Ancient Echoes

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘Jack?’

  ‘Sorry. She’s very close. Still very close. She might be outside the room, that’s how close she feels to me.’

  Of course there’ll be a third trip.

  The other question that fascinated Steve was that of language. He made Jack go over and over again the sort of words and gestures that had been used by the knights of the fortress.

  A linguist was brought in to listen and watch, and there was a great deal of debate about the fact that, even when communicating by sign, gesture and alien tongue, understanding was achieved remarkably quickly. Nemet, however, spoke English – or Jack spoke the apparently Levantine language of the woman – and so she clearly came from a different part of the unconscious world that was informing the Deep and the Hinterland.

  Nemet and her aggressive partner – her brother/husband – were older, deeper, more a part of Jack than the others, who were most likely to have been constructs to cover the various personalities, shades of grey, that create the complex human individual.

  Nemet was ‘archetypal’, though Steve was uncomfortable with the word. But she and Baalgor were part of an archetypal image, released, or revealed in Jack’s case, but perhaps present in all the human population.

  What they represented was hard to see, though their link with the City – or sanctuary, as Ahk’Nemet thought of it – their relationship with an event that had been City/Sanctuary based, suggested they came from a time when the human mind was growing aware of ‘community’.

  As with the chaos of their forms, their armour and their functions, so the language of the mercenaries was a mish-mash of what Jack had heard, what he knew, and what was innate: a neurobabble that flowed like French, was heavily influenced by an early form of Welsh, and contained almost coherent passages of proto-Finnish, one of the earliest languages still in common usage, reflecting the common tongue of Central and Northern Europe in the period after the end of the Ice Age.

  Although the words were meaningless to Jack himself, they were nevertheless part of the so-called Resurrection Imagery controlled by the brain’s limbic system, those scattered memories that are resurrected in the human foetus during the third month of incubation … similar to – Steve showed him – but not quite the same as, the neo-Jungian notion of Experience-Programmed Common-Unconscious … or the post-Sheldrake concept of Transmissible Resonant Neuromorphs …

  The hidden mind was a world of its own, a playground for any isolated ego that had decided to go a-roving!

  Jack was weary; Jack was sad. He no longer felt at home. Home was beneath the stars, by the Watching Place, where the lithe woman, wearing her sisters’ faces, waited for him. He became impatient with the Institute, irritable with Steve and Angela, and as soon as he had recounted what he remembered of the trip, saying nothing of his feelings or activities with Greenface, he called an end to the debriefing.

  ‘Ok! Ok!’ Steve said, as his persistent request for just ‘one more session’ began to arouse anger in the subject.

  Jack calmed down.

  ‘Let me out of here. For Christ’s sake, let’s end it. I’m stifling …’

  ‘Yes. The session’s over. Go home, Jack. Angela? Look after him.’

  But Steve could never let go. He walked with the couple towards the playroom where Natalie was at work on a huge jigsaw with two other children.

  ‘Nemet is an enigma. And Baalgor. We need to try and place them in time, and in the world. You need to try and understand what they did, where they did it, and who is pursuing them. Are you going into the shimmering again?’

  ‘I don’t know!’

  ‘If you do …’

  ‘I said, I don’t know! Leave me alone, Steve. I’ve had enough!’

  Brightmore tugged at his sleeve. ‘I want to be with you if you do. I want to record the trip. There’ll be a link with the Deep. There has to be. Let me come with you.’

  Angela led her husband along the corridor, calling back to Steve, ‘I’ll be in touch. Your idea’s a good one.’

  But she added in an almost inaudible whisper, clearly not intended for Jack to hear: ‘He’ll take some persuading. Leave it to me.’

  Natalie had a surprise for him. As they walked together to the car, the girl could hardly contain her excitement. She babbled about what she’d been doing while her father had been ‘away’, and she kept asking about the ‘tiny horses’. Again and again, as they drove home, she asked whether he had seen any more of the tiny horses.

  ‘Seen them, rode them, herded them!’

  Natalie seemed concerned with the colour of the beasts. ‘Weren’t they striped with reds and greens?’

  ‘Only the biggest and best. But yes. Striped with reds and greens.’

  The girl giggled to herself. Her small hands clutched at her father’s as they rode in the back seat of the car.

  At home, Angela quickly opened windows to air the house. And after a meal of vegetable soup and garlic bread, Natalie made the presentation: her gift to her father.

  Jack opened the box, aware that it rattled. Inadvertently, he spilled the contents on to the carpet. A jigsaw made of balsa wood painted with pastel. At first glance he thought there were a hundred pieces.

  ‘Eighty pieces!’ the girl announced proudly. ‘I made it myself. In school.’

  ‘Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant! Thank you, Nattie.’ He kissed the girl, who squirmed away.

  ‘Do it, then! Put it together.’

  He picked out the obvious streaks of red and green (the horses), the straight edges, soon got the general idea, then joked and made odd connections, insisting that they were right despite the girl’s protests that he was wrong.

  ‘Horses don’t have tails on their faces!’ She looked shocked, realizing she had given the surprise away. ‘I didn’t say horses …’ she said quietly.

  ‘Bears don’t have tails on their faces, did you say?’

  ‘I didn’t say bears …’

  ‘I thought you did.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘What did you say, then?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I thought you said “bears”.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Lots of animals have tails on their faces, mind you.’

  ‘No they don’t.’

  ‘They certainly do.’

  ‘What animals?’

  ‘The big-tailed Nose Bird, for a start. The tail-nosed Aardvark, for another … The short-tailed nostril fly …’

  ‘No such animals,’ Natalie announced uncertainly.

  ‘There most certainly are!’

  ‘No there aren’t.’

  ‘Are you insinuating that your loving father is a liar?’

  She stared at him for a long moment.

  ‘Yes,’ she said with a sudden, mischievous smile. He looked shocked.

  ‘Go and get your book of Unusual Beasts!’

  ‘I haven’t got a book of unusual beasts.’

  Even more shocked ‘You haven’t got a book of Unusual Beasts?’

  ‘No.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘What a sad upbringing. All the wrong books. Well if you did have the right books, you’d see all sorts of huge and hairy animals with tails on their noses.’

  ‘You’re telling stories.’

  ‘I am not!’

  ‘Am!’

  ‘Aha!’

  He had fitted the final piece of the jigsaw into place and sat up straight to admire the painting of tiny horses, with tall trees in the background, and a human figure – he assumed the squat and dumpy man-thing was intended to be himself – riding the biggest of the beasts.

  ‘This is wonderful! Just like the real horses.’

  ‘I like making jigsaws. There’s a special cutter that makes the shape. Are they like the horses you saw?’

  ‘Identical. Thank you. I’ll treasure this.’

  ‘Did you see any other funny … unusual beasts this time? Did you?’

  ‘Lots.’

 
‘Not with tails on their noses, though.’

  ‘Even stranger than the nose beasts. Have you ever seen wolves that stand up and run like human beings?’

  ‘No. What colour were they?’

  ‘Black, with golden streaks on their flanks and big, stiff ruffs, like spines, around their necks.’

  Natalie ran for her paints. ‘I’ll paint them for you.’

  ‘Their lair is by a big stone arch, covered with carved figures and animals.’

  Let’s see what you make of that …

  For a while, then, as his daughter exercised her imagination over the subject of wolves, Jack pondered the jigsaw, amused by it, genuinely pleased with it. And as he stared at the crudely cut, naively painted image he realized that Natalie had drawn a second human figure: hidden in the trees, the green outline, clearly female, was blended in so well with the background foliage that only by staring hard could it be resolved.

  He touched the green woman and wondered exactly who or what the girl had been meaning to portray.

  Only later did the thought occur to him that perhaps Natalie had not been meaning to portray anything at all; that another hand may have been guiding the brush.

  29

  The Frouden moors rose behind the small town of Chagwick like brooding cliffs, always cloud covered and shadowy, the signs of time evident in the scars and runnels of the foothills that carried the rainwater from the vast expanse of craggy, marshy land that was the moor itself.

  A long drive from Exburgh, and in a remote part of the country, Angela had arranged to stay with friends, artists and toymakers, at Stinhall – Stone Hall – in the tiny hamlet of Stiniel, a few miles from the Frouden hills.

  Buried in a deep valley, almost completely hidden from the road by oak and asper, Stiniel consisted of three houses, long-houses of old that had been converted inside to accommodate modern taste, but which from the outside might have been habitations out of history.

  Natalie loved Stinhall. It fascinated her to think that below the flagstone floor of the house there were remains of even older buildings. She played on the turf maze in the garden with Toby, who was much the same age, while the adults indulged in the Stinhall hosts’ wonderful hospitality.

  The house was a treasure cave of puppets, paintings of folkloric figures, statues, green men, and creaky, eerie nooks and corners. It had a ghost, of course; and a wild man could sometimes be seen by moonlight, running along the edge of the woods across the fields from the kitchen.

  While Brian and Angela supervised the spit-roasting in the garden of a haunch of local venison – the owners of Stinhall were nothing if not overwhelming in their largesse when it came to feasting – Jack helped Wendy create her Green-Man pie, a gooseberry tart in the shape of a face, decorated in pastry with leaves, branches, wild eyes and tongue, then painted green and red with edible dye. She had intricately carved waxy new potatoes into the shapes of beetles, to amuse the children, and created a ‘fairy tower’ out of pineapple chunks, apricots and slices of kiwi fruit.

  ‘What’s the point of cooking if you can’t have fun?’

  ‘Indeed. And what’s the point of fun if you can’t sink your teeth into a Green-Man pie?’

  It was a warm, late autumn evening, perfect for a barbecue, perfect for sitting around by candle-light and talking, and exchanging news.

  With Natalie under watchful eyes, Jack and Angela set out at six the following morning for the moors, and by nine were high above the surrounding land, buffeted by cold wind, striding out across the peat and heather, heading for infinity. They added grey stones to the cairns that dotted the wide land. They lunched below a craggy stump of rock called The King’s Tor, then used map and compass to pick a route to the west, avoiding the danger areas of Old Gould’s Pit and the Quaking Marsh, that would bring them to Windlash Edge, a cliff of more than two hundred feet, and a favourite ascent for climbers.

  Here, with the wind in their faces and the sun now rosy behind thin clouds as it began to settle towards dusk, they sat, legs across the precipice letting the heady sense of ‘old time’ blow around and kiss them, drawing them almost out of time itself, so that they lay back and watched the sky, and smelled the scrub grass, the sharp earth, the crystal wind.

  They held hands and closed their eyes. All concern, all confusion, was scoured from them. This was so peaceful, so remote, so private. They drifted together for what seemed like hours. It was almost like old times. Almost as good as when they’d first been together.

  Almost …

  ‘Let’s stay here for ever,’ Jack said.

  ‘I need a pee.’

  ‘Pee over the edge.’

  ‘There might be a climber down there.’

  ‘Pee over the edge – run like hell!’

  ‘You would, too, wouldn’t you? Time to get the hell down, anyway. Civilization beckons. It’s two hours’ walking from here to the bus station.’

  Jack checked his watch. ‘Oh Christ. Ninety minutes of light left. You’re right. Let’s move!’

  The last part of the walk was along road, hard on sore feet and ankles, but safe in the darkness that had deepened in minutes. From the bus station they ’phoned Stinhall. Everything was fine. With an hour to wait, Jack suggested a steak; Angela argued for something spicier and they found a Thai restaurant in the town centre, asking for a table well away from the other customers.

  ‘We’ve been walking for seven hours.’

  No problem, the courteous waiter assured them from a safe distance.

  It was after ten when the bus dropped them in the nearest town to the hamlet. In pitch darkness, below heavy cloud cover, they trudged along the country road, a mile and a half to the hot bath and strong tea that both, now, craved. Their torch cast feeble light on the trees and hedges, on the bright eyes of rabbits and two owls that were out, pursuing their own activities.

  As they crossed the hill before the road dropped to Stiniel itself, flashing lights in the distance made them stop for a moment.

  ‘Torches?’ Angela said as she stared at the four criss-crossing beams of pale, white light.

  ‘Torches,’ Jack agreed. ‘In the field behind Stinhall.’

  ‘Natalie!’

  ‘Oh Christ! He’s followed her!’

  They ran frantically, on feet that were stiff and sore. Angela slipped on the muddy hill, bruising her thigh, but irritably shook off Jack’s helping hand.

  They could hear Brian’s voice in the darkness, and another man calling from across the field. By the time they’d run along the drive, through the turf maze garden and across the thin bridge that crossed the deep, scrub-filled ditch that divided house from farmland, the scatter of torches was spread widely.

  Wendy was closest. She saw Jack and came running over.

  ‘We think she’s in the woods. Jack, I don’t know what to say …’

  ‘It’s OK. We shouldn’t have assumed she wouldn’t do this here. She’s done it before.’

  ‘She played happily with Toby all evening, watched some TV, finished off the Green-Man pie; then went to bed, good as gold. Toby came down and said she’d started to laugh and dance in her room, so we went upstairs …’

  ‘And she’d slipped out of the house.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Jack reassured her. ‘She’s quite safe. We just have to get her home.’

  A neighbouring couple had turned out to help in the search. If she’d run towards the woods, she was safe enough; but towards the bottom of the fields were pools and soft mud, a danger to animals, certainly to children. Felicity, the neighbour, had gone down to keep watch there.

  Eventually they found her. Brian had gone into the deep wood and seen Natalie’s white nightdress. She had climbed a tree and was sitting on a branch, twenty feet from the ground, swaying slightly and singing.

  ‘Come on down, Natalie. That’s where the trolls live.’

  ‘Where’s Daddy?’

  ‘Coming up the field. Shall I get a ladder?’

  �
��No, thank you. Just fetch Daddy.’

  ‘You gave us quite a shock. We thought you were asleep.’

  ‘My friend came and I wanted to come and dance with him.’

  ‘What? Half way up a tree?’

  ‘No, silly.’

  Jack arrived in the woods, breathless, relieved to see his daughter. He could hear Angela calling behind him as she ran with Wendy. Jack had heard most of Natalie’s exchange with Brian, who was shivering in the cold air. ‘She must be perished,’ he said urgently to Jack. ‘I know I am. So I’m running home. Here …’

  He took off his overcoat, then ran quickly in his pyjamas back through the dark.

  From her branch, Natalie said, ‘Send them away, Daddy. He wants to talk to you alone.’

  Here we go again …

  ‘Send them away!’ Natalie said loudly, her child’s voice teetering on hysteria. Angela and Wendy walked from the woodland edge, following Brian to the house.

  Staring at his daughter, Jack said angrily, ‘Come down right now. No arguments. Down! Now!’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Is he here? Greyface? Is he here?’

  ‘I’m here,’ the girl said with a smile, blinking against the beam of the torch. ‘So of course he’s here.’

  He’d followed this far! Two hundred miles away from Exburgh, and he was still in control!

  Frightened and cold, unsure as to whether or not this was Natalie – or Natalie plus Shade – who spoke to him from the high tree, Jack said simply, ‘Shall I leave you here then? I’ll leave this coat. Put it on. Keep warm; or do some dancing. Whatever, make sure you don’t get a chill; and come down carefully from the tree when you come down. We don’t want any broken bones.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Back to Stinhall. To bath and bed. I’m tired from walking, so’s your mother. We’ll see you at breakfast.’

  ‘Stay here!’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, imitating the gentle sarcasm of her own words. ‘It’s been a long day, and as long as you’re happy out here in the woods, and as long as you climb down carefully, I’ll trust you. Goodnight, Nattie.’