Ancient Echoes

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘Hello Jack. How’re the wounds?’

  ‘Healing. Though some wounds heal slower than others.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s true. Laura drove, by the way. At my request. Always pass the buck, if possible.’ He grinned. ‘I was writing my report on your Midax transfer. I didn’t know she was ill, and I didn’t notice the damage. You want me to move the car?’

  ‘Forget it. And if it’s of any interest to your report, coming out of a Midax journey is far more of a re-adjustment than just coming out of a deep, lucid dream. I’m very shaky. In the last hours in the other land I felt called back here. Now I feel very strongly called back to the world … wherever it is. It’s like I’ve abandoned people, and a place, and the mission isn’t finished.’

  Brightmore was instantly professional. ‘This is important. Can I get a record of what’s happening to you? How you feel?’

  ‘Of course. Walk ahead of me. I’ll bring the harpoons.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Angela still stood by the cooling coffee percolator, her head low, her arms folded. Brightmore glanced at her then walked into the small study.

  Upstairs, the toilet flushed and there was slow, unsteady movement back to the front bedroom.

  An hour later, Brightmore drove Laura back to Cambridge, and Jack started to regret his transparency, his moment of uncontrolled irritation. He had given himself away, of course; the New Zealander had instantly made the connection between the reference to harpoons and the earlier account of the Walk to the Shore. And that look between him and Angela, that quick glance, the question expressed in the merest narrowing of eyes. Does he know? How the hell could he know?

  I don’t want to know! Not yet …

  Natalie had made a drawing of the wild, tiny horses. There were ten of them, running among tall trees, and although the girl was only five, the effect of her imagination, combining what her father had told her and what she had experienced on the decrepit, grey Shetland pony, was astonishingly vigorous.

  ‘This is as good as a cave painting!’ Jack informed her. ‘It’s got a real feel about it. I can hear those little devils snorting as they stampede.’

  ‘What’s a cave painting?’

  He sat down heavily. He’d forgotten the extent to which Natalie questioned everything.

  ‘It’s a painting in a cave: usually of hairy elephants called mastodons and horses with huge fat bellies.’

  There aren’t any hairy elephants, silly …

  ‘Is there a hairy elephant in the zoo?’ she asked.

  ‘No. Only in the permafrost.’

  What’s the permafrost, Daddy?

  She was frowning. ‘Why do the horses have big fat bellies?’

  Damn! Why do you have to be so unpredictable?

  ‘They ate too many hairy elephants.’

  ‘Horses don’t eat elephants. That’s one of your stories!’

  ‘I suppose it must be. Anyway, what’s wrong with stories?’

  ‘Steve doesn’t tell stories.’

  ‘No. I don’t suppose he has the time.’

  She was fussing with the green canopy of the giant trees. ‘He makes Mummy laugh. He tells jokes.’

  ‘Isn’t that nice.’

  ‘When I’m playing outside with Baalka, he tells funny jokes to Mummy. I can hear them.’

  Baalka? Playing with Baalka? What the hell do you play?

  Torn between two concerns, Jack said, ‘I always thought you liked my stories.’

  ‘I do like your stories.’

  ‘And I like your horses. Though don’t forget they had three toes on each foot.’

  Extra toes, eighty in total, were duly crayoned in, a tedious process which Jack watched with patience, his mouth dry, his mind an insistent chant: I don’t want to know. Not yet. Not yet.

  Angela came in and praised the crayon drawing. ‘Time for bed, young lady.’

  There was no protest. The girl packed up her crayons, slid from the chair and ran to the tall window, looking out over the garden towards the city.

  ‘He’s not here yet,’ she announced, and ran back across the room, grabbing her drawings and scampering up the stairs. In her own room, she undressed, ready for a bath. As Jack stood in the doorway, Angela sat the girl down and said, ‘What have we said to you? Haven’t we asked you not to play with … Baalka?’

  ‘I won’t get dirty,’ Natalie said earnestly. She looked at her father, her pale, pretty face suddenly sad. ‘I like dancing with him. He doesn’t hurt me. If I say he’s dancing too fast, he always stops. He always brings me home. All he takes is a dream, and I’ve got lots of dreams. Baalka said so. Oh please … don’t stop him coming.’

  She was looking at her father, ignoring Angela’s stem words, her affectionate hug, her reassurance that it was alright to tell Baalka to go away.

  Jack whispered, ‘If she wants to dance with Baalka, maybe she should.’

  Without looking up, kissing the girl’s fair hair, Angela said, ‘Why?’

  He wanted to say: because he’s peeling her life away, strip by strip. Because she’s incomplete, though she seems fine. Because there’s a shade of her in the shimmering and I don’t know how important it is to get that ghostly echo back. Because! Because! Because maybe we should keep the bastard happy. Maybe if he thinks I’m trying, he’ll bide his time.

  And most of all … maybe he could be reasoned with …

  ‘Will he come tonight?’

  Natalie grinned and nodded. ‘Every night. But he doesn’t hurt me.’

  ‘When you’re tired of dancing, tell him you want to come home and go to sleep. Promise me?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘Goodnight, then.’

  ‘Night …’

  ‘Sweet dreams …’

  Angela followed him downstairs to the kitchen. ‘What are you going to do? Why are you suddenly encouraging her? I thought you said Greyface was dangerous. I only have your word for this, Jack. You realize that, don’t you? If you tell me something, I have to believe it. It’s only you that can see it! Why the change of heart?’

  ‘It’s not a change of heart,’ he said, levering the top from a bottle of beer. ‘It’s a change of strategy.’

  ‘Meaning what, exactly?’

  ‘I’m going in. I’m following him in. Tonight, when he comes out to play, I’m going into the shimmering to play a game of my own. Any objections?’

  ‘Yes. It sounds dangerous. And I need you. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’

  He drank beer, watching her angrily. ‘Of course I don’t. I feel like I’m in some crazy film. Cities slip out of the earth, whirlpools suck forests, prehistoric animals crush my breakfast, my daughter dances with ghosts, my wife screws a man she once told me she thinks is a shit. Of course I don’t know what I’m doing.’

  Her arms, already folded, tightened more as she watched Jack through narrowed, pain-filled eyes. ‘I don’t love him, Jack. It’s just good chemistry. It’s over now. I promise it’s over now.’

  ‘Good chemistry,’ Jack said, and held the bottle before him. ‘Like this beer. When the soothing alcohol gets inside me, it makes good chemistry with the gastric juices, then good chemistry with the blood plasma, then with the pleasure receptors in the brain. Good chemistry! Yes, I think I can understand that. I don’t love this beer …’ he masturbated the neck of the bottle … ‘I just want it inside me, doing things to me–’

  ‘Shut up Jack. I told you. I don’t love him. It’s finished.’

  ‘Until the next time I go inside after Greenface. Four days, Angela! Four fucking days I was helpless. You could have waited four days.’

  Gently, she said ‘I’ve waited five years. You’ve not exactly been attentive since Natalie was born. Christmas and birthdays, the night before you went into the Deep. I gave in for two days, two days only, two days when the chemistry was right, because when you’re on the edge, like, you know …’ (she struggled for words, head shaking) ‘… li
ke on the edge of something really big in your field, and you were there, our first real Midax voyager, well … it gets intense. So yes, we made love …’

  ‘Made love?’

  ‘OK! We screwed. For old times’ sake! I’m sorry. It was chemistry. I don’t intend to take a degree in the subject. Because I love you.’

  ‘Do you? I wonder.’

  ‘Don’t wonder. Just believe.’

  ‘Let me have another of those chemical beers. Then I’ll see if I believe. But I’m still going in after Greyface. I have Nattie to think of. I have to be attentive to her. I have to keep my eye on her. Remember that expression?’

  ‘Of course I do. You’re drunk …’

  ‘Your words, years ago. I was your Life Project, Angela! You were going to keep your eye on me. Funny, isn’t it? I thought you were being romantic, I thought “keeping your eye on someone” meant looking after them. But you just meant studying me like a man looking down a microscope at a chicken embryo.’

  ‘I did not mean that. That’s a cruel thing to say. Please stop drinking. Christ, how much have you had?’

  He opened the bottle and raised it in a toast. ‘Not a lot. And yes. Cruelty! Here’s to cruelty. It’s in our lives whether we like it or not. In the shape of Greyface.’

  He drained the bottle and smiled falsely, an angry and pained expression, childish, confused, but very determined …

  ‘That’s why I’m going in.’

  ‘Going in?’

  ‘To the shimmering. I’m going in. After him. Beard the bastard in his den. Bury him in the ghost of Glanum, then kick Bright-more in after, seal the entrance, pick up our lives.’

  24

  At three in the morning Natalie slipped quickly from her bed and went silently downstairs. Jack emerged from the shadows in her room and followed her to the small utility room. The girl was standing on the step-ladder, effortlessly opening the hinged window which was kept permanently locked.

  So that’s how she gets out.

  In seconds, the child had slipped through the narrow gap. Jack checked the lock and saw that it had been tampered with, then followed his daughter into the back garden by a more orthodox exit.

  She was already on the wooden fence that separated garden from field, her while nightgown bright in the moon. By the time Jack had eased his heavier body over the fence, the girl was dancing and laughing, skipping in a wide circle around the huge horse-chestnut that dominated the scattered trees in the paddock.

  He walked across to her, but kept his distance, circling the child as Natalie circled the tree, talking to someone, her hands reaching out to an invisible grasp.

  She was oblivious of her father, but her dancing companion was not, for she stopped suddenly and looked puzzled, looking towards the man who stood in the moonlight but calling for ‘Baalka’. Jack felt the ghost very close to him, but it was pure imagination that suggested eyes and the soft touch of breath on his lips.

  ‘What have you done to my daughter?’ he said to the night air. ‘Leave her alone. I’ll go after Ahk’Nemet again, but please leave my daughter alone.’

  The reply to this request was the sound of Natalie’s laughter, the sight of her running across the field, round the houses to the road into Exburgh. Jack followed. The girl stopped suddenly, then turned and ran back to the house, but for a fleeting instant he saw a flash of her shape continuing towards the road, like an after-image.

  Natalie crawled back into the house and pulled the window shut. A few seconds later he saw her at the window, then she’d gone, presumably back to bed. Angela had woken and was standing anxiously at the back door, a coat over her sleeping-shirt.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Back in the house. She uses the utility room window.’

  ‘I thought it was locked! We always keep it locked!’

  ‘The lock’s been opened, forced, I think. Anyway, she’s safe for the moment.’

  ‘Did you see Baalgor? Baalka? Whatever …?’

  Whatever?

  He shook his head. ‘He was there, but he’s gone back to the hidden city. I’m going to the church.’

  ‘What church?’

  ‘St John’s! That’s where the gate to the inner city lies. I’m sure it’s the way in.’

  ‘Be careful, Jack.’

  ‘As careful as I can.’

  The doors into the church were locked and Jack trotted back down the steps, casting a double shadow from the lights above the porch, illuminating the façade of the building. Suddenly, Natalie cooed at him from the shadows in Mourning Passage. The ethereal child, in her ghostly nightgown, had a hand in front of her mouth, as if suppressing a sound that had been uttered mischievously. As her father approached, so she backed away, crouching slightly, feigning apprehension.

  The moment Jack faced the shadows of the alley, the shimmering opened before him, the cleft in the rock, the stone pillars, the standing stones among the heavy trees. The suicide gate. Cool breezes blew at him. This was a different night in a different world, and the ghost of his child was running away, running into Glanum.

  For a long while the passage continued as he’d remembered it from a few weeks ago, a narrow tunnel, a natural fissure in the mountainside that was dank and slick with water seepage, dangerously unpredictable as it suddenly dropped away, deeper into the ground.

  The sound of someone running preceded his cautious entrance, but though he called to the girl – or whatever the girl was, this shade of his daughter – there was no reply.

  That time before, Jack had panicked as the passage opened into a rock-hewn chamber, an immense vault illuminated by grey light. The stink of fear in this place, the buzz of wailing voices in an otherwise empty, echoing rock cavern, had been too much. But he crossed the chamber now, and it occurred to him that he had passed the Hinterland of this particular world, an altogether bleaker and more sombre experience than that in the world of Ahk’Nemet.

  A second tunnel led deeper, but … He emerged, eventually, through a stone gate into the sombre city beyond, facing high grey walls, curved alleys, towering buildings. Everything here seemed warped and grotesque, perspectives changing as he moved slowly through the streets.

  He began to run, his legs powered at times by panic, at other moments by hope. There were small squares with drab fountains, and areas where the doors of the houses swung lazily, protecting only shells. Elsewhere, the gruesome shades of people, cowled, like lepers, he thought, moved about the alleys, aware of him but unafraid of him.

  He became exhausted, his body seizing up, his breathing laboured. And as he realized that he needed to rest, so he became aware of the passage of time: he had been exploring this urban shadow for more than eighteen hours, although the light had not changed, such light as there was.

  He found a gate into a small courtyard, where the stone floor was broken by stunted bushes and trees. The broken windows of the house opened into empty rooms, crumbling plaster walls and cracked floors on which traces of mosaic could be seen, but colourless.

  He was hungry, but sleep called more urgently, and he crept into the deepest of the shadows and closed his eyes.

  On waking, he checked his watch. He had slept for three hours only, but he felt revived. He was thirsty and soon found a fountain, drinking messily from its sluggish flow, aware that he was watched – it was the girl, he was sure – but sensing that he was not threatened.

  For several hours, then, he wandered through the labyrinth of streets, calling out, answered by echoes, sometimes by silence. In one place, in a small square surrounded by marbled buildings, wild horses grazed the rough grass that grew between the cracked flagstones. They bolted at his approach and ran the streets, twenty animals surging through the maze, lost for a while, then reappearing. They eventually came trotting back into the square, nickering and cautious, eyeing the stranger constantly as they began to graze again.

  He passed through five gates, some plain, some decorated with the motifs of animals, grotesque human faces, on
e of them with a frieze of migrating human beings, animals, carts and children, a thousand small, intricately depicted characters, the story of some long forgotten journey between historical lands.

  The walls grew higher, thicker, the light darkened, and eventually he came among monolithic tombs and shrines. The sky overhead was developing into a storm, a great spiral of swirling clouds, slowly turning above the centre of the city.

  He watched that sky for a long while before familiarity pricked at his senses: here, in clouds, was a similar storm to that which had been engulfing the trees and ruins in the Midax Deep.

  Am I below that other world?

  It was a strange thought in a strange place; there was no sign of any of the structures and ruins that surrounded him being sucked into the sky, nor of the crumbling cliffs of the Deep plunging through the Eye, onto the grey city below.

  But I’m close … I feel I’m close …

  And as that insight captured his imagination, so he heard the sudden, sonorous call of a horn, ahead of him, where a river glimmered among the tombs, and drawn to it by curiosity he made his cautious way down the hill.

  As he crossed from the street to the wide steps leading down to the mooring-wall of the river, he was pleased to find the greyness turning steadily, as he approached, into brilliant sun-shine, and the sound of festivities and revels became an ear-shattering delight. Far from being a sombre call, the blast of the horn was part of a great celebration on the river, where full-sailed barges drifted and collided, people swam naked, streamers coiled from decks and music screeched, squealed and whined, encouraging dancing and the beating of drums, and the swinging of blazing torches in dangerous fashion.

  The steps were covered with sprawling, brightly-dressed couples. Glass shattered, metal flagons were tossed across the stones, aromatic scents and the odours of cooking filled the air as smoke wreathed and coiled from incense braziers and stone-lined pits, where meat charred and sizzled.

  It had the feeling of a wedding, but the noise of shouting and laughter were sucked into the sky, leaving Jack oddly remote, a man surrounded by hollow sounds, a ghost who moved among the revellers without impinging upon their awareness, although he was solidly a part of them.