by Phil Rickman
‘Well …’ Maiden sank into a dusty, brocaded cushion. ‘The bottom line is, I suspect my superior officer would like me out of the picture.’
‘You are out of the picture. You’re eighty miles away. If you mean dead, Maiden, say it.’
‘Dead, then.’
‘Why, precisely?’
Maiden said, ‘For being possibly the only copper in Elham division who hasn’t at some time, to some extent, been on the take.’
Yes, he thought. It is that simple.
Marcus leaned forward, firelight gleaming fiercely in his heavy spectacles. Then he poured himself a Scotch.
‘That’s it, then, is it?’ he said. ‘I mean, do forgive me, Maiden, but I was rather expecting something to test the imagination.’
Only later, when Marcus was too drunk and maudlin to handle and he was trudging across the yard to the cottage, did Maiden realize this hadn’t been sarcasm.
‘Correct me if I’m wrong, Maiden.’ Marcus holding out his tumbler and gazing into the whisky as if it was the true elixir of life. ‘But you snuffed it, didn’t you?’
‘Apparently.’
‘And dear old Anderson coaxed you back from the Other Place when everybody was ready to pull the plug, have you bagged up and put in a big drawer or whatever they do. Doesn’t that make you think? I mean, you now know that there’s something beyond death. Does that not change your whole life, utterly and completely? Doesn’t it blow your mind? Doesn’t it make you think, here I am, a snivelling little detective getting all worked up about a bunch of bent coppers, when there are real mysteries all around. Mysteries so close, so damned intimate … that most people, especially policemen, never even focus on them. Big mysteries. Don’t you ever feel overwhelmingly excited? Humble, even?’
He didn’t want to answer that. Didn’t want to confess to feeling, in what was supposed to be his soul, a coldness and a bleakness and a complete absence of hope.
Marcus sank a quantity of whisky. ‘I was a teacher, Maiden.’
‘Never have guessed.’
‘Something happened to you. Like the thing that happened to Mrs Willis on High Knoll on her thirteenth birthday. Now, in all of the six decades of my life on Planet Earth, while the way we live has changed and worsened out of all recognition, I have never had anything that could be described as a vaguely mystical or paranormal experience. Which is why I run a spotty little magazine devoted to it. If I had had any kind of experience, I’d be out there living it … doing things, making things happen. But, then, you know what they say about teachers.’
Maiden said, after a barely respectful pause, ‘Them as can do, them as can’t … teach.’
‘Which is why people like you make me sick. You died, Maiden. You died. And you came back. And what the holy fuck are you doing about it? ‘
XXI
Folklore. There was a whole lot of it around the Rollright Stones, Matthew Lyall said, and most of it was pretty sinister stuff.
The circle sure looked sinister today, with a black cloud the shape of a bathtub hanging over it, and these stalky pines; Grayle never had liked pines, they were too aloof, blocked out the sun but never seemed to offer you shelter. Pines didn’t care.
In contrast to some of the ruined stone circles she’d seen in pictures, the Rollrights looked like a true circle. Almost too complete, the stones packed in tight, so it was like a wall in places. Matthew’s girlfriend, Janny Oates, said it was part of the folklore of the site that if you counted the stones, you would never get the same number twice.
‘The circle’s known as the King’s Men,’ Matthew said. ‘That stone over there is the King Stone, and across there is a group of stones that used to be a burial chamber, only it’s caved in, and that’s called the Whispering Knights.’
The stones were weird. The King Stone was like a twisted tree stump, and there were metal railings around it, like it might break out. The smaller stones, in the circle, were eroded, like lumps of rotting cheese.
This site should have been surrounded by miles of forest and swamps and stuff, and yet here it was, among well-tended fields, barely a half-hour out of Oxford.
‘Ersula was here?’ she said.
‘We wanted her to spend the night,’ Matthew said. ‘In the stones. I said I’d be her therapeute.’
‘But she wouldn’t,’ Janny said.
‘Which we thought was unusual,’ Matthew said, ‘considering how enthusiastic she’d been, you know, in the end, about the whole experiment.’
Janny and Matthew were kind of cute. They were very early twenties and engaged. Both scrubbed and shiny, real childhood sweetheart types. They wore identical Shetland sweaters and finished off one another’s sentences as if they’d been married for years.
‘When was this?’ Grayle asked. ‘When was she here? When did you last see her?’
They’d both been on a University of the Earth course when Ersula was there. Now they were working weekends with something called the Dragon Project, which was a long-term inquiry into anomalous levels of radiation and electromagnetism at selected ancient sites. The Rollrights was its main base, which was fine for Janny and Matthew, who lived nearby, in the town of Chipping Camden.
‘Three weeks.’ Janny flicked back her fine, light-brown hair. ‘Where did she say she was going then, Matthew?’
‘Actually,’ Matthew said, ‘she seemed a little confused. I think she’d had what my father would call a mind-blowing experience. That was back at Cefn-y-bedd. When we first met her, Ersula was very much the scientist, and she was sort of pooh-poohing all this stuff about earth-energies that Janny and I knew existed.’
‘Because we’d spent all our holidays going to hundreds of sites, and you can just tell after a while. You just walk into a circle and … and …’
‘Whoosh,’ Grayle said sadly.
‘Absolutely. That’s exactly it, isn’t it, Matthew? I think — well, I’m certain — that Ersula came round to our way of thinking. And that can be quite a shock to the system when you start off by not believing.’
‘She was sort of wandering around the stones,’ Matthew said. ‘Looking a bit starved.’
‘As though she had a cold coming on, or a chill. I offered her some tea from our flask, but she shook her head. She was wearing this enormous parka, with the hood up, though it wasn’t a bad day, was it?’
‘Not like today,’ Matthew said. ‘I don’t think we’ll be sleeping out tonight, Jan.’
Grayle thought, Jeez, I sure wouldn’t like to sleep here.
She stepped out of the circle, turned away. Just being near these grim, broken stones solidified all her fears for Ersula. It was clear she hadn’t told anyone on the course about her awful dream at Black Knoll, the full details of which she couldn’t even tell her own sister.
‘Look.’ Matthew patted her arm. ‘I wouldn’t worry about her, you know. I mean, compared with … well, some of the people involved in earth-mysteries are a bit bonkers, to be honest. But Ersula really had her feet on the ground.’
Grayle’s father had said, Be careful.
Not what she’d expected. She’d imagined something like, I never openly said this to you, Grayle, but I hated that column. I found it gross. It gives me enormous pleasure that you outgrew it finally.
No, nothing like that. Dr Erlend Underhill had never once mentioned the column. He’d copied out the addresses and phone numbers of two professors he knew, history guys in Oxford, said he would call them to put them in the picture, tell them she was on her way. Grayle said, Why? Because, right now, prehistoric studies in England was attracting a large number of crazies, her father said; you needed some back-up, a point of reference.
‘Dad, I’m an official, badge-wearing weirdo. I can bond with crazies.’
‘Humour me,’ her father said humourlessly. And insisted on giving her five thousand dollars for airfares and accommodation. ‘This is family business. Keep me informed.’
Next, she’d gone to tough it out with the editor. Who, to
her dismay, seemed entirely undisturbed at his unique New Age columnist’s wanting to quit. ‘Yeah,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘I agree the column’s been a mite tired of late.’ (What?) ‘We can handle it in-house, maybe. I got a couple new kids in the city room, maybe we can give it a new slant.’ He meant save money. Asshole.
All right, she hadn’t expected Burton to plead, but it still wasn’t the exit she’d imagined. So she’d had her last doughnut with Lyndon (you were right, maybe I peaked), held back the tears, and took the first daytime flight out of JFK with a small suitcase and a strange lightness in the head.
The next night she was in Woodstock, the one Jimi Hendrix never played, outside of Oxford, at the home of her father’s one-time associate, a sixty-year-old ancient history professor called Duncan Murphy, and his Australian partner, Nancy Chad, a poet.
‘Oh yes, we know Roger Falconer,’ Duncan Murphy said. ‘People tend to sneer these days because he’s big on the box and making the most of it, but that’s us Brits for you. Can’t stand other people’s success. Of course, we’d all be doing pretty much the same in his place and he knows it. And he does actually know his stuff. These rather lucrative courses he runs, he may have let the ley-liners in, but that doesn’t mean he accepts what they have to say. He listens, that’s all. On the box, and during the courses too, no doubt, he appears more liberal than he actually is, which tends to be the best policy, long-term-careerwise, I’ve found.’
Grayle remembered the issue of The Phenomenologist, the almost unreadably dense journal which Ersula had enclosed with her last letter. The one with the front-page editorial which read: Professor Falconer boasts of his ‘open-minded’ approach to the paranormal. In fact, all his books show him to be a sneering sceptic, and the ‘exciting new venture’ at Cefn-y-bedd promises to be merely a cynical exploitation of genuine seekers — people who, unlike Falconer, are unafraid to venture into battle without their academic armour.
‘I was at a dinner party with him a couple of years ago,’ Nancy Chad said, ‘and that actually wasn’t my impression. I thought he had a great passion for prehistoric people. That seems a strange way of putting it, but I can’t think of a better one. He’ll talk at length about the abilities we’ve lost that they possessed in abundance. He’s quite magnetic when he gets going. I reckon he’s closer to the ley-liners than he admits.’
How close to Ersula? Grayle wondered. Ersula, for whom knowledge could also be a great passion. Unlike me, I just get crushes.
‘Women always claim to know him better,’ Duncan Murphy said disapprovingly. ‘Anyway, you can judge for yourself. I got you a videotape of a couple of his programmes. You won’t mind if we don’t watch it tonight?’
The video cassette had a picture on the box of a lean, suntanned man in denims and Ray-Bans, his back to the Great Pyramid of Giza.
‘That’s good of you,’ Grayle said. ‘Thanks.’
‘Your father’s done me many favours. He’s very proud of Ersula, you know. I’m sorry, that’s not to say-’
Grayle smiled. ‘How old is Falconer?’
‘Fifty-five going on twenty-five. Keeps himself fit, has to be said. Swims, rides, pilots his own chopper.’
‘Ah yes,’ Nancy Chad said archly. ‘That as well. Some of my friends figure the guy’s biggest claim to fame is the one he can’t keep in his pants for too long.’
Raising the question of casual sex. The Ersula that Grayle knew didn’t do casual anything. For me, she’d say loftily, if unoriginally, the most erogenous zone is the mind. Oh sure, Grayle had said. Until it happens.
‘Look,’ Duncan said. ‘I feel I’m not doing enough.’
‘Oh, hey, come on-’
‘You probably need a more … radical viewpoint than ours. I didn’t know whether to mention this, but some of our neighbours, their son and his girlfriend were on one of Falconer’s courses. They spend most weekends down at the Rollrights, messing about with magnetometers and things. Won’t take you long to get there and it’ll give you a taste of what it’s all about.’
‘You know what I think?’ Janny’s face glowing with the need to be kind. ‘I think she needed to go away by herself and think everything through. Everything that happened to her.’
‘I can see her in some Oxford library,’ Matthew said, ‘hunched up with a laptop computer, feeding everything, puzzling it all out. I can imagine her getting a book out of this.’
‘Not Oxford, Matt. More like Hereford library. I think she’ll have gone back to the Welsh border. She was obsessed with the dolmen at Black Knoll, though, personally, I never thought it had much going for it. Not compared to Avebury and, well, here …’
‘Why did she come here?’ Grayle asked.
‘Oh.’ Janny looked as though she hadn’t given this much thought. ‘Well, I suppose … I mean, she knew we were here most weekends, and we’d said to her, you know, please come over when your next course is finished and you’ve got some free time. She just wanted to hang around and talk, I suppose, sort of loosen up.’
‘The way you described her, she doesn’t sound at all loosened up. She tell you much about her experiences with the dreaming thing?’
‘Well,’ said Matthew, ‘she asked us a lot of questions about our experiences.’
‘Like what?’
‘Whether we’d ever been …’
‘… frightened,’ Janny said. ‘I mean, we weren’t supposed to talk about our dreams or that would defeat the object of the exercise if someone was thinking about another person’s dream and had the same one. The idea is to find out what influence the site has on our subconscious.’
‘And have you?’ Grayle said. ‘Have you ever been scared?’
Matthew folded his arms. ‘Not scared. Some of it’s sort of … challenging.’
‘In what way?’
‘Oh, I can’t tell you without … Should I tell her, Janny? I mean, it’s not as if she …’
‘… is actually involved. Go on, then.’
‘I met the guardian once. That was here. At least I presume it was the guardian. Every site has one, you know. In my dream, I was over by the Whispering Knights, and this old lady was there …’
‘Old … lady? ‘ Janny spluttered.
‘Oh well, a hag. She was pretty revolting, actually. She was wearing a sort of ragged cloak and she had terrible staring eyes, and she … um … smelled pretty awful. Oh, look, I’m not sure I should be telling you this … not here.’
Grayle said, ‘Smelled?’
‘I think it’s OK,’ Janny said. ‘I think she was supposed to be off-putting. Guardians are. You’ve got to demonstrate your resolve, your intensity of purpose, by standing up to them. And you did, didn’t you, Matt?’
Well, I didn’t run away. I just sort of tried to meet her eyes. And then she sort of dissolved, and that was when Janny woke me to get it down on tape.’
‘You still have the tape?’ Grayle said.
‘No, this was a Dragon Project thing. We did a transcript and then … I don’t know where it is.’
‘So what’s the difference between the Dragon Project and Falconer’s stuff?’
Well, the Dragon Project started it off, the national dream survey thing. It’s all going into a computer in California or somewhere, to see if there are any correlations. I suppose Professor Falconer sort of picked up on it.’
‘What happened,’ said Janny, ‘is a chap called Adrian Fraser-Hale, who was involved with the Dragon Project, went to work for Falconer, as an expert on the sort of earth-mysteries stuff…’
‘And Roger thought it was a good idea,’ Matthew said.
‘You mean …’ Grayle said carefully, ‘he thought it would attract people to his courses.’
‘He isn’t like that!’ the kids said almost in unison.
Matthew added, ‘I really think he’s going to be the best thing that ever happened to the earth-mysteries movement. Because he’s part of the Establishment. I mean, in archaeology, he is the Establishment. If people like Adr
ian can convince him that there’s really another dimension to prehistoric science, it could be the start of changing the whole of human thought.’
‘Right,’ Grayle said. Thinking, I was here before; everyone’s on the point of a major breakthrough. ‘So, uh, what conclusions do you draw from this guardian thing?’
‘Well …’ Matthew looked over his shoulder as though he thought this hag might be eyeing him from the edge of the circle. ‘I suppose this is a bit obvious, but the legend of the Rollrights is about this king — not any specific king, just a sort of regional chief — who encountered the witch who controlled the land and — it’s a bit like Macbeth really — the witch said to him that if he took seven long strides from here …’
At this point, Matthew and Janny looked at each other, held hands, said together, ‘If Long Compton thou canst see, King of England thou shalt be! ‘ bringing their joined hands up and down to the rhythm.
‘Well,’ Matthew said, ‘the king thought this was going to be a pushover, because he knew the village of Long Compton would come into view as soon as he reached the top of the rise. Only problem was, when he got there, this mound had arisen on the horizon and completely blocked his view.’
‘Screwed, huh?’
‘Turned to stone, actually. The witch turned the king into what is now the King’s Stone, over there, and these are his men.’
Grayle looked around the cheesy circle, planning to smile, but it got overtaken by a shudder.
‘She offer you anything, Matthew?’
‘If she ever did, I hope I wouldn’t be arrogant, like the king. I think, actually, she was telling me — us — that it was OK. Giving us her blessing.’
‘We’re going to be married next week,’ Janny said.
‘Well, uh, congratulations.’ Grayle was suddenly feeling very old.
‘We love it here, as you can imagine. It’s our part of the world. The most mysterious part of our part of the world. Earth-mysteries is about discovering your own heritage, and this is ours. That’s why we’re doing it here.’
‘There’s a church out here?’ Grayle looked around. No village visible, no spire, no tower, but presumably Long Compton was just over the next mound.