Ancient Echoes

by Robert Holdstock

  Then suddenly they’d slipped down a bank and over the edge of a rocky cliff, falling quite a way into a narrow gorge. They splashed into the water and sank a long way down before surfacing. Rubble and dirt were falling after them from the precipice and a piece of stone hit Greenface and she started to sink again. She was choking. I could feel her beginning to swallow water, then Greyface had swum down and grabbed her. The river was running very fast, surging over sharp rocks, but he hauled them both to a ledge, turned her face down and she started to be sick, then breathed in, gasping for breath. He went back into the water and rescued the pack. For a moment I thought I was drowning. I was so close, so inside them both. And then it was like falling asleep again. It always ends with me falling asleep.

  He shrugged to indicate he’d finished. But Ruth was fascinated.

  ‘I want to hear more!’

  3

  He had been five years old when the bull-runners first smashed through the walls of space-time and plundered his inner eye.

  He was on a hillside, looking out over scattered woods, down-land and fields golden with late summer wheat, hazy in the strong sun. Behind him, in the shade of tall trees on the knoll, his father sat cross-legged and contemplative, staring into the distance, while his mother read a fat book, lazily turning the pages.

  The remains of the picnic were scattered on the white cloth, where two finches darted in to feed.

  Jack suddenly wanted to run down the hill, arms wide like a plane, until the wind took him and lifted him, to float out across the fragrant land. It was a dream he often experienced, though he was usually hunched up, arms round his legs, skimming the tree tops, turning sharp angles, circling above and around his home. Now he wanted to run. He could hear running, the sound of gasping breath. His legs felt compelled to move as the sound of people running came pounding close behind him.

  He glanced back in fright, just as the shadow-shapes leaped across him, making him cry out. In the trees behind his parents, an enormous red-faced bull bellowed; he glimpsed the spread of its horns, the wet glistening around its mouth.

  If he was aware of his father’s cry of alarm, he later forgot it. Suddenly he was running – running down the hill – then towards the sandstone cliff, to the overhang, where deep shadows on the sun-baked red rock suggested shelter, safety. The tall, dark man in his swirling cloak was ahead of him, the woman in her leopard skins and flayed leathers running at his shoulder, her green face grimacing with fear.

  On he ran, towards the cliff, above the wide, parched land, descending fast, his legs threatening to give way.

  He started to scream. An animal’s breath was hot and hoarse behind him, bellowing suddenly as the ground thundered beneath its hooves.

  The bull-runners had fled into the shadows against the rock wall. Jack stumbled, rolling towards the precipice – falling heavily down the hill until strong arms grabbed him, halted his uncontrollable tumble. Breathless, he gazed at the sky. His father’s ruddy face loomed close.

  ‘What are you doing? You’ll hurt yourself, you silly boy! What was all that screaming?’

  He didn’t know what to say. He watched a floating cloud, felt the warm drops of sweat from his father’s face on his own.

  ‘The running people. Running before the bull. Red cliffs …’

  ‘You’ve been daydreaming,’ the strong man said. ‘Come on. It’s a long way back to the knoll.’

  He stood, hauled up by his father. He heard his mother’s voice, distantly, and his father shouted, ‘He’s fine. Just acting on impulse. Get the heart massage machine ready for me, though.’

  He grinned down at the wheezing boy. ‘You certainly run fast!’

  ‘Bull-runners. Running from the bull.’

  They began the hot walk up the hill.

  His story about two running people was put down to a blossoming imagination. His cousin Roland was much the same, an older lad who delighted in constructing wild tales, usually concerned with the grotesque murders of the Victorian Age, from Burke and Hare to the Ripper, but often with that abiding obsession of the young: buried treasure.

  Jack liked Roland’s company, he liked the stories, he liked the hidden camps in his cousin’s huge family garden in Devon, a tract of land that opened onto fields, and the river shore. He especially liked fantasizing about building a raft and floating away down the wide river and out to sea.

  It was here, two years after the incident known in the family as ‘running-down-the-hill’, that Jack glimpsed the two hunted people for the second time. He was sitting with Roland on the upturned rowing boat that belonged to Roland’s family. It was a cool autumn day, heavily overcast and showery and the river was grey and choppy.

  They’d been sitting in silence for a while, caught in that restless ennui that comes from being aspiringly adventurous, but constrained by the conditions of the weather. They certainly didn’t want to go up to the house, where the parents and grandparents would be talking endlessly about things the boys had no interest in. They wanted to go exploring, but Jack had to leave in thirty minutes for the return drive to Exburgh.

  With a shift in the wind came the smell of fire and the sound of flames, huge flames, like a forest burning …

  The man and the woman were suddenly stumbling towards him, the wood behind them brilliant with the conflagration. Both of the bull-runners were coughing violently, the woman crying out in her distress. She was carrying a flaming torch, which she cast aside, throwing it into Jack’s face, it seemed. They ran past him, smoke streaming from the fire that burned them, brushing at their smouldering clothes. Jack heard the roar of an animal beyond the wall of fire, the shaking of the earth as it ran towards him. In terror, he turned and ran after the hunters, the heat making him sweat, the smoke making him gag. The land gave way to water, an angled drop down rocks, and he scrambled down to the cool river, where Greyface and Greenface were already immersed and swimming strongly in the current. As he followed them in, splashing helplessly as the river swept him round and down towards the sheer sides of a gorge, he looked back and saw the swaying shape of an immense horned animal, standing on the rocks above the water.

  Behind it, white stone towers gleamed! The ruins of a castle, he imagined, reaching right to the river, half fallen into the river itself.

  This was all he glimpsed before the current tugged him down and he felt water in his lungs …

  And was suddenly being dragged up by the hair, pulled to the shore amidst screaming voices and confusion.

  Roland was half crying, half shouting.

  ‘He just suddenly ran into the water! I couldn’t stop him. He shouted, “It’s burning!” and ran into the water. But I can’t swim! I can’t swim!’

  A soothing voice calmed the boy. Then Jack’s father’s voice, ‘Was something burning, Roland?’

  ‘No. I did smell woodsmoke, just briefly, but there wasn’t a fire. He just ran away from the shore. He was splashing so hard, but he was in deep water in no time. I can’t swim. I’m sorry …’

  ‘It’s OK, Roland. You did the right thing, fetching us as quickly as you did. Everything’s all right. Jack’s OK, now. Aren’t you, Jack?’

  Jack sat up, shivering. It was beginning to rain again. He stared at the ring of solemn, adult faces. Their expressions seemed to demand an explanation.

  ‘I thought there was a fire. I followed the running people, the bull-runners. I think they’d started it – the fire – to stop the beast – but they got caught in it …’

  ‘The runners, again,’ his father said, shaking his head and looking away in exasperation.

  His mother said something sharp to her husband, then helped Jack up and placed a heavy towel around his shoulders. He huddled inside it, shaken and confused, as he followed the procession back up the five wooden steps from the shoreline and through the long garden, to the welcome warmth of his grandparents’ house.

  * * *

  After this incident, running-from-the-fire, Roland became very aggressive towar
d his cousin. The friendship that had been close and comfortable now became a distanced challenge, Roland always putting the younger boy down, stalking off on his own, seeking separate company.

  Jack missed the older boy, partly for his sense of direction, his knack of always knowing what to do, what to suggest for fun; but mostly for his gruesome stories.

  A year after running-from-the-fire, however, he met Angela, the daughter of friends of his own parents, and at once found a willing pair of ears for his own versions of the ‘gruesome’, discovering that he could satisfy his own imaginative craving by copying Roland, by evoking memories of Roland’s tales, and by describing, in as much detail as possible, his odd, occasional visions of the bull-runners. He could see and remember in such fine detail the various exotic landscapes that the hunted couple inhabited as they ran from the immense, red-faced beast which pursued them, and from the furious men who followed that beast, that his descriptions were awe-inspiring.

  ‘It’s as if you’ve really been there!’

  And in a very real way, Jack had.

  Angela was a tidy girl, orderly in her habits, precise in her thinking. She hated sports, preferring to read books about the mind, astronomy and bizarre events; so-called past-lives, which were fashionable parapsychology when she was nine years old, absorbed her thoroughly. She believed in them totally, but was unwilling to accept anything other than a rational basis for the phenomenon. It might or might not be reincarnation, but if it were, then reincarnation could be explained!

  Her games invariably consisted of ‘projects’, analyses of her friends and family for evidence of reincarnation; searches in chalk quarries or other fossil sites for unusual remains (evidence of time travel); speculative essays about life on other planets. It was natural that she should begin to study Jack, and although their friendship waned towards the end of their primary school years and into their first years at Exburgh’s red-brick comprehensive, they eventually came to be in the same class and joined the same group – which they called a tribe, the fashion of the time.

  Angela’s interest in the phenomenon associated with Jack’s encounters remained high, and it was she who coined the word ‘shimmering’ for the film of other light that seemed to seep from Jack’s skin when the bull-runners were close.

  4

  Jack had finally escaped from school.

  The endless questions from Ruth, the ‘retesting’ with electrodes as he described running-from-the-fire, and Angela’s long conversation with the psychologist afterwards had eaten up his spare time, and he was edgy and irritable as he met Simon and the others at the school gates.

  ‘Come on. There’s a lot to tell.’

  ‘Don’t do this,’ Angela called to him, standing away from the rest of the tribe. Jack ignored her.

  Simon Baines’ parents always worked late, and his house, close to Jack’s, was a perfect place to go to after school. He’d been nicknamed ‘Mouse’ – alone in the house, although ‘Mouse’ hardly described his stocky, slightly swaggering gait and long, unkempt hair. He knew where to find the key to the glass-fronted cabinet where the Scotch, gin, Cognac and liqueurs were kept. Each drink was rationed carefully so that the dip in quantity wasn’t too obvious. Even so, lately there had been a questioning look in his father’s eyes as he studied the depleted bottle of Southern Comfort.

  Most evenings, when Simon opened his house to the tribe, they watched videos, or played Elite, a 3-D space game that ran on Simon’s personal computer. He alone possessed such an extravagance; the computers at school were never made available for games. Jack was hopeless at Elite, which depended on lightning reflexes and a willingness to kill everything in sight. He preferred to watch the Baines’ collection of banned horror videos, and especially the pirated copy of Clockwork Orange which they kept poorly hidden in the drawer of their bedroom table.

  They approached the house shortly after six, Angela trailing reluctantly behind. Jack’s parents wanted him home by seven, so there was not a lot of time, but Simon led the way to the front door, then stood back to collect the fifty pence coins, the price of entrance.

  ‘Don’t do this,’ Angela said again, standing at the bottom of the step. Jack shrugged her off, but felt his skin flush at her disapproving look. ‘You’re such a fool!’

  ‘I have to tell the story. I saw it today. I have to tell it.’

  ‘You’ll make it up. It’s all lies. I don’t like you, Jack. You’re cheating on Greenface.’

  Simon gave Jack four of the six coins. ‘If you’re coming in,’ he said to Angela, his face pinched with hostility and dislike, ‘pay up. If you’re not: eff off!’

  Angela stared at him for a moment. ‘You’re disgusting,’ she said coldly. Then with a sharp glance at Jack she turned quickly away, hunched in her black school jacket, arms folded.

  Inside, Jennifer was clumsily rolling a joint. Simon swore. ‘Not that! They always know how much they’ve got of that!’

  But Jennifer moved away from him to the window and leaned out with her friend Deborah, laughing as they drew on the cigarette, blowing the smoke into the day.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mouse, we won’t give you away in court.’

  ‘We love your body too much.’

  Laughter.

  Simon’s parents had supplied the cannabis – inadvertently. The boy knew where everything was hidden, and how to get it, and kept most of his knowledge to himself. But the girls were sharper than him. They’d worked out just where to look and had taken their cut while the boy had been collecting the Jack-tale fee at the front door.

  ‘Come on. Come on.’

  They went up to Simon’s room, closed the curtains and turned on the green light.

  Jack sat on a high stool, the green spotlight on his face. The boys in the tribe sat on the floor, the girls on the bed, all holding plastic cups of gin, all waiting for the story of Jack’s Vision.

  It was so easy.

  Jack had noticed months ago how quickly the two girls, Jennifer and Deborah, changed from being threatening to so gullible when it came to engaging their imaginations in a little romance. He sensed there was an explanation, but also that as yet he was too inexperienced to understand it fully, and so he never confronted them at school, where they’d certainly cut him as dead as they always cut Mouse (who in any case seemed to ask for abuse, as if he somehow thrived on it). He just kept them at a distance, but fed them the fairytale on these after-school sessions, and happily took their money.

  And it was especially easy today because they’d all seen the encounter, they’d seen the fuss, the filming, the arrival of the psychologist … All of them, now, accepted that Jack could glimpse a world in parallel to their own. And though they hadn’t heard the question and answer session in the technician’s room, they were up for the fantasy today more so than on any of the days when he’d lied, claiming to have encountered the hunters in order to boost his finances. He should have charged more!

  After a while, he began to speak:

  ‘Their journey has now taken them away from the snows and the mountains of Eriodor (he’d made the name up; it was the best he could do: a touch of Tolkien), the land of the redskull knights … now the hunters, who are the hunted, have come to a land where the earth is older, where the creatures of the past struggle among the sucking swamps, and crowded, stinking forest of the oldest times …’

  And later:

  ‘… I saw them making love, a time of naked joy in a place that is trying to kill them. But when they made love it was sensuous and sexy … it went on for several hours … They were aware that the Scorched Face, their guardian, watched them from the treeline, smiling at them in this time of passion …’

  And so on. He knew what the group wanted. He could read their faces, every one of them, knew how to add sexual titillation for Deborah, Rex, romantic longing for Jennifer and Kate, quest adventure for Danny and Sandra, and the macho detail of fights that always made Simon lick his lips and narrow his eyes as he sat cross-legged by th
e far wall, playing with the coins that were his cut of any evening in the house.

  What they all really wanted was the weird, and to achieve this he simply combined what he had glimpsed in those terrifying moments of day-dream with the elements of fantasy that had always intrigued him: dragons and dinosaurs, time-travelling princesses from ancient Egypt, trigger words like Avalon, Atlantis, Lavondyss, Middle-earth. He had invented a burning face which watched the runners and warned them, The Scorched Face, a primal elemental which he used to get them out of trouble when his plotting failed him. And a wolf which served the same purpose by assisting their shape-changing into animals. He mixed it, he fixed it, and they loved it.

  He was a born storyteller. He could have made a fortune in ancient times. Now he was making ten or twelve pounds a week evoking ancient echoes.

  ‘Greenface is carrying a child, I think. The wounds inflicted on her by the Megatherium, that giant creature, with its horned protuberances, gaping jaws and slashing claws, those wounds have healed, but she is still weak. She holds the stolen magic carefully at night. There is something in the obsidian flask that flows into her, and Greyface knows it. He’s jealous, but the child is his, and there are dangers all around … He’s trying to ensure that the pursuing Demon cannot find a way to enter the unborn child …’

  He didn’t want to handle the subject of childbirth. Besides, the Greenface in his vision wasn’t at all pregnant! He’d got into deep water trying to please the Romantics. Next time there’d have to be a miscarriage during a fight with a sabre-tooth.

  It was nearly seven o’clock. Jack stopped speaking and walked silently from the room. He hoped that Angela would be outside waiting for him by the gate, but she’d gone home, angry.

  The money for his Jack-tale felt good in his pocket.

  His mother was tearful with guilty concern when he got home (she’d not been able to leave a meeting to go to the school and support him). She hugged him and fussed him. Later, when his father asked to hear what had happened, he simply recounted the brief details of his real glimpse into the parallel world, and concisely described the questions that Ruth had asked him afterwards.