Ladies From Hell (22 page)

The dizziness worsened. I fell to my knees, and saw the girl do the same. Somewhere beneath us, thirty thousand volts were pulsing through the ley; I felt an urgent need to lie flat, prone, spread my weight on the unstable earth. Boulter said, “Three’s in,” and I said, “
Let’s get out of here
…”

He still had his watch held in front of his face. He seemed oblivious. He said, “There goes Four …”

If I couldn’t trust my feet, at least I could crawl. I started making efforts in that direction, but was hampered; the girl was clinging hard to my arm. I tried to pull away; and Alec said quietly, “Look …”

I turned, and I think for a moment my jaw must have dropped. Between us and the village, wavering and
shifting but brightening as I watched, stretched a broad band of milky light. The church tower was bathed in it; and trees, barns, buildings, the old mill, glowing with the spectral beauty of St. Elmo’s Fire. Gable ends flashed and sparkled, coruscating; while we ourselves were lapped by the brilliance so that I saw Sarah’s startled face clear, her eyes huge as she once more yanked at my arm, pointed wordlessly back up the hill. I turned my head, it seemed with difficulty, and saw the grandest sight of all. Coombe Hasset One was lit from end to end, as if by powerful searchlights; below the machine the shining track, intense now and blue, stretched down the hill and, on the instant, began to
pour
.

Boulter said, or shouted, “Five’s in …” But I was incapable of useful movement, and all but incapable of thought. The giddying sense of speed increased, bringing with it the new and extraordinary notion that it was us, not the strange plasma, who were moving, whirling through space at breakneck speed toward a wholly unknown destination. Yet fast as we raced the turbine, the generator, the whole gigantic machine fled before us, away and down the brilliant pathway that opened before it, eddied in its wake. I seemed now wholly disoriented; so that though I gripped the ground with my hands, felt the very grass of the hill, I was unable to rid myself of that terrible notion of progression. Rather, the speed seemed increased, and increased again; and I noticed something else, something later confirmed by Boulter. A secondary motion, a rolling, almost a swaying from side to side, like a railway carriage moving at dangerously high speed. This sensation I found if anything more distressing than the first; while I despair of describing adequately the awful fetch and check when without warning both motions ceased, simultaneous with the strange glow clicking off. I fell headlong into a darkness as sudden and total as the throwing of a switch.

And that I thought, scrambling to my feet, was exactly what had happened; the waking of the ley, the great river of light, had alarmed the engineers as it had alarmed me. I felt a flooding
of relief; but it was shortlived. Boulter shouted again, his voice harsh with alarm. “
Get back Glyn, quick. Back into the trees
…”

I’ve done a lot of thinking since about the time we spent in the power of the ley. It was a confused and confusing experience, more akin to a dream state than what I had thought of, up to that time at least, as reality. Thus although I heard his voice, although I felt the grip of his arm, I think I was aware even at the time that this was not, in some subtle way, the Alec Boulter with whom I had set out less than an hour before to climb the down. I was however given little time to ponder; I was forced back by the shove he gave me, into the shadows of the undergrowth. I stumbled, almost fell; and turned to see a wave of men come flooding down and across the shoulder of the hill. Who or what they could be I had no idea; but of their intentions at least I was left in no doubt. The force was opposed by another; and a confused battle began, yells and shouts mingled with a clashing and ringing for which at the time I was wholly unable to account. The intervention at least won us the few seconds we needed; I moved back hastily, clutching Sarah’s wrist, staring over my shoulder at the hillside that seemed now inexplicably outlined by fire. I saw the flames lick and spread, and by their light the battle move downwards, fanning out toward the fringe of trees. I saw something else too, in the growing light. The machine that had topped the down was gone; vanished, as though it had never been.

I have said the experience was confusing; but why I should have felt nothing in the way of surprise still seems bizarre. I was, it seemed, not susceptible to surprise; rather it was as if the fact, monstrous in any other context, fitted into a matrix the logic of which I accepted though as yet could not understand. Neither, apparently, was I susceptible to fear, though in retrospect there would seem to have been ample cause; for Coombe Hasset itself had also vanished, shops and pubs, houses and cottages, mill and church. Where the village had stood now clustered some score or more of dome-topped huts, their walls of mud, their shapes like that of
old-fashioned beehives. They seemed deserted, though from the low entrance of one—little more than a hole—came a flickering of firelight.

We must have passed at some point in our flight through the space that had been occupied by Ley House itself. Certainly the valley side seemed familiar, a rough grass slope stretching to the stream. The stream still flowed; but broader and flatter, negotiable near the foot of what had been the lawn by a series of well-worn stepping stones. We hurried across them, driven on by the noise from behind; and I became aware for the first time that we were not alone. Through the darkness to left and right moved what seemed scores of folk; there were groans and little cries, the creaking of wheels, once what sounded like the whinny of a horse. It was the dream of the night before over again; but this time I was part of it, a fragment impelled by a relentless current that drove us on through the village, out on to the broad rutted road beyond.

The notion of a dream remained with me, strengthened by the tricks my senses continued to play. I saw for instance that though it was apparently still night, the land to either side was by no means wholly dark. Hills and trees, the road itself, the dim moving masses of our fellow fugitives, seemed lit by a dull, rich glow that though omnipresent yet gave no real illumination. Also—and this too was a notion later confirmed by Boulter—there seemed to be a less than real feeling about the ground beneath my feet; it was as if I trod not on earth but on some strange elastic barrier of air above it, as thick and yielding as a carpet. Spatial dimensions likewise seemed confused, so that at times it was as if the dim horizon toward which we moved was nothing but a backdrop, drawn forward aggravatingly a few yards from our faces, while at others I was made crushingly aware of the vast dimensions of the land across which we trudged, our own locked and tiny isolation.

If the ‘space’ that surrounded us was malleable to a degree, so too was the apparent time through which we progressed. It seemed our journey was endless; yet I was also conscious, initially at least, that the richness and variety of the impressions I received were crammed somehow into the passage of so
many seconds. So how ‘long’ we fled before that pursuing army, in the midst of that great shoal of fugitives, is a question that has no meaning. It was only the increasing weariness of our limbs, over what I must describe for want of a better term as hours, that convinced us we must seek shelter. I know I turned at one point to stare concernedly into the girl’s face, I know the matter was discussed at length; but strangely, of all the words uttered by me or the others during the experience almost none have been retained. I know ‘Sarah’ put her hair back, sorrowfully, watching back at the place we had quitted; I know the shadow-Boulter pointed ahead to what looked like a cluster of tumbledown barns, urged us encouragingly over the last few yards. I retain a memory of great piled masses of hay or sweet smelling straw; and also a curious sense of the richness of the interiors of those ruined buildings, though in what exact details that richness resided is now a matter of mystery. There were, I am almost certain, columns of some kind, the walls between them brilliantly coloured and decorated; so much so that I must have made some comment, to Boulter or the girl, on the absurdity of stuffing such a place with hay. I know that others shared the refuge, breathing and turning restlessly; and I remember clearly the huge wave of weariness that swept me, the conviction that the devil himself with his legions behind him could not have driven us an inch further along the way. One curious detail does stand out, almost arbitrarily. The girl crying bitterly, with a face of dumb reproach; and Boulter bringing her water in an earthenware bowl, as if she was a puppy. After which we must have slept; though such were the curious inconsistencies of the time that it seemed the act of closing my eyes was the act of reopening them, and though I sat up refreshed my mind shied from the notion of continuing the march.

Daylight, in the world of the leys, seemed as insubstantial and uncertain as the night. The sky was infused now with a coppery glow, an overcast like the half-light of an eclipse, through which the chalk hills on every side gleamed stark and bare. There was about them, about their exaggerated forms,
something familiar, almost recognizable; Boulter later suggested their origins, from what rough sketches I could bring myself to make, in the work of Sutherland or Nash, though I am still unsure. Suffice it that in a strange way I ‘knew’, and accepted, the landscape through which we moved; and something too of the nature and purpose of our journey.

Certainly it was with no surprise that I saw a cart drawn up outside the doorway of the strange place in which we had sheltered; a primitive affair, high-sided and with massive wooden wheels. Oxen drew it, bony, dispirited-looking creatures. Beside the driver, wrapped in a coarse-woven cloak, sat Boulter. I saw, again apparently without surprise, that he waved to us impatiently to join him. Certainly I was curious; I desired to know where he had procured the thing, more importantly how he had spoken to these people whose voices had sounded all night in my ears with no more sense than the gabbing of birds. He seemed to laugh at that and I have a clear memory that he said, “
The Welsh is close enough
,” which is curious. For although I have never spoken my mother’s tongue Boulter, for reasons known only to himself, is an expert.

There were other cloaks in the cart, of the same rough material; thick and harsh, like a sort of serge. I draped one round Sarah’s shoulders. I remember with clarity the intricate, lovely pin with which it was fixed; and also, curiously, the
joy
derived from the simple act, at her touch, the light pressure of her shoulder against mine. She pushed at her sandals, the flimsy summer sandals she had worn, nestled into the hay with which the cart was piled and slept again, jostled and bumped, her head rolling against my shoulder.

It seems strange that we never questioned, or I never questioned, the urgent necessity for flight; nor can I explain the conviction that came over me that though our fellow travellers seldom came into sight, and almost never into close detail, an entire countryside was on the move around us. The sense of their presence, the mumbling din of a vast concourse,
remained with us through the whole of what I must call a day, though—and this again is a point on which Boulter later agreed—the sound that reached us, though evocative, seemed possessed of a curious muffled hollowness. There was a flow and ebb to it too, so that at times it seemed remote and lulling as a summer sea, at others it dinned into my ears with a fierce urgency, becoming by turns the noise of gunfire, or traffic on some enormous motorway. This last effect distressed me to the point where I determined that, delicious though the dream-presence of Sarah had become, I must finally wake. For a time it seemed I was partly successful; certainly it was as if, ghostly round me, I saw the walls of the bedroom in Ley House, the bowl of flowers she herself had placed on the dresser. But that too was wrong. I remembered at least that our walk up the hillside had been no fantasy; if I slept it was upon that hill, it was to the hill I must return. I relaxed my grasp, and was glad to let the phantom slip away.

It was, as I have said, sufficient that we fled; from the soldiers, from the flames, from the drumming that carried fitfully on the wind. The cart wheels rumbled, stirring up clouds of whitish dust; those of our fellow travellers whose faces did swim into my vision stared up dully, but no move was made to molest us. At some point Boulter explained—he must have explained, or how could I have known so clearly—that the fame of ‘the strangers’ had already gone abroad, that the people regarded us with superstitious awe; and that above all haste was essential. But this I already understood.

Sometime in the afternoon—I must judge the passing of that strange ‘time’ as best I can—we reached a town; a massive, ruinous place with high white colonnaded buildings, paved, weed-choked streets. I would give much, even now, to recall its details; but the curious visual interference was then at its height so that it was as if we passed between two gigantic cinema screens on which the images of columns, walls and porticoes swam insubstantial as clouds, falling away behind with exactly the distortion imparted at the field edges by an anamorphic lens. The girl, I remember, woke to stare laughing
at the phantoms, pushed herself up on her elbows to see the stonework streaked with green and brown, the moss-grown roofs, the soldiers who surged round us. For we had come, it seemed, into the midst of a retreating army. I remember an old man, white haired and seamed-faced, wearing a conical headdress of leather and rusting metal; a youth, wild haired and green eyed, his face alight with some strange passion that was perhaps the joy of battle. The air was filled with the jangle and clattering that had baffled me before; and at last I saw its cause. Both men and horses wore armour; plates and overlapping scales of the same rusty iron, surcoats of faded richness. I saw the banners that waved, saw the red dragons each one bore lap and cross, weaving; I saw buckles and rivets, the jewelled hilt of a sword, sweat that stained a horse’s neck. Then the immediacy of vision faded, and we were once more alone. The hills crowded back, humped and steep, topped by tree groves that shone with dark, prismatic greens against the high dun of the sky.