by F. G. Cottam
That made him smile.
‘Join me,’ she said. And so he did.
‘We were talking about you this evening.’
‘Really?’
‘You’re surprised?’
‘It’s a bit adolescent to go around thinking that people are ever talking about you. Thankfully, I stopped thinking the world revolved around me when I was about fourteen.’
‘We think you’re up to something. Well, Martin thinks so anyway. He thinks you might have found something or found out something that you’re keeping to yourself. You’ve been elusive, the last couple of days.’
‘Maybe I’m just giving you two some room.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means exactly what it says. I like you both. I enjoy our being friends. But sometimes I sense the need for privacy. There’s this … awkwardness.’
Her expression had changed. Adam couldn’t read it; it seemed frozen. Then she blinked and shifted forward and tilted her face to him. ‘Kiss me,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Just do it, Adam. Jesus. I didn’t bring the manual. Just kiss me.’
And so he did.
He got into the Land Rover the following morning carrying only a small rucksack containing a change of underwear and his toothbrush and a book to read on the train. He saw his artefact straight away. It had been placed on one of the rear seats in a cloth drawstring bag, probably wrapped in tissue paper, he thought, looking at the soft, indistinct shape it made against the fabric of the bag.
There was a first-class return rail ticket awaiting him at the Carlisle Station booking office, Grayling told him. He was staying overnight at a Brighton hotel where Grayling sometimes stayed himself. He was not to concern himself with the cost of any of this. The college was paying, Grayling informed him blithely. The college could certainly afford it and Grayling thought it better for him to arrive in Brighton fresh. So comfort on the journey was only a sensible precaution.
Adam nodded but did not comment. He thought that the book in his rucksack had probably been needlessly packed. It was a novel that had come highly recommended. But he didn’t think he would have the concentration or the enthusiasm to follow a fictional plot. Events in his real life had taken an intensely interesting and completely unexpected turn. Not even the baleful object on the back seat of the Defender could spoil his euphoric mood.
He hadn’t slept with Jane Dobb. He had wanted to, of course. They had shared a final kiss outside her bedroom door. He had sensed her struggle at that moment with her own desire. She had wanted them to share her bed as much as he had. But she was a woman who felt the need to be earned. And he knew he had never been paid a greater compliment in his life.
‘Even by your rather taciturn standards, your conversation this morning lacks a certain sparkle, Adam.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Also, your hair smells of Shalimar perfume. It’s a classic, of course. But not a scent you habitually wear.’
‘No.’
‘I would advise against studying that object on the journey. You might be tempted. Seclusion is sometimes a feature of first-class travel and you might find yourself alone in a carriage with a long run between stations. But I’d caution against taking it out of the bag until you are with Doctor McGuire in his study. I’m aware I can’t forbid you from looking at it, and I remember how strong an impulse curiosity is in the young, but I’d counsel discretion.’
Adam nodded. He thought that the professor had chosen his words with forensic care. A week ago, the notion that an object could possess malign powers would have made him laugh out loud. But he had not seen the bestial figure squatting on the seat behind him then. Grayling, who knew more than he was letting on, had let slip a couple of things. Adam had not discovered the object. The object had discovered him. And he had heard at the moment of discovery the clarion call’s angelic summons to arms.
He would listen to what this elderly professor in Brighton had to say about the artefact. He would do so with an open mind and genuine interest in what the old man might reveal. Then he would return to Scotland and give it to Grayling. He could have it as Adam’s gift on the condition that the true circumstances of the find could never be disclosed.
Adam had resolved to ignore the weird portents, the shrill trumpeting, the lurid business with the ravens and the lamb. He wanted no part of any of it. His life had just become vastly more intriguing and worthwhile and he was not about to jeopardize its new possibilities.
In the station car park, he took the bag from the back seat and put it into his rucksack, struck by the thought that what it contained had grown larger in the time since he had last seen and handled it. It can prompt irrational judgment, he thought, as well as provoke dismay. Maybe he should just fling it from the end of Brighton Pier. But something told him he would be punished if he did that. And not just by Grayling.
The artefact really did provoke irrational thinking. He was aware of that fact after he had said farewell to the professor, pacing the platform with a latte in a paper cup, waiting out the ten minutes until the arrival of the nine a.m. express, unable to shake the uncomfortable conviction that someone there on the station was watching him all the while with eyes that were hostile and keen.
TWO
His carriage aboard the train was quiet, the artefact discovered in the Forest of Cree safely out of sight in his rucksack on the luggage rack above where he sat.
He thought about Jane Dobb. He had wondered what it would be like to kiss her. And then he had done so, at her invitation. It didn’t seem real to him now, that moment in the hostel kitchen under the harsh fluorescents with Stevie Nicks warbling on the radio. He had not seen it coming at all. Had it really happened? Had he not just dreamed the whole experience?
A text signal sounded on his phone. He took it out of his pocket and read the message. It was from Jane.
Last night was delicious, it read. You were delicious. Come back soon.
As soon as I can, he replied. He signed off with a kiss.
It had happened. It really had. And there was more of it to come. He really couldn’t wait to see her again.
Jane was posh. It was all relative; everyone was posh compared to Adam, but Jane was from one of those flamboyantly posh families that got written about in glossy magazines. Her mum was a famous fashion designer who campaigned on environmental and human rights issues.
Her dad was possibly even more famous. He was an architect, quite old to have teenage daughters, Adam thought. But despite his age, he was very radical in his building theory and design and therefore remained a somewhat controversial figure.
Unusually for an architect, he was also a bit of an intellectual all-rounder. He had written a book about the Restoration architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, which had been highly praised. And he had come up with a theory about the origins and true purpose of Stonehenge which had eventually been the basis of a two-part television programme.
Adam had seen it. He had been sixteen at the time and thought it interesting and quite convincing, too. But even at sixteen, he had thought the mysteries of the Salisbury Plain megaliths beyond any modern-day explanation. He did not think the ancient past could be neatly rationalized by the standards of the present. He suspected it to be both alien and strange in a way that modern thinking simply could not grasp.
Jane and her twin sister Dora had been brought up all over the world. Adam envied her this. It should have played havoc with her education, but she was really clever. She learned stuff with a careless ease. The lack of a routine hadn’t mattered. Martin said she spoke three or four languages fluently.
Even if she wasn’t so easy on the eye, Jane would be likeable, Adam thought. She was friendly and funny and cheerful. But she just happened to be gorgeous too. And she was interested in him. She was attracted to him. They were about to embark on a romantic adventure.
He sighed. He sensed the weight of the baleful item of luggage he carried in the rack above him. And then he
folded his arms and did what any student would do, faced with a long train ride, occupying a comfortable seat. He fell asleep. He didn’t dream. Or, if he did, he did not recall the dream. And he didn’t wake up again until the train slowed on its approach to Euston station.
Carrying his prize in his bag on the underground proved an uneasy experience. Descending the escalator from the Euston concourse to his Victoria Line platform, he had become acutely aware of the weight and sheer malevolent strangeness of the object in the pack on his back. It seemed to swell between his shoulder blades, as though gaining in strength the deeper it travelled downward through the tunnelled earth.
The looks on the faces of his fellow passengers took a lurid turn and Adam felt trapped and claustrophobic in the confines of his underground carriage as he never had before. The sound of the train on its rails was loud, less like a mechanical noise than the maul through the tunnel of some groping beast.
His discomfort must have showed somehow on his face. A fellow passenger broke with London custom and asked him if he was feeling okay. The question came from a woman in a smart business suit in the seat next to his. He smiled and said he might be suffering a bit from travel sickness having come up from Scotland that morning, and she nodded and gave him a sympathetic smile.
He felt that all the eyes in the carriage were on him, curious and appraising. He couldn’t shake this feeling until he emerged into afternoon daylight at the entrance to Victoria.
On the Brighton train, he looked at his watch. There was no chance of missing his station. Brighton was where the train terminated. He was due to arrive there at around three-thirty. His appointment with Doctor McGuire was not until six p.m. He thought that there were probably worse places than the famous south coast seaside resort to kill a couple of hours.
But he was basing that judgment on what he had heard about the city. He’d never visited this part of the country before. There hadn’t been the money for childhood holidays, and when his growing interest in archaeology had started to prompt his independent travel in his mid-teens, it had taken him and his tent and his trowel and metal detector to the south-west. He had naturally been drawn to the enigmatic England of standing stones and pagan myth. He had gone to Wiltshire and Dorset and Devon and Cornwall.
He would tell Jane, he decided. When the moment came, he’d tell her about the forest find. Everything he learned from McGuire, he would eventually confide in her. He would even tell her about the odd business with the ravens and his surreal recent experience on the London underground.
Partly he resolved to tell her because he wanted to be honest, and to keep the whole business of the find secret would be deceitful and patronizing. But in part, his motive was selfish, he knew. He believed that a problem shared was a problem if not exactly halved, then at least reduced in size – and his instinct kept insisting ominously that the object in his rucksack was going to prove to be a problem.
He was looking forward to showing her the artefact. He wanted to see how she reacted to it; whether it provoked in her the same unsettling emotions it did in him and had seemed to even in Professor Grayling.
McGuire lived in an Art Deco mansion block on the promenade, about half a mile west of the pier. It was a distinctive building, according to Grayling, and should be very easy to find since almost every other facade dated from the Regency period.
Adam walked through narrow lanes towards the shore with the scent of the sea growing stronger in his nostrils all the time. Then he emerged on to the promenade and saw the sea, vast and sullen under a sky growing pink at its western extremities. In the descending sun, the foam cresting the breaking waves was the colour of candyfloss. He found the apartment block he was looking for and then with the secure knowledge of its location, decided to walk the length of the pier in search of something entertaining to do in the time until his appointment.
The weight of the rucksack he carried seemed to have increased. He was aware of this as soon as he set foot on the pier. He adjusted the straps so that they would not dig so viciously into his shoulders. When he inventoried in his mind what the little pack contained, it seemed ridiculous that it could burden him so uncomfortably. It felt large and leaden and unwieldy, increasingly so with every step. He stopped. He was over the water now, could see it toil and sway pinkly in the twilight in the gaps between the wooden planking under his feet, twenty feet beneath him.
It was the artefact, of course. It had increased in apparent weight when he had descended with it beneath the ground. It was reacting in the same way to being conveyed out over the water. It was a response to elemental change, a protest, or a warning that it would not be interfered with.
It suspects I’m going to throw it into the sea, he thought. I pictured doing that in my mind and the sly little beast knows I did. It’s digging its feet in, protecting itself. How much further before I feel the grip of its claws in the meat of my back, or the prick of its tusks, or the power of its bite?
Adam stopped. He was sweating now, though the approaching evening was cool and blowy and he was out there thoroughly exposed in it. He thumbed sweat out of his eyebrows and wrestled off the rucksack. He looked at the various stalls flanking the central walkway of the pier with their flags and banners and candy-stripes, their gaudy displays of rock and giant lollipops and balloons and crappy toys.
And he saw what he was looking for. He saw the detached expression of terminal boredom that signals a student in casual employment. He recognized it. He’d worn that face himself enduring a dozen indifferent part-time jobs.
This particular student was selling a selection of souvenirs: key fobs and T-shirts and fridge magnets depicting Brighton Pavilion. Except that he wasn’t selling anything just then, he was merely manning the stall in the event of a sale. Adam walked over to him and gestured at the rucksack, hanging from his hand now with a weary, impossible weight. He had money in his wallet. He’d visited a cash point before buying his fish and chips the night before in the expectation of funding the journey Grayling and the college had paid for.
He nodded towards the amusement arcade at the end of the pier. ‘Could I dump this with you for an hour, mate, while I go and play the machines? I don’t want it nicked while I’m distracted winning the jackpot.’
‘You’ll be lucky.’ Not a local accent. Lancashire, maybe Preston or Chorley, somewhere in that region, Adam thought.
‘It’s worth a fiver to you.’
The student grinned. ‘So long as there’s not a bomb in it,’ he said. ‘I’m not being blown to pieces for five quid.’ He reached for the rucksack, swinging it back over the display in front of him as though it weighed nothing. He didn’t look exceptionally strong. He was only slightly built. He put it in the corner of the stall, behind him, out of sight.
‘Cheers,’ Adam said.
‘No worries.’
Adam wished that were true. Relieved of his burden, he felt weightless himself. There was Wurlitzer music pumping out of the amusement arcade ahead of him. It didn’t sound like a real organ. This was the seaside; everything here was cheap and contrived and fake. Visitors would feel cheated if it wasn’t.
He passed a fortune teller’s tent. He was not inclined to inflict his future on the occupant, or on himself, for that matter. The particulars of destiny could wait – until after McGuire’s revelations, at least. Through the tent awning he glimpsed a table and a crystal ball and a woman in a turban and florid gypsy shawl as she rose and her beringed fingers closed the flap in a scramble.
The arcade was the expected riot of microchip enabled fruit machines he’d never understand how to play and car and bike race simulators with nothing about them to tempt him. The sound of bucketing cash in junk denominations erupted every few minutes. Most of the arcade’s occupants were female and middle-aged, and they drifted along the rows of one-armed bandits expressionlessly, clutching plastic tubs of the coins that accessed their thrills.
There was a rear entrance, unless it was an exit. It went unannounced
by the neon signage signalling ‘drinks’ and ‘toilets’ and ‘change’ and everything else. It was flanked by a laughing sailor in a glass case.
The sailor was antique, decommissioned, a legacy exhibit with the slot for an old-fashioned penny crudely soldered over. The style of his blues placed him in the early years of the twentieth century. His eyes were glass, his teeth bared in a grin of chipped enamel. His porcelain skin was raw, unless it was just weathered, Adam thought to himself, by all those years of salt and spray endured aboard some grey-funnelled ship of the line.
It would be a dreadnought, the vessel this rating served aboard, steaming through a North Sea swell, manned by crew as stiff-limbed as zombies. He studied the figure. He thought it sinister, a leering parody. Even still and silent, the sailor would frighten a child. It was an apparition summoned from an infant nightmare.
He walked outside. It was almost fully dark, the last of the sun a blood-coloured crescent on the horizon over to his right. He put his hands on the rail and looked down towards the sea. Its rhythm sounded wrong, its sound unfolding somehow backwards. And he blinked and stared.
The motion of the water wasn’t right. The waves were rolling away from him, rising and cresting and then crashing outwards, running in reverse. Behind him, he heard the laughing sailor rise from his stool in his case with a creak and wheeze into chuckling life.
As Adam endured the feeling of being observed on Carlisle Station that morning, Jane Dobb sipped coffee from a flask at the edge of the main excavation in the centre of the Forest of Cree and watched Martin Prior walk the waterlogged ground a hundred yards distant, staring at it, scratching the stubble on his chin occasionally in a mannerism that had become familiar to her since the start of their fieldwork.
It signified concentration. Martin was thinking hard. He started to walk back to her and she blew on the surface of her drink to cool it, craving the caffeine. Her own concentration, after the turn taken by events the previous evening with Adam Parker, was proving difficult to sustain. She took out her mobile and thumbed Adam a hasty text as Martin splashed and slithered towards her. The mobile coverage here was patchy. She wanted to tell him that the previous evening had meant something to her.