by Jon Jacks
‘Even worse?’ Beth repeated as her mum rifled through the journals towards the bottom of the trunk.
With an elated cry, her mum pulled out an old folder made from thin wooden slats, the cloth bindings threadbare and shredding.
She handed it to Beth, saying, ‘Open it; go on, Beth, open it!’
Even as she untied the ribbons holding the two slats together, Beth wanted to hold her nose.
Whatever was inside smelt horrendous.
The stench was worse than ever when she turned the top slat aside. It was like something had gone off, having been left and forgotten in the bottom of the fridge for months.
There wasn’t paper inside but something that looked like a solidified layer of oven pan grease.
It was hard, warped, and almost transparent.
Writing had been scratched into the surface, the ink having faded long ago to little more than the weak blue of a vein.
Tentatively, Beth picked one of the sheets up.
It was stiff, but as fragile as the wafers she’d had in Indian restaurants.
‘What is it? It’s not paper.’
‘Its skin; stretched animal skin!’
With a horrified grimace, Beth let the sheet fall back on top of the others.
Her mum laughed.
‘See, I told you the urge to write things down made our ancestors do some pretty weird things! Back in those days, that’s what they had to use for paper; skin cleaned and stretched. Gran reckons they made this themselves, probably from rabbits they had caught for the pot. No wonder their neighbours thought they were witches, eh? Can you imagine walking into their old cottage and finding sheets of this hanging up to dry?’
Beth wasn’t listening.
She had picked up the sheet again, and was studying it closely.
Yes, she hadn’t been mistaken.
This was the passage about Merlin entrapping the demons and fays once again.
But the only thing that made it recognisable were the names underneath; Gesta Britanniæ, Maidulph of Malmesbury.
It wasn’t that it was unreadable because the original ink had faded away; someone had taken the trouble to carefully trace each letter in a later and no doubt better quality ink.
But the words, if in English, were an older form of English that Beth didn’t recognise.
She wouldn’t even have been able to make out ‘Merlin’ if someone hadn’t helpfully written it down above one of the unrecognisable words.
‘So…’ Beth paused thoughtfully once again. She turned to her mum. ‘Why did you give up mum? Why did you stop trying to find answers to what you were going through?’
Her mum reached out, grasped her hands tenderly.
‘Because you were born, love. Gran said she went through the same thing when I was born. The dreams, the urge to find answers to them; they all just suddenly vanished.’
‘But…but mum, you…well, dad says…’
Beth struggled for a polite way of saying that her mum had been worse after her birth.
‘Dad says I was crazier, you mean?’
Her mum smiled wanly as she nodded in agreement.
‘That’s right, love; but you saw that yourself, didn’t you? And I’m sorry for that, I really really am, Beth love. But it was a different craziness. Once you were born, I felt somehow; I don’t know, it’s hard to describe – lonely, empty. It was an incredible sense of loss, like a great part of me had disappeared, vanished. It is crazy, I know, to say I missed that earlier me. This woman who’d had all these weird, frightening dreams I spent ages trying to understand. But I was a shell; yes, that’s it! I felt like I was nothing but an empty shell and all my insides – the real me – had simply gone away! So, like an idiot, I thought I could find the real me again if I just got happy, got drunk, or lived life in a dream of drugs and–’
‘Mum! That’s an awful thing to say.’ Beth was appalled. ‘I can’t have caused all that, I–’
Leaning forward, her mum hugged her tightly.
‘Beth, Beth! You misunderstood me! It wasn’t your fault, of course it wasn’t your fault! I don’t know what caused it, but I do know it wasn’t you!’
Reaching out with one hand, she flicked through one of the old journals.
‘See, it’s something weird that runs in our family. These poor women here write about it time and time again. And some of them, poor dears, had their babies even though they weren’t married. In those days, things like that could ruin any woman.’
Beth hugged her mum tightly. She couldn’t stop the tears that were beginning to fall.
‘Mum,’ she said, ‘it’s good to have you back mum!’
A cold, uncontrollable surge of horror abruptly ran through Beth.
Deep inside, deep down inside, she realised she was laughing.
Mischievously laughing!
Oh Beth, Beth! You are to blame dear! For here I am, a part of you now – and no longer a part of your poor mother.
*
Chapter 20
Was she possessed?
Possessed by some evil spirit, like in those films, The Exorcist, The Poltergeist?
How had that chair moved across the room last night?
Looking back, Beth could remember other things seeming to move, things she thought she had put in one place – she was sure she had placed them there – only for them to appear somewhere else.
In the commune, amongst the crusties, they had often accused her of being simpleminded, of misplacing things they knew, for sure, that they had placed just there. She had been the only one around to move it, so it must have been her.
But, naturally, she had put it all down to faulty memories.
We all did it, didn’t we? Thought we’d put something in such and such a place – we could have sworn we did – only to discover it somewhere else later.
Now, she suddenly wasn’t so sure.
She wondered if she should have told her mum. She should have asked her if she’d felt this way too; if she’d heard voices inside her.
But no one, no one in the notebooks, mentioned hearing voices.
They were just chaotic, unshakable thoughts, or recurring dreams, which they were all trying to make sense of.
Not inner, demonic voices.
No one talked of being possessed.
No one wondered if they should be asking the local priest for an exorcism.
So, despite the unusualness of her family, perhaps, yes, perhaps in this case, she was just imagining it.
Imagining the voice.
Talking to herself.
That was it.
Everyone talks to themselves at some point, don’t they?
That’s the way your conscience works, after all, isn’t it?
Hrumph; not in your case dear.
*
People talk of having a ‘restless sleep’.
They mean by this that they tossed and turned all night, and suffered disconcerting dreams.
So what terms could be used to describe Beth’s sleep that night?
Her dreams were of glaring, penetrating eyes.
Of witches, stretching tenderly shaved skin.
Of objects moving around the house, even though no one was touching them.
Finally, the sun’s sharp glare, streaming in through the window’s thin curtains, woke her up with a start.
She sighed with relief.
She stretched lazily, languidly turning to see the time on her bedside clock.
The clock wasn’t there.
The bedside table wasn’t there.
Startled, she sat up.
And then she realised that her bed wasn’t there either.
Glancing down, she
saw that the bed, table and clock were still there.
Still where they had always been.
She was floating. Floating within touching distance of the ceiling.
*
Chapter 21
Getting down from hovering just beneath the ceiling had been a lot easier than the startled Beth had thought it would be.
She had simply had to move as if she were getting out of the non-existent bed. Sliding her legs across a non-existent mattress and dangling them over the non-existent edge.
She had slowly dropped to the floor as if she had risen as usual from her bed.
She ended up standing alongside her bedside table as if it were all just a regular, normal morning.
She didn’t mention it to her mum.
What was the point?
*
As she silently finished her breakfast, she watched TV.
Whatever had interested yesterday morning’s hosts and newsreaders about Silbury Hill was no longer of interest to them.
All the world’s airports had come to a standstill.
No matter what part of the globe was being filmed, the shots were virtually the same; hordes of angry people thronging airport concourses, making themselves as comfortable as they could on their own luggage and coats.
Many were weeping. Many arguing, threatening flustered airline staff.
The departure boards were motionless. No planes were taking off. Every one had been grounded after reports that those already airborne were experiencing frightening flying conditions.
Airliners were suddenly losing stability or height.
At least two planes were known to have crashed. Over a hundred had only narrowly averted disaster.
People stared blankly at the arrival boards, fretting over any flight that was overly delayed.
The military had been similarly affected.
The only aircraft still airborne was a fighter plane that had been deliberately designed to be aerodynamically unstable. It relied instead on an array of computers to constantly compensate for any loss of lift and maintain its stability.
‘Is it the electrics, do you think love?’
Beth’s mum stared absently at the TV screen as she picked up the used cereal bowls from the table.
‘Electrics?’
‘Well, yes; it could be the electrics, couldn’t it? They’ve been playing up all morning. It took forever to boil the kettle earlier this morning. But now, for some reason, it’s just the opposite; the water’s boiling in next to no time.’
Beth frowned, wondering if her mum had just made a mistake. Got her timing wrong, something like that.
But as for the worldwide grounding of the planes, she couldn’t see what could have caused that at all.
‘I can’t see as our dodgy old kettle’s got anything to do with all these planes mum!’ Beth chuckled as she headed for the door.
She noticed that her mum still hadn’t had time to wash the bed sheets.
She thought about mentioning it to her mum.
Thought about saying, please wash them this morning mum!
She didn’t.
She would just look stupid, wouldn’t she?
But as she made her way down the garden path, something inside her told her she had made a huge mistake.
She should have said something.
*
Chapter 22
After her experience with Donna, Kate and Claris the previous day, Kate took particular care to avoid bumping into them as she made her way to school.
She stopped at corners, peering around them before stepping out into the street.
If anyone had seen her, they would have thought it unusual behaviour – at best, they would have thought she had been watching too many spy films – but Beth didn’t care.
Everyone already thought she was crazy anyway.
Fortunately, no one saw her, as far as she was aware.
And she didn’t see anything of Donna until she was already at school.
Kate, basking in the terrified fawning of those graced by her presence, contented herself with walking around the school grounds as if she were royalty.
Claris ambled alongside her, collecting together and carrying the ‘gifts’ of sweets and money being offered by their cowering subjects.
Donna came forlornly up the rear, her eyes full of the confusion, fear and longing of a beaten dog.
Beth had feared that the teachers would make a great show of greeting her back to school. Thankfully, however, (doubtlessly because they wanted to avoid anything that would remind everyone of Miss Hilary’s death) they treated her as if she had never been away.
Donna, Kate and Claris mostly took different classes, so when they appeared in the same room as Kate the threesome had at least been separated.
Donna resorted to taking her irritation out on Beth by glaring at her from across the room. Claris ignored her.
Kate observed her warily, as if still unsure what had happened yesterday. She eyed Beth as a potential and perhaps unpredictably dangerous rival for her new status.
Beth took advantage of a lull during the IT instruction class to browse the web.
She ignored the news headlines lamenting ‘the confusion caused by the strange – and hopefully temporary – anomalies in both the Laws of Aerodynamics and Thermodynamics.’
She searched instead for information on the riddle uncovered beneath Silbury Hill.
She found a number of newspaper websites offering an answer to the riddle.
Plumping for the first one listed, she found it repeated the riddle, with the interpretation set out below. The professor enlisted by the newspaper to provide the answer was quite scathing in regards to the riddle’s lack of complexity or ingenuity.
‘It’s not a particularly difficult riddle to answer. As we’d expect of what is, after all, nothing more than an admittedly elaborate prank. It’s produced by the kind of people who would normally be out at night creating corn circles.’
Beth clicked on other websites.
There was a general consensus that the riddle’s first lines were referring to Pi.
‘A constant number, Pi is the ratio of any circle’s circumference to its diameter. Although Pi has no real form, and therefore can’t be seen (except when written down), it dictates reality, such as the circles in the eyes we see with. It has long been recognised that, as constant numbers such as Pi actually govern form, they must necessarily have existed even before the creation of the universe. Long before you and I could think of them, in fact. And this led to the belief that they could only have arisen in the mind of God himself.’
But what about the last two lines? Beth thought; the lines about Troy?
So when Troy falls for a second time
My time finally ends too
She searched a number of other sites, only to find that most of them either ignored these last two lines or dismissed them as ‘an irrelevance’.
It was doubtlessly added, a site maintained, ‘primarily because it doesn’t make any sense – thereby making their riddle more enigmatic than otherwise deserved.’
Beth had heard of Troy.
She knew it was an ancient, walled city that had fallen to the Greeks after they had tricked the Trojans into accepting a huge, wooden horse full of their best warriors.
But that had been thousands of years ago. And Troy had lain in ruins for almost as long.
What’s more, Troy was in Turkey, t
housands of miles away from Silbury Hill.
Perhaps the experts were right.
Perhaps it was all just a great big joke.
The words ‘Silbury Hill – Latest’ flashed up in a banner running across the top of the screen.
Beth was tempted to ignore the banner’s urgent, red-tinged flashing. But the words were immediately followed by others that caught her interest.
‘Breaking news; Silbury Hill Calendar moving! Ar...’
Without waiting to read the rest, Beth clicked on the banner.
Unlike the riddle, the calendar was genuine; even the experts had confirmed that.
Clicking on the banner took her to a web page showing a diagram of the calendar and the video cameras placed around it.
The icon representing one of these cameras blinked, a superimposed title claiming that it was ‘Now Live’.
The grainy black and white images being recorded by the camera appeared in the top right hand corner of the screen.
This camera was more or less focused on the area where Beth had tumbled off the cog as it had come to an abrupt halt.
She could see the cogs that marked off the days.
Everything was wobbling slightly, as if the camera hadn’t been secured properly.
It suddenly dawned on Beth that it wasn’t the camera that was moving.
It was the cogs.
At the top of the screen, the remaining part of the banner she had earlier ignored confirmed this.
‘Silbury Hill Calendar moving! Archaeologists and scientists amazed!’
Below, there was extra, more explanatory text.
‘It has been established by our reporter that the Calendar’s slow movement was first noticed yesterday. It was later observed that the cogs had moved to register the passing of another day.’
I told them the calendar had moved by itself!
Beth was so ecstatic she almost crowed out loud, almost raised her arms in a grateful cheer.
She read on.
‘It had originally been presumed that the cogs had been knocked or dislodged by a careless archaeologist. But playback of the camera’s recording revealed that the cogs’ movement had taken place unaided.’
The cogs’ movement was now more pronounced, more obvious than ever, on the video footage.
The teeth of one cog were pushing hard against the teeth of another.
Inaudibly, the cogs clicked into their new position.
It registered the passing of one more day.
That would be today’s date then, Beth surmised.
With the fizz and buzz of interrupted electronic signals, the computer’s screen abruptly blanked out.
*