Ancient Echoes

by Robert Holdstock

  The girl loved the animals; Angela loved the walking, through deep gorges, along the wide, slow rivers that flowed out of the central highlands; Jack enjoyed the canoeing, slipping away from his cares and duties to drift lazily below the steep cliffs, perforated with caves, covered with gnarled and stumpy oaks and proud pines, precariously growing from the rock, a literally vertical forest above the winding waterways.

  Like all good things, this time away from the pressures of work came to an end, and after ten days Angela took her leave of the farmhouse. She was scheduled to attend the Konference Nove Psychologie in Prague, and was giving a paper on ‘The Source and Meaning of Limbic System Echoes’. The paper had been written well in advance and she had spent her two days’ ‘preparation’ simply memorizing Wendy Cope’s splendid parody of W S Gilbert (A Policeman’s Lot) on the subject of ‘Patrolling the Unconscious of Ted Hughes’, the darkly mythical British Poet Laureate at that time.

  In order to make one of her points during the presentation she wanted to be able to look up from her notes and sing the lines.

  It was typical Angela: anything for effect.

  So with sadness, but anticipation, she made her farewells to the farm (‘But I shan’t miss you damned turkeys!’) and Jack drove her to the airport, before returning for the last few days of the holiday.

  Distracted without her, and now unable to take a kayak on the river – Natalie was too young – he took his daughter to the nearest gorge and descended the steep path to the wide, grassy bank with its thin pebble beach in the shallows. It was here that they’d had most of their picnics. The girl paddled and Jack swam, though the water was icy. They lay back on the grass and basked in the sun as it moved high overhead. Everything in the valley became steamy and drowsy. Canoes and kayaks drifted past, the paddlers’ young voices hollow and echoing, fading into the distance …

  After a while, Jack got up and stretched his arms and legs.

  He continued on along the river, wary of the steep slopes with their concealed paths, and the bushy hawthorn that could easily have concealed danger. The sun was still bright and the sides of the gorge were dropping to more open land. He cut inland for a while, struggling through undergrowth, wading across muddy streams, aware that there was a smell of smoke in the air, woodsmoke, a settlement close by.

  At some point the river turned and the land opened out into dense forest, with the mountains now behind him. He was approaching the bank again, and could hear the laughter and chattering of several young women. He moved towards the treeline and peered from the shadows, his heart beating hard with the humidity and effort of his long journey.

  There were five of them, all dressed in patchwork skirts and simple shawls. They had black hair tied in tight ringlets, all except the tallest and eldest who had fashioned her own luxurious locks into an elaborate pony-tail, high on the crown, flowing down around her shoulders. They were playing on the rocks that dropped to the river itself, which here was wide and sluggish, bordered by woodland on the other side.

  The girls were making linked loops of flowers into a single, draping necklace. When the flower ring was finished each of them in turn put it around her shoulders and ran twice around the group, laughing, sometimes almost hysterically, though the joke was lost on Jack.

  The tall girl was the last to wear the necklace, and when she had completed the ritual of running, to the rhythmic applause of the others, she flung the ring of bright blooms into the water.

  The five girls crowded together, watching how the flowers moved on the turbulent surface, one of them jumping up and down and clapping loudly in her excitement.

  It was she who turned suddenly to the far woods, looking nervous. There was movement there, dark shadow.

  At once the excitement stopped. The girls murmured with apprehension, huddling down and peering across the river. From his watching place, Jack could sense the movement too. There was a strong, strange smell on the air.

  A moment later, a loud series of bellows pierced the tranquillity with shocking effect. Huge curved tusks rose above the trees and five elephantine creatures charged through the edge wood, massive, shaggy bodies crushing the undergrowth. Their trunks were held high above the tangle of the forest. They thundered down the bank to plunge into the river, lowering tusks and shaking the long, amber hair that swathed their heaving flanks.

  The girls had screamed and fled as the five mastodons waded into the shallow river, heads swaying so that the curling ivory from their jaws raked the water.

  Suddenly they stopped, lowering trunks in unison to drink. After a few minutes these winter beasts turned into single file and began to walk up the river, belly deep, in the direction of the village.

  A figure moved past him, a shadow in the bright, cold sun, head low, body low, darting to the edge of the water and disappearing beyond the rocks where the flower girls had played. Jack rose quickly to follow, alert to possible danger, and as he came closer to the river he was aware that–

  Someone was calling from the flowing water. And he walked with less caution, more concern, to the bank …

  Disorientated: he was in the shadow of high, gloomy cliffs.

  Natalie was floating away from him, calling hysterically …

  He sat up! And blinked, staring in confusion at the struggling form in the river, now more than a hundred yards away. The shock hit him like a hammer blow, and he screamed as he jumped to his feet, running to the water’s edge.

  Floating away from him!

  ‘Nattie. Splash your arms! Oh Christ …!’

  He ran along the bank, but trees intervened and he struggled to find a way through. The river was slow, but Jack himself was a slow swimmer and he was afraid that if he entered the water it would take too long to catch the drowning girl. Natalie went below the surface and Jack screamed again, screamed for help, looking desperately back along the river, but they seemed quite alone.

  He flung himself into the water, crawling with all the strength his panic could muster, blinded by water, choking on water, unaware of the cold, unable to see the fair-haired girl he loved so much.

  Then he heard Natalie’s cry, and tried to shout, ‘Keep splashing your arms! Keep kicking the water! I’m coming. Daddy’s coming!’

  He was aware of something sleek and yellow sliding past him, the cold splash of water on his face as a paddle nearly struck his nose. Exhausted, he trod water, saw the slim kayak swerve around the struggling child, then suddenly turn over.

  When he had swum further he saw a girl dragging both Natalie and a kayak to the shore, Natalie’s arms around her neck. When Jack struggled to the narrow, muddy ‘beach’, she was rubbing the shivering girl’s arms and laughing with her.

  ‘Thank you …’ Jack said, and the canoeist stood up, glancing at him. She was tall and German, probably a student, wearing a black bikini bottom and a life-jacket over a saturated T-shirt.

  ‘She’s OK, I think,’ she said. Jack hugged his daughter, crying with relief and the after-shock of his day-dream.

  The girl had squeezed down into the kayak and was pushing herself back into the river. She seemed very confident. She had kept hold of boat, paddle and child, despite being knocked over by the abruptness of her turn.

  ‘Thank you again!’ Jack said. She looked at him sharply.

  ‘She’s a nice girl.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are lucky to have her.’

  ‘Yes. I know. Thank you again …’

  She drifted into the middle of the water, then began to paddle vigorously. As she rapidly vanished round the bend in the river, the ambiguity of her words struck home and Jack felt sick.

  If Natalie had been terrified in the water, she showed no signs of upset now, as if the German canoeist’s brief words with her had exorcized all terror. She played happily as they walked back to the farm, unaware that her father was shaking and himself in sudden apprehension.

  He had been dreaming, but the dream was the same as in those days when the bull-ru
nners had infrequently but powerfully invaded his mind’s eye. And yet they hadn’t been there – or had they? The female figure had been in silhouette – could it have been Greenface? He’d seen no sign of Greyface – unless he’d been watching from the Scalpcloak’s eyes! And the lucidity, the immediacy of the vision had been exactly as he remembered it.

  Mastodons, tundra-creatures, charging through a forest into water, scattering girls from a primitive village, interrupting their flower ritual …

  He could still smell the monsters; he could still hear the screams of the girls, fleeing for the thin security of their tents, their stockade, their parents.

  Was it part of the same sequence of visions that had haunted his childhood and his adolescence? Ten years without the bull-runners; ten years without any sense of Glanum as more than a stone shadow; ten years in which he had thought himself free of the Otherworld. But ten years of disappointment for Angela, who was eager to turn her training and understanding on the phenomenon: ‘I promised to keep my eye on you, and now there’s nothing to keep my eye on!’

  He realized at once, as he led Natalie up the winding track to the road and their holiday home, that he had to return to England. Without Angela, he was now a risk to his daughter, no more, no less than if he were subject to fits of epilepsy. He couldn’t afford these lapses with so precious a life at stake.

  What clawed at him was the thought of the two-day drive to their home in England. There was no way he felt able to risk the journey, so he called Angela at the conference hotel in Prague and waited for her to return. She arrived by taxi a day later, triumphant – she had already presented her paper when the urgent call from her husband had been put through to her – and with mixed feelings of horror, at her child’s near death, and excitement that encounters with the bull-runners might be returning.

  When they went to bed that night, Angela was passionate and close, her libido fed by the kudos of success, and perhaps by the more primal need that surfaces when a family has been threatened, the need for survival, for replacement. Throughout the mating, Jack cried silently against her shoulder.

  Once at home again, he dictated a detailed account of the shimmer, which Angela noted carefully.

  ‘Was there any sense of the runners?’

  ‘No … except that …’

  It was so hard to define, like trying to explain Angela’s presence in his dream, his certainty that a middle-aged man was her own partial presence …

  ‘I was watching from the tree line, behind the girls. I have a sense of my own face looking out, a striped, grey face, concealed in the light and shade of the underbrush, watching curiously. Perhaps I was Greyface …’

  ‘No sense of the woman at all?’

  ‘None at all. Maybe it was just a dream, a daydream. Maybe it doesn’t connect.’

  Angela was scrawling furiously, pushing her auburn hair back over her head, absorbed by her thoughts; after a minute or so she wound back the tape and started to transcribe it.

  Jack went outside where Natalie and her cousin, Ben, were splashing in the paddling pool, supervised by Ben’s minder, a cheery Australian girl who made sudden gasping sounds and begged a beer. Jack popped back into the house to fetch a cold lager, then went down to the bottom of the garden, staring out across the downs to the distant line of hills.

  A patch of woodland, a copse known as Battle Clumps, marked the part of those hills where the city of Glanum had flowed from the Deep, surfacing to entice, to capture John Garth, ten years ago.

  It was this view of the Mallon Hills that had finally convinced them to purchase the house, a ramshackle property on two floors overlooking Exburgh from the south, needing so much modernization and decoration that family life had operated constantly in the dust and debris of builders, the chaos of refurbishment. The large garden was mostly given over to an orchard, with paddocks beyond where a few sheep and three retired horses grazed. Its sense of boundary with wild country made it popular with Natalie’s friends, and they always seemed to have visitors.

  He looked, now, at the trees on the horizon that marked the drop down to the valley where Garth had hidden and lived for more than a year, and he felt, for the first time in ages, a need, almost a compulsion, to go back to the shrines of the hidden city, to the masks of the travellers, carved in antiquity, according to conventional wisdom; faces that had seemed alive when first exposed.

  Angela wanted to come with him, to watch him as he returned to the Hercules shrine, curious to know what was happening to her husband; but Rachel would be leaving at three in the afternoon, so Natalie would have to be supervised. ‘Why don’t we all go tomorrow?’

  He stood in the low-ceilinged room, looking at the bespectacled and beautiful woman, at the flow of her precise handwriting, the tumble of hair, and he heard:

  running

  And Greenface was close to him, her breath sweet, the sweat on her body oily, staining her tunic, making the green tattoos on her face seem to writhe like snakes as she came towards him

  running

  Close now, and desperate. She was alone. Greyface was not around. She was behind him, around him, before him

  inside him.

  ‘They’re coming back,’ he said to Angela, who at once rose from the table and came to him, feeling his skin, smelling his skin, looking closely for any sign of the shimmering.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘No. Not sure. It feels like it, though.’

  ‘Then you shouldn’t go out now. Stay home. If they’re close, we can record it.’

  ‘Not that close … Not yet … I need to go …’

  He was gasping for breath. Why?

  ‘Got to go,’ he stammered.

  Hooks pulled him. Memories of Garth were strong. He could feel the city shifting below the town, imagine the ochre crumbling from the walls, the masks, the frescoes …

  ‘It’s something I want to do alone.’

  ‘You’re not to drive. Jack, I absolutely insist on that! Your driving days are over. I’ll phone for a taxi.’

  ‘I agree. Quickly, though, quickly …’

  She’ll follow me, he thought as the taxi turned in the road to take him the two miles to Exburgh. She’ll find a way to look after Natalie and she’ll follow me.

  Greenface was calling to him. He started to whine, holding his eyes as the woman’s pain surfaced. She was calling to him, she was terrified. Greyface was close behind her, angry, his voice a low thunderous rumble as he challenged the woman, demanded the impossible, some impossible thing, some deed, some duty, something that terrified her, so that

  came close, looked through his eyes

  The taxi dropped down the steep road to the old town. Church spires and office blocks gleamed in the late afternoon sun; the river curled, silver and still, around the town centre, flowing towards the setting sun.

  ‘Here! Here’s fine!’

  He was almost above the hidden heart of the city, on the narrow road by the steep slopes of Castle Hill, where a handful of people wound their way to the ruined walls and Norman Keep at the summit. Below him, Glanum pulsed like a waking beast.

  He walked further into the town, towards St John’s in the distance, following a course that had less to do with modern thoroughfares than with a feeling of communication with forgotten alleys, hidden walls. And after a few minutes he came to the Hercules pit.

  He paid his money and went down the ramp, a remote figure among the few tourists who passed the plaster masks with a brief look, attracted more by the colourful frescoes on the north wall.

  Jack faced the masks, looking between them, challenging the blind eyes to open, trying to see beyond them.

  ‘You were dead. I thought you were dead.’

  Cold plaster remained sightless across the centuries.

  ‘Leave me alone. Leave me alone, for God’s sake. I have a child now, and I nearly killed her …’

  For ten years their world had drifted away from his, taking them into silence, into the distance
of space and time. Ten years of peace …

  The woman’s breath was suddenly hot on his neck. His sense of smell was excited by the oils that streaked her body. His head echoed to the thunder of her heart. She was frightened. She was being hunted. She was charged with energy, alert to every sound, every movement in a world of shattered light and shadows.

  Jack left the sanctuary and walked across the park. Shadow trees shifted in and out of his vision. He made his way steadily towards St John the Divine’s, where the suicide gate lay buried. Turning a corner, Greyface suddenly leered at him, ice-eyes flashing, teeth bright through the clay mask. When Jack stepped back with shock, he collided with a man carrying shopping, nearly knocking him over onto the cobbled stone road.

  Since they were the only two people in the street, the action must have seemed deliberate, and the older man struck out at his confused aggressor. Mumbling his apologies, Jack fled through Market Square.

  At last he came to the river and crossed a bridge, walking away from the city’s heart. But he turned back, thinking ‘Urban area’, and stared across the water at the spire of St John’s and the bulk of Castle Hill. A canal boat, gaudily painted in red and green Victorian designs, was chugging slowly against the flow. A laughing couple were struggling with a rowing boat, oars splashing uselessly as they circled helplessly. They were drifting slowly towards the dark maw of a cave, a vertical gash in the immense cliff that Jack could see shadowed, straddling the water.

  The cliff seemed to be rising from the earth, a ghostly movement that disorientated him. When a boulder, carved with crude faces and symbols, its wet surface catching a heavy, alien sun, slid suddenly, translucently into view right before his eyes, he again staggered back, turning among the trees, the dark rising columns, aware of a glimmering light – shimmering – somewhere to his left. He seemed to be sinking, but …