Ancient Echoes

by Robert Holdstock

  It’s coming up from below!

  Greyface was calling to him, taunting him. The hunter was circling, out of sight, sending shadow birds scurrying from the bushes. Piercing whistles, mocking laughter, mingled with the dull roar of traffic.

  Jack panicked and started to run. A hand grabbed him, slapped his face.

  The shadows faded, a less alien sun caught his eyes, made him squint as Angela held him, shaking him, her words slowly coming clear.

  ‘I knew you’d watch over me,’ he gasped with relief.

  ‘Come on. Jack. Come on. We’re going home. You’re a danger, and not just to others.’ She scanned him, searched his face, amazed. ‘You’re glowing – like fire. We have to get this recorded. Come on, Jack. Come home …’

  But the hold of Glanum was too strong.

  He let Angela take him back through the streets, to the municipal car park, but he insisted she drive him to his parents, to their house above the city. Here, with the sound of running loud in his ears, with the stifling presence of a forest he could not see, with the scent of blood and sweat from two people who were so close he could almost touch them, he stood at the bottom of the front drive and looked down the hill.

  As if it were yesterday, he could remember Garth strolling towards him, coat flapping, smoke coiling from the stub of his cigar. He could see the man’s shape against the setting sun on the glimmering roofs of the town, and like the ghosts that haunted him, he felt he could reach out and take Garth’s hand.

  You’re the boy who sees other worlds …

  You’re the man who dowses for lost cities …

  ‘What happened to you?’ he whispered, and a gentle touch on his shoulder made him turn. Angela put her arm around his shoulders, followed his gaze to the sprawl of Exburgh. ‘What happened to who? Who are you talking about?’

  ‘Garth.’

  ‘Oh yes. Of course. You miss him.’

  ‘I hardly knew him, but yes. I miss him. What’s happening to me? It’s come back, but it’s different. It’s like they’re …’ he reached out, running a hand through the warm air, rubbing the air against his palm with his fingers. ‘It’s like they’re right beside me.’

  ‘You said the city was rising. Are you still seeing the city?’

  ‘Yes … but more distantly. Like a photograph projected on a wall – the real and the ghostly mixed together.’

  It was like a dark shadow above the churches, the town hall, the multi-storey car parks, the clutter of structure that makes a modern town. If he blinked he saw reality, but if he looked hard enough he could see a hill, groves of trees, the clutter of red-tiled buildings, a shadowy, shimmering illusion of something that might once have been, but which might also be his imagination.

  Is this how it was for John Garth? Is the world he inhabited an overlapping vision of the alien and the real?

  He said, ‘But Greenface is behind me, watching over my shoulder. She keeps talking to me, murmuring things, touching me …’

  Sensual … that touch … he couldn’t tell Angela, but the touch of the alien aroused him, as if she had always been intimate with him, and now looked to him for strength, for companionship.

  ‘Can you understand what she says?’ Angela was examining him closely, disappointed, perhaps because the film of ‘otherness’ was not now present on his skin.

  He thought of the woman, let her breathing grow loud, let his mind slip away from Angela.

  ‘Time to come through … found gate … at last … searched so hard … look after me …’

  ‘Oh Christ!’

  Angela grabbed him, turned him sharply to face her, watching his eyes.

  ‘What is it? What? Come on, Jack. What’s happening?’

  ‘They’re coming through …’

  She practically dragged him to the car, while his parents stood concerned and unhappy. He sat in the passenger seat, strapped by the seat belt, watching as Angela talked briefly with the older couple then returned to the car, reversing out of the drive with a speed approaching the dangerous. She stopped just once, at neighbours, to pick up Natalie, and within an hour Jack was washed, naked, monitored, videoed … and crying …

  ‘Damn!’

  Angela turned off the camera, came over once more to inspect her husband. Jack let her turn his face this way and that, enjoyed her hands on his body, tolerated the gradual detachment of the chemical pads and electrodes, listened to her sighs of frustration.

  He wanted her. Naked, his skin cool, he suddenly wanted sex, and tried to tug her back to him, his head clearing fast.

  ‘Let me clear away the equipment, first. For God’s sake, Jack, you nearly killed yourself today. Again!’

  ‘Take your clothes off.’

  ‘Let me get cleared up, let me get Nattie to bed, let me scan the data and then we can play.’

  He lunged at her. Greyface laughed, watching from behind him. The hunter easily blocked the blow from the woman, tripped her and tugged at her skirt and blouse.

  ‘This is nice,’ Greyface said. ‘The hair colour. Like amber. I like it. Long hair like amber. Wind it round your hand.’

  Greyface showed him how to pin the wrists with a single, powerful grip. The girl was in the doorway, screaming, but the sound was swallowed by the forest, disturbing nothing more than animals.

  ‘Gently. Gently!’ Greyface mocked him. ‘This woman loves you … Give it to her gently!’

  Far from gently, Jack stretched down to suck the woman’s breast.

  And suddenly Greyface reached out and jerked him by the hair, pulling him away, laughing. ‘Get up. Get up, you fool. I just want you to know that we’re close.’

  He was standing, naked and shaking, powerfully aroused and bleeding from the scratches Angela had been able to inflict upon him before he had disabled her. In the doorway, Natalie was a huddled, silently sobbing figure, watching everything.

  Angela stood, tugging down her skirt and closing her blouse. She ran to her daughter and hugged her. ‘It’s all right, darling. Daddy’s dreaming. He didn’t mean it. It’s all right.’

  ‘He was hurting you!’

  ‘No he wasn’t. He was just dreaming. Come downstairs, everything is all right. Daddy was having a nightmare.’ She glanced furiously over her shoulder. ‘Put your pants on, chief! Get downstairs!’

  And then, with a quick frown, ‘Greyface?’

  Close to tears, still numbed by what he had done, all Jack could murmur was, ‘I’m so sorry …’

  ‘Greyface?’ she insisted.

  ‘Yes … Oh Christ …’

  ‘I thought so. I could smell him. Jesus, he’s old … he’s from somewhere old! Dress and come down.’ And to the child, ‘It’s okay, Nattie. Everything’s okay.’

  With the girl settled, they huddled by the cold fire, curled up on the broad sofa, sipping vodka and tonic.

  ‘I hope we did the right thing,’ Angela murmured, swirling the ice in her glass. ‘What do you say to a child who sees an attempted rape by her father on her mother? Christ, I need some advice. I think.’

  ‘You seem to have done fine. She’s quite settled.’

  ‘Maybe trauma can do that to you.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Nor do I. With the near drowning, and this … I really do think it’s take-advice time. Any problems with that?’

  Jack drained his glass, trying to block the sounds of the forest, the breathing behind his head, the tantalizing and painful feeling of his body about to split, like the silken pupa of a moth, splitting open to release the traveller within.

  ‘No,’ he said awkwardly. ‘I don’t have a problem with that. My problem is the sound in my head.’

  There was nothing showing on his skin, no shimmering.

  They had already talked through the events of the day, the glimpses of a shadow city, overgrown and ruined, rising from below Exburgh. Angela’s wrist ached with taking notes. She had filled three hours of tape, getting Jack to analyse what he had experienced almost down to t
he prickling response of each individual hair on his neck.

  But once home, there had been nothing, and although the chemical analyses of the various pads that had absorbed his sweat would be some days in the analysing, from the encephalo-graphical point of view he had shown no more neurological disturbance than a man daydreaming.

  Angela was frustrated. ‘It’s like trying to photograph a fabulous beast. Every time it’s seen, there’s no camera. Every time there’s a camera, no beast.’

  ‘There’s a beast. Make no mistake,’ Jack said, and reached for the bottle to refill their glasses.

  They were running him down, hunting him like an animal, and he fled across the broken land, between the rocks, the bushes, over dried streams and along the dry mud gulleys of the other world. They were running him down …

  He sat up in bed, his head throbbing with pain. Angela slept beside him, exhausted by thinking, writing and alcohol. The video blinked at him, the three hour loop catching his every breath, the shimmer on his skin.

  He held out his hands, aware of the haze of light in the darkness.

  ‘Angela …’ he breathed.

  They were close behind him, screaming at him and he covered the wild land with long strides, his chest bursting with the effort.

  They were running him down … an animal …

  He staggered from the room, hitting the door, wrenching it open and walking unsteadily out onto the moonlit landing. The sound of the pursuit made him wail with fear. His legs wanted to move in rhythm, in sympathy with the shadow-creature that fled the hunters. Every muscle in his body was aflame, every sense heightened so that the world outside this darkened house drummed upon him like a persistent, shocking rain.

  And something made him think: record this.

  He found his way back to the bedroom, but he couldn’t call out, couldn’t raise the sleeping woman. The red light on the camera flickered and he stared at it.

  Watch me. Keep an eye on me …

  Then he went to the wardrobe and crouched before the mirror, aware of the glowing face, the gleaming, sweaty flesh of his body, his belly heaving, his hands spread on his thighs, light seeping from his hair, from his eyes.

  They were coming through!

  He tried to scream, but all the sound of his voice was sucked into the vacuum that accompanied the passage of the man. Greyface leapt from him and Jack felt his body torn from the inside out. He shuddered, shedding the gleaming shadow of the hunter, who turned and cried out as if with pain and a fury of triumph.

  ‘Catch me now if you can!’

  In the mirror, Greenface ended her fusion with the kneeling man, and again Jack’s body was wrenched. Like a woman struggling out of tight-fitting clothes, the glowing green body detached from him, then saw Greyface, who lunged.

  ‘We made it through!’

  ‘No!’

  Watching from isolation, helpless, immobile, Jack saw the woman turn and run to him. She came out of the glass, out of his own pale reflection, and

  burst into him

  He swallowed her. He heard her running, fleeing deeply down, while in the glass Greyface scowled and drew away, drew back into shadow, his voice growing distant.

  They had come from inside him. Not from a world in parallel, but from inside him. As he knelt, watching Greyface fade as a grinning eel draws down into the murk of the bottom of a pool, so he felt the woman in his mind, retracing her steps, crying out with fear, with exasperation, lost in a land that hunted her.

  And that land was Jack Chatwin himself. And she was running home, oblivious of danger, a frightened spirit, returning to her source.

  Greyface loomed above the kneeling man, his face twisted with fury.

  ‘Fetch her back!’

  Jack couldn’t speak. He was paralysed, all but his eyes. His tongue was heavy, his face locked. The woman ran into him, a shadow in his dreams. Finally, Greyface crossed the darkened room to the window. He looked at the distant glow above Exburgh, above Glanum, then passed into the hall. Watching in the mirror, Jack tried to scream. Angela turned in her sleep, disturbed by the sudden sound of their daughter, crying out. There was noise downstairs, the back door slamming. Distantly, Natalie wailed. Frozen inside his body, Jack realized that Greyface was running to the hidden city, Natalie taken in response to the loss of the woman.

  As Angela woke, so the spell broke and Jack staggered to his feet, screaming, ‘Call the police. He’s got Nattie!’

  From the window he saw the glimmering shape of the man, moving fast across the field at the bottom of the garden. A brief glance into the girl’s room established that she had gone. He tugged on gardening shoes and an old raincoat from inside the utility room and began to run, covering the garden in seconds, leaping the wire fence and striking out into the darkness.

  Behind him, Angela was shouting. Lights in neighbouring houses were beginning to glow.

  For a few minutes he thought he would die. He was terrified of Greyface. He could not begin to understand the process by which this monster had appeared in the bedroom, at night, from his own day-dreaming mind, all he knew was that the monster had his daughter, and that she was in terrible danger …

  Suddenly, she was there, a pale figure in white nightie, hands clasped in front of her, a frightened face on a motionless body.

  Jack dropped to his knees in front of her, grasped the girl’s shoulders.

  ‘Nattie?’

  ‘I’m cold.’ He looked around, but there was no sign of the man, or the glow that had briefly been associated with him. The girl was beginning to shake, but she wasn’t crying.

  ‘Nattie, are you all right? Did he hurt you?’

  She shook her head. ‘He told me a funny story. He’s nice. He said to tell you something.’

  ‘Tell me then.’

  ‘You’ve taken something of his. You can’t keep her for ever. Fetch her back. If you don’t, he’ll take something of yours.’

  ‘Will he, indeed! What else did he say?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What about the funny story?’

  Natalie frowned, thinking hard, then shook her head. ‘I’ve forgotten it. But it made me laugh.’

  You can’t keep her for ever. Fetch her back …

  12

  Five days later the woman came back, a shadowy, frightened presence at the edge of the forest, close to a wide river that surged and bubbled over dark rocks.

  It was a maddening haunting. She inhabited the edge of his vision. However hard he tried he could not quite see her, but he dreamed of her, watched her as she hunted small game, smelled the fires she lit, in a clearing among stone ruins, sometimes caught snatches of her song.

  Eventually she came to a church, at the side of a wide square, where a crimson sun cast a perpetual twilight. Here, she hid in the dark spaces, ate when she could, slept and cried below the corrupt statues of strange gods.

  He imagined, too, that he could feel her uncertainty. She would not leave her own world again, but she was if not helpless without her male partner, at least less adequate than before. She called to him, pleadingly, then angrily. At night she huddled, taking sleep in short naps, always wary of danger.

  She was thinking that she should return, back to the source, the scene of their crime.

  This is how she thought of it: their crime. Jack knew that she was frightened of the city, the stone towers, the hunters from that ancient place who followed the bull, seeking revenge for a deed whose nature eluded the watching man.

  Jack felt like a voyeur; at the worst of times, which were the most lucid, Greenface crept so far to the river’s edge, crouching there, that he could smell her scent and see the way her eyes glittered behind the mask of paint. But the sun was bright and she was part of the green, an inhabitant of two worlds, an inhabitant of the shadow.

  During this time, the video recording of the ‘auto-exorcism’, as Angela called it, was computer enhanced, analysed electronically, scanned at various wavelengths, even played to a professed
psychic. None of the techniques were able to enhance the flash of shadow that had been caught visually, the shape that Jack had quite literally shed. It was amorphous, lasted one fiftieth of a second, but obscured the thin gleam of moonlight on one of the polished wooden bed posts.

  For the first time in their life together, Angela’s questions, and her notes, were half-hearted. The shadow was physical evidence of the phenomenon to be added to the observable shimmering that had been part of Jack’s boyhood. The realization that one ghost was abroad in the city, and one holding back through fear, begged careful thought, not just in regard to what was happening, but of the consequences, and it was the obvious consequence that was now terrifying the woman, since she lived every day with her husband’s almost palpable fear.

  Greyface had physically taken their daughter. He had threatened them. He was not far away, and perhaps, like the woman within, he was watching them constantly.

  ‘Let’s move away. For a while, at least.’ Angela spoke quietly, cradling Natalie, who was drowsy. It was mid-evening and they were sitting in half-light listening to music.

  ‘How would that help?’

  ‘The male is embroiled with the city. You seem to feel that, so to move away …’

  ‘I don’t think distance is a factor. I think he’ll come wherever we are. I don’t know what to do …’

  They put the girl in her room, locked the windows, then locked every door and window of the house. Before he went to bed, Jack watched the old town for a while, but the only light was from cars, and the late-night disco in the Grand hotel.

  He was woken at three in the morning, opening his eyes as a gentle pressure on his shoulder roused him. Natalie was standing by the bed, her fingers on his bare skin, squeezing rhythmically. He sat up and the girl’s hand dropped away.

  ‘Nattie?’

  She stared at him, half-smiling.

  ‘He wants to talk to you.’