Shooting Lights

by Mary Victoria Johnson

  “Gosh, Tree, look!” Jeanne gasped, tugging at my sleeve. Then she hastily retracted, muttering, “Sorry.”

  I was about to tell her that there was no need to apologize when I caught sight of it.

  Stonehenge was rather like the Eiffel Tower, or the Empire State Building, or the Colosseum, in that I’d seen so many pictures of it that my initial reaction was, “That’s it?” swiftly replaced by a more excited “That’s it!” Usually, in all the pictures I had seen, the stones were rising out of a morning mist like megalithic tombstones, eerie and mystical and, most importantly, deserted. Today couldn’t have been more opposite. Every car in that sea of a carpark must have had an average load of five people, who were all gathered right here, flooding the monument in the same way ants might cover a discarded apple core. Even from where we were, still half a mile away, I could hear the hum of thousands of voices and languages, along with a strange, irregular drumming.

  “The worst part is,” Chris said to Ritchie, “I can’t see a hotdog stand. What an absolute bloody outrage. In America, there’d be at least a dozen hotdog stands here, maybe with some mini-donuts or ice cream. England is stuck in the Dark Ages.”

  A group of young people dressed in getups similar to Jeanne shot him a vicious glare as they passed.

  “He’s joking.”

  “Thank you, Teresa.” His stomach audibly rumbled. “But not entirely.”

  The closer we got, the more obvious it was that a good chunk of those gathered were not, in fact, tourists. We were overtaken by a barefoot girl wearing a medieval-style dress and what looked suspiciously like a wolf skin, sandals dangling from one hand and a satchel of odd objects in the other. A large group clad entirely in white robes was holding hands in the middle of the circle, chanting, and a man covered in an impressive array of body paint nodded at us like we were old friends. Even Jeanne, it was safe to say, had found herself swimming firmly within the mainstream in comparison.

  “What utter chaos.” Jeanne inhaled, soaking it all in. “I’m in heaven.”

  “Do you reckon we’ll be able to go right up to the stones?” I asked.

  “Unfortunately I left my baton back at base,” Chris joked, “but with Ritchie’s face, we’ll be sure to part the crowd.”

  “They’ll swoon,” Ritchie agreed.

  “Whatever works, works,” Jeanne laughed. “Ah! I can’t believe we’re here!”

  We ran the rest of the way, taking a leaf out of the medieval girl’s book and abandoning the path. The drumming grew louder and the stone circle disappeared underneath the heads of the crowd, which was oozing with a smell halfway between incense and campfire.

  “Elbows out,” Chris instructed, plunging in. “Keep up, guys!”

  The sensation was so similar to moving underwater that I found myself holding my breath. Bodies mashed into me from all sides, and given my not-so-generous height, it was like being a little lost child in a busy supermarket. A supermarket for the strange.

  Jeanne grabbed my arm as I tripped over an abandoned backpack, elbowing a young man trying to paint an intricate symbol on his girlfriend’s forehead.

  “Watch it!” he hissed in an obvious posh accent.

  “Poser,” she retorted. Then, to me, “I mean, who paints the symbol of a Celtic demon on their face? Someone without a clue, that’s who.”

  “Unless they actually are into all that.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe. Probably not, though.”

  I wanted to ask her how she had a clue, but before I could, she realized she was still touching me and let go, running to join Ritchie and Chris. I followed, albeit slower, and tried to ignore the feeling of being drowned. In sweat, in smoke, in tourists, and believers . . .

  Then I was there. Out of nowhere, the crowd in front of me melted away and was replaced by a block of towering stone. I was struck by how ordinary it looked up close, almost like concrete, polka-dotted with lichen and shallow holes. I traced my hand down a curve. Warmed by the sun, by all the hordes of others trying to touch it, and pulsing with more than five thousand years of history. Not nine hundred like the priory and castle. Five thousand years. People had been standing exactly where I was standing, touching this weirdly ordinary rock for five thousand years. And, despite the sweltering heat, that thought was enough to send a procession of chills dancing down my spine.

  The moment lasted only a fleeting instant before I was roughly shoved out of the way. Ritchie rejoined me, declaring he’d had enough of crowds to last a lifetime, and we battled our way back into the open to wait for Jeanne and Chris.

  As the rays of sunlight became golden and slid toward the western horizon, the eastern sky darkening, we decided to set up camp for the night. “Camp” being a subjective term, as ours consisted of nothing but the tiny square of grass we’d cordoned off as our own and my bag. Most people had blankets and food and even tents, which, as Jeanne ruefully pointed out, we hadn’t owned even before the crash. So Chris disappeared into the crowd and returned with a box of homemade sausage rolls and some much-needed water bottles.

  “How’d you get these?” Jeanne asked.

  “A magician never reveals his secrets.”

  “These better be just sausage rolls.” Ritchie took one gingerly.

  “Shut up and be grateful for what the breadwinner has brought you. Anyway, I doubt that after all that’s happened, it will be a pastry that takes us down.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” Jeanne said. “I had a bizarre encounter with a pork pie once.”

  Sleep was a distant fantasy. The sun took forever to disappear, and even when it did, the night remained anything but dark. Camera flashes bleached the blackness with the frequency of lightning strikes. Sparklers—somebody must have been selling them, as there was no way so many people thought to pack them—traced fiery circles and symbols before fizzling away to be replaced again and again and again as the night progressed. It was a mess of drums, chanting, whooping, shouting, an atmospherically inappropriate boom box blasting disco music, laughter, a fiddle, what sounded like fireworks, the shrieking of names, a creepy trumpet thing, random loud bangs, whistles, murmurs, and the steady sound of latecomers crunching into the distant carpark.

  We lay on our backs, feet pointing the four directions of the compass, heads touching in the middle. We’d chosen a spot sufficiently far away from the Henge, but were still surrounded by other campers a stone’s throw away. I felt every lump and knob in the grass digging into my back, my skinny jeans rendering it impossible to get comfortable, yet there was enough going on that I didn’t mind. It wasn’t like sleep was going to happen.

  “Anyone good at constellations?” I asked, squinting through the artificial light to get a better picture of the stars.

  “I can find the dippers, but that’s about it,” Chris yawned. “See, there’s one, and there’s the other one.”

  “That’s actually the ‘head’ of Draco, not a dipper,” Jeanne corrected, also yawning. “See, you can see his tail stretching all the way down there.” She raised her finger and traced a path through the sky, connecting a twisting trail of stars. “And there’s Cygnus—shaped like a crucifix—and that really bright star over there is Vega, next to that tiny circle constellation which is Lyra, the harp. Polaris is . . . ”

  “Wow,” Chris said, impressed, after she’d mapped out what must have been the entire sky. “You know your stars.”

  “Yeah.” I felt her shrug. “I wanted to be an astronomer once.”

  “You did?” I frowned. “I never knew that. Why did you change your mind?”

  “Life got in the way, I suppose. I wasn’t quite clever enough, wasn’t quite motivated enough, et cetera, et cetera.” She sighed. “You know how it works, Tree. Village life seems small at first, but it’s so contained that after a while, it becomes everything. There is no other world.”

  “What about you, Teresa? What would you do, given the chance?” asked Chris.

  In all honesty, I’d never thought about it.
Jeanne was right; there was never a reason to leave Castle Acre, so nobody did. We all finished school, rarely ever going on to complete higher education, got jobs in the local businesses, and saved up enough to buy a house so our children could repeat the same steps. Else just wasn’t done.

  “I don’t know,” I said, honestly. “I suppose I’d be here.”

  “That’s a vague answer.”

  “It’s the truth. Given the chance to do anything, I’d like to visit places like here.”

  “Can you believe she didn’t want to come in the beginning?” Jeanne chuckled. “Where would we be without each other, hey?”

  “You,” I said, “would be dead. Or in jail.”

  “And you’d live life like a scratched record.”

  By the stone circle, someone suddenly screamed, followed by a ripple of hearty laughter.

  The others piped down after that, lost in their thoughts, and I attempted to find all the constellations Jeanne spoke about. Around two a.m. I realized my extremities had gone completely numb, the cold ground having soaked up all the heat I’d gained earlier on, so I stood up and walked around. Chris noticed and came to join me. We didn’t speak the entire time, our eyes flickering over the various odd or mundane activities other campers were doing in anticipation for sunrise, before returning.

  I dozed the remaining hours away until I was woken by a cry. It was about quarter to four in the morning, and ever so slightly, the darkness was fading in the east.

  Chris rolled over and shook Ritchie—who had somehow managed to achieve proper deep sleep—awake. “It’s starting!”

  “Don’t care,” Ritchie mumbled, batting him away.

  “Jeanne?” Chris nodded at her. She came over and they both hiked him to his feet, until he was awake enough to realize what was going on.

  The way to Stonehenge itself was a minefield of miniature camps, many containing the motionless forms of those who had partied the earlier night hours away. Those who were awake and moving were quiet, hushed by the spectacle beginning in the sky. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d watched a full sunrise, if ever.

  “I’m freezing,” Jeanne muttered, wrapping her arms around her torso and rocking from side to side as we walked. “Everyone’s wearing parkas and fleeces!”

  “Me too.” I exhaled, releasing a faint cloud.

  “Don’t look at me,” said Ritchie, zipping up his jacket. “I need it as much as you guys.”

  “I wouldn’t want it anyway,” Jeanne scoffed, “it’s ripped.”

  “You two are adorable,” I said with an eye roll, which normally would have earned a shove from Jeanne. Not today, though.

  We joined the main pack of people crowded around the stones, close enough to have a good view, although too far away to be able to touch them. In the dark the people all seemed much more normal than they had yesterday, bundled under blankets and rubbing the sleep from tired eyes. Many were even wearing winter hats, though I caught a glimpse of someone wearing antlers nearer the stones. Ah, diversity.

  “This is going to take forever. I could’ve had another hour,” Ritchie sighed.

  “We’d lose our seats,” I pointed out. Already, the space behind us was filling with rows upon rows of onlookers. And, with every passing second, the light in the east grew brighter as the sky shifted from black to navy to a pale blue-gray, strips of ashen clouds replacing the stars.

  “This is a really stupid question,” Chris said, directed at Jeanne, “but what happens? What’s the hullabaloo about?”

  “Midsummer’s night is a symbol of new beginnings,” she explained. “The Celts celebrated it with fire, and many pagans believe it’s when magic is strongest in our world, and—”

  “But Stonehenge?”

  “Shut up and watch,” I told him, quite mildly. “Then maybe you’ll see.”

  Jeanne grinned at me. I grinned back.

  As Ritchie predicted, it took a long time coming. Across the plain, with thousands of impatient eyes looking on, rays of insipid yellow added the first splash of color to the sky. Then pinks and oranges, and finally, the harsh blood-red glow of the sun itself.

  A group of kids about our age sat up on each other’s shoulders and started throwing glitter around, chanting, “Sol-stice! Sol-stice! Sol-stice!”

  Another group, whom I presumed to be the bona fide druids, moved into the middle of the circle and held hands, chanting in a different, beautiful language.

  As the shadows receded, the first rays washed over us and dimmed the chill. I was barely aware of how cold it was now; there was too much else to focus on. The atmosphere was one of anticipation, and you could feel it in the energy of the crowd. Nobody seemed to remember what ungodly hour it actually was.

  “Whoa,” Chris exclaimed. “It’s rising right in the middle of—oh! I get it. That’s the cool part, isn’t it?”

  Jeanne nodded. “Yeah. Every year, for millennia, the sun has risen directly between those stones on the solstice.”

  The stones in question were the more iconic of the circle, the ones that formed square arches by having horizontal slabs on top of them. The sun, inch by inch, rose exactly in the middle of that arch. That meant, if the plain were empty and the circle still complete, there would be a perfect shadow in the west.

  “Sol-stice! Sol-stice! Sol-stice!”

  I recognized the posh couple from last night in the crowd, symbols still painted on their faces. They had their eyes closed and were moving their lips in perfect synchrony, ignoring everyone else around them.

  “Hey,” I elbowed Jeanne, “what do you know?”

  “I can top that.”

  She bent down, grabbed a handful of trampled clover, sprinkled it in her hair, raised her arms to the sky, and began singing. Not in Celtic, or even anything relatively close to that. No, she began singing the theme song of a children’s television program.

  “Oh God,” Chris laughed. “Jeanne, no.”

  “Why that song?”

  She ignored us, still singing as the sun continued to rise. The people next to her, far from being irritated, laughed too. A few began singing songs, too.

  The sun rose higher, the energy in the gathered crowd gained momentum, and the sky grew more and more spectacular. In a gesture of unspoken unity, everyone raised their hands and stretched their fingers open wide, capturing the sun from ten thousand angles. It was cheesy and magical and intensely personal at the same time, the sort of other feeling that had to be experienced to be understood.

  “Sol-stice! Sol-stice! Sol-stice!”

  Chris had a Cheshire cat grin plastered across his face, Ray-Bans in place and reflecting the stone arch. Ritchie was also participating, tattered jacket hanging off his arms, eyes glazed over as though contemplating a particularly deep thought, which he probably was. Jeanne had her eyes closed and was smiling a very contented smile. She looked at home.

  Well, on second thought, everyone looked at home. The girl with dreadlocks down to her ankles and the middle-aged woman wearing a sensible overcoat, the obvious tourists with their cameras flashing madly, and those here for a more spiritual purpose . . . there simply wasn’t such thing as a poser. Because all these people came and were here, and as the sun peaked over Stonehenge, nothing else held any consequence. Jeanne was the real deal, and so was I, and so was the rest of the crowd. We were all watching the same sunrise, no matter why we were here or where we came from or who we were. Nobody set rules dictating when we were “in” enough to belong. It was special for all of us.

  We let out a cheer when the sun finally cleared the arch. The hush lifted and people began to chatter and shout and sing again, some even hurrying back to their camp in order to catch a few extra winks.

  “For something very ordinary, that was very cool,” Chris said, still grinning.

  Jeanne, hands and head thrown back, did a pirouette. “Ah, my life is now complete. Seriously. I can die happy.”

  “Good,” I chuckled, “because our only way home is on their motorc
ycles.”

  Ritchie’s eyes widened. “Oh, no.”

  Chris clapped him on the shoulder. “Feeling sufficiently sober, old buddy?”

  “If you call me that again, then I’ll have sufficient reason not to be.” He cracked the ghost of a smile, aimed at Jeanne. “Give me a few hours. It’ll be fine.”

  “Knowing Jim, it’ll be more than a few hours. He’s the one towing them over,” Chris added. “He owes us several significant favors.”

  The crowd began dispersing, some to their cars in an effort to beat the rush, many to pockets of other festivities striking up, and more shifting to try and get a better view of the sunrise. We stayed where we were, shoulder to shoulder, squinting—with the exception of Chris and his Ray-Bans—at the eastern horizon. Jeanne tilted her head sideways to rest it on Ritchie’s shoulder. He tensed, glancing at Chris and I for a reaction, and when we pretended not to notice, he slipped his arm around her waist.

  Kissing behind a public toilet is totally fine, but PDA in front of best friends is making you nervous? Ha.

  Soaking it all in as much as possible, I wondered what would happen when it was all over. If Jeanne would chalk Ritchie down to a fleeting summer fling or make an effort to continue seeing him. If I would ever keep in touch with Chris.

  “Happy solstice!” An androgynous figure wearing what could only be described as an ornate Halloween costume (with bells, bright face paint, and a strange, tattered overcoat) danced past, handing both Jeanne and I dead flowers.

  “Yes,” I said, unable to think of anything else to say. “It is.”

  I DIDN’T REALIZE HOW DISHEVELED I WAS UNTIL I SAW my reflection in the mirror of a gas station bathroom. My hair, usually moussed and curled, hung limp around my shoulders. My makeup was gone altogether, and my clothes were rumpled and covered with grass stains. I’d have killed for a shower.

  “Au natural,” Jeanne said, appearing from a stall and shuddering at her own reflection.

  “Mm. Artfully scruffy.”

  “That’s it.” She whipped a tube of bright red lipstick out of a hidden pocket in her skirt, pouting and applying. “Want some?”