Ancient Echoes (3 page)

Jack missed the older boy, partly for his sense of direction, his knack of always knowing what to do, what to suggest for fun; but mostly for his gruesome stories.

A year after running-from-the-fire, however, he met Angela, the daughter of friends of his own parents, and at once found a willing pair of ears for his own versions of the ‘gruesome’, discovering that he could satisfy his own imaginative craving by copying Roland, by evoking memories of Roland’s tales, and by describing, in as much detail as possible, his odd, occasional visions of the bull-runners. He could see and remember in such fine detail the various exotic landscapes that the hunted couple inhabited as they ran from the immense, red-faced beast which pursued them, and from the furious men who followed that beast, that his descriptions were awe-inspiring.

‘It’s as if you’ve really been there!’

And in a very real way, Jack had.

Angela was a tidy girl, orderly in her habits, precise in her thinking. She hated sports, preferring to read books about the mind, astronomy and bizarre events; so-called past-lives, which were fashionable parapsychology when she was nine years old, absorbed her thoroughly. She believed in them totally, but was unwilling to accept anything other than a rational basis for the phenomenon. It might or might not be reincarnation, but if it
were,
then reincarnation could be explained!

Her games invariably consisted of ‘projects’, analyses of her friends and family for evidence of reincarnation; searches in chalk quarries or other fossil sites for unusual remains (evidence of time travel); speculative essays about life on other planets. It was natural that she should begin to study Jack, and although their friendship waned towards the end of their primary school years and into their first years at Exburgh’s red-brick
comprehensive, they eventually came to be in the same class and joined the same group – which they called a tribe, the fashion of the time.

Angela’s interest in the phenomenon associated with Jack’s encounters remained high, and it was she who coined the word
‘shimmering’
for the film of other light that seemed to seep from Jack’s skin when the bull-runners were close.

Jack had finally escaped from school.

The endless questions from Ruth, the ‘retesting’ with electrodes as he described running-from-the-fire, and Angela’s long conversation with the psychologist afterwards had eaten up his spare time, and he was edgy and irritable as he met Simon and the others at the school gates.

‘Come on. There’s a lot to tell.’

‘Don’t do this,’ Angela called to him, standing away from the rest of the tribe. Jack ignored her.

Simon Baines’ parents always worked late, and his house, close to Jack’s, was a perfect place to go to after school. He’d been nicknamed ‘Mouse’ – alone in the house, although ‘Mouse’ hardly described his stocky, slightly swaggering gait and long, unkempt hair. He knew where to find the key to the glass-fronted cabinet where the Scotch, gin, Cognac and liqueurs were kept. Each drink was rationed carefully so that the dip in quantity wasn’t too obvious. Even so, lately there had been a questioning look in his father’s eyes as he studied the depleted bottle of Southern Comfort.

Most evenings, when Simon opened his house to the tribe, they watched videos, or played
Elite
, a 3-D space game that ran on Simon’s personal computer. He alone possessed such an extravagance; the computers at school were never made available for games. Jack was hopeless at
Elite
, which depended on lightning reflexes and a willingness to kill everything in sight. He preferred to watch the Baines’ collection of banned horror videos, and especially the pirated copy of
Clockwork Orange
which they kept poorly hidden in the drawer of their bedroom table.

They approached the house shortly after six, Angela trailing reluctantly behind. Jack’s parents wanted him home by seven, so there was not a lot of time, but Simon led the way to the front door, then stood back to collect the fifty pence coins, the price of entrance.

‘Don’t do this,’ Angela said again, standing at the bottom of the step. Jack shrugged her off, but felt his skin flush at her disapproving look. ‘You’re such a fool!’

‘I have to tell the story. I saw it today. I have to tell it.’

‘You’ll make it up. It’s all lies. I don’t like you, Jack. You’re cheating on Greenface.’

Simon gave Jack four of the six coins. ‘If you’re coming in,’ he said to Angela, his face pinched with hostility and dislike, ‘pay up. If you’re not: eff off!’

Angela stared at him for a moment. ‘You’re disgusting,’ she said coldly. Then with a
sharp glance at Jack she turned quickly away, hunched in her black school jacket, arms folded.

Inside, Jennifer was clumsily rolling a joint. Simon swore. ‘Not that! They always know how much they’ve got of that!’

But Jennifer moved away from him to the window and leaned out with her friend Deborah, laughing as they drew on the cigarette, blowing the smoke into the day.

‘Don’t worry, Mouse, we won’t give you away in court.’

‘We love your
body
too much.’

Laughter.

Simon’s parents had supplied the cannabis – inadvertently. The boy knew where everything was hidden, and how to get it, and kept most of his knowledge to himself. But the girls were sharper than him. They’d worked out
just
where to look and had taken their cut while the boy had been collecting the Jack-tale fee at the front door.

‘Come on. Come on.’

They went up to Simon’s room, closed the curtains and turned on the green light.

Jack sat on a high stool, the green spotlight on his face. The
boys in the tribe sat on the floor, the girls on the bed, all holding plastic cups of gin, all waiting for the story of Jack’s Vision.

It
was so easy.

Jack had noticed months ago how quickly the two girls, Jennifer and Deborah, changed from being threatening to so
gullible
when it came to engaging their imaginations in a little romance. He sensed there was an explanation, but also that as yet he was too inexperienced to understand it fully, and so he never confronted them at school, where they’d certainly cut him as dead as they always cut Mouse (who in any case seemed to ask for abuse, as if he somehow thrived on it). He just kept them at a distance, but fed them the fairytale on these after-school sessions, and happily took their money.

And it was especially easy today because they’d all
seen
the encounter, they’d seen the fuss, the filming, the arrival of the psychologist … All of them, now, accepted that Jack could glimpse a world in parallel to their own. And though they hadn’t heard the question and answer session in the technician’s room, they were up for the fantasy today more so than on any of the days when he’d lied, claiming to have encountered the hunters in order to boost his finances. He should have charged more!

After a while, he began to speak:

‘Their journey has now taken them away from the snows and the mountains of Eriodor
(he’d made the name up; it was the best he could do: a touch of Tolkien),
the land of the redskull knights … now the hunters, who are the hunted, have come to a land where the earth is older, where the creatures of the past struggle among the sucking swamps, and crowded, stinking forest of the oldest times …’

And later:

‘… I saw them making love, a time of naked joy in a place that is trying to kill them. But when they made love it was sensuous and sexy … it went on for several hours … They were aware that the Scorched Face, their guardian, watched
them from the treeline, smiling at them in this time of passion …’

And so on. He knew what the group wanted. He could read their faces, every one of them, knew how to add sexual titillation for Deborah, Rex, romantic longing for Jennifer and Kate, quest adventure for Danny and Sandra, and the macho detail of fights that always made Simon lick his lips and narrow his eyes as he sat cross-legged by the far wall, playing with the coins that were his cut of any evening in the house.

What they
all
really wanted was the
weird,
and to achieve this he simply combined what he had glimpsed in those terrifying moments of day-dream with the elements of fantasy that had always intrigued him: dragons and dinosaurs, time-travelling princesses from ancient Egypt, trigger words like Avalon, Atlantis, Lavondyss, Middle-earth. He had invented a burning face which watched the runners and warned them, The Scorched Face, a primal elemental which he used to get them out of trouble when his plotting failed him. And a wolf which served the same purpose by assisting their shape-changing into animals. He mixed it, he fixed it, and they loved it.

He was a born storyteller. He could have made a fortune in ancient times. Now he was making ten or twelve pounds a week evoking ancient echoes.

‘Greenface is carrying a child, I think. The wounds inflicted on her by the
Megatherium,
that giant creature, with its horned protuberances, gaping jaws and slashing claws, those wounds have healed, but she is still weak. She holds the stolen magic carefully at night. There is something in the obsidian flask that flows into her, and Greyface knows it. He’s jealous, but the child is his, and there are dangers all around … He’s trying to ensure that the pursuing Demon cannot find a way to enter the unborn child …’

He
didn’t want to handle the subject of childbirth. Besides, the Greenface in his vision wasn’t at all pregnant! He’d got into deep water trying to please the Romantics. Next time there’d have to be a miscarriage during a fight with a sabre-tooth.

It was nearly seven o’clock. Jack stopped speaking and walked silently from the room. He hoped that Angela would be outside waiting for him by the gate, but she’d gone home, angry.

The money for his Jack-tale felt good in his pocket.

His mother was tearful with guilty concern when he got home (she’d not been able to leave a meeting to go to the school and support him). She hugged him and fussed him. Later, when his father asked to hear what had happened, he simply recounted the brief details of his real glimpse into the parallel world, and concisely described the questions that Ruth had asked him afterwards.

He’d been frightened for a while, certainly, then elated. And he was still revelling in the experience of the encounter with the bull-runners.

Right now, though, he just wanted to watch TV.

A week later, Garth came to Jack’s house, climbing the hill from Exburgh slowly and steadily, walking in the middle of the road. It was evening, and the sun was setting behind the town. Garth was a dark shape against the glare from the west, his long coat flung back, his hands in his pockets. A trail of smoke drifted behind him as he chewed on the stub of a cigar.

Jack saw the man from the window of his room and went out to meet him, walking to the end of the path. He’d had a phone call from Angela about two hours before, saying that Garth wanted to speak to him. Angela’s father had taken photographs of the new frescoes in the pit, and the girl, who’d been with him, was surprised at the similarity between the blinded mask-faces on the east wall, and the sketches of the bull-runners, Greyface and Greenface, that Jack had been occasionally drawing over the years. Her articulated surprise had provoked the dowser’s curiosity.

Angela cycled slowly behind the man, trying to keep her balance on the mountain bike as she weaved a zig-zag across the road. When Garth emerged from the sun’s glare he tossed the cigar to the road then kicked it to the kerb, where it dropped into a drain. He removed his hat and swept fingers through his loose, long hair, then grinned.

‘Are you the boy who sees other worlds?’ he asked as he came up to Jack.

‘Yes. You’re the man who dowses for buried cities. I came to the excavation with the school.’

Garth towered above the boy, reaching out a hand that almost enclosed Jack’s fingers. The pressure was gentle, the skin of the man’s hand coarse and etched. The face that smiled
down was deeply lined too, around the eyes especially, which glittered greyly, almost without feature. The smell of the cigar was fresh. There was a fleck of black paper on the man’s thin upper lip, and as if conscious of Jack’s gaze on it he picked it away. Garth hadn’t shaved for a couple of days, and a salt and pepper stubble covered his chin and cheeks.

‘How do you find them?’ Jack asked nervously. ‘The ruins …’

‘I don’t use hazel rods, if that’s what you mean. Not two sticks. Not like a water diviner.’

‘What
do
you use?’

The man seemed amused by the question. ‘Emotion. Insight. Magnetism? Christ! I don’t know. Luck? Smell?
Dreams.
Simple tools, really. All the tools of any hunter! I never really think about it.’

‘How do you know when a city’s there?’

‘I feel it move away from me,’ the tall man said. ‘They’re clever, but they’re big. They can’t hide that easily.’

Jack laughed at that. ‘Cities can’t move …’

‘Depends what you mean by a city,’ Garth said pointedly, then tapped a long finger on the boy’s shoulder. ‘I came to talk about you. If that’s all right? I’m intrigued by these visions of yours. We’ll talk about hidden cities later. Are your parents in?’

Rachel and David Chatwin came out to greet their son’s guest, and the three of them talked for a while, mostly about the excavations, partly about the worry of living with a son whose dreaming occasionally turned dangerous. Jack’s father had work to do and excused himself. His mother and Angela brought four garden chairs and a small table out to the front lawn so they could sit and stare down the elm-lined avenue to the sprawl of Exburgh. The river could be glimpsed between the Abbey and the shopping centre. A few barges drifted downriver to the locks at Ashford. The church spire of St John’s still caught the dying light. The breeze was warm and John Garth sipped a cold beer and ate a welcome supper of toasted cheese and grilled bacon. ‘When things are turning up all the time, on the sites, I forget to eat.’