Ancient Echoes

by Robert Holdstock

  Traffic shunted past, heading down the Church street to the ring road. It was cool in the shadow of the tower and Jack was glad to be out of the sun.

  ‘What do you think is below us?’ the dowser asked. Jack looked down, then around, at the wide flagstones, the cracked pavement by the road.

  ‘The crypt?’ he volunteered.

  ‘The suicide gate through the city’s curtain wall,’ Garth corrected. ‘Glanum was divided in two by a massive wall, several layers deep, labyrinthine. It separated the urban district, which had a gate to the outside, from the Sanctuary heart. The remains of the gate into the Sanctuary are below you.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘It’s my job to tell. Come on.’

  He led the way round St John’s and through the narrow alley called Mourning Passage. They crossed High Street, passed through the crowds in Market Square to emerge onto Ickendon Way, a wide, busy road, now, but part of an ancient droving road. From here they walked briskly to the river. On the lawned bank, watching the barges and pleasure boats, Garth lit a cigar and pointed across to the recreation fields on the far side.

  ‘The buried city crosses below the river and reaches its widest point. The urban area, with a single, towered gate opening to the north. Anything strike you as strange?’

  ‘The city was built across the river?’ Jack asked, frowning. ‘It wouldn’t be easy to defend.’

  ‘Exactly,’ the man said. ‘It would be a stupid thing to do, wouldn’t it? A weak design. You build along the bank, like at London, or Paris, and use natural wells. And you make sure you strongly defend an access way to the river itself.’

  ‘Maybe the river changed its course. This could be the new course.’

  ‘River’s been flowing here for thousands of years.’

  ‘Maybe there were water gates. Like in London.’

  ‘Interesting idea. But I don’t think so. Again: why make the main gate so close to two water gates? That’s a concentration of weak points. It makes no sense. Does it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m glad you agree. Think hard about what we’ve just been saying. Come on.’

  Garth, now, retraced their steps, working their way through Exburgh towards the Hercules excavation. Glanum, he explained as they walked, was shaped like a coffin, wide and single-gated at the head-end, the urban area with its forges, bakeries, potteries, leather-workers and discreet houses. The triple curtain wall, with its suicide passage, divided the coffin at the shoulders. The tapering body of the ‘coffin’, where the multitude of shrines were located, the actual heart of Glanum, lay substantially below Exburgh Castle hill.

  As they walked up Abermyle Street, through Gogmagog Square and back towards the church, Garth defined the perimeter of the city, showing how the old walls were now below modern buildings, how nothing of the new in any way reflected the buried.

  ‘It doesn’t fit,’ Garth said. ‘Everything below you, everything to do with Glanum, is at the wrong angle. It’s rare to encounter a hidden city like this, though they certainly exist. You usually get clues in the new town: Oldgate; Westgate; Oldwall street; Roman Way; Tower Green. You know the sort of thing. New towns are built on old towns and the shadows are there in the architecture.’

  ‘But not here …’

  ‘No. Not here. Because this is Glanum,’ he added cryptically. ‘The hidden city doesn’t belong, Jack. What do you remember from the museum? What is it you know about Glanum?’

  ‘That Glanum was obliterated on this site. Sometime in the third or fourth century AD. Between then and the first town of Exburgh, five hundred years later, this was just wildwood, wild country. The two histories don’t connect.’

  ‘What if there weren’t two histories?’

  ‘Not two histories? I don’t get it.’

  ‘What if Glanum was never here!’

  ‘You mean – like a fake city? You’re digging up a fake city?’

  Garth was expressionless as they walked. He said only, ‘Funny word: fake.’

  Jack let Garth’s words hang in his mind as they came to Westwell Passage and turned to walk along a cobbled way until they reached the excavation of the shrine to Hercules. And here, for the first time in the real world, he saw the blinded faces of the running hunters, the bull-runners.

  And for a moment, as he gazed at them, time seemed to stop. The faces on the wall seemed to scream at him, but he could hear nothing. The gouged eyes seemed to weep as he watched them, but nothing had changed, only the pattern of shadow on the colour as the sun faded behind clouds.

  He knew these people! They inhabited his dreams. Their violent retreat from the consequences of some terrible action was a sound of terror, and a fear of reprisal, and a stink of effort as they fled across the land that was ever-present in his life.

  ‘Who blinded them?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘The person who painted them, I expect. Far away, in the past, or wherever. Your friend Angela might have a few suggestions. The blinding was part of the depiction. A curse, perhaps. Or a wish. Have you ever seen these faces before? In the town, I mean.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not in a church, somewhere? Or an old hall? Or the museum?’

  ‘No. Only in visions.’

  Jack understood the point of the question: if this savage painting of his dream-hunters was represented elsewhere in Exburgh, then he might have seen the faces, registered them subliminally, used them to inform his hallucinatory encounters with the running couple. But he could not recall seeing such faces in the churches, though there was an abundance of Green Men, gargoyles, and the stone faces of mediaeval peasants. And if his drawings of Greyface and Greenface had been taken from anything in the museum, then his school’s headteacher, Mr Keeble, would have recognized them: he’d been the museum’s curator for years, before returning to the teaching profession. Besides, Jack instinctively knew that such exposure could never have happened. It simply didn’t feel right. He couldn’t articulate the particular feeling to the grey-haired man who now led him around the inner walls of what had once been a sanctuary, but the bull-runners were real. He wasn’t hallucinating them; he wasn’t daydreaming them, drawing on scenes from TV or comics, or film. He wasn’t dreaming them at all! They were as real, when they appeared in his Vision, as the ancient plaster wall around the pit, with its fading colours, its frescoes depicting faces, figures and animals.

  Greyface and Greenface were close enough to touch (almost). When they came to him, he was running with them, slipping from this world to theirs, aware of the textures of the earth, the gusting of the wind, the sounds and scents of the landscape they fought against.

  They were not dreams. The bull-runners were a part of him. And even now he could feel them, hear them, but distantly, as if on the other side of a high wall, and as he realized this, so he realized that they had always been there, like a vague distraction, an ache, a murmuring in the ear, a part of his life that only occasionally concerned him when it became acute.

  He realized that he was standing again by the mutilated faces of his dream, his hands reaching out to touch the thin paint, the grey, the green, the touches of red, feeling the moulded plaster below. Garth was standing behind him and he turned, squinting up at the man against the bright sky.

  ‘It feels angry here. I’m frightened.’

  ‘You’ve been drifting,’ Garth said quietly. ‘You’ve been standing there for thirty minutes …’

  Jack was shocked. Seconds ago he’d been walking round the walls, listening as Garth suggested possible meanings in the various painted motifs of the place.

  Seconds ago!

  ‘I think I’ll go home.’

  ‘Stay,’ the man said. ‘I want to show you something else. This place has a grip on you. It has the same grip on me. I want you to enter more deeply … will you?’

  The words were frightening. Jack tried to see the look in Garth’s eyes, but there was just shadow below the brim of the hat, the faint waft of cigar smoke from t
he figure, the man standing on the rise of earth away from the wall, looking down at the shaking youth.

  ‘I don’t like it here,’ Jack said loudly. ‘I feel sick.’

  ‘So do I. The place is alive. I know that now. That’s why I want you to enter more deeply. Can you feel the bull-runners?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are they close?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I want to be there when they next come. I want to see for myself …’

  ‘But I already told you, I can’t tell when they’re going to come! It happens suddenly. I’ll go home now, please.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Garth stepped down and gripped Jack’s shoulder; almost hauling him up to the level of earth, then propelling him to the ladder from the pit. His voice was a fierce whisper. ‘Don’t be afraid, boy. You have more control than you know. I was frightened at first, just like you. The fear passes – believe me. I want to show you where the shadows are. Stand in the shadows for a while and then go home. But come again. Come and help me out. There’s a lot of digging to do, and I like the way you see things. Do you understand?’

  ‘Do you see the bull-runners too?’

  ‘If I did, I wouldn’t need you. I’m not letting you go, Jack. This place is too alive and you’re part of that life. If you want to know more, you’ve got to do what I say. Understand?’

  Jack got the point. Garth released his grip and they walked the street at speed, the man’s hand an occasional encouragement on his back, Jack almost stumbling at times. They crossed a road between complaining cars, walked over grass to the side of St John’s, approached one of the flying buttresses, walking a straight line towards the sheer wall. Jack pulled back as they approached the dark stone, but Garth urged him on, until a moment later the man walked straight into the church, reeling back, holding his face.

  Jack stood beside him, not knowing what to do. Garth fumbled in his pocket for a handkerchief, wiped at the blood that streamed from his nose.

  ‘Damn and blast!’

  He looked furiously up at the church. ‘I’d forgotten this … this …’ he bit back the expletive. ‘This thing was in the way. Damn! Come on, we have to go round.’

  He paced along the wall, occasionally glancing up, dabbing at his nose. Jack followed behind, aware of the curious looks from the drivers on the Broadway, but now intrigued, his apprehension dissipated, perhaps by the odd impact of man on church, perhaps by being away from the excavation.

  Garth was in his own world, it seemed. They entered the church, paced down the north aisle, and for a moment hesitated below a modern stained glass window that depicted the Garden of Eden and the dove released from the Ark, after the Flood.

  ‘There’s no way through,’ Garth said. ‘What about down here …’

  ‘Why don’t we just walk through Mourning Passage?’

  The man stared at Jack for a second, then frowned, then smiled. He led the way back to the main doors, out and down the steps, and so to Mourning Passage, where he picked up speed again and followed an odd route until they came to the site of an excavation from four years ago, now preserved beneath a newly-built shopping centre, specifically, below the shoe shop.

  The store was just closing, which would mean denying access to the ruins, but the store-manager knew John Garth and welcomed him in. He led the way to the rear of the shop and then down steps to the neon-lit room. An observation ramp ran all the way around the chamber; the remains of the shrine were now enclosed in glass.

  Jack had been here two years ago and had been as little impressed then as he was now, finding no particular fascination in the exposed layers of red brick, the flint walls defining rooms and entrance ways, and the broken expanses of plaster with the faint impressions of goats, satyrs, bulls and sun discs.

  To his surprise, Garth agreed. ‘It’s a shrine to Minerva: two a penny stuff. But it’s all we could really get to, and that’s the frustration, because just beyond the far wall it starts to get very interesting indeed!’

  He moved round to a low door in the solid earth that bordered the excavation.

  ‘As you’ll have realized, if you’re any good at orientation, a bloody great office block is built between us and the place where the heart of the city begins. The foundations have gone down through a part of it, but it’s likely that most of what is really interesting is still there, just inaccessible. We can only get to a fragment of it. Older by far than Minerva and the dear, decaying Bacchus.’ He used a key to open the low door, then reached in to switch on a light. Beyond the door was an earthy passage, just wide enough to accommodate them if they crawled on all fours along the wooden slats. Garth pushed Jack ahead of him. The tunnel was bright with fluorescence, opening after ten yards into a roughly hewn, claustrophobic chamber some ten feet across and four feet high. There were hints of colour, here, on a peculiarly organic-looking mass in one corner. As Jack grew accustomed to the earth and stone textures of the place, he realized he was looking at a small part of a massive carved structure, deeply embedded in the earth, protruding in this one place with a ripple of muscle and knobby excrescences, animal certainly, but shapeless because of the partial nature of its exposure.

  ‘What the hell is it?’ he asked, running his hand nervously over the cold stone until Garth reached to pull his probing fingers away, for fear, perhaps, that the boy would dislodge some of the flaking ochre that still adhered.

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ the man said. ‘The truth lies very deep, far down below the town above us. But we found bones here, human and animal, and signs that the shrines and sanctuaries continue ahead of you. Which is below the Castle – Castle Hill. The narrow end of the hidden city. The heart of Glanum. The shrines within the inner city form a channel into the heart. And my feeling is: the further they go in that direction, the older, the more primitive they get.’

  The confined space seemed suddenly to shrink a little, and Jack ducked, feeling the ceiling come down towards him. The ground vibrated.

  They were coming back, closer than ever. He could hear their voices …

  Garth’s hand was on his shoulder, his voice concerned. ‘Are you ill?’

  ‘I can’t breathe …’

  They were almost on him, they were exhausted, terrified, running for their lives!

  ‘Time to leave, then. You go first.’

  Jack needed no second invitation. He crawled at full speed on his hands and knees away from the chamber to the glassed-off area where Roman murals played. He raced up the stairs to the shoe shop, bursting through the door – breathless as he plunged into the dense wood, running between the trees, weaving through the light wells, half blinded by the shafting glare of the sun as it broke through the canopy.

  Greyface loped ahead of him, head turning as he sought the way through the tangles. He was shouting. Come on. Come on. I can hear water!

  Jack could hardly breathe. His lungs were bursting with the humidity and the thickness of the forest air.

  Come on!

  He put on a burst of speed, struck against a tree and stumbled, then ran on, while behind him loud breathing made him cry out, and a hand reached for him, jerking him back, away from the figure of Greyface, away from the thin light, back on his haunches, dragging him, dragging him …

  Onto the pavement!

  Garth was standing over him, blood running freely from his nose, his face twisted with concern. The sound of traffic was loud and a man’s voice was saying, ‘What the hell’s he up to? Running like that?’

  ‘Easy. Easy,’ Garth said and crouched by the trembling boy.

  Jack sat up and watched a container truck slide past in a cloud of grey smoke. ‘I was in the forest.’

  ‘I know. I caught a hint of the smell as you ran through the shop.’ He was crouching, now, quizzical. ‘How close are they?’

  Jack listened. The traffic growled along the Broadway, but he could hear them. He could hear Greyface shouting. They were in terrible danger again, alive by the skin
s of their teeth, by the strength in their legs.

  ‘Close,’ Jack whispered. ‘Coming closer.’

  7

  Intrigued and fascinated by the city dowser though he was, the very proximity of the bull-runners, their constant shouting, the constant danger, the overspill of adrenalin from their hunted bodies into his own, pre-occupied Jack totally for a while.

  They were close and coming closer, running through his dreams with moments of intense lucidity, before fading again into the distance. The odd reflectivity of his skin did not occur during these sleeping episodes, nor could Angela, occasionally sleeping over at the house and brought to Jack’s room when the shouting started, hear or scent the otherworld as she had done that day in class.

  During his waking hours the sound of the bull-runners was a constant breathless dash for safety, their running interspersed with fighting for survival, with swimming, with skirting the forests or the mountains where white towers shone, threatening them.

  With his parents, he had two meetings with Ruth at the hospital where she worked. They reviewed the video footage and saw the shimmering of light, like a film of oil around his face as he was ‘dreaming’; analysis of the film showed only normal wavelengths; there was nothing discreet or unusual in the glow.

  The chemical pads from his skin showed traces of complex terpenes and plant esters, chemicals that were alien to the human excretory system, but familiar to marshland. Somehow, then, Jack’s body had produced organic matter reflecting the landscape that he was hallucinating. Ruth was exercised in the extreme by this, almost wild in her excitement, and Jack agreed to have permanent swabs attached to his underarms, to be removed every day and posted to the hospital. He kept this up for a week, then because of the discomfort and inconvenience resorted to keeping a chemical record one day in seven.