Ancient Echoes

by Robert Holdstock

  Even so, he showed traces, on one occasion, of a polypeptide similar to that in the scent glands of a wolf … and he had glimpsed Greyface in a savage tussle with a wounded, lone wolf, while Greenface stabbed down on the creature, eventually driving it away, a scene of attack that had lasted only seconds, a brief disorientation during a class on Economics.

  And the traces of woodland and grassland were there in one swab of every three.

  Garth visited him twice during the summer, but could not persuade the boy to come to the dig and help, although Angela gave a willing hand and regularly reported to Jack on the progress of the excavation.

  By the early winter, the distracting sense of proximity of the bull-runners had faded considerably and Jack felt his life become his own again. Now he risked a second visit to the Hercules shrine, where the revealed masks of Greyface and Greenface were carefully protected behind a frame of toughened glass. As he looked at them this time he felt only plaster and stone, no life at all, no resonance.

  ‘They’re dead,’ he said, and when the glass was opened and he touched the blind eyes he just shrugged. ‘I was frightened before. But there’s nothing to be frightened of now.’

  Garth seemed to have been expecting this. ‘Then come with me,’ he said. ‘Come and see the new find.’

  In late October, telephone engineers laying cable in the area behind Spittlefield, close to Castle Hill, had breached the roof of a deep chamber, ten feet square, eight feet in height, and with a small access portal from the west that had been sealed in antiquity. The room was filled with the bones of animals, mostly skulls. The way to the next chamber was downwards, through a stone trap-door.

  Garth could stand upright in the skull room, standing on a wooden platform that had been carefully placed so as to avoid disturbing the bones. With Jack at his side he pointed to the earth below.

  ‘It goes four chambers down, maybe more. That’s all we’ve been able to reach. The whole sanctuary area spreads out to the west and slightly to the north, chamber after chamber, each embedded more deeply within the complex, accessible by a single door, or shaft. This one is free of rubble, but beyond and below it the chambers are impacted with the earth itself, and a lot of them are probably obliterated.’

  ‘This isn’t Roman …’

  ‘Damn right. Nor Greek. And it certainly isn’t Celtic. Older than all those times.’

  Jack stepped down to the floor without thinking. Garth crouched beside him, watching as the youth bent down to touch the crumbling skulls, with their wide horns. ‘Bulls. The skulls of bulls. What is this place?’

  ‘It could be pre-Minoan Crete; it could be pre-dynastic Egypt. It could be Turkey, the Levant, as far east as Persia … anywhere where the bull was sacrificed to worship. The walls are mud-brick. I’m inclined to think Turkey, Levant, maybe Egypt. But older by centuries than the Hercules shrine, than Minerva of the Shoe Shop, than the Lord of Animals under Market Square. It’s what Glanum is all about, the concentration of temples.’

  ‘But in Exburgh? They came all this way from the Middle East to Exburgh?’

  Without thinking, Jack had picked up a bull skull, one horn shattered, one stretching two feet, curving up from the bone, still polished white. If he felt the shrine shake, it might have been imagination, traffic, or the contact with the runners. There was a hard breathing somewhere around him, and the sense of something vast moving furtively through tall grass. But the mood passed quickly and he placed the dead bone down on the dry earth floor, by the well into the dark below, the chamber underneath.

  There were no paintings, no frescoes, no carvings, no symbols anywhere in the room.

  Just bones.

  Just wrongness.

  He said, ‘Is this the heart of Glanum?’

  ‘No. Where we are now is on the edge of the heart. As I said to you, the sanctuaries get older the closer you get to the centre of the city. Wherever you find Glanum, it’s always the way: the heart in the corpse is always inaccessible. But we’ve come damned close in Exburgh. And since the corpse is still warm …’

  Jack watched the man in the half light from the street, aware that John Garth was talking more to himself than to the student in the pit.

  ‘How many Glanums are there?’ he asked.

  ‘As many as you can find,’ Garth answered darkly. ‘Glanum has left its shadow across the world, and it has been doing so for longer than you can imagine. Are they close? The bull-runners?’

  Suddenly chilled, Jack said, ‘No.’

  He hauled himself onto the wooden ramp and climbed the ladder from the cold room into a street that hummed with traffic; he stared up the slope of Castle Hill to the sheer walls of the Castle itself. He thought: Solid sandstone. The hill is solid sandstone. There’s nothing underneath but rock and mantle. There could never have been a city there!

  The town of Exburgh bustled, seeming to widen with every passing month as a new ring road was built, and rows of terraces bulldozed down to make way for a supermarket, and a wide, well-appointed parking area.

  The excavations were prettied up and made presentable, and the tourists came in the spring and summer months, fascinated by the frescoes and the given story that Glanum was a city of shrines, a city whose heart was hidden below the Castle Rock, beyond the abilities of contemporary excavation.

  Jack worked at weekends in the small museum, collecting tickets, selling pamphlets about Glanum, postcards, and other Heritage Industry publications. On occasion he acted as a guide, but Angela was far more effective, being less inclined to exaggerate the truth and thus avoid awkward, probing questions. In any case, Jack could not abide the skull chamber. When he descended into the room he heard echoes of the running bull and his hackles rose and his concentration drifted. But the skull-room was the gem in the excavation tour, since it belonged to a culture that could not possibly have been present in the country unless brought in under exceptional circumstances.

  Towards the end of the summer vacation following Jack’s final school exams, Garth arranged for a trip to the country, supplying a minibus and driver, hampers of food, cold-boxes of wine, beer and mineral water, and such an air of mystery that his invitation was hard to refuse. Jack and his parents, Angela and hers, and three of the students who had been regulars on the Glanum dig crowded into the small van and sang and laughed their way into the hills, into the high hills, and then down to a wooded river site where a tarpaulin was stretched on the ground, and a series of canvas sun breaks slung between branches to create patches of shade in the intensely hot height of the day.

  Garth prowled the shallows of the river, black jeans rolled up, feet bare, his heavy arms bronzed, almost as dark as the leather vest he wore. What he was looking for he never said, but continued to hunt the water’s edge while the food and drink he’d provided was consumed with all the enthusiasm and inelegance of a typical picnic. Perhaps he stayed apart from the rest because he was smoking, one cigar after another, the pungency of the fumes hanging heavy over the glade.

  Because it was hot, and because they were now very close, and because it was dangerous and they were game for anything, Jack and Angela slipped away from their families and made frantic if furtive love for half an hour, screened by rocks and dense bushes of wild, yellow rose. Hot and sticky, glowing with achievement and an adolescent sense of triumph in the deception, they dressed and emerged from their hiding place, to find Garth leaning against a tree, smoking, his gaze on the ridge above them, the top of Mallon Hill.

  ‘We were just, er … we went for a walk,’ Jack said, aware that Angela’s gaze was furious, a clear statement: what the hell are you doing? We don’t have to explain ourselves.

  Garth nodded. ‘There’s nothing like it. Nothing like it at all.’ His smile was enigmatic.

  Still staring at the ridge, he ground his cigar between thumb and forefinger. ‘Feel like another? Walk, I mean … I’m sure you do. Come on.’ He was wearing patterned, brown leather boots with pointed toes, but covered the uneven groun
d with as much facility as if he’d been wearing proper hiking boots. Jack, in loose trainers, found the going easy but Angela, in sandals, lagged behind, swearing loudly, and struggling on the hill, whose slope was murderous.

  At the top, Garth stripped to the waist. His lean body running with sweat, he stood with his hands on his hips, breathing slowly and deeply. When Angela arrived at the summit she tossed her useless sandals at Jack, sat down and picked at her feet, which were bleeding from several small cuts.

  The air was very clear here, without the constricting humidity of the woods by the river. As quickly as she had become angry she became at peace, flopping back to stare at the clouds. Jack, sitting by the tall man, knees drawn up, watched her for a moment, stared at the sweat saturated T-shirt which was clinging to her body as she drew breath to relax, but he was finished with sex for the moment and waited for Garth.

  This was not just a walk for walking’s sake.

  After a while the man said, ‘Can you see movement out there? I don’t mean the cloud shadow …’

  Jack scanned the hills, the woods, the expanse of flowing, open green, sun-saturated, shadow-flecked.

  ‘Just a flock of birds in the distance. Otherwise, no.’

  ‘What can you hear? Put your head to the ground …’

  Angela was sitting up, now, watching curiously.

  Jack leaned down and listened through the grass. At once, the struggling of the bull-runners came into sharp, auditory focus, and he smelled forest. Greyface was carrying a bleeding carcase, an animal of some kind, Jack couldn’t be sure – they were too distant. He just knew that they’d been hunting.

  Apart from the bull-runners all he could hear was the faint sound of voices from the river and the thump of his heart, magnified, it seemed, through the earth itself.

  When he told this to Garth, the man glanced down and smiled. ‘Listen through all that. Can’t you hear the movement?’

  Jack concentrated. He tried to hear beyond the rustle, struggle and murmuring of the two people who were running, close by.

  And at once he heard the slow creaking of great stones!

  ‘It’s like movement … deep in the earth …’

  He felt the ground vibrate. Angela watched him closely, eyes narrowed against the sun’s glare.

  ‘Can you hear something?’

  The sound that was rising from below him was like a deep thunder, coming in waves, the sound of an earthquake, he imagined, or mine workings, but far away, far away …

  ‘There’s something down there, something moving around.’

  But Garth said, ‘There’s nothing there. Just echoes. Pre-echoes. There’s nothing there yet, but it won’t be long. I had a good feeling that it would stay around …’

  ‘I can’t hear anything at all,’ Angela said. ‘Echoes of what?’

  ‘The white whale,’ Garth said with a smile, pulling his biker’s vest over his broad shoulders. ‘This is where I leave you, Jack. I need time to think, time to prepare. Veronica will drive the bus home.’

  And before Jack could say a word, he walked out across the hill, tugging his broad hat over his damp hair, descending the rolls and folds of ground until he could only be seen occasionally, a diminishing figure walking to the west.

  For a while, Jack thought the man had taken off for the afternoon, requiring solitude, and he went back with Angela to the river and the picnic.

  In fact, that was the last he saw of Garth for more than a year, the man having clearly decided to abandon the exploration of the hidden city.

  He left without a word, without a note, and when the rains of October began to wash against the earth of the scattered shrines, the pits that dotted Exburgh, they were covered over and preserved for later excavation.

  8

  Jack eventually saw Garth again on two occasions. The first was shortly before Christmas, three days before the end of the long winter term. With two other boys, Jack had left the school grounds for the latter part of the afternoon, quickly changed from school uniform into jeans and leather jacket and walked down to the city centre in search of last minute suggestions for Christmas gifts.

  As they strolled through the neon-lit darkness of the main street, aware that a fine, icy drizzle was starting to fall, Jack glimpsed the tall man emerging from the shoe shop above the Minerva shrine.

  ‘That’s Garth … Garth!’ he shouted.

  ‘Who’s Garth?’

  ‘An old friend. The guy digging up the old city. Christ, don’t you know anything?’

  Jack ran through the crowds until he came to the ring road. Garth was already across on the grass verge, walking towards the high wall of the church on the opposite side. Again Jack called to the man, and this time Garth looked round, squinting through the traffic. In the early evening darkness it was hard to read the man’s expression, but Jack was in no doubt that he had been waved away.

  Garth had turned, then, and disappeared around the building.

  Jack went back to the shop and asked for the manager.

  ‘I came here a year ago with the archaeologist, John Garth? He took me downstairs to see the temple.’

  ‘Yes, I remember. You got claustrophobic. Very frightening. I suffer myself, which is why you won’t get me–’

  ‘He was just here, wasn’t he? I saw him.’

  Ignoring Jack’s youthful impatience, the manager agreed. ‘Went downstairs to listen, he said. Up against the rock statue at the end of the passage. I don’t know what he was listening for. Do you?’

  Jack shook his head. ‘Has he been here before? I mean recently?’

  ‘No. Not for months.’

  ‘If you see him again, could you ask him to call me? It’s really important.’

  Jack wrote his name and telephone number and left it with the man, then on impulse asked, ‘Could I see downstairs again?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. I’ll have Shirley come with you, just in case … if you like …’

  But Jack wanted to be on his own. ‘I’ll be OK. I just want two minutes.’

  He went straight round the covered sanctuary to the small door that led to the claustrophobic tunnel. He’d forgotten that the narrow entrance would be locked against the public. But behind him, soft steps on the metal stairs announced that Shirley had been sent down anyway; she peered across the model below its glass case. ‘You all right?’

  ‘I feel fine. I wanted to see the rock statue. Do you have the key?’

  The woman came over. She was very small, slightly built, probably only a few years older than Jack himself. Her small hands were heavy with rings, an engagement ring gleaming with blue-tinged diamond light. She opened the small locker by the door and gave Jack access to the passage, switching on the fluorescent light, which flickered several times, then glared. When he reached the far end, against the rough rock, the odd shape, the muscle shape in the stone, Jack pressed his ear to the cold surface, closed his eyes and listened.

  Breathing!

  He pulled back, alarmed by the deep and sonorous breath that he had felt being drawn. Then he slapped the stone shoulder of what Garth claimed was a buried statue and listened again.

  A swirling pool, breath heaving and sucking from its centre …

  Again he was startled by the image that touched his senses. For a second he had felt sucked down, face blasted by an icy wind from the subterranean deep.

  He went back for a third time, fingers spread on the rock, ignoring Shirley’s tentative call checking that he was safe and not frightened.

  And for a moment he was in the sea, rising dizzyingly to the surface, twisting as the water flowed over him, reaching for the light above. Except that it wasn’t water; the light was coming closer, but he was struggling against drowning, and the world around him was heavy, black and stifling!

  He threw himself away from the rock, choking and gasping for breath. He could hear the woman calling to the manager.

  ‘I’m all right! I’m coming back.’

  He crawled al
ong the narrow tunnel, banging his head, aware of the pink, anxious oval of the assistant’s face. She helped him brush the dust and dirt from his clothes, straightened the collar of his black leather jacket and locked the passage.

  ‘You’ve seen a ghost?’ she asked with a smile, and Jack laughed, remembering earlier words in a similar situation.

  ‘I don’t know. There’s something under the hill, though.’

  ‘Yes. A billion tons of sandstone! The shop’s closing, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’m on my way.’

  Christmas came and went, the traditional orgy of television, attempts at games, visits from and to relatives, near-death by turkey, chocolate and cocktails, secretly consumed wherever his friends’ parents were less strict on such under-age abuse than his own.

  He was a reluctant passenger in the back of the car on New Year’s Eve, as his parents drove southwest to the moors for four days of bracing, damp, treacherous walking. Angela had been invited to join them, but she had cousins visiting from Australia, two boys of her own age. And besides: she was working on a paper, an actual, formal piece of work which she intended to submit to Nature magazine.

  Jack slumped and sulked. He was aware of his bad mood, aware that it wasn’t really like him, but damned if he’d do anything about it. He watched the saturated landscape, hardly sharing the enthusiasm of his parents as they began to reach the deep country, with its signs and signals of a long forgotten past, the monoliths and grave mounds, the bleak castles slipping from the high hills where they had been built to stand forever. Why does she always hate to be working?

  Angela, he had to acknowledge, annoyed him as much as she thrilled him.

  His small radio screeched to the strident, wonderful sounds of the punk rock band PIL. On each occasion that he was instructed to ‘turn the racket down’–

  ‘And stop singing that you’re the “Antichrist”. We’ve got the message. Jesus! have we got the message …’