Darkhenge

by Catherine Fisher

  He stood, brushing his knees. There was nothing to say. It sounded totally boring to him.

  She must have guessed that, because she laughed, a cool, mirthless laugh. “And look what we’ve found in it.”

  He looked. At first he couldn’t make out anything at all, his eyes bewildered by the variety of trenches. And then, with the sort of shift he recognized from looking at optical illusions, the strangeness resolved into a shape inside the mess and disorder.

  A circle.

  A circle of black lumps, ridged, looking like coal. They barely rose out of the peculiar clotted mud, and he had no idea what they were, but they made a wide ring, about ten meters across, and there were a lot of them. He counted quickly. Twenty-four.

  “Buried stones?”

  Her blue eyes considered him. “Not stone. Wood. Four thousand years old. Cut down and erected before iron was discovered, maybe before pottery on a wheel.” She crouched, reaching out and rubbing one of the timbers with her hand; he could see now that the ridges were like the weathering on gateposts. “In fact before almost everything we take for granted—money, nations, wars, possessions. When men dreamed the earth was alive, when soil and stones talked to them, when the sun was a burning power to be placated, the stars told the time.” Her voice had softened; she looked up at him. “So old, Robert Drew! And to be here still. Waiting for me to find it again.”

  For a moment she seemed quite a different person, younger, balanced on the edge of friendliness. And then she stood and brushed the mud from her knees and her voice was as cool and hostile as before. “You may as well start straightaway. We’ve taken photos, so I want a plan of the northwest section. Marcus will show you the ropes.”

  Marcus turned out to be the bearded one. “So she took you on!” he muttered, watching the woman stride back to the Portakabin. “Didn’t think she would.”

  “Why is it so hush-hush?”

  Marcus hauled the drawing board up and pinned graph paper on; it flapped in the breeze and Rob had to hold it down for him. “It’s massive. She wants the credit. It’ll make her career. Now, this is what you do.”

  It was complex, but hardly art. Measuring and drawing every tiny feature. But once he’d started, he found he settled to it quickly, squatting on a rickety stool, knees up.

  The site was quiet. The other two—Marcus and Jimmy—chatted sometimes and he listened, but mostly the sounds were nothing but tiny scrapes of trowels, buckets, mud-clogged boots on the boards, the rattle of a filled wheelbarrow. The stillness of the afternoon came down around him like warmth; as his hand drew, his brain slipped into a dream state, vague and comforting. Until he remembered it was Thursday.

  The dread was dull, and familiar. It came up from somewhere deep and he couldn’t stop it; like spilled water over a drawing, it blurred and spoiled the afternoon’s peace.

  Tomorrow was his day for seeing Chloe.

  “How are you doing on that?” Jimmy loomed over him. “We want to start taking the level down now, for the last hour or so.”

  “I’ve finished.” He looked at the site, then back at his plan. The tops of the posts were thin outlines of black ink. They looked like crazy flowers.

  “Great. You may as well help out then.”

  A shovel was put in his hand; he stared at it. “You mean dig?”

  “Clever boy.” He had already noticed Jimmy was the sarcastic one.

  It was hot work, and harder than he’d thought. Marcus mattocked the earth lightly, stopping and bending at anything interesting, then Rob and Jimmy shoveled the peaty soil into a barrow and Jimmy wheeled it off. When the layers changed color, infinitesimally sometimes, Marcus would crouch and scrape and pick out tiny fragments, his nose almost touching the soil.

  Rob grew hot. His hands were sore on the smooth wooden handle. Pausing for a gulp of water, he saw he was spattered with the dark mud; it clotted his trousers and T-shirt, his sneakers were ruined with it.

  Jimmy grinned. “Get you some overalls tomorrow.”

  Now they used trowels. Inch by inch, the surface came away. It smelled, a rich stink of fibrous rotting material, saturated, so that you could squeeze a handful till it dripped. There were few worms, but the stuff was packed with lumps and bone splinters. Clare Kavanagh had come out of the van and was watching; eagerly she jumped down and picked a piece out. “Antler,” she said.

  Rob straightened his aching back.

  The antler was white, perfectly preserved. Clare’s fine fingers turned the piece swiftly. “Look at the battered grooves here. They used it to dig with.”

  She handed it to him and his fingers closed around it. Who had dropped it here? he wondered. Who had been the last person to hold this?

  “Boss!” Marcus came hurtling around the metal fence. “Car in the lane.”

  Clare turned at once, her ponytail whipping out. “Make sure it goes by. Wait, I’ll come with you.” She glanced around. “It’s getting late. Pack up and make sure everything’s covered. Set the water sprays up.” As she went she glanced at Rob. “Be here at nine o’clock tomorrow. And remember, say nothing to anyone. It’s just a few holes in the ground.”

  He frowned, scraping the mud from his shovel with a trowel. What did she think he was going to do? Ring the Marlborough Chronicle?

  Marcus and Jimmy had gathered up the buckets and finds trays and wheelbarrowed them off; left alone, Rob turned the antler over in his hands.

  Then he held it very still.

  In the mud, just at the foot of the nearest of the wooden posts, something was squirming.

  He stepped back, looked around for the others, but he was alone in the encircling metal fence. The ground was bubbling. Something was coming up from it. It seemed round, clumps of mud falling off it as it wriggled and twisted, and then its shape broke out into two flailing things that he thought for an appalling second were tiny arms. He dropped the antler and crouched, holding his breath.

  It was a bird.

  It was coming out of the earth alive, its feathers bedraggled and crusted with soil, eyes blinded by mud, beak gaping. He reached down and touched it in disbelief, and it panicked under his fingers, giving a squawk, fluttering.

  He dug his fingers into the sodden peat around it, easing it out, holding it, feeling its heart throbbing through the clotted feathers. Under the dirt he could see its colors: blue and green, scarlet flashes on its wings. No species he knew.

  “Rob! Give us a hand with these!”

  “Coming.” He didn’t know what to do with it. The thought of showing it to them seemed strangely frightening. It was an impossible thing, a warping of reality. Instinctively, he held out his hands and opened them. “Fly!” he whispered. “Quickly!”

  The bird panted. Its eyes were open now, looking at him. It unfolded a long tongue, then spread its wings, and he saw they were gaudy with red and blue. In an instant, with a startling flap, it had flown away, over the fence.

  Rob turned back and stared at the soil.

  Marcus put his head around the fence. “Did you hear? We need a hand with the sprays.” He glanced at the mess on the smoothly troweled surface. “What happened there?”

  Rob shrugged. He kept his voice very low. “I don’t know,” he said.

  F. FEARN: ALDER

  He saw the bird fly. I was going to tie a message to its leg but he was running up the corridor and I had to let it go quickly.

  It scraped out through the cracked window and fluttered into branches.

  He went quite still when he saw the broken glass. A branch reached in like a hand; even as we watched, it was growing inside, and the leaves on it were unfurling like they do in a speeded-up film.

  He grabbed my arm and pulled me back.

  The window splintered and fell in.

  “The first caer is breached,” he whispered.

  Nine months was I carried

  In Ceridwen’s womb.

  At first I was Gwion.

  Now I am Taliesin.

  THE BOOK OF TALIES
IN

  Three strange things. The girl on the horse; Vetch; the bird from the ground.

  Calmly, he considered them.

  It might be the strain. He was under terrible strain. If he let it, it would crush him. He knew he hid from it behind layers of defenses.

  Or it might be that these things were real, and he had seen them. Everyone knew Avebury was a focus for strangeness. He should ask Mac.

  But it was Vetch who came into his mind, the man’s dark look, his riddling words.

  Vetch.

  On the table beside him the flowers were fresh. They always were. The cut glass vase held roses today—white roses, barely out of bud, and the delicate smell of them filled the room. One perfectly round bead of water on a leaf caught his eye. It shone.

  The nursing home was expensive, and fussy about details. The sunny room had pictures on its walls, calm, cool frames full of seascape, and a distant sunset over a forest. Nothing to alarm anyone. Rob had seen them so often he didn’t really see them anymore, except for the line of forestry in the small oil by the door. Forestry against the sky. It was faintly disturbing. During the long hours he had sat here his eyes would slide to it, dreaming about the earthy smell under the trees, the deep coniferous glades. He had put up one of his own pictures too: a portrait of Chloe laughing. She’d always complained he never drew her; he’d had to do it from photographs. He remembered the hours in his bedroom, having to study her cheeky grinning face. The only way he had coped was by making it just a painter’s exercise in color and technique.

  His eyes moved around the room, looking for something else to rest on.

  His mother’s knitting. A great pile of red wool. He had no idea what she was making; she used it to give her hands something to do. A crucifix on the wall. That new, unworn dressing gown.

  Always, though, his gaze came back to the bed.

  Chloe lay on a mound of pillows. Over the months her hair had grown; it was below her ears now. She wouldn’t like that. She liked her hair short, what Dad used to call her Peter Pan look, all spiky bits. Long hair made her look older, but then she was older. It would be strange for her, to wake up and find she was older.

  That three months had vanished.

  There were tubes to the veins in her arms, but not to her mouth and nose, because she breathed by herself. That was what puzzled the doctors. At first they’d kept her on a ventilator, but his mother had made them stop. “She can breathe. Let her breathe.”

  There was brain activity too, jagged peaks on the monitor. So she just looked as if she was asleep, as if she was the princess in that story, sleeping for a hundred years while outside everything went on as normal. Buses rumbled by, school terms ended, exams happened, birthdays, summer holidays.

  He frowned. Her birthday. “What a fiasco that was!” he said aloud. They were supposed to talk to her, because it would help, the nurses said. They said she heard it. Rob didn’t know if he believed that anymore.

  He got up and wandered closer. “Remember the cake? Just there? Fourteen candles and the smoke alarms went off. Nearly got the place evacuated.”

  He laughed harshly. “But you know Mum. Has to make a fuss.”

  Everybody else, he knew, would have preferred a few cards, flowers, some music tapes in fancy paper, because what other present could you give someone who didn’t move or talk and who might not even be there anymore? But his mother had wanted a party, because she never gave up. It had been appalling. Alone with Father Mac in the car on the way home, he had curled up in the dark on the backseat and Mac had let him, not saying a word, just letting him be. They had both been silenced by it. His mother’s terrible happy chatter. By the unwrapped clothes, the new watch, the cell phone.

  He rolled the bedside drawer open now and looked down at the phone.

  It was kept charged. If she woke up when Mum wasn’t here, it was for her to ring home, straightaway.

  “She’ll never give up waiting, Chloe. If you only knew what it’s like now, at home. She’s turning down so much work—anything in America, anything that takes her away. She’s still doing the cops series, and there was talk of a film, but they won’t do it without her.” He turned and sat down on the bed, taking his sister’s hand. It was cool, and oddly soft.

  “Every time the phone rings, she jumps. She doesn’t care about the fans, or the interviews, not like it was before. It’s all acting now.”

  Holding her hand. It wasn’t something he’d do if she was awake. If she stirred now he’d drop her fingers fast, because she’d be astonished and say something sarcastic. She was always saying cutting things to him, he realized. He wanted to say sorry about the picture of Callie, but that would mean telling her he’d opened her journal. She’d go mad. If she could still hear.

  Abruptly, he put her hand down and stood. His hour was up. He could go with a clear conscience now, but there was something he had to say first.

  He turned and looked down at her, the still girl in the pink pajamas, the new watch ticking time away on her wrist.

  “I saw you. It was you at Falkner’s Circle. I know it was you, Chloe, so don’t tell me it wasn’t.” His voice was angry; he let it be. Lately he was often angry with her. “What’s happening? Are you dead and was that your ghost? Has your soul got out of your body and is wandering the downs? All sorts of odd things are starting to happen, and I don’t like it, Chloe. You’ve got to stop it! Are you listening to me? Listen to me!”

  He was yelling at her. His own fury shook him, and then out of nowhere came a sudden certainty that she heard him, that she would open her eyes now, sit up, yawn. He didn’t breathe, waiting, knowing it would be now.

  Now.

  But she stayed the same. He unclenched his fists, breathed out. That old fantasy. It kept coming back.

  The door opened and the big nurse, Mel, put her head around. “Everything okay?”

  “Fine.” They had probably heard him shout.

  “Time for Chloe’s bed bath.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’m just going.” At the door he turned back and looked at his sister. “I know you don’t really hate me, Chloe. Do you?”

  There was no answer. After a moment, he walked out.

  He bought a can of Coke in a newsagent’s on the main road and leaned against the wall, drinking from it. The warmth of the sun was the best thing he had ever felt; he realized he was chilled, that sweat had dried on his back. He pulled out his sunglasses and put them on. The world went a rather crazy yellow.

  “Hey. Want a lift?”

  A car had stopped at the traffic lights; it was old, a little dirty. The door swung open and a girl leaned over, her red hair bright. “We’re going back to Avebury. Jump in.”

  The girl from the Cauldron tribe. He emptied the can, dumped it in the bin on the lamppost, and slid into the car.

  She and another girl were in the front. “Sorry about the mess.”

  The car smelled of perfume. Crystals hung on the windshield, and the music coming from the speakers behind his head sounded Indian maybe. World stuff.

  “My name’s Rosa.” She changed gear. “This is Megan.”

  “Hi. Rob.”

  She turned the music down. “Vetch said we’d see you.”

  Rob stared at the back of her head. “What?”

  She grinned at the girl next to her, a closed smile. “He’s such an amazing person. He said you’d be along, because you’re part of it. You pulled him into the sacred circle.”

  Rob said, “Oh. Right.” He leaned back and stared out of the window, wishing she’d turn the music up again so he wouldn’t have to talk. He should have got the bus. If Dan found out, he’d never hear the end of this.

  They had crossed the M4; now the road swung through Wroughton, with its pretty green and mill-stream. Passing the Three Tuns, the other girl said, “You live in Avebury?”

  “Just outside.”

  “Lucky. This is such a special landscape.”

  He said nothing; Rosa glanced at h
im in the mirror. “I expect you think we’re a bit crazy. We’re not really hippies, you know. I’m a medical student. Meg’s a mum. All the group come from different places, some from Europe. This is the first time we’ve met.”

  He wasn’t interested but he said, “Because of dreams?”

  She shrugged. “No ordinary dream. It was incredibly vivid. I was walking in the sea, ankle deep, and there was this beach and I had it all to myself. The sky was gray, as if it was going to rain, and there was a wind whipping my coat out. It wasn’t like a dream. I could feel it.”

  He nodded. The car droned up the sudden, steep side of the Marlborough downs.

  “Then I looked into the sea. And I saw the sand wasn’t grains at all but letters, tiny, tiny letters. Billions of them. All the same. D.”

  “D?”

  She laughed. “Weird, or what? So I put it on the group Web site. The other messages came back almost instantly. Nine of us had had the same or a similar dream. With some it was in a wood, or in a room or a building. But there was always one letter of the alphabet that was featured. So we put them together. They made the word Vetch knew.”

  “Darkhenge,” Rob said. And as he said it he went cold with sudden realization and dismay. “Darkhenge!” He bit his lip. “I think… Do you know what it means?”

  “Hang on. We’re picking him up here.”

  A bridle path. Like the rest of them it came down from the Ridgeway, the ancient road, distant here, high on the crest of the downs. As soon as the car turned in and the engine was switched off, the silence of the wide country surged through the open windows. Megan opened the passenger door and swung her legs outside, looking up the track. “Here he comes.”

  Vetch was walking toward them. He still wore the dark clothes, despite the heat of the afternoon. On either side of the white track the fields were drifting acres of golden crop, the wind causing shivers that changed shade and tone. The sky was vast, a dome of blue air.

  Vetch waved. Rob heard the scuff of his boots, saw the dust of the chalk rise. He climbed out of the car and leaned against it, waiting.