by F. G. Cottam
So he did think it was a forgery, a plant, a bit of mischief. Adam sat back and sighed. ‘Well, I was up early yesterday morning, obviously, because at car boots you’ve got to be there at the crack of dawn to have any chance of finding a bargain. My eye was caught by a tray of bric-a-brac, some Victorian stuff, Gothic-revival mostly. I singled out my ugly little front parlour mantelpiece ornament, gave the bloke a fiver for it and the rest I’m sure you can reconstruct for yourself.’
Grayling smiled. His eyes did not waver. ‘I wish that scenario were true. If it was, this is something we could both just quietly forget about. But the thing you discovered is all too genuine, I’m afraid.’
And to Adam, at that moment, the professor himself looked genuinely afraid.
‘Tell me truthfully and accurately about the circumstances in which you found it. Tell me about what impelled your movements. Tell me what was on your mind.’
Jane Dobb had been principally on his mind. She had a mane of red hair and a generous mouth. She had a gorgeous figure and a filthy laugh and she smoked too much. She was clever in that careless way only women ever were, in Adam’s slightly envious experience. He was speculating on what kissing her would be like. But three wasn’t divisible by two and he thought that she had her eye on Martin Prior. He couldn’t blame her. Martin made women laugh. He did it effortlessly. It was a very attractive attribute.
She was there now, standing at the lip of the main excavation, sipping something with steam rising from it from a metal flask cup that was dull in the matt morning light against the ruby pucker of her lips. She was laughing at something Martin, standing next to her, was saying. Of course she was. She stood there, sipping and laughing, looking sexier than anyone had any right to in a plastic poncho and a pair of rubber boots. She was tall and lithe and she rested her head on Martin’s shoulder in amused empathy at something he had just said.
Adam walked away. It was all a bit tragic, really. You didn’t expect to be hit by the hopelessness of an adolescent crush at the age of nineteen. It didn’t really seem particularly fair. But maturity was one of those wobbly attributes, wasn’t it? It tended to desert him in times of crisis. And the crises tended to be provoked by attractive girls. Jane Dobb was the most attractive girl he had ever encountered. He couldn’t compete with Martin’s wit or Martin’s classic Mercedes sports car. Martin was sophisticated and rich. The fight for Jane’s affections was a battle lost before it had even been fought.
He retreated and walked away. He sensed that their eyes were on his back, which really was adolescent, wasn’t it? It was the sort of self-consciousness fourteen-year-olds inflict on themselves because they assume they are the principle point and natural focus of the world that surrounds them. Next, he’d be thinking that they were talking about him.
Were they? He turned and looked. But they were remote now and out of sight, already below the ground and busy sifting for the jigsaw puzzle pieces of the past. He carried on in the same direction he had been travelling, walking backwards for a few steps before stumbling on a surface root and stopping to gather some composure.
He was a foot beyond the lip of a slight depression. The depression had exposed the root on which he had just snagged a heel. The way in which the root had been exposed was slightly suggestive of sagging in the ground, of gentle subsidence. He was on the edge of a very shallow bowl, about twelve feet across and maybe eight inches lower at its centre than at its perimeter. He didn’t know what this circle of ground resembled; perhaps, slightly, a baked cake that had failed to rise.
What it didn’t resemble was a patch of earth concocted by nature. The circularity was too neat. Nature was more ragged and imprecise. The depression was very subtle, though. He owed his noticing it at all to the snagged root and to something else; which was the low angle of the autumnal morning sun. It had only just broken through a skein of cloud. Any higher, and it would flatten out the subtle contour of depression. With cloud cover, you wouldn’t notice the geometric perfection of this slight feature at all, covered as it was by the random forest litter of fallen leaves and broken twigs.
He walked the perimeter of the depression. He could think of only two things that left perfect craters in the earth and they were the impact of meteorites and the explosion of high velocity artillery shells. The concave shape he studied now seemed far too slight to have been caused by either.
Adam was aware that a silence had descended upon the moment and the place, and stillness also. There was an atmosphere he was aware of but could not have easily described. There was something confidential about it, he told Professor Grayling at their table in the pub. And the mood was odd.
‘The mood was odd in what way?’
‘There was urgency,’ Adam said. ‘The air almost crackled with it. The forest is a serene location, you know that yourself. But the mood in that spot at that moment was anything but serene. It was as though something dramatic and urgent impended there.’
‘What prompted you to dig?’
Adam became conscious of the trowel hung on his belt because its blade tinkled audibly against the keychain hanging next to it. It was as though the shining metal sang to him. The wind hadn’t shifted it because there was no wind, and neither had his movement, because when it happened, he was standing still, staring at the ground. He felt the vibrating thrum of the trowel blade, of its energy against his leg.
He looked to the centre of the depression. And he saw something dimpled and infirm in the spread of leaves at the spot, as though signalling something concealed, a weakness in the sub-structure of the soil itself – a flaw caused by some ancient damage done to the fabric of the earth. He sensed the violation of the ground caused by digging, by burial. And he walked across to the spot, slid to his knees, then took his trowel and began to dig himself.
‘Most unusual,’ Grayling said, dryly. ‘Ancient damage done to the earth doesn’t generally leave traces of violation on the surface for millennia.’
‘I know it doesn’t,’ Adam said.
With the back of his hand, Grayling wiped traces of beer from the bristles above his top lip. ‘Go on.’
‘I dug. The earth was giving.’
‘Collusive,’ Grayling said.
But Adam ignored this. ‘I found it two feet down, loose in the soil. I fingered it out. It never felt the sharp edge of the trowel. I suppose it must seem in some way that I knew it was there. Maybe in some sense I did. I can’t really explain the find otherwise.’
‘Did anything else strike you as strange?’
‘Don’t you think it strange enough already?’
‘I can’t judge. I don’t think you’ve described the whole event,’ Grayling said.
Adam thought hard, trying to remember the exact detail of the experience he’d undergone in the clearing the previous morning. ‘I thought I heard music,’ he said eventually. ‘The silence of the forest was breeched, at least in my mind, by music. I heard it distinctly at the very moment of the find.’
‘What manner of music was it?’
‘It was trumpets. They were shrill and deafening. That was what I heard when I groped through the soil. I heard music that was harsh and loud. For a moment, my mind was filled with it.’
‘And that’s everything?’
‘I think it is. That’s except for the object itself, Professor. You have that.’
Grayling pushed his pint away and stood up. The spell of his story broken, Adam looked around the bar. It was dimly lit, smoky from logs that hadn’t yet properly caught in the big grate of the fireplace over to his left. There were no other customers in the bar. No one had eavesdropped on his curious account.
‘You’re going?’
‘We’re going. We’re going to the site.’
‘But it’s dark.’
‘And there are enough lights on the Defender’s rig to illuminate a rock concert. That is unless you’ve other, pressing business?’
The torrential rain gave the streets of the small town a glossy look
in the darkness. The interior of the Land Rover smelled of diesel and loam and vinyl seat covers and damp canvas, and this cocktail of odours was a comfort to Adam, because it was familiar and normal. He needed comforting, he realized. He was nervous about this unscheduled visit to the site.
He didn’t know why, but recalling the circumstances of the find, reliving the moment, had been an ordeal for him. When he thought of the object itself, he felt something close to actual horror. Grayling switched the engine on and the wipers started to swish across the screen. ‘Fasten your seat belt, Adam,’ he said.
They travelled the four miles to the site in silence, encountering no other traffic on the road. As they left the tarmac, Grayling engaged the four-wheel-drive and they bumped along forest path with the headlamps dimmed and the visible world just a shallow crescent of yellow forest growth unfurling before them.
Adam thought about the Bell in Newton Stewart. He looked at his watch. It was just after nine. Martin Prior had another hour to work his cut-rate seduction magic on Jane Dobb. Not that cost was really an issue with Martin.
He saw one of the dig markers emerge into view through the windscreen and was able to orient himself. ‘A degree or so south,’ he said to Grayling. The professor turned the wheel fractionally and put the headlamps on full beam. ‘The spot is framed by the two large trees straight ahead of us,’ Adam said, after a minute. ‘It lies just beyond and between them.’
Grayling brought the Land Rover to a halt. He put the shift in neutral but kept the engine idling because it would power the floodlights on the rig mounted above the cab. Above the engine noise, Adam could hear rain heavy on the canvas that covered the rear of the vehicle. Rain on taut canvas was usually a comforting sound, he thought, suggestive of dry and cozy shelter from the elements. But not tonight; tonight was an exception.
Grayling flicked on the lights. A white dazzle bathed the scene before them in bleached shapes and deep black shadows. They pulled on their ponchos and climbed out and down to the sodden ground. Waterlogged soil and leaf mulch squelched under their boots.
‘Jesus!’ said Grayling.
Were they carrion crows? No, Adam decided. These birds were too big. They were not crows but ravens. And they clustered and fought, tugging at the entrails of something pale and dead at the place where he had dug the previous day. They hadn’t been alarmed by the bright electric light. Perhaps their eyes didn’t equip them to be aware of it. But they must be aware of the approach of the two poncho-clad men. Either they were bold by disposition, or the thing they scavenged was a feast so tasty it made them reluctant to leave. Adam and the professor were almost upon them before they flapped and scattered, cawing, tearing upward at the night sky in a tatter of dark wings.
They left their prize behind. It was a lamb. It did not, to Adam, look more than a few days beyond birth. Its entrails were pink and immature. Its eyes were sockets, pecked out, empty. It lay on the precise spot where Adam had knelt and dug out his find.
‘It’s called a Clarion Call,’ said the professor, his voice soft, beside him in the rain. ‘The first mention of it occurred in the eleventh century. It’s a call to arms.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The trumpet sound you heard. They were shriller, then, less accommodating to the ear. Their place was not the concert hall, but the battlefield. They had to be heard, you see, above the tumult. It’s said the angels were the first to sound them. But that’s a Christian myth.’
Adam gestured at the small carcass on the ground. ‘How do you think it got here?’
‘A Sea or Golden Eagle would be a plausible explanation,’ Grayling said. ‘The breeding of both species has been encouraged in recent years. They’re indigenous, of course. Both are predatory and either one is big enough. And neither, dropping this from the sky above us, would have been able to recover it. Eagles don’t really do forests. It’s a matter of wingspan, you see.’
He walked forward. He had with him something he had taken from the equipment rack in the back of the Land Rover. He walked to the centre of the clearing, shifted the lamb carcass with his boot and swept the loose leaves from the surface of the ground, then put it down. He crouched to look at what it displayed. It was a spirit level. Adam thought its use pointless. He could see for himself that there was now no dip in the ground where he’d described one. The ground here was wet and muddy and almost billiard table flat.
They were back in the Land Rover cab and out of the rain before either man spoke again.
‘What is it, that object I found in the ground yesterday?’
‘I honestly don’t know.’
‘You know something, Professor.’
Grayling switched off the searchlights and flicked on the wipers, then put the Land Rover into gear. He turned them around before he spoke. ‘Through decades of hard work and very occasional moments of inspiration, I’ve achieved a modest reputation in my chosen field.’
‘Come on, you’re a legend.’
‘You hear stories, over a career as long and varied as mine has been. You see things. The best preserved sites are always the ones left intact by fear, where breaching hallowed ground or opening the door to somewhere long considered sacred and forbidden invites punishment.’
‘That thing I found? I think you know something about what’s going on here and it’s only fair to ask you to share the information.’
Grayling brought the Land Rover to a stop. ‘You’ll be familiar with the old saying about a little knowledge being a dangerous thing, Adam?’
Adam didn’t reply.
‘I had a tutor back in my own undergraduate days, a man I greatly respected. He’s long retired now, in his nineties, I should think, but still intellectually vigorous and his memory has not yet departed him. He lives in Brighton, in retirement. I think you ought to talk to him.’
‘There’s nothing you can tell me now?’
‘What scant information I might possess would probably alarm rather than enlighten you. I wasn’t certain until I saw what we both saw back there just now, but having seen it, I am. You need to speak to Doctor McGuire. I’ll call him tonight. Men of his age don’t require a great deal of sleep and he’ll still be up when we get back. You can take a train from Carlisle in the morning. I’ll give you a lift to the station.’
‘It’s sixty miles to Carlisle from here. You think it that urgent?’
‘I do.’
‘Because I discovered that object in the ground, where it was not supposed to be?’
‘Not because you discovered that object, Adam. But because it discovered you.’
He was hungry when he got back to the town. The rain had finally stopped. He didn’t really want the professor dropping him off outside the hostel, where someone might see him climb out of the Land Rover. But neither could he really afford the gastro-pub platter the professor had so heartily recommended, not with a return rail ticket to Brighton to have to stump up for in the morning. He got Grayling to drop him on his own route back to his dinner at the Black Horse, then found a chippie and ate steak pie and chips seated on a wet bench on the high street.
In theory, Adam was sharing a room with Martin Prior, but Martin had paid for his own accommodation at the hostel, muttering something about how he’d done enough sharing of night dorms at prep school. So Adam had a double room to himself.
He walked back to the hostel after his dinner in the rain thinking that Martin would probably have no need of the room he’d paid for tonight. They would be discreet about it. There was nothing cheap or cheesy about either of them. But Jane and Martin would be an item soon, if they weren’t one already. The thought was a despondent one, accompanying him through the empty darkness of the streets on the route back.
He’d agreed a cover story to explain his abrupt departure in the morning: he had to courier a set of valuable documents back to Cambridge for the professor. Unique and priceless, they were not documents that could be trusted to any means of transportation other than persona
l delivery. It would be seen as sucking up to Grayling. He might get some stick for it from the others. But it was a more practical story than the truth. Revealing the find was out until Doctor McGuire had spoken to Adam and, more importantly, examined the artefact.
When he reached the hostel he went straight to the kitchen, because the salt on his chips had made him thirsty and he wanted a glass of water before turning in.
Jane Dobb was seated at the kitchen table. Alone. She was listening to a transistor radio. On whatever station she had tuned into, Fleetwood Mac was playing – Stevie Nicks singing one of her gypsy ballads. A Coors Light sat halfway gone in front of Jane. Beside it was an open pack of Marlboros. She had an unlit cigarette in her right hand and was rolling it between her fingers.
‘What are you doing?’
‘It’s more a case of what I’m not doing,’ she said. ‘I’m trying not to go outside and smoke in the rain. The Scottish weather really brings home the humiliation of addiction on a filthy night like this. Anyway, I’m trying to quit.’
‘I thought you were a live fast, die young sort of person, Jane.’
‘Well, there you go,’ she said. ‘It’s a life of surprises.’
What he actually thought, was that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. The overhead lighting in the hostel kitchen was not kind, but it proved no handicap in her case. Her lips were ripe and full. Her eyes were a green as vivid as sunlight on the sea. And though she was naturally redhead pale, her skin was even, with a creamy lustre over strong bones.
She was staring at him. He prayed he was not beginning to blush. ‘You should grow your hair,’ she said. ‘Really, you should. You’d look like one of those Grail Quest knights in a painting by Arthur Hughes.’
‘Bloody good reason for keeping it short, I should think.’
‘The looks of Sir Galahad,’ she said, ‘undermined by the soul of Victor Meldrew.’