by Phil Rickman
Marcus smothered his second cough in his handkerchief. It was the cough of a man desperate not to cough, crippling himself to keep quiet.
It was enough.
Bez didn’t say, ‘Who’s that?’ or ‘Come out.’ Bez just wore his smile. The cough had made him happy.
At the top of the spiral, Marcus tensed, his arms so tight around the jagged stone that it rocked, and that stone must weigh more than the average anvil. Marcus closed his eyes as Bez put a foot on the first cracked stone stair. There were eleven steps before the stairs broke off. Seven before the final curve.
Come on then, bloody well get it over with.
Bez came up slowly. One foot on a step, then the other foot. Bez was, God forbid, some sort of bloody professional.
In the house, Gallow would be walking up the hall, being careful because he didn’t know where the dog was.
Bez reached the fourth step. Gallow would have discovered the old treatment room. Three more doors to the kitchen.
Please, Malcolm. Under the table, you cross-eyed bloody idiot, stay quiet until he arrives outside the kitchen door and then he’ll know you’ve been shut in and he’ll simply turn away.
Unless he thinks there’s someone in there with you.
God.
Fifth step.
Two and a half years he’d had Malcolm. Ugliest pup the RSPCA kennels ever took in. Poor old Malcolm.
Six. Bez stopped, listening. He’d see there was a curve ahead; he’d have his gun out in front of him. Marcus backed up the broken wall where the branches of the sycamore tree overhung. Sat on the top of the wall, leaning back into the branches which dipped under his weight. He was breathing hard, his glasses half misted. Braced himself against the biggest branch, holding on to it with both hands. Both feet wedged against the great stone that looked, from the ground, like a single battlement.
The yard was about thirty feet below. Break his bloody neck quite easily if he fell. And he’d rather fall than be shot by a moron.
And so Bez arrived on the seventh step and saw Marcus cowering on the edge of the tower, half into the sycamore tree. He relaxed.
‘All right, pal,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for Maiden.’
‘Sonny,’ Marcus said, through gritted teeth. ‘Be bloody lucky if you can find a maiden over the age of twelve between here and Chepstow.’
Bez didn’t laugh. ‘Funny man, eh?’ Bringing the pistol into view. ‘This oil yer memory, Grandad?’
‘I’ve got an excellent memory, you cocky little bastard.’
‘Good. Yow gonna tell me where Maiden is?’
‘Don’t know what you mean.’
‘Then yow … are fucking dead.’ Bez brought up the pistol. ‘Old man. ’
Marcus stared into the pistol’s small, black hole and pushed both feet into the battlement stone.
The gun didn’t even go off. It clattered down, from step to step, quicker than Bez as the stone toppled onto his chest and he clutched it to him with both arms as he fell backwards, half spinning. And when his head hit the stone lintel on the curve of the spiral, there was a very delicate, genteel little crack, like the sound of two crown green bowls meeting in the stillness of a summer evening.
Marcus stood on the top step for a moment with both hands over his face.
Then he heard Malcolm yelp and he snatched up his pitchfork and staggered down the steps. At the bottom, his eyes met Bez’s eyes and Bez looked astonished, both eyes wide open, his mouth too.
Bez was dead.
‘Oh lord,’ Marcus said, shocked into moderation. ‘Oh God. ‘
And then stumbled across the dark yard to the house, edging round the building to the rear door, the pitchfork out in front of him.
The light was on in the passage. Doors either side were flung open. In the Healing Room, bottles and jars had been swept from shelves; some were still rolling on the stone floor, and two clicked together, reminding Marcus of the appalling sound of Bez’s skull smashing.
His back to the wall, his pitchfork pointed upwards, he slid round the L in the passage. The kitchen door came into view. It was still closed. From the other side of the panels, the dog growled.
Marcus saw Gallow’s gloved hands around the sawn-off aimed at the kitchen door. As he edged round the bend, trying not to breathe, he saw the whole of bulging-eyed, shaven-headed Gallow, backed up, the shotgun at groin level, the way he must have seen Sylvester Stallone or some other movie oaf doing it. Gallow’s lips were pulled back over his clenched teeth.
‘Come and fucking get it, then!’ Gallow kicked the door.
Which remained shut. There wasn’t room in the passage for anyone to get in a decent kick. As Gallow’s foot came back again, Marcus hurled himself round the corner. ‘Baaastard! ‘ Pitchfork out in front, aimed at the shotgun.
Gallow spun round and the pitchfork missed. When it connected with the wall at the end of the passage, both its corroded tines fell off.
Marcus stood there, holding a wooden shaft. Looking into a double gun barrel.
‘… the fuck are yow?’
‘Might ask the same question,’ Marcus said gruffly. ‘My bloody house.’
‘Back up.’
Marcus stood his ground.
‘I said back up, y’ old fuck! ’
‘All right. All right.’
Gallow prodded him back along the passage to the open rear door.
‘Out. Slowly! Don’t turn round.’
As if he could. As if he could take his eyes from those two black holes.
Gallow bawled, ‘Bez!’
Marcus said nothing. Stepped out backwards into the yard. The only sound was Malcolm barking, way back in the kitchen.
‘Yow on your own?’
Marcus raised his eyes to the snarlingly familiar, horribly dangerous face of the Boy with Something to Prove. Gallow was perhaps a couple of years younger than the late Bez, blotches of acne still fighting the stubble on his chin.
‘I said … yow on your own?’
‘Not necessarily,’ Marcus said belligerently, and Gallow’s arms swung out, and several things happened almost simultaneously. With sickening force, the shotgun barrel smacked him in the jaw and left cheek. His glasses fell off. Something crunched into his left leg, just below the knee. He crumpled. The yard blurred up at him.
He couldn’t move.
‘Bez! Where the fuck …?’
He was kicked in the stomach.
‘Where’s my mate?’
He retched and tried to curl into a ball, but his knee wouldn’t bend. He heard the crunch of his glasses becoming powder under the heel of Gallow’s boot. He was wrenched up by the lapels, dragged a few inches in the dirt. Flung back, his head and shoulders meeting stone. The house wall.
He could make out Gallow’s shape against the light. Gallow with his legs splayed, his shaven head like a hard-boiled egg.
‘Yow move a fucking inch, I’ll smash yer eyes out. Got that?’
Couldn’t, if he’d wanted to. Marcus moaned over the sound of Gallow’s feet skidding away.
‘Bez? Don’t shit me, man. Bez!’ The shouts echoing between the house and the castle, fading off.
The world had turned into a dark expressionist painting, full of violent blotches. Marcus gave up trying to focus on it, and consciousness slipped away like an ebb tide on a long beach. Along the beach skipped Sally, following a big, coloured ball, laughing, the laughter echoing.
‘Bez! ’
Marcus’s one coherent thought was that Maiden and Lewis couldn’t be far away. Maiden knew what these people were like. Only one of them left now, anyway. One man. And a gun.
Out of it again. Footsteps along the sand.
Sally?
Darkness. Then he couldn’t breathe. His nose flattened under a great, flat weight.
‘Dead.’
The weight lifted. He snorted some air.
‘Fucking dead. ‘
The boot came down on his mouth this time. Slowly enough for him to cat
ch a brief, blurred, zigzag flash of rubber.
‘He’s fucking dead! ‘
Smell of metal. Two endless, black, metal-smelling tunnels under his eyes.
‘And so are yow. ‘
There was a brief moment of total awareness.
An absolute knowledge of who he was, why he was here … why he was here on this Earth.
No pain, only this brilliant crystal clarification of the Big Mystery.
Marcus closed his eyes and never heard the big bang.
He saw two smiling girls running hand in hand across a golden hay meadow. One girl was in sepia, the other in bright, glowing colours.
XLVII
The King Stone, nearly eight feet tall, was like a caged beast inside its iron, schoolyard-type railings. To Maiden — standing in an open field behind it, now — it seemed like a huge head and neck attached to feet or claws, half sunk into the worn grass, clutching at the ground, as if it was preparing to spring out of there.
‘Known as an outlier, this is.’ Cindy set down his suitcase outside the rails. ‘We often find them in the vicinity of stone circles, but set apart. For astronomical reasons usually, or it gives you a line on the rising sun. Not sure about this chap, never having worked here before.’
Maybe once, the King Stone and the Rollright circle had been part of the same prehistoric observatory or whatever it was, but now they were separated by a road and a hedge and part of a wood.
Cindy opened the case, brought out a rolled-up woollen mat. Maiden opened the gate in the railings and Cindy carried the mat through and spread it out next to the King Stone. The mat displayed an interwoven Celtic design, such as you saw on ancient crosses.
‘Far as I’m concerned, Bobby, if they call this the King Stone and the circle’s known as the King’s Men, then this old chap has to be the boss. Getting better feelings, I am, from him, certainly. He hates these bars, but he’s kept his distance from some of the bad things that’ve happened in the circle. Hasn’t been tampered with much. Kept his integrity, see. I think I can work with him.’
Maiden and Grayle watched him in sceptical silence. Against a luminous backdrop of the most malign combination of dusk and stormclouds Maiden ever recalled, every hole and hollow and crevice in the King Stone was clearly defined.
This seemed crazy, time-wasting, probably irresponsible. Logically, Maiden thought, what they should be doing was simply calling the police.
‘Who would send two cars. Maybe three, if they were informed that the murderer Bobby Maiden was here. And then what? They’d arrest him, and he’d try to explain in the little time they had. It was impossible. Convincing even sensitive, reborn Maiden had taken many hours, plus the discovery of a woman’s body in a concrete grave.
‘So what’s going to happen?’ He was tense, restless, the impending storm getting to his nerves. Desperate to move, flush out Fraser-Hale. Needed to see him. To know the disease.
‘I’m going to talk to the storm,’ Cindy said.
‘I see,’ Maiden said.
‘Do you?’
‘No.’
‘All right, Bobby. Very quickly: weather control. Marcus knows more about the scientific side of this than me, and I wish we had him with us. But the electrical storm is a terrific source of energy, the most powerful phenomenon in nature’s bag of tricks, and there is evidence that Neolithic people sought to control storms — using megalithic circles — and perhaps to store the energy so that rain could be summoned when it was needed.’
‘How would they use stone circles?’
‘Because they’re invariably sited at places where underground streams intersect, places which are likely to attract bolts of lightning seeking to discharge themselves in the earth. Grayle, this cricket bag of Adrian’s, could it have contained, for instance, rods of iron, or copper?’
‘I guess.’
‘When you were in or around the circle, did you see anything of that nature sticking out of the ground, anywhere?’
‘I don’t recall … I’m sorry, what would they be for?’
‘Lightning conductors, perhaps? Bobby, if you remember, when he is discussing the circumstances of the killing of the birdwatcher, he talks of dismissing clouds and also creating them. By willpower and meditation, yes? So we know he’s studied weather control. Suppose he’s convinced himself he can bring about, by force of will, an electrical storm, like the one in Mr Turner’s picture? Suppose he’s been working on this for quite a considerable time … with this little gathering in mind.’
Grayle backed off from the King Stone. ‘At a wedding? That’s what he meant by sacrificing friends?’
‘I don’t know. This is speculation. Adrian’s view of our remote ancestors has them as rather less practical and scientific and agriculturally minded than we would perhaps like to think. A storm, as your picture demonstrates, is a dynamic killing-force.’
‘Aw, come on,’ Grayle said. ‘He’s just a guy.’
‘Practical guy, though,’ Maiden said.
‘And, at the risk of sounding religious,’ Cindy said, ‘history has shown that individuals who wish to do evil can seemingly attract to themselves an element of, shall we say, back-up. But I don’t want to talk like this. I don’t want to court your scepticism. Let’s just say that if there’s a grain of truth here, we can do three things. We can find Adrian Fraser-Hale and … constrain him. We can stop this wedding. And we can try to hold off the storm meanwhile. Do you see?’
Maiden didn’t see, not really. Adrian was not like Cindy; he was a nuts-and-bolts man; he was practical. ‘Still,’ he told Grayle as they crossed the road between a couple of dozen parked cars, to get back to the circle, ‘you learn not to dismiss anything Cindy comes up with.’
When they took a final look back at the King Stone, there was a big red thing on top with wings and bulbous eyes you could see even from this distance. Cindy must have stood on his suitcase to prop it up there.
‘What the hell is that, Bobby?’
‘I think it’s Kelvyn Kite. His, er, shamanistic totem creature. Something like that. Don’t think about it, you’ll only lose confidence.’
They turned left into the small wood which hid the entrance to the circle. The congregation was hushed. The two candles flickered innocently.
‘OK,’ Grayle whispered. ‘I’m gonna be straight with you. I don’t know what to believe.’
‘Like I said, a problem you tend to have, around Cindy.’ Maiden dropped behind the wooden hut.
‘No. Listen to me,’ Grayle said. ‘Ersula. Do you know she’s dead?’
Her lower face was in shadow. Her eyes, through a soft tumble of hair, were bright with pleading.
‘I …’
‘Bobby, I just need to hear what you believe is the truth.’
‘Well. A body’s been uncovered at Cefn-y-bedd. In the ground. It’s a young woman. Very light, blond hair.’
‘Oh … OK …’ Steadying her voice. ‘That’s … that’s …’
‘I don’t know her, do I? But he says he killed her.’
‘You talked to him? When?’
‘He left tapes. He talks all the details into a recorder. At the High Knoll burial chamber. Laying down his own EVP for posterity. That make sense to you?’
‘Like a confession.’
‘More like a celebration.’
‘Friends!’ From the circle, the minister’s voice rose up, loud and relaxed. ‘We’re gathered here today in the sight of God — Oh, yes, it is! … whatever some of you might think about stone circles …’
Laughter.
Grayle said, ‘And the woman … when he thought he’d killed me?’
‘Was called Emma Curtis. She was my friend. Close friend. She was the woman who collected me last night at Castle Farm, while you were there. It was going dark like now, and she had … light hair, and he thought it was you. He’d followed you down from the Knoll — that was your mistake, the Knoll is his — and he climbed into his Land Rover and he tailed us. To a hotel. And la
ter … when she was on her own … he … he killed her. After he discovered the hotel was at the crossing point of two leys. Serendipity.’
The minister said joyfully, ‘To join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony!’
‘How did he kill her?’
‘With a carpet knife.’
‘Jesus. And Ersula?’
‘We … can’t be sure. It’ll take a post-mortem. But …’
He waited.
‘The cause of death may be … a kind of suffocation.’
She shook a little. She didn’t want to hear any more. ‘You’re not lying to me, are you?’
‘I swear to God I’m not lying to you.’
‘Now,’ said the minister. ‘It says here, in this little prayer book, that marriage is an honourable estate, instituted of God, in the time of man’s innocence, signifying to us the mystical union between Christ and his church. I want us to think about that, about what it means.’
‘Close friend, huh?’
‘Almost,’ Maiden said, and there must have been a fissure in his voice because Grayle suddenly clung to him, for just a second, then let him go, stepped away, blinking hard.
‘Bonding of the bereaved,’ she said. ‘Jesus, he could be in these woods. He could be just yards away from us now.’ She didn’t look around. ‘This shamanic stuff of Cindy’s. You believe he can intercede with nature, head off that storm?’
‘Do I hell,’ Maiden said.
Grayle nodded. ‘So we need to stop the ceremony.’
‘No need to make a drama out of it. We just get everybody together in one place, well clear of the circle, for safety.’
‘I know,’ the minister said, ‘that some members of Janny and Matthew’s families must think a stone circle is a highly unsuitable place for a wedding.’
‘I’ll do it,’ Grayle said. ‘I’m from New York. Everybody knows how crass and crazy we are. I got nothing to lose.’
‘Just don’t start a panic. Be playing into his hands. Be discreet.’
‘Sure. What will you do?’
‘If he’s here, I’ll find him. I have to find him.’
‘How?’
He didn’t reply.
‘… and what do we think of when we think of a wedding?’ the minister asked. We think of a ring. And here we are, all of us, inside one of the oldest rings in these islands. Joining together, in our faith — perhaps our various faiths — to celebrate love. So I’d like us all to join hands … no … come on … there’s nothing pagan about this, we’re all decently dressed …’