Darkness Rises

by Jason Foss

  ‘Why, what happened on Wednesday?’

  ‘It rained,’ Flint said, ‘then it looked like the Somme down there.’

  For twenty minutes Flint was happy, watching the neat jawline chatter inconsequentially, the brown eyes squint when the glasses were removed, the nose wrinkle when Vikki was expressing opinion. A door had been opened in his life, a new interest, a new objective. She had cared to drive all that way to see him. He started to construct expectations, not noticing her drift away from intimacy.

  Vikki had been toying with a daisy plucked from between her feet. ‘You know what you suggested? About hiding?’

  ‘Yes ­– have you been all right?’

  ‘Fine, it’s been dead quiet. I’ve been at my cousin Pat’s, anyway, but nothing has happened. How about you?’

  ‘Anyone who can read the college notice-board knows where I am. But so far, zilch.’

  ‘I thought there might be some of those nutters still around, you know, friends of Piers Plant.’

  ‘If they are, they’re keeping quiet.’

  ‘So it was him all along,’ said Vikki, ‘sending those postcards, paying someone to burn your boat and rough me up.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’ Flint was fresh out of explanations. ‘We can all go back to living normal lives.’ He managed his widest, most seductive grin.

  ‘Is this your holiday?’ she asked.

  ‘No, after this, I’m going to Turkey. I’m staying with Jules and his wife, they have the right idea, they dig where it’s sunny all the time. I’m going to try to get to see Ephesus and Aphrodisias.’

  ‘That sounds wonderful; have you room to squeeze me into your luggage?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, a little too swiftly.

  Vikki gave a little laugh before she let him have it on the chin. ‘I bet it will be a bit more exciting than Corfu. Me and Vince are going there next week.’

  ‘Vince?’

  ‘Yeah, you know, my photographer.’

  ‘Oh yes, Vince.’ All leather jacket, fake Rolex watch and roll-your-own fags. This was the limit. Flint reeled in confused disgust; where was her taste?

  ‘We’re off on Tuesday.’ She seemed immune to the fact that she was hurting. ‘I’ll send you a postcard. Does this place have an address?’

  She chattered for another ten minutes or so, but his enthusiasm had gone. The red Metro kicked up dirt, then was just memory, where no room remained for self-pity. It was ironic that Vikki was going to Corfu. Half a dozen years before, Flint had been on the edge of falling in love with a brown-eyed travel courier in Greece. Events had forced him to leave her behind and he had never seen her again, yet a week rarely went by without him thinking of her. History is great, unless it is you living through those tragedies and heartaches. Flint grabbed a wheelbarrow and set to work to sweat out the devil in him.

  Leading from the front, getting his hands dirty, it all served to keep mind and body occupied, and it impressed the volunteers by example. Ten of them assisted the work, with a fifty-fifty mix of sexes. Four were Flint’s undergraduates, two hailed from other colleges, the remaining four were an ad hoc assemblage of keen amateurs. Mr Death’s application to come on the excavation had been turned down.

  A steady stream of visitors flowed across the hillside; people from the local archaeological society, colleagues from London, friends from the Hertfordshire field unit. Tea breaks, lunchtimes and evenings were enlivened by old acquaintances stopping by to drink, gossip and trade tales of digs gone by.

  After a fortnight, the uncovering of third-century rubbish pits beyond the villa started to excite Jeffrey Flint’s interest. All he had to do was to find the house which went with them. He had just finished explaining this to the farmer when a white Vauxhall van drove into the field and parked beside the college Land-Rover. As Flint walked uphill, his eyes made out the name Naturella Wholehealth Market stencilled in blue along the side of the van. A tall woman clambered out, her silver-blonde hair glittering in the sun.

  ‘Hello,’ she called.

  He greeted her, recognising the woman from the Kingshaven shop.

  ‘You said I should drop by, so here I am.’ She grinned brightly, bringing out a few wrinkles, but Jeffrey Flint liked the colour of her eyes, first green, then blue as they reflected earth and sky.

  ‘I brought some tea. I couldn’t remember what type you bought, so I chose three varieties for you to try.’

  Flint took the paper bags and thanked her, then offered to show her around the excavation. ‘I’m very sorry, I don’t even know your name.’

  ‘Monica Clewes.’

  ‘I’m Jeff,’ he said.

  ‘Oi Doc!’ called Jeremy, a big, bluff amateur digger.

  ‘They also call you Doc,’ Monica said. She had a soothing way of speaking, always backing up her statements with a smile. Instantly, Flint was happy she had come. He led her over to Jeremy’s trench and inspected his find: a trio of small cubes of fired clay.

  ‘Ho ho ho!’ Flint exclaimed. ‘So we had a mosaic, did we?’

  ‘The ploughing’s fair buggered it up though,’ Jeremy said, ‘this is all that’s left.’

  When Monica was allowed to touch the artefact, she trilled with delight. ‘Isn’t this wonderful? We’re touching the past,’ she said.

  Her enthusiasm demanded to be rewarded, so Flint gave her a detailed, deluxe tour of the site and their finds. She was captivated, bending down by each trench, soaking up each morsel of information thrown out by the diggers. Running her fingers through the shards of pottery spread out in the sun to dry, she sighed.

  ‘I always wanted to go on an excavation,’ she said, ‘a dig.’ She added the word with embellished excitement. ‘You must need all sorts of qualifications.’

  ‘The ability to make tea and a fondness for sitting in the dirt.’

  She laughed. ‘Is that all? You’re teasing me.’

  ‘Last year a pair of American tourists just walked up to me and asked if they could help. They stayed a fortnight in the end; the wife was really handy with a trowel, she was a natural digger.’

  Monica’s eyes were in their green mode, a little smile sneaking up one cheek. ‘How about me? I need a week off from the shop.’

  Within a few moments, the team had been expanded to twelve. Monica drove off to her friend’s house to change whilst Flint informed Stuart about the new recruit. As he walked away from the trench, Flint knew what the diggers were thinking. That reputation was dragging him down again, would people never let him escape it?

  Two days after Monica had joined the team and found a penchant for washing and marking pottery, Jeffrey Flint sat brooding whilst filling in the site notebook.

  ‘Cheer up, Jeff.’

  The pen stopped doodling in the margin and he threw attention Monica’s way. Her anxious beam cut through his depression. ‘Sorry, things on my mind.’

  She waved a heavily abused toothbrush. ‘But it’s a lovely day.’

  ‘Again, again, good thing too. You can’t dig this soil in rain, it goes all plasticky.’

  She picked up another small potsherd, dipped it into the plastic washing-up bowl between her knees and began to scrub. ‘Do you know, if I could do this for a living, I’d never be unhappy again. You are so lucky, you know.’

  ‘Doing this?’ He pointed to the pile of record sheets at his feet.

  ‘No, this.’ Monica pointed the toothbrush out towards the horizon. ‘You don’t even have to dig in England, you could go anywhere in the world. You’re so free and so lucky.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I suppose I am. I ought to cheer up and be thankful.’

  ‘You should.’

  Slowly, as they talked, Flint became aware he was moving into chat-up mode. It was subconscious, aimed at erasing both Vikki and Lucy from memory. Monica was another blonde, an older English Rose with a love of life. Jeffrey Flint’s golden rule came to mind: never seduce your students. It had a corollary: never seduce your diggers. Mentally, he wrote this out a
hundred times and was pleased with the result. He gazed out over the fields again. Irregular relationships had become his way of life since nearly falling in love in Greece half his adult life ago, then being unfairly wrenched away. Flint knew some academics that were still playing the campus stud at fifty, and to avoid following the same path he had to take serious steps to stop chatting up women on reflex. Monks must find some pride in celibacy, he thought.

  ‘Penny for your thoughts,’ Monica said, ‘or is it a denarius?’

  ‘Sorry, I’m brooding.’

  ‘It must be those horrible things that you were tied up with. I read all about them in our local paper, it all sounded shocking.’

  Shocking, yes, Flint had again begun to dwell on Lucy. She might be dead, but she did not die in his mind. Ever, she returned to haunt him, sometimes he imagined her still alive and playing a complex game of hide-and-seek, beyond his understanding.

  ‘But it’s all over now,’ she said, ‘you should try very hard to forget it.’

  ‘But is it over?’ Flint asked with a wistful note to his voice. ‘You knew Piers Plant, didn’t you?’

  ‘After a fashion. I think everyone who moved in local society knew him a little.’

  Flint shook his head. Random thoughts zig-zagged through his brain as he sat in the cane chair, filing cards, making notes, gazing across the stubble of the cornfield. He thought of other cornfields he had visited that summer. Harriet’s Stone and Devil’s Finger: the names had mystery about them.

  ‘I thought I’d found him,’ Flint began to confess, relating his self-doubt and confusion over Piers Plant’s motives. Why had Plant taken those volumes to his attic and marked those pages? Why had the coven rented a cottage nearby? What importance did the megaliths hold?

  ‘Poor Jeff,’ Monica said, in her sincere, sympathetic tone, ‘all that midnight stalking simply isn’t you, is it? And as for all this business with the megaliths...’

  ‘But you were at Glastonbury,’ he cut in. ‘You must know people who are into fringe New Age practices.’

  ‘I sell wholefood, I sell New Age books, I have a friend who writes Green poetry and I like folk music. I can see what they see, but,’ she paused and sighed — Monica had very dramatic mannerisms ­– ‘one meets an awful lot of fools.’

  Flint tossed aside his index cards and allowed himself a stretch. ‘You’re so right. I mean, I’d like to believe there was a deeper meaning to life. I vote Green, I hate modern materialism, but most of the stuff I’ve found out in the past six months is sheer nonsense. It’s not New Age, it’s Dark Age. I just wish people would realise where to draw the line.’

  ‘You blame yourself for something,’ Monica said.

  Flint inclined his head to admit it. ‘You knew Plant a little. You know the area. Where would a madman with intense Pagan beliefs bury the girl he had once loved?’

  ‘Gosh! That’s a question. Are you sure this girl is dead?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be just a shallow grave by a motorway embankment, but somewhere holy, romantic, even magical.’

  ‘One of these stone circles?’ she guessed.

  ‘Perhaps, but Inspector Douglas of the Darkewater CID is not going to relish digging up two dozen scheduled monuments to satisfy a wild hunch.’

  He recalled a shadow in the corn around a finger of granite. Had it been at Imbolc when the coven had met at Harriet’s Stone?

  *

  Thoughts of shadows stayed with him until the day that Ralph and Judy Slack, the man-and-mate team from Cambridge visited Burkes Warren and pushed air photographs under his nose. ‘Your site, 1943; we came across it in our records.’

  The photograph was familiar, but Flint bubbled thanks. He had given them the usual tour, apologised for the lack of exciting discoveries and offered them Oolong tea. Monica had been the archaeologist’s constant, and welcome, shadow; but she had taken a day off.

  ‘Well team, what do you think?’ The visitors sat in the dirt as a stiff wind propelled a solid bank of clouds above their heads. ‘No earth-shattering discoveries, just plain old dirt archaeology.’

  Big, brash and bearded, Ralph made an envious grunt. ‘I wish I could do some. It would be so good to get out in the air, pick up my trowel and be a real archaeologist again. I spend most of my time in the dark room these days.’

  His gypsy-complexioned colleague protested at this. ‘What he means is I spend time in the dark room while he goes off to meetings.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve not become a meetings animal, Ralph?’

  ‘Not deliberately, it just happened.’

  ‘Don’t you feel that the bureaucrats are taking over these days? Everyone I meet does less and less archaeology, and spends more and more time sitting on committees and responding to directives. The route to the top these days is to excavate paper.’

  ‘Aw Jeff, you get more cynical all the time,’ Judy commented.

  ‘Well, I’m in archaeology to discover, not to sit in meetings and expend hot air.’

  ‘You’re right, you’re right,’ Ralph said, kicking at a loose piece of spoil with his sneakers, ‘but you’ll never make professor with that heavy dose of attitude.’

  ‘Maybe not.’ It was time to squeeze in an ulterior motive for inviting the couple to visit the site. ‘So, meetings apart, what are you into at the moment? Still the aerial survey of megaliths?’

  ‘As ever,’ Ralph replied. ‘Things are progressing, as they say. We’re a little behind, but then that’s only to be expected.’

  ‘Are you including the Darkewater Valley Group?’ Flint pounced.

  ‘We did them last year,’ Judy intervened.

  Damn. ‘All the sites?’

  ‘We did six or seven,’ she added.

  ‘How do you fancy doing them again?’

  ‘No way,’ Ralph said firmly, ‘it’s too late, in any event, all the fields will have been cut by now. A month ago it might have been possible.’

  ‘Pity.’

  ‘They’ve been cutting early this year due to the heat.’

  ‘Greenhouse effect,’ Flint commented gloomily. ‘I suppose air photography is useless on stubble?’

  ‘Unless it snows,’ Judy came back, ‘then only if it hasn’t been ploughed. Are you looking for clues? We heard you were on some kind of man-hunt.’

  Flint told them about the chase for Lucy Gray.

  ‘It wouldn’t be smart to bury someone in a cornfield,’ Ralph said, ‘you’d leave a hole in the crop which would be easy to find in summer, and afterwards, deep ploughing would be sure to bring up evidence.’

  It had been a futile hope, a stab in the dark, another wild idea discarded. The couple came for a drink in the evening then returned to their college. Monica returned and spent two final days with the dig before departing back to the Darkewater Valley. Flint walked to her van as she was taking off her short boots for the last time.

  ‘Thanks for coming along.’

  She reached out and touched his hand, tiny crows’ feet gathering behind her eyes to complement the smiles. ‘Jeff, I’ve loved it, but I’m afraid I have to return to real life. If you’re ever in Kingshaven, do drop by and say hello. I may even have some bargains you can’t resist.’

  ‘Now you mention it, I’m in Durring again tomorrow, the dead won’t lie down.’

  Her concern was genuine. ‘I thought all that was over.’

  ‘It is, or it will be,’ he corrected. ‘It’s the inquest; I’ve got to attend, like it or not. By tomorrow night, it will truly be over.’

  ‘Then you’re free to resume this wonderfully carefree life you lead.’ Monica stood up in her driving shoes and took Flint by the elbows. She planted a short, social kiss on his lips. ‘Thanks for letting me help out.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have been the same without you.’

  Chapter 17

  Jeffrey Flint rarely drove, so taking the college Land Rover to Durring was both a novelty and an escape from the monotony of British Rail. The inquest into the death of the curato
r taught him little, as his own laboratory was efficient and accurate. Digitalis, the product of common foxgloves, had been mixed with the stew in killing proportions. Amelia Winter had collected herbs, including a few foxglove leaves in a jar, but Plant had apparently picked a fresh batch for his final meal and left the remains on his chopping board. The probable date of death was the first to third of August.

  Amelia Winter, robust and oddly jolly, testified to Plant’s diminished mental state. She related his obsession with death and his dreams of horned men and demons. An expert psychiatrist presented an interpretation that Piers Plant was suffering from schizophrenia and Chief Inspector Douglas stated that no evidence had been found that anyone else was involved. The verdict was suicide. Case closed.

  The old woman was on police bail and staunchly refused to be driven back to Oulwich in a squad car. Vikki Corbett, highly suntanned, highly chic, was shunned by a swish of blue knitted shawl when she tried to speak to the woman. Then Jeffrey Flint stepped forward, his red tie almost straight, his jeans almost free from Hertfordshire mud. He offered the old woman a lift in his Land Rover. She smiled at him and took hold of the crook of his arm before allowing him to lead her from the court.

  Once at Forest Farm, Flint could not suppress a shudder at the memories, but Amelia Winter seemed hardly ruffled by the prospect of re-entering the cottage of death. They walked around the rear, Flint apologising in an awkward manner for what he had done to her dog.

  ‘I had Toby from a pup,’ Amelia Winter said as they walked, ‘he was just six. Ah well, that’s the way of things.’

  They came to the rail fence at the edge of her fields and she turned her eyes to her goats. She pulled her shawl close and screwed up her ageing eyes against the thin autumn sun.

  ‘I’m sixty six next week, in case you want to know,’ she said. ‘Have the police charged you?’

  ‘Aye. Aiding a fugitive. He was flesh and blood, Doctor Flint. I had no choice. Piers was a strange boy, but he never did all those things I read in the newspaper.’

  ‘Do you know who did?’

  ‘Now you sound like the police.’