Ancient Echoes (10 page)

‘It must have been hell for you. Steve was …’

‘I don’t
want
to know the bastard’s name. I just want you. Come back to me – but please! Only if you’re sure.’

She was slightly startled. She agreed silently, then added, ‘I know I’m going to be sure. Give me a few weeks, that’s all. Just a few weeks. But Jack … you
have
to come to Cambridge. Steve’s been doing – sorry … The Department of Psychology are doing some really interesting stuff with dreaming and a new thing, computer generated
Virtual Reality.
It’s going to be big. It’s going to change lives! And it might be a way of getting a
visual
record of the bull-runners.’

‘I don’t want to talk about this now …’

‘No, of course not. I understand. But
have
you seen them recently?’

‘They’re around. They’ve not presented any primary visions, not for a long while. I really
don’t
want to talk about that. OK?’

‘I have to go.’

‘I know. That’s why I don’t want to talk about anything but us.’

She grinned over her shoulder. ‘As I said to you once before, you’re my life’s work. I’ll be keeping my eye on you!’

‘You and John Garth both, it seems.’

Years had passed, years of inner silence, years of change. In the early summer, to celebrate his twenty-eighth birthday, Jack took Angela and their five year old daughter, Natalie, to a ‘surprise’ location in France, an old farmhouse in the mountainous Perigord region, ramshackle but fully equipped, and with turkeys (noisy and disgustingly messy), hens (noisy but egg-laying) and small black-spotted pigs (clean, quiet, but unwelcomingly curious) as their garden companions. The farm belonged to a work colleague of his, a man in his fifties with no family commitments who had bought the small house years before, visited the place for two weeks every year, and otherwise took pleasure in ‘lending’ it to friends for their own holidays.

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-runners 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.