The Buried Circle

by Jenni Mills

I’d never been into a church. It felt wrong. It was where the other people went, Christians. The ones who stole places like Avebury, stamped out the old religion. As we chased each other between the gravestones in the churchyard, I kept hearing Mum’s voice in my head. Mind the traffic on the main road, mind your manners, and don’t go in the church.

  Why not?

  Because they don’t like pagans.

  Frannie had wanted to take me to church once, when I was visiting her, but Mum had found out the night before and kicked up a terrible fuss. Put your grandmother on the phone this minute. I’d handed it over, shaking already. Mum’d screamed down the phone, so loud I’d heard all the words. How DARE you docternate her? Frannie had held the phone away from her ear, wincing. Afterwards she said, maybe when you’re older, Indy Or your mam’ll call down forty terrible curses on my head.

  Keir stepped out of the sunlight into the darkened porch. His hand was hovering near the heavy iron door handle.

  I was afraid. You didn’t know what kind of bad things might happen to you if you went in a church. You might get nailed to a cross.

  Don’t, I said. Keir turned his head and gave me a wicked smile from under his tousled fringe, bleached by the sun. Keeping his eyes fixed on me, he stretched out his hand and grasped the iron ring. Slowly he turned it. It made a rusty clunking noise. I could hardly breathe. Mick’ll be furious with you, I said.

  Keir stuck out his tongue, leaned his shoulder against the door to open it and slipped through the gap. I waited for the strangled scream that would surely come, but there was silence. I gave it a moment longer, then followed him in.

  It was huge inside, much bigger than I’d expected, and not as dark, though there were rows of hard, forbidding pews. Sunlight filtered into the nave from a tall window, but the chancel was much darker, behind a fretted screen of age-polished wood. I nearly yelled when I looked above it: there was a huge metal cross on the wall, wrapped with barbed wire. That must be where they hung the pagans.

  There was no sign of Keir, not even a puddle of melted flesh on the floor. They’d got him then.

  ‘Yaaah!’

  I almost wet myself with fright. A figure bobbed up like a jack-in-a-box from the rows of pews, waving its arms. ‘Caughtcha!’

  ‘Sssh. They’ll hear!

  ‘There’s no one. We’re on our own.’

  ‘That could be…as bad.’ Christians, after all, were people. But Jesus–Jesus was a dead person who’d come back to life. What if Jesus was lurking in the shadows behind the wooden screen? I’d seen Dawn of the Dead. They ate you. I said as much to Keir.

  ‘No, you got it the wrong way round. Christians ate Jesus.’

  I hadn’t realized they were cannibals. This was getting worse.

  Keir pranced off along the pews, giggling. There was a big book, open on top of a high stand. ‘Double dare me?’ he called.

  ‘To what?’

  ‘Touch the book.’

  ‘No!

  He was on tiptoe already, trying to reach up to it. Desperate to distract him from this almost certainly lethal experiment, I ran in the opposite direction.

  ‘Hey, look at this,’ I called.

  I’d only meant to grab his attention with a cartwheel in the aisle, but then I saw it, this beautiful stone tub with a wooden lid, and carvings on the side. It stood in a shaft of sunlight under the tall window.

  ‘I mean, wow. It must be really old.’ I walked round it, tracing the patterns on it. The stone was wonderfully cool under my trailing fingers. ‘There’s a snake!

  I couldn’t have said anything more likely to attract him. He forgot the book and belted after me, thinking I meant a real one.

  ‘Oh.’ Disappointment in his voice when he saw it was only a pockmarked stone carving.

  ‘Yeah, but look. There’s a bloke stabbing it with his spear.’

  ‘Maybe it’s a dinosaur!

  There was another rusty clunk, a rattle. Somebody was turning the handle of the big wooden door, the wrong way, trying to open it. Keir and I looked at each other. There was panic in his eyes. I’d have felt smug, if I hadn’t been scared shitless too.

  ‘Hide,’ he hissed.

  ‘Where?’ The tub wasn’t big enough to conceal even one of us, or I’d have lifted the lid. Keir was already darting through the wooden screen, and I followed him into the part of the church that was darker and spookier. I didn’t understand why the seats here faced inwards, instead of forwards, though I supposed the table with a cross must be the altar.

  The heavy church door swung slowly open. In came the curly-headed friend of Keir’s father, one of the others camping in Tolemac. He’d been with us when John had made a crop circle, a couple of nights ago, right after Solstice. He had his back to us, looking at leaflets on the stand by the door, but at any minute he could turn and see us through the screen, two splashes of brightness in our yellow and red hippie kids’ clothes. I looked for somewhere better to hide–under the altar cloth?–but it was too late.

  ‘It’s only Riz.’ Keir was walking out into the middle of the church. ‘Hi, Riz!’

  A frown screwed up Riz’s face, only for a second, to be replaced by a wide smile. ‘Whatchoo doin’ in here? You pair of monkeys, Meg’ll give you what-for.’

  ‘What are you doin’ in here, then?’ asked Keir. Hadn’t given him credit for so much boldness: he never had a problem talking to me, but was usually shy with grown-ups.

  ‘Sizin’ up the opposition,’ said Riz. He pulled open the top of his shirt, revealing a peace symbol on a chain. ‘See, I’m protected. You two got summat like this? If you ain’t, you better get out quick because the old man with the long white beard don’t like pagan kids.’

  ‘Nothing happened to us yet,’ said Keir.

  Riz looked at his watch. ‘How long you bin in here?’

  Keir looked uncertainly at me. ‘How long, Ind?’

  ‘Maybe ten minutes,’ I said.

  Riz shook his head slowly. ‘You bin lucky. Good thing I found you. Reckon you got three, four more minutes at most before he sees you. It’s like a searchlight, see–God’s eye swings back an’ forth, but there’s a lot of churches for him to keep his eye on.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s right,’ I said. ‘My gran told me God can see everything at once.’

  Riz’s dark button eyes narrowed. ‘You doubtin’ me, Ind? Because God and pagans is at war, see? You seen that big book up on the stand there? You go take a look in that. Genesis three, thirteen.’

  ‘What’s that?’ I said.

  ‘You’re good at readin’, intcha? Flip back near the beginning of the book.’

  There was a step behind the reading stand. Riz made me drag it over and stand on it to reach the book. It had flimsy, fragile pages.

  ‘Keep turnin’ back to the beginning.’ He was at my side, not much taller than me now I was on the step. ‘There–read that bit. From where it says thirteen.’

  ‘“And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent be–beg–”’

  ‘Beguiled me,’ said Riz. He seemed to know it by heart.

  “And I did eat.”’

  ‘Go on. What does it say next?’

  ‘“And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life…”’

  ‘See?’ said Riz. ‘That’s God cursing the serpent. And you know who the serpent is?’ From the lectern, I could see the stone tub, with the serpents carved around its base. The man sticking his spear into one of them was hidden on the far side. ‘That’s us. The pagans.’ He reached over my shoulder and tore the flimsy page right out of the book, flipping the pages back to hide what he’d done. ‘Upon thy belly shalt thou go, Ind. I reckon you got about thirty seconds left to leg it out of here. Before you ain’t got any legs left to leg it on.’

  Keir had turned
pale under his tan. He tugged my arm. We legged it and, in our hurry to put distance between ourselves and God, almost collided with the other man in the leather jacket who was coming into the porch.

  He was a black man. And that was weird because although there were plenty of black people back home in Bristol, I hadn’t seen a black man in Avebury all summer long.

  The sound of the church door scraping on stone hauls me back to the present, shivering, because by now I ought to know that the brighter memories of that summer all turn dark in the end. An elderly woman comes out of the porch, carrying a bucket filled with dead flowers. She nods at me as she comes towards the bench. ‘Lovely evening.’ The nod turns to a smile, and she stops. ‘India, isn’t it? Frances’s granddaughter?’

  I vaguely recognize her from the film show in the Red Lion.

  ‘You’ve been working with that TV crew, haven’t you?’ she says. ‘Someone rang me the other day to persuade me to be interviewed. Said I’d think about it.’

  ‘You should do it,’ I say, moving up the bench to make room for her. ‘I’ve been trying to talk Frannie into it.’

  ‘Won’t stop, I must take these to the compost heap and get on home.’ Nevertheless, she puts down the bucket. ‘Those kids running towards the camera in Percy Lawes’s film? One of them was me. Your gran always seemed so grown-up to us–such a pretty girl, she was, quite the young lady, especially after she started at the Manor. And she had spirit, still does. Though it wore her down eventually, I reckon, working for that old devil.’

  ‘Keiller? What did he do to her?’

  ‘What I mean is, I shouldn’t have liked it. He used to stand on a box among the stones, bellowing instructions through a megaphone. And in the end he did the same to her as he did to the whole village.’ She picks up the bucket of dead flowers. ‘Tore the heart out of it. I remember it ever so clearly, that September he had her parents’ guesthouse demolished, and we all stood and watched.’

  CHAPTER 24

  September 1938

  I thought it would be in the Manor. Mr Cromley said that when Mr Keiller carried the chalk phallus out that night in February, the dinner guests made a circle, and they all kissed it before Mr K presented it to the statue of Pan. You could feel the energies swirling and crackling, he said, because the stone circle is like Mr Rawlins’s big Crossley generator, making invisible power that spills over the henge banks through the whole village. But the ritual can’t be there this time: the Manor’s not private enough. If Davey and I could spy, who else might be watching?

  So it’s a house in Swindon, an anonymous terraced house in a row on the north side of the town. Respectable, characterless. Behind it is a park, with trees, which seems nice, only when I look closer it’s not a park after all: it’s a cemetery.

  I let myself in with the key Mr Cromley gave me. A long, dark, spooky hallway that smells of furniture polish. Kitchen at the back, abandoned in the middle of a meal. There’s a plate on the oilcloth with half a piece of buttered toast, an eggcup of white powder covered with a saucer, a cup in the sink. But maybe I wasn’t supposed to go in here. Upstairs, Mr Cromley said. Front bedroom.

  The curtains are already drawn across the bay windows, worn crimson damask. The satin eiderdown on the bed is a purply red that clashes. The carpet is dark blue with swirly gold leaves, not quite enough to cover the room so there’s a border of stained dark brown floorboards round the edges. It’s a large room for such a little house, hardly any furniture except a wardrobe with a mirrored door and an old-fashioned dark oak washstand in the corner, but still the bed seems to fill most of it. Someone’s left a long white nightie on the pillow, freshly washed and ironed. I slip off my shoes and sit down on the end of the bed to wait.

  The village turned out to watch the wrecking crew bring down Mam and Dad’s guesthouse. The first people were already gathering on the road outside at half past seven when I came downstairs, and they looked surprised to see someone coming out of the empty house. Mam and Dad had moved out weeks ago, gone to Devizes with all their furniture and bits in a van, apart from what was thrown out for the rag-and-bone man. I’d found lodgings less than a mile down the road at Winterbourne Monkton, under the roof of a widowed lady who rattled around in a house she couldn’t afford to keep up. I had my own gas ring and she let me have the back sitting room all to myself, so I never saw her unless it was on the way to the bathroom. She didn’t seem to care about my comings and goings. The night before they was due to knock down the guesthouse, I’d gone home with a stub of candle and blankets and slept on the bare boards of my old room.

  Mr Cromley had said it took time to arrange these things. He said it wouldn’t be the same as the ritual on the stone under the trees. That was a makeshift demonstration of what the energies could do; this had to be more formal, like, more special. It should take place near the autumn equinox, when light and dark were in balance, between summer and winter, to help us slip between worlds.

  He’d never taken me into the circle again, but sometimes he caught me in the corridor in the Manor, and would press me against the panelled wall and kiss me, slipping his hand under my skirt. It excited him all the more if there were people not far away. Once, we heard Mrs Sorel-Taylour’s little feet clacking down the wooden staircase, and I tried to push him off but he kept sliding his fingers against me and only stepped away a moment before her shape blocked the light at the end of the passageway.

  ‘Mr Cromley!’ I said, a little breathless, the minute she’d gone. ‘That was–’

  ‘My lovers call me Donald,’ he whispered in my ear. ‘But you still can’t bring yourself to do that, can you, Heartbreaker?’ His fingers resumed their relentless circling. He never called me Frances or Fran, and he never finished what we were doing. That was for the equinox.

  I’d had cold feet about it since September blew in and swept the stone circle with drifts of golden leaves. What was I letting myself in for? This wasn’t black magic: Mr Cromley was clear on that. I wasn’t putting my soul in danger, oh, no, there was a long tradition of Christian magicians, like John Dee, whose magic mirror Mr Keiller kept in his study. Occult didn’t mean bad: it meant secret, hidden. Knowledge that had to be hidden from ordinary people because it was powerful and, in the wrong hands, dangerous. Like electricity, from Mr Rawlins’s generator: it lit the house, but it could kill you too, if you pushed in a plug with wet hands.

  Had to be done with proper ritual, he said. They would wear robes and masks. I was to be masked too, dressed in white. Masks were important, to make us not entirely ourselves: we would become vessels for the forces we were calling on. I was to be the Goddess made flesh, and I would draw down her power into me.

  What you will shall be

  Between worlds.

  The front door rattled with the key in the lock, the hall light went on downstairs, and I jumped up and threw off my coat because I wasn’t undressed yet like he’d told me.

  ‘Hello. You there?’ Mr Cromley’s voice floated up the stairwell. I didn’t answer. He muttered something, then I heard a foot on the stair.

  ‘I’m here,’ I called. ‘Getting myself ready’

  ‘Good.’ I could hear the relief in his voice. The floorboards creaked as I took off my coat and dress, my fingers fumbling with the buttons. I was in a panic. I wouldn’t be ready, they’d come up and find me in my vest and knickers…But they could hear me moving around, and they wouldn’t come straight up because they were getting ready too, in the front room downstairs.

  Robes and masks. Masks make you free, Mr Cromley had said. You can do what you like wearing a mask. Mine was tucked under the white nightie. I’d imagined it would be a little black Burglar Bill mask, just covering the eyes, but it was a great sparkly thing with sequins and feathers, and it came down over my nose and cheeks, so there was only my mouth exposed. I’d put on red lipstick before catching the bus to Swindon, but it was all eaten off now. I looked for my bag that I’d kicked under the bed, but I heard their feet on the stairs.<
br />
  There was only the two of them, like he’d said. They had hoods on their dark blue robes, and under them masks, like balaclavas made of leather, that covered the whole head. A smell came off them, a tannery smell overlaid with whisky fumes, a hot chemical stink of excitement. Eyes gleamed through the eyeholes, lips glistened in the wide oval cut in the masks for the mouth; they looked like blacked-up minstrels from an end-of-the-pier show. One was taller, one was younger; and anyway, I’d have known which Mr Cromley was because he spoke, he said the words, he told me what to do, and he was first.

  The dagger, he’d told me, is called an athame, a ritual tool from earliest times. The dagger and the cup. You mix the fluids in the cup with the dagger. A little mead, a little blood and, afterwards, a little seed. We shall smear it on your forehead, Heartbreaker, and on your breasts, and call down the Goddess into you. In the space that hangs between worlds, you shall have infinite power. What you will shall be. Demand the universe gives you whatever you desire.

  At the empty guesthouse I woke before the dawn, and washed my face in cold water from the jug I’d brought in from the pump the night before; the mains water had been turned off when Mam and Dad left. No power, either, and the range was long out, so I drank water from the jug for my breakfast and ate the bread and jam sandwiches, soggy now, I’d made at the widow’s house. The early sun was coming through the kitchen window, making patterns on the dusty flagstones where Mam had danced. There’d been a frost in the night–no wonder I’d been cold under the thin blankets–and the stalks of the runner beans had turned black.

  I took out my rosewood watercolour set that Mr Keiller had given me in the summer, filled the little tray with water, and began to paint what I could see. Beyond the fence at the back of the garden, the trees on the main road hid where the workmen was still busy with the digging. At the end of the field was a single stone, trussed and bound and propped with planks. A cement mixer and a wheelbarrow stood a few yards away, ready for making the concrete base so it’d never fall down again. Mr Keiller had said he’d carry on till November if need be, so he could say he’d finished the first half of the circle by the end of 1938.