Samain

by Meg Elizabeth Atkins

‘No, really. Thank you for the tour of inspection.’

  ‘It was a pleasure ...’ She lingered, helping him to sort things out from the back seat. At last, still chatting, they stood ready to go into their separate gardens. They knew they would be friends: cautiously, taking their time, observing formalities and respecting each other’s privacy, but they would be friends. Prompted by some casual remark she made and an impulse he could never afterwards explain to himself, Henry asked, ‘Who was the woman on the common?’

  Lydia gave him a puzzled look, not understanding. He reminded her of how she had seen him from her attic window that morning, ‘... and there was a woman, walking across the common. A woman with sort of Pre-Raphaelite hair, wearing a long skirt.’

  After a moment’s thought, still puzzled, she shook her head. ‘No, there was only you. That was why I noticed, you were the only person about so early. Unless I was so busy watching you I just didn’t notice anyone else.’

  ‘You couldn’t have missed her. She was out there, in the open, when I was under the trees.’

  ‘No, Mr Beaumont. Perhaps you saw her earlier, when you set out from the other side of the village. You stood for quite a while under the trees here ...’ Again she shook her head, and he saw she was being completely truthful. ‘But there was no woman, no one at all. The common was deserted.’

  3

  Children played in the garden of the police house and ran in and out of the open door. The constable’s wife was neat, pregnant, and said good morning without a smile and the minimum politeness.

  Constable Crowther, in contrast, had a face as open as his wife’s was closed, wayward blond hair and a friendly, boyish manner. He spoke in clichés, and no doubt thought in them, not a bad thing for a country copper whose work would have a predictability that would drive any sharp-witted, enterprising man insane with boredom. He had heard of Henry, of course — ‘New arrivals aren’t exactly ten a penny round here. If you’ll pardon the expression, sir, they tend to stick up like sore thumbs, the area being sparsely inhabited.’

  He appeared to be doing his best to remedy that, Henry thought, having given up the attempts to count the constable’s offspring. Perhaps someone should tell him about the population explosion.

  In the sparse, well ordered office, they sat and chatted about generalities; the young man spoke of Henry’s aunt, offering his condolences. The uncommunicative Mrs Crowther brought in tea and to her husband’s jovial, ‘This is Inspector Beaumont you’ve heard about, Mary. Old Miss Garner’s nephew —’ she replied, ‘Yes,’ and went away.

  ‘You see, you’ll find everyone very friendly. We all know about you,’ the constable said, with his ready smile and no comprehension of irony.

  ‘How long have you been here? Or are you a local man?’ Henry asked.

  ‘Not exactly local, near enough. I come from the next valley. Let me see. It’ll be eight years. Yes, that’s when our first was born.’

  ‘Really’ Henry said, thinking, good God, he probably has one a year to celebrate the event. ‘Perhaps you can tell me something, about my aunt. A couple of remarks that came my way ... They might be nothing but gossip, but odd sort of gossip if there’s no foundation.’

  For a moment it could have been that the constable’s face was fractionally less candid, less eager, but he said pleasantly, ‘Well, carry on, sir. Let’s see if I can throw any light into dark corners.’

  Dark corners, possibly. The constable’s devotion to cliché being in this instance so apposite there might almost be something more than random significance in his choice of words. ‘My aunt’s dog, a black labrador. Some time ago ... Do you know anything about its being killed?’

  ‘Black. Labrador. Killed,’ the constable murmured the words as if mnemonics, his face thoughtful. ‘Yes, as you say, sir, some time ago. About seven years near enough.’

  ‘What can you tell me about it?’

  ‘Have to get my thinking cap on for a minute. Or, better still, the O.B. Best way of refreshing the memory.’ It was no trouble for the constable to put his hand on the seven-year-old Occurrence Book, his official effects being kept in what he would no doubt term ‘apple pie order’.

  ‘Yes, here we are. Now. I remember your aunt asking me if I’d seen her dog about anywhere. He was quite a local character, everyone knew him. Very upset, she was, convinced he’d disappeared. I said he’d probably just wandered off but she said he wouldn’t do that — he was an old dog, knew his way around, always found his way home. It’d be a couple of days after I spoke to her that two spinster ladies by the name of Tack — perhaps you’ve met them, sir?’

  Henry shook his head.

  ‘They were having a walk on Markhill, where the stones are. And they found him, dead, his throat cut. Unpleasant business. They were very distressed, being animal lovers and ladies and everything. The younger Miss Tack went off to tell your aunt, the elder came straight to me. There ...’

  In the constable’s firm plain handwriting the report stated briefly the date and time, Miss Martha Tack’s address and the information that she had found the body of a black labrador dog — ‘... lying on a stone on Markhill. Its throat had apparently been cut by deliberate action.’

  Henry looked at the ‘Action Taken’ column. ‘Beside the stone was the dog’s collar bearing the name and address of Miss Bertha Garner of No. 5 The Terrace, Marchstearn. Miss Garner visited and wished no further action taken. She removed the body of her dog.’

  Lying on a stone ... ‘She didn’t want any enquiries made? Even unofficially? She didn’t ask if there had been any similar incidents?’

  ‘No. No. Preferred to forget the whole thing. Understandable.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘I should think so,’ the constable said firmly, comfortably.

  Lying on a stone ...

  Henry closed the book, but the words went on whispering in his mind. ‘What about those stones up there?’

  ‘Yes?’

  Henry felt a flick of impatience at the man’s phlegmatic politeness. ‘You know about places like that. They can attract cranks, deviants, people with perverted ideas of ritual, sacrifice.’

  ‘They can,’ the constable agreed, unruffled, with the merest suggestion of pity at the lunatic propensities of a disreputable minority. ‘But not here, sir. We’ve had nothing of that sort here. Maybe in other areas, but it’s usually all very much exaggerated. I blame the press, sir, I really do.’

  Henry could have quoted cases but didn’t, there would have been no point. Instead, he asked, ‘At the time, what did you think?’

  ‘To my knowledge nothing like the manner of the death of that dog has ever occurred in the area — or anywhere round about. I made enquiries, of course. But at the time I was very busy, we had an influx of poachers to the area. It happens now and then.’ The constable was not making an excuse, he was stating a fact.

  ‘Did you get any impression — from my aunt’s attitude, or did you have any reason to suspect — that this was an act deliberately aimed at causing her distress?’

  ‘No, I can’t say I got impressions, sir,’ the constable said, seeming to imply that only pathetically over-imaginative people did. ‘What crossed my mind was what you said — some people or persons making use of that place to perform their crack-brained ceremonies. If they did, it was an isolated occurrence. Either there was just that once or they moved on somewhere else, beyond my ken, so to speak. Miss Garner said nothing to me about anyone — well — getting at her personally. If she had, I wouldn’t have neglected to take notice.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘She was a very pleasant lady.’

  ‘A witch.’ Henry, having decided on surprise tactics, watched the constable’s reaction with interest. Once again, more definitely this time, caution closed the candid expression before embarrassment, a touch of smugness, opened it again.

  ‘The second piece of gossip that came my way,’ Henry added, by way of explanation.

  ‘You don�
�t want to pay any attention to it, sir,’ Crowther answered stoutly.

  ‘Why not? It’s interesting. I didn’t know I was related to one.’

  ‘If you’ll excuse me saying so, sir, you’re not. It’s like this ... An old lady, living alone; a countrywoman knowing the traditional herbal remedies, perhaps reading teacups, a little bit eccentric in her manner sometimes ... Well, goodness knows, there’s plenty of old ladies like that in rural areas, and stories get about. No malice in them, a kind of game — “That’s our local witch.” It might sound odd to you, sir, you not being used to country humour ...’

  The constable launched himself politely, ponderously, into a lecture on the ignorance and credulity of townspeople. Henry, sipping hot weak tea, listened with attention, occasional impatience, assessing the man.

  Narrow, decent, painstaking.

  Boring.

  But then, anyone with those qualities unleavened by imagination was bound to be. The constable had fitted around himself a world so small and bland there was not even room for a moment of sudden mental alarm; and he had no time for, no interest in anything outside that world. He would see what there was to see, deal with what he had been trained to deal with; anything out of the ordinary would make as much sense to him as a set of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

  Henry was not offended by the constable’s assumption that anyone born within reach of anything as unnatural as a daily bus route was deficient in several senses. What he found hard to endure was the development of the lecture into a series of anecdotes concerning the laboured, cunning, and apparently pointless practical jokes played by the village people on ‘foreigners’ — unless the point was to make the latter appear even more witless than the former.

  The constable used the term ‘yokels’, implicitly claiming superiority by intelligence and occupation (which was true); at the same time his attitude stated plainly that, sharing their way of life, he had loyalties from which he would not budge, which Henry could scarcely be expected to grasp. A fundamentally decent man, he had sincerity, principles ...

  I wonder if my eyes are glazing over? Henry thought.

  ... he had authority, too. Outside the office the noise of children’s voices rose, threatening to become ear-splitting. The constable opened the door and spoke a few brisk words. There were no protests, no arguments, just a chorus of little voices: ‘Yes, daddy,’ and the precipitant, murmuring busyness of children going off to play quietly somewhere else.

  ‘Kiddies have to exercise their lungs, only natural. Still, we can’t have them getting out of hand, can we?’ Crowther said placidly, smiling, evidently longing to indulge himself in even more boring anecdotes, this time concerning the family of which he was obviously immensely proud.

  ‘Er ... yes,’ Henry agreed, taking advantage of the interruption to leave.

  ‘Any help I can be, any time,’ the constable said, showing him out of the office. ‘And I’m sure you’ll enjoy Marchstearn. If you can’t beat them, join them, that’s what I always say. You’ll soon be feeling at home here.’

  *

  At home.

  Is that what it is? Henry thought, each time he returned to the village.

  He was a city man, bred to the clamour of humanity, with an understanding of harsh streets and shopping precincts, the conformity of suburbs, the architectural detritus of the Industrial Revolution, the hazards of dockland, the wreckage of slum clearance. He had assumed it would be necessary to make some deliberate effort to adjust himself to a rhythm of life so utterly out of tune with everything he had known, that it would be a matter of wilfully putting aside one self and adopting another in order to force his claim on the place unexpectedly presented to him ... But it was the other way round. Gradually, insidiously, the landscape closed around him; its green centuries of dreaming unbroken, it took him into its dream —it claimed him.

  Alone, or with Wanda, he spent hours tramping about, finding his way down roads and blossoming lanes, through densities of trees out into the sun struck fields. And up on to the hills, the sweeping hill that held the village in its arms, the desolate hill where the earthwork crouched over the megaliths. Deliberately following what remained of the old trackways, he sought out their mark points as his aunt had described them in her book. She claimed no specialist knowledge, she stated simply that she cared for such things, that instinct, observation, old legends guided her in her discovery.

  She wrote:

  Once, a family, a tribe, an army moved along the ley you walk now. They rested, they ate, they made their sacrifices. They looked ahead for the way they would go, guided by the hill fort, the figure cut out of chalk, the sacred grove crowning a rise, the light reflected on a flash or ford in a hollow; through the perils of the unknown this was to them the known way. To you, walking in safety, may come an awareness of this, a sense of the pattern laid down upon the countryside thousands of years ago.

  ... yes, Henry thought. He would have admitted it to no living creature; but to the shade of the kind, unknown, thoughtful woman, he said ... yes, that’s how it is.

  *

  ‘They say there’s a curse,’ an arty woman shrilled at Henry as he drank sherry at a party. ‘Do you feel it? Being new here. Over the village. Something hostile.’

  ‘No,’ Henry said; he did not ask the woman if she did. She had too many beads, a red dot painted on her forehead and green fingernails. She would feel anything she was told was there to be felt.

  ‘At atmosphere, though,’ she persisted. ‘All this Merrie England stuff — morris dancers and mummers and Jack in the Green and Christ knows what — underneath that a suspicion they’re just waiting till it’s dark to go out and worship the devil.’

  ‘Balls,’ Henry said, hoping to discourage her. He was wedged in a corner and could not get away.

  She had the fixed expression of a ferret. Nothing would discourage her. ‘I’m not so sure. These remote places are the last strongholds of pagan religion.’

  ‘They didn’t worship the devil.’

  ‘I can see you know nothing about it. You’re probably insensitive to vibrations. Don’t tell me you haven’t been up amongst those bloody great stones, they’re quite terrifying. There’s a peculiar feature of those stones — now what is it? Roger —’ She dragged at the arm of a man standing nearby, questioning him truculently. He smiled apologetically at Henry; they had previously made a brief acquaintance in the local pub. The woman had come to the party as his wife’s guest and Henry felt sorry for him.

  ‘What it is,’ he explained to Henry, ‘some of the stones have a slight hollow, roughly oval shaped, near the top. Nobody knows why the hollows were made and in normal light they’re scarcely discernible. Have you noticed them?’

  ‘No. But I’ll look next time I’m walking up there. I suppose if I did notice I’d assume it was simply weathering. Could it be?’

  ‘Definitelynot,’ the woman said. ‘Definitely something supernatural.’

  Roger looked even more apologetic. Henry remembered he was a civil servant of some kind; a polite, restrained man with a pleasant nineteen-twenties gabled house, strapping daughters who rode ponies and a wife who wrote poetry.

  ‘Weathering ... No, opinion is against it; we’ve had chaps from the University, various archaeological societies taking a look. It does seem to be that the hollows were made deliberately, at the same time the stones were erected, roughly five thousand years ago.’

  ‘Some kind ofmagnetic principle. Concentration of something or other. To guide in space ships, originally. Sort of landing strip. God, I need another drink, they’re bloody mean with it here, aren’t they?’ the woman said, mercifully thrusting away.

  Roger was too much a gentleman to allow himself to look relieved, and in too short a time the woman was back, clutching a glass and a handful of olives, demanding, ‘Have you told him? About the faces? What do youthink?’

  ‘We haven’t got that far yet,’ Henry said.

  ‘Christ, Roger, you bloody establishment p
eople are all piss and wind. Soprecise.’

  ‘It helps when one is attempting to convey information, Rowena,’ Roger said mildly; then, to Henry, ‘You see, what happens is at night, when the moon plays on the stones. The effect is curious, as if the stones are hooded figures and the hollows their faces, shadowed by the hoods. I’ve seen it myself ... It’s very eerie.’

  ‘Imust,’ the woman shrilled, ‘come and stay with you at full moon, and go up and see for myself.’

  ‘I didn’t say every full moon,’ Roger corrected her patiently. ‘It depends on the weather conditions a great deal, I understand. It was October when I was there, the last night of October to be — er — precise. I remember because I’d been talking to - ’

  ‘Why October?’ The woman gulped olives, not waiting for an answer. ‘That can’t possibly be relevant. You just happened to cross some kind of barrier, step into another dimension. I’ve heard of people living round about who’ve seen that effect occasionally. Others have gone up and waited and watched time and again and absolutely nothing’s happened. No, it’s something quite random. You’re so bloody hidebound in your ideas of time, Rog. Time is utterly meaningless. That being so, what could the last night of October possiblymean?’

  ‘All Hallows Eve,’ Roger ventured.

  She snorted. ‘Conventional religious cock.’

  ‘Samain,’ Henry said.

  ‘Sam who?’ she asked.

  Roger looked at Henry with interest, an obvious longing that Rowena would go away now written all over his face. ‘Yes. That was how I’d fixed the date in my mind. You see, it was the first time I’d heard about Samain — that same day, actually. I was talking to —’

  ‘Samwhat?’ the woman persisted.

  ‘Samain. A pagan festival, preceding conventional religious cock and our meaningless calendar,’ Henry said, correctly assuming that as the woman was devoid of manners she was deaf to irony as well. ‘In pre-Christian culture it marked the end of the old year, the gates of the underworld opened and took down the sun. It was a dangerous time, not only because it was a prelude to the darkness and cold that would cover the world for months, but because on that night, when the gates were open, the dead could find their way back.’