by F. G. Cottam
A fog had descended when Martin reached the site. It slithered along the ground, fingering depressions, embracing trees in grey blindness. He took his night vision goggles from his pack and put them on. But they did no good. Their lenses were infrared and worked by shaping the heat radiated by an object. The evening was cold and the fog had apparently chilled everything it enveloped so that no objects emerged when he stumbled about the forest until he collided with them.
He needed to locate only one familiar object in the landscape to be able to orient himself using his compass. The night did not faze him and neither did the weather.
His father had been determined that his moneyed upbringing would not leave him soft. Thus he had been packed off to Gordonstoun rather than to Eaton for his expensive education, where he had learned white water canoeing and how to dig a snow hole along with his Greek verbs and his Latin prep. He had been further toughened by teenage expeditions to Patagonia and the Antarctic.
He could climb and ride and abseil. He was more familiar than most people of his age with the remote and inhospitable regions of the world and he had a hard-earned expertise in how to survive in them.
This knowledge did not make him arrogant in the wilderness. He knew how quickly things could deteriorate in challenging conditions. He was deliberate and methodical and wary. And he was always very alert, which was why he was now having difficulty concentrating on his compass reading in the mist. He knew the conditions made it practically impossible. But he had the strong sensation that he was being watched.
He quartered the ground and searched for ten minutes before finding one of the metal poles that marked the deep excavation. In that time, Martin thought the temperature dropped significantly. The fog was frozen in places into visible crystals. His own breath emerged in a cloud so white it seemed solid in the freezing air.
The ground crunched invisibly with stiffened autumnal leaves under his booted feet. He had on a woollen sweater and a pea coat under his poncho. He wished he had worn his winter parka. Then he found the rolled sheeting that covered them when they dug in the rain. He remembered its position relative to the spot where he suspected Adam had made the find. He took a compass bearing and made for the spot, unable to believe just how silent, beyond the sound of his own footsteps, the night forest had become under its mantle of grey.
He had strayed off track. He must have done. There was something in front of him he would not have encountered had his route to the location of Adam’s find been true. It was a slab of stone. In the murk, Martin thought it looked like the sort of rough slab that might mark the tomb of a prominent man in medieval times. He crouched and removed a glove to finger its surface, which was pitted and worn and icy to the touch.
His fingers hit something. And Martin gasped. It was not a tomb at all. It was a set of ascending steps. He could just make out the second of them now that his reaching hand had found it. And when he really looked, he could see a third and a fourth. They were deeper than they were wide. He could not see their ascent when he looked up; the thickness of the fog prevented it. But he had the sense that the steps rose to a towering height.
A thrill ran through him. He had to discover where the steps led. They looked to him to be as old as time. They were logically impossible but would not be denied in their stony ascent to wherever they went. He had to take them.
FOUR
Adam strode back into McGuire’s sitting room, struggling to regularize his breathing and bring order to his reeling mind. The object he had found in the ground in the Forest of Cree lay where the doctor had left it, uncovered on the table between the two armchairs.
He allowed it a glance on his way towards the window. He needed the view of what lay outside. The pier was out there, of course. And the pier had proven to be a much stranger experience than he had anticipated. The sea beneath it had betrayed his expectations too. But he needed the twinkle of the night sky and the drift along the seafront of car headlamps to look at. His assaulted senses craved normality.
McGuire was standing in the far corner, facing away from him when he re-entered the room. He was holding the receiver of an old-fashioned telephone to his ear. The coiled cable linking the receiver to the cradle shivered with what Adam thought might be a tremor in the old man’s hand. His grip was not so steady now as it had been earlier on the stem of his sherry glass. There was something confidential in his stance and attitude. He was listening and nodding. Eventually he looked around and across at Adam and said something into the phone and then put it down. Its bell jingled as the connection broke.
‘Well?’
‘It’s real, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, yes. It’s real all right.’
‘Why would anyone keep so grotesque a pet?’
‘It comes from a place alien to the notion of pets, Adam. The beasts there are put to work. At least, the ones that can be domesticated are. The rest are best described as natural hazards it is wise to avoid entirely.’
Adam laughed. ‘You mean monsters, dragons and sea serpents and the like?’
‘You have seen what you have just seen. I am surprised it amuses you.’
Adam remembered something Grayling had said to him in the tent at the site, after his find, during their first conversation concerning the artefact. He nodded in the direction of the object, engaged in its continual duel against itself on the table top. ‘That thing exists there, doesn’t it, Doctor McGuire? That creature lives and breathes.’
McGuire smiled and nodded. He now looked much more like the frail and elderly figure Adam had expected to find on his journey to Brighton. Thinking about the shadow world had aged him. Or thinking about the vile creature he kept behind a fortified door had done so. Or maybe, Adam thought, the subject matter of the telephone call had done this. That was the new consideration. The rest he had expected and planned. Some fresh bad news had been inflicted upon him. Adam wondered who the caller could have been. He thought that he probably knew.
‘Why do you keep that thing along the corridor?’
McGuire attempted a smile but gave up on it, the effort just now evidently too much. ‘It prevents my natural optimism from deluding me about the threat we face,’ he said. ‘In language you would be familiar with, its presence here keeps me grounded.’
Adam took a last, reluctant look through the window at the sanity outside and then walked back to the two armchairs and the table between them bearing the object he had discovered. McGuire joined him as they sat for a while in silent appraisal of something created in Babylon seven millennia ago.
‘Are you a student of history, Adam?’
‘I have to be, to an extent. Every archaeology student does.’
McGuire shook his head. ‘No. I mean modern history. What do you know, for example, about the Great War? Could you answer some straightforward questions about the course of the war? When would you say it originated? When did the conflict conclude?’
Adam had taken history A-level and his revision was recent enough for him to remember plenty of detail about the Great War. He’d found it too interesting to forget, really, the helter-skelter ride towards catastrophe aboard which all the great nations had scrambled for a seat. ‘Most people would trace the origin of the war to the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo in the late June of 1914.’
‘Just so,’ McGuire said. ‘Can you remember the name and fate of the assassin?’
‘Gavrilo Princip,’ Adam said. ‘He was a nineteen-year-old Serbian and a member of the secret society that planned the killing of the archduke and his wife. They were called the Black Hand. He died in a prison cell in 1918 before the conclusion of the war his actions either caused or accelerated, depending upon your point of view.’
‘I think my point of view will be very different from yours,’ the doctor said.
Because you were there, Adam thought. It was an insane thing to think. But it had come upon him with the force of intuition. ‘You mean about the origin of the war?�
�
But McGuire did not answer him. Instead, he asked, ‘When would you say the conflict concluded?’
Adam blew out a breath of air. He felt thirsty and shaken by the confrontation in the room along the corridor a few minutes earlier. He thought that what he would like right now was a drink, not a trawl through the stuff he had studied in sixth form.
As though reading his mind, McGuire stood and said, ‘We could both use some liquid refreshment, I think. Ponder on your answer while I fetch your beer from the kitchen.’
‘I don’t need to ponder on my answer,’ Adam said, looking up at him. ‘The Germans and their allies surrendered in the autumn of 1918.’
McGuire smiled. He seemed to have recovered himself. ‘I take a rather broader view than that,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you a cold beer from the refrigerator and pour myself a larger whisky than can possibly be good for me. Then I will tell you when I think the Great War really concluded.’
Neither man made any further comment until Adam’s beer was drunk down to the suds at the bottom of his glass.
‘Well?’ Adam asked.
‘You could conceivably argue that the Great War concluded only with the Velvet Revolution of 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down. The links are compelling ones. And they travel all the way from the path of Princip’s bullet to the finish of the Cold War.’
‘You’re saying the war went on for almost a century,’ said Adam.
‘Yes, and at a colossal cost.’
‘It could have been much worse, the cost.’
‘Could it?’
‘Of course it could. You know that better than I do. You were alive to remember it.’
Adam was thinking about the Cuban Missile Crisis, about fourteen days in October, 1962 when Russia and America stood on the brink of nuclear war. They did so with the will to obliterate one another, because their rival arsenals housed only offensive bombs, all-out attack the only means of defence available to their rival technologies.
Had Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev pressed the button, had American President John F. Kennedy blinked, the world would then have destroyed itself.
He glanced at the object on the table top. Familiarity did not make it any more comfortable to look at. The rucksack still lay on the floor at the side of his chair. He reached for it and placed the artefact inside and zipped it up.
‘That was Professor Grayling on the phone earlier, wasn’t it?’
McGuire did not answer him.
‘What’s happened?’
The doctor’s hazel eyes met his with their innocent focus. ‘There has been an escalation. Matters are accelerating. You must not go back to Scotland, Adam. It is too dangerous. It would be foolhardy.’
‘Bollocks,’ Adam said. ‘I’m sorry, Doctor, for the language, I mean. But I have no intention of not going back. You don’t run away from a mystery. You try to solve it.’
‘Stuart is closing up the site. The Cree project is at an end. There is nothing to go back to Scotland for. The rest of the party will be returning to Cambridge tomorrow or the day after at the latest. I’m going to tell you as much as I can tonight about the part you are expected to play in all this, about what you have been summoned to try to accomplish. You can believe or disbelieve as you wish. You can take on the duty I will insist is yours, or you can reject it out of turn. All I ask is that you hear me out and sleep on your decision.’
He had been there, Adam thought again, and this time the intuition hit him with the strength of certainty. He had been there on that hot and restless day in Sarajevo on 28 June, 1914. There had been five would-be Black Hand assassins. Princip had all but given up and had gone off to seek out some lunch when the royal coach trundled through the street junction he was attempting to cross by fluke alone and he took out his revolver and fired the two fatal shots. There had been five and McGuire had gambled on the wrong assassin and the gamble had failed. The odds had beaten him. Probability had beaten him. Had there been more to it? Had chance enjoyed some diabolical help?
‘I’ll hear you out,’ Adam said. He got to his feet. There had been no invitation to do so. But he was not a prisoner here. He felt restless. He stretched muscles cramped by the confinement of a day spent largely aboard trains. He had enjoyed no real exercise, and he habitually exercised strenuously for at least an hour every day.
He looked at some of the stuff on the shelves on the walls surrounding him – the bric-a-brac and souvenirs and solid fragments of a long and learned life. A cane lying on one shelf caught his attention. It was about three and a half feet long and sturdy. It was burnished to a nicotine brown by age and the silver pommel topping it had been allowed to tarnish. This neglect seemed out of character. McGuire was a fastidious man, the owner of a spotless hostess trolley. His back to his host, facing the wall, Adam smiled to himself and reached for the cane. It was surprisingly heavy.
Because it conceals a blade, he thought. That fine Toledo steel is pitted by time now but still keen along its edge. He was armed with this there, at Sarajevo. He would have used it, too, would have skewered the boy assassin without a single troubling thought. Why not? He had used it often enough before. And that had been the whole point of his presence.
Adam was there, on the teeming summer streets of the Balkan city, the rich aromas of coffee and cigar smoke and pedestrian sweat rising in the hot, stagnant air, the dusty trundle of coach wheels and the clip of escorting cavalry hooves and the pressing crowds gathered for the sight of royal pomp parading in vivid procession through their streets.
And the doctor, with the murderous weapon that Adam now held sheathed between his hands, sweating through his pale linen suit and desperate, young then and lithe and strong and ruthless but, on this occasion, thwarted. It was impossible, of course. The Sarajevo assassination had occurred almost a century ago.
‘You are a very perceptive boy,’ McGuire said, from somewhere behind him. ‘Put the swordstick back where it reposes. It long ago earned its retirement from the fray. Come and sit down, Adam. It is late now for an old man and I am tired and I have much to tell you.’
Jane Dobb did revisit the site in the forest the following morning. This was nothing to do with facing down her demons or attempting to get closure or any other New Age novelty.
A rap from Martha Collier’s meaty fist on Martin Prior’s door at the hostel at seven a.m. had raised only the groan of someone who sounded terminally hung-over. They needed her to help, a pair of hands she was happy to volunteer in Martin’s absence from the effort to neatly and conclusively wrap up the dig.
Grayling gave her a somewhat severe look when he saw her jump down from the rear of the minibus. But he raised no explicit objection to her being there. Too many people around for a public row about an experience he had urged her to keep private, she supposed. He merely stared at her for a moment and frowned, then looked around as Jane thought the point-man of an infantry company might do on hostile ground in search of a holed-up sniper.
It rained. Of course it did. It was their last day and on their last day it had always been destined to rain. They were finished up after two muddy hours and Jane indulged the bleak enjoyment of a cigarette in the downpour as their sheltering tarp was folded and lashed by the burlier students to the roof rack of Grayling’s Land Rover.
She felt sad. And the sadness was provoked by more than just the failure of her smoking resolution and the end of their Scottish adventure, melancholy as the end of something so closely shared among so few, like this, so often was.
She did not think that she would see Adam Parker again. That was the whole of it. Oh, she would see him, of course. She would do so in the factual sense. But she would not see him again in the circumstances they had enjoyed here.
It was a shame, she thought, exhaling smoke, grinding out the butt of her Marlboro under the heel of her boot before scrupulously retrieving it and putting it into a Ziploc bag to join the rest of the site detritus they would dutifully take away with them.
She
did not feel nervous or watched. She supposed that was something. But it was absence that filled her senses, absence with a name, and its name was Adam Parker. She did not feel relieved that her cruel observer had gone from the forest. She thought that it was to be expected. She had the certain intuition that he would not welcome a crowd of curious students and their tutor, watching him. Solitariness and stealth were the cold essentials of his character. So he was not there now. She felt sure of it.
Grayling was suddenly behind her. She knew his aftershave. ‘You lied to me,’ she said. She sniffed. Her nose was cold and runny and the loss in her felt a bit like grief. ‘Adam isn’t coming back today.’
‘No,’ Grayling said. ‘He isn’t.’
She turned to face the professor. ‘You said that matters would be explained on his return. But now he isn’t returning. Where does that leave your explanation?’
He raised an eyebrow and looked around again. He did so discreetly, but still scrutinized the full 360 degrees of their desolate vista. She had not previously thought him a man who had ever been concerned with cloak and dagger aspects of the world. Now she did.
‘I need to speak to your father, Jane,’ he said. ‘I need to seek his counsel before talking truthfully to you about events.’
She sniffed again and rubbed at the tip of her nose with the back of her hand. The burned tobacco from her cigarette tasted foul in her throat. That, at least, she supposed, was a positive thing. ‘I’m not close to my father. I’m not close to either of my parents.’
‘It’s the protocol.’
Ignoring his last comment, she explained, ‘We grew up feeling sort of peripheral, Dora and me, a bit like accessories. My folks didn’t have a lot of time for mundane obligations like childcare.’
‘Dora is your twin?’
Jane nodded. ‘Identical, as makes no difference.’
‘Are you close to her?’
‘Do you ask out of your duty of pastoral care?’
‘I ask because I’m intrigued.’