Ancient Echoes

by Robert Holdstock

  For a moment her words made no sense. ‘He wants to talk?’ Then he understood, the knowledge like a shot to the head. ‘Christ!’

  And he realized with a further moment’s shock that he could smell grass. He reached down to his daughter’s bare feet and felt the smooth, dew moist blades from his freshly-mown front lawn. ‘You’ve been out! How did you get out?’

  ‘Followed him out.’

  ‘Followed who out?’

  ‘The feathery man. He danced in the garden with me. He told me a funny story.’

  Angela had woken with the loud sound of voices and now grabbed for her housecoat. She was alarmed and angry.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Natalie’s been to a disco.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She’s been dancing outside. With a hairy, feathery man.’

  ‘She can’t have been!’

  Angela went quickly downstairs, her natural concern manifesting as exasperation.

  The front door was open. It hadn’t been forced, it had been unlocked. The key was still in place, but it was the spare key, which was usually kept hidden in a tin on the freezer. Natalie had known it was there, a fact that Angela had forgotten.

  Arms folded, she walked down the path. The street lamp illuminated the lawn, and she pointed to where the girl had run around the single gleaming silver birch that graced the garden.

  Jack was watching from the bedroom window, Natalie in his arms. He could see, clearly enough, that there were two sets of tracks on the wet grass around the moon-silvered tree.

  ‘Tell me the funny story,’ he whispered to the girl, but again Natalie shrugged.

  ‘Can’t remember it.’

  ‘But it made you laugh.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was he dressed in, this man who danced with you?’

  ‘A bird cloak, lots of feathers. But with hair on it. Different coloured hair.’

  ‘Does he have a name?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve got to guess it.’

  ‘Like in Rumpelstiltskin? Like in the story?’

  Natalie repeated the name from the fairy tale, but she could never get it right, this time managing Rumplit Skinny, which made Jack laugh, and his daughter giggled too.

  Guess my name, little girl.

  Guess my name like in the story.

  Guess my name and I’ll …

  And you’ll what? Guess your name and what would happen? He kissed his daughter on the cheek, then whispered, ‘I want you to promise me something. Will you promise me something?’

  Natalie squirmed in his arms. She was getting tall, and she was heavy, but she clung around his neck, blinking as she stared into the night. She hesitated, then nodded silently.

  ‘I don’t want you to guess his name. I don’t want you to dance with him again. I don’t want you to go outside at night. I don’t want you to listen to his funny stories.’

  ‘They make me laugh …’

  ‘He’s not a nice man, Nattie. Promise me that if he tries to talk to you, you’ll come and tell me first.’

  The girl nodded again, huddling into her father’s bosom. Then she said suddenly, ‘He wants to talk to you!’

  ‘I know. You’ve already told me. And when I talk to him I’m going to tell him to stay away from us.’

  But where to go? Where to talk to this creature?

  And as if his thought was transparent, the girl said, ‘He’s by the cave in the cliff.’

  ‘What cave? What cliff?’

  ‘The big cave, silly. By the funny building. There!’

  And she pointed out across Exburgh. ‘There!’ she said again, her expression of irritation older than her years. She was pointing towards the church, whose tower could just be seen against the sky. Jack turned as he held her so that her pointing finger drifted, but when he asked her to show him again, unerringly she found the spire of St John’s.

  ‘There! Silly …’

  ‘The church?’

  ‘The cave in the wall,’ she said.

  The entrance to the labyrinthine passage, Glanum’s suicide gate to the city of shrines!

  With Angela’s words of divided loyalty fresh in his mind (‘Tell him to leave us alone; but find out what you can about where they came from …’) Jack walked through the quiet streets towards the church, encountering little night activity until the main shopping centre, where the bright mall was filled with teenagers, fresh from a ‘rave’ in the Exburgh Hotel.

  Beyond the precinct the church rose darkly against the drifting cloud. The sounds of music and revelling faded behind him and he crossed the cemetery, coming round to the front steps, circling the building twice, before suddenly detecting the scent of water, and old, cold stone. He was standing, facing Castle Hill, looking inwards to the heart …

  Almost at once, the hidden city rose to confront him, night-shadow in the darkness, surging from the earth. A wall faced him, but a thin entrance began to glow, faint blue light defining a crack as if in rock. He was aware that he stood in a crowded grove of trees, where dangling wooden shapes clattered in a light breeze.

  Greyface stepped forward, leaning against the rock wall, squeezing his body through the narrow gap; waiting, watching. His eyes sparkled. He seemed to be draped in rags, but Jack could see the broken splay of feather, the lank fall of scalp hair. And there was the sheen of polished stone, a wide-bladed knife, resting on his hip.

  ‘Have you brought her back?’ the Scalpcloak asked.

  ‘Who are you? Why are you doing this to my family?’

  ‘You have someone I need. Give her up.’

  ‘I can’t. I have no idea–’

  ‘Give her up! She can’t have gone far, the land was too difficult. Bring her back and your life is your life, and your darling daughter can sleep in peace.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Jack whispered, and the ragged figure stepped out of the crevice in the cliff. He reached out and gripped Jack’s face in a hand that was broad, heavy-fingered and callused, twisting the man’s head this way, then that, the fingers bruising skin.

  The clay mask was cracked and the eyes ferocious.

  ‘I’ll take your Natalie,’ Greyface murmured. His breath smelled of blood. ‘I’ll take her bit by bit. I’ll steal her spirit, shade by shade … I’ll build my partner from the life of one you love … unless …’

  He smiled, released Jack and pushed him away. He stepped back into the darkness, and a girl giggled. A moment later Greyface reappeared, pulling the shivering, naked figure of Natalie into view.

  ‘My God!’ was all Jack could shout before stumbling forward, only to be repelled violently by the dark-feathered and hair-cloaked hunter. Natalie’s eyes were black and wide, her mouth open, her hands clutched tightly against her chest. She watched her father without comprehension.

  ‘I left her safely … in the house …’

  Greyface pushed the girl behind him.

  ‘Only a shade, Jack. The first of many. I shall pare her down, layer by layer, ghost by ghost. You can keep the flesh, much good that will do you. Unless you fetch her back!’

  A moment later he had gone and Jack ran after him, squeezing into the rock crevice and feeling his way blindly along the cramped passage beyond.

  The tunnel twisted. It echoed with sound, which might have been the retreating hunter, or just a subterranean wind, booming and surging somewhere ahead. The walls were carved: he could feel the lines and curves, but it was pitch-black, and the ceiling was getting lower.

  When he cracked his skull against rock for the third time, and felt blood oozing from the graze, he backed away from the further darkness, aware that he had begun to experience a primal fear that was quite irrational, that he had begun to imagine the rock passage as a crawlspace, that he was a child, crawling through a longing, loving mother, hard-wombed but enticing. He was dizzy with the feeling of sex, and fright, and he felt his way back to the grove of trees, staring at the crescent moon above, listening to the dull clatter of the grotesque wo
oden masks that were slung from boughs and stone arches.

  He took a tentative step forward, and

  suddenly tumbled down the steps of the church, twisting his wrist and ankle painfully, ending up on his side, the dark tower of St John’s above him, a scatter of summer stars behind a spreading, gentle cloud.

  He stood, holding his wrist, turning slowly on the spot as he looked for any sign of the sanctuary, but Greyface had with-drawn. All Jack could think of was his daughter’s shade, an echo of the girl, which the bull-runner had implied had been drawn from her, leaving her less than whole.

  And he remembered meeting John Garth on these steps, years ago, and being asked what lay below. He had answered ‘the crypt’, but Garth had said, ‘the suicide gate … the labyrinth … to the hidden city.’

  The suicide gate, then – if this illusion, this vision of magic was correct – the gate was a crack in the cliff, and the city lay beyond, concealed from the world by the earth itself.

  As he started for home, Jack turned to the church.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ he said aloud, aware of the melodrama. But unable to rid his mind of the gaping, giggling monstrosity that had been the shadow of his daughter, he picked up a stone from the flower border and slung it at the church. And again shouted, ‘I’ll be back!’

  13

  He paced around the kitchen, pretending to do things, watching the girl as she sat quietly at the pine table, making a clown puppet out of cardboard pieces. Her tongue was wedged firmly between her lips as she concentrated; her only sounds were little grunts of irritation and effort.

  ‘How do you feel Nattie?’

  She looked up, frowning, eyes bright, hair a little stringy with cow-gum. She didn’t speak and Jack went over to her, leaning down to meet her gaze. ‘Do you feel funny in any way?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Just thirsty.’

  ‘Ginger beer?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  He fetched the drink. The girl slurped noisily, then had difficulty removing her sticky fingers from the glass. Tongue between lips she leaned forward to press the next part of the red clown from the card.

  Jack walked the length of the kitchen again, staring out at the orchard, across the fields to the distant hills. He strode back to the hall, patting the girl’s shoulder as he passed her, picking up the newspaper from the telephone table. But in seconds he had again paced to the back door, his heart beginning to race.

  I’m going mad. I’m cracking up. I’ve got to stop this … Where the hell is Angela?

  The phone went and he ran to it quickly.

  ‘What’s going on, Jack?’ came a man’s voice at the other end. ‘Are you ill?’

  ‘Oh. Hi, Bob. No … I mean yes. But not seriously. I think my blood pressure’s up. A really bad headache this morning.’

  His section manager was clearly irritated. ‘Crap. You’re too young to have blood pressure. And you were scheduled to be in the marketing meeting at eleven. Without you we could only complete half the agenda.’

  Oh Christ!

  ‘I’m sorry, Bob. I should have called in.’

  ‘Yes. You should have. Are you on medication?’

  ‘No. Just resting. I’ll be in tomorrow. Can we reschedule the discussion?’

  ‘Already done. Tomorrow at nine. And that’s a.m. You will be there? With the ExoNel file?’

  ‘I won’t let you down. Again, I’m sorry. It was a hell of a weekend; a family problem, two sleepless nights.’

  ‘Okay, Jack. No harm done. Just make the meeting at nine. If you need to spend the rest of the day in a darkened room, we’ll sort something out.’

  ‘Thanks, Bob.’

  Damn!

  It had been a very foolish oversight. He’d been awake all night, sitting either in or outside the girl’s room. The ExoNel meeting had completely slipped his mind. Angela must have got up and gone to work as usual … and now he suddenly remembered breakfast, her conversation, her assumption that he was going to work late. Events cleared in his head, a dream breaking. He’d missed an important discussion; thank God it was only a preliminary brainstorming and not the presentation to clients. He bit his nail angrily, standing by the cool glass of the back door, letting the cold surface soothe his forehead. Natalie held up the first clown and he admired it, then felt her brow.

  No temperature. No signs of illness. No signs of change. No signs of anything wrong.

  He made her add up to fifty again, listening for the slightest hesitation. He made her do the alphabet. He made her sing two songs, though she soon tired of his persistence.

  Nothing was out of place, out of speed, out of rhythm.

  What had that creature been, then? What had that ghost been? It had looked so like his daughter.

  Again the phone jarred, this time Natalie’s school. She’d been missed, and again he went through the routine apologies, this time saying that the car had let him down, and he’d been forgetful.

  Yes, Natalie was fine; she was doing creative work, and yes, he’d practice the song with her that she’d be singing in the school play on Parents’ Day.

  He sat down across the pine table from the studious child, sipping strong coffee. Natalie asked him if she could go to school, now. She seemed quite keen, but when he said, ‘Not today, darling. I want you to do some paintings for me,’ she accepted the answer with only the slightest sigh.

  At midday, Angela called.

  ‘What’s going on? Why aren’t you at work?’

  ‘I’m not leaving her,’ he said. ‘I just feel frightened. I can’t explain it.’

  ‘Natalie? She’s there?’

  ‘Painting.’

  ‘Didn’t the Robinsons take her to school? I saw them driving up when I left this morning.’

  ‘I sent them away. I’m not letting her out of my sight.’

  ‘I thought we’d agreed at the weekend: to behave normally, not to disrupt her.’

  ‘You didn’t see what I saw,’ he said, and felt tearful panic quickly surfacing.

  ‘I’m coming home …’

  As the line went dead, the back door was shaken loudly, rattled on its hinges. Natalie was staring at it, solemn and quiet, quite motionless. What had she seen?

  ‘Was that the wind?’

  ‘I think so,’ the girl said. The garden was empty. The day was still, bright, no breeze that he could discern at all. He checked the lock; it was still firm. He strained to see left and right in the garden, but could perceive no movement, no shadow, no shape of human or beast.

  Christ, I’m cracking. Maybe it had just been a delusion, the whole thing at the church, the grinning ghoulish child …

  But it wasn’t a delusion, he knew it. He had spent his life being haunted; he had witnessed a city sailing majestically through the earth, and he had absorbed the image, and consoled his affronted psyche; he had accepted the phenomenon, made it a part of his life, with the echoing and screaming of the running couple. He had probably always known that there would be a moment when it would go too far, when something would have to give.

  He had seen too much, now; he had passed the point of acceptance. But instead of going crazy, – he was protected against insanity, a lifetime of living with ghosts had done that for him – instead, he was frightened so deeply in his heart that each time he drew breath he felt sick. It was a panic that was welling up, a wave of terror that he was just, just, keeping at bay, but it was coming closer, and it was focused through his daughter, because his mind had spewed out a scalp-cloaked animal man, who had his claws in Natalie.

  Jack could feel that touch, almost scent the blood. The door had rattled, the air had shifted, and it hadn’t been the wind. He was being watched, closely watched.

  There were other eyes upon him too and he almost howled his despair as he felt the woman shift towards him, to take over his mind’s eye.

  Where is he? How do I call him back?

  There was no language, just a certainty of meaning expressed through her green-faced gaz
e, the emanation of fear and loss that came from her body as she crouched in the twilight, in the shadow of ruins. She watched his world through his own eyes, but seemed not to hear his words as he shouted loudly, then tried to talk inwards, to find some way of communicating with the huntress.

  The green on her face flowed across her skin, an optical effect, an illusion, distracting him from the dark deeps of her eyes, from where she surveyed the world of her own nightmares.

  Where is he? How do I call him back?

  ‘You can’t. You can’t! Come out of me! Leave me alone! Go back to him, follow him, run with him, leave me alone!’

  Natalie was shrieking in terror.

  He’s got her again …

  ‘NO!’

  Natalie was sobbing hysterically, slamming the kitchen door closed against him as he stumbled to save her from …

  ‘Leave her alone!’

  He pushed at the door, but the key had turned, the security lock. He kicked frantically at the wooden panelling, splintering the wood.

  Natalie was screeching, fumbling at the door to the garden as he kicked his way into the kitchen to save her.

  ‘Natalie!’

  ‘Go away! Go away!’

  He watched her as she slammed the kitchen door behind her, running hysterically through the apple trees, towards the high fence that separated their garden from the paddocks. He felt his knees give way, slumped down on the vinyl flooring, aware of dry fragments of cat food, a pencil, the top of the tube of gum.

  ‘Oh my God …’

  He’s got her. I’m helpless.

  Greenface whispered in his ear: Where is he?

  ‘Who are you? What are you? Why can’t you leave me alone?’

  Bring him back.

  ‘He wants you to go to him! Leave me alone!’

  We were wrong to leave … we shouldn’t have run … bring him back …

  The pain in his face was like a fist as he smashed into the pine table, staggering to his feet. Then there was shattering glass and he was cut and the sudden stumble down the concrete step. He bludgeoned the trees with his body, aware of the slow fall of unripe apples. The red twilight confused him. The deep shadow frightened him. He turned and turned again in the place of temples, searching for his daughter among the rose-tinted stone, while Greenface, running at a crouch, followed his every step, keeping her distance, curious and watching.