The Greenstone Grail

by Jan Siegel

  Nathan followed them as well as he could, frustrated by the difficulty of keeping out of sight. They met few other people, and those always stopped when they saw the Grandir, standing motionless, presumably out of respect, until he had moved on. This gave Nathan a moment to get under cover, or such cover as he could find, slipping round a corner, or into a doorway. They passed down many corridors, curving and intersecting like the passages in a maze, and moving staircases which swung round at the touch of a button, so you could alight in a number of different places. Halmé did not look round again, but Nathan wondered if she was aware of him. She walked always behind the men, not out of humility, he was certain, but because her thoughts were elsewhere, and their murmured exchanges did not interest her.

  They went through a sliding door into a cylindrical cell which he knew was a lift. He dared not follow, he was too clearly defined; they would see him; he could only wait, half frantic at the suspense, until the lift returned. There was no illuminated panel to indicate its progress, no buttons that he could perceive, but presently the door reopened, and the lift was back, empty. He stepped inside.

  The door closed and the lift began to descend immediately, though he had touched nothing. Its motion was smooth and very fast: even in that dream state his stomach seemed to be left behind. He remembered he had been inside a lift in an earlier dream, but then he must have been too insubstantial to react to it; the more solid he became, the more he responded to his surroundings. A terrible fear grew in him that the time would come when he was completely solid, and then he would be unable to wake up, but he tried to suppress it: he had fears enough to deal with for now. When the door slid back again, at the bottom of the shaft, he almost expected to find someone waiting for him. But the passage was vacant, and a single door at the end showed him the only way his quarries could have gone. There was lettering on the door, in the language of Eos. In his mind it translated as Private – No Unauthorized Entry. There was little light down here and he felt as if he must be underground, in some dim sub-basement below the city. The gloom gave him confidence: here at least he had a reasonable chance of passing unseen. He touched the door, pressing gingerly. To his surprise, it opened at once.

  He found himself entering a long room which reminded him of a laboratory in a film, the kind where they did experiments on animals. There were boxes and cages along the right-hand wall, most of which appeared to be unoccupied; along the left was a range of screens and storage units. The space in between was entirely taken up with workbenches stacked with bizarre scientific equipment: oddly shaped retorts connected with convoluted glass tubing, sealed metal containers, things which might be futuristic microscopes, or telescopes or other kinds of scopes. The area was poorly lit for a laboratory and the Grandir and his two companions, at the far end, had evidently not noticed the opening of the door. Cautiously, Nathan began to move towards them, peering into the cages on his right as he went. As he had already noted, most of them were empty, but one was heaving with locust-like insects whose bodies shone with a faint, phosphorescence, while in another a gigantic black rat bared wicked teeth at him. Strangest of all, in a third there was a cat which seemed at one moment to be lying dead and the next, savagely alive, clawed at the sides of its prison. The Grandir, Halmé and purple-cowl were staring at a much larger cage at the very end of the room. Nathan slipped under an adjacent workbench and crept as close as he dared.

  ‘I thought there were none left,’ said purple-cowl. ‘They were wiped out a thousand years ago.’

  ‘Not all,’ said the Grandir. ‘I saved a few – just a few – and bred from them.’

  ‘But … is this prison secure?’

  ‘Of course. You need have no fear. The glass has been infused with threads of iron, too fine for the naked eye to see them. They cannot tolerate it.’

  ‘Iron?’ queried purple-cowl. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘It used to be common knowledge, in the days when such knowledge was necessary,’ the Grandir said. ‘It emits a magnetic field which can kill them. There are disadvantages to being equipped with hypersenses. They can become all but invisible, and pass through solid objects, but they react to stimuli which would not affect us.’

  ‘I remember now. The scent of a particular herb, the right sound level …’

  Nathan crawled forward on hands and knees until he could see into the cage. He knew what was there now, but they looked different in this world. Almost solid, except if they moved, when their substance seemed to blur, becoming briefly fluid. They resembled monkeys, or so he thought at first, save that they were naked, and there was a webbing beneath their arms which extended into wings, not perhaps adequate for flight but designed to skim short distances. But their eyes were enormous, too large even for nocturnal primates, milky globes with a slitted pupil which shrank or dilated with every variation of light, and their faces were squashed into tiny triangles with no brow and little mouth, only distended nostrils in a flattened nose and outthrust ears which moved and twitched constantly. Their skin was dark, of some non-colour just short of black, and it had no sheen, no visible texture: it was as matt as shadow. There were maybe thirty or forty of them, some motionless on branch-like perches, others climbing over one another, heaving like the locusts, their bodies appearing to dissolve and blend into a single swell of movement. Nathan found that the more he stared at them, the more he found them both fascinating and horrible.

  ‘The cage is sound-proofed,’ the Grandir said, ‘for their own protection, and as you see, I do not allow strong light in here. They dislike even ordinary daylight, though they are not affected by the sundeath.’

  ‘They were made illegal,’ purple-cowl said. ‘You ratified the law.’

  ‘Naturally. They are very dangerous. In the wrong hands, they could do great harm. As it is, I do not use them … here.’

  ‘It is true then? They can pass through the dimensions?’

  ‘They can pass not merely between dimensions – that is a child’s trick – but between universes. All they need is an opening, a weakening of the barrier, and a reference point. These things can be engineered. Of course, not all have that ability – the genotype is unpredictable – but I have destroyed those which are of no use to me.’

  Purple-cowl was silent for a minute, evidently absorbing the implications. ‘How do you control them?’ he asked. ‘Can they be trained?’

  ‘They respond to powerful thought-waves,’ the Grandir explained. ‘There are certain spells and rituals, some of them forbidden, which magnify the brain’s telepathic faculty, and enable the practor to control and dominate lesser minds. These creatures have hardly any mind at all – just enough for my purposes. Once subjugated, they will obey my every thought, regardless of distance or location. I can even entrance myself and see – or hear – through their senses. They are my eyes and ears in another world.’

  For the first time, Halmé spoke. She had been gazing for a long time into the cage, apparently paying little attention to the discussion. ‘They are disgusting,’ she said.

  ‘They are useful,’ said the Grandir. Nathan had a feeling he was correcting her. ‘I find I even have a certain affection for them, as people in ancient days had for their pets. They are as werenature made them. And if we do manage to escape our doom, believe me, it will be in part – in a small part – due to them. You should not condemn them because they are not beautiful.’

  She did not answer, but detached her mask and crouched down, pressing her naked face close to the glass. Gazing and gazing.

  ‘Don’t do that!’ the Grandir said sharply, but though he reached out, he refrained from pulling her away. ‘These are half-trained. Your face might impress them. They could become attached to you – imprinted with your image. That would be very dangerous. I have always been careful to attach them to an inanimate object or specific location.’

  The cup, Nathan thought. The Grimthorn Grail. He didn’t know why or how, but he was sure of it.

  Slowly, almost r
eluctantly, Halmé drew away and replaced her mask. Purple-cowl made a sudden movement; he had obviously been staring at her exposed face – Nathan could sense his intentness and his shock. An unmasked face must be a shock, he realized, in this world of masks and cowls. And perhaps, even here, her beauty was something special, the stuff of legend, spoken of but never seen, a jewel hidden in a secret vault. He thought of the beauties of his own world, seen continuously on television, in newspapers, in magazines, and they seemed to him shallow, creatures of plastic and celluloid, cosmetics and artifice. Here was mystery, the beauty of myth and fairytale, the face of Helen. He recalled reading the lines somewhere: Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, And burned the topless towers of Ilium? He had never really understood how towers could be topless, but there was a magic in the words, and he could imagine them applied to Halmé. For her, the Grandir might indeed seek to tear down the barriers between the worlds, and make another Eden, a paradise beyond contamination.

  As he watched her, the laboratory darkened, and he felt himself fading – thinning – dissolving back into sleep. It was a curiously slow process, as if he were unwilling to leave, and when he awoke in his own room it troubled him, because he sensed that like the gnomons he was becoming attached, not to a single place or an object but to a world, a state of being, which was not native to him. For all its troubles this alternative cosmos both excited and intrigued him, and with every dream, every materialization, he found it harder to let go.

  ‘We need iron,’ he told Hazel, the next day. George was out with his family and they were alone. ‘I thought of the poker by the fire, but it looks like brass, and our cutlery’s stainless steel: I don’t know how much iron there is in it.’

  ‘Why iron?’ Hazel demanded.

  He explained about the gnomons, and his dream.

  ‘It’s like in the old days,’ Hazel said unexpectedly. ‘Great-grandma told me, people used to have iron to ward off bad spirits – wicked fairies – things like that. Uncle Dicky – he’s the builder – he was doing a conversion once, and he said he found all this iron stuff buried under the front door.’

  ‘What stuff?’ Nathan asked. ‘I can’t find anything that’s made of iron.’

  ‘I don’t know. Tools and things. Great-grandma said, people used horseshoes. She still has a couple: she brought them with her. There’s one on her bedroom door and one outside the attic where she … she goes sometimes. She likes to be private there.’

  There was a short, significant silence. ‘Could you get them?’ Nathan said at last. ‘Borrow them, I mean. Not steal. We’d put them back.’

  ‘I could try. But now your mum’s found the injunction, do you really need to go back to that place?’

  ‘I was driven away,’ Nathan said. ‘That’s reason enough. Let’s see if your great-grandma’s out.’

  In fact, Effie had gone back to her cottage, presumably to pick up something, and borrowing the horseshoes presented no problem. She must have hung them outdoors at some stage, for they were worn from weather and much handling, all sharp edges eroded, misshapen loops pierced with holes where the nails had once gone. It looked as if she had had them for a very long time. Nathan and Hazel took one each and tried putting them in their pockets, but the pockets weren’t big enough. So at Nathan’s suggestion they got some string, threaded it through one of the nail-holes, and hung them round their necks. They felt awkward and cumbersome, but it was easier than having to carry them. Then they set off for Thornyhill. ‘I’ll have to persuade Woody to show us the way again,’ Nathan said. ‘He’ll be a bit shy of you – he’s shy of me now – so you’ll have to let me talk to him alone, just to begin with. And I think we should take Hoover. Extra protection.’

  ‘He’s the soppiest dog on the planet,’ Hazel said. She liked Hoover, but she was in a mood to be scornful. This was an adventure where Nathan, even more than usual, seemed to be way ahead of her, and close though they were she didn’t enjoy the feeling of always tagging along behind. ‘He looks like Scooby Doo.’

  ‘So he’s going to be good at dealing with magic then.’

  ‘I don’t believe in magic,’ Hazel insisted. ‘It’s just Great-grandma muttering to herself, trying to frighten people. Other universes – that’s different. That’s science.’ And, after a pause: ‘What happened with the asylum-seeker?’

  ‘Eric,’ Nathan said. ‘Eric Rhindon. He’s the most extraordinary person.’

  He told her everything, or everything he could remember, while they walked. At Thornyhill, they scrounged sandwiches off Bartlemy ‘for a picnic’, summoned Hoover to accompany them, and set off into the woods. Leaving the dog with Hazel, Nathan went on ahead to find Woody. Persuading the woodwose to accept his friend was less difficult than he had anticipated.

  ‘I know her,’ Woody said. ‘She climbs trees and just sits there for hours, very still, almost as still as me. Like an animal. She used to come here a lot. Not so much now.’ He added, greatly daring: ‘I liked her.’

  Of course, thought Nathan. It’s the same as picking up language from me. He’s picked up my likes and dislikes too.

  But Woody was less comfortable about Hoover. ‘The dog? He used to hunt for me, when you were little, trying to sniff me out. I’m afraid of him.’

  ‘He won’t hurt you,’ Nathan promised. ‘I expect, when I was a baby, he was just being protective. He doesn’t look it, but he’s a very protective dog. That’s why we’re taking him along now. He’ll protect you, too.’

  Woody took some convincing – the idea of returning to the site of the former house terrified him – but eventually he agreed. ‘You mustn’t let the dog see me,’ he said, evidently torn between his various fears. ‘You see me – the girl can see me – but not him Otherwise he’ll hunt me down.’

  ‘All right,’ Nathan said.

  Rejoining the others, he instructed Hoover accordingly. ‘He won’t understand you, stupid,’ Hazel said, but when Woody approached the dog kept his head down and his ears flattened, gazing pointedly at the ground. Woody eyed him nervously, sparing only a brief glance for Hazel.

  She studied the woodwose with wary curiosity, only half believing the evidence of her own eyes. ‘What is he really?’ she whispered to Nathan as they followed him through the trees.

  ‘I don’t know. I think perhaps – he came from another world too. I might have brought him here, like Eric, only when I was very young.’

  Hazel said nothing. She knew Nathan’s dreampower troubled him deeply, but she couldn’t help being a little envious. Contrary to her great-grandmother’s assertions, she felt she had no power of any kind. It was wonderful – it made her feel special – being his friend, but sometimes she wanted more.

  The woods were the deep green of summer, sun-mottled, rippling with birdsong and insect-hum. There were wild flowers here and there: pink campion, purple nightshade, white deadnettle, yellow aconite. ‘Yellow is a warning,’ Hazel said unexpectedly. ‘Great-grandma told me. Even buttercups are poisonous to some animals.’ As they entered the Darkwood the shoulder of the hill cut off the sun for a few minutes, and there seemed to be less green, more rotten wood, old leaves, moss-grown stumps of trees long fallen. As always, the birds fell silent; a cloud of midges billowed towards them. Further down the slope Hazel’s white T-shirt was suddenly alive, coated with winged ants. Nathan called Woody to halt and brushed them off, but they still swarmed around her, ignoring Nathan’s darker clothing, and they wouldn’t leave her alone until the little troop had covered some distance. They reached their destination unawares, while Nathan was still looking for familiar landmarks. Afterwards, he wondered if the trees had moved, just a little way, or if the place looked different because it was earlier in the day, and later in the season, and woodland can change with every month, every hour. There was more sunlight, and the ridges in the ground looked slight and insignificant. He came to the drop and prepared to scramble down.

  ‘Last time, we stayed too long,’ Woody said. ‘I go now. If
you stay, you have to deal with bad memories, bad spirits.’

  ‘We can deal with them,’ Nathan said. ‘We have iron.’

  Woody came close, stretching out a brown finger as Nathan extracted the horseshoe from under his sweatshirt. But the woodwose flinched away from it, as if he too were adversely affected. ‘Iron is strong,’ he said, and flickered round, vanishing into the treescape in an instant.

  ‘Can we find the way back?’ Hazel asked.

  ‘Hoover can,’ said Nathan. ‘Anyway, the wood isn’t large. Get your horseshoe out and hold on to it.’

  Hazel did so, glancing fearfully over her shoulder. Nathan slid down the short drop and began to feel between the root-filaments, scrabbling at the earth with his fingers, realizing too late that he should have brought a trowel. Presently, as before, his hand encountered metal. It occurred to him that it could be iron, and he wondered if that was chance, or whether it was there to keep the whisperers away. He cleared some of the soil, until he could see bars, embedded in stone, and beyond, he was certain, a darkness that wasn’t more soil but space.

  ‘Nathan.’ Hazel had been on her knees, peering down, watching him, but now she was standing, looking the other way. Hoover’s hackles rose; his lip lifted; the low unfamiliar growl rumbled in his throat. And there was the deadly breeze, curving towards them, ruffling last year’s leaves, nudging hanging bough and jutting twig. The murmur came with it, sibilant and soft, filling their heads with words they didn’t want to understand.

  ‘Keep Hoover close to you!’ Nathan adjured. ‘Hold the horseshoe out!’

  The ripple of motion came to within a couple of yards before it stopped. Nathan had hoped they would be driven off, panicked into flight, but instead they circled, angrily – he could feel the anger – stirring the leaf-litter, whispering with many voices. He remembered the tiny mouth-slits, and pictured them moving in a language they themselves couldn’t comprehend, parroting a memory of some ancient impression, an echo of someone else’s thought. ‘You’ll have to hold them off,’ he told Hazel. ‘I need to dig.’