Lie of the Land

by Michael F. Russell

  Carl sat on the edge of the bed, hangover and fear making his voice and hands shake. ‘They will stop transmitting, the masts, the nodes. They might pack in tomorrow, right?’

  ‘They might,’ said Brindley. ‘But SCOPE was designed with resilience in mind. It’s robust. And the two-hertz harmonic is a standing wave, with a strong magnetic component. Impossible to shield against.’

  Sitting on the bed, Carl considered the whisky bottle on the bedside table. Enough for a hair of the dog remained.

  ‘I heard someone crying. Or maybe I dreamed it,’ he said, taking a slug from the bottle. ‘Maybe it was me. I’m not sure. But there was crying, somewhere. Everywhere. There’s always someone crying somewhere.’

  Brindley shifted his stance, pursed his lips. He sighed, standing awkwardly, breathing in the silence and sweat and alcohol fumes in Room 14.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it then.’ He opened the door to leave. ‘I’m in Room 22 now. It’s down at the end of the corridor. Let me know what you think about mapping the area.’

  The door closed. Carl sat there for a while, then went to splash his face in the bathroom. Another slug of whisky made him feel almost human again. He grabbed his jacket and the ignition key for the car.

  It seemed like most of the villagers were out of doors, and they stared at him as he drove through the fine morning. Fair enough if they thought he was nuts. He would just drive on, drive on, drive on . . .

  He went around the bay and up onto the southern headland. After turning inland for a short distance, he stopped. There were four cars up on the grass verge, and about thirty people standing at a line of traffic cones, a police roadblock sign lying flat on its back. Someone kicked one of the cones into the ditch.

  Carl joined the crowd. Getting out of the car and walking towards the cones he felt a sharp twinge of pain in his temple, and a faint clicking noise. A bit further and the faint clicking would become a sonic skewer that would make his nose bleed. Day 2 and SCOPE still hadn’t packed in. How long can people live when they can’t wake up, lying where they fell?

  He laughed. One or two from the crowd glared at him. Just ahead of the roadblock was the road sign for the national speed limit, a fading black slash across white. 60mph had been enjoyed by the few of late, an unreachable pleasure. Now the sign may as well have been in a different universe.

  Down the road. Where sleep ruled the airwaves.

  A crow flew across his field of vision. The bird was already in the delta field when it veered further, deeper, where humans could no longer set foot. Animals seemed unaffected; Brindley said they had different brains. Or maybe it was just crows that had different brains. They could feast now, and the rats too.

  ‘They’ll survive,’ he said to the sky and hills. ‘Rats always fucking survive.’

  He jumped the ditch and started walking at a right angle to the road, ignored by the crowd, up the green slopes that rose towards the heather and hilltops of bare rock. He left the crying and silence behind.

  Late in the afternoon he returned, exhausted, to the hotel, his feet soaking, clothes and hands filthy, knuckle grazed from a fall. George was right about the conifer forest though: you couldn’t really go through it because the trees were so densely packed. He was tired, worn out, limbs aching as he flopped onto the couch in the residents’ lounge. Burned it off, he had. But the terror would be back. Even now he could feel it around his stomach, coils tightening. He lay there, dozed, imagined; tried to feel lucky. A car pulled up outside. Who was driving? He heard the hotel door open.

  Footsteps. Silence.

  Still lying on the couch, Carl opened his eyes, aware he was being watched. It was Brindley.

  ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ he said, sitting down in a leather chair.

  Carl turned away, faced the back of the couch. He just wanted to go to sleep, but his curiosity got the better of him.

  ‘How did you get here, Mr Brindley? To Inverlair, I mean.’ His voice was level, expressionless.

  The leather chair creaked.

  ‘With great difficulty. Friends of mine, they tried to get me to go with them, on their boat.’

  ‘Friends?’ Carl sat up. Sleep could wait.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So where are they now?’

  Brindley sighed. ‘West coast of Ireland, I hope. That’s where they were headed. SCOPE was being trialled in Dublin – they had their own Civil Contingencies Secretariat – and down the east coast, and in the north, but parts of the west coast should be okay, I think.’

  Carl turned to face Brindley. ‘So you did manage to persuade at least some people that SCOPE was a danger?’

  ‘Yes, close friends, my sister and . . .’

  ‘That all?’

  Brindley narrowed his eyes. ‘Yes.’

  ‘So why didn’t you go with them, these friends of yours?’ Carl sat up on the sofa. ‘And why exactly did you choose to bring me up here?’

  ‘To save you, I suppose.’

  ‘Save me?’

  ‘Yes. Who else would follow a lead connected to SCOPE all the way up here? It was your job.’

  That was something Carl didn’t want to think about. Instead of thinking he could sleep, or walk. Being hungover didn’t help matters, made it harder for him to judge the truth of what he was being told. It had been his job to sniff around ugly secrets such as SCOPE. Exposing that kind of crap was supposed to be a calling, a vocation; at least that’s what he’d believed. Maybe he’d failed to do his job properly. If there had been any saving to be done, he should have been the one doing it, in banner headlines over an exposé. But nothing like that had been possible.

  ‘Why didn’t you try to stop it?’

  Brindley folded his arms, his eyes flashing. ‘What the fuck are you talking about? You don’t think I tried to stop this?’ He jabbed a finger at Carl. ‘You must have known that SCOPE was more than a communications system. You knew that. You must have. You said you had the full spec – you mentioned bioactive frequencies for Christ’s sake in one of your pieces. You must have known, at least suspected . . . you must have talked to Cobhill or Haarland or one of these guys.’

  Carl heaved himself off the couch, anger rising in him. ‘I couldn’t have stopped this any more than you.’

  Silence.

  The hint of a smile played around Brindley’s thin lips. ‘You think I was any less impotent than you?’

  Carl didn’t answer. He headed upstairs without looking back.

  •

  Shadow marked the deepening evening, sun sinking behind the northern headland. Carl got up to sit by the window and look out across the sun-bright bay.

  In the quiet, he could hear the sea stir against the bay, a background rush of water lapping on rock. The day moved into early evening and it was warm, and the smell of the sea was strong. He leant on the sill of the open window. There was crying somewhere, though he wasn’t sure where, and a steady stream of people coming back from the edge of the delta field. He reached for the cigarette he had been given by one of the locals. There was a big NO SMOKING sign on the back of the door, but he guessed that George Cutler would have other things on his mind apart from the smell of smoke in one of his rooms. The death of his wife would be fairly high on that list.

  A knock at the door. He listened. It came again, louder. He heard a woman’s voice, out in the corridor.

  ‘Are you there?’

  He sat up, his lips parched, wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts.

  ‘Come in,’ he rasped, rising from the bed.

  The door creaked open and Simone Cutler looked in, her face pale, eyes red. Sleepless. Just like him.

  ‘We were wondering if you’d like anything to eat?’

  She came into the room. Instead of her waitress whites, she wore a dressing gown. Her hair was loose.

  ‘No,’ Carl said. ‘Thanks. I’m not hungry. How . . .’ He stopped, unable to finish the question. There was no need to ask.

  Simone started to shake. She was
next to him now, and Carl could smell traces of perfume and, deeper, her true scent. She raised a trembling hand to her eyes. The next thing Carl knew they were holding each other, a full-on hug, in the summer stillness as the birds sang in the sun.

  He stroked Simone’s unbrushed hair, pressed her closer. They sat on the bed and, as her dressing gown parted Carl automatically slid his hand between her thighs. He felt himself harden, and he gave himself to an emotion that blotted out fear.

  November

  12

  Autumn was on the move, flinging storms in a fusillade from the Atlantic. On the main road south Carl stopped in his tracks, sucking deep for air. He was pushing himself too hard, full recovery still some way off, evidently. How long would it take?

  This is how it is and how it would be. Pneumonia had given him a glimpse of the future and he now existed as a weaker, older man. He’d never felt so tired and worn out. Was this to be his new peak fitness? Maybe he’d never fully recover.

  Bed had suited him too well; it was as if he belonged in the hollow his dead weight had pressed into the mattress in Room 14. Try as he might, he couldn’t make himself as strong as once he’d been, couldn’t shake the disease. A deeper resting-place than his bed would have been no bad thing, one next to Howard and the German couple. But he wasn’t going to die any time soon. There was here and now to consider; pressing concerns that demanded a response, even if it was jumping off a cliff or slitting his wrists. That was always an option.

  Perhaps he’d pushed himself too hard, walking into the hills, following the invisible bars of his cage from one side of the bay to the other.

  They were watching him, the villagers. Through binoculars they were scrutinising him as he plodded and puffed along the southern headland, on the road that curved up and out of the bay. He knew they were watching him because he was watching them. There were two pairs searching for him, he could see through his binoculars: the old woman in Bayview Cottage, standing at her living-room window, and one of Cutler’s boatyard crew down on the pier. Well, he’d give them a good show. He put one foot in front of the other, a feat of dexterity that was bound to amaze the observers.

  He walked out from behind the trees, adjusted his headphones and headed south in time to the music throbbing in his ears. Thank Christ for solar power.

  •

  On the main road out of Inverlair where there was an opening in a line of rowan trees, a gravel track led to a rusty metal gate that was wide enough to let a lorry through. Hidden by low branches Carl saw a washed-out sign for Levanche Aggregates, Inverlair Quarry. The metal gates were chained together and a wheelless windowless old car was taking root among the bushes. Carl climbed over the chest-high gate and continued down the rough track and into the quarry. Warning placards atop wooden posts, all flattened by the wind, urged site visitors to WEAR PERSONAL PROTECTION EQUIPMENT and DON’T TAKE UNNECESSARY RISKS. As far as the pregnancy was concerned, it was a bit late for any of that. He crunched on down the stony track, into the great gouged pit.

  The main part of the quarry must have been over 300 metres wide and at least 50 deep, one side open, leading down towards a sagging ballast-filled pier where the cargo ships had loaded up with gravel sand and aggregate. Long gone now, everything rust and rot: prefab site office with broken windows; corrugated-iron works shed rattling and squeaking in the wind; corroded tank and concrete bund for waste oil; lorry trailers with flat tyres; a long conveyor-belt machine, angling into the air, a dead dinosaur like Eric. Like himself.

  At the far end of the quarry another dirt track ploughed up and through banks of peat, until it opened out again into a steep-sided lagoon. Signs warned of deep water. Young pine trees had taken hold on the lagoon’s stony slopes, along with gorse and tufts of heather. Wind ghosted in gusts across the dark water.

  Nobody was watching him here.

  On a stone track overlooking the lagoon, Carl picked up a fist-sized stone and hurled it underarm down towards the deep water. The splash echoed round the pit, setting birds to flight. Some of them sped from the quarry’s floor, twittering in fright, flashing towards the safety of holes in the sand cliffs, at the far end of the lagoon. When the sun was out it was warm, but the cool breeze sped the clouds, and it was cold in the shadows, spines of winter needling into autumn.

  Carl made his way down the side of the quarry towards the lagoon. The wind dropped away and, sitting next to a pile of huge boulders, he felt some heat in the sun in the rocks and on the ground. He unzipped his jacket and pulled out his water bottle.

  There was sand on the quarry floor, around the lagoon. The plaque at the village viewpoint said the sea level had fluctuated since the last Ice Age. Maybe that explained why he had his own private inland beach.

  Tenacious buggers, those young pine trees, half-submerged on the slopes of the lagoon, green shoots bursting through the gravel, some of them saplings barely knee-high. The earth was reclaiming this man-made scar in the landscape, creeping down the sides of the quarry, covering the pit and the tracks, the mounds of till and rusting machinery. Healing over. Carl sat with eyes closed and out of the wind until the next cloud, a big one, came and blocked the sun. Shadow lowered the temperature and sitting there became uncomfortable after a spell. He got to his feet. The book in the hotel said there was a prehistoric structure, and some caves, up in the hill. There was nothing else to do but walk and hide and think. Despite what George had said, people probably blamed him for everything that had happened; when they found out about Simone they’d blame him for that as well. Fair enough. Rather than question their own lack of awareness, their blindness, they could pin SCOPE on him and Howard. Simone’s brother seemed to have Little Man Syndrome. Carl doubted whether being an uncle again would cause him unbridled delight.

  •

  Two hours later he was 300 metres up on the opposite headland, at the remains of a Bronze Age broch, trying to envisage what this pile of stones had looked like, standing twelve metres high and with two-metre thick walls. There was tightness in his chest and weakness in his legs. But he’d managed the climb, all the way, whereas the week before he hadn’t.

  People had looked out from here once, he thought, across the same hills and bay, out to where sun and cloud danced on the same leaden Atlantic. Hungry people, perhaps, watching from this spot. How healthy had the prehistoric diet been? It seemed to consist mainly of nuts, berries and fish. How could you square a healthy diet with dying young? Simple: death had more than one trick up its sleeve. It could seep into your bones with the drizzle, or it could strangle you with your own umbilical cord. A harsh winter. The point of a sword. These were the ways before Alzheimer’s and cancer and the industrialised race to extinction. Erase the main road from the picture, the forest plantation too, and you could be looking at a million years ago.

  The broch was anywhere between 2,000 and 4,000 years old, according to the book in the hotel, but there wasn’t much left now. The thing had collapsed in on itself, or been knocked down. A defensive structure, built to keep watch over a wide area with one face towards the sea and the other inland. Inverlair was an ideal spot: a river at the head of a sheltered bay. But something, someone, would have come along to break the peace. Did the invaders export their desperation, taking by force what Inverlair had?

  SCOPE would fail – everything man-made did, sooner or later. SCOPE would retreat, mast by mast, and those who were left could take over again, could . . . what? Scavenge over relics? Worship the fucking masts like some death cult?

  Looking down the hill towards the village Carl could see the spill of big stones from the collapsed broch, some of them completely grown over. He walked down the slope and knelt, touched one of the buried stones. Within this grass swelling, this bump, was a missing piece of the past, and it would stay there unless he freed it. Perhaps he should help the rock get reborn.

  Stamping with the heel of his boot, he struck a solid edge under the grass, worked around in this way until he had the outline, then with his
hands he pulled the sods and black soil from the broch stone. After a few minutes of effort, sweat running into his eyes and down the small of his back, lungs straining, he’d worked the boulder loose, like a molar in its socket.

  Straining every sinew, he extracted, a heave at a time, a hundredweight of rectangular stone, dragging it free of the centuries and onto the grass. Many stones were buried further down the slope.

  Gasping for breath, Carl sank down next to the slab, dark earth reeking from the hole. After a few minutes, he sat up. Already the soil was drying on his hands; cold sweat on his face, nails topped with a line of dirt. There were dozens more stones to dig out. Big ones on the outside, smaller ones forming the inner wall of the broch; the whole thing tapering upwards for seven metres, just like the book said. His arms were shaking with the effort and his lungs were sore. Maybe he could dig more out, maybe all of them, in time.

  He lifted his binoculars and scanned the village. If he could see them clearly, then they could see him. He searched the backs of houses, upstairs bedrooms and kitchen windows. Did he see a movement in one, someone ducking behind a curtain?

  Carl patted the stone he had just dug up, the first of many. He could do it. He could resurrect the dead.

  That would give them something to talk about. The nutter on the hill. The guy who knew about SCOPE and who didn’t try to stop it. The guy who killed his friend.

  After a while he stood up, drank some water from his bottle. It was too early to go back yet; too early for the awkward silences and the hints and the looks. Simone wanted a conversation, but he doubted if anything he had to say would improve the situation, although, now that he thought about it, he wasn’t sure if he could find any words of significance at all. Sometimes it felt like a dream, and at other times everything came sharply into focus; a reality he had no idea how to handle.

  Best not to think about it. It was easier to push it away. He had to push it away.