by Phil Rickman
Into the circle of light came the bird of prey.
‘Bloody hell,’ Marcus said.
‘Been consulting my guides, I have.’ It hung over Maiden, wings spread wide.
‘Dear God,’ Marcus said cynically.
It was a full-length cloak made of some rough material like sacking with rows of feathers sprouting out of it.
Cindy also carried a drum. And a large bird made of some black and red fabric, with a curved beak and big, globular, spiteful eyes.
‘Off-the-peg shamanic-wear,’ Marcus explained to Maiden, with heavy ennui. ‘The feathers are especially meaningful for Lewis. Kite’s his totem-creature. Once wrote a piece for The Phenomenologist about spending three days and nights fasting in the Cambrian mountains, and on the last night, the great red kite flew down in a dream. The red kite, at the time, being almost extinct in Britain and more or less confined to that particular part of mid-Wales.’
‘What a memory you have, Marcus.’
‘Kelvyn Kite.’ Maiden awakening to an old, fogged memory. ‘That’s Kelvyn Kite.’
Marcus looked up, but the bird said nothing.
‘Kelvyn Kite. This big talking hawk. On telly when I was a kid.’
‘You must be older than you look, Bobby,’ Cindy said, sitting down, arranging the cloak.
A single, hollow drumbeat.
‘This place is a special place. The lights down there are the little lights of England. The darkness behind us is the darkness of Wales. Above us, heaven. Below us, Earth. Duality. The Black Mountains: a sacred frontier.’
Cindy paused.
‘Four leys cross here. From stone to tumulus to holy hill and ancient church. Lines of spirit. Soul-paths.’
Maiden saw that Cindy was holding the flat drum between his knees. Looked so much bigger in the cloak of feathers and yet less substantial. Shimmering in the unsteady light. But then, nothing seemed entirely solid seen through a single eye blurred with tears, drugs, fatigue.
‘And, behind me, the stones themselves, set to the midsummer sunrise. Stones of light.’
On the drum, Cindy’s hands had found a slow rhythm, regular as a hall clock ticking, and Maiden became aware of his heart beating, in time to the drum.
‘And stones of darkness. Because, when times grew harsh and the land itself darkened into war and strife, the religion of the Celtic priesthood, the Druids, degenerated into blood ritual, animal sacrifice, human sacrifice. And the shaman no longer waited in the chamber for the blessing of the sunrise but stood, with sickle raised, under the full moon, and blood gushed over the capstone and trickled in rivulets down the fissures in the stone and so to the earth.’
Maiden flinched. The drumbeats speeded up; he thought of the thrumming of blood through veins. Oh, Em, oh God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry you ever had to know me.
‘And so the Knoll became a place of fear and death.’ Cindy’s voice matching the rise-and-fall rhythm, acquiring the timbre of a chapel preacher. ‘High Knoll, in effect, became Black Knoll.’
Bang on the drum.
‘High Knoll.’
Bang.
‘Black Knoll.’
Bang.
‘Du-al-it-y!’
Bang-bang-bang.
‘Think on it, children. Think on it, as we call upon the guardian of this site to yield to us the images lodged in the soul of our friend Bobby. Ready, are we, Bobby?’
‘What’s going to happen?’ Token question; he didn’t give a shit.
‘We take you back,’ Cindy said. ‘To the minutes of your death.’
‘And you leave me there. No need to bring me out of it.’
XXXIII
We’re mad, Marcus thought, still amazed at himself for going along with this bollocks. Mad.
Standing here like relatives around a bloody deathbed.
Insane. Or will be by morning.
Supposed it was the remains of the bloody teacher in him, but he liked a certain level of order. Liked his anarchy to be structured. Which was what The Phenomenologist was supposed to be all about: bunch of tweedy old academics and retired surgeons and vicars and bank managers whose hero was the immortal Charles Fort, collector of yarns about black rain and toads that fell from the sky. All right, it’d been taken over by the biddies now but it was still respectable people … breaking out of their social strait-jackets, daring to consider the absurd.
To consider. Not to be bloody part of it, for Christ’s sake!
Maiden lay on the foam-rubber mattress from Marcus’s backpack. The capstone, a little above chest height to Marcus, was on a slight incline, so that Maiden’s head was higher than his feet. There was a small cushion under his head and they covered him with a travelling rug.
‘All right there, lovely?’
‘Fine,’ he said dully. Poor bugger was half out of it. Staked out on the tomb like an offering — Lewis blatantly exposing him to the dark side of the Knoll. Maiden too low, too beaten down, to care. And was he a killer? Was he lying to them, to himself? Was he a killer?
And where the hell was this nonsense going to get them? Falconer’s dreaming experiment was designed to find out if human consciousness was affected in any quantifiable fashion by the location and composition of ancient sacred monuments. Whereas Lewis seemed to think Maiden’s dreams could solve everything. Lewis ought to take over the damned magazine. Get on well with the biddies.
The first candle had burned three-quarters down and Cindy the bloody Shaman, in his ritual cloak, blew it out and Marcus heard him ramming another one down the lantern.
‘We’ll watch him in ninety-minute shifts, all right? You know what you are doing, Marcus?’
‘Every few minutes, I check his eyes for REM.’
‘And then you give him a few minutes more — no more than three, because the action in a dream happens very quickly.’
‘Then I wake him up, poor sod.’
‘Very gently. You want him talking about the dream almost before he is out of it. He may fall asleep again and awake with no memory of having spoken to you. We have to be able to play his dream back to him, make him face up to it. How is the recorder?’
‘You have to shake it, hope the bloody light comes on. Haven’t used it in years.’
‘Hardly needs to be broadcast quality, Marcus. Switch on just before you wake him. Can you hear me, Bobby? Very tired, you are, yes? Now, I want you to empty your mind. I don’t want you lying there thinking about what happened tonight. Just make yourself quiet inside. Watch the sky.’
Lewis lit the new candle.
Another two hours, it would be dawn. The miraculous dawn at High Knoll. Marcus was freezing, wished he had a bloody cloak of feathers. During Lewis’s shift, he’d managed to doze intermittently, for about two minutes at a time, before the cold razored through his duffel coat.
He realized Malcolm had moved away, leaving another large cold patch. Aware of the dog standing a few yards away, growling uncertainly, and the voice of Cindy the bloody Shaman.
‘Perhaps you could assist me, Marcus?’
Opening his eyes fully to see Lewis leaning over the stone like some Victorian granite angel over a grave.
‘‘S wrong?’
Marcus stumbled to his feet and approached the stones.
The lantern showed the sleeping Maiden’s visible eyelid behaving like a moth trapped in a jar.
‘Oh. That all?’
During his own shift, Marcus had spent too long leaning over the capstone, persuading Maiden to spill some irrelevant nonsense about a woman under a streetlamp, while Lewis sat on the groundsheet, legs folded under him, meditating or whatever they did. Not even coming out of it when Maiden had begun to weep, Marcus feeling obliged to take off his eyepatch to let the tears out, endless bloody tears, crying himself back to sleep, poor bastard. Marcus fighting tears, too, because all the worst nights of his life had involved females dying: Celia in hospital, Sally at home, Mrs Willis here at the Knoll. His adult life a series of bridges over rivers of death.
‘No. That’s not quite all, Marcus. Thing is … a little resistant, he is now, to awakening.’
‘You can’t wake him? Well, that’s all we bloody need, isn’t it?’
‘And your cassette recorder is malfunctioning.’
The recorder lay on the capstone. Marcus snatched it up and hit it with the side of his hand. The red light wavered on then went out.
Maiden’s face had that frozen effigy look. Still in REM, and thank Christ for that because if his unpatched eye wasn’t moving you could think he was …
‘Don’t like the look of him. Come on, man, snap out of it.’
‘Softly!’
‘Bugger softly. Man’s got bloody brain damage. Could be that stuff you filched out of the Healing Room. I did warn you.’
‘Bobby.’ Lewis shook Maiden’s shoulder. The rug over him moved and Lewis pulled back, holding the candle high when one of Maiden’s arms came out as if he was going to grab it.
‘Bobby? Can you hear me?’
Maiden’s hand went instead to his throat, dragging the rug away. His head started rolling from side to side. He began to cough.
‘Come on now, Bobby.’
A dry, rasping cough. His head still rolling until it dislodged the cushion, which fell off the capstone and then his head was rolling on the bloody stone, you could hear it, and it must be hurting and even that didn’t bring him out of it.
‘Don’t think I like this, Lewis. To put it mildly.’
Chest heaved weakly and the cough softened into a kind of hoarse breathing, as though there was something he wanted to bring up, but he was too weak.
‘What if he bloody dies?’
‘Again?’
‘Yes, again. Except, Lewis, that this time there’ll be no whitecoats, no crash team, no oxygen mask, no Scottish nurse with healing hands. Only a silly old sod who should know better and a lunatic in a bird-suit with a lot of bloody explaining to do. Maiden … wake the fuck up!’
Marcus pulled the rug away. Maiden’s chest was throbbing weakly, like a sparrow’s when it’s been hit by a car and you know it’s only seconds away from expiring.
‘Oh,’ the madman Lewis said. ‘Oh dear.’
‘Oh fucking dear, indeed! He wanted to go to the police station. He begged you to take him to the fucking police station … but you had to be clever.’
‘Because the police — fair play to them — would have been no help at all. Because, if that girl is dead, they’ll never know why.’
‘And you will?’
‘I do, Marcus. I want Bobby to know. It’s important Bobby knows.’
‘It’s more important he bloody lives.’
Maiden was making a sort of whooping noise in the back of his throat, as though there was some ghastly blockage there. He gagged. His fingers clenched. Back arched. Whole body tightened up, clenched, went rigid, his face convulsed in the lanternlight, swimming in sweat and tears.
Dead silence.
A moment of heightened reality. The reality, in fact, was almost searing. Marcus, holding the lantern now, was aware of all these delicate mosses and lichens and tiny plants stubbling the stone.
One of those crystal moments when you realized you were at the heart of a nightmare and you kicked a hole in the dream-membrane and woke up covered in sweat and trembling with relief and went downstairs and made coffee.
He heard himself say, ‘I hope your famous shamanic training included the basics of first aid. Because I think this poor bastard’s run out of air to breathe.’
‘All right!’ Lewis throwing off his stupid bloody feathery cloak, dragging himself up onto the capstone, extending a hand to pull Marcus after him. ‘Help me.’
‘Turn him over,’ Marcus snapped. ‘On his side.’
Both hands underneath Maiden’s back, heaving him over so that one arm was flung out over the edge of the capstone.
‘Marcus, no! Sit him up. That’s it.’
Marcus pulling Maiden’s body forward, taking the weight, and Lewis bunching a fist and striking Maiden sharply in the small of the back, again and again and Marcus was utterly furious.
‘You bloody bastard, Lewis. You knew something like this would happen, didn’t you? Didn’t you?’
‘I thought it might be … rather unpleasant, and … you might make me … stop it before it was over, and … Oh dear. Oh dear. Take the light! Marcus … hold the blasted light … look.’
Maiden’s body twitched violently, a spasm, and the dog let out a terrified yelp, eyes glowing at the foot of the burial chamber.
Something falling out of Maiden’s mouth. Pink and grey in the candlelight. Coming out in lumps.
‘Marcus, don’t … don’t touch it!’
Marcus froze. On the horizon, a thin, grey bar appeared, where the night was lifting like a roller blind.
Part Three
The nasty cruelties of slaying Cock Robin with an arrow, or of walling up poor Jenny Wren alive in a hole in a tree, were once celebrations of the passage of the year and offerings to the gods of nature, but when the magic necessity was finished with, the hunting of a few birds and their needless deaths were just ignorant savagery. Perhaps they released emotions from the unconscious minds of bigger children who took part in them; but in our world of repression and parallel outbursts of physical violence, the old rituals must assume a new meaning or we may drift into brainless cruelties on a bigger scale than the killing of wild birds. A return to pagan sacrifices, even of people, is not impossible.
C. A. Burland, Echoes of Magic.
XXXIV
First light, if you could call this off-white seepage light.
Andy prodded the car into the dull, redbrick street with the derelict furniture warehouse hanging over it like a half-expended curse. Doing the usual slow slalom between parked cars — some families had three or four beat-up wrecks; summer nights, the street would be full of hard-faced kids with spanners trying to make them go faster, sound louder.
Not much better at seven-forty-five on an autumn morning, even the kids at home.
Coming off nightshift, usually, you couldn’t park within a couple of hundred yards of your own house. Today, though, Andy slotted in between a dark Rover and a rusting camper van, as if the space had been reserved for her. The Rover looking suspiciously new: either a visiting doctor, or the police were getting so apathetic the kids were bringing stolen cars home now.
Jesus God, she’d be glad to get out of here for ever.
Her mind almost made up now, just needing one more sign — OK, this was stupid, but it was that kind of decision: intuition over logic.
The air was white and bland and smelled vaguely of gas as she carried her shopping bag to the front door of the middle terrace house. Shoved her key in the Yale, slammed the flat of her left hand against the door where the wood had swollen. Making herself regard the place, however temporarily, as home again, this was the hardest thing. A place where she couldn’t even make a safe phone call, until Bobby Maiden, or whatever passed for him these days, came back to collect his life.
Or lose it.
Aw, come on …
For once, the door fell open easily. Due, maybe, to the other hand above hers on the panel.
‘After you, Mrs Anderson.’
The big guy pushing her inside, shouldering the door shut behind him, flashing the credentials in her face.
‘Police, Mrs Anderson. Superintendent Riggs.’
Marcus faced himself in the bathroom mirror, tying today’s bow tie, the sea-green one. The considered formality of the exercise was supposed to give him a grip on the day. And, by Christ, this was a day that needed a grip.
He’d drunk four cups of strong tea and had a shower. Hadn’t helped much.
Cindy the bloody Shaman was still on the premises. Supposed to be sleeping on the sofa in the study, but Marcus had awoken to hear the sound of the TV from down there.
Marcus looked out at the castle walls in the white morning. How those ruins had excited him a fe
w years back. Now, just a crumbling pile of medieval dereliction you were legally obliged to keep from crumbling further. Age and erosion. Enough of that in the bloody mirror.
He went downstairs. It was strangely quiet. No sign of the appalling Shaman, but the sofa had its cushions neatly arranged, as only a woman or a raging poof would leave it.
Malcolm ambled over. ‘All right,’ Marcus said. ‘Fair enough.’ He put on his jacket and they walked out across the old farmyard. ‘Come here, dog. Don’t shit in the bloody ruins.’
Wanting it all to look pretty for the estate agent’s camera.
The dog followed him over the stile onto the footpath through the meadow. Marcus kept his eyes on the grass a few yards in front of him. No longer wanted to look up at High … no, dammit … Black Knoll.
‘You bloody idiot!’ he bawled out suddenly. ‘You bloody old fool!’
Couldn’t believe he’d gone along with last night’s bollocks.
Take you back … to the minutes of your death. The trick was the high drama, the scene-setting. The cloak and the candle. The senses fuddled by lack of sleep. Anyone would be hallucinating at the end of a night like that.
Marcus remembered all that buzz back in the seventies about the psychic surgeons of the Philippines or somewhere, who’d produce handfuls of intestines without the customary incision. Bollocks. A conjuring trick. Lewis had pulled off something similar last night: wake you up, get you into a panic thinking Maiden’s dying, and then …
Conjuring trick.
‘Bollocks!’
The mountains were hard as prison walls. He needed to be miles away. In a town. With traffic and fumes and the sound of kids he used to teach, now ram-raiding Curry’s.
‘Marcus?’
He stopped. Because he’d had his eyes on the ground, he hadn’t noticed he wasn’t alone in the meadow.
A still figure in white stood a few yards away. Unearthly, somehow, because it was so unexpected. The dog strolled over, tail waving.
‘Get you some tea?’