“You do that if you want to!” cried John. “I’m getting back!” He fell into the passage next to that through which they had entered; the first alcove was less than a minute ahead. He looked back miserably. Dave was peering at the suits. John forced himself over the harsh blue stone. Then Dave screamed.
John knew he had to run — but to Dave or away? He was too old for blind heroism, too young for conscious selflessness. His legs trembled; he felt sick. He turned.
Dave hadn’t moved, but one suit lay crumpled at his feet. He was staring at what it had hung upon, too far for John to see in the blue haze. John’s hand pulsed and perspired. He stretched out his fingers toward Dave as if to draw him forward; Dave’s hands were warding off whatever was before him. John tore his feet free of the urge to flee. As he began to trudge forward, a figure moved between him and Dave. Cobwebs held to its shape like an aura. John recognized the profile and the patched coat. It was the newspaper-seller.
John struggled to shriek a warning to Dave — but of what? His lips were gummed shut as if by cobwebs. His legs were tied to the stone. The man moved round the pool, beyond John’s vision. John’s lips worked, and Dave turned. His mouth opened, but this time no scream came. He backed around the pool, past the suits. And something appeared, hopping toward him inside the patched overcoat: long arms with claws reaching far beyond the sleeves, a head protruding far above the collar, and from what must have been a mouth a pouring stream of white which drifted into the air and sank toward Dave’s face as he fell, finally screaming. John clapped his hands over his ears as he ran toward the outside world, but Dave’s screams had already been muffled.
As he fled past the first alcove, the web moaned feebly and opened a glazed eye. No more, he prayed, no more. Each turning was the last; each stretch was cruelly telescoped by the unrelenting light. His lungs were burning; each sucked breath drew a wisp of cobweb into his throat. In one alcove a girl’s eyes pleaded; her hand stretched a wedding ring toward him. He, screamed to blot out her stifled cries. In answer came a sound of something hopping round a bend behind him, of something wet slapping the walls. A web-wisp brushed his cheek. He blundered onward. Another bend. He heaved around it hoarsely, and saw daylight.
The door was propped with an empty milk-bottle; someone had found and blocked it, perhaps meaning to return. He staggered out onto a patch of waste ground: a broken bed, a disembowelled car, a baby’s rattle encrusted with mud. Reaching behind him, he wrenched out the bottle. The door became one with the earth. Then he fell face downward on the bed.
Dave! He was down there in an alcove! John jerked to his feet, shivering. Through the slight drizzle he saw people passing, eyeing him oddly. He couldn’t tell them; they might be from the pool. Someone had to know. Dave was in The Catacombs — no, in the catacombs. Someone. Where was he? He sidled to the pavement, watching them all, ready to scream if one came near. Up the road from the school, in the opposite direction to that they’d taken so long ago. Even further from home than he’d thought. Ford. He’d tell Ford that Dave was in The Catacombs. He made for the school; the tangled lines of rain on the pavement looked like something he’d forgotten.
Scott was waiting at the gate. He folded his arms as John appeared. John’s terror kicked him in the stomach. Scott’s lips opened, waiting; then his gaze slipped from John to someone behind him, and his expression altered. “All right, Norris, you’d better get to class,” he said.
It was the Inspector! John thought as he hurried up the stairs to the familiar faces. He didn’t know where Ford was — perhaps he could tell the Inspector that Dave was in The Catacombs. If Scott would let him. He’d have to — he was scared of the Inspector. “He’s scared of the Inspector,” he said to Dave. “What?” said Hawks behind him.
Scott and the Inspector entered; Scott held the door politely. The class stood, raising chalk-dust and a cobweb from John’s blazer, which was grey with wisps, he saw. But then so was the Inspector’s pinstripe suit: even the orange handkerchief in his top pocket. “Dave, sir — Mr Ford — ” cried John, and vomited into his open desk. “My God!” shouted Scott. “Please, Mr Scott,” said the Inspector in a voice light yet clinging as cobwebs, “the boy’s ill. Fie looks frightened. I’ll take him downstairs and arrange something for him.”
“Shall I wait?” hissed Scott.
“Better start your class, Mr Scott. I’ll have time to find out all I want to know about them.”
Bare corridors. Leaping tiles smelling of polish. A strap cracking. Somewhere, laughter. A headlong latecomer who gaped at John and the figure leading him by the wrist. The tuning of the school orchestra. The dining-room, bare tables, metal plates. The cloakroom, racks of coats stirring in a draught. “I don’t think we can entrust you to any else’s care,” said the Inspector.
The gates, deserted. They turned toward the pillared pub, the side street. There was still time. The fingers on his wrist were no longer fingers. The eyes were veiled as the pool. Two women with wheel-baskets were approaching. But his mouth was already choked closed by fear. They passed on toward the side street. Yet his ears were clear, and he heard the comment one woman made.
“Did you see that? I’ll wager another case of “unwillingly to school”!”
RELATIONSHIPS
SENTINELS
They were the last people Douglas expected to see in the village pub, but their appearance could hardly have been better timed.
“Good Lord,” he called, “Ken! Maureen! Come and help persuade Barb to drive up to Sentinel Hill.”
“Doug,” Barbara said uneasily, looking to the newcomers for help but finding none: they’d hurried to the table through the sawdust, eager as children kicking sand. She searched the pub: farmers’ faces propped on elbows like florid gargoyles, puffing clouds of pipe-smoke which buoyed up a last moth circling the oil-lamp on invisible elastic: ten miles from home and not a face to which she could look for aid.
“Barb, don’t be anti-social,” Doug reproved. “This is Ken and Maureen — I met them at the science-fiction convention. You two want to go up on the hill, don’t you?”
“If the young lady’s driving I don’t see why not,” Ken said, “but first I must buy you a drink.”
He took their orders and Maureen sat opposite Barbara, setting a transistor radio between them. “Why don’t you want to go?” she asked Barbara. “You won’t be scared with Doug, surely. The hill’s got a terrific atmosphere, more so than this pub.”
Barbara thought of Sentinel Hill. They’d driven past at dusk on their way to the pub: the sloughed stone faces mobile with shadow; a few cars, uniformly grey, from which their passengers had climbed to count the stones and count again and descend baffled; a child at the centre of the circle prancing awkwardly and, as she’d slowed to let Doug watch, turning to her a cardboard demon’s face. “I can’t see any sense in going/ she told Maureen. “It’s warm in here, but it’ll be icy cold up there this time of year.”
“I’m sure Doug will keep you warm,” Maureen said.
Barbara watched Ken returning from the bar, his arm beneath the tray supple as a waiter’s. “Ken moves beautifully,” she said to Douglas.
“You can judge better than I.” That morning he’d awoken to rhythmic thuds in the next room; he’d strode across her bedroom, past the framed embroidery, the flowers in a cut-glass vase fragile as the chime of the bell her mother used to denote dinner, and found her leaping, graceful as a fountain, before a propped ballet manual. She hadn’t noticed him; he’d tiptoed back to his side of the bed and The Eighth Pan Book of Horror Stories. “Barb says you move beautifully,” he told Ken.
“I shall find a way to repay the compliment.”
“How did you two meet?” asked Maureen.
“Quite by accident,” Douglas said. “Someone invited me to what I thought was an all-night party, only it turned out to be a musical evening. Six weeks ago, that was. I suppose the Brichester SF Group was up in arms about that diatribe in the Herald, Ken?”
<
br /> “These days we ignore the critics. Let’s face it, only fans appreciate sf. Mundanes never will. At least, it’ll never be appreciated as literature while the critics insist on setting it apart from the mainstream.”
“I’m a fantasy man myself.”
“I wish he’d read something else,” Barbara said, looking away as the moth toppled inside the oil-lamp: a flare, a wisp of smoke. “Not that science fiction’s any better.”
“Don’t start that again,” Douglas warned.
“Fantasy’s indistinguishable from sf? At the Convention you’d be shot at dawn!” Ken said. “I don’t mind fantasy, but I do wish people wouldn’t call it sf. Still, it explains why you’re drawn to the hill, Doug.”
“Not drawn,” Douglas said, glancing sharply at Barbara, “just interested.”
“It’s like Rollright,” Maureen interrupted. “Do you remember that girl at the Convention talking about the Druid circle at Rollright?” Douglas thought he did: they had found her asleep on a bed in Dave Kyle’s room, her hands full of change for one of the card-playing writers. It had been Douglas’ first Convention; the first night he’d staggered sickly from the Liverpool Group’s party, and the next day he’d had to sidle out from lectures as the stage began to slip below his vision. On the Saturday he’d met Ken and Maureen in the Brichester Group’s room, and then had gone early to bed, hearing someone putting his fist through a pane, the thud of a bottle, what sounded like a mob breaking down a bedroom door. It must have been the strangeness of it all. Even in the horror fans he’d never recognized his visions, the thrill of slipping into its niche the last of a set of magazines, the membranous wings against the moon, the face which peered back from the pool, the pale stone steps descending into darkness. He’d thought when he’d met Barbara that he could reflect his images in her. He was still trying.
“If you’re a science-fiction reader,” Barbara was saying to Ken, “you won’t be interested in Sentinel Hill.”
“Fan, dear, not reader.” He was lifting the last of his beer to Maureen’s lips. “I don’t want to seem hidebound,” he said.
Maureen caught his hand and wiped her mouth. “Come on, you two, drink up,” she called. “I want to play my radio.” Ken pulled her to her feet and led her toward the door. Their shadows drew across the farmers and refreshed them: gargoyles, yes, but protective as a church. “Don’t let’s go tonight,” Barbara whispered. “Let’s go home instead.”
“We will, of course, afterwards. Your parents are away all weekend, after all.” Douglas stood; above his head a flake of ash fluttered in the oil-lamp. “We don’t want to seem unfriendly,” he said.
Beyond the houses in the square outside the pub stretched a field, iced by the moon, sharp as the surface of December air which instantly moulded to her. If they invited Ken and Maureen to her home for Christmas Eve next week perhaps the others wouldn’t mind their driving back to Exham now — but no doubt Ken and Maureen would be otherwise occupied. She’d tried her best; she didn’t want to make a scene. “Would you really rather not go to the hill?” Douglas asked.
“I don’t want to spoil the evening for everyone. I’m the only one who can drive.”
In the back seat Maureen switched on the radio. Singing, the car swung about and rushed headlong from the village, its lights touching small high empty windows, projecting a tilted ploughshare on a barn. Ahead Barbara saw avenues of bleached trees sweep to meet them, immediately engulfed by shadow, threshing as they passed. On the road stones gleamed like toads; one hopped. She wasn’t sure how far ahead the hill would rise. “I don’t like the name,” she said.
“What name?” Douglas enquired abstractedly, moving his arm along the back of the seat.
“Oh, Doug. Sentinel Hill.”
“I shouldn’t think you would,” Maureen said. “They’re supposed to guard the hill against anyone who doesn’t make a sacrifice to them.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Barbara declared; the bloodless trees waved wildly, a sinister greeting. “I suppose I’ve been brought up apart from such things. Who guard? A sacrifice to whom?”
“The Sentinels. You remember, Doug, that girl was saying they make pilgrimages to Rollright from Birmingham on Walpurgisnacht. I gather something like that happens here. Have you been to a Convention, Barbara?”
“She hasn’t yet but I hope she will next year,” Douglas said.
“I thought next Easter you might come up to Exham,” said Barbara, “to stay with us.”
The highest twigs pulled free of the moon like strands of cobweb, and the hill swelled up before her. Above the depression into which her car slowed as if summoned, the ring of shapes stood white and waiting. She could no longer play for time. She turned the car so that it was poised for the road; the headlamps spotlighted a gate into a field opposite, one bar comfortingly askew, pale uncombed grass beyond, barbed wire atop the gate silver as tips of lightning. “I’ll leave the engine running,” she said. “We won’t be long.”
“Think of the petrol,” Douglas expostulated.
“I don’t want the engine to catch cold.”
“I shall bring my radio as protection,” decided Maureen, and dragged Ken toward the figures. Over the tinny jangle and the announcer’s voice Barbara heard Ken: “I hope we’re not going to stay all night, this seems a bit futile to me.” The radio faded; soon it would be inside the circle. Barbara felt obscurely disturbed; it seemed like an insult, a blasphemy. Nonsense. The Sentinels were relics, no more.
Douglas took her hand and began to climb. He caught her glancing back; but all he could see was the car, thumping like his heart, and a gate. He felt deliciously unnerved. The moon stood above the circle like the beginnings of a face; ominously still against the tethered trees, the Sentinels surveyed the countryside. On one side of the circle, silhouettes of branches rippled like unquiet muscles; opposite, a figure held its stumps before it like a dog beneath the moon, begging or about to pounce. He hoped Barbara felt frightened too. He wanted her to grip his hand until it hurt.
They met the others in the centre of the ring. Their coats were shaken by the wind, the girls” headscarves blew out like flats. “It’s senseless to call them the Sentinels,” Barbara said, “when some of them are facing inward.”
Maureen surveyed the circle, the rough ambiguous hump each back presented. “I don’t know where you get that,” she called above the radio. “They’re all facing outward.”
“But as we came up I thought — Oh, well. Doug must be affecting me.”
“There is a story, though, that you can’t count them,” Maureen continued, craning on tiptoe, clutching Ken’s shoulder for support. “Eighteen, I make it.”
“Seventeen, surely,” Ken argued. “You must have counted twice.”
“I have eighteen too,” Douglas said. “Barb?”
“Oh, I don’t know. You’re all pretty close, I’m sure. Yes, yes, eighteen. No, nineteen.”
“We must split up and go round,” Maureen said. “Me and Ken, you and Barbara. Here’s where we start.” She ran and crowned one figure with the radio. At once a voice sang from its erased mouth.
They followed her, bruising the moon-painted turf. “We’ll go anti-clockwise,” Douglas said. “One. Two.” The radio’s song streamed away on the wind. The Sentinels waited to be discovered. From the road they hadn’t looked like this to Barbara: each face set back in a cracked cowl, fragments of the cheeks emerging from shadow like petrified sponge; beneath the cowl, the folds and ridges of what once might have been a cloak, from which protruded hands or wrists held high like the parodied paws of an animal. The heads came up to Barbara’s shoulder. “What were they supposed to be?” she asked, instantly regretting.
“Six. Seven. I don’t know. Not human, anyway. Look at those pores. As though they’d suck your soul out. Or something might crawl from one of them.” He thought he remembered a story like that. “Now, Barb, I didn’t mean it. I was only joking.” He embraced her.
She cl
osed her eyes. Not here, she thought, but she opened her mouth. Behind her eyelids floated fear; the moon was steady, waiting patiently, old as the Sentinels. They swayed. Something supported her. Two hands clutched her waist. She struggled and looked down. They were stone stumps. She choked; for a timeless second she was wedged, caught. She slipped on the turf and was free.
“I’m sorry I brought you,” Douglas said. Ken and Maureen passed them, counting: “Now then, we’re winning!” Maureen laughed.
The next face was blank as the moon, except for the eyes. They must have been deep indeed; in one a hollow spider tattled in a cobweb, like a loose eye. “Do we count this?” Douglas wondered, pointing.
Inside the circle, behind the figure, a bud of stone grew from the earth. She couldn’t see what it was meant to be.
Douglas drew her to stand by the Sentinel while he tried to connect the protrusion with the figure. Unwillingly she glanced at what stood by her shoulder. From this angle she thought she saw the hint of a mouth; it was grinning. The head was about to turn; the eye would come first, the cob-webbed eye rolling in glee. “Come on, Doug,” she said unevenly. “The others want to go.”
“Seventeen, eighteen,” Douglas finished, touching the stone on which the radio was balanced. Beneath the moon the radio’s light had dimmed.
“Same as me,” Maureen told Ken triumphantly. “What did you have, Barbara?”
But Barbara was listening for some sound which should have underlaid the radio’s. She stared down the hill toward the road. The gate was gone. “The car!” she cried, and ran.
She climbed out of the driving seat as they pelted down. “It’s dead,” she said: she seemed on the edge of weeping. She gripped Douglas” hand; he thrust his fingers through hers, happy.
“I trust you’re suitably frightened,” Ken said to Maureen. “One hysterical female will do, I should think.”
“I’m not given to melodrama tics.” Barbara gripped Douglas” fingers between her own. “There’s nothing more frustrating than a dead car, that’s all. Can you fix engines, Ken?”.
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