by Adam Thorpe
I move to the square below, taking in the upper quarter of the village, Ulverton Hall, the beginning of the scarp, the white horse, the long and supple lines of Frum Down. Nothing. I stroke the square, the church, the Old Barn, the shops, the pubs. I sidle past the mill and over Saddle Bridge, wondering if the water might twitch the rods, but it doesn’t. I slow over John Wall’s tiny black dot, hover over his roof, feel myself duck under the washing-line, afraid of being spotted. Cross on to Malcolm’s lawn, past his woodworking shed, splash down the lane.
Nothing, nothing!
Everybody in Ulverton can feel my finger pass over them as a shadow, a little chill. This is the kind of thing I did in the war, Mother, as an observer, bent over huge maps of German towns and cities, of forests and fields and limber rivers; the maps swapped for photographs, my finger passing over roofs, streets, parks, no more than scores and scratches on splotches of grey until the open country appeared and the cross-light of dawn pulled trees, hedges, walls and even hay stooks up and out of the white fields by their shadows – those thousands and thousands of hay stooks and hay ricks like little houses that have gone now, Mother, along with wattled sheep folds and the white chalky roads!
Did they feel a chill as well, those who were to die in flames the following day, as our fingers passed over them?
Nothing.
I pass to the right, to the east, to the grid square of open downland, of rolling fields of corn, a tumulus or two, and Five Elms Farm. I remember the walk there with Rachael, the fields alive with butterflies and the air with love’s nectar, the sky marred only by a silver speck, the vapour-trail of war. Deep, cool bluebell woods. The mighty undulations of the bare open downs. There. My finger has finished with it.
Nothing. Then, conscious of the time this is taking, I jump to the square, two to the left, in which the wildwood lies. I look up at Ray before setting off. He’s unchanged, like a statue, as if made from wax. Only his eyelids are alive, the wheeze like an old pump. The V of the rod is rigid in his knobbly hands. He looks both very old – too old – and very young, still the boy with his toy. Put away childish things. But what remains, Mother?
I start to track the garden with my huge finger, bringing again the leopard skin and its cloud of green flies into my head.
Something. Something caught. The rod twitching up.
I am staring at the map, at the tip of my finger, but I don’t think I stopped in time. A grunt from Ray – the rod’s flat again now. I retrace my route, the pad of my finger like a sharp point – I am only just touching the map’s surface, you see, shadowing a few square yards on the ground. I see the grass of the garden as I glide in front of the house. The faint line of the grid square is like a wall between the house and myself. But we have done the house before: it is not in the house, is it? I pass easily and slowly through the wildwood, with a bit of a shudder when I touch the part where the corpse hung, up in the tree.
I haven’t been picturing the leopard skin. I go back and pass through Ilythia again. Scratch scratch scratch as Father swabs the hide. Quiri is in the door of the kitchen, beyond. He’s crouched as if someone is trying to shoot him. I go up to him. Quiri is terrified – not of me, but of what we are doing. He tells me that the leopard spirit will return and avenge itself.
Then I see the skin in the main room, as a rug. Its eyes agoggle, as if the body has been winded by your weight. Why did you sack Quiri, Mother, as soon as my back was turned?
Something, again.
I am not in the garden at all, not now. I’ve moved out, over the beechwood, to the middle of the scorched field behind. Jenny has told me of the crop-circle here in the summer, a bit like a brain. Nothing again. I glance at Ray. He’s looking at the map, at my finger.
‘You’re in two places at once,’ he whispers.
What does he mean?
‘Your thumb’s the one,’ he adds. He’s wheezing, as if he’s been walking with me.
Yes, the thumb on the same hand is poised very close to the sheet, I hadn’t noticed. I lift my finger clear and drop my thumb as a needle is dropped on a record. The rod’s pulled upwards, as if by a thread in the ceiling, until it is vertical, trembling in Ray’s hands.
I am over Fierce End. The furzy, acid basin of Fierce End, where Rachael wobbled on the witch’s stone. Where I told her that the lines of turf between the heather were scars made by giant claws. Where the clean galloping turf of the open downs has a bit of a tumble into heath!
Flying through the air as if pouncing, that’s how I see it. And then realise how ridiculous this image is, since the creature weighs too much to be flung in that way. When it was wet, Father could hardly carry it from tub to table, could he?
The rod hits my hand. Ray has dropped it. He’s fallen asleep, his head slumped to one side. No, he isn’t asleep, he’s murmuring something through a slow, heavy wheeze.
‘Phew,’ he is saying, ‘I need a drink.’
‘What kind of drink?’
‘I’ll thank you for some water.’
I fetch some and he drinks it with difficulty from trembling hands. The whole operation has been too much for him.
‘I feel wobbly,’ he says. ‘I need my injection.’
I squeeze his arm and thank him profusely, fold up the map, and return it to the drawer. The white nightshirt, I notice, has a hood. It is more a monk’s cowled habit than anything else. He’s watching my quizzical expression with his mouth open, drawing breath with difficulty.
‘Ask Cliff Trindle about it,’ he whispers.
I nod, and fetch the nurse. She seems surprisingly concerned. Half-jokingly, administering the shot, she asks me what I’ve done to him.
‘I think he needs a shut-eye,’ she adds. ‘Visit over.’
She smiles sweetly. I squeeze Ray’s hand and he gives me a feeble smile.
‘I’d go up in scale if I could, but it takes it out of me.’
Of course – we might have used one of his parish maps to find the exact spot. But Fierce End is not huge, and any disturbance of its surface would be easy to see. I tell him not to worry, it’s fine as it is. The nurse is frowning at me, holding her syringe up – just like they hold it up here, Mother! I take the bent hazel withy, squeeze Ray’s hand again, and leave.
Cliff draws up in the car just as I emerge from the gate.
‘You look happy,’ he says.
‘I am.’
‘How is he?’
‘Better. But he needs a rest.’
‘What else is he doing in there, then? Aikido?’
On the way back to the village I ask him to tell me about the monk’s white habit in the drawer. A pause.
‘We’re both members of the local branch of the Most Ancient Druid Order,’ he says, as if admitting to being a Rotarian.
‘Gosh. I thought Ray Duckett was down-to-earth, for all his dowsing skills.’
Cliff gazes at me wistfully in the mirror.
‘That, if you don’t mind me saying so, is a rather ironic remark.’
He goes on about earth power and earth currents while half my mind is circling about the little patch of heath. It’s dusk outside. We’re passing the out-of-town shopping centre, with its prefab hangars and giant hoardings. There are lights on, lots of cars. ‘Ray only does it because of Stukeley, I admit to you. Stukeley is Ray’s hero. The guy pretty well invented us, you see. The Druids. Eighteenth century, most of it. But that doesn’t put me off. I like the ceremonial bit. We’ve got this huge horn, about ten feet long, and blow it at the solstice.’ A giant, moaning sort of raspberry, the car wandering all over the place. ‘Turns you inside out, takes you out of yourself, like the ships’ hooters. Like a sort of aural sauna. That and the sun coming up between the menhirs. You know what Stukeley said about the bods that built them? You’ve got to admire the vast size of their minds. That’s what he said.’
I pay him way over the odds, I’m so excited. Ted is standing by the back door when I arrive in the yard. He’s sweeping leaves off the mat i
n the last of the light. His face is drawn and white. He seems surprised to see me.
‘Back from the dead,’ I say, too heartily.
‘It’s all right for some, then,’ he mutters.
He went to the police mortuary yesterday, identifying the body.
‘Definitely Muck, then?’
Ted nods. ‘Horrible sight,’ he murmurs. ‘One eyeball hanging out. You’d think they’d have popped it back in or something, knowing I was coming. Couldn’t sleep last night. Can’t stop thinking about it. One eyeball sort of resting on his cheek.’
He stares at my eye-patch. There’s a shape in the doorway, which turns into Fatso. Ted notices that I’ve noticed. ‘Might have to take him to the vet,’ he says. ‘Doesn’t normally fight, that one.’ Fatso’s flat face is mottled with dried blood, and a bit of his ear is missing. The animal pads off across the yard, still nervous. I think to myself: I must go now. I must bring it back before it’s too late. But of course it’s already too dark. I go to bed rather early, setting my alarm for dawn.
I wish the heat here was African heat.
Your loving son,
Hugh
Even hotter. Lawn yellow. Sputtery useless sprinkler.
Dearest Mother,
Morris has just visited. He calls me Mr Mime. I’m leaving him the bundle, with instructions to burn it ceremoniously, if anything should happen to me. Some idiot might want to publish its contents, Mother. The whole world prying.
A lovely crisp dawn stroll, in normal circumstances. Deer, rabbits, touches of mist. But I’m rather het up, of course. I have to wipe my brow quite frequently. Now I’m on the rim of the heathy patch, by the stand of beech. The sun has just risen enough to light them. They were there when you were with us, sixty years ago; one of them has fallen, but the others look much the same, except that the earth has worn away around the roots. The sarsens won’t have changed, that I know for sure. Their Ice Age rubble stretches along the frosty coomb in the dawn light. The long limber waves of the open downs are more sky than earth, at this time, especially while the mist is still in the air. I could go for a long walk into those empty spaces.
Instead I walk down to the bottom. It’s quite a bit colder, down here. Gorse and heather and waist-high bracken. I catch my breath and look about me. I’m nervous, Mother. I half-expect to see the skin sprawled behind a stone, or draped over the gorse thorns, and scan the bracken for a paw or a savage grin.
Nothing.
I look at the slope with the downy claw marks. The bracken has not crept over them at all – not in fifty years! I bend the hazel rod as Ray instructed, then walk up to the far end, where the easterly incline sweeps up to the dark brow of ragged pines. Turning round, making a dent with my heel, I start to dowse at a steady pace. One two, one two, the hazel rod held out before me, the ground passing under it, still grey and shadowy. My breath whirling in the air.
The leopard’s hide, sprawled on the table in the yard, Father grunting over the suds of borax, soap and sulphuric acid, his panama shielding his face from me, the leopard’s eyeless head bobbing slightly, hanging off the edge, as if it was agreeing with every point put, its long whiskers silver in the sunlight. I’d touched them, and Father had ticked me off. Not a whisker must be bent or broken. Think of them as piano strings, he said. Do you remember, Mother? How annoyed he was, how anxious.
Nothing, the whole way along that side. I do feel a bit ridiculous, Mother, with my hazel rod. At one point I think I see a figure standing high on the crest above the stripes, and whip my head up to look. Nuncle, I was thinking about Nuncle: and it has the same stocky shape. It merges with the silhouetted bracken fronds – and might have been the bracken itself, moved by the early morning breeze.
I make my breathing shallower, with a couple of Eilrig exercises. I don’t think it works if you’re worked up. Aunt Joy could never dowse, anyway, and she was always worked up. I try to remember how it felt. Was it like a pulse, a current? A warmth, a chill? Or was it moved like a puppet by a thread hanging from the sky, or pushed up by an invisible hand? Did you ever have a go, Mother? I don’t recall you having a go.
I think it just happened, at the time. I was waiting for the cakes, or for the chance to slip away and turn the boring, long-coated crowd into marauding pirates glimpsed from the trees, invading my coral island, desperate to lay hands on my treasure. I had my homemade bow and arrow but I never actually shot at them.
Nothing on the return, one pace to the north.
I think you have to let go. Not think about it.
My lines wiggle between the great lumps of sarsen. I’m not even sure whether the sighting I make each time on a distant tree, as the ploughmen used to do on a whitened branch or Raymond on my ladder, is enough to keep me on the right course.
Then I spot the witch’s stone, the stone Rachael stood and wobbled on. It’s the only one that rears up like that, like a stag beetle’s armour. I lifted her off and hugged her, just there, between the scrubby gorse. How slow-growing is gorse? The peopled world vanished, when I hugged her here. Now there’s no one to hug, so it stays: a bright vapour trail, distant blast-furnace of traffic, some snarly saw or other. But no people, at least.
Now I’m standing by the great stone and my hand is on it. The surface is cold from the night. There’s lichen on its puckered flanks, green and crisp and perhaps dead. There are little holes scattered over it; I know what these are, these are where the roots of palm trees poked, when the climate was African, when the stone was not yet a stone. Before it was rolled by the ice and smashed up. Oh, that was only yesterday, it’s saying. Or maybe the day before. This is not a witch, but a god. No wonder they set them upright.
And the little cupping heath becomes a slurry of ice again. The tundra stretches away, the graveyard of all those warm woods and ferns and African beasts. Hippopotamus, even! Crocodiles! All gone – only the tundra now, the wild icy wind and the sheets of scurrying white.
For the moment, anyway.
I climb onto the top – it’ll give me a good view of the whole coomb. The effort of climbing it is age, not the stone. It doesn’t wobble, anyway – it’s no longer the wobbling stone. The little hollow in its top is filled with rainwater, with a few drowned rowan berries, dropped by birds. The rowan is called the witch-wood, isn’t it? Nuncle’s most famous essay was about the rowan berry, Mother. The berries germinate in the birds’ excreta – their seeds are protected from the stomach’s acids by a special skin. So he concluded that birds and rowan trees had made a pact, because rowan trees would not grow without hungry birds, and that this proved nature’s vital intelligence.
I roll one of the berries around in my hand and think of Nuncle as a flint-blade buried deep in my vertebrae: when I am exhumed they will find it. A figure on the crest – head and shoulders – pops into the corner of my eye up by the oak copse, then is gone. I’m sure it dived out of sight. There again, it might have been a shadow on the bracken. It had a flat cap on its head, like Nuncle did for a time. I was once mildly rude about Aunt Joy long after she was dead; he told me that if someone ever thought of him badly after his death, he would know and respond, like a dead gypsy. ‘This is why I only have good thoughts about Aunt Joy, d’you see?’ I tell him in a whisper to go away. Then his presence seems to flood backwards from the future that lay before me when I was last here – and sweeps away the memory of Rachael, standing in my stead, arms out on top of this stone, her lovely black hair tumbling down and down.
Your loving son,
Hugh
Everything shrivelled.
Dearest Mother,
So I have to kneel, or fall off.
I kneel.
Oh, the stone is looking up at me. The trapped witch is pressed to the surface, staring through a chink. Her eyeball boggles up at me through the rowan berries in the little basin of water. At first I think it’s the reflection of my own eye – but when I move, it stays.
A perfect eyeball.
Wisps of cloud float ov
er it. Muck didn’t actually lose his eyeball, did he? Oh, how horrible. When I’ve calmed down, I persuade myself to dip my finger into the water and touch it.
It’s not gristle, but glass. They call sarsens ‘bridestones’, locally. At least they did in your time, Mother. Maybe Bride was the old goddess’s name. The old goddess, the witch, the ill-wisher, the evil eye. Or perhaps this is one of her miracles. Perhaps she is giving me sight in my blind eye. So I scoop the thing out.
The big glass marble rolls in my palm, almost the companion to Dr Johnson’s. Flecked hazel, ordered from London in a pair by Father, with instructions for insertion from a Mr Platting, Taxidermist to the Crown. The things you remember. The things you forget.
Of course I’m happy. If it takes me five, ten, fifteen days, I will find the leopard here. The one-eyed leopard. I even picture it with an eye-patch on. Imagine that, Mother. A snarly leopard with an eye-patch!
In the bracken, probably. Oh, I so like the eye’s glassy hardness. Good old Mr Platting, Taxidermist to the Crown.
But why was it placed here? Now there’s the funny thing.
I stand up, thinking hard. Oh, I can’t remember exactly what I am working out. I don’t think any of them were right. I can just see the two barrows poking above the crest, bright in the new light. Keiller once told me they were capped with chalk when they were new, gleaming like white rainwashed skulls in the green turf. Huge albino graves dotted all over the bare green roll of downland. Deathcaps, Nuncle called them. Then I think I see a figure standing on one of them. I shake my head to clear it. It’s gone.
But I feel so vulnerable, Mother, up there on that rock. The sun blinds me, shafting over the crest of this place. That means I must be brightly lit, as if I’m on my own little stage. But this very peculiar fear grips me, when I think of climbing down. I think I’ll be taken, you see. By the leopard men. Men who know they are leopard men, not men with leopards so deep inside them they don’t know they are men. Men with big claws, stalking me. I fancy the whole little furzy coomb is surrounded by leopard men, that if I climb down and stand on the ground they’ll leap up from behind every sarsen or rise in a ring from the crests. This strange idea seizes me in the belly, turning my guts liquid with terror. Real terror, Mother. It’s so great I can’t move. It’s like the terror Father felt once, when he thought he heard the growl of a leopard on one of his bush tours. It saves you because it makes you stay absolutely still, gripped by a paralysing fear. I find myself on all four paws on top of the stone, unable to move. At least I’m higher than them, up here! Then this even stranger thing happens. My lips start to draw back from my teeth. I like this sensation, I like exposing my teeth, my gums. You hated me doing this but I’m doing it anyway. I’m doing it now. It requires effort, it’s a strain, but I can just about expose my lower gums as well as my upper gums. It makes you feel very fierce, your whole face stretches and becomes one with this snarl, all teeth. It’s very satisfying. You see? It protects you from all those leopard men, all those huge metal claws hidden under their skins. You can’t argue or plead with a leopard man, you have to frighten him off – even if you are paralysed with fright yourself. You have to be more leopard than a leopard man, like Fatso was more cat than I was in my nightmare on Sunday night. And up there on that stone I feel more leopard than any leopard man, even without the skin. My body becomes limber like the lines of the open downs, and covered in fur like turf, and as strong as the chalk depths are strong. I recommend this sensation, Mother. It does away with the nuisance of being a mortal, fidgeting about with human matters. The only drawback is that you can’t speak words. In my book, that is its advantage.