The Narrows

by James Brogden

  Bex suggested that the bloody thing must be pre-war – pre Trojan War, possibly – and after wrestling with both it and a huge modern road atlas for half an hour in the passenger seat, eventually gave up and demanded that they stop at the next services before she threw the lot out of the window.

  She climbed back into the van’s interior and began rummaging through its tiny cupboards. ‘Where do you keep the kettle in this thing?’ she asked.

  ‘I told you,’ he called back over his shoulder, ‘not while we’re moving!’

  With his Astra wrecked by the skavags, Rosey had been left with no choice but to pull the winter covers off what he called his ‘shed on wheels’: a 1972 Volkswagen campervan with bay windscreen, pop-top, and a marmalade-orange paintjob which made Bex think of old penguin paperbacks. She understood that he called it a shed in the sense that it was his manly refuge from the world, but it was also a fair description of its shape; it had all the aerodynamics and maneuverability of a loaf of bread. She’d fallen in love with it instantly. Secreted ingeniously away in little cupboards were a fridge, stove, sink, and all manner of space-saving gadgetry, but he’d expressly forbidden her to explore or tamper with anything while he was driving. Needless to say, she paid absolutely no attention.

  At Warwick services, they found that the commuter frenzy had trickled away, and they were able to spread their maps over two tables as they ate. Bex discovered that she was ravenously hungry, and Rosey watched with a bemusement bordering on alarm as she demolished first a huge Cumberland sausage, coiled python-like in a lagoon of red-onion gravy, and then most of his scampi. And then a sticky toffee pudding.

  He found himself wondering where she stored it all, especially someone so small that she looked like if you kept peeling back the multiple layers of clothing she’d disappear completely. Then he found that thinking of peeling off her clothes made him feel very awkward indeed, and he went to get a coffee. As he stood at the counter being served by a bored-looking young woman who couldn’t have been much older, he realised that never mind monsters, murderers, and geomantic sorcery – at some point he was going to have to explain to a mother or father why he’d gone off gallivanting around the countryside with their teenaged daughter.

  And that really scared the shit out of him.

  He headed back to their table, seriously considering calling the whole thing off and hauling her back to Birmingham, but as he did so he saw that her sleeves had ridden up as she’d leaned over the map, exposing an inch of the clean bandage which he’d insisted on applying before they left. Maybe she was better off with him. He knew that he was no cradle-snatching perv, and that should be enough.

  It didn’t make a blind bit of difference to the smirking check-in clerk at the Ramada Holiday Inn next door. As Rosey paid for two single rooms he got a look which as clear as day said You aren’t fooling anybody, old man. Paying cash was probably what did it, but it was the lesser of two evils; he didn’t think Barber had the connections to trace his credit card, or would even bother, but he was taking no chances. He’d withdrawn as much as the ATM would allow and had been paying cash for everything since Moon Grove. Let the spotty-faced little twerp of a desk-monkey smirk all he liked.

  Bex had made a token protest of wanting to carry on as far as possible that evening, but had given in gladly enough when he asked her if she really wanted to spend the night stumbling around the pitch-black countryside in the rain, looking for a non-existent village.

  She was even able to ignore the room’s corporate sterility and indulged in the guilty pleasure of a full, steaming hot bath without having to worry for once about how much hot water she was using. She slid gratefully between impossibly clean sheets and collapsed into a sleep so profound that it formed Narrows in her own mind, down which she could flee the nightmares which threatened as soon as she closed her eyes.

  Running. Always running.

  ***

  It really didn’t matter whether or not the reception clerk believed that he was Bex’s father, Penrose thought as he let himself into her room. The important thing was that he’d been given a duplicate key-card.

  She was sound asleep and snoring amidst a drift of clothes and belongings from her rucksack. A can of Special Brew stood on the bedside table. It was a good job they’d only taken cheap rooms; Lord only knew what damage she could have inflicted on an actual mini-bar.

  He watched her for a while, wondering at how long it had been since he’d watched his own boys sleep like this and what had happened to all the time in between. Why it wasn’t her own Mum and Dad who were watching her like this – what had gone so catastrophically wrong that their daughter had ended up in a poxy motorway motel like this with a strange man? Jesus, she couldn’t have been much more than sixteen. The world was getting sicker by the day. Who could blame her for wanting to run away and find a better one?

  Taking care not to disturb her, he rummaged in her bag until he found the A-to-Z, and left the room as quietly as he’d entered.

  Back at reception, he did at least have the pleasure of seeing the clerk’s smirk replaced by dim confusion when he asked ‘Excuse me son, you don’t have a photocopier I can use, do you?’

  ***

  Penrose let her sleep long the following morning and insisted that they have a decent breakfast while they worked out exactly which way to go next.

  ‘What’s this really long straight road?’ she asked, pointing at the road atlas.

  Rosey glanced at it. ‘That’s the Fosse Way. It follows the line of a Roman road all the way from Leicester down to Bath, I think. Dead straight for hundreds of miles.’

  ‘Where’s Bath?’

  ‘There.’ He made a pained noise. ‘Do they teach nothing in schools these days?’

  ‘And where’s England again?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  She grinned. ‘Okay, but seriously. I’m trying to work out why Walter ended up in Birmingham. Holly End’s here, right?’ She indicated a point at the northern edge of the Cotswolds.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So he grabs baby Andy because he wants to put an end to whatever Barber’s been doing, and he goes looking for a safe place to hide. But there are loads of places closer than Brum, look: Cheltenham, Stratford, Banbury. Why not them?’

  ‘Maybe he thought he could hide better in a big city rather than a medium-sized town.’

  ‘Maybe. Or maybe it’s not about where you go so much as how you get there.’

  He sighed. ‘Ley lines again, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said defiantly. ‘Tell me, Mr Penrose, exactly how do you explain what you’ve seen and everything that’s happened to you?’

  ‘Just because I can’t explain it doesn’t mean I have to swallow every crackpot piece of New Age crystal-clutching rubbish that claims to.’

  ‘None taken,’ she replied acidly.

  ‘Roman roads aren’t ley-lines though, are they?’ he pointed out. ‘Even I know that.’

  ‘Not necessarily, no. But leys are just channels for the earth’s ch’i energy – either they occur naturally or they can be created by people travelling the same route for hundreds or thousands of years. Like the difference between streams and canals. Anyway, Fosse Way’s no good. Look, it goes off on the other side of Coventry, nowhere near Birmingham.’

  ‘Well the only other Roman road I know anything about is Icknield Street,’ he said, flipping through her battered A-to-Z. ‘There are parts of it still visible in Sutton Park, and…’

  But whatever he was about to say was drowned out by her cry of ‘OhmigodYES!’ as she slapped the table in excitement. Bacon and hash-browns bounced. Heads turned. ‘That’s it! That makes so much sense!’ Her eyes were shining and she was grinning widely, and Penrose couldn’t help noticing how badly she needed a dentist. I am getting old, he thought. ‘All the Narrowfolk kn
ow Icknield Street – it’s one of the oldest, quickest narrows – or it was until it closed. It was the first to close, now that I think about it. But of course, it would be the first one that Barber targeted, wouldn’t it? We all used to travel it. It’s where Andy’s flat was – he practically lived on it.’

  ‘I know. I saw what was left.’

  ‘Yes, but look where it ends!’ She swept the map around and shoved it at him across the table. ‘Follow the line!’

  He did so, tracing the line of Icknield Street nearly due south through the city and out into the countryside, where it was renamed Ryknild Street in quaint olde worlde lettering, becoming A-roads, then B-roads, and finally dwindling into farm tracks as it was lost in the rising slopes of the Cotswolds, barely a mile away from where Walter’s map indicated that Holly End should be. He felt a strange plummeting sensation in his stomach, as if he was in a lift that had suddenly dropped one floor too many.

  ‘I don’t care what you say,’ Bex insisted. ‘There is no way that could be a coincidence. Andy must have felt it way before any of this kicked off. That’s the way Walter got out, and it’s the way we’re going to get in.’

  3 Ryknild Street

  A few miles west of Stratford’s carefully manicured tourist traps, they caught Ryknild Street as it crossed the river by an ancient, single-lane stone bridge at Bidford-on-Avon, and entered the Vale of Evesham. Shortly after they’d crossed, Bex asked Rosey to park the Shed and got out with Dodd’s dowsing rods.

  ‘Look,’ she said, seeing the expression on his face, ‘there’s no New Age crystal clutchery involved here. All these do is amplify the effect of the interaction between the human central nervous system and the Earth’s ley matrix.’

  ‘Of course. Silly me.’

  ‘Involuntary tics and twitches in the arm muscles, right? They get translated into a swingy-pointy movement of the rods.’

  ‘Swingy-pointy movement.’

  ‘Shut up, it’s perfectly rational!’

  She stood in the middle of the road with the dowsing rods outstretched (she’d replaced the split copper sleeves with bright pink drinking straws from the service station), and before she’d had a chance to try and relax or concentrate, they immediately flew to cross themselves. Simultaneously she felt a tremendous jolt of energy spiral upwards through her body: in from the ground through the soles of her feet, setting off explosions between her legs, behind her navel, at the tip of each breast and at the base of her throat, before shooting out through the top of her head. She yelped, dropped the rods and staggered back against the campervan.

  Rosey was out and at her side in a second. ‘Are you alright?’

  ‘Well I think we can definitely confirm there is a ley running along here,’ she replied, dazed and flushed. ‘Bit of a kick to it, actually.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It was like – no, I don’t think I should really say.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’d probably say it wasn’t very ladylike.’ She giggled, blushed to the roots of her hair and got back into the van.

  The Roman road arrowed straight towards the grey shadow of the Cotswolds’ most northern edge. It was built up slightly higher than the surrounding fields, which were flat and shining with floodwater mirroring the grey sky, and cross-hatched with winter-bristling hedgerows. By the roadside these were overgrown – long-fingered ash, scribbly beech, and hawthorn stripped bare to the thorns – punctuated occasionally by gaunt, black-limbed oaks. The only sign of green came from stands of holly which seemed gleefully oblivious to the emptiness of the season.

  Bex grew ever more uncomfortable, all too aware that this was the very worst time of the year to go exploring ley paths or hunting for lost villages – especially those named for trees which were at the height of their power. She remembered what Carling had looked like for having run afoul of it, and she shivered. The sheer, flat openness of the landscape was making her twitchy too – there were no roofs to shelter under or alleyways to hide in. She felt exposed and defenceless.

  Rosey too found it disconcerting, being used to the stop-start labyrinth of city driving or else just tooling around tame country lanes in the Shed on a weekend. This wasn’t the chocolate-box England of bank holidays, however. Driving for so long in one direction was something you did in America or Australia.

  The hills grew nearer, becoming low, wooded ridges, and they passed through a few villages with names which made them sound like they should have been inhabited by hobbits: Bickmarsh, Bucklestreet, Honeybourne. At last the land started to rise, and they stopped at a village called Weston-sub-Edge which was the first they’d seen built in the characteristic toffee-coloured Cotswold stone and, true to its name, nestled at the very feet of the hills. Up close, they undulated in wooded waves east and west, folding around themselves in deeply shadowed coombs and vales.

  Weston was also the point where the road turned away from Ryknild Street, which continued its southerly course as a walking track up into the hills. Rosey suggested they stop and gather their bearings, though he wasn’t optimistic about the chances of the locals being either able or willing to tell them anything. Bex was more philosophical, figuring that they should at least be able to get a decent lunch.

  ‘How can you possibly be hungry again?’ he asked, aghast. ‘You’ve done nothing but sit in the van for two hours.’

  ‘Come on, old man,’ she laughed. ‘Let’s get you a nice ploughman’s, shall we?’

  They had parked outside a plain, square-fronted pub called the Seagrave Arms. She’d been expecting it to be hideously touristy, full of yompers and chompers, but was pleasantly surprised to find the opposite. Instead of pool tables, one-armed bandits and televisions ramming Sky-bloody-Sports down your eyeballs, there was a fireplace, brass-handled beer-pulls, and the dark-warm smell of beer and oak. It reminded her of Moon Grove a little bit. There was even a community noticeboard next to the bar, which she checked out of habit while Penrose ordered drinks.

  She skimmed over cards advertising Christmas cakes, home accountancy, central heating repairs – village life in minutiae – and wanted to point it out to Penrose.

  See? she wanted to say. It’s not us who are odd, swapping this for that and trading favours, it’s you lot. You people, who have your finances looked after by Bangladeshi call centres, who pay the supermarkets to fill your homes with rubbish which you then have to pay the Council to take away again, who can’t touch the soil that your food grows in. Us Narrowfolk, we’re not living some kind of New Age alternative lifestyle – this is the oldest lifestyle there is.

  But he’d just bought her an orange and lemonade – bless, as if she couldn’t drink him under the table – and she thought it might have come across as a bit churlish.

  Then her eyes lit on a flyer for the Ryknild Ramblers’ forthcoming Boxing Day expedition, which sucked the air out of her lungs and set her heart hammering in its cage.

  Ryknild Ramblers Boxing Day Woodwalk

  Come and burn off some of that Christmas pudding with a traditional Boxing Day ramble through the beauty of our local woodland! Starting from the Seagrave Arms, we’ll follow Ryknild Street up into Weston Woods, along the Narrows to the Kiftsgate Stone and back down in time for a lunchtime pint.

  Contact details followed, but by that time she was grabbing for Penrose. ‘Look!’ When he’d read it she snatched the flyer from the noticeboard and went over to the landlord, who was chalking the day’s lunch menu on a small blackboard.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, showing him the flyer, ‘but where is this?’

  He glanced at it and then her. ‘Which part, m’dear?’ he asked genially.

  ‘The Narrows! Are there some nearby?’

  ‘Wouldn’t know about “some” there. There’s just one – road at the top of the hill. That’s what it’s called; don’t ask me why though
. Goes to Chipping Camden, it does. That the way you’re heading then, is it m’dear?’

  ‘What about this Kiftsgate Stone thing?’

  ‘Ah,’ he said sadly, ‘I think that might be what you’d call a bit of poetic licence, seeing as how there isn’t one. Not now, leastways. Got stolen, it did, maybe sixty years ago now. But people’s memories are long, especially for something that’s been here longer than most of the villages around abouts.’

  ‘What kind of stone was it?’

  He paused, laid down his chalk and leaned on the bar, looking at her properly for the first time. His hair was a shock-white thatch, and he had the bushiest eyebrows she’d ever seen. ‘Well now, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, but we don’t often get young people like yourself interested in the old paths and stones. Getting dragged around the countryside by your dad, then, is it?’ he nodded at Rosey.

  ‘Yeah,’ she drawled. ‘I have a passion for old things.’ Out of the landlord’s eyeshot she tipped Rosey a saucy wink. He nearly choked on his pint of the house ale.

  ‘She really loves Time Team,’ he coughed.

  ‘Well then m’dear,’ said the landlord, warming to an unexpected audience, ‘the Kiftsgate stone was, is, a big standing piece of limestone, like them chappies up at the Rollright Circle, if you’ve been there. These hills are covered in ‘em. People have been burying their dead up here since the Stone Age. But the Kiftsgate Stone now, that was what you’d call a moot stone. Anglo-Saxon, that is: a meeting place for all the villagers hereabouts to settle their business with each other in the old times. They say that George the Third was proclaimed king by it.’