Ancient Echoes (7 page)

‘Can you hear something?’

The sound that was rising from below him was like a deep thunder, coming in waves, the sound of an earthquake, he imagined, or mine workings, but far away, far away …

‘There’s something down there, something moving around.’

But Garth said, ‘There’s nothing there. Just echoes. Pre-echoes. There’s nothing there yet, but it won’t be long. I had a good feeling that it would stay around …’

‘I can’t hear anything at all,’ Angela said. ‘Echoes of what?’

‘The white whale,’ Garth said with a smile, pulling his biker’s vest over his broad shoulders. ‘This is where I leave you, Jack. I need time to think, time to prepare. Veronica will drive the bus home.’

And before Jack could say a word, he walked out across the hill, tugging his broad hat over his damp hair, descending the rolls and folds of ground until he could only be seen occasionally, a diminishing figure walking to the west.

For a while, Jack thought the man had taken off for the
afternoon, requiring solitude, and he went back with Angela to the river and the picnic.

In fact, that was the last he saw of Garth for more than a year, the man having clearly decided to abandon the exploration of the hidden city.

He left without a word, without a note, and when the rains of October began to wash against the earth of the scattered shrines, the pits that dotted Exburgh, they were covered over and preserved for later excavation.

Jack eventually saw Garth again on two occasions. The first was shortly before Christmas, three days before the end of the long winter term. With two other boys, Jack had left the school grounds for the latter part of the afternoon, quickly changed from school uniform into jeans and leather jacket and walked down to the city centre in search of last minute suggestions for Christmas gifts.

As they strolled through the neon-lit darkness of the main street, aware that a fine, icy drizzle was starting to fall, Jack glimpsed the tall man emerging from the shoe shop above the Minerva shrine.

‘That’s Garth …
Garth
!’ he shouted.

‘Who’s Garth?’

‘An old friend. The guy digging up the old city. Christ, don’t you know
anything?’

Jack ran through the crowds until he came to the ring road. Garth was already across on the grass verge, walking towards the high wall of the church on the opposite side. Again Jack called to the man, and this time Garth looked round, squinting through the traffic. In the early evening darkness it was hard to read the man’s expression, but Jack was in no doubt that he had been waved away.

Garth had turned, then, and disappeared around the building.

Jack went back to the shop and asked for the manager.

‘I came here a year ago with the archaeologist, John Garth? He took me downstairs to see the temple.’

‘Yes, I remember. You got claustrophobic. Very frightening. I suffer myself, which is why you won’t get
me
–’

‘He was just here, wasn’t he? I saw him.’

Ignoring Jack’s youthful impatience, the manager agreed. ‘Went downstairs to listen, he said. Up against the rock statue at the end of the passage. I don’t know what he was listening for. Do you?’

Jack shook his head. ‘Has he been here before? I mean recently?’

‘No. Not for months.’

‘If you see him again, could you ask him to call me? It’s really important.’

Jack wrote his name and telephone number and left it with the man, then on impulse asked, ‘Could I see downstairs again?’

‘I don’t see why not. I’ll have Shirley come with you, just in case … if you like …’

But Jack wanted to be on his own. ‘I’ll be OK. I just want two minutes.’

He went straight round the covered sanctuary to the small door that led to the claustrophobic tunnel. He’d forgotten that the narrow entrance would be locked against the public. But behind him, soft steps on the metal stairs announced that Shirley had been sent down anyway; she peered across the model below its glass case. ‘You all right?’

‘I feel fine. I wanted to see the rock statue. Do you have the key?’

The woman came over. She was very small, slightly built, probably only a few years older than Jack himself. Her small hands were heavy with rings, an engagement ring gleaming with blue-tinged diamond light. She opened the small locker by the door and gave Jack access to the passage, switching on the fluorescent light, which flickered several times, then glared. When he reached the far end, against the rough rock, the odd shape, the muscle shape in the stone, Jack pressed his ear to the cold surface, closed his eyes and listened.

Breathing!

He pulled back, alarmed by the deep and sonorous breath that he had felt being drawn. Then he slapped the stone
shoulder of what Garth claimed was a buried statue and listened again.

A
swirling pool, breath heaving and sucking from its centre
…

Again he was startled by the image that touched his senses. For a second he had felt sucked down, face blasted by an icy wind from the subterranean deep.

He went back for a third time, fingers spread on the rock, ignoring Shirley’s tentative call checking that he was safe and not frightened.

And for a moment he was in the sea, rising dizzyingly to the surface, twisting as the water flowed over him, reaching for the light above. Except that it wasn’t water; the light was coming closer, but he was struggling against drowning, and the world around him was heavy, black and stifling!

He threw himself away from the rock, choking and gasping for breath. He could hear the woman calling to the manager.

‘I’m all right! I’m coming back.’

He crawled along the narrow tunnel, banging his head, aware of the pink, anxious oval of the assistant’s face. She helped him brush the dust and dirt from his clothes, straightened the collar of his black leather jacket and locked the passage.

‘You’ve seen a ghost?’ she asked with a smile, and Jack laughed, remembering earlier words in a similar situation.

‘I don’t know. There’s something under the hill, though.’

‘Yes. A billion tons of sandstone! The shop’s closing, I’m afraid.’

‘I’m on my way.’

Christmas came and went, the traditional orgy of television, attempts at games, visits from and to relatives, near-death by turkey, chocolate and cocktails, secretly consumed wherever his friends’ parents were less strict on such under-age abuse than his own.

He was a reluctant passenger in the back of the car on New Year’s Eve, as his parents drove southwest to the moors for four
days of bracing, damp, treacherous walking. Angela had been invited to join them, but she had cousins visiting from Australia, two boys of her own age. And besides: she was working on a
paper,
an actual, formal piece of work which she intended to submit to
Nature
magazine.

Jack slumped and sulked. He was aware of his bad mood, aware that it wasn’t really like him, but damned if he’d do anything about it. He watched the saturated landscape, hardly sharing the enthusiasm of his parents as they began to reach the deep country, with its signs and signals of a long forgotten past, the monoliths and grave mounds, the bleak castles slipping from the high hills where they had been built to stand forever.
Why does she always hate to be working?

Angela, he had to acknowledge, annoyed him as much as she thrilled him.

His small radio screeched to the strident, wonderful sounds of the punk rock band PIL. On each occasion that he was instructed to ‘turn the racket down’–

‘And stop singing that you’re the “Antichrist”. We’ve got the message. Jesus! have we got the message …’

‘It’s the song. The words of the song.’

‘You don’t say …’

– he obeyed
(they were laughing at him)
then inched the music up by degrees. The tape played endlessly – he’d only brought the one – his only comfort as the moors approached.

By the end of the journey, he felt seriously like falling headfirst into Grimpen Mire – the muddy bog of Sherlock Holmes fame – to be dragged down until the black dogs swam for him, to be eaten in celebration on the rocks, the
Antichrist,
a victim of the old earth and its old powers.

His imagination shifted into overdrive.

What a story he would tell when the new term started!

But instead, he walked and complained, and almost sobbed with relief when he was left in the hotel’s television lounge for most of the evening while his parents tucked into the
a la carte
menu, and shared hiking stories with an older couple who were
walking the whole way from one end of the country to the other. (They hadn’t
got
very far then, Jack thought, until he realized they were almost at the
end
of the journey, eleven hundred miles down, sixty to go.)

Angela called during the evening, but all she wanted to talk about was whether or not he’d had an encounter with the bull-runners, and to enthuse to him about something she’d read in her research.

‘Primal, primitive words and images might sometimes slip into a sort of sump, like a pit. They’re discarded, not needed by the main memory systems in the brain. But they form archaeo-stories which occasionally become sufficiently complex to filter back to the conscious level.’

‘Archaeo-stories.’

‘Yes. I read about them in a French Canadian journal of psychology. They’re events or images, or whole stories that have sort of created themselves out of our own reading, our own imagination – our experiences. They surface because they become energized from–’

‘You’ve been reading French Canadian journals of psychology?’

‘Yes. Yes, I have. I’ve begun to understand what’s happening to you, Jack. Do you want to hear about this?’

‘What language are they written in?’

‘The journals? French, of course.’

‘I’m stuck here, up to my neck in mud, bog and black dogs, missing you, thinking of you all the time, and you’re reading
French
.’

There was a moment of stunned silence. ‘The work is fascinating. Jack, I think Jandrok’s
archaeo-story
might explain–’

‘I want to be in bed with you,’ he whispered. ‘I want to be making love.’

‘Jack! Keep a grip! My parents often listen in.’

‘Are they listening in now?’

‘I haven’t heard the
bips
on the line. I don’t think so.’

‘Do you miss me?’

‘Of course. Of course I miss you. Jack, you’re only away for four days. I’ll see you next week.’

‘How’re the cousins?’

‘Big, loud, rude … very self-centred! But rather nice.’

‘Have they tried to seduce you?’

He heard her gasp of irritation, could imagine her annoyance. ‘What do you mean
try
? Didn’t have to
try,
Jack. It’s three in a bed every night. You’re
pathetic.
Grow up!’

The line went dead on her angry voice. Jack mimicked her fury into the mouthpiece then slammed the receiver down.

Why did I
do
that?

After a fitful night’s sleep, he got up and showered at six in the morning, dressed in walking clothes and stared out at the sweeping rain, the waving trees, the tumbling, tormented clouds rolling in from the Atlantic.

‘Great day for a walk!’ he sneered at the world outside. Then thought,
so let’s go walking!

When his parents came down to breakfast, he had already finished eating and was standing, fully clothed and ready for the elements, grim-faced and twitchy.

‘Hurry up,’ he said, to the amusement of other guests in the breakfast room. ‘Let’s not waste a moment of the day. Let’s get
walking.’

His father smiled at him half-heartedly. ‘It’s too wet for the moors. They’ll be too dangerous. We thought we’d take a coast drive, look at some castles.’

‘Not to cast any aspersion on the joys of a coastal ride, I’m for the moors. The black dogs are waiting for us. I feel a family like ours can take them on and triumph.’

His father stared at him, frowning. ‘Shut up, Jack. It’s too risky to walk in weather like this. The mud softens up …’

‘Then I’ll see you later.’

‘Where the hell are you going?’

By the time his father had gathered his wits and come out
of the small hotel into the rain, Jack was standing in the bushes, concealed and grim. When the man on the steps disappeared inside again, he ran quickly through the grounds, across the main road, and began to pick his way across the fields to the rise of land that marked the bleak moors.

In two hours, he was high above the town and could look back at the grey stones and slates of the hotel itself, nestling among black winter trees in the curve of the river. The rain had eased, but was still strong; importantly, the wind had dropped and the wind-chill was no longer as discomforting and dangerous as it had been earlier.

There were a few other people striding up the slopes, some of them with dogs which ran in a bedraggled, miserable way rather than leaping and barking for exercise. Jack followed them, pacing along the muddy path, stopping only when he saw a distant shape, a solitary figure moving along the ridge, dark against the grim sky, ascending a path towards the main Tor.

Something about the stride …

He pressed on. Sheep moved away from him, almost silent in the downpour. A vixen moved around them, a huge creature, rust-red and lithe as she trotted cautiously downwind of the flock, looking for anything lame or small. After a while she vanished into the mist and the sheep relaxed.

He was suddenly alone on the moors, no sign of life, animal or human, just the dull if verdant bog grass, the grey, mist-shrouded rocks of the tors, the swirl and drum of rain. He struck out for Wolf Tor, the highest point, and after crossing a ruined stone wall, an old boundary marker, he found a crude path that wound towards the summit.

Between one glance at the Tor and the next, the tall man had appeared there, watching him, rain pouring from his leather hat, glistening on the long raincoat.

This was Jack’s second encounter with Garth before the Spring, and he sensed at once that something was wrong. He trudged along the path, wiping the water from his eyes, aware
that the man was standing in the lee of the craggy rocks, smoking and staring back.