by James Long
‘That’s two. I can’t see another one. Are you sure that’s it?’
‘Absolutely sure,’ said Ali, with an edge of excitement in her voice. She searched the map. ‘Look, there’s the earthworks symbol, where it says Pen Pits. Anyway, the village is marked. It’s Pen Selwood. Don’t you remember? That’s what he said – Pen Selwood.’
Jo was not listening. She was standing a little away from them, searching her mind for Gally, who had gone ahead of her and, surely, should be here. She cast around in growing panic. There was no sign of her friend anywhere, in the back of her head or in the world outside. Wasn’t this where he was meant to find her? She looked out, then saw a movement below and glanced down. A boy was pushing a bicycle towards the tower from the edge of the trees. She stared at him, feeling something disturbing and almost like a fever rising in her, then reached out to grip the parapet as if it might be the only way to stop herself falling towards him.
The door to the stairwell spat a squabbling family out on to the roof like a Roman candle launching star shells. Four teenagers emitting sharp, derisive yells, an angry red-faced father and last of all a large mother, puffing and out of breath. Two of the teenage boys started a strident ‘It was him, it wasn’t me’ argument.
Ali turned the map around and looked out towards the invisible village. She walked towards Jo as if to show her. Lucy followed. They peered down to see what had caught Jo’s attention. The boy with the bicycle was right below them. They couldn’t see his face. He stopped and stared down, inspecting his front wheel.
‘There’s a path,’ said Ali. ‘That’s going in the right direction.’
Lucy leaned over, looking down, just as one of the teenagers aimed a wild swipe at the other, who grabbed his arm. The first boy pulled away and ran, chased by the second. The running boy tripped, swore and fell headlong just as he reached the girls. Two of them had turned to face the noise. Jo was still staring down at the boy with the bicycle and the boy suddenly looked up.
However it began, the end result was horrifying. One, or perhaps two, of the girls screamed. Bodies collided, legs tangled, and in a moment Lucy felt a violent impact and found herself tilting, falling, already more than half over the parapet, head down, staring at the hard, hard ground twenty storeys below. She felt herself sliding helplessly beyond the point of no return, the stone scraping at her waist then her hips as her feet came off the ground in a second which seemed to last a whole minute. With absurd clarity, she saw the pale face of the boy with the bicycle far down below, looking up then dropping his bike and starting to run.
‘He’s going to catch me,’ she thought, and knew he couldn’t and that, quite madly, she was about to be dead. Then came an immense tug on one of her legs and on the belt of her jeans. Jo and Ali both got their hands to her and hauled her back with adrenalin strength, scraping her arm raw on the stonework.
Afterwards they went over and over what had happened. By that time they were sitting on a fallen tree trunk down at ground level. They were all three in shock.
‘You grabbed me,’ Ali told Lucy, ‘then we both fell against Jo.’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ Lucy said, still shaking. ‘I think he ran into Jo and then both of them hit me.’
‘I thought you fell first, Ali,’ said Jo. ‘You screamed.’
‘That wasn’t me. I thought that was you.’
‘They might have taken a bit more notice,’ Lucy complained as the other family, still arguing, came out of the tower’s entrance and walked away without even a glance at them. ‘I mean, their stupid son nearly killed me.’
‘I don’t think they saw how it happened,’ said Ali judiciously.
‘Stop being so bloody fair,’ snapped Lucy.
It all went round in circles but they talked it out endlessly as they needed to do, until the remembered image of horror had been slightly dulled by the repetition. There was no single version of the true course of events, but Jo could not say plainly what she had felt. She kept it to herself because she knew she had no choice, but above all it was an enormous disappointment that there was no sign of him when they had reached the ground. The boy and his bicycle had disappeared utterly.
Exhaustion had followed in the footsteps of shock. They wanted to eat and then to sleep somewhere well away from the loom of the tower. They were all three eager to be somewhere else.
There was indeed a path through the trees but it curved off left and then hairpinned round right, twisting until they were no longer sure they were heading in the right direction. Lucy kept up with the other two as if she had a new grasp of what mattered in life. The business of finding their way allowed them to put what had just happened behind them.
They came to a fork where a smaller path went off to the right and the main track curved away. Ali’s map didn’t help. It had been opened too many times and a diamond of paper had gone missing from the double fold just where she thought they were.
‘Which way?’ Lucy asked.
‘I’m not sure.’
‘You’re always sure – at least when there’s a map involved.’
‘Well, I’m not this time,’ said Ali. ‘There’s a hole in it.’
‘We could toss a coin.’
‘Or we could follow the arrow,’ Jo said abstractedly. She was searching the path ahead and the bushes each side, hoping to see the boy or something.
‘What arrow?’
She pointed at the ground ahead. Three sticks in the middle of the path pointed down the left fork. ‘That one.’
It was too perfect to be accidental. ‘It’s probably kids playing,’ Lucy suggested, prodding the sticks with the toe of her shoe.
‘Well, anyway, if I had to guess,’ said Ali, looking up towards the sun as if that might help, ‘I would say that’s probably the right direction. Let’s try it.’
It was right. It joined a wider track and brought them to a tarmac road, climbing up from a valley to their left and curving away to go straight ahead into trees.
‘That’s it,’ said Ali, looking at the map. ‘That’s exactly where we wanted to be. See? There’s the bend.’
They walked on into the woodland and these were higher, darker trees, closing out the sky, surrounding them with shaded hiding places and foreboding. They walked more slowly and closer together and when they saw an earth rampart ahead, coming out of the woods each side, they stopped. The road ran through it as if through a gateway, as if demanding permission to pass.
Lucy peered at it. ‘What’s that?’
Ali brought out her map again. ‘I think it’s a hill fort.’
‘Is it one of the three castles?’
‘No, they’re Norman. This is much older.’
‘Do we have to go through it?’ asked Lucy.
‘No, of course not,’ said Ali, looking back at the map. ‘We don’t have to do that at all. We could go back down the road and all the way round to Stourton, then through Zeals and back to Pen Selwood that way. It shouldn’t be more than – oh I don’t know – fifteen miles? Or we could walk straight through here and it’s a mile and a half at the outside. That’s a tough call. I just don’t know how to choose.’
‘It’s creepy,’ Lucy said. ‘It reminds me of The Lord of the Rings. There’ll be a Ringwraith or something like that waiting inside.’
‘Don’t be so stupid. You just need to . . .’ Ali broke off, suddenly noticing Jo, who was staring ahead, her face white and her lips moving almost silently. Ali strained to hear what she was saying.
‘Now what’s the matter with you?’ Ali asked. ‘I don’t know what’s happening today. The world’s gone mad. Come on, let’s go,’ but Jo didn’t move, ignored her, stared ahead as if Lucy had spoken the truth and some bad spirit was waiting in ambush. She was shivering, calling silently for Gally, needing support.
Lucy frowned at her, looked away and waded into the long grass on the verge. She came back holding a piece of paper. ‘Someone’s messing around,’ she said. ‘They’ve left us a message.
’
Ali turned to her. ‘What does it say?’
‘It says, “There’s nothing here to hurt you. Have no fear. Walk on.”’
Jo turned slowly and held out her hand for it. The pencilled message was written in capital letters on a sheet of ruled paper torn from a notepad. A rough hole had been punched in the top.
‘Where was this?’ she asked.
‘Spiked on a stick, just there, right beside the road.’
‘How could it be for us?’ said Ali. ‘It must be kids again. They’re having some game of their own.’
‘It hasn’t been there long,’ Lucy objected. ‘It’s like brand new. I think it must be for us.’
‘I’ll put it back.’
However it had got there, it seemed to change things. Jo walked on and Lucy followed as they passed through the gap, seeing the old ramparts flanking them on either side, making a sweeping ring out amongst the trees. Then the banks curved in on the road again, closing the circle at the far end of the old fort. They came out of the woodland to fields on the left of the road.
Ali saw it first. ‘There’s another message.’ She ran ahead and pulled it off the stick, but instead of running back she stood there, reading it, with a puzzled expression. Lucy and Jo walked up to her.
‘It’s not kids,’ she said. ‘Kids wouldn’t write this. Listen to what it says. It says “We’re never quite old and we’re never quite young, you and me.” That’s not kids, is it? Then underneath it says “Remember that?” with a question mark. It’s definitely not kids.’ She held it out to them.
‘It can’t be meant for us. Perhaps it’s a treasure hunt,’ suggested Lucy, ‘though it’s a funny sort of clue.’
‘It could be a quote from something,’ Ali suggested, ‘or a line from a song?’
The other two shook their heads and they walked on but as the landscape opened up, so Jo was suddenly less sure about that – much less sure. In the course of the next hundred footfalls, those words began to seem as old as the bones of the ridge itself and as familiar as the palm of her hand, and they came with a tune attached to them. She tried to hum it, but she kept losing it, then she thought back to the boy with the bicycle and twisted to look behind, feeling him close by, hoping he might be coming along after them. They passed a house on the right and a farm down a drive to the left and she found there was nothing new there either, just deep familiarity. Someone else was close by too. Jo knew Gally was there in some new and startling way. She was the first to see the final sheet of paper pinned to its stick, and she went to it with her heart beating like a bird. There were three words on the paper.
‘Welcome back, Gally’ was all it said.
CHAPTER 16
Ferney had stood staring up until the scream from above broke the pull like snapped elastic and sent him reeling backwards, clutching at his bike for support. What he saw up there cut through him: a girl, long hair dangling towards him, sliding impossibly far over the parapet on her way down to death. Knowing she must fall, he dropped the bike and ran towards the tower in sick horror and in the slow motion of the worst of dreams, believing he had caused this, knowing it was hopeless. His feet caught a root, but his speed carried him leaping beyond the stumble. The thought flashed through him, in the middle of his desperate sprint, that this was absurd – to find her and lose her again immediately. At the base of the wall he rocked back, eyes searching up in fear, expecting to see gravity’s express rushing her down to him, to where her fall would kill them both. Better that way, he thought. Everything had stopped. She was still there, halfway over the stonework, but hands were gripping her, hauling her back to safety, back out of his sight.
He walked backwards, a pace at a time, keeping his eyes on the top of the tower, as if he might have to rush to her rescue again. The girls had disappeared so he took his bicycle into the edge of the woodland, crouching down in the green cover, eyes fixed on the doorway, too shaken to know clearly what he should do next.
He saw it over and over in his mind’s eye: long hair hanging down, surrounding and obscuring the face that craned towards the killing earth. It had been blonde hair. Lucy, the blonde Lucy – it must have been. Whatever had leapt between him and the girls had pulled Lucy to him.
Three girls came quietly out of the tower’s doorway and down the steps. From a hundred yards away he could see her, Lucy, the tallest of them. The other two were supporting her. Ferney crept forward as far as he could without showing himself. Gally was there, almost within reach and comfortably within the pull of the village – Gally who might be Lucy. He was desperate to know for certain so that he could reveal himself to her and make sure he would not lose her again.
He stretched forward, studying each one to differentiate the overwhelming sense of Gally that was flooding from the three of them. It seemed absurd that he could not immediately tell. They walked to the edge of the clearing and sat down. He moved through the trees, closer, but had to stop short where there was a wide gap. He must not be caught skulking, spying on them. He saw the other two comforting Lucy with arms round her shoulders until time had passed and they all seemed calmer, then they studied a map, got to their feet and, to his intense pleasure, headed into the woods straight towards the village.
He abandoned his bike and took to older paths, running to get ahead, looping well away from them in the shelter of the trees. They walked slowly and he raced further on as they neared the junction where, as the first sign to Gally, he laid down an arrow of branches as they had each done before in their lives. They almost caught him. He picked up their chatter round the corner in time to flatten himself behind a tree only feet away, so that he heard all their talk, drinking in their voices, trying to match them to invisible faces, trying to discern which one fuelled this near-bursting passion inside him.
When they had gone on he cut across to the west, dropped down the slope and ran through the open trees along the lower terrace to gain ground. He stopped at the old ramparts – Kenny Wilkins’ camp as they’d called it these past three hundred years, Cenwalch’s as it had been way back. He knew for sure that she would be afraid there. It was where their whole long story had begun in blood and terror. In every new life she always had to pass through the fear it triggered until she remembered what had happened and recognised the root of that fear.
Knowing that, he reached into his bag, pulled out his pad and wrote her a message of love and reassurance. Skewering the note on a stick, he ran on ahead, fired by the idea that this was the kindest way to bring her home and the best way to end his awful uncertainty by seeing her reaction.
He watched from the bushes as the three girls read the second note, ‘We’re never quite old and we’re never quite young.’ The line had been playing inside his head ever since it first woke up there, prodding him to remember more, teasing him with the start of a tune. It had a power to it that felt both old and recent and he thought it must surely have the same effect on her, but as he watched them read it he could not be sure. They all looked puzzled. Now they were walking towards where he hid, getting closer and closer, and for the first time since that brief meeting at Montacute he had the opportunity to study their faces. The short one was the one with the map. Everything about the way she walked and talked showed she was bossy. She looked young, not yet woken into womanhood. The taller, dark-haired girl was blank, restrained, a little removed from the other two, and he couldn’t get a sense of her at all. There was no sign of any joy rising in her. That left the tall blonde Lucy who had so nearly fallen from the tower when their gazes met, just as if he had pulled her down with the force of their recognition. She reminded him of his neighbour’s Afghan puppy, fine and floppy and endlessly playful. She was alive to everything around her. He looked at her, on the edge of her coming beauty, and thought he could see how Gally’s purpose would blossom in her.
He backed carefully away into the thicker cover behind him, turned and raced on again, nearing the outskirts of the village, knowing that time and distance were runn
ing out together. The answer came to him and it was so simple and he pinned it all on three plain words, ‘Welcome back Gally’, pegged into the ground. He held his breath as they came closer but he suddenly found he already knew the answer. It was the quiet dark girl who went to it and he could see Gally’s animating spirit in the way she moved. He filled with love as he watched her read it. He thought she would turn to show it to the others but instead she sank to the ground as she read the words. It was the quiet dark girl who began to cry and his heart went out to her.
CHAPTER 17
Lucy and Ali walked up to where Jo was kneeling, still staring at the note in her hands.
‘Are you crying?’ Lucy asked. She reached out to take the sheet of paper but Jo wouldn’t let go.
Ali was craning over to see it. ‘It doesn’t mean anything, at least nothing worth crying about,’ she said. ‘I mean, who’s Gally? I don’t know anyone called Gally, do you?’
‘Yes,’ said Jo, ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Who?’
‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘Of course it is.’ She had never told them about her friend.
‘Oh, don’t be daft.’
‘It’s always been me,’ she said, ‘and all the time I thought it was somebody else.’ She wiped the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand and stood up, looking from one girl to the other with slight surprise, then she stared back into the woods and down the road ahead as if expecting to see somebody else.
‘You’re frightening me,’ Ali said quietly.
‘There’s no need. I’m fine. Come on.’
She strode off towards the village. The other two walked fast behind her, trying to catch up, exchanging looks and mouthing silent questions at each other.
They came to a scatter of houses where five lanes curved round the corners of fields to meet in a loose group of junctions. Jo was still walking fast, straight to a gate on the far side where she stopped. They caught up to find her staring in through a graveyard at an old stone church with a squat tower.