by F. G. Cottam
‘I can’t remember – which side of his face does the scar afflict?’
‘The left,’ she said without hesitation. ‘Adam has this mannerism. When he’s unsure of himself, he raises his left hand and traces the scar with his thumb. An inch to the right, I sometimes think, and the blade would have gone through his eye socket and pierced his brain and killed him.’
Grayling said nothing. Jane blinked and sat back in her chair. She was staring at nothing, back in the forest, he thought, remembering.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘The scar was on the wrong side. The tall man in the forest with Adam’s face had an identical scar. But it was on the right side of his face and not the left.’
‘Like a mirror image,’ Grayling said. ‘Everything reflected and warped and reversed.’
‘You know what’s going on here, don’t you, Professor?’
Grayling only looked at her. Then he smiled. He thought the smile probably a sad expression, if it represented truthfully the weight of the burden carried by his heart.
But Jane did not think the smile merely sad. Much later, recalling it, she described his smile as defeated.
‘I can think of no rational explanation for what I saw,’ she said. ‘But I did see it. Was it a ghost, do you think, or some kind of demon?’
‘I think it was flesh and blood, Jane, as real as you or me, nothing ghostly or supernatural about it at all.’
‘The look on its face was demonic,’ she said.
‘We’re packing up tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to revisit the site. It won’t take more than four or five of us to finish up and clear away. A fortnight of fieldwork is enough when the pickings are as scant as they’ve been at Cree. We need to get out of the woods.’
‘So you think Adam’s find a one-off?’
‘A one-off, yes, I do. It’s an anomalous find with no significant link to the locality. We could stay for another year and sift out only bones and pottery shards. In any event, I don’t want you going back there.’
‘Shouldn’t we face down our demons?’
‘New age platitudes don’t apply to this particular set of circumstances. If they did, I could drive you back there now. Is that what you’d like me to do?’
She didn’t reply. It had started to rain on the short walk to the pub, the rain falling heavy and cold, and she thought that it was probably still raining outside now. She thought of the tall figure she’d seen, standing in the dripping forest. He had worn boots and gauntlets and a dark green tunic with metal buttons that had glimmered dully like pewter. His breath would bloom and his hair would trail in wet coils and he would be entirely oblivious to the freezing deluge.
He’d been hunting, hadn’t he, when she had seen him? He would have his prey by now, plucked and bloodied in the grip of one gloved fist. That was unless, in his hunger, he had consumed it already.
‘Jane?’
She blinked and sighed. But still she didn’t reply. Her eyes were drawn to the fire. She was remembering Chaucer’s knight and the battles he had fought, a long, cruel litany of the most savage conflicts of the Middle Ages. She had the fanciful notion suddenly that the time would soon come when Grayling would unsaddle his war horse and unbuckle his broadsword for the last time. And it would be Adam to whom he would be passing them on.
Martin Prior was not used to being sidelined. He was witty, attractive and comfortably off, and believed he belonged at the centre of things. Life’s spotlight shone on him and centre stage was his rightful place. But Jane Dodd was not answering her mobile phone. And Professor Grayling had sent Adam Parker off on some secret mission somewhere.
Worst of all, Jane and Adam had embarked upon a romance. And Jane’s failure earlier in the day to rise to his taunts had done nothing to convince him it wasn’t serious. She had looked different: flushed by her porcelain-pale standards, and bright-eyed and distracted. He suspected miserably it was the look of love.
His tactics with Jane had been determined by the fact that she was clever and independent and wouldn’t go for chat-up lines. His plan had been to insinuate himself; to become the entertaining friend in whom she could confide and on whom she could rely. He had determined that the route to her heart was to become her trusted ally.
Jane wasn’t going to sleep with someone unless she trusted them. She was cautious and had too much self-respect. But when it came to seduction, Martin was a very patient man, happy to play the long game if it meant landing a prize like her.
It was hard for him to believe now that he had not seen Adam Parker as a threat. He had inventoried Adam in his mind and Adam had come up short. He was provincial and poor and rough around the edges, with his flat vowels and terrible wardrobe.
He had always been humourless too in Jane’s company, in awe of her, intimidated by her chic sophistication and her striking good looks. He didn’t ski or sail or even drive a car. He had grown up on a council estate and didn’t even know the whereabouts of his own father. He was gauche to the point of awkwardness, with his discount shoes and cheap wristwatch.
But these were superficial failings, weren’t they? Since the revelations of the morning, whispered to him by that fizzy-haired dumpling Martha Collier over breakfast, Martin had tried to imagine how Adam would look through Jane’s eyes.
And the picture, of course, was totally different. The Adam she saw was modest and courteous and impressively self-taught. He was someone fulfilling not just aspirations, but a childhood dream. He was beautifully put together, powerful and athletic. Martin had been forced to concede that the average girl would find Adam very easy on the eye. Jane was hardly average, but she had eyes in her head and when they looked at Adam, they liked what they saw.
The find just added insult to injury. It had been a fluke, hadn’t it? There had been no logical reason to dig in the spot at the end of Grayling’s tyre tracks, the site marked earlier in the day by that curious litter of feathers and lambswool and bones. Nothing, no clue, had existed to separate that place from any other outside the area of the main excavation. Adam had literally stumbled upon whatever he’d discovered there.
Martin couldn’t understand it, really. All his life he had been not only privileged, but blessed by Lady Luck. In his hands, even in his orbit, things had always had a happy habit of turning to gold. But now fate, or providence, in the solid shape of Adam Parker, had dealt him a double blow.
There had to be something he could do about it. He thought that he could sow the seeds of doubt in Jane’s mind. He’d done it before, with other girls, faced by the awkward obstacle of a boyfriend. He was subtle and crafty and he believed that everything was fair in love and war.
That was a medium-term project, though. And it didn’t address the bigger, immediate problem of how to detract from Adam’s find. Unless Jane was wrong, of course – unless there was a cache of stuff to uncover and Adam had only chanced upon the one item that led to it.
It was worth a punt, he thought, trying Jane’s mobile number again and coming up with only the recorded message telling him her phone was still switched off. It was worth a trip to the site just to check privately that there was not more buried treasure to be found.
How bad would he feel if they dug thoroughly on Adam’s return from wherever he’d gone and found a whole hoard of priceless items?
It was worth enduring a bit of rain and mud to check out that possibility. He owed it to himself to make absolutely sure the ground there had surrendered all its secrets. It was not like he was missing out on a hot date with a beautiful girl, he thought bitterly, wondering where Jane could have got to. And he didn’t feel in the mood to swill cheap lager while playing pool against strangers in the Bell. He really had nothing to lose.
He laced on his waterproof boots, pulled on a sweater and grabbed his poncho from where it hung on the back of the door. He looked at his watch. It was seven-fifteen. He would have to walk to the site and that would take him half an hour. It
wasn’t a hazardous route. There was never any traffic on the road.
What he was about to do was strictly against the rules, but he thought his chances of being caught were remote. If he found anything, he would just hide it well enough to make damn sure he was the one who located it again before anyone else did in the morning.
The logical thing to do of course was to wait for the morning himself. He had a pair of night vision goggles in his backpack but it was always more practical, not to say safer, to dig in the daylight. He couldn’t wait, though. He needed to expend some energy, to do something diverting and positive, frustrated as he was about being unable to contact Jane.
And there was something else, a feeling growing increasingly urgent inside him as he put his flashlight and trowel and brushes and a roll of Ziploc bags into his pack. There was his intuition. It told him there was something at the site, waiting to be found, waiting for him to be the one to discover it. It was almost beckoning him aloud. And like all gamblers, Martin Prior trusted his hunches.
McGuire had plucked the artefact from Adam’s hands and examined it with a wistful smile on his face, as a person might if reunited with a lost and cherished souvenir. Its fierce ugliness did not seem to offend him in the slightest. He squinted at the tusked, snarling jaws and fingered the metallic muscle bunched behind the creature’s opposing heads.
He seemed to weigh the figure in his palm. And then he said, ‘We’ll eat first and talk later. There’s much to discuss. We’ll have more stamina for our conversation when our stomachs are full. I’ll provide you with answers to some of your questions, Adam, though they may not be expected or terribly welcome answers.’
They ate their dinner pretty much in silence. It was a relaxed silence and Adam was hungry after the travel and the exposure in the early evening to a couple of hours of Brighton’s sea air. He’d served their coffee before his host began to speak seriously.
‘The object you brought me was fashioned from silver at a smithy in Babylon, about five thousand years before the birth of Christ.’
‘It feels harder than silver, denser, more durable,’ Adam said.
‘Indeed. Their silversmiths were very skilled. And they discovered a process in the casting and cooling that tempered the precious metal. This formula of theirs has been lost.’
‘People were not that advanced, Doctor McGuire, with respect, sir. Not seven thousand years ago. They couldn’t have been. They possessed neither the tools nor the necessary knowledge of chemistry. The technology wasn’t invented – the bellows to generate the required heat.’
‘The world is a great deal older than you think,’ said McGuire.
And so are you, Adam thought. But he kept this intuition to himself. ‘Why are the two heads attacking one another?’
‘Decoratively and symbolically, the artefact is both a metaphor and a statement. Practically, it is an invitation. If you were of a gloomy turn of mind, you might call it a summoning.’
‘It had no place in the ground where I found it, did it, Doctor?’
‘None, Adam, but as Stuart Grayling has already intimated, it found you.’
They had not drawn the curtains. Through the wide window, the night sea glittered in the moonlight beyond the promenade and pier. Outside that pane of glass, the universe seemed indifferent. Inside this spacious room, Adam had the sense that everything paused on the brink of permanent change. He was grateful for the food in his belly. Without it he knew that he would have felt, at that moment, hollow and sick.
‘Have you ever felt uneasy looking in a mirror, Adam?’
‘Always, since I was a child. It’s been with me for as long as I can remember. Sometimes I have the sensation of being watched and think that if I look hard enough the watcher will get careless and I will see some snatch of his reflection at the edge of the frame and my suspicion will be proven and my fear founded.’
‘Interesting, go on.’
‘Sometimes I’m just disturbed by my own reflection, as if it might move independently of me, wink or grin wildly while I stare back with a poker face. It’s a shameful, phobic thing. I’m embarrassed about it.’
‘It isn’t a phobia. It is an instinct. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about.’
‘Speak plainly, Doctor. I’m not clever enough for riddles.’
‘Imagine a world that is the dark twin of ours. This is a malevolent and hopeless place, a landscape of despair and wilful cruelty. It has no idealism, no notion of progress, none of the selflessness that can distinguish the nobler examples of humanity.
‘It has but one ambition. And that is supremacy over us. It seeks to supersede and replace us and to erase everything we have accomplished. It has striven since the dawn of history to achieve this and once or twice almost succeeded. Now it is about to try again.’
‘I don’t wish to be unkind, Doctor, but I have no appetite for fantasy.’ Adam was remembering, though, the sea at the end of Brighton pier, the momentum of the water underneath him, occurring in reverse.
‘You won’t be able to dismiss it as fantasy for long, lad. You will not be allowed that luxury.’
‘You really believe in this place?’
‘I’ve been there.’
‘It sounds like Hell.’
‘That is what some cultures and faiths have called it. And some have called it Hades or the Underworld. It has been variously known as Tartarus, Uffern, Mictlan, Arula and a host of other aliases. Every creed and mythology has a name for it.’
‘Then why is it not generally known about?’
‘Sometimes the myth is more easily endured than the reality that fosters it. If mankind knew of the struggle, mankind would despair and the battle would be lost. The knowledge would be self-defeating, so the secret is maintained.’
‘But you know. And so does Professor Grayling. Others must, too.’
McGuire nodded. ‘A very few, through the centuries, have known. And those have been mostly archaeologists and architects, zoologists, mathematicians and so on. Nicholas Hawksmoor knew. It was where Shakespeare encountered his Caliban. Darwin knew, of course.’
Adam had heard of Hawksmoor. He was the Restoration architect about whom Jane Dobb’s father had written a book. ‘Historians must know. One of them would have said something.’
McGuire raised an eyebrow. ‘But none of them has. For the very good reason I have already given you. This world is the shadow to our light, Adam. And you will not enjoy your scepticism concerning its existence for very much longer.’
‘You are asking me to enter a waking nightmare, Doctor McGuire.’
‘Have you never wondered at the source of our most potent myths; at how and where Frankenstein’s monster and the vampire were inspired?’
‘Are you telling me they’re real?’
‘Medical research breeds miracles. Dabbling with magic, by contrast, breeds monsters. Trust me on this. I’ve seen them.’
‘And vampires?’
‘The vampire is a metaphor for a parasitic creature that strayed deliberately from its evolutionary path. There is a tribe, a nation of them there. I have encountered them too.’
‘What did you mean, when you said I hadn’t a choice?’
‘You have been called. The artefact you found is the summons.’
‘Because I did not find it at all; because it found me.’
‘Good. You’re learning.’
‘I’m sorry, Doctor McGuire,’ Adam said. ‘I just don’t believe a single word of this.’
‘No. Stuart Grayling is a fair judge of character. And he said that you would not.’
McGuire rose somewhat stiffly from the table. Adam wondered again at his true age. He took a key from his pocket and nodded at the door in the wall to the right of where he stood. ‘Go through there and you will discover a corridor. Open the door at the end of it, on the left. Lock it immediately behind you. Under no circumstances attempt to touch the thing you see in there.’
The interior doors in McGuire’s flat were all of
a type, wooden and decorated with carved Deco motifs. The one confronting Adam at the end of the corridor was different: plain, heavier, banded in iron. It opened on darkness and a cold, feral stink. Adam entered, aware of the close confinement of narrow walls, and he heard the shuffle of something a few feet away, a sound so sudden and furtive it caused his fingers to tremble groping for the light switch.
The bulb was pearly, with a feeble wattage, and the light it cast was scant. Some bird of prey, the size of a vulture, was chained by a ring above the talons of one claw to a wooden rest. Its head, perfectly still now the light was on, was covered by a coarsely stitched leather hood.
Adam scrabbled the key into the keyhole to his rear and locked the door as he had been told to. The great bird tilted its head very slightly under the hood at the sound. It was about five or six feet away from him and he wanted to get no closer to it than he was already.
He stared at it, his eyes adjusting to the lack of real illumination and the way the bulb in the ceiling above leached all colour out of the objects in that dismal space. It was not feathered, he saw. He had assumed its plumage was a uniform grey – but the grey was not feathers, just a reptilian skin of rough goose bumps over its body and stretched between the struts of its folded wings.
It made a noise, then. It must be aware of my presence and this scrutiny, Adam thought. The noise was somewhere between a rattle and a purr. Its call was loud in the confines of that cell and as bleak as a threat. Then the creature bowed its head. The movement was supple and loathsome. And the claw that was not chained rose and gripped the hood and eased it from its head. Its beak was a baleful yellow, curved cruelly downward. It looked like a scimitar shaped from ancient bone. Its eyes were watchful and dead. Then it said something and the something it said sounded like human speech. Adam unlocked the door behind him and fled.
