Ancient Echoes (6 page)

Garth’s hand was on his shoulder, his voice concerned. ‘Are you ill?’

‘I can’t breathe …’

They were almost on him, they were exhausted, terrified, running for their lives!

‘Time to leave, then. You go first.’

Jack needed no second invitation. He crawled at full speed on his hands and knees away from the chamber to the
glassed-off area where Roman murals played. He raced up the stairs to the shoe shop, bursting through the door – breathless as he plunged into the dense wood, running between the trees, weaving through the light wells, half blinded by the shafting glare of the sun as it broke through the canopy.

Greyface loped ahead of him, head turning as he sought the way through the tangles. He was shouting.
Come on. Come on. I can hear water
!

Jack could hardly breathe. His lungs were bursting with the humidity and the thickness of the forest air.

Come on
!

He put on a burst of speed, struck against a tree and stumbled, then ran on, while behind him loud breathing made him cry out, and a hand reached for him, jerking him back, away from the figure of Greyface, away from the thin light, back on his haunches, dragging him, dragging him …

Onto the pavement!

Garth was standing over him, blood running freely from his nose, his face twisted with concern. The sound of traffic was loud and a man’s voice was saying, ‘What the hell’s he up to? Running like that?’

‘Easy. Easy,’ Garth said and crouched by the trembling boy.

Jack sat up and watched a container truck slide past in a cloud of grey smoke. ‘I was in the forest.’

‘I know. I caught a hint of the smell as you ran through the shop.’ He was crouching, now, quizzical. ‘How close are they?’

Jack listened. The traffic growled along the Broadway, but he could hear them. He could hear Greyface shouting.
They were in terrible danger again, alive by the skins of their teeth, by the strength in their legs.

‘Close,’ Jack whispered. ‘Coming closer.’

Intrigued and fascinated by the city dowser though he was, the very proximity of the bull-runners, their constant shouting, the constant danger, the overspill of adrenalin from their hunted bodies into his own, pre-occupied Jack totally for a while.

They were close and coming closer, running through his dreams with moments of intense lucidity, before fading again into the distance. The odd reflectivity of his skin did not occur during these sleeping episodes, nor could Angela, occasionally sleeping over at the house and brought to Jack’s room when the shouting started, hear or scent the otherworld as she had done that day in class.

During his waking hours the sound of the bull-runners was a constant breathless dash for safety, their running interspersed with fighting for survival, with swimming, with skirting the forests or the mountains where white towers shone, threatening them.

With his parents, he had two meetings with Ruth at the hospital where she worked. They reviewed the video footage and saw the shimmering of light, like a film of oil around his face as he was ‘dreaming’; analysis of the film showed only normal wavelengths; there was nothing discreet or unusual in the glow.

The chemical pads from his skin showed traces of complex terpenes and plant esters, chemicals that were alien to the human excretory system, but familiar to marshland. Somehow, then, Jack’s body had produced organic matter reflecting the landscape that he was hallucinating. Ruth was exercised in the extreme by this, almost wild in her excitement, and Jack agreed to have permanent swabs attached to his underarms, to be
removed every day and posted to the hospital. He kept this up for a week, then because of the discomfort and inconvenience resorted to keeping a chemical record one day in seven.

Even so, he showed traces, on one occasion, of a polypeptide similar to that in the scent glands of a wolf … and he had glimpsed Greyface in a savage tussle with a wounded, lone wolf, while Greenface stabbed down on the creature, eventually driving it away, a scene of attack that had lasted only seconds, a brief disorientation during a class on Economics.

And the traces of woodland and grassland were there in one swab of every three.

Garth visited him twice during the summer, but could not persuade the boy to come to the dig and help, although Angela gave a willing hand and regularly reported to Jack on the progress of the excavation.

By the early winter, the distracting sense of proximity of the bull-runners had faded considerably and Jack felt his life become his own again. Now he risked a second visit to the Hercules shrine, where the revealed masks of Greyface and Greenface were carefully protected behind a frame of toughened glass. As he looked at them this time he felt only plaster and stone, no life at all, no resonance.

‘They’re dead,’ he said, and when the glass was opened and he touched the blind eyes he just shrugged. ‘I was frightened before. But there’s nothing to be frightened of now.’

Garth seemed to have been expecting this. ‘Then come with me,’ he said. ‘Come and see the new find.’

In late October, telephone engineers laying cable in the area behind Spittlefield, close to Castle Hill, had breached the roof of a deep chamber, ten feet square, eight feet in height, and with a small access portal from the west that had been sealed in antiquity. The room was filled with the bones of animals, mostly skulls. The way to the next chamber was downwards, through a stone trap-door.

Garth could stand upright in the skull room, standing on a wooden platform that had been carefully placed so as to avoid disturbing the bones. With Jack at his side he pointed to the earth below.

‘It goes four chambers down, maybe more. That’s all we’ve been able to reach. The whole sanctuary area spreads out to the west and slightly to the north, chamber after chamber, each embedded more deeply within the complex, accessible by a single door, or shaft. This one is free of rubble, but beyond and below it the chambers are impacted with the earth itself, and a lot of them are probably obliterated.’

‘This isn’t Roman …’

‘Damn right. Nor Greek. And it certainly isn’t Celtic. Older than all those times.’

Jack stepped down to the floor without thinking. Garth crouched beside him, watching as the youth bent down to touch the crumbling skulls, with their wide horns. ‘Bulls. The skulls of bulls. What is this place?’

‘It could be pre-Minoan Crete; it could be pre-dynastic Egypt. It could be Turkey, the Levant, as far east as Persia … anywhere where the bull was sacrificed to worship. The walls are mud-brick. I’m inclined to think Turkey, Levant, maybe Egypt. But older by centuries than the Hercules shrine, than Minerva of the Shoe Shop, than the Lord of Animals under Market Square. It’s what Glanum is all about, the concentration of temples.’

‘But in Exburgh? They came all this way from the Middle East to
Exburgh?
’

Without thinking, Jack had picked up a bull skull, one horn shattered, one stretching two feet, curving up from the bone, still polished white. If he felt the shrine shake, it might have been imagination, traffic, or the contact with the runners. There was a hard breathing somewhere around him, and the sense of something vast moving furtively through tall grass. But the mood passed quickly and he placed the dead bone down on the dry earth floor, by the well into the dark below, the chamber underneath.

There were no paintings, no frescoes, no carvings, no symbols anywhere in the room.

Just bones.

Just wrongness.

He said, ‘Is this the heart of Glanum?’

‘No. Where we are now is on the edge of the heart. As I said to you, the sanctuaries get older the closer you get to the centre of the city. Wherever you find Glanum, it’s always the way: the heart in the corpse is always inaccessible. But we’ve come damned close in Exburgh. And since the corpse is still warm …’

Jack watched the man in the half light from the street, aware that John Garth was talking more to himself than to the student in the pit.

‘How many Glanums are there?’ he asked.

‘As many as you can find,’ Garth answered darkly. ‘Glanum has left its shadow across the world, and it has been doing so for longer than you can imagine. Are they close? The bull-runners?’

Suddenly chilled, Jack said, ‘No.’

He hauled himself onto the wooden ramp and climbed the ladder from the cold room into a street that hummed with traffic; he stared up the slope of Castle Hill to the sheer walls of the Castle itself. He thought: Solid sandstone. The hill is solid sandstone. There’s nothing underneath but rock and mantle. There could never have been a city there!

The town of Exburgh bustled, seeming to widen with every passing month as a new ring road was built, and rows of terraces bulldozed down to make way for a supermarket, and a wide, well-appointed parking area.

The excavations were prettied up and made presentable, and the tourists came in the spring and summer months, fascinated by the frescoes and the given story that Glanum was a city of shrines, a city whose heart was hidden below the Castle Rock, beyond the abilities of contemporary excavation.

Jack worked at weekends in the small museum, collecting
tickets, selling pamphlets about Glanum, postcards, and other Heritage Industry publications. On occasion he acted as a guide, but Angela was far more effective, being less inclined to exaggerate the truth and thus avoid awkward, probing questions. In any case, Jack could not abide the skull chamber. When he descended into the room he heard echoes of the running bull and his hackles rose and his concentration drifted. But the skull-room was the gem in the excavation tour, since it belonged to a culture that could not possibly have been present in the country unless brought in under exceptional circumstances.

Towards the end of the summer vacation following Jack’s final school exams, Garth arranged for a trip to the country, supplying a minibus and driver, hampers of food, cold-boxes of wine, beer and mineral water, and such an air of mystery that his invitation was hard to refuse. Jack and his parents, Angela and hers, and three of the students who had been regulars on the Glanum dig crowded into the small van and sang and laughed their way into the hills, into the high hills, and then down to a wooded river site where a tarpaulin was stretched on the ground, and a series of canvas sun breaks slung between branches to create patches of shade in the intensely hot height of the day.

Garth prowled the shallows of the river, black jeans rolled up, feet bare, his heavy arms bronzed, almost as dark as the leather vest he wore. What he was looking for he never said, but continued to hunt the water’s edge while the food and drink he’d provided was consumed with all the enthusiasm and inelegance of a typical picnic. Perhaps he stayed apart from the rest because he was smoking, one cigar after another, the pungency of the fumes hanging heavy over the glade.

Because it was hot, and because they were now very close, and because it was dangerous and they were game for anything, Jack and Angela slipped away from their families and made frantic if furtive love for half an hour, screened by rocks and dense bushes of wild, yellow rose. Hot and sticky, glowing
with achievement and an adolescent sense of triumph in the deception, they dressed and emerged from their hiding place, to find Garth leaning against a tree, smoking, his gaze on the ridge above them, the top of Mallon Hill.

‘We were just, er … we went for a walk,’ Jack said, aware that Angela’s gaze was furious, a clear statement: what the hell are you doing? We don’t have to explain ourselves.

Garth nodded. ‘There’s nothing like it. Nothing like it at all.’ His smile was enigmatic.

Still staring at the ridge, he ground his cigar between thumb and forefinger. ‘Feel like another? Walk, I mean … I’m sure you do. Come on.’ He was wearing patterned, brown leather boots with pointed toes, but covered the uneven ground with as much facility as if he’d been wearing proper hiking boots. Jack, in loose trainers, found the going easy but Angela, in sandals, lagged behind, swearing loudly, and struggling on the hill, whose slope was murderous.

At the top, Garth stripped to the waist. His lean body running with sweat, he stood with his hands on his hips, breathing slowly and deeply. When Angela arrived at the summit she tossed her useless sandals at Jack, sat down and picked at her feet, which were bleeding from several small cuts.

The air was very clear here, without the constricting humidity of the woods by the river. As quickly as she had become angry she became at peace, flopping back to stare at the clouds. Jack, sitting by the tall man, knees drawn up, watched her for a moment, stared at the sweat saturated T-shirt which was clinging to her body as she drew breath to relax, but he was finished with sex for the moment and waited for Garth.

This was not just a walk for walking’s sake.

After a while the man said, ‘Can you see movement out there? I don’t mean the cloud shadow …’

Jack scanned the hills, the woods, the expanse of flowing, open green, sun-saturated, shadow-flecked.

‘Just a flock of birds in the distance. Otherwise, no.’

‘What can you hear? Put your head to the ground …’

Angela was sitting up, now, watching curiously.

Jack leaned down and listened through the grass. At once, the struggling of the bull-runners came into sharp, auditory focus, and he smelled forest. Greyface was carrying a bleeding carcase, an animal of some kind, Jack couldn’t be sure – they were too distant. He just knew that they’d been hunting.

Apart from the bull-runners all he could hear was the faint sound of voices from the river and the thump of his heart, magnified, it seemed, through the earth itself.

When he told this to Garth, the man glanced down and smiled. ‘Listen
through
all that. Can’t you hear the movement?’

Jack concentrated. He tried to hear beyond the rustle, struggle and murmuring of the two people who were running, close by.

And at once he heard the slow creaking of great stones!

‘It’s like movement … deep in the earth …’

He felt the ground vibrate. Angela watched him closely, eyes narrowed against the sun’s glare.