by Phil Rickman
‘Twice that’s happened. How normal is that?’
‘Aw, hell …’ She hesitated. ‘You know what this says to me? I mean, this is just off the top of my head, I havenae thought it out, but it’s as if when … after we brought you round … some part of you stayed dead. It’s as though something down there in your mind doesnae know we got your body to come back.’
He saw her hands tighten on the wheel.
‘It’s like you’re carrying around your own corpse, Bobby.’
‘Well, thanks,’ Maiden said. ‘That’s very encouraging.’
They kept on talking after that. There was a flask of black coffee Em had made, and chocolate biscuits. They were through Spaghetti Junction, so little traffic this time in the morning that the great concrete snakepit looked like a major overspend.
She was telling him about this guy called Marcus Bacton, a schoolteacher for over thirty years, though he claimed to hate kids worse than the flu. Took early retirement after his wife’s death, and bought himself this rundown farmhouse on the Welsh border, to start a new career as a magazine editor.
‘Kind of Learned Gentleman’s Journal of the Unexplained. Printed on the kind of paper you wouldnae wipe your arse on in case your fingers went through. So … he’s stuck out in the sticks, losing money hand over fist on this awful rag, and having to pay a housekeeper on account of he cannae tie his own shoes. Lucky to land one who didnae ask for much other than a roof over her. Mrs Willis. The healer.’
Andy pulled off the motorway, giving two fingers to the driver of an Escort who’d zipped in from the fast lane and cut in front.
‘Dickhead. Listen, I never went for this baloney. Laying on of hands. Sending healing vibes. I’m a professional. Like, if it works, what we doin’ spending billions on hospitals and clinics? And yet …’
Healing vibes. He was remembering Jonathan telling him about Andy’s hands either side of his head as he lay dead, Andy’s eyes closed. It was as if she was somewhere else. She was concentrating so hard on bringing you back, it was as though nothing else in the world mattered or ever would again if she failed. When you started to breathe, she just sagged. And we thought …
Maiden jerked in his seat. He’d almost slipped away. It was like waking up on the edge of a sheer cliff. He swallowed a lot of air and laid his cheek against the window, for the coolness of it.
‘… burial chamber,’ Andy was saying. ‘Part of it had collapsed, and there was a sign telling you not to go inside. But me — all six and a half stone of me — I fitted under the capstone, no trouble. I was that weak, you know? When you said that about being dried out like a corpse, that was how it was for me, with the colitis. You’re just crapping all the moisture out of your system. You’re a husk. Tired the whole time, and weary as hell, and you’ll try anything. And so I’m lying there, in this burial chamber, until the dawn comes. You like the dawn, Bobby?’
‘When the world’s all quiet and fresh and sparkly.’
‘This was a dawn like I never knew — and I’ve seen a few thousand, end of a shift. It’s like … very dark in this wee chamber. I must’ve fallen asleep straight away. Just lying there on the hard earth. These huge stones all around me. A really dense sleep. And then, the next thing, I become aware of my hand … I must’ve been lying with my arms under my head and my hands are out in front, and this hand … it’s like it’s on fire.’
The car slowed, her hands on the wheel lit by red light from traffic signals.
‘But it’s … it’s like the fire’s inside. The hand glowing in the darkness. Just this hand. Not the stone, not the earth. Just the hand, like there’s fire inside. So I reach out with the other hand to touch it, and that lights up too.’
The lights changed to green and Andy pulled away. Maiden saw she was smiling.
‘What it was, it was the midsummer sun coming in through the slit, in this really focused beam. They were warm, too, the hands.’
They were coming into Worcester city centre and by its lights Maiden could see the girl in Andy’s rugged face.
‘Found I was breathing very, very slowly, aware of each breath as it came in. And it was like each breath was going further into my body. And while this happened, it was getting progressively lighter and warmer inside the chamber. The sunlight coming between these big stones like … molten gold from a what-you-call-it? Crucible. I can feel it now.’
Maiden smiled at hard-bitten Andy, all poetic. But he was impressed.
‘Afterwards, walking back to the cottage, it was like, you know, walking on the golden clouds. It was Midsummer’s Day. They told me how this wee girl, years back, she had this vision of the Virgin Mary in this very same place, on Midsummer’s Morning. Jesus, it’s enough tae give you religion.’
He noticed how her accent would ebb — the result of thirty years in England — and then roll back in a wave with the powerful memories.
‘They wouldnae take any more money for the cottage, though Mrs W fed me for days. Fresh fruit, homemade veggie soup. And weird stuff from bottles with stoppers. Miracles. Magic. When I left, I was about a stone heavier but … light. Inside, you know? And before I go, she says, You can do this now. If you want to. So when I get back to work, I’m signing on for every healing course advertised on the back wall of Elham Healthfoods. Acupuncture, homoeopathy, cranial osteopathy, Reiki.’
Maiden said cautiously, ‘You’re saying you used this on me?’
Andy shook her head. ‘I wouldnae claim credit. I’m a convert to alternative medicine, but … powerful enough to kick-start the dead? I don’t dare think. The Holy Mother? Bobby, I was raised a Presbyterian. All I’m saying, there’s something remarkable about that place, and I cannae explain it in any scientific terms. Whether it’s some kind of magnetic thing, some property of the place, like Lourdes and such, I wouldnae have any idea about that. All I know is, when you were lying stone dead on that table in A and E, I was holding the image in ma head of the rising sun at High Knoll and willing it to come into ma hands and to come into you.’
… we thought, for a second, that she was going to drop dead, Jonathan had said.
‘Maybe I blacked out for a split second. And the next thing, the whole team’s jumpin’ up and down and whooping and everybody’s hugging me and stuff. I … couldnae … I couldnae go home. I was too high. Couldnae sleep that night.’
They were through the city now, back in the dark country.
‘So why didn’t you feel like that, Bobby? Breaks ma heart.’
The other side of Hereford, small signs were saying Michaelchurch, Craswall, Longtown. Tiny, scattered lights from windows in the sky. Hill country.
‘I feel I’ve been ungrateful,’ Maiden said. ‘You wasted your … light.’
‘Get lost. There’s always a reason for things. Did I ask you what you believed, Bobby? If you ever believed there was stuff out there?’
‘Yeah, well …’ Through the windscreen, Maiden saw a church steeple greyly smoke-ringed with low night cloud. ‘I used to believe all kinds of stuff. Once.’
‘When you were gonny be a painter?’
‘Yeah. Not many coppers believe. Like doctors. Like how can any kind of a just God allow this shit …?’
‘I’m a cynic, Bobby. And a sceptic. I take a lot of convincing. Years of seeing good human beings die prematurely and bad human beings keep on recovering. I have no answers. And yet …’
‘Truth is I’d love to believe all that,’ Maiden said. ‘Be nice to be that kind of person. New Age cop. But my experience of being dead ties in only too well with the kind of deaths I’ve been seeing for years. Cold, ugly … to be avoided.’ He sighed. ‘To be avoided.’
At the end of the village street, a muddied sign said: Capel-y-ffin. Mountain road, unsuitable for heavy vehicles.
‘Nearly there, son,’ Andy said. She was thinking of how, when she talked to Marcus yesterday, he said Mrs Willis told him she had seen a black light. Over the Knoll.
That would make sense to Bobby, all
right. With his experience. Black light.
In the headlights, the whitened bone-branches of two half-dead trees locked horns over the road.
XVII
Never needed an alarm; he awoke at six, precisely, to the bloody second. Always woke at six, from the days when he was employed to force-feed Shakespeare sonnets to gluesniffing thugs.
So, when Marcus fumbled on his glasses and the luminous clock said 4.55, he knew there was a problem.
Had hardly any sleep. Didn’t get to bed until half past one. Sitting around waiting for the Anderson woman — seriously, who could you rely on these days? — and worrying about Mrs Willis, who’d gone to bed early after two hours sitting alone in her Healing Room and not — here was the clincher — not even coming out for The Archers.
Another crash. Thunderous but familiar. An October gust thrusting at the barn door, slamming it back and forth — what happened to the new padlock and chain? One day that door would blow off and there’d have to be a gaping hole for the duration, because he couldn’t afford to replace it. Whole bloody fabric was coming apart, rot setting in, and the farmhouse would collapse a bloody sight faster than the original castle.
Felt he was under siege in his own ruins, the motte a tiny island in a Falconer sea, foundations eroding. The whole of the western world turning into a Falconer society: glib, superficial, arrogant, narcissistic.
Bastards.
The barn door went again, this time with a faint splintering coda, as though it had been hit by a team of men with a battering ram and they were backing off for another go. It must have sprung completely open.
In the dark, Marcus pulled his trousers from the bedpost (never be caught without your trousers) and his tweed jacket from the bedroom door, hauling it on over his string vest. Creeping in his socks down the stone stairs — although there was little danger of awakening Mrs Willis, state of her hearing these days — and stepping into his wellies by the back door, Malcolm ambling through to join him.
The cold hit him with a surprisingly vicious punch. Be winter before you knew it. Seemed no bloody time at all since last winter, the way the years just flashed by. But, then, why shouldn’t they? A year was nothing. Sixty years were nothing; what could you learn in sixty bloody years? What had Marcus Bacton learned?
Bugger all of any real significance. ‘Just has to be more than this,’ he told the dog. Grabbing his torch from the hook in the porch, stumbling into the yard.
The barn door blew out at him as he reached it, almost knocking him over. Bastard. Looked like the bloody chain had snapped. But when he pointed his torch at it, he saw the chain hanging loose from the hasp, the padlock still dangling from the chain … and the bloody padlock was open.
What the hell? Couldn’t be a burglar or a tramp looking for a bed, unless it was a tramp with the skill and patience to pick locks, and the door was so rotten anyway that he could have kicked his way in quicker, and … Good God!
Marcus saw that the key was still in the padlock.
The keys to the buildings were all kept in an old coffee tin on the kitchen window ledge.
Oh my God.
Mrs Willis.
Andy swung the car sharply right into a bumpy track, between outstretched arms of stone.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a castle, Bobby. Did I no tell you he lived in a castle?’
Something huge and tubular was pushing out of a bushy mound into the charcoal-grey pre-dawn. Half of a stone tower.
‘Well, he lives in it inasmuch as the walls are all round the house,’ Andy said. ‘More a liability than anything, with the upkeep and the official inspections.’
Behind the ruins, the headlights had found a low house, heavy with oak timbers, small, irregular black windows. Andy parked about fifty yards away. ‘We’ll bide here a while. Don’t want to set the dog off. Marcus’ll be about soon enough.’
‘Get some air, I think.’ Maiden pulled down his eyepatch, levered himself out of the car. It was chilly, the darkness rattling and squeaking. His body aching. There were no visible lights, apart from a fading moon and a single star.
Andy joined him. ‘How you feeling?’
‘OK.’
‘I bet.’
‘No, really. Better.’
‘You’ll sleep fine here. Air’s like rough cider. Listen. I have a thought. This may be stupid.’
‘Go on.’
‘It’ll take us no more than twenty minutes to walk to the Knoll.’
‘You don’t think that’s stupid at all,’ Maiden said. ‘You’ve been planning it all along.’
Only a barn owl shrieked in reply. He found himself losing touch with the reality of it, the scene receding into a small screen of pebble-glass, the kind you saw in front of vintage TV sets from the 1950s.
He saw a sliver of gold in the east. In the west, behind the castle’s bush-bristled mound, dark hills.
* * *
Halfway up the rise, he turned to look back into the east. Saw the dawn like an estuary in the sky: flat banks of cool sand and spreading turquoise pools. But he knew there was something wrong: it was just a pretty picture, he wasn’t feeling it.
‘You OK, Bobby?’ Andy moving briskly through the dew-damp field, looking back at him. He was out of breath; she wasn’t.
‘I’m OK.’ He could feel the excitement in her. Couldn’t believe that she believed his survival was down to some kind of prehistoric magic.
Andy shook her head over the view. ‘Will you look at that?’ She had on a blue nylon jacket, pink jeans and a pair of walking boots she kept in the car. She looked loosened up, very much at home here. ‘I mean, isn’t that just amazing?’
‘It’s very nice.’
‘Very nice?’ She stared at him. ‘Jesus, Bobby, I thought you were supposed to be an artist. You’re talking like a guy with no poetry in him.’
‘Sorry.’
‘You think I’m mad, don’t you? I mean, come on, if you think I’m out of it, you bloody well say so.’
‘I think you’re an optimist,’ he said.
‘Let’s just try it, huh? You stand on the Knoll and you let the sun rise over you, and if you think it’s still February … Just try it, huh?’
Ahead of them, in the west, the land rose steeply towards what were either high hills or low mountains, hard to separate them from the still-night sky. Andy tugged at the sprung bar on a metal gate.
‘Not far. Just we’ll need to go careful. Don’t wanny get arrested for trespass. Guy who owns the land — this TV archaeologist, Falconer?’
‘He owns this land?’
‘He does now. He and Marcus are, ah …’ Andy dragged the gate across the tufted grass. ‘… not over-friendly. He’s apparently fenced off the Knoll. If he found Marcus climbing over the wire, he’d be pressing charges. We’d probably get off wi’ a warning, but he’s no gonny see us anyway, this early.’ She lowered her voice. With any luck.’
Andy closed the gate behind them and crackled confidently through a patch of dry bracken. Did she really imagine she was going to have him skipping back down the hillside, praising God, the Virgin Mary, the Mother Goddess?
‘What happened to the girl who had the vision?’
‘Aw, it becomes less inspiring. Child tells her mother, gets the strap for being late to school. And lying. When she keeps on about it, Ma summons the vicar. No friend of the Roman Church. Plus the local people are saying any vision at a pagan site has got to be the work of the evil one. They kind of ostracized her.’
‘Christians,’ Maiden said.
‘Cause celebre for The Phenomenologist and Marcus. Hates religious prejudice, though, God knows, he has enough of his own. Look …’
She stopped, took his arm. About a hundred yards away, at the summit of the slope, something squatted like a massive, stone toad.
‘Most people find them kind of weird, these old sites, wouldnae want to go up alone. Now it’s like … approaching a cathedral.’
She turned her fac
e into the dawn. There were channels of crimson under the lightening sandscape in the sky, chips of glittering cloud. Andy’s skin was ambered in the morning glow, her eyes shining, red hair alight.
‘Supposed to be a chambered tomb, that’s what the books say, but this … this is no to do with death. Jesus, how can you ever turn your face into the sunrise and contemplate dying?’
Maiden looked down at the dirty yellow grass. He felt cold.
‘These people,’ Andy said. ‘The old guys. They positioned it to grab the earliest daylight. So it’s all about rebirth. New life, healing the body, healing the mind, healing the spirit. It’s everything we’ve forgotten. As a race, y’know? Like … Hey … you OK?’
‘Nothing.’ His mouth dry. ‘Someone walking over my grave.’
He looked down at his hands, saw they were trembling. Never before, in his whole life, could he remember his hands trembling.
‘You’ve gone pale, Bobby.’
The stone toad crouched over him.
‘OK, listen to me.’ Andy put her hands on his shoulders. ‘C’mon now, what are you feeling? Right this second.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Yes you do. Give me a word.’
‘All right, dread.’
‘Dread? Son, this place saved your life.’
‘You saved my life.’
‘Aw.’ Andy dropped her arms, walked away from him, shaking her head.
‘Sorry. Wrong thing to say, huh?’
‘Bobby, everything you say’s wrong. Walked on your grave. You said grave. This is no to do with graves.’
‘You’re taking it personally.’
‘Damn right I am. All the way down here I’m thinking this was gonny bring you out of it. Out of all this grey stuff, this fear of death, all this February shite.’
‘It doesn’t change what you did. You wanted to think it was linked to your own recovery and whatever happened to you up here. I don’t know why you don’t just accept that it was you … your instincts, your experience …’
He risked another look up at the stone toad on the mound, vaguely hoping it might have acquired a halo, turned to gold.