by Phil Rickman
‘No, here, silly. In the circle.’
‘Jesus,’ Grayle said. ‘You guys are, like, witches?’
‘Oh, good God, no. We’ve not gone pagan or anything.’
‘Though we’ve nothing against that, obviously,’ Matthew said hurriedly. ‘But this is going to be a proper Christian service. There’s a chap we know who was ordained and practised as a curate before he sort of … dropped out.’
‘As your father would say.’ Janny giggled.
‘Actually, he was a friend of my father’s. Used to turn up and camp on our sofa for days at a time, and the old man got a bit annoyed, but he is a real clergyman. Sort of.’
Grayle shook her head, mystified.
‘My mother’s a bit disgusted with us, actually,’ Matthew said. ‘Wanted the full church bit. But they don’t realize these places were the original churches. I mean, the number of churches actually built inside stone circles or in places where there used to be circles or on top of Bronze Age mounds … I mean, a holy place is a holy place. Energy is energy.’
‘And something really joyous like a wedding is really giving some energy back to the earth.’
The stones were all around Janny and Matthew like an open mouth full of decaying teeth. Grayle couldn’t imagine there being joy here.
‘It’d be lovely if you could come, if you’re still around,’ Janny said. ‘We did invite Ersula, but …’
‘Right,’ Grayle said dismally.
XXII
On an evening like this, the village was made of stone and smoke.
The first fires had been lit on the cottage hearths — lit with abandon because the log-piles were high. The first amber lights were showing in the cottages, and an ice-blue fluorescence stuttered from the deep freeze in the village shop.
Easing the elderly Morris Minor across the stone bridge over the young but apparently seldom rebellious river Monnow and into the core of the village, Cindy felt unexpectedly nervous and stopped a while, with the windows cranked down, to watch and listen. And perhaps absorb, through secret pores, the essence.
An overcast sky. October, that most mysterious and numinous of months, was really beginning to be October, the land vibrating with the subtle lights of nearness.
The warped sign of the Ram’s Head creaked in the breeze — perhaps it would be best to stay there tonight, if there was a room available — and, above it all, the warm clangour of bell practice was there to sustain and protect the ancient spirit, like cupped hands over a candle.
It was a night to drink cider and drowse by the ingle-nook in the pub, to the mellow thud of darts and the rumble of country laughter.
But not for Cindy, who was here to investigate a death.
No wonder that, when he had asked the pendulum Where will it happen next? it had not responded to the Welsh border. Because it had already happened.
And this time there was nothing particularly suspicious. An old lady had wandered away, disoriented no doubt, and died of a stroke. No intensive police investigation, no forensics, no scenes of crime people, no orange tape. Cindy would be free to examine Marcus Bacton’s beloved High Knoll burial chamber without either being interrupted or the risk of further falling foul of the constabulary.
Perhaps an hour of daylight remained. He would go at once.
To find out, if he could, how a place of light had become a place of death.
‘For you.’ Marcus thrust the phone through a morass of books and typescript. ‘Some woman.’
With Mrs Willis gone, the study was a mess. Unwashed teacups, and biscuit crumbs stuck to used whisky glasses. Verging on the squalid. Even worse than Maiden’s flat, but his offer to help clean the place up had led to a brusque invitation to fuck off back to the cottage and keep his nose out.
The inquest had been opened and adjourned very rapidly, no uncomfortable questions — everyone apparently accepting, as Maiden had thought they would, that old dears sometimes died in unusual places. So the body was available for burial, throwing Marcus into a state about how the hell you organized a funeral, who you invited, all this sort of bloody palaver.
‘A woman asking, somewhat coyly in my view, for a Mr Lazarus,’ Marcus said.
For Maiden, the squalor instantly mellowed to somewhere around cosily chaotic.
‘Still alive, then,’ Emma Curtis said.
Now he was alive. ‘Where you calling from?’
‘Yeah, don’t worry, I got that message. Your fairy godmother, the Rottweiler of Elham General … we’ve had coffee a couple of times. She thought you were being paranoid. Not me, baby, I know these reptiles too well. Hence, I’m in the phone booth inside the public bloody library. Late night opening. Listen, I just popped into the reading room for a glance at the Elham Messenger, just out. It says … hang on, let me fold the thing … it says your condition is giving cause for concern and you’re believed to have been transferred to some specialist neurological unit in Brum. Unnamed, naturally.’
‘I’m a cabbage?’
‘Also, the paper suggests the police are having second thoughts about a hit-and-run. It’s believed there is a real possibility that no third party was involved. Looks like you fell off the kerb, Bobby. Pissed again, I expect.’
‘Bloody Riggs. Who’s that guy he knows at the Messenger?’
‘Roger Gibbs. What it is, Gibbs is next in line for Grand Worshipful thingy at the Lodge. Simple as that. Or so Vic says. Vic knows these things. Hey, you sound better.’
‘All the better, as they say, for hearing you. Perhaps, er, perhaps we need to meet. Do you think? Discuss the whole situation in greater depth.’
‘The whole situation? Are you up to discussing the whole situation?’
‘In depth,’ Maiden said.
‘Really. Oh, well … No, hang on, there’s a bloke outside. Just a bloke, I think, but we can’t be too careful. Well, yes, I thought I could come down. Take you for a little outing. Uncle.’
‘That would be very nice, my dear. When might one expect to be exposed to your delightful company?’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Ah. We do have a funeral tomorrow.’
‘Well, maybe you might need cheering up after that. Change of scene. What if I were to make a reservation for you and a friend at some primitive but homely B and B for tomorrow night? Would that help your recovery? Hey, the good Sister said she’d sent you a black eyepatch. Why do we find black eyepatches dead sexy, Bobby, can you tell me? I mean, Long John Silver?’
Down the steep lane went the intrepid Morris Minor, putter, putter, putter.
It was like going down a rabbit hole, the banks high each side, trees growing from the tops of the banks and tangling overhead, filtering the already meagre light through a dark green grille. At the bottom, you could almost miss the house, the way the single-track road swung round to the right, and the house was down a short track on the left, tree-screened.
Cindy stepped on the brakes and backed up. Ornate gold lettering on a black board read, Cefn-y-bedd. The University of the Earth.
Cindy saw lights coming on in the house behind the trees; what were they up to there?
The University of the Earth. Most of what he knew about this enterprise had been gleaned from the obviously biased pages of The Phenomenologist. It did, though, sound more than a little irresponsible, offering to connect students and holidaymakers to the inner mind of the planet. It would seem entirely innocuous, of course, to Falconer, an academic, a sceptic, a man who apparently believed there was nothing out there more powerful than his own intellect.
How could these people know so much and yet so little? Cindy had read some of the man’s learned articles but not seen his apparently more populist television programme. Life was too short to spend in the company of sceptics.
Round the corner, past Falconer’s farmhouse went the venerable car, and onto a track of stone and dirt, emerging into an open field, sheep nibbling around the fringes. It was bisected by a rough path, which began as a sheep-track, a nar
row, muddied depression, and then turned to concrete before widening into a big, flat apron.
From the sky, this would look like a giant frying pan. Like a landing area for UFOs. A big new shed had gone up, too, and the whole damn thing across not only the path, but the Path — the principal ley line itself, leading through two dinky little round barrows and a standing stone to Dore Abbey itself. How utterly crass of the man.
But the concrete apron was out of sight of the house, so Cindy parked on the edge of it and set off on foot, with his little case. It was important, in a situation like this, to weave in and out of the path of power, the spirit-way. If you followed it directly, you were advertising yourself to the denizens of other planes, and might therefore attract all manner of unnecessary hangers-on.
How fortunate little Annie Davies had been on that morning. Just the right side of adolescence, the innocent side, and — due also, no doubt, to a rare and fortuitous pattern of circumstance — exposed to only the right, the very rightest elements.
And so her young life was blessed.
Marcus Bacton had written that each time he walked to the Knoll, it was a kind of pilgrimage. He believed it was a naturally blessed place. But of course there was no such thing. Some points on the earth, because of their geophysical properties and their positioning in relation to the sun and the stars, might be termed places of power. But power was not holiness … and holiness was not an inherent quality. It could be visited upon a place but it required maintenance.
And there was certainly no sense of holiness here this evening.
Senses racing ahead of him, Cindy followed the path up the side of High Knoll — or Black Knoll as it was called on the map. Why was that? Why black? A reference to the Black Mountains, or something more sinister?
Under a wind-blasted hawthorn tree was a small, staked sign.
Black Knoll.
Once a long barrow, this chambered tomb dates from at least 3000 BC and appears to have been oriented to the midsummer sunrise. A monumental feat of Neolithic engineering, its capstone, now damaged, has been estimated to weigh nearly thirty tons. Evidence of several burials was found during an excavation in 1895.
No mention, naturally, of the vision of Annie Davies.
The stones were on a small, exposed plateau, like an island now in the misty rain. Cindy stopped. He could see the huge capstone, unbalanced and yawning like the open mouth of an alligator.
Where Mrs Willis had lain to die.
The stones glistening with damp and ancient magic.
There was a stout new fence and barbed wire. A gate in the fence was padlocked, but someone had cut the wire, and two of the horizontals had been taken out. Was this before or after the tragic death of Mrs Willis?
Cindy crouched in the damp, yellowed grass and went into the Quiet for a moment, wondering how best to approach.
No birds sang. The grey sky hung low and heavy, like a giant mattress.
A stroke was such a convenient way to go. It was rarely possibly to diagnose how, precisely, the stroke had been brought on. Had Mrs Willis overexerted herself getting here? Or had she been badly frightened by something or someone?
Cindy hitched up his tweed skirt and climbed over the damaged fence and walked, with undeniable trepidation, towards the burial chamber.
Was this, like, primitive, or was this primitive?
OK, there was no sawdust on the floor (Grayle had heard some English pubs still had sawdust on the floor), but the Waldorf it was not. The bedroom had a bed with an iron frame and a washbasin you could see the pipes coming out of and then snaking down this hole in the floor. It did not, of course, have a bathroom en suite.
And no phone, on which to call room service and have them bring up a selection of the sweating pork pies and potato chips on sale in the saloon bar (it actually said saloon bar on the frosted glass door) or call a doctor to treat your food poisoning and your insomnia.
Grayle had been to Britain twice before in her life. That is, she’d stayed in London and Bath and Stratford-upon-Avon, and all these places were overcrowded but elegantly civilized, as you might expect.
But civilization seemed to end at Hereford. Even the roads. She’d hired this small Rover car in Oxford, spent some time getting over the problems of driving on the left. But most of the roads hereabouts, those problems didn’t arise; they were so narrow you just drove right down the middle and closed your eyes and headed for the hedgerow when someone came the other way.
Scared she was going to trash the hire car, Grayle had parked outside the first building resembling a hotel she came to after crossing the St Mary sign and checked in for two nights. The Ram’s Head. Maybe a mistake.
Grayle rested her ass on the edge of the bed — which was like a goddamn girder — and hoped it would take no longer than a day to establish if anyone in the village or the course centre, Cefn-y-bedd (however the hell you pronounced that), knew of Ersula’s present location.
First thing she’d done, on arrival, was to use the phone. Gave the landlady a ten-pound note and called up her dad at the ivory tower.
And no. No, his favourite daughter had not arrived home. Or written. Or phoned. He sounded busy.
Grayle looked out of the window at the stone houses, the church tower. Ancient, beautiful, serene. But the cottages had TV aerials, a couple had satellite dishes, the village shop would rent out videos of Tarantino movies … and St Mary’s was doubtless full of people with cute country accents thinking, God, I could really’ve made something of myself if I lived in … the States.
Feeling suddenly terribly lonely, Grayle keeled over on the bed, clutching her favourite quartz crystal. What if spirituality was just a human fabrication and life’s real peaks were getting drunk and getting laid? What if it was like that?
Cindy straightened his tweed skirt and opened his case.
Meeting the gaze of Kelvyn Kite, the bird’s glass eyes glittering malevolently. Silly old tart.
He scowled at Kelvyn and felt beneath the feathers for his drum, his beautiful bodhran, made with deerhide, stretched and patterned, dubbed and tightened, until the skin was a membrane … the membrane between worlds.
He decided not to bother with the feathered cloak. Too ostentatious. What he was wearing would surely suffice.
Cindy had come in his female aspect. Arising this morning, on the seaward side of the bed, to bathe in St Bride’s Bay. Softening the body with powder and lavender water. Shaving his legs before dressing in sensible countrywoman’s clothing. Leaving Wales as a woman, entering England as a woman; if High Knoll were to be coaxed into giving up her secrets, there was no other way.
For this was where Annie Davies had been granted a vision of the highest female divinity. A feminine place, a goddess site. The Lady of Light — it didn’t matter who she was, Holy Virgin, sun-goddess or alien being — was a symbol of rightness of the moment: the time, the person, the location.
Cindy sat upon the earth, in the passageway of open stones leading to the chamber. And began, with his fingers and the heel of his hand, to drum himself into separation.
This was the meeting place, the place of the confluence of many paths.
He began to chant, to the hollow, rhythmic resonance of the old drum.
Meeting place.
Meeting place.
Here the sky.
Here the earth.
Here the mountain,
Here the valley.
Here Albion,
Here Cymru.
Meeting place.
Time passed. The chant died. Cindy listened to the evening breeze, to the birds in the distance (the only birds were distant), to the waving of the grass.
He felt the weight of the capstone on the uprights and the strength of the Earth which bore the stones.
He collected all the sounds inside himself, in his head and in his breast and in his solar plexus. He breathed the sounds into his chakras, carried them around his inner circuit and let them go. And began another chant.
Here the sky.
Here the earth.
Here the mountain,
Here the valley.
Here Cindy.
Here Annie?
Here … Mrs Willis?
Time passed. Cindy was aware only of a faraway longing and an ache in his stomach. When his eyes opened again, for an agonizing second the sky was very nearly black and the stones were the colour of candlewax.
He didn’t move. He took it calmly at first. It had happened before, a whole scene changing into a photographic negative, clouds becoming smoke, muddy rivers running like double cream, green grass turning pink as watered blood.
It had happened before. But never with a smell.
The smell was rank and feral. Of pond slime and decayed leaves with a smear of faeces. Cindy was deeply shaken. His hands felt as if they’d been in cold water. The woman in him felt violated. Holiness, a tender and vulnerable quality, could also be negated, reversed. All too easily. All too easily.
Beside the stone, three yards away, a figure stood in green-black smoke and looked down on Cindy, whose fingers fell from the drum, who sprang up in fear.
Stumbling away down the side of the Knoll, coughing into a handkerchief soaked this morning in lavender water.
Fleeing in terror from High Knoll, where little Annie Davies had been granted a vision of the highest female divinity.
High Knoll was a feminine place! A goddess site!
Was …
XXIII
Amy Jenkins, whose name was over the door of the Ram’s Head, was very neat, very dark and very Valleys — Cindy could tell by the little black Juliette Greco dress and all the gold bangles and necklaces. So he shook out his own bangles and stripped down to his glittery high-necked top, and it was as if they’d known each other years.
‘Quaker’s Yard, I am, born and bred,’ Amy said.
‘Abercynon,’ Cindy lied.
‘Never! Don’t know Dusty Morgan, do you? He haven’t lived there, mind, for thirty years, poor old Dusty. Tegwyn Bogart? Well, that wasn’t his real name, but he could curl his lip brilliant, Tegwyn could …’