Ancient Echoes

by Robert Holdstock

  What had happened at Jericho?

  What had Ahk’Nemet, Baalgor her brother, and the other five (seven in all, she had said) done to the Stone Place by the Great Spring to doom them to an eternity of being hunted?

  Jack rested several days with his family, spending as much time with Natalie as she would tolerate, being an independent little thing who sometimes liked her own company. But they rode horses together, and rowed on the river, and picnicked on the hills where John Garth had stepped out of his life.

  Natalie was happy and played noisily.

  Jack could find no sign of stunted growth.

  But she was more easily distracted, now, and there was an occasional vagueness in her eyes that made his stomach heave with fear. Angela encouraged him to think that this was nothing less than normal … but Angela hadn’t been to the Moon Pool and encountered Baalgor.

  Eventually he returned to the Institute where the Midax experiment was being run. He had to go back to the Deep again. The summoning voice – the urge to go felt just like that: a calling voice – was stronger than he had previously experienced; the need was greater.

  Brightmore had been studying the latest accounts of Jack’s experiences in the Deep and in the Shimmering. He was waiting in the Institute’s small TV lounge, deep in thought, the pages of notes taken by Angela during Jack’s latest debriefing spread on the coffee table before him.

  ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ he said, watching Jack narrowly through the curls of smoke from his cigarette. ‘What a fertile mind you do have!’

  ‘The experiences all seem so real,’ Jack said as he sipped coffee and Brightmore laughed in that irritating, slightly mocking way of his.

  ‘Of course.’

  Jack ignored him. There were questions to which he needed answers, even if only half answers. ‘Such real experiences,’ he echoed. ‘But I can’t connect them. I can’t understand a damned thing about where I am at any time, or how I got there, or what the hell’s going to appear next …’

  Brightmore glanced away for a moment, letting smoke trickle from his mouth. ‘You mean the Shimmering, of course.’

  ‘Yes. I mean the Shimmering.’

  ‘The ghostly echo of Glanum in Exburgh …’

  ‘Yes. And Glanum – the city – in me. The last time I went deep I saw it in the distance. This is what I don’t understand. How can Glanum be … here, in this world, taking away a man called John Garth, travelling the real world, and also be … inside? In my unconscious? Is it the same place?’

  Steven Brightmore gave the merest hint of a shrug, tapping the table with his pen. ‘After all I’ve explained to you, Jack, I don’t see what your problem is. Yes – it’s the same place! The same place, but being experienced from two different perspectives. It makes sense if you accept that you yourself are a sort of Hinterland. You’re a passing-through place to this strangely mobile Glanum. You asked me once: Why you? Why is it happening to you? I can’t do better than think that you were in the right place at the right time. As simple as that.’

  ‘That’s what John Garth said to me, years ago.’

  ‘He knew a lot more than he let on. Glanum, the supernatural entity, moves through the earth, God knows how. I should have taken your story more seriously when we began your Midax training–’

  Yes. You should have!

  ‘Angela was right, it seems. But to get to the point: Glanum was generated in pre-history when Jericho was abandoned, reading between the lines of your latest account. Now it exists both in the real world, but as a ghost, and in the human unconscious, buried as a shadow of memory.

  ‘Imagine that like a whale, which blows as it surfaces, when Glanum surfaced below Exburgh years ago it blew – a spout of memory and emotion linked to its heart, the abandoned heart, memory of the deed perpetrated by your ghostly Bull-runners that caused it to be abandoned – an upsurge of memory that on this occasion met its own archetypal reflection, carried for hundreds of generations, and present in the newest, most vulnerable mind in the town. Namely you – minutes old. In the right place at the right time.’

  Jack sat silently for a few seconds. ‘So it was mere chance that involved me …’

  ‘Mere chance. But at that chance moment you were connected – to the ghost city, and to the odd echo that it left behind in Exburgh, the Shimmering, like a shiny umbilical cord, holding you to its after-image.

  ‘The entity you call Baalgor is hiding in that after-image. The second entity – Nemet – has returned to the buried world of archetypal landscape. Glanum, though, recognizes no boundary between our earth and your mind. Think of it as an animal whose boundaries are not physical fences but scent-marks – a different set of dimensions.’

  ‘The Mallon Hills, the Frouden Moors, and my own unconscious – all part of a single road?’

  ‘To Glanum as it moves, yes. And also: when you enter the Shimmering, you are entering a hinterland that exists both inside and outside your mind. You have characterized the connecting gate between inside and outside as a spiral storm, seen in the sky in the Shimmering, and swirling in the earth in the Deep, a beautiful use of imagination to symbolize both confusion and connection – just as your hinterland is a world of crumbling religion, rotting temples, broken icons, broken faith … abandoned faith, if you like. And when the Shimmering came for you near the Frouden Moors, like a mouth, it was simply shortening the umbilical cord that connects you.’

  For a while Jack sat in silence, staring through the mist of cigarette smoke at the bright window.

  Abandoned faith? I never had a faith to abandon! My parents gave it up when they were young.

  It was an odd sensation, to be confronting for the first time the fact that his inner world was a graveyard of discarded dogma, unacknowledged belief, untried religion. He felt suddenly empty, which was strange – he had never needed churches; he had only ever needed family …

  ‘What about the ruins below Exburgh?’ His mind was unfocused. There were too many imponderables. ‘What of John Garth – he climbed aboard the city!’

  ‘My best guess is that the stone remains are petrified memory, as Garth, if I remember right, once suggested to you; memory crystallizing out in random form each time Glanum sheds a shadow of itself.’

  ‘That sounds crazy … absolutely crazy …’

  For a moment both men stared at each other, then both burst out laughing.

  ‘Well … crazier!’ Jack amended. After a moment he asked, ‘But why does Glanum shed shadows?’

  ‘Now we come to it,’ Brightmore said, turning to a page of his notes – ‘a honey trap perhaps? Each shadow a snare, a trap for the entities being hunted? And after ten thousand years, the trap has finally been sprung in Exburgh? One “Bull-runner” escaped, one is running back in, but Glanum is in both worlds, now, and its hunt is nearing its end.’

  Jack just shook his head, staring at the other man, the words trying to nest in a mind that was reeling.

  Glanum’s hunt?

  Brightmore said quietly, ‘You saw a Bull chasing the runners. You saw white towers in most locations where they were fleeing. You have experienced a moving city – a city with a Bull-Gate

  – and that moving city may have at its heart prehistoric Jericho

  – which we know was a white-towered town ten thousand years ago!

  ‘The question then is this: is it a Bull – or a city that is hunting your friends?’

  Glanum itself?

  Jack breathed deeply, remembering what he could of his childhood visions, re-living the dream-like encounter with stone walls and a grinning Bull-Gate on the sun-warmed Mallon Hills, a lifetime ago.

  Glanum itself …

  ‘So it will come back?’ he said. ‘To finish things?’

  ‘I believe it will. You’ve already sensed its return, I think, when you saw it in the distance, in the Midax Deep.

  ‘As for John Garth – I don’t know. He stepped across the threshold with great ease.’ Brightmore tapped the table again, t
hen smiled. ‘I have a feeling he belongs there not here. But I just don’t know. Whatever happened in the Jordan Valley ten thousand years ago, Garth is involved in some way. But I just don’t know.’

  Brightmore’s words echoed: Glanum is in both worlds, now, and the hunt is nearing its end.

  So if it was inside as well as outside – then Ahk’Nemet was in danger.

  Natalie threatened outside, Nemet inside … His real child and his … imaginary lover.

  But the call in, for the moment, was the strongest and he scarcely dared think of the full consequences of the action he was about to take.

  ‘This is the last trip,’ he said to Angela. ‘I promise.’ ‘Good. Steven thinks it’s getting dangerous for you.’ ‘But I insist – don’t bring me back until I signal. Don’t interfere this time!’

  ‘Then keep your hands off that bitch.’

  For a moment he was stunned by the words, blushing with guilt. But Angela’s smile was neither sardonic nor concerned; she was signalling that she was joking, and yet it had been her own anger that had pulled him from Nemet the last time he had been in the Deep.

  We no longer know what we want, he thought.

  Or do we?

  There was a moment of awkwardness, of tension between them. Jack felt very distant from his wife, his fears focused entirely on Natalie, who was playing in the garden of the Institute. He wanted to go to her, to reassure himself that she was all right, to hold her in his arms, but Angela was blocking his way.

  ‘Don’t bring me back,’ he insisted after a moment. ‘Not even if it looks like my throat is being cut!’

  ‘Then take care,’ she said. ‘There are two people here who need you.’

  They kissed quickly, it was not intimate, then stood in each other’s arms for a moment, more for reassurance than affection. All Jack could think of was Natalie, downstairs, and a distant warm breeze on a wooded ridge, where small horses grazed and dark, sensuous eyes entombed his own.

  PART EIGHT

  Abandoned Cities

  32

  I was running through woods, through a tunnel of trees, towards a growing and welcoming light.

  For a while it was my father who chased me, a growling presence, menacing and furious, but as I came into the Hinterland, the irrational representation of the man dissolved into the mad stampede of horses, taller, streaked with red across their haunches, more powerfully flanked than the hippari from the Deep. They scattered across the broken piazza, stumbling on the disrupted earth, the shattered stones of the steps and the temples.

  How and why my father, a man I had loved and joked with all my life, had become representative of fear I cannot imagine; except that there were other fathers at work in this zone, and Ahk’Nemet’s was one of them, a man she had clearly trusted yet who had apparently betrayed her.

  The horses took off again, like a flight of birds responding to a sudden shadow. They clattered through what had once been the Bull Temple, sucked into the maw of the cliff.

  I watched them go, then tried to re-imagine this place of desolation, remembering it as I had experienced it previously. The cliffs were the same: high, infinite, curving out of sight, enclosing the place where once rich temples and churches had beckoned and enticed the curious mind.

  All of those structures had been eaten; I can think of no better way to describe it. They had been cut back, bitten back to their cliffside walls, scoured away, leaving nothing but sad foundations.

  The piazza itself, that wide, white space, had been broken upwards, as if shattered from below.

  My instinct was to think that something massive had erupted from the earth and chewed away the familiar and potentially welcoming façades of saints and bulls, of magic and mystery. I thought, quite naturally, of Glanum, the city from the Deep.

  But whatever the cause, there was nothing left for me here, now; this place was devastated. I was not wanted; there was no comfort.

  I inspected my pack briefly, finding it to be an adequate representation of the supplies I had garnered before this third trip inwards, and turned back to the woodland. I walked back along the familiar hollow track to the roaring waterfall, passing through the honeycombed cavern behind the cliff and emerging onto the high mountain, to look again across the land and its distant lakes, where William and Ethne had loved, and where I hoped Greenface still waited.

  At once I saw the rising bulk of a sinister dark structure, built, I was certain, on the site of the fishing village and the later defended town, which had fallen to the enemy from the Ice Age. It was hard to tell for the moment, but the new building seemed to be pyramidal. Small in the landscape now, it must nevertheless have been vast to have caught my eye across this great divide.

  Two days later I stood in awe and in the shadow of the mausoleum. Built, or at least faced, with black obsidian, the tomb almost covered the shore and the woodland where Ethne’s people had once lived. It gleamed in the pale sun; the waters of the lake broke against its flank with a melancholy sound. Lakescrow, or carrion birds of some description, stalked the edge of the flattened roof, flew down and into the echoing chamber through the tall, opened entrance.

  I walked twice around the silent, eerie structure. Four sides for four seasons, each marked with a symbol of the time of the year: a snowflake of astonishing intricacy; a sunblaze; a reed pipe for the spring; a musk ox, bound and dying, for the autumn, the time of stockading.

  And on each of the sloping walls, ten figures rose, twice the height of a man, icon-dressed, armed and watching the sky or the forest or the ground with long, lean-faced, blank expressions.

  I remembered William’s description of his function in the world: ten steps of the winter dance; waiting to be united with the dances of the other seasons.

  I knew this was William’s place, I could feel it in my blood.

  I was shaking as I stepped into the inner sanctum, where shafts of light broke the gloom from slats in the ceiling, a towering distance above my head.

  The tomb itself was in the centre of the space, dazzled by the light, crawling with crows which flapped and screeched as I approached, and took off, slow-winging, into the shadows. I watched them for a few moments, glad to delay the moment at which I would stare, I was sure, at the face in deepest repose of the man who had become my friend, and whom I had abandoned.

  It was not William Finebeard, however, who lay in imperfect preservation in the glass-topped coffin.

  She was dressed in shells and blue-green beads, her body swathed in this ornamentation; strands of the fine lace on which the shells were threaded drifted in the yellow liquid, for all the world, like anemones feeling for their prey. Ethne had been laid on her side, her knees drawn up, her hands tied together, palms together, as if in prayer. Her long hair drifted about a face reddened with ochre.

  It was a vile sight. Whatever the preserving fluid, it was inadequate to the task, and the blotch and shrink of rot had begun to take its toll on the sweet corpse. The eyes were open, the lips drawn back, yellowing teeth bulging in the shrunken face. A cloud of fragments swirled in the tinted fluid, excited by the light from above, darting like living creatures among the drifting hairs and strands, in and out of the shell patina of the body.

  Poor Ethne. Poor William.

  Rose-pricked though she might have been, no princely kiss would bring this sleeping beauty back to life.

  I walked the shore for days, searching for a boat, a hulk, something, anything that could get me to the farther side of the great lake. The jetties and harbour of the fishing city were all corrupt, shaped stone spread out below the water, sinking into the mud. Wildlife abounded; my hunting skills improved; my belly remained full. I slept, at night, in the mausoleum, curled into a corner, fire protecting me from the snarling beasts that roamed and searched the shadows, some even standing up to peer at the silent queen, biting and snapping at the glass before retiring to the growling, nervous night outside.

  At last, a small boat beached, an old man entered the tom
b and placed fresh flowers on the grave. As I watched from hiding, he walked about the hall, gathering the bones of the creatures which had been consumed here, brushing up the leaves, piling everything into a shallow pit and setting this rubbish-tip alight.

  He crouched by the flames, stoking the fire, shifting the bones, throwing finger-fulls of powder on the conflagration, which roared and spat, filling the mausoleum with an acrid smoke.

  He was aware of me; he had deliberately left my hiding place alone. When I rose and walked to the door he watched me, an old man, grizzle-bearded, sharp-eyed, his body frail, I thought, behind the robust swell of leather armour.

  He followed me to the lake’s edge, leaning on a thin harpoon, keeping the point ready. The boat, big enough for two, shifted on the swell as a fierce wind blew up from the direction of the maelstrom. I threw my pack into the boat and raised my hands, a question and an indication that I meant no harm.

  He nodded, waved me in with the pointed stick, then clambered aboard himself, tossing me the rope that held the single sail, leaning hard on the rudder as the small craft sought the right angle of the breeze, dipped, swung and began to hop the waves towards the far white tower.

  He watched me curiously, this greybeard, but never spoke, except to bark an order when the sail flapped, losing the wind, prompting me to tug the lines and secure them in the wooden cleats. I tried to remember if I had seen him on my previous Midax voyage, but only the gruesome face of Perendour came to mind. I was more exercised by the question of how many years had passed since I had last stepped on the land that circled the Eye.

  From the rotten state of her hallowed corpse, it was impossible to say how old Ethne had been when fate or circumstance had intervened to cut her heart-strings. And for how long had she been entombed?

  If the answer was centuries, then there would be no Greenface, waiting for me by the Watching Place. Or would there?

  We came into the stone harbour, near the white tower, and the greybeard navigated the small boat between the half-sunk, rotting hulks of greater ships. This place, too, was long abandoned, though the smoke from fires further down the lake’s edge suggested that the area was still inhabited, though by whom, and in what fashion, I couldn’t tell.