by Phil Rickman
‘If you’re gonna be alone,’ Grayle said, ‘you make sure he doesn’t find you first.’
‘I know.’
‘Or Cindy. He’s alone too.’
‘If you don’t include the spirits of the air.’
‘I could get quite fond of that old weirdo,’ Grayle said. ‘But spirits of the air I can live without. You take care.’
I have to know, Cindy said deep inside himself. Is it blood you want? Is it the lifeblood of mammals? Is it our terror? Do you thrive on the fear of the fox before the hounds tear it apart? And do you suck the life-force released in the blood of a woman or a man at one of your shrines, at the crossing of energy lines and ghost roads? I have to know, or this is useless.
From the top of the King Stone, Kelvyn cackled contemptuously.
You old fool, you don’t even know who you’re talking to.
It was true. He’d never known. The Welsh were a contradiction, they both worshipped nature and feared the God of the Old Testament, in whose honour they built, in place of standing stones, all those grim, grey, monolithic chapels.
Shrines to cruel nature, a cruel God.
And yes, there were times when that Old Testament God would have struck down the guests at a wedding with hardly a thought. In the Old Testament, people died for being in the wrong place at the wrong time in the wrong company.
‘Cindy?’
He opened his eyes. On the other side of the railings stood Bobby Maiden.
‘This is a bit hard,’ Bobby said, ‘if you want the truth.’
He’d taken off his jacket, stood there, his T-shirt brilliant against the sky, torn at the left shoulder.
‘Tell me, lovely.’
‘Grayle’s trying to stop the ceremony, I’m wandering around like a spare prick. And … what I thought … anybody can find him, it’s got to be me, right?’
‘It’s an argument.’
‘Only I don’t know how to go about it.’
‘And?’
‘Possibly, you can help.’
‘I see.’ Cindy rocked a little on his shaman’s mat, working this out. ‘You want to go back into the darkness. Into the cold.’
‘Whatever.’
‘Remembering that the whole point of last night was to get you out of there. And to get it out of you.’
‘The way I see it, for a few seconds, me and him … I may be losing it a bit here, but I feel some part of him collided with some part of me.’
‘So it seems.’
‘Maybe they need to collide again.’
Cindy deliberated, taking several long, pensive breaths. Kelvyn cackling nastily in his head.
‘Don’t think about it too long.’ Bobby folded his arms. ‘I think I can hear the cold calling.’
‘Hmm.’ Cindy stood up. Couldn’t spring up, these days, like he used to; old age catching up, what a bind it was. ‘I helped to bring you out, see, but I can’t ask you to go back. You have to ask me, isn’t it? This is how it’s done.’
‘Shamanic etiquette.’
‘Bit more than that, lovely. Do you really want to ask me?’
‘I think I just did.’
Cindy made him sit on the mat — forget the shamanic posture, no time for that, sit however was most comfortable — and then blindfolded him with a black woollen scarf, pulling it tight, heedless of the bruised eye.
‘Don’t fight it, don’t try and see through it. Submit to it. Steady your breathing. Empty your mind.’
From the suitcase he brought the envelope. That, envelope. He emptied the pieces of dry soil into his palm and crumbled them into dust. Whether this had come out of Bobby didn’t matter; it was what they had found on the capstone when he stopped vomiting. And it connected directly with the worst of all deaths, the choking, in the earth, of Ersula Underhill.
‘Don’t worry about time. There will be time.’ Cindy sprinkled the soil in a thin circle around both Bobby Maiden and the King Stone. ‘Step out of time. And think dark. Think cold.’
Lifting his drum from the case, fingers finding the rhythm.
‘After me … dark.’
‘Dark.’
‘Cold.’
‘Cold.’
‘Dark is cold.’
‘Dark is cold.’
‘Cold is dark.’
‘Cold is dark.’
‘Cold is Earth …’
It was a pity. Even the older, family guests were getting into it, resistance breaking down. Charlie had charm, he had style. It was a friendly, participatory wedding. He was making more of it than most of these guys did, in Grayle’s experience, most likely spinning it out because he was having fun too. And because of the dope, maybe.
They were all holding hands, even the relatives, and now the band was leading them in a hymn. Charlie was facing where the sky was darkest, so that Janny and Matthew, the other side of the picnic table altar, could look into the last light, not that there was much of that.
See, Charlie could have had it all over by now, the ceremony part at least. Not that this would get everyone out of the circle, someone having erected another picnic table out by the pines, this one more secular, bottles of champagne on it, towers of paper cups. Getting their money’s worth out of the Rollrights this black Saturday.
While they sang the hymn, All Things Bright And Beautiful, Grayle wandered quietly among the guests, looking into their faces, fearful that one would be the rugged, corn-topped visage of Adrian Fraser-Hale.
He was not here. Neither were there any stakes or rods protruding from the earth inside the circle. What would she have done if she’d found one? Pulled it out? Would that have made everything fine, made the dark clouds disperse?
Sure, and brought Ersula back to life.
Earth is dark.
Earth is dark.
Earth is cold.
Earth is cold.
When Bobby started shivering, Cindy stopped drumming, reduced his chant to a whisper, brought out the cloak of feathers and hung it round Bobby’s shoulders.
It was 6.30 p.m. and almost night. But not cold; this night was as close as October could get to humid. Only cold, apparently, where Bobby was, which was how it should be, but Cindy wasn’t happy about this. It was unknown country, a level of being he’d had no experience of, a harsher, more elemental place, kept in motion by the energy of slaughter. And it made no difference at all that this was, in all probability, an entirely imaginary country which had never existed outside a single, disturbed psyche.
The chant had taken its own direction, Bobby no longer responding to Cindy’s words. Which, again, was how it should be, but also rather frightening. It meant that Cindy no longer had a measure of control. He prayed for assistance, without knowing quite to whom the prayer was addressed.
Earth is dark.
Earth is cold.
Earth is grave.
Earth is grave.
Earth is dark is cold is grave.
Bobby stopped chanting. He was utterly still, did not even appear to be breathing. Face as pale as his T-shirt.
Cindy heard a humming. Not heard exactly, he was aware of a humming. It was coming not from Bobby but from the King Stone. The stone blurred before his eyes and seemed to swell, then came into sharp focus; despite the paucity of light, he could see every smear of mould and liver-spot of lichen.
Bobby Maiden’s lips parted, as if to resume the chant, but all that came out was a hiss, a sibilance, a rustling, in more than one tone. As though one hiss was communicating with another, a whispered conversation.
A whispered conversation between huddled figures. Identifying the location.
Cindy shook him, yelling in his face. ‘Stop. Get up. Get up!’
They could have got through this. It could have been over.
But then, just as Charlie came to that routine stuff about how if anyone knew of any just cause or impediment why these two fine young people should not, right this minute, be declared man and wife, then …
… then, in the east,
over towards the city of Oxford, came a small but vivid flaring in the sky.
Christ.
Pushing people’s hands apart, Grayle ran out towards the altar. Reaching it about half a second before the distant punch of thunder.
‘Listen, I’m sorry … I’m sorry …’
The Reverend Charlie broke off, half turned to her. Another faraway fan of lightning briefly lit up his creased surplice.
‘Grayle?’
‘Charlie, listen to me, we have a problem. No sweat, but we need to suspend this ceremony. Until the storm passes. We have to get all these people out of here.’
Laid-back old Charlie, a dope-haze over his senses, he just looked at Grayle, kind of curious. But Matthew Lyall — a bulge in his top pocket that anyone could see was a ring box — was cold-sober and angry.
‘Who says?’
‘Me. I say. Please. You saw the lightning. That’s bad news, Matthew. That is very seriously bad news. See, I was hoping it was gonna pass, but it didn’t, and that’s real bad news, I’m sorry.’
‘Grayle, what on earth are you trying to do? This is our wedding.’
‘I, uh … Listen, I got a bad feeling about this whole thing. I’m a very sensitive person, Matthew, OK? Holy … Holy Grayle, right? In the States people listen to me. You should listen to me.’
‘I’ll listen to you as long as you like when Janny and I are married. Which would probably have been by now, if you hadn’t-’
‘You saw that lightning? Up in the sky? It’s gonna come closer. My feeling … I get feelings, OK, you should listen to my feelings … and my, er, strong, deep-down psychic feeling is you should not be getting married in a storm. It’s bad luck. It will overshadow your whole married life. Cause instability, and in … uh … infertility. Your marriage will be barren.’
In the third, slightly brighter flash, Janny Oates’s face crumpled like a paper bag, and Grayle felt like a piece of shit.
The slow, rolling thunder seemed to set off mutterings everywhere. ‘Who the hell is this woman?’ demanded some deeply offended, deeply Oxford-English man’s voice among the congregation. ‘She on drugs?’
A fourth flash lit a stone which was knotted and eroded — good Christ — into the shape of a hunched-up, grinning, winged demon, with a long neck and a bony crest on top of its head. Jesus, it was just a stone. They were all just stones. Like Adrian Fraser-Hale was just a guy.
‘I’m someone who knows,’ Grayle cried, ‘OK?’
XLVIII
Maiden moved quickly but circuitously across the field. Don’t use the path, Cindy had warned. It’s too straight. And don’t, whatever you do, put yourself between the circle and the Knights.
The Whispering Knights.
The Whispering Knights was the name given to another collapsed dolmen, once a kind of High Knoll-type structure, but taller, and the stones had folded in on one another, and now they were like giants conspiring.
The monument was in a fairly vast, open field on the opposite side of the road from the King Stone and about a quarter of a mile from the Rollright circle.
You can’t miss them, Bobby; there’s nothing else in that field.
Only a sprinkle of trees on the horizon, a line of hedge marking a field boundary — all briefly shown to him by the sheet lightning, some miles away yet, but closing.
And, unfortunately, anyone inside those stones, they can’t miss you.
When the lightning came again, like a revolving searchlight, Maiden dropped into the short grass. The image of the Knights burned into his mind. They were surrounded by railings, like the King Stone but far bigger, more like big birds than men, black hooded crows, huddled.
Rising.
Earth release me.
Clouds cushion me.
Sky receive me.
Cindy felt himself looking down on the bone-hard Cotswold Ridge, imagining his body growing lighter than the clouds, in all senses of the word, his cloak of feathers coming alive, becoming wings. And the wings, when he spread them, all aglow.
The Fychans had taught him this. The Fychans, father and son; there had been a grandfather, too, and two more generations before him, taking the family tradition back into the eighteenth century. And farther back, to the days when the family house of rubble was a house of skins. The word shaman never used, no specific Welsh word for shaman. Dynion hysbys, they called the Fychans. The Men who Know. When a Christmas show in Llandudno had been abandoned following a fire at the theatre, Cindy had wandered south into the mountains around Cader Idris, happened to stop at the Fychan farmhouse for a night’s bed and breakfast, which turned into two nights, then three weeks and several years, on and off — the Fychans forever saying, in their sly, North Walian way, that he’d never make a proper dyn hysbys, not being born to the Welsh language.
But he would be … well, something.
It was an inner way, a discipline; it did not exclude Christian ethics, it harnessed the imagination in a practical way. Now Cindy made himself go walking in the unstable sky, into the nervous system of the storm, imagining every charcoal cloud he touched being softened by his incandescence.
When lightning came at him, he opened himself to it and the electricity hit him in a great, sizzling spasm of agony, but he walked on, playing with the storm, taunting it like a lion-tamer with a whip.
Only it wasn’t a whip, not really; Cindy suspected that it was no more than a piece of string, that he was not a great and powerful shaman but very possibly an ageing sham.
Less than thirty yards from the Whispering Knights now, and Bobby Maiden was wriggling along the ground on his stomach, because there was nothing in that flat, spacious field but him and the Knights. And anything which the Knights might enclose.
If Fraser-Hale was here, there wasn’t going to be much of an element of surprise, but advertisement wouldn’t help.
Something inside him started quivering like a very thin wire. Trepidation. He’d never seen Adrian Fraser-Hale, only his blood-washed leavings. Trepidation, where there should have been hatred. He wondered how his dad would handle this. Wondered what had really happened the night Norman Plod took on Harry Skinner and his lads in the old paint warehouse at Wilmslow.
The daft things you thought about when you were terrified.
Aw, come on, he’s just a guy.
Just a guy who killed and killed and killed again and was never even suspected to exist because his motivation was beyond the accepted parameters of criminal behaviour.
Out of the darkness, out of the old stones, the Green Man spoke.
‘Hullo there?’
‘Sheet lightning showed him leaning over the railings: flop-haired, boyish.
Maiden didn’t move.
‘Don’t come any closer, will you, old chap?’ the Green Man said. ‘I wouldn’t recommend it. Rather tense tonight.’
Maiden didn’t reply. The darkness settled back around him like a security blanket. He couldn’t believe the voice. Together with the flash-image, the voice — so clear in the still, taut air — had brought up a ludicrous picture of some cool young World War Two airman, leaning against his Spitfire, smoking a pipe and wondering, in a desultory way, what Jerry had up his sleeve for tonight.
‘Except you might stand up. Quite like to take a look at you next time there’s a flash.’
So Fraser-Hale couldn’t see him, didn’t know how close he was. Perhaps had heard him moving across the field. Hadn’t seen him in the lightning.
Which made him seem less of a threat, less of a fine-tuned, hawk-eyed, all-sensing Stone Age stalker, half man, half Will o’ the Wisp woodland sprite.
‘So let’s have you on your feet, shall we? See who you are.’
Maiden said carefully, ‘Who do you think I am?’
Barely a pause. ‘Someone the woman told I suppose. Made a mistake there, but we broke down in the wrong place, you see. Engines are man-made. Imprecise. I can’t be doing with things I haven’t made myself.’
‘What woman’s that … Adr
ian?’
‘Oh … blond hair. American. Someone’s sister.’
Green Man Psychological Profile: when they lost their identity, became ‘the man’, ‘the woman’, it meant they’d been consigned to the mental file marked Sacrificial.
‘You mean the place you broke down, it would have been wrong to kill her there? Nowhere near a ley, or a sacred site?’
‘Who are you?’
Maiden kept his voice steady. ‘I’m your shadow, Adrian. I was with you in the New Forest. Under the pines near Avebury. And last night. At Collen Hall.’
‘Who are you?’ Plain curiosity.
‘It doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t know me.’
‘No,’ Adrian said. ‘It certainly doesn’t matter to me. For the moment.’
‘But we know you. Quite a few of us.’ Tip the scales a little; make him feel exposed, analysed, possibly surrounded. We’ve been watching you for quite a while.’
‘With what purpose? To learn?’
Bloody hell, the arrogance.
Think.
Remembering, while he was with the Met, being sent on a siege-negotiators’ course. Not the full course, a weekend primer, play-acting. Learning to relate to the hyped-up nutter at the upstairs window holding a blade to his former girlfriend’s throat, the fugitive on the eleventh-floor balcony with the baby. Keep them talking. Become a friend, the only friend they’ve got.
The course had been short on advice for dealing with a passionately motivated assassin perfectly at home among Neolithic stones with a storm on the way: his ideal killing situation, but you didn’t know quite who he was planning to kill or quite when or quite how, only how he’d killed the others, no specific MO — apart from being governed by earth-forces which might not exist outside the labyrinth of his mind.
Maiden rolled onto his side. Over to the right, there was a tiny, twin glow. The candles on the wedding altar, over four hundred yards away. Were the people all still there? Had they moved away, leaving the candles?