by Phil Rickman
‘Not just a hunter, Bobby.’
‘Cindy, I’m going to have this cunt.’
‘Of course you are, lovely, of course you are.’
Marcus made himself a cheese sandwich and shut Malcolm in the kitchen with a bowl of water and four Bonios to keep him quiet.
He was a good dog, a brave dog. But very, very bad guys?
‘Stay,’ Marcus said.
He went out of the house and prowled the tumbledown buildings, in search of weapons. The best he could find was the head of a scythe, which he couldn’t hold without it biting into his hand, and a wooden-handled pitchfork with rusted tines, so badly eroded, in fact, that it was hard to tell if there was actually any metal beneath the rust.
Marcus straightened his bow tie and climbed over a short, broken wall to the remains of the only serviceable tower, the highest part of the castle. It was no more than about half of a sundered tower in the remains of the curtain wall. Possibly part of a gateway. Perhaps there’d been a portcullis here.
Could have used one now, all right.
Marcus climbed a treacherously narrow, dangerously worn spiral staircase inside the tower. Hadn’t done this in years; bloody steps would be beyond repair soon.
He turned a corner and came out in the sky. Always a surprise, the way the steps simply ended, broke off. A sycamore tree had grown up next to the tower, partly obscuring the view in high summer, but there was still quite an extensive vista of the Black Mountains, for once living ominously up to their name, filling the western horizon, like the massed tents of a dark army.
Once, raiders had come down from the mountains, from the poorer country into the lushness of the Golden Valley. The reason the castle had been built. But now the threat, presumably, was from the east. The only way to reach this place was by road from St Mary’s. From the tower, the road was visible for nearly half a mile before it dipped between the high hedges and the hills.
Marcus sat on the top step, adjusted his glasses and unwrapped his sandwich. Might as well go out on a full stomach. Joking, of course. Maiden and his urban thugs and his bent coppers. Nothing would happen.
The jagged walls of the castle sawed into a sky of sickly yellow, like tallow.
XLV
This was the tape Cindy had found himself dreading the most.
Ersula Underhill.
They’d been playing them at random. Realizing that, with perhaps six hours of Fraser-Hale’s boastful ramblings, there wasn’t going to be time to hear all of it before they reached Rollright. Snatching out a cassette if it didn’t appear to be going anywhere, opening another.
Ersula’s was, as he’d feared, the worst death of all. Worse than Maria, worse than Emma Curtis — that would have been terrifying for her, but it would also have been relatively quick; he was in a hurry that night, frantic almost.
With Ersula, he’d had time to plan.
When he goes to find the woman, he has already prepared her tomb.
And she is prepared for it.
She’s weary of her life and its limitations. Her dreams have shown her better. She has found a fulfilment in sleep … in sacred sleep and dreams surpassing, in their intensity, all her waking achievements. Which, in the superficial world of scholarship and academe, have been considerable.
But such so-called learning, lies passed from book to book, is nothing. A waste of life. Even Falconer admits this now.
As a follower of the Green Man.
Falconer is a weak man with no original thoughts. She is his superior, but he has betrayed her, and she turns at last to the Green Man. When he enters her room at dusk, she is crying. And bitter.
She asks the Green Man to lie with her.
On the tape an owl hooted.
‘Where’s he recorded this one, do you think?’ Bobby Maiden hit the stop button.
‘Same place as all the later ones. When I tire of his mock-heroic ramblings, I study the background. You notice that, although it’s obviously exterior as shown by noises like that owl, there’s also a hollow sound. A vault-like sound. We should have realized. It’s High Knoll itself.’
‘He wouldn’t fit inside.’
‘His tape recorder would. And his head and chest. I think he’s lying in the entrance. So proud of this, he is, that he’s giving his voice some resonance, making sure the Earth hears, telling it in Her temple. And he’s letting the chamber absorb it too. Stone records, see.’
‘Thinking, maybe, that one day some EVP enthusiast will capture remnants of the Green Man himself. That it?’
‘Imprinting his life’s work upon the great earth-memory. Been missing the obvious, we have, the final link. We hear him talking about a place, we assume that’s where he is. But he isn’t. The Knoll has become his psychic confessional. He’s been bringing as much as he can back to the Knoll. Storing it all there, abomination upon abomination.’
‘Like a database?’
‘If you like. And also restoring a tradition, which he sees as having been damaged by the holy vision of Annie Davies. It’s become a vaguely acknowledged “healing place”. Which he would see as feeble and womanly. It needs to be reinstated as Black Knoll. Now let’s hypothesize, Bobby, that he was dictating to the stones a chapter of his memoirs … say this very chapter … on the night of your death. He sleeps at the Knoll — on the Knoll, laying himself out like those corpses of criminals — night after night. He dreams of the time when it was a sacrificial stone, a hunter’s stone. His dreams are running with blood and steaming with putrescence. And by now, see, he’s developed a certain amount of control. He’s conditioning his dreams. And, at the same time, consciously feeding into the Knoll his accounts of such blood and darkness as it has not known in many centuries. This … all this … the foul contents of the tapes … is the black light perceived by Mrs Willis. This happens, Bobby, don’t look unconvinced, these places have been, for thousands of years, the receptors of the Earth.’
She disgusts him. Once, he was attracted to her … to the power of her spirit, the intensity of her longing to know. But now, as she lolls about on the edge of her bed, with her skirt plucked up to her thighs, he sees that underneath she’s little more than the rest of modern womanhood, flawed and weak and unstable, a prey to lower desires.
She has been drinking. There is a brandy bottle on the dresser, three quarters of its contents consumed. She can hardly stay upright. She’s repulsive, a disgusting mess.
‘You want me,’ she says, ‘I know you want me. You’ve wanted me from the start. So go ahead. Have me. ‘
And yes, he thinks, yes, I will have you. In spite of it all, I’ll help you. I’ll free that deep and questing soul from the squalid desires of the shell. I’ll free it to rise up and pursue its finer goals.
‘I’ll make some tea,’ he tells her.
She giggles. ‘How profoundly, goddamn English of you. ‘
‘I’m proud to be English. ‘
‘Well, listen to you. ‘
‘Yes. You should. ‘
The Green Man puts the kettle on the electric ring. She giggles and lies back on the bed, her eyes closed and her skirt ridden up. The Green Man turns away in revulsion. From a pocket he takes a screw of paper containing the mixture he has prepared including the sedative herbs from the healthfood shop in Hereford and the psilocybin mushrooms he has picked at the foot of Black Knoll.
When the herbal tea is made, he sits on the bed and lifts her up to drink it, tolerating her sweating face against his shoulder. She grimaces. He tells her it will help her. Soon she is rambling. She insists that the Knoll is a place of utter, profound evil.
Talking nonsense.
‘Magic mushrooms.’
‘Britain’s best natural hallucinogen. Used by generations of witches. Magic mushroom tea, with God knows what else in it. After all that drink.’
‘A more merciful death than any of the others got.’
‘It’s not over yet, Bobby, I’m very much afraid.’
‘Grayle! ’
&nb
sp; ‘Oh, hi.’
‘Gosh, I’m delighted you came!’ Matthew Lyall, to her surprise, wore a morning suit, with tails. Traditional English wedding outfit. OK, maybe the white T-shirt underneath was a mite irregular …
‘Compromise.’ He fingered the white rose in his lapel. ‘Everything’s a compromise today. My parents are both here, with their respective spouses. And Janny’s mother. They all wanted a traditional old church wedding, and we said, well, you won’t find an older church than this one! And Charlie’s the real thing, so where’s the problem?’
The relatives, stiffly obvious, stood outside the circle, near the hut where you left your courtesy-donations to animal charities. In memory of the poor, sacrificed spaniel maybe.
Matthew said, ‘Er, have you …?’
‘No.’
‘Oh gosh, I’m so sorry. But there are loads of people here who might’ve run into her.’
‘I already asked around,’ Grayle told him. ‘A little.’
‘No luck?’
‘Uh huh.’
‘Suppose I get Charlie to make a special appeal after the service. How about that?’
‘That would be kind. You haven’t seen Janny today?’
‘No, that’s another compromise. We wanted to spend the night here in the circle … in a chaste sort of way. In spiritual preparation. And to see what our dreams might tell us about our future together. But Janny’s mother …’
‘May be better not to know,’ Grayle said. ‘Maybe marriage should be an adventure.’
‘That’s one way of looking at it. Could be quite an adventure today, actually. Just look at that sky.’
‘It’ll hold off, Matthew. After all the favours you did for Mother Earth, it’s the least She can do.’
It is nearly two a.m. when he carries the woman to the organic tomb. She falls to sleep in his arms and still slumbers as he brings her, perspiring freely and smelling disgustingly of drink, to the place.
A cloudy night, but sufficient moon. It glitters in the fluted tin roof of the helicopter shed, which screens the place from the house.
His night-vision is pretty remarkable by now and he can see the egg-shaped hole from twenty yards away, on the edge of the freshly concreted base. Soon after dark, he lined the hole — three and half feet deep and oriented east to west — with alternate layers of moss and gravel, and then added a bed of soft grass-cuttings, warmly mulching. Beside the hole lies the mound of excavated soil and a heap of local gravel. Between them, a spade.
The Green Man places the woman in the hole, on her side. She awakes and giggles and reaches out for him and he forces himself to caress her and she moans and drifts back into sleep. She needs to be awake, but not yet.
It came to him, as always now, in a dream. He dreamed of a green land of mounds and standing stones and gaily dressed people horse-trading, racing, making merry.
While, in the Earth, not far below the merrymaking, a woman screamed for all eternity.
Next day, in the university library, he found an account of a burial at a place called the Curragh, in County Kildare, where gypsies and tinkers traditionally gather for their fairs. In a henge there, about fifty years earlier, an oval grave was found, less than four feet deep and packed with gravel. In this grave was the skeleton of a young woman, on her back, facing towards the rising sun, the skull pressed hard down upon the chest and the arms tight against the sides of the grave. The bones were in a contorted and unnatural posture, suggestive of writhing.
In the hole, the woman whimpers, rolls onto her back and wiggles her fingers, in the throes of some hallucinatory semi-dream.
She seems to be beckoning.
It is the sign.
The Green Man loads his spade with good, red border soil, the flesh of Her body. The woman chokes as the soil enters her mouth and her eyes open — fear pushing through the psychic membrane of the drugs — to meet the second spadeful…
Cindy had to slam on the brakes and pull over onto the verge, and Bobby Maiden almost fell out of the car, rolled over in the grass, producing enormous dry heaves, mouth open fishlike and hands at his gut.
He’d be fine. Cindy watched him through the windscreen and the tape played on, the unbearable details only half registered. What did register was the tone of voice. On top of everything the Green Man remained the most insufferable prig.
After a minute, Bobby rolled over onto his back below the car’s weak, yellow headlights, and Cindy got out under a spreading fungus of dark brown clouds. It was a dull country lane, open fields and hedges, not a house nor a steeple in sight.
Cindy stood where Bobby had been. Nothing but dented grass. No evacuation. It had all come out last night. It was in an envelope. Nothing left other than what remained in Bobby’s head. And now it was in the manageable part of his mind, no longer buried deep.
Why then, bearing in mind the circumstances of its entry there, had his subconscious mind not seen it from Fraser-Hale’s side of things, letting him experience the perverse ecstasy of unspeakable, self-righteous cruelty? Because of what he was. He had experienced it only from the side of the victim.
Bobby held on to a signpost to pull himself to his feet. The sign pointed left to Long Compton and straight ahead to Great Rollright: two miles.
Which meant they were less than half a mile from the Rollright Stones.
Cindy thought of the day when, back home in the caravan in Pembrokeshire, he’d let the pendulum dangle over the map and asked the question: Where will it happen next? The pendulum had gone into a violent anti-clockwise spin not where it was expected to go, among the Black Mountains, but over the area where Oxfordshire met Gloucestershire and Warwickshire, and Cindy, hoping for the Welsh border, had dismissed it.
‘Sorry.’ Bobby produced a smile which contrived to be both bashful and bitter. ‘Something went down the wrong way.’
‘When we see Grayle,’ Cindy said, ‘don’t tell her, will you?’
‘You’re joking.’ Bobby brushed grass from his jacket.
‘For what it’s worth,’ Cindy said, as dispassionately as he could make it, ‘it was another of his failures. She was supposed to have been buried alive, like the woman in prehistoric Kildare. But when the soil went into her eyes, she came out of it and began to scream. At which, our man felt obliged to finish her off. With the spade. In her throat.’
‘He can’t get anything right, can he?’
Bobby’s face as rigid as a mask, his bad eye livid in the last, unhealthy light. Dealing with it now. He said, ‘I remember, in one dream, I saw his face shadowed by the spade. That is, the Green Man face. Twigs sprouting. And again, in a wreath in the front of a funeral parlour. And yet we don’t know what he looks like, do we? Except he’s a big lad with corn-coloured hair. Harmless-looking. And we don’t know if he has anything in mind for today. He can’t do much in front of an entire wedding party. Crowds aren’t his style, unless-’
‘Surely, Bobby, that’s the problem. Doesn’t have a style, does he? He responds to the location and the prevailing conditions. And he watches for a sign. Which could be anything. He’s pretty free with his interpretations.’
Bobby was looking up into the east, where the sky was darkest.
‘What is it, boy?’
He shook his head.
‘Tell me.’
Bobby shrugged, and Cindy listened without interruption as he described a painting by Turner, showing Stonehenge lit by a vivid storm.
‘Maybe another of your archetypal images,’ Bobby said. ‘But I just had the feeling that was the bolt that hit me. When I was dead. They’ve got a print of it at Cefn-y-bedd. Knocked me back, seeing it. Magda said that was his favourite painting. I assumed she meant Falconer.’
‘But that was Stonehenge?’
‘But the public isn’t allowed into Stonehenge any more. Security guards and everything. It’s the one place he can’t get to.’
‘No, indeed.’
‘There’re dead lambs in the picture,’ Bobby said. ‘And
a dead shepherd. It’s like the storm’s been drawn to the circle. This break in the clouds, like the eye of the storm’s just opened over Stonehenge. It’s a scene of violent death and there’s a sense of inevitability about it. See, if I was him, and that was my favourite painting and I just happened to be in a stone circle during a thunderstorm, even I might see that as some kind of sign. You know?’
Cindy said, ‘Know much about meteorology, do you? How long, for instance, before this one arrives?’
‘Surprised we haven’t heard it already.’
Cindy looked into the hard, tight sky. ‘And how many dead lambs?’
XLVI
Marcus knew it was them by the speed the van was travelling.
You’d think the drivers who would race along these lanes would be those who knew them best, had negotiated them all their motoring lives, could anticipate the angle of every treacherous bend.
Not so. The locals knew, from bitter experience, that if they crashed it would be into a neighbour. Or a neighbour’s wife. Or a neighbour’s second cousin who was pregnant. Or the midwife on her way to deliver the second cousin’s child.
The locals knew that if they crashed and it was their fault and someone died, then the crash would live with them, even unto the third and fourth generation. No, the locals took it easy, pulled into the verge for oncoming tractors, exchanged polite waves.
So Marcus could tell by its reckless speed in the dusk — and because it was an anonymous white van and because it drove past the castle entrance and then returned the same way within a couple of minutes — that it was them.
He discovered that he had wedged himself against the highest, most concealing part of what now constituted the battlements of the tower. He found himself hunched up, his hands gripping his knees.
He recognized what fell onto the left sleeve of his tweed jacket as a droplet of sweat. Truth was, he hadn’t really expected anyone to come at all.
It had occurred to him that in not leaving the farmhouse after Anderson’s call, he had been spectacularly stupid. If Maiden and Cindy the bloody Shaman had returned, he’d have told them about Anderson’s message and they’d have urged him to go with them; he’d have refused, naturally, at first, but might conceivably have backed down.