Ancient Echoes (12 page)

Angela was frustrated. ‘It’s like trying to photograph a fabulous beast. Every time it’s seen, there’s no camera. Every time there’s a camera, no beast.’

‘There’s a beast. Make no mistake,’ Jack said, and reached for the bottle to refill their glasses.

They were running him down, hunting him like an animal, and he fled across the broken land, between the rocks, the bushes, over dried streams and along the dry mud gulleys of the other world. They were running him down …

He sat up in bed, his head throbbing with pain. Angela slept beside him, exhausted by thinking, writing and alcohol. The video blinked at him, the three hour loop catching his every breath, the shimmer on his skin.

He held out his hands, aware of the haze of light in the darkness.

‘Angela …’ he breathed.

They were close behind him, screaming at him and he covered the wild land with long strides, his chest bursting with the effort.

They were running him down … an animal …

He staggered from the room, hitting the door, wrenching it open and walking unsteadily out onto the moonlit landing. The sound of the pursuit made him wail with fear. His legs wanted to move in rhythm, in sympathy with the shadow-creature that fled the hunters. Every muscle in his body was aflame, every sense heightened so that the world outside this darkened house drummed upon him like a persistent, shocking rain.

And something made him think:
record this.

He found his way back to the bedroom, but he couldn’t call out, couldn’t raise the sleeping woman. The red light on the camera flickered and he stared at it.

Watch me. Keep an eye on me …

Then he went to the wardrobe and crouched before the mirror, aware of the glowing face, the gleaming, sweaty flesh of his body, his belly heaving, his hands spread on his thighs, light seeping from his hair, from his eyes.

They were coming through!

He tried to scream, but all the sound of his voice was sucked into the vacuum that accompanied the passage of the man. Greyface leapt from him and Jack felt his body torn from the inside out. He shuddered, shedding the gleaming shadow of the hunter, who turned and cried out as if with pain and a fury of triumph.

‘Catch me
now
if you can!’

In the mirror, Greenface ended her fusion with the kneeling man, and again Jack’s body was wrenched. Like a woman struggling out of tight-fitting clothes, the glowing green body detached from him, then saw Greyface, who lunged.

‘We made it through!’

‘No!’

Watching from isolation, helpless, immobile, Jack saw the woman turn and run to him. She came out of the glass, out of his own pale reflection, and

burst into him

He swallowed her. He heard her running, fleeing deeply down, while in the glass Greyface scowled and drew away, drew back into shadow, his voice growing distant.

They had come from inside him. Not from a world in parallel, but from inside him. As he knelt, watching Greyface fade as a grinning eel draws down into the murk of the bottom of a pool, so he felt the woman in his mind, retracing her steps, crying out with fear, with exasperation, lost in a land that hunted her.

And that land was Jack Chatwin himself. And she was running home, oblivious of danger, a frightened spirit, returning to her source.

Greyface loomed above the kneeling man, his face twisted with fury.

‘Fetch her back!’

Jack couldn’t speak. He was paralysed, all but his eyes. His tongue was heavy, his face locked. The woman ran into him, a shadow in his dreams. Finally, Greyface crossed the darkened room to the window. He looked at the distant glow above
Exburgh, above Glanum, then passed into the hall. Watching in the mirror, Jack tried to scream. Angela turned in her sleep, disturbed by the sudden sound of their daughter, crying out. There was noise downstairs, the back door slamming. Distantly, Natalie wailed. Frozen inside his body, Jack realized that Greyface was running to the hidden city, Natalie taken in response to the loss of the woman.

As Angela woke, so the spell broke and Jack staggered to his feet, screaming, ‘Call the police. He’s got Nattie!’

From the window he saw the glimmering shape of the man, moving fast across the field at the bottom of the garden. A brief glance into the girl’s room established that she had gone. He tugged on gardening shoes and an old raincoat from inside the utility room and began to run, covering the garden in seconds, leaping the wire fence and striking out into the darkness.

Behind him, Angela was shouting. Lights in neighbouring houses were beginning to glow.

For a few minutes he thought he would die. He was terrified of Greyface. He could not begin to understand the process by which this monster had appeared in the bedroom, at night, from his own day-dreaming mind, all he knew was that the monster had his daughter, and that she was in terrible danger …

Suddenly, she was there, a pale figure in white nightie, hands clasped in front of her, a frightened face on a motionless body.

Jack dropped to his knees in front of her, grasped the girl’s shoulders.

‘Nattie?’

‘I’m cold.’ He looked around, but there was no sign of the man, or the glow that had briefly been associated with him. The girl was beginning to shake, but she wasn’t crying.

‘Nattie, are you all right? Did he hurt you?’

She shook her head. ‘He told me a funny story. He’s nice. He said to tell you something.’

‘Tell me then.’

‘You’ve taken something of his. You can’t keep her for ever. Fetch her back. If you don’t, he’ll take something of yours.’

‘Will he, indeed! What else did he say?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What about the funny story?’

Natalie frowned, thinking hard, then shook her head. ‘I’ve forgotten it. But it made me laugh.’

You can’t keep her for ever. Fetch her back
…

Five days later the woman came back, a shadowy, frightened presence at the edge of the forest, close to a wide river that surged and bubbled over dark rocks.

It was a maddening haunting. She inhabited the edge of his vision. However hard he tried he could not quite see her, but he dreamed of her, watched her as she hunted small game, smelled the fires she lit, in a clearing among stone ruins, sometimes caught snatches of her song.

Eventually she came to a church, at the side of a wide square, where a crimson sun cast a perpetual twilight. Here, she hid in the dark spaces, ate when she could, slept and cried below the corrupt statues of strange gods.

He imagined, too, that he could feel her uncertainty. She would not leave her own world again, but she was if not helpless without her male partner, at least less adequate than before. She called to him, pleadingly, then angrily. At night she huddled, taking sleep in short naps, always wary of danger.

She was thinking that she should return, back to the source, the scene of their crime.

This is how she thought of it: their crime. Jack knew that she was frightened of the city, the stone towers, the hunters from that ancient place who followed the bull, seeking revenge for a deed whose nature eluded the watching man.

Jack felt like a voyeur; at the worst of times, which were the most lucid, Greenface crept so far to the river’s edge, crouching there, that he could smell her scent and see the way her eyes glittered behind the mask of paint. But the sun was bright and she was part of the green, an inhabitant of two worlds, an inhabitant of the shadow.

During this time, the video recording of the ‘auto-exorcism’, as Angela called it, was computer enhanced, analysed electronically, scanned at various wavelengths, even played to a professed psychic. None of the techniques were able to enhance the flash of shadow that had been caught visually, the shape that Jack had quite literally
shed.
It was amorphous, lasted one fiftieth of a second, but obscured the thin gleam of moonlight on one of the polished wooden bed posts.

For the first time in their life together, Angela’s questions, and her notes, were half-hearted. The shadow was physical evidence of the phenomenon to be added to the observable
shimmering
that had been part of Jack’s boyhood. The realization that one ghost was abroad in the city, and one holding back through fear, begged careful thought, not just in regard to what was happening, but of the consequences, and it was the obvious consequence that was now terrifying the woman, since she lived every day with her husband’s almost palpable fear.

Greyface had physically taken their daughter. He had threatened them. He was not far away, and perhaps, like the woman within, he was watching them constantly.

‘Let’s move away. For a while, at least.’ Angela spoke quietly, cradling Natalie, who was drowsy. It was mid-evening and they were sitting in half-light listening to music.

‘How would that help?’

‘The male is embroiled with the city. You seem to feel that, so to move away …’

‘I don’t think distance is a factor. I think he’ll come wherever we are. I don’t know what to do …’

They put the girl in her room, locked the windows, then locked every door and window of the house. Before he went to bed, Jack watched the old town for a while, but the only light was from cars, and the late-night disco in the Grand hotel.

He was woken at three in the morning, opening his eyes as a gentle pressure on his shoulder roused him. Natalie was standing by the bed, her fingers on his bare skin, squeezing rhythmically. He sat up and the girl’s hand dropped away.

‘Nattie?’

She stared at him, half-smiling.

‘He wants to talk to you.’

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 …