The Narrows

by James Brogden

  He’d felt it the moment he and Barber had entered the valley.

  In the outlying woods, Barber had swapped his car for a battered jeep, but just before tying him up and throwing him in the back, he had abruptly changed his mind and turned to look at Andy as if a new idea had suddenly struck him.

  ‘Come,’ he said. ‘There’s something you should see.’

  As he led Andy to the brink of the valley, he withdrew the tightest reins of his power, allowing a measure of freedom to return.

  Andy stared around in amazement at the encompassing hills and the village below, where something far-off sang a discordant anthem of earthpower. The same thing that Bex had felt as an indefinable wrongness nagged at him like the sound of distant screaming, yet despite the feeling of revulsion, he found himself responding to its call – all other things aside, he wanted to see its source.

  ‘It’s a Fane,’ he breathed. ‘My god, it’s a huge Fane.’ He turned back to Barber. ‘What have you done to this place?’

  Barber shrugged. ‘If you want to call it that, though it seems unnecessarily poetic. Technically, it’s a Schumann-Watkins Displacement Field. The villagers simply call it the Spinny.’

  ‘Walter copied it. Moon Grove – he was trying to recreate this.’

  ‘A slave building sandcastles in flattery of his master’s palace.’ Barber regarded the frozen fields and said, half to himself, ‘But I won’t allow them to go the same way. When the end comes for them, it should be swift, painless and without fear. They deserve at least that.’ He switched his attention to Andy. ‘I’m afraid I can’t offer you the same.’

  Then he shook himself, clapped his hands together and said, ‘Now then. A spot of history, I think. But before I begin, understand something. I tell you this not to gloat or revel in my own accomplishments. Nor to taunt you. I simply believe that a soul should not die in ignorance of its own nature. When death comes for you, you will understand its purpose and its rightness. That is what I can offer you.’

  ‘Great. Allow me to weep with gratitude.’

  ‘Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave us something new to fear – atomic annihilation – and so when the war turned Cold, it was necessary to manufacture a new global monster. Everybody naturally looked to the Soviets. Throughout the war there had been boffins squirrelled away around the country, coming up with all sorts of top-secret wizardry, some of which involved tinkering with electromagnetic fields to hide our planes from enemy radar. Stealth, they call it now. Then some bright spark came up with the idea of, well, why can’t we hide ourselves from the enemy’s planes too? There’s only so much you can bury in a bunker, but what if we could find a way to protect entire towns and cities by manipulating the subtle energies of the very landscape itself?

  ‘Did you know that during the First World War “earth-current signalling” devices used the ground’s own electrical conductivity to transmit messages between trenches where enemy shells had destroyed the telegraph wires? Oscar Schumann’s early work on the resonant frequencies of the earth-ionosphere cavity provided a conceptual framework, after which it was only a question of developing an appropriate mechanism for manipulating the field – and that we took from the practice of acupuncture.’

  ‘Stakes in the ground.’

  ‘Exactly. When the Jerusalem Project was set up, the War Office had already commandeered hundreds of villages for its own purposes, usually as gunnery ranges. In most cases, the inhabitants were simply turfed out and there are still ghost villages like Tyneham and Imber, where they’ve never been allowed back since. The original project’s location was one such. But despite all our efforts we were unable to establish a stable Schumann field until we realised that what was missing was the presence of people. The human bioelectric field and the earth’s own iso-electric field interact in subtle, symbiotic ways which we don’t yet fully understand. For example, the original neolithic ‘old straight tracks’ didn’t just follow pre-existing energy channels; somehow they came into being simultaneously.’

  ‘Walter said that we walked them into existence, like aboriginal songlines.’

  Barber glared. ‘Walter had the soul of a poet, and that made him fundamentally unsuited for Jerusalem. If I’d seen that earlier I might have been able to spare him.’

  ‘But not me.’

  Barber regarded him for a long, silent moment. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not you. But then your fate was never part of the plan to begin with.

  ‘The original residents of Holly End were, of course, delighted to be allowed home so soon after the war. The prospect of having a few soldiers billeted on the outskirts and a pair of mad scientists conducting their odd experiments in the woods must have seemed a small price to pay. It wasn’t until we actually succeeded that any of us realised how dear that price truly was.

  ‘The Schumann field was an unqualified success: we were immediately and totally cut off from the outside world. Which, as you can imagine, posed some tricky logistical problems.’

  ‘You mean like how to stop all the villagers from starving to death? That sort of thing?’

  Barber flapped a dismissive hand. ‘That was never an issue. We’d stockpiled plenty of supplies and worked out a sustainability programme based on old-fashioned crop-rotation techniques long before they ran out. But it took nearly a year to re-establish communication with the outside world. This was in 1954. A year later, when I finally stumbled out on the road to Chipping Camden, it was 1963.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘A week after the assassination of President Kennedy, and a year after the world had nearly blown itself to smithereens over Cuba.’

  ‘Bullshit!’

  ‘If I remember rightly, Doctor Who had just started on the telly.’

  ‘Nine years?’

  ‘It’s not so surprising if you think about it. You and your Narrowfolk utilise a much weaker version of the same displacement effect to sneak around parts of the city where you don’t belong.’

  ‘But of course,’ Andy replied, ‘you never told the villagers what you found, did you?’

  ‘A lot can happen in one year, never mind nine. The Jerusalem Project was officially dead. We’d been forgotten about by the War Office, by friends and relatives, and even disappeared from the maps as if we’d never existed in the first place. And yet, it was the best thing that could have happened. At a stroke we were liberated from the petty demands of our war-mongering paymasters and free to set our own agenda – to use Holly End for an altogether more profound and lofty purpose: the secrets of the human soul and reality itself.’

  ‘Here we go.’

  Barber pointed at the village below. ‘Down there, oh righteous one,’ he said with heavy scorn, ‘there is no crime, no addiction, and no deviance; no suicide bombers, no genetically modified food, no oestrogens in the water supply; no ASBOs, spam email, reality television, 20-20 cricket, or GPS navigation systems. Do you understand yet? The people who live down there brew their own beer and eat food that they’ve grown themselves. They have a bit of a sing-song and dance in the pub on a Friday night, and they say their prayers for Queen and Country in church on a Sunday. The girls make cakes, and the boys catch newts, and at school they all read Kipling and Shakespeare. This place is as close to being perfect as anywhere you are likely to see.’

  ‘Funny. I keep hearing that. It’s all still a lie, though. They deserve to know the truth. They should be able to choose for themselves.’

  ‘Deserve? Should? Don’t bandy moral absolutes with me, boy; don’t you think I heard this bleating a thousand times from Lyttleton? What would you do? Give them to the care of the so-called Welfare State so that they can be housed in high-rise slums, with access to all the best crack and pornography that money can buy?’

  ‘Don’t pretend that you care. Not after what I’ve seen you do.’

  ‘Th
e fact that I have a sense of loyalty and responsibility to them does not stop me from doing what must be done, however unpleasant it might be.’

  ‘That’s just self-justifying crap, and you know it.’

  ‘I imagine you told yourself much the same when you left your fiancée,’ Barber shot back. ‘Or am I wrong?’

  Andy found he couldn’t answer that.

  ‘In any event, the adults are altogether useless as test subjects. Their meridians are already set and fixed, and they’re not susceptible to the kinds of manipulation which are necessary. They were all born Outside; they’re like colonists on a new planet with different gravity – any scientist trying to research human development in such circumstances would have to wait for the first native generation to be born.’

  ‘The children.’ Andy felt sick.

  ‘Yes. But you see, the children of Holly End had all come in from the Outside too. What we really needed, Walter and I…’

  ‘…were the ones born Inside.’ The implication of what he was hearing struck him suddenly. ‘Dear God – how old am I?’

  ‘You were born in nineteen fifty five, the firstborn son of Holly End. You were three when the good doctor spirited you away. That was two years ago – nearly eighteen Outside. In one sense, you’re over fifty years old. That’s older than I am.’

  Barber then told him the story of a young woman who had found herself pregnant by a soldier stationed at one of the nearby army camps; of how, despite pressure to have the child adopted, she’d borne both the shame and the boy and moved to Holly End to make a fresh start. Of how after the Spinny had cut them off, she had fallen in love with a farmer who’d wedded her without a second thought for curtain twitchers or post-office gossip. Of devoted step-fathers and new half-brothers. Of the first devastating Rousler attack which destroyed crops, houses, and families, and a community too shocked to properly realise that not all of the bodies were accounted for.

  ‘What family you might have had here are long gone. The gates of the garden are shut, son of man, and there is nothing for you here except death.’

  But it was just another story. It connected with nothing in him which could envisage having ever lived here, because the buzzing in his head was getting stronger, and he felt himself becoming dislocated just like when he’d been on the payphone to Laura. If only he could think it through, if only it would let up for a second, he might be able to get his head around all this.

  That was when Barber threw him in the back of the jeep, under a pile of tarpaulins and spades and drove him down into the village to be locked in this crypt.

  ***

  He must have fallen asleep at some point, because the sound of the crypt’s heavy door crashing open startled him awake. He’d lost all sense of time.

  ‘Get up.’ Barber stood at the top of the crypt steps, looking dishevelled; he was covered in mud and leaf-mould. His needles, and thus the power which controlled Andy through them, had been withdrawn when he’d been dumped down here while Barber had been off doing whatever had made such a mess of his nice long coat. It gave Andy the freedom to at least lie there and squint up at him.

  ‘Spot of gardening, is it?’ he mocked in weak defiance.

  Barber smiled mirthlessly. ‘Something like.’

  Unfortunately, freedom wasn’t the same as strength. Despite the fact that his wounds were almost healed, he could do nothing to stop Barber dragging him up the steps, through the church, and out into the snow-blanketed graveyard, where he finally saw the source of the tortured earthpower by which Barber meant to end his life.

  6 Rabbit John

  Bex became aware of the dry-sweet smell of herbs and woodsmoke, the sound of cheerful whistling, and a monstrous pain as if a railroad spike had been driven straight into the middle of her forehead.

  She found herself lying on a narrow cot in a small, dimly-lit shack. The ceiling was raftered with rough-hewn timbers from which hung all manner of tools, traps, and animal skins in various stages of preservation. She tried to sit up, winced at the pain in her head, and discovered that someone had bandaged it. A thick poultice was wadded between her eyebrows; her fingers came away covered in green guck. She tore it off in disgust.

  A second stab at the whole sitting up business was slightly more successful, but a sudden wave of dizziness turned the world inside out and upside down, and she fell back, knocking over a small bedside table that had been set with a tin mug and a jug of water.

  At the noise, a man appeared in the low doorway. He was dressed in army fatigues which had been heavily customised with animal furs, but despite this, and the generally unkempt state of the shack, he was clean-shaven. She found this oddly reassuring, although it made telling his age it impossible. He had the look of a young man ridden hard by life.

  Rabbit John regarded her with concern. ‘You’ve woken up, I see.’

  Bex lurched to her feet. ‘Where am I?’ she demanded.

  ‘Come outside when you’re feeling up to it,’ he replied by way of an answer. ‘There’s a brew on.’

  It took a while to gather her marbles together. Outside, she found that the shack occupied a small clearing in the snow-cloaked woods; a wide lean-to porch ran the length of it, under the shelter of which the man was boiling a kettle over an open fire. Two boys were hovering nearby, and when she appeared, they drew back fearfully, whispering. Wordlessly, Rabbit John handed her a chipped mug of tea. It was black, unsweetened, and cut clean through her mental fog. She sipped carefully as he left the fire and approached to inspect her forehead.

  ‘You took the dressing off,’ he observed.

  ‘It smelled of tree.’ This close, she noticed that his eyes were exactly the same colour as Maltesers and found herself blushing inexplicably.

  ‘It took half an hour to make,’ he chided.

  ‘Sorry, but… You haven’t got any paracetomol, have you?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know what that is. How many fingers am I holding up?’ He showed her three.

  ‘Three. Is this some kind of concussion thing?’

  ‘Yes. Can you count backwards from ten?’

  ‘Certainly can,’ she replied and simply returned his gaze. It wasn’t easy – he was nearly a foot taller.

  ‘Humour me.’

  She sighed and counted backwards from ten.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he continued. ‘This isn’t a “concussion thing,” I should add.’ There was a hint of warning in his voice.

  ‘What’s yours?’ It came out more aggressive than she’d intended, but she let it stand.

  ‘John,’ he answered amiably. ‘Most people add a Rabbit to it, but you can’t blame them for that.’ He gestured self-deprecatingly at his coat. ‘It’s not like I don’t invite it. There, I’ve told you mine. Rousler or not, you can’t really be so ungrateful as to not return the favour, can you?’

  ‘Actually, yes I can. Nothing personal, you seem like nice boys, but I don’t want to get you mixed up in all of this. I’m just looking for a friend of mine. If you’ll let me have my stuff, I’ll be on my way and out of your hair.’ She didn’t sense any harm in these three, for all that they looked like rejects from a bad costume drama, but Carling had said that Holly End was the centre of Barber’s power, and she wasn’t taking any chances.

  Rabbit John merely settled back onto his tree-stump chair with an amiable smile, as if to suggest that it was all the same to him whether she talked or walked – then she saw that his foot was resting on her backpack like a footstool and swore aloud. There were shocked gasps from the two boys.

  She turned on her brightest, sunniest fuck-you smile. ‘Angela,’ she said, ‘Angela Parkhurst,’ and held out a hand, which Rabbit John shook with dry amusement. It was the name she habitually gave in doubtful company; ‘Nosey’ Parkhurst had been the biggest bitch and gossip in Year Nine, an
d Bex had no qualms about dropping her in anything nasty. ‘I’ll play, but I’m not sure how much of this you’re going to believe.’ She launched into a heavily truncated version of the events that had unfolded since Five Ways tunnel, leaving out as much as she could about Barber until she knew where this strange woodcutter’s loyalties lay.

  As she spoke, his face grew pale, and his mouth set in a thin, hard line; clearly he was trying to contain a turmoil of emotions – but whether they were anger, fear or excitement, she couldn’t tell. Ted and Sam were exchanging increasingly bewildered looks and whispering together urgently. It wasn’t at all the reaction she’d expected.

  ‘I think,’ he replied slowly, piecing together his thoughts, ‘that you’ve probably told us less than half of what you really know. I’d have done the same in your position. But I don’t think you realise how much more you’ve told without meaning to.’

  He reached into her backpack and brought out Dodd’s A-to-Z. ‘I was having a look through this, back when I thought you were a Rousler. I know better now.’

  ‘That’s the second time you’ve called me that. What is it?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter now.’ He looked like he was about to be sick. She couldn’t work out what the problem was. ‘In the front here, it says this was printed in the year two-thousand and four.’ He laughed shortly. ‘Birmingham’s a bit bigger than I remember.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So this is quite battered by the look of it. What year is it now?’

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  ‘Sam,’ said Rabbit John, his liquid chocolate eyes never leaving hers, ‘how old are you, son?’

  ‘I’m nearly nine,’ he answered proudly.

  ‘And when were you born?’

  ‘On the twenty-second of April. There was a ‘lectricity cut. The doctor thought I was a girl,’ he added in disgust.