. He’s a creature of the underworld, after all. He even smells like a damp coal bunker.
*
She looked up suddenly among the ruins of Lydney Temple, as if startled – though she’d seen nothing, heard nothing – and there in front of her, set in the grass, was a door. There had never been any question that she was still awake. Obviously she was dreaming; she recognised the door. It belonged in the street next to her parents’ end-terrace house in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Every other house in that steep street had a back yard with a coal bunker next to the outside toilet, both built of brick. Theirs however had a hatch in the street, covered by heavy wooden doors, that allowed the coalman to drop the coal straight down into their cellar. Her Da thought that maybe their place had once been a pub, and probably this was the delivery entrance for beer barrels. If so it had come down in the world, because they kept their coal down there now and no beer. Peggy had always been nervous of that cellar as a child – a filthy place her Ma hated her brothers and her playing in – and positively scared of the hatch, which she always felt might give way under her feet and drop her into the darkness. Of course, that meant she had to try standing on it every day after school.
Now that hatch – she recognised the vestiges of faded green paint – stood there hundreds of miles from home in a Roman ruin on a hilltop in the West Country, one leaf open and leaning back. A faint glow shone up from within. It looked like an invitation.
Rising, she approached the drop. Not a coal-hole, as she’d anticipated. No, the open door revealed a spiral staircase of polished wood descending vertically into the earth. The walls of the shaft were covered in shelves full of books, and on the first step sat a lamp, an old-style miner’s lamp like her Da used to use when she was little. That was the main source of the illumination, though there was faint shine on the shelf edges that suggested a glow from far below.
Picking up the lamp, Peggy began her descent. The staircase coiled round, lapping itself, her footfalls clunking on the wooden treads. She glanced at the books, thinking that they seemed familiar; she saw bright modern paperbacks, the kind she liked to read on the train, and bound copies of archaeological journals such as she consulted in the university department. Then a set of worn Dickens hardbacks like her Ma kept in the front parlour – no, not like, identical to, even down to the torn cloth spine on A Christmas Carol that was her fault – although she couldn’t actually read the faded lettering on the spines; it seemed all mixed up somehow. A Margaret Murray she recalled borrowing from the local library. Yes, lots of library books with inked shelf-numbers. And now, further down, fifty steps down, children’s books she had long forgotten but which now stood out like the faces of old friends in a crowd. She recognised the pictures on the covers even though the letters danced out of focus. Alice in Wonderland – of course. What could be more appropriate? Enid Blyton; The Princess and the Goblin; a rare, treasured golden-era Perrault’s Fairy Tales that her Ma had read to her at night.
Peggy pulled this last one out of its shelf and tried to flick through, but although the colour plates were there just as she remembered, the text was blurred beyond legibility. Of course, she told herself. You can’t ever read in dreams.
She replaced it carefully in its slot, because the blackness at the back of the shelf – and the cold draught blowing out of that hole – was oddly unnerving.
Then she took the last turn of the stairs, and that warm glow that had been growing all through her descent, rendering the lamp more and more unnecessary, made her blink.
Seventy, she said to herself, not even sure why she’d been counting. She was standing in a broad cavern with walls of rough-hewn rock and a floor of marble so highly polished that for a moment she thought it was glass. In the centre of the floor was well-head from which a column of flame rose, twisting like a tornado. The fire flickered from red to yellow to violet as it burned, and it took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust.
From either side behind the flame stepped two tall men. They were dressed in tunics of white linen, with broad pectoral collars of blue beads. Both sported long stiff beards dyed blue, both had their heads shaved bald and their eyes heavily outlined in kohl. Peggy had never seen men wearing eyeliner before, at least not outside a historical illustration, and she found either their makeup or something else about them deeply disconcerting.
Egyptian, she guessed. Or Roman. She couldn’t tell. Romano-Egyptian priests. What is this?
“Peggy Anne Connings,” said the first man, looking her up and down as he frowned.
“What are you doing here, child?” asked the second.
“I … er … I don’t know,” she muttered. She’d spotted what it was about them that she didn’t like. The column of flame threw their shadows up the walls of the cavern, making them dance and loom. But the heads of those shadows did not match the heads that cast them. They weren’t shaven. They weren’t even human.
“What did you come here for?”
She bit her lip, trying not to stare at the shadows. His black eyes bored into hers and he was so close now that she could see herself reflected in them; that silly little backstreet girl with her grammar-school education and her scholarship grant and her fake aspirational accent. The girl who’d let herself be charmed and used and then dropped like an empty chip paper. The girl who’d reached out for the ladder up and found it snatched from her reach.
“Justice,” she said, licking her dry lips. “I came here for justice.”
*
“Just us!” Nigel cries merrily as he opens the front door. “Hello Gran!”
Peggy happily accepts their greetings, as the kids push into the house and run round checking out the dusty collection of weird stuff – Malaysian masks, Burmese puppets, anthropomorphic Peruvian pots – that makes visiting the old lady bearable. Nigel looks jolly and Andrea looks mildly harassed, as ever. For years Peggy thought he'd never marry – it wasn’t good for a boy to be brought up by his grandmother no matter how hard she tried, she'd berated herself – but he’s somehow pulled it off at the final moment. He seems to thrive on fatherhood, she is relieved to see.
She has no worries about anyone spotting Eustace. He’s only a figment of her imagination, after all, so they never notice him. As they all settle down for a drink and a chat, he drapes himself across the top of the big dresser as if watching with his non-eyes. His long and wickedly spined tail hangs down like a cat’s, twitching gently.
After a cup of tea, Nigel loads Peggy and the children into the car and takes them out to the shops, while Andrea stays behind to give the house a bit of a clean – an arrangement that suits eve
ryone. Gaps in the buildings give them glimpses as they drive of the Clifton Suspension Bridge over the Avon gorge, and the brick towers and graceful Victorian span catch the children’s attention.
“What’s that? What’s that?”
“Can we drive over it, Dad?”
“No,” says Nigel firmly, casting Peggy a worried look.
“She told me she could fly, in her dreams,” Peggy murmurs.
They spend an hour looking at home furnishings and toys in the big warehouse store, where Peggy buys birthday cards and a new washing-up bowl. Then they eat lunch in a burger bar chosen by the children, much to Nigel’s embarrassment.
“It’s fine, Nigel dear. Don’t worry,” Peggy reassures him for at least the third time. “I don’t mind where we eat.” It isn’t like she has much appetite these days, anyway.
She steals a glance around the café, wondering if Eustace has come out with them. It’s much harder to see him outside the familiar confines of home, she’s discovered, but he’s still there.
“I drawed you a picture, Granny,” announces Bo, the youngest great-grandchild, hard at work with the free kids’ meal crayons.
“That’s lovely.” She holds the paper at arm’s length, squinting at the stick figure next to the black scribble. “Who is that?”
“That’s you,” he says, “and that’s your doggy.”
“Gran doesn’t have a dog,” Nigel says when she doesn’t answer.
“I dreamed she had one.”
“You know,” says Peggy, “there’s a theory that we are all dreaming, all the time. The mind is in a constant state of visualisation, even when awake, but the brain overrides these hallucinations and doesn’t let the consciousness register them. Unless you take LSD or are totally exhausted or something, of course.” She blinks and then realises that everyone is staring at her, confused.
*
The first priest lifted his painted brows and stepped back as if this was no longer his responsibility. The second spread his hands.
“Choose a door then.”
There were two tall doors on the right-hand side of the cavern. Set into the rough rock, they were themselves exquisite works of pointed Gothic art, carved and traced with abstract designs. Peggy, a little warily, walked closer. One door was made of pure white ivory, its swirling inlay all of gold. The other door was more ominous, a yellow-brown with even darker mottled patches, and its filigree inlay looked like wrought iron.
I know these. Virgil, isn’t it? The Aeneid? The Gate of Horn, through which true dreams pass, and the Gate of Ivory, which sends out deceptive ones.
There was another gate, on the far side of the cavern, but that had no door and she could see that it was another stairway, leading downward. She didn’t like the look of that one at all.
“This,” she said, laying her hand on the door of horn. It swung open without resistance.
She was standing on a cliff edge. Whether she was still underground it was hard to tell, but the cavern roof – if it existed – was lost in a pale grey haze in which black birds flocked and wheeled. The cliff dropped away in a tangle of jagged black rocks, and washing against those rocks, far below her feet, was a great sea of clouds. She watched the waves of vapour roll in and explode against the cliff-face, sending up showers of spray that splashed against her face with no sensation of wet at all, but dry as rice. There was a faint pattering as the spume fell back and drained from the inky stone.
All around her feet the rocks were patched with silvery grit. Pearls, she realised – seed pearls flung up from the deeps by the cumulonimbus surf. Mixed among them were paler specks that turned out, when she scooped them in her hand, to be babies’ teeth.
Of course, she told herself. Nodens was no god of the ocean or the forest, not even of death, though all those things were metaphors for his domain. The Great Abyss was the wilderness inside our heads – the unknown and unknowable depths of the subconscious. The land of dreams and terrors and lost memories. He was god of something that had no material existence, god of nothing at all. Yet that no-thing shaped us and made us and drove us. It was the place all our gods and our selves came from. He was a tiny insignificant god, and at exactly the same time he was Deo Maximus.
After all, the things that truly mattered were those that existed only inside our heads. Love and loss and pain. Everything in the real world was just the shuffling of atoms.
Another wave spat foam high, and the birds circling overhead caught her attention on the upward glance. They weren’t rooks after all, though they were just as black. Bats, perhaps? Their dusky wings looked translucent. There were thousands of them, and they were flying closer now.
No, not bats. Legs too long, and tails like whips. Demons, like in some Italian fresco depiction of the falling angels.
Shuddering, Peggy spun round – and there louring behind her waited Nodens.
Grey was her first impression. Grey and awful. Its long hair was grey, exactly the same colour as its draping robes, and covered its face so fully that she could only guess the shape of the head beneath, and imagine the hollows of the eyes watching her.
At its feet lay the carcass of a dolphin, gutted to expose its pink entrails and the silver spill of the fish that had formed its last meal. Crabs were feasting on both.
“What do you want, Peggy?” Nodens’ voice was a whisper, a trickle of shale fragments on a barren scree slope.
Then she realised that the hair, just like the silks, was nothing more than cobweb, layer upon layer of the stuff, thickly coated in dust. Those drapes were neither hair nor robes, and the true form of that hunched and shrouded figure was something she suddenly did not want to descry.
For a moment she wavered, wondering whether she could flee past it back to the safety of the gate. But she couldn’t see the portal from this side, just a towering cliff-face reaching up to the maybe-sky. And she could feel the watching demons overhead; her scalp crawled at the thought.
“Professor DeAngelo,” she said, clearing her throat. “He’s a thief and a liar and he picks on young girls who don’t know any better.” She felt that the words were coming out wrong, but she had to explain.
“What do you come to ask of me?”
“He hurt me. So I want him hurt.” She sucked her dry lips. “He has to be stopped, or he’ll just go on and do it again.”
Nodens tilted its head. There was something weird about her vision, she thought – she could not tell if the figure was human-sized and close, or further away and unspeakably vast. It seemed to change every time she tried to focus.
“I will do that. If you are willing to pay the price.”
“What’s the price?”
“Peace of mind.” That desiccated voice fluttered and sank, as if spoken down a tube miles off. “You will always remember what you did, and you will never sleep easy.”
“I can live with that,” she answered, drawing herself up.
“You will have to, for many years. Now go home.”
*
“We should go home now,” says Nigel, gathering up Bo’s crayons. “I promised to fix that porch light today, didn’t I?”
They drive back, and Nigel fixes the back porch light while the kids run round the overgrown garden – “This is really too much for you now Gran, you should hire someone to take those shrubs out and put in a nice patio” – and Andrea hangs the laundry out. They've brought along a DVD of some cartoon show Peggy doesn’t recognise, which keeps the kids quiet for an hour while Nigel replaces the batteries in the remotes and does a second load of laundry, and Andrea pops out with the car to do a supermarket shop and stock up all the cupboards.
Peggy is grateful for their kindness, but exhausted. She finds herself wanting to sit in her armchair in front of an old movie, with just Eustace crouched on the rug or hanging in the corner of the room for company. The noises of life and youth are too much these days. Shrieking and squabbling voices make her head spin.
Had she misheard Nodens, she sometimes wond
ers wryly. Had he said peace of mind or a piece of your mind?
“I've got something to show you, Gran,” Nigel tells her with a smile. He’s holding out his laptop computer like a silver tray. “Take a look at this.”
Peggy has never bothered with owning a computer, though she does have a smartphone which she'd been bought for Christmas and barely used. She sits with Nigel at the kitchen table and watches with what she hopes is proper enthusiasm as he opens up browser windows.
“This is Wikipedia,” he tells her. “Do you know what that is?”
She shakes her head.
“It’s an online encyclopaedia. There are literally millions of articles on every subject you can imagine here, in hundreds of languages. Anyone can access it, and anyone can contribute to it… Well, sort of. You have to prove you know your stuff, and cite sources and back up your arguments. But it means there’s not just a handful of people telling us what we should think about a subject. There are millions of people all over the world sharing their knowledge. The Encyclopaedia Britannica’s dead in the water, Gran – this is the future of information sharing. Now, look at this.”
He clicks on a star. A new page opens, headed Lydney Park Excavations. It’s divided into several subsections – the Mortimer Wheeler dig in the 1920s, the Casey et al excavation in 1980-81 – and between them, to Peggy’s alarm, a couple of paragraphs on the DeAngelo digs in 1963-5.
She doesn’t want to look.
“Is the text big enough for you, Gran?” Nigel asks, doing something that makes the screen zoom in. She has no excuse. She scans the first few sentences and then comes across one that makes her heart cram into her mouth:
DeAngelo’s postgraduate assistant, Peggy Connings, was the first to identify the range of buildings behind the temple as an incubation (Greek: abaton), a place for guests seeking divinatory or healing dreams.
“Oh,” she says. She can feel her pulse racing. “Really?”
“Yep. Everyone can see it now, Gran. Everyone in the world.”
“That’s…” She passes her hand over her face. “My goodness. That’s wonderful.”
The Private Life of Elder Things Page 13