by Jon Jacks
‘Things will be different this time Beth, I promise! I’ve thrown away all my pills, my booze. Since you left, I’ve been better! I’ve tidied myself up a lot!’
Beth noted the ‘since you left’.
So, what’re you saying mum? That the way you were was all down to me, yeah?
Perhaps Beth’s mum saw the flash of anger in Beth’s eyes.
Perhaps she wanted to make sure this was all a fresh start between them.
But whatever the reason, she said suddenly, ‘And now everyone knows you weren’t crazy Beth! It just seemed so unbelievable at the time, right, yeah? You understand that, don’t you love?’
Beth shrugged.
‘I know mum. You said that every time I called home to let you know I was all right, remember?’
And every time her mum had said it, Beth had hung up.
*
Yeah, thanks for reminding me of that mum.
Not even you believed me when I mentioned the flipped coin.
Everyone thought I was crazy. Crazy like my mum.
And that’s why I left mum.
Because I didn’t want anyone thinking I was turning out to be like you!
‘Of course I remember your calls love! How could I forget? I wanted you to know that I realised those silly men in that courtroom had got it all wrong. I wanted you to come back! To let me know where you were staying!’
Sure mum, you figured out those men were wrong, but only later.
Only when those damn symbols started appearing everywhere!
*
The symbols had started appearing on walls as graffiti not long after Beth’s court case.
She had first seen them when she had gone into town to beg.
The numbers and size of the symbols increased with each visit.
It was like a graphic battle, one symbol being sprayed over and erasing the other.
The eyes stared down at you from hoardings. They watched you as you passed defaced posters. They followed you as you walked by post-boxes and lampposts.
The words ‘God’ and ‘Horus’ began to appear alongside them.
Soon, too, there were accompanying phrases, usually revolving around words like ‘Kingdom’, ‘Prevail’ and ‘Power’.
Beth had looked up Horus on a library computer.
An Egyptian, falcon-headed Sky God.
He had lost an eye in a battle with his evil uncle Set.
(Or was that his brother Set? Beth had become increasingly confused on that point.)
The eye had been magically restored, taking on the magical, eerie light of the moon.
His other eye was more akin to the brighter sun.
Reporting on the rash of graffiti, the newspapers had insisted that no matter how the symbols were drawn, they represented the Eye of God.
After all, even when it was drawn with the lines that made the triangle look like a pyramid, wasn’t this how it appeared on every American Dollar bill?
Besides, the interest of the newspapers’ lay in the way their readers could ‘fool a friend into buying the next round of drinks’, simply by drawing the symbols on either side of a coin.
Some had even worryingly called the trick ‘The Devil’s own luck’.
No one could explain why the laws of chance had changed in this way.
Least of all when the same lottery numbers came up exactly the same and in exactly the same order over three weeks.
There were other examples, including a house hit five times by lightning in a single month. There was also a frightening increase in ‘unlucky, one-in-a-million’ motorway pileups, and, fortunately, a rise in near-miraculous escapes.
‘There was no need to leave home Beth! No one thinks you’re crazy anymore!’
Beth’s mum hugged her tightly once again.
‘Your room’s just as you left it love! I knew you’d be back, knew you’d come back one day!’
‘Yeah, right, thanks mum,’ Beth mumbled, trying to sound as grateful as she could.
Did that room mean anything to her anymore?
The posters of the pop stars on the wall.
The line-up of cuddly toys on her bed.
The books of teenage romance.
Somehow, it just didn’t feel her anymore.
*
Chapter 10
Beth had been right; this wasn’t really her room anymore.
It was like she had walked into someone else’s room.
Someone much younger than her. Someone less worldly.
The single bed, with its flowered quilt.
The small wooden chair by the door, with its strawberry-patterned pillow.
The drawers, painted white and pink.
The curtains at the window, quaint and daintily frilled. Like they belonged in a country cottage.
She didn’t belong here.
*
Thankfully, Beth’s mum had left her to come up the stairs on her own.
Beth had insisted that she needed a little bit of time on her own before dinner.
Her mum had chuckled, said she understood.
She had headed off to the kitchen, saying she had a lot to be getting on with anyway.
‘It seems ages since I last had to iron your school clothes!’
‘School?’
Beth had been surprised. She hadn’t even thought about school since she had run away all those months ago.
‘It’s part of the agreement dear. The agreement with the police. You need to start school tomorrow!’
*
‘School! That’s just great!’
Beth grumbled to herself as she moved towards her bedroom’s half-opened window.
It was much darker outside than she had expected, as if a heavy storm were on its way. The air seemed sharp, seemed to crackle. It felt like it was about to explode with bolt after bolt of lightning.
As she looked down on the street below, yellow eyes stared up at her hungrily.
The yellow eyes of a wolf, half hidden by a lamppost.
Startled, Beth involuntary jumped back from the window.
Her foot caught on the edge of a rug, causing her to stumble.
She fell uncontrollably towards the wooden end of her bed.
Beth couldn’t be sure what happened next.
The small chair seemed to slide across the room. She ended up safely sitting on it, rather than smashing her head hard against the edge of her bed.
What the…?
She jumped out of the chair, like it had suddenly become electrified.
She spun around, gazing at it in a mix of horror and amazement.
Surely the chair didn’t…?
She abruptly remembered that she had been looking out of the window.
I can’t have seen a…!
What the heck is it out there?
She rushed back to the window.
It was a normal day once again, the sun weakly shining from behind hazy clouds.
Just as it had been when the police had dropped her off at the house only minutes ago.
A white boxer dog was cockily making its way along the pavement.
It had left its mark on the lamppost.
But…it doesn’t seem quite right. Doesn’t seem real, somehow.
She wasn’t such an idiot that she would mistake a dog like that for a wolf!
She looked back towards the chair.
The chair that had seemed to move by itself.
; It was by the bed.
Not by the door. Where she was almost sure it had been earlier.
Where it usually was, in fact.
But, yeah, okay – it could be that she had moved it.
And just forgotten about it, right?
But she had seen a wolf!
It had looked at her.
Hungrily, too.
But…but it wasn’t the hunger you’d expect of a wolf; the hunger for a tasty victim.
It was a hunger for the excitement of the chase.
A hunger for the command to hunt the prey down.
And it had been waiting for the command to come from her.
*
Chapter 11
How had she known that the wolf was waiting for a command from her?
Beth thought about this once again as she poured breakfast cereal into her bowl.
Her mum was with her, absently watching the television. A pair of ridiculously chirpy presenters were demonstrating a new carpet-cleaning device.
Beth wasn’t sure how she knew the wolf was waiting for a command.
She just did.
Had she recognised something in those eyes?
Something similar to what she had seen in Foal’s sparkling, excited gaze whenever the little dog was waiting for Beth to take her out for a run?
Yes, yes; that must have been it!
Now all I have to figure out is how I came to see a wolf standing outside my bedroom window.
*
Without even thinking about it, Beth had moved onto pouring the milk over her cornflakes.
She stopped halfway through as a picture of Silbury Hill flashed up on the television.
A man was talking about ‘an amazing find’.
‘No, we don’t mean this,’ the man continued, speaking over numerously angled shots of the Sword in the Stone. ‘Undoubtedly, it would have been the archaeological find of the century if had been real. Unfortunately, it’s just a fake. If a clever one.’
The woman who had been Beth’s chief interrogator came up on screen. Her blond hair whipped around her face in a strong wind.
A subtitle appeared beneath her on the screen; Dr Jane Prellor, Assistant Chief Archaeologist, Silbury Hill Excavation Team.
‘Yes, I’m sorry to disappoint followers of the Arthurian legends,’ she said into the microphone being held up in front of her face. ‘But I’m afraid this elaborate contraption is the work of modern mischief-makers rather than Merlin. It was placed inside the uppermost of Silbury Hill’s two chambers, rather than the less accessible and only recently discovered lower chamber.’
The interviewer frowned seriously.
‘But, in its way, it was this that led to an even more amazing discovery? Is that right?’
Dr Jane Prellor smiled, raising a hand to stop a long strand of hair curling across her eyes.
‘That’s right, Ben; something that would make even the discovery of the real Sword in the Stone pale into insignificance.’
As she talked, the camera took the viewer on a swift, edited trip down the steps leading into the lower chamber.
Even Beth, who had already seen the machine, gawped in wonder, as if seeing it for the first time.
Was it really so big?
How could anything made of such huge stone discs and gears ever hope to move in any way?
Seen up close, and from wildly different angles, it appeared unfathomably complex.
‘It completely changes the way we think of the people who constructed structures like Silbury Hill,’ Dr Prellor continued to explain over the images. ‘It displays a grasp of technology that we previously thought was beyond them.’
Through the magic of television editing, interviewer and interviewee were abruptly standing by the machine.
‘It really is an incredible device Dr Prellor. But do we know what it is? Or what it was used for?’
‘We certainly do Ben.’
The camera once again lovingly lingered over the beauty of the stone machine.
Up close, it showed the cogs, the teeth, the symbols.
‘It’s undoubtedly a calendar. And an amazingly sophisticated one at that. It would have been used to track the course of the planets in the sky; probably to arrange religious festivals and observances.’
‘So how did it work? Surely it didn’t have a power source?’
Dr Prellor laughed good-naturedly.
‘Well, it did if you’d call human muscle a power source. It would have been slowly turned by hand, probably by the same small amount each day.’
‘And this isn’t a hoax?’
‘Definitely not. As you can see, unlike the sword and the stone, this would be completely untransportable. It’s very sophistication, too, discounts the involvement of any but the most ridiculously intelligent hoaxer. We have cogs representing blocks of hundreds of years. Cogs representing years. And even cogs marking off months, and even days.’
‘So if it’s thousands of years old, the question is; does it still work?’
‘Oh yes, most definitely. And I’m afraid we know the answer to that because the tricksters who’d broken into the chamber had moved its pointer to yesterday’s date.’
Beth felt a lurch in her stomach as she found herself staring once again at the very spot where the cogs had come to an abrupt halt, catapulting her into space.
‘We’ve ensured it won’t be tampered with again, Ben, by installing cameras to keep an eye on it.’
There were shots of a number of small cameras positioned around the machine.
A few examples of the grainy, black and white film they were recording followed.
In these shots the machine looked eerier than ever, almost ghostly.
Abruptly, everything changed.
The screen filled once again with an overly-bright studio.
A stupidly grinning couple were sitting on a red sofa.
‘Oh, they don’t have anything interesting on these shows anymore do they, love?’
Beth’s mum put the television remote back down on the kitchen worktop.
Beth was about to complain, but realised she didn’t want to.
Not when she had just got back with her mum after all this time.
Not when her mum seemed, surprisingly, to have finally put all that crazy behaviour behind her.
She seemed, well, almost normal.
Not that Beth knew how a normal mum was supposed to behave. But she guessed it must be something like this.
Her school uniform, all washed and ironed, rather than still lying crumpled and dirty in the wash basket.
A cornflake box that actually contained cornflakes.
Milk that wasn’t yellowing and sour.
A kitchen that didn’t smell of stale booze.
And, most amazing of all, her mum was actually there in the kitchen as Beth ate her breakfast.
This time in the morning, she would usually have still been in bed.
Still dozing fitfully, and getting tangled in the sheets she was now carefully, rhythmically ironing.
There was even a newspaper, lying opened on the edge of the worktop, as if her mum was actually taking an interest in the world outside the confines of her own confused mind.
Even though she was seeing the newspaper from an odd, low angle, Beth could tell that the main picture was of the Sword in the Stone.
‘Sorry mum; are you reading this?’ Beth reached for the newspaper.
‘No, not just at the moment love. You take it if you want.’
Her mum had gone back to ironing while staring somewhat blankly at the television screen.
The newspaper article was full of other shots of the Sword in the Stone, taken from diff
erent angles.
For the first time, Beth could see what it looked like now it had been completely uncovered and cleaned up.
It was just how she had imagined the Sword in the Stone would have looked.
Or, rather, it seemed to be an amalgamation of how similar swords had appeared in films she had seen.
Excalibur. Disney’s The Sword in the Stone.
Added to this there were her own more fantastic imaginings, usually conjured up while she listened to either her mum or gran telling her stories about King Arthur, Queen Guinevere, Merlin, Morgan le Fay and the Lady of the Lake.
(And yes, she knew enough about these stories to know that it wasn’t Excalibur that Arthur had pulled from the stone.)
Why had her mum and gran told her all these tales?
She couldn’t think of anyone from school who had heard anything but the most basic versions of these legends.
Beth glanced back at her mum curiously.
Why wasn’t she excited by these pictures of the Sword in the Stone?
Okay, so it was a fake; but it was an amazing fake!
And it had been found beneath Silbury Hill at that!
*
Beth had been brought up in a house cluttered with all kinds of fake Arthurian materials.
Celtic-styled wallpaper and furnishings.
Statutes of knights, maidens, sorcerers and dragons.
Pseudo Holy Grail goblets.
And, yes, a ‘replica’ Excalibur fixed to the wall.
Her mum had even bought a ridiculously expensive and elaborately embroidered gown, one she would sometimes wear on an evening.
She used to move around the house as if taking part in some otherwise unseen fairy dance.
Strangely, these were the only times that Beth could recall being completely relaxed and at ease with her mum. The only times Beth didn’t feel that her mum could at any moment reach for the whiskey, vodka or rum that would plunge her once more into angry despair.
Looking about her, it dawned on Beth that all the Arthurian paraphernalia had disappeared.
Even the walls had been painted, either magnolia or white.
Gone were all the vibrant, often clashing colours. The wheeling, complexly intertwined patterns.
Perhaps mum’s new found stability rested on casting her past – and all that pseudo Arthurian past – away.
*
In the newspaper pictures, the sword’s hilt gleamed with all the emerald greens, sapphire blues and ruby reds that had disappeared from her mum’s life.
There was also a riddle. The riddle engraved into the stone that Beth had managed to only partially reveal.
I can’t be seen yet appear in every eye for you to see
I have no form yet form all things
I was here before you thought I was
Yet only in your thinking can you recognise me
So when Troy falls for a second time
My time finally ends too