Ancient Echoes (11 page)

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 …

It’s
coming up from below!

Greyface was calling to him, taunting him. The hunter was circling, out of sight, sending shadow birds scurrying from the bushes. Piercing whistles, mocking laughter, mingled with the dull roar of traffic.

Jack panicked and started to run. A hand grabbed him, slapped his face.

The shadows faded, a less alien sun caught his eyes, made him squint as Angela held him, shaking him, her words slowly coming clear.

‘I knew you’d watch over me,’ he gasped with relief.

‘Come on. Jack. Come on. We’re going home. You’re a danger, and not just to others.’ She scanned him, searched his face, amazed. ‘You’re glowing – like fire. We have to get this recorded. Come on, Jack. Come home …’

But the hold of
Glanum
was too strong.

He let Angela take him back through the streets, to the municipal car park, but he insisted she drive him to his parents, to their house above the city. Here, with the sound of running loud in his ears, with the stifling presence of a forest he could not see, with the scent of blood and sweat from two people
who were so close he could almost touch them, he stood at the bottom of the front drive and looked down the hill.

As if it were yesterday, he could remember Garth strolling towards him, coat flapping, smoke coiling from the stub of his cigar. He could see the man’s shape against the setting sun on the glimmering roofs of the town, and like the ghosts that haunted him, he felt he could reach out and take Garth’s hand.

You’re the boy who sees other worlds
…

You’re the man who dowses for lost cities
…

‘What happened to you?’ he whispered, and a gentle touch on his shoulder made him turn. Angela put her arm around his shoulders, followed his gaze to the sprawl of Exburgh. ‘What happened to who? Who are you talking about?’

‘Garth.’

‘Oh yes. Of course. You miss him.’

‘I hardly knew him, but yes. I miss him. What’s happening to me? It’s come back, but it’s different. It’s like they’re …’ he reached out, running a hand through the warm air, rubbing the air against his palm with his fingers. ‘It’s like they’re right beside me.’

‘You said the city was rising. Are you still seeing the city?’

‘Yes … but more distantly. Like a photograph projected on a wall – the real and the ghostly mixed together.’

It was like a dark shadow above the churches, the town hall, the multi-storey car parks, the clutter of structure that makes a modern town. If he blinked he saw reality, but if he looked hard enough he could see a hill, groves of trees, the clutter of red-tiled buildings, a shadowy, shimmering illusion of something that might once have been, but which might also be his imagination.

Is
this how it was for John Garth? Is the world he inhabited an overlapping vision of the alien and the real?

He said, ‘But Greenface is behind me, watching over my shoulder. She keeps talking to me, murmuring things, touching me …’

Sensual
…
that touch
… he
couldn’t tell Angela, but the touch of the alien aroused him, as if she had always been intimate with him, and now looked to him for strength, for companionship.

‘Can you understand what she says?’ Angela was examining him closely, disappointed, perhaps because the film of ‘otherness’ was not now present on his skin.

He thought of the woman, let her breathing grow loud, let his mind slip away from Angela.

‘
Time
to come through
…
found gate
…
at last
…
searched so hard
…
look after me
…’

‘Oh Christ!’

Angela grabbed him, turned him sharply to face her, watching his eyes.

‘What is it? What? Come on, Jack. What’s happening?’

‘They’re coming through …’

She practically dragged him to the car, while his parents stood concerned and unhappy. He sat in the passenger seat, strapped by the seat belt, watching as Angela talked briefly with the older couple then returned to the car, reversing out of the drive with a speed approaching the dangerous. She stopped just once, at neighbours, to pick up Natalie, and within an hour Jack was washed, naked, monitored, videoed … and crying …

‘Damn!’

Angela turned off the camera, came over once more to inspect her husband. Jack let her turn his face this way and that, enjoyed her hands on his body, tolerated the gradual detachment of the chemical pads and electrodes, listened to her sighs of frustration.

He wanted her. Naked, his skin cool, he suddenly wanted sex, and tried to tug her back to him, his head clearing fast.

‘Let me clear away the equipment, first. For God’s sake, Jack, you nearly killed yourself today. Again!’

‘Take your clothes off.’

‘Let me get cleared up, let me get Nattie to bed, let me scan the data and
then
we can play.’

He lunged at her. Greyface laughed, watching from behind him. The hunter easily blocked the blow from the woman, tripped her and tugged at her skirt and blouse.

‘This is nice,’ Greyface said. ‘The hair colour. Like amber. I like it. Long hair like amber. Wind it round your hand.’

Greyface showed him how to pin the wrists with a single, powerful grip. The girl was in the doorway, screaming, but the sound was swallowed by the forest, disturbing nothing more than animals.

‘Gently. Gently!’ Greyface mocked him. ‘This woman
loves
you … Give it to her
gently!’

Far from gently, Jack stretched down to suck the woman’s breast.

And suddenly Greyface reached out and jerked him by the hair, pulling him away, laughing. ‘Get up. Get
up
, you fool. I just want you to know that we’re close.’

He was standing, naked and shaking, powerfully aroused and bleeding from the scratches Angela had been able to inflict upon him before he had disabled her. In the doorway, Natalie was a huddled, silently sobbing figure, watching everything.

Angela stood, tugging down her skirt and closing her blouse. She ran to her daughter and hugged her. ‘It’s all right, darling. Daddy’s dreaming. He didn’t mean it. It’s all right.’

‘He was hurting you!’

‘No he wasn’t. He was just dreaming. Come downstairs, everything is all right. Daddy was having a nightmare.’ She glanced furiously over her shoulder. ‘Put your pants on, chief! Get downstairs!’

And then, with a quick frown, ‘Greyface?’

Close to tears, still numbed by what he had done, all Jack could murmur was, ‘I’m so sorry …’

‘Greyface?’
she insisted.

‘Yes … Oh Christ …’

‘I thought so. I could smell him. Jesus, he’s old … he’s from
somewhere
old
! Dress and come down.’ And to the child, ‘It’s okay, Nattie. Everything’s okay.’

With the girl settled, they huddled by the cold fire, curled up on the broad sofa, sipping vodka and tonic.

‘I hope we did the right thing,’ Angela murmured, swirling the ice in her glass. ‘What
do
you say to a child who sees an attempted rape by her father on her mother? Christ, I need some advice. I think.’

‘You seem to have done fine. She’s quite settled.’

‘Maybe trauma can do that to you.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Nor do I. With the near drowning, and this … I really do think it’s take-advice time. Any problems with that?’

Jack drained his glass, trying to block the sounds of the forest, the breathing behind his head, the tantalizing and painful feeling of his body about to split, like the silken pupa of a moth, splitting open to release the traveller within.

‘No,’ he said awkwardly. ‘I don’t have a problem with that. My problem is the sound in my head.’

There was nothing showing on his skin, no
shimmering.

They had already talked through the events of the day, the glimpses of a shadow city, overgrown and ruined, rising from below Exburgh. Angela’s wrist ached with taking notes. She had filled three hours of tape, getting Jack to analyse what he had experienced almost down to the prickling response of each individual hair on his neck.

But once home, there had been nothing, and although the chemical analyses of the various pads that had absorbed his sweat would be some days in the analysing, from the encephalo-graphical point of view he had shown no more neurological disturbance than a man daydreaming.