Buried Fire

When Michael McIntyre staggers home, red-eyed and disorientated, his family thinks he is suffering from sunstroke. No one realises that Michael has unwittingly released a powerful evil force that will gradually engulf them all. Are the fagile bonds that hold the McIntyre family together strong enough to resist the nightmare creature at the heart of the evil?

Under the old king’s barrow, in a hollow place hidden from the winter mists and the summer sun, a dragon coils.

Round and round a hoard of gold its long length stretches, pin tail to razor snout, plugging the airless space like a giant bung. The old king, who had once sat proudly in the centre of his gift hoard, now lies in a corner, a clump of bones swept into the shadows and forgotten.

In the darkness, nothing stirs. The dragon lies as still and silent as a graveyard skull. For a thousand years or more it has never moved, not an inch. But its mind is burning.

The fire is barely a needle prick in size – a blood-red point glowing in the dark, a tiny flame of anger, lust and greed, squeezed almost to nothing. There is no air in the barrow, but the dragon does not need it. The flame of its mind feeds off its own white fury, and burns, burns, burns down the endless years.

Far overhead, in the bright, green world, little things with hasty bodies live and die. But here in the stillness, change is banished, for the dragon has learned to ignore Time.

To do this, the dragon compresses its mind clean of its memory. It allows the pressure of the earth to squeeze out all traces of the life it has left behind.

One by one, across the centuries, it purges its thoughts; they rise, coiling and uncoiling, through the dead ground like bubbles in the sea. At last, almost imperceptible except where they shift the dew, they emerge from the earth and hang above the grass until the breezes drift them away.

The ground where the discarded thoughts appear is thickly grown with foxglove and harebell, and home to a large company of brightly-coloured lizards and little birds. Eager for strange knowledge, their quick eyes watch from hidden places, waiting with a silent hunger.

Only rarely – once, twice in a millennium – does the dragon notice the sagging earth pressing down upon its back. Then the red point flares with sudden anger, and far above, the earth quivers.

Long centuries pass.

The barrow flattens under the weight of grass seeds.

The dragon lies still.

DAY 1

DAY 2

DAY 3

DAY 4

THE BOY WAS asleep in the hollow on the hilltop when the dragon’s thought came up from the ground and enveloped him. It rose through his body slowly, like a giant soap bubble, with its oily surface quivering and glinting in the sun.

As it spread out across his chest and stomach, the boy stirred uneasily, but he did not wake. His face had time to grimace briefly – then the bubble crept up across his throat and over his face, and the sound of his breathing was suddenly cut off.

Still it rose, a vast translucent dome, until the boy was swallowed whole. A book lying open on the grass beside his hand burst into flame as the thought engulfed it.

Time passed. The sleeping boy slept on in the afternoon sunlight, with a burning book beside him. It burnt unsteadily, with a jittering green and yellow fire, until it was reduced to a fine white ash. A light breeze blew across the hollow, but could not reach inside the dragon’s thought, and the pile of ash lay quiet upon the grass. The boy lay like an embalmed thing, steadily breathing the thought inside him.

Quick movements stirred the grass across the hollow. Tiny lizards, flecked with green and orange scales, pushed their way up between the gorse stalks and the early heather. With eager, darting movements, they scuttered ever nearer to the bubble, until one by one, and in ever greater numbers, they passed through its surface, out of the natural air. Small tongues flickered, drinking in the essence of the fiery thought, while the boy’s clothes singed around the edges and his face grew pale.

It brought with it a sudden hunger, a sharpening of senses and a new keenness of desire. He felt as if he hadn’t eaten for a month, a year, a hundred years, though his midday sandwiches lay heavily inside him.

The redness was all around. It had a pink tint, like a strong light showing through flesh.

And it burnt his eyes. All about him everything was aflame – the trees, the rocks, the earth, the sky. Though his eyes were closed tight shut, the heat from the burning world set them both on fire.

Then, just when it seemed to him that his whole face must burn away, the terrible heat died down and his eyes opened. He saw a sky blistered with a savage sunset that seemed to set the world alight. Dark things circled beyond the clouds. A smell of chemicals and cave water stung his skin and his ears caught the sound of gold melting through the mountains. His mouth tasted of cast-iron.

It seemed as if days passed, and nights; the sun moved at a bewildering speed, striping the unknown landscape with zebra shades while his eyes and the eyes of the dark moving things above him watched it all unblinking.

Now he seemed to move

with a lightning movement,

and he was in a different place,

where tall pillars were arching to a point,

and tiny things were running, screaming,

scattering,

leaving an explosion of gold on the marbled

floor beneath his descending claws.

Another movement, and now

a pitch black stillness, of which he is a part.

A red gleam on a wet stone floor,

and a breath

so slow, it ceases;

drawing out an impossible span

years long.

And now

The blue sky lightened towards evening and a wind sprang up, blowing south-easterly over the hilltop from Fordrace and the Russet Woods. The dying sunlight shimmered on the bubble dome, and the torpid lizards, lying head to tail in a perfect circle against the inside of the bubble’s rim, twitched uneasily.

Then the bubble was caught in a stronger gust. It rose further from the ground, and was lifted free at last, to be blown across the hollow and over the ridge, west towards Little Chetton and the sun. The lizards scattered, the ash dispersed on the winds, and only the boy was left, sleeping on the grass, with scarlet weals upon his eyes and cheeks as white as death.

Fifteen minutes later, a cooler breeze caught his face, and Michael MacIntyre awoke.

THE REVEREND TOM Aubrey was a busy man. Before the afternoon was over he would have to chair three parish meetings, attend one Women’s Institute coffee circle and inspect the leaking pipes in the Sunday School boys’ lavatories. And he was too hot to relish any of them. The simple fact was that summers and dog collars did not mix. The tight white ring constricting his throat was a perfect trap both for sweat trickling down and for heat rising up. It rubbed and it itched and it grew dirty with a speed that rather annoyed the Reverend Tom.

He sat in his chair in the small white study behind the vestry and scratched the back of his neck with a deliberate care. On the desk in front of him a thick pile of ecclesiastic correspondence stared up at him accusingly, demanding to be read. His eyes flittered across the top sheet, glazing as they went. Behind him, the voices of the workmen in the churchyard, and their radios and spades, drifted in through the blinds along the slats of sunlight. The Reverend Tom sighed, and his sigh became a yawn.

There was only half an hour before the church finance meeting, and he had yet to read the warden’s notes on the subject. With a reluctant hand, the Rev. Tom flipped through the papers looking for the report. As he did so, his eyes accidentally rose a little, and caught sight of himself in the study mirror, framed between the rails of cassocks and robes that he seldom wore. He looked at the reflection and wondered what Sarah would think if she saw him now. Handsome? Possibly. Dishevelled? Certainly. In need of a shower and a change of clothes? Yep.

There was a knock at the door. The Reverend Tom lowered his head and interested himself in the topmost paper. “Come in!” he called, in an otherwise-engaged sort of voice.

“Tom—” The church warden, Elizabeth Price, put her head round the door. “The top workman wants to see you – if you’re not too busy. Are you too busy, Tom?”

“Far too busy,” said the Reverend Tom. “I’ll be right with him. What’s it about this time?”

“Not sure. They’ve found something. Won’t tell me what, but they’ve all stopped work, so you’d better come and look.”

They took the long route through the nave, since the side-door was blocked with the workmen’s things. St Wyndham’s church was never warm, but Tom could still sense the mid-afternoon heat pressing down remorselessly from outside. Strong cones of stained-glass sunlight speared down from the windows every ten strides along, filled with silent spirals of wandering dust. A line of poetry came ridiculously into Tom’s head. He said,

“Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

Guiltie of dust and sinne,

There was an old woman in the church, sitting in the final row of chairs before the doors. Tom eyed her cautiously as he approached. He had been at St Wyndham’s three months; it had taken him less than three days to recognise and dislike Mrs Gabriel. As ever, she wore her thick red shawl and a look of disapproval. Tom adopted a genial smile and made a forlorn attempt to pass her by.

“Are you not ashamed, vicar?” She was looking straight in front, towards the distant altar. Tom and Elizabeth halted.

“Of the sacrilege going on in this ground.” She did not turn to him. “It wouldn’t have happened in the Reverend Staples’ time, nor in the Reverend Morrison’s.”

“Mrs Gabriel, we’ve talked about this before,” Tom began, but Elizabeth interrupted him.

“I’ll just go ahead and tell Mr Purdew you’re on your way,” she said, and disappeared hastily through the West Door. Tom looked after her enviously.

“The churchyard is a holy ground,” went on Mrs Gabriel, still gazing straight before her. “Though I don’t expect that word to mean much to you, young man. People had expectations when they were laid there, no matter how long ago. Now you’re digging them up.”

“Mrs Gabriel,” said Tom, shifting from one foot to the other, “there really is no need to be concerned. I’ve told you about this already. The church foundations are slipping a little on the north side. It’s nothing dangerous at present, but we must shore them up. That’s why the men are digging here. And because no one was buried on the north side in the old days, there’s very little chance of disturbing anybody’s rest.

He took a deep breath, wondering if he’d won. For the first time, Mrs Gabriel turned her head towards him. “I still say—” she began, but Tom had had enough.

“I’m sorry, Mrs Gabriel, but I must fly. I’ve a meeting very shortly. See you on Sunday, I hope.” Tom gave a brisk smile and made off, leaving the old lady sitting alone in the church. As he opened the door, he heard her final sally.

“I don’t know, vicar. You’ll find an excuse to dig me up when I’m gone.”

I think there’s very little chance of that, Mrs G, thought Tom, as he went outside.

Fordrace parish churchyard stretched in an unbroken ring right around St Wyndham’s, and was itself surrounded by an ancient stone wall. On three sides of the church, the grounds were wide and sunny, and filled with a higgledy-piggledy crop of well-tended gravestones. But to the north of St Wyndham’s was a narrow strip of grass cast in almost permanent shadow. A path ran through it, close to the side of the church, and one of the four old yew trees grew stunted beside the wall. There were no gravestones here, and no evidence that it had ever been used for that purpose, in all Fordrace’s long and quiet history. It was a slightly cheerless spot, and if it weren’t for the church’s sagging foundations, Tom would have been quite happy to leave the place undisturbed.

Tom walked around the corner and out of the searing heat, which in all directions drained the colour from the yellow-red rooftops of the village and the blue-green bulk of the Wirrim. The shadowy side of the churchyard was littered with piles of earth and scattered work tools, and the red-skinned workmen sat on the stone wall in the fringes of the shade, stretching their legs out into the sunlight and taking great gulps from Cokes and Fantas. Elizabeth and the foreman were standing beside the trench. It ran along almost the entire length of the church wall, practically obliterating the path, and ending under the green-black leaves of the yew.

Tom came over to them, smiling at the workmen on the wall. One of them grinned back.

The foreman was a thin man with a face turned to leather by long years in all climates. He reminded Tom of the Bog Man he had seen in the British Museum before he came to Fordrace. There was the same sad resignation about Mr Purdew, who at that moment was staring doubtfully into the trench with a cigarette hanging almost vertically from his lip. Elizabeth looked up at Tom, her eyes gleaming.

“Depends how you mean good,” Mr Purdew said. “It’ll be a devil to shift, that’s certain.”

“Just look at this, Tom!” Elizabeth was grinning with excitement. “We’ll all be in the papers tomorrow!”

At the bottom of the trench was a large stone cross. Still caked in orange clay, it lay at an angle to the trench walls, its shaft extending away from the yew tree, and with its left arm still buried in the earth.

Tom nodded. It was ancient. You could tell by the shape. It was not like the simple Latin cross, with the three short arms and one extended out into the shaft. It had a circle as well, surrounding the centre, and joining each of the four arms with arcs of stone shaped like the handles of giant cups. That style was called the Celtic cross, though Tom had a vague idea that it wasn’t just the Celts who used it. Moreover the whole front of the cross seemed carved with ornate patterns, caked with clay, and impossible to make out.

“Good heavens,” said Tom, at last. “Mr Purdew, this is a marvellous find.”

“Aye, I suppose you’ll be wanting us to shift it out of there, will you?” Mr Purdew flicked ash from the end of the cigarette with a quick purse of the lips.

“Well, we must call the archaeological authorities over at all speed,” said Tom. “But yes, with their blessing, we must get it out.”

“And I suppose you’ll be wanting us to extend the trench and all,” continued Mr Purdew, gloomily running a hand through lean hair.

“To uncover the rest of it; yes, of course. Hold on, I’ve got to have a closer look.” Tom crouched on the edge of the trench and swung himself in, landing heavily on the packed earth beside the buried cross. Taking his handkerchief from his pocket, he dabbed eagerly at some of the encrustations of clay on the centre of the cross. Before long his voice rose out of the trench.

“It might be Celtic, or Anglo-Saxon; I don’t think the Vikings came this far west, did they, Elizabeth?”

“Long and sinewy carvings. In the centre at any rate. They wind all over each other. It might be an animal of some kind. Yes! There’s a claw.”

“I think it’s going to be the devil to shift it. Can the lads go home, vicar, if you’re going to be down there all afternoon?”

“Mr Purdew, I’m sorry! I’ll leave you to it. We’ve got to have this out today!” The Rev. Tom thrust his claggy handkerchief back into his pocket and straightened up. Then he gave an oath. “Oh damn! I think one of the arms might be off. The one that’s still in the clay. I can see a ragged edge just here.” He ran his finger between the hard wall of the trench and the stone.

“It’s bound to be down there,” said Elizabeth. “Come on up, Tom. Let’s get the museum on the phone.”

Tom left the cross reluctantly and walked back along the trench to the far end, where a steep ramp led back to ground level. His heart was dancing now. Let Mrs Gabriel chatter how she would – nothing like this had ever happened in the Reverend Staples’ time, nor the Reverend Morrison’s. It was Tom Aubrey, new vicar of Fordrace, who had dug here – and if this didn’t wake the village up a little, he’d be very much surprised.

MICHAEL HAD WORKEN up. There was a pain in his mouth, and a worse one in his eyes. His whole body felt raw, with the faint tingling shivering of a fever. He tried to open his eyes, but a piercing light blinded him and he screwed them up tight shut.

“Bluh’ee heh” he said, and afterwards “Chrith!” when he realised his tongue had swollen so much that he could hardly speak at all. It was like the feeling you got when you burnt your tongue on soup – sore and clothy all at the same time. Michael groaned, with a mixture of pain and panic, and tried to sit up. But his body resisted with a lancing arc of pain, and he subsided back onto the grass.

He lifted a weak arm and put his hand to his forehead. Sure enough, his skin was red hot but very dry. I’ve sweated all the water out of me, he thought again, till there’s none left at all. Now I’m overheated, and I’m going to die.

He tried to remember all the little he had ever known about sunstroke. Stephen had suffered it once, on the first day of the holiday in Tenerife. He had been out on the beach all day without his sun hat and though Michael had been very young, he had never forgotten the embarassment of Stephen vomiting up all over the hotel lounge.

He recalled Stephen having a cold bath. Michael had had to run to the bar to ask for a box of ice. Stephen had shouted and struggled, all red in the face, lying in the bath with his clothes still on.

But he was red-hot, and weak, and he’d been out in the sun all afternoon long, like Stephen had. It was sunstroke for sure. And God, his eyes hurt!

Time to move. Michael forced himself to concentrate. He had to get home quickly, for an ice-cold bath. Or he might die.

And home was not near. It was out of the Pit, and across the high ridge of the Wirrim and down almost two miles to the cottage, where his brother and sister might or might not be home.

Never mind. Concentrate. Move. Slowly, his eyes still tight shut, Michael rolled himself onto his side, and then onto his front, until his face touched the cool grass. Which smelt – faintly – of something chemical.

The scent made him nauseous. (Oh God, that was the first sign of sunstroke!) Frantically, he levered his head and chest off the ground with his hands flat and his elbows shaking. Then he was sick.

When it was over, Michael felt a little better. He remained with his arms locked, his eyes closed, wishing he had positioned his hands a little further apart. Then he bent his knees, moved to a crawling postion, and tried to stand.

He managed this with a surprising lack of difficulty. The strength seemed to be returning to his body. For a minute or two, he stood with his head bowed into the fresh breeze across the head of the Pit, willing it to cool him, but feeling the blood throbbing in his temples and behind his eyes like a salt tide. Then, covering his eyes with cupped palms, he tried opening one eye.

The pain was so intense that he cried out, and almost fell. Instead, he was sick again, which dulled the agony, and gave a chance for despair to rise up within him.

Oh Christ, he thought, if I can’t see, I can’t find my way out of the hollow. And I can’t get down the hill. I might as well be blind! Oh God – maybe I am! He felt a tightening of the chest and a spasm in the bowels. Not that it’ll matter much – I can’t get home to have my bath, so it’s all over.

The image of the unreachable bath overwhelmed Michael with grief. He bent over, with his hands clamped on his knees, and began to cry. The great washings of tears gave his eyes the first relief since he had awoken. The salt water bathed his eyelids, stinging and cooling them all at once. Yet, as they issued from the corners of his eyes, he experienced an odd sensation, which made him frown even in his pain.

There was a tiny spitting noise, a low angry hissing, as if a stove-hot saucepan was being dunked in sink-water. And as his burning tears fell onto his cheeks, Michael felt jets of hot air erupt from between his squeezed eyelids and rise up on either side of his head.

The key to this had been his sister’s mood. It had swung from sunny prospects to darkest gloom with the speed and variation of a berserk barometer. Outlook had become definitely unsettled. At breakfast, she had been an administering angel. She had cooked it, which was rare, and included black pudding, which was rarer. All through the meal, she had chatted happily, without any sign of what Stephen called her ‘martyr business’. She had even left the table without hinting once about the washing up, which so startled Stephen and Michael that they had done it automatically.

By mid-morning things had changed. For a start, Sarah’s hay fever had started up again and put a dampener on her mood. Then, in the midst of her snuffles, she had rung the estate agency, and had a tense conversation with her boss that left her smouldering. After that, she had prepared a briefing for her new client, concerning a property in a northern fold of the Wirrim towards Stanbridge. At ten, she had driven off to collect the keys and make the tour. At eleven thirty, when she returned, she was in the blackest of moods, the visit having gone badly. By now, her hay fever was worse than ever. Then she shouted at Michael for resting his trainers on the kitchen table, and at Stephen for walking in at the wrong time to enquire about lunch.

“I was going to make some for you, actually,” said Stephen mildly, and not altogether truthfully.

It had been the wrong thing to say; he realised that now. Well, he’d probably realised it at the time, sort of, but perhaps he’d hoped that his sister would be less than predictable. She wasn’t. When the resulting fracas was over, no one was speaking to anybody. Sarah ate her lunch in her room. Then she emerged with an announcement.

“Tom’s coming over for dinner.” She spoke it like a challenge. “So don’t mess the house up.”

“Oh shut up,” said Sarah. “If you don’t like it, you can go out. I don’t care.”

After the door had slammed, Michael and Stephen sat for a moment in contemplative silence. Then Michael said, “She’s right. It’s too good a day for stewing here. I’m going up the Wirrim. See you later.”

And out he had gone, taking a couple of apples and a novel from their grandmother’s bookshelf. For a demure old lady, she had been unusually fond of what she called ‘racy’ fiction. First Stephen and now Michael had found benefits from her collection that their grandmother would hardly have expected.

Stephen had stayed in the cottage through the hot afternoon, until Sarah, in a suddenly busy mode, had begun hoovering. That was the last straw for Stephen. The rigid drone and the fraught atmosphere finally drove him out of the house and onto his bike.

Outside, the heat of the summer rose from the garden and hovered in a flickering haze in front of the heavy beech trees and the laurel hedge. Stephen’s watch read five thirty. Up on the Wirrim, Michael would be getting fried to a crisp, unless he had the sense to keep in the shade, which Stephen thought doubtful. For a moment, he was tempted to follow the lane to the right, to the bridleway which led by steep degrees to the quarries under the lip of the Wirrim, but the pressing heat bore on him strongly. Far too much like hard work, thought Stephen as he turned the bike towards the Fordrace road.

The village of Fordrace was clustered around a compact green, beside which, in all seasons and even in the height of summer, a sizeable stream ran, heavy with the rainwater dropped on the Wirrim’s ridge. To the north, a thickly growing beech and oak wood, locally known as the Russet, stretched along the foot of the Wirrim’s nearest curve. lb the east and south lay ancient croplands, some still marked with the strip patterning of the medieval farmers, and all at this time heavily blanketed with wheat. The village itself had expanded little over the centuries. It still retained its ancient visage, except for one small estate of cramped redbrick houses, behind the Parson’s Pub, which had been built in the early eighties and regretted ever since. The church of St Wyndham stood overlooking the green, with its Olde Mill (now a tea-room), its millpool, and its collection of glossy well-fed ducks. Elsewhere, a 19th century schoolhouse, a small library and two general stores completed the picture.

Stephen knew it very well, without feeling quite at home there. He had been there many times in his early childhood, on visits to his grandmother, and from those far-distant days some memories remained: the general store (particularly the penny sweet bags), the ducks, and the dusty boredom of the inevitable Sunday morning services. But then his parents had moved far away to the north, taking Stephen and Michael with them, and their visits to Fordrace had almost ceased. Sarah had not gone with them. She had chosen to go to live with granny, looked after her in her illness, and found herself a job. Stephen could still remember how pleased she had been with this independence.

And now we’re lumped on you again, he thought, as he cycled down the hill. And aren’t you glad!

Stephen tethered his bicycle to the wooden signpost on the fringes of the green. Without any particular purpose, he wandered across it, dodging squalling toddlers and their over-heated parents, until he came to Pilate’s Grocery and General Store. The cool interior beckoned him.

“Yes sir, what can I get you?” Mr Pilate was the kind of shopkeeper who wished his customers to be as efficient as he was himself. The three walls of his Grocery and General Store were teetering from floor to distant ceiling with jars and tins and boxes and hanging objects, all meticulously ordered and arranged. It reminded Stephen of an Egyptian temple, with its coolness and its dark, and the hieroglyphic columns of Heinz and Baxters rising austerly into the shadows.

Stephen made a spur of the moment choice. Mr Pilate reached behind him with blind assurity and picked up the chocolate and the can from the icebox, smiling all the time at Stephen as if waiting for the real order, the order that would make his time worthwhile.

“Anything else, sir?” he asked, which meant, ‘You’re not seriously expecting me to be satisfied with that? Look at the choice on display, think of all the hours I’ve spent ordering this down from Stanbridge, placing them in neat rows on your behalf, and now you’re waltzing in here asking for a Snickers and a Fanta, and you’re not even concentrating. I deserve better than that, surely.’

Mr Pilate gave a little sigh, and thumped out the paltry sum on his old cash register.

Stephen handed it over and took his goods. As he received his change, Mr Pilate said abruptly, “Well, you’re my last customer. I’m closing early today. Off to the church.”

“They’ve found an old cross in the churchyard. Buried there. Very old, they say. Museum woman’s over now, and they’re due to lift it out shortly. Huge thing, apparently. Needs a crane.”

“Whole village will be there, most likely.” Mr Pilate raised the hatch in the counter and emerged. “Your friend the vicar’s been bustling about like a blue-arsed fly. Very pleased with himself, he is.”

“He’s no friend of mine,” said Stephen. “You must be thinking of someone else.”

Even in the coolness of the store, Stephen flushed. Mr Pilate’s teeth gleamed in the dark as he shepherded Stephen towards the door.

“I won’t say anything against him myself. He’s young. And maybe a little eager. Our blood runs slow and thick in these parts. He’ll learn.”

“Goodbye, Mr Pilate,” said Stephen. He walked out onto the green, and leaving the grocer locking up behind him, set off towards the church. Its tower was bathed in evening pink, and a large group of people were thronging against the boundary wall. A yellow breakdown truck with a winch and crane had been reversed up the lane, and now stood with the crane’s arm extended out into the churchyard.

By the time he had crossed the green, Stephen had drunk his can dry. He lobbed it into a bin and squeezed himself into the nearest gap in the crowd. The crane’s arm was positioned with its horizontal bar over the side of a long trench. Three thick metal cables had been lowered into the depths. Several workmen stood around the hole, and Tom Aubrey was standing close by them, talking animatedly to a man with a notebook and pen.

At that moment, a short stout woman appeared up a ladder from the trench, climbed heavily to her feet and began barking instructions to the workmen standing round. Stephen turned to a man standing next to him.

“Looks like they’re going to raise it. About time too. I’ve been waiting here all afternoon. That woman wouldn’t give permission for ages, but she must reckon it’s safe now.”

“Yeah, took a look earlier. Must weigh a ton. It’s got an arm missing, but other than that it’s in perfect nick, which is why they’re all so worked up.”

The man’s voice trailed off, and Stephen realised that the hubbub of the crowd had died away and a stillness had descended. In silence, the workmen climbed out of the hole, Tom and the reporter moved back to a safe distance, and the archaeologist gave a last frowning inspection to the cables. Finally she moved away. Expectancy hung in the air.

The foreman nodded. A man in an armless denim top vaulted over the wall, pushed his way through the crowd and made some professional adjustments to the winching system on the back of the truck. Everyone waited. Stephen noticed that a metal trolley, like the sort driven around in large stations, only thicker and heavier, had been brought to stand on one side of the trench. It was covered with plastic sheeting.

“When you like, Charlie,” the foreman said, and spat his cigarette behind him into the trench. The man by the truck nodded and flicked a switch. With a low smooth whirring, the drum on the truck began to turn and the metal cables were drawn upwards. First they went taut, then there was a moment of stress, and a slight increase in noise from the rotating drum.

Now the cross appeared from the trench, caked in earth and longer than a man. Its bulk was securely looped by cables in three places, twice along the shaft and once on its vertical arm. Orange clag clung to it everywhere, making the outline irregular and lumpen. One arm was missing, its shoulder abruptly broken off beyond the stone ring. As the cross rose through the air, Stephen was fleetingly reminded of those rescues where helpless bodies are winched by helicopter from some cliff face or upturned boat. He was suddenly aware he was holding his breath, and that the same mood was shared by the rest of the crowd. Everyone was silent, sober-faced. Even Tom’s smile had turned into an anxious line.

After two minutes of smooth whirring, Charlie flicked the switch again. The cross hung above the trench, two feet above ground level. Without a word, he pulled a lever, which swung the crane arm slowly to the left. At first, the arm moved too strongly. The cross was jerked violently in mid-air; it swayed back and forth with alarming swings. One of the loops of cable slipped a little, towards the end of its arm. With his face white and his eyes staring, Charlie slowed the rate of movement. Slowly, the rocking of the cross became less and less until it was almost imperceptible. By now it was over the trolley, scraping clear of it by a few inches only, and still no one had said anything.

“All right Charlie-boy, lower away,” said the foreman. His voice was hoarse with relief.

Charlie released the cables and the cross sank down upon the trolley. The motor cut off. A collective sigh of released tension rose up from the crowd. Stephen realised that his t-shirt was slippery with sweat.

Without a word, as if released from a spell, the crowd began to disperse. Across the wall, Tom was clapping the foreman on the back and the workmen were cracking open cans of beer. Stephen quickly turned away. After all the tension, he had a sudden overwhelming need to move. Two minutes later, he was back on his bike and pedalling hard.

MICHAEL OPENED HIS eyes. The pain which had blinded him an hour before rose up again, but less insistently, as if it had lost heart.

Slowly, his squint relaxed and he looked around him for the first time. He was still sitting at the bottom of the hollow; all around him were the clumps of bracken, the scattered rocks and the tufted grasses. A couple of clouds hung in tatters in the sky. It was just as it had been when – an age ago – he had put his book aside and closed his eyes. Just as it had been, and yet everything had changed too. The whole world was tinted with a reddish hue. Where the grass was once a sundried yellow, it was now dull red. Where the sky had once been blue, it was now a grey expanse like beaten metal, flecked with a pinkish tinge. All the summer’s variety of colour seemed to have been leached away.

Michael held his head in his hands, pressing gently on his boiling eyelids with fingertips which flinched at the heat. He looked again; the view was the same. Everything seemed oddly flat, like a bad painting with no real perspective. It lacked the normal depth which he had never really been aware of before, but which now, in its absence, he missed with a sharp pang. He wondered vaguely whether it would be dangerous to descend the hill with his vision in this state. But it didn’t matter. He was already wrecked.

In fact, his condition puzzled him. Physically, he felt a little stronger, which was odd, for the day was hardly any cooler and the sun still beat down. A sudden increase in energy, flowing upwards through his body, had cleared his head, and stopped his shaking.

He got to his feet and began to climb warily out of the hollow. Everything still looked flat. Once or twice he misjudged the distance of a rock or tuft of earth and slipped, but his sight was not as treacherous as he had expected and he soon gained the top of the rise. There, he paused to take stock.

He felt fine. Full of beans in fact. The climb had done him good. If only his si—

A rabbit ran across the opposite end of the hollow, over the back of the ridge and out of sight. Michael froze where he stood, his heart thumping in his chest.

It had been fast, and he had caught only a second or two of its sprint across the grass, but he had seen enough to realise he hadn’t seen it properly at all.

Although well out in the open, it had been almost invisible in the red-grey twilight of his gaze. He had caught its rabbit’s outline, the shape of the ears, the flash of feet. But where was its solidity, where was its substance? He had seen the grass behind its body as it ran. And what was that crystal brightness lodged up where the head should have been? That hard-edged shape, which erupted from the dullness of the red-grey world with the impact of a pearl in mud?

Michael shook his head. Sunstroke. Remember – Stephen had been delirious too. It made no difference. He had to get home. Hastily, he turned away from the hollow, and began to negotiate the rise, walking east along the Wirrim, between the holes and crevices of old mine workings, and here and there the upraised mounds covered with short grass.

Five minutes later, he saw something which convinced him he had finally gone mad.

Two figures were approaching along the path which curved in an elegant descent down the combe to Fordrace. They were several hundred yards away when they came in view, walking together and holding hands, though their lower halves seemed curiously dim. Michael found he couldn’t focus on their legs at all, but this was almost irrelevant beside the horror and wonder of their heads.

They each had a sheep’s pointed ears and blunt, curved, foolish snouts. They also had a general air of sheepiness, placid, amiable and somewhat stupid. And yet, aside from this, Michael had never seen anything less like sheep in his entire life.

The heads were formed of a glorious patterning of moving lights, scintillating like a fish’s scales or the facets of a diamond. As they drew closer, their surface was revealed to be a flowing current of changing colours, which swirled and disappeared and reappeared again in a never-ending motion. A bright nimbus blurred the outline of the heads, but even so, they seemed sharper, more real and three-dimensional, than anything Michael had ever seen before. He stopped and gazed in stupefaction.

A man’s voice. A woman’s voice. They passed close by him, Michael smelling a perfume in their wake, hearing the crunching of their boots on the stones of the path; hearing, as if in a dream, the left head say to the right head, with his sheep’s mouth close to her sheep’s ear, two words of human sarcasm.

Michael looked after them with his mouth open. He blinked once. And, as if a veil had been removed, the picture was changed. The sky was blue again, the grass was a familiar parched yellow-green; and the two figures were suddenly a rather ordinary man and woman, walking along with their heads too close to mind the view.

Then Michael began to run, careering down the slope in a terror that gave no thought to path or precipice. He ran unblinking, ferns lashing at his legs, until his eyes began to smart at the buffeting air and filled with tears. Then he tripped on a root edge, sprawled forwards blindly, and tumbled over and over down the hillside, until the crashing bracken slowed the fall and closed over him at last.

WHEN MR CLEEVER called in at the church, Tom was standing in his shirtsleeves and open collar in the vestry, washing the last of the clay from the surface of the cross.

It had taken a lot of effort for eight workmen and one vicar to wheel the trolley around the side of the church and in through the West Door. In fact it had been, in Mr Purdew’s words, a devil of a job, but Mrs Troughton from the museum had insisted on it. She had wanted the cross safely under lock and key before she left for Stonemarket, and no amount of groaning or swearing had changed her mind. Now here it was, and Tom had been quietly studying his spoils.

“Good heavens, Reverend, washing your own floor?” said Mr Cleever, as he stepped into the nave. He smiled, widely.

About the Book

DAY 1

DAY 2

DAY 3

DAY 4

1

2

3

4

5

6