Ancient Echoes (24 page)

Her callous words inflamed me. I felt a call home as urgent as any need I could imagine, and I tore at the briar, ripping my flesh, but broke it down, careful of my eyes, shedding the cage and howling with rage and pain as I stumbled down the valley, looking for the running woman, listening for her.

‘Come back! Oh Christ, come back!’

I glimpsed her. She was in the night shadow of the towering wooden wall, below the carved and fire-illuminated totems that leaned out from the ramparts. I could hear animals, a cacophony of sound inside this fortress; and drums beating a fast tattoo, and the screech and whine of ancient instruments. She had gone towards a low gate, a simple hole in the wall with, as ever, the skull of a horned animal leaning out across it. For a second I saw her figure, crouching, then darkness took her. By the time I reached this gate she had vanished. I peered into the tunnel, aware of the redness of the light at the far end. Ducking down, I went in, feeling my way below the thunder of drums and dancing, and the vibration of the creatures that were being paraded within this structure.

Suddenly I was on the side of a hill, blinking against the deep red of a familiar sun. There was a swift movement behind me, but I was too late to turn and defend myself, and a foot kicked me between the shoulders, sending me tumbling into the unknown.

‘Leave me alone!’ she called after me, but I was lost already, slipping down the slope of land, falling endlessly it seemed, the sun moving above me, the glitter of silver catching my eye, until–

I came down in dust and bruises to rest against the angled roof of the church.

This was the Hinterland again.

Somewhere below me, my name was being called, and I began to move as if in a dream, surfacing from a sea of unconscious towards a brighter light, the steady chanting of my name.

I thought briefly of William, waiting for me by the lake shore. How long would he wait before recklessly crossing the water to Ethne, to a place where his death was assured?

‘Sorry, William … she tricked me … but I’ll be back … a promise is a promise … I’ll be back to help you …’

He had imagined the return from the Hinterland would be like coming out of a dream, but the sensation was quite different. Instead of experiencing confusion, the dissolution of reality, in fact the journey, his close encounters, remained as real, as painful, as they had seemed at the time. The trap and the trick by Greenface were minutes only in his past. He could still smell the odour of the thundering beasts inside the wooden-walled town, still hear the dancing and music and he was in pain from the rose thorns. Nothing fragmented into ghostly disconnection. He might simply have stepped through a garden gate from one house to another.

‘I was so close,’ Jack said as he sat on the couch and was shoulder-massaged by strong fingers, while a wan-faced Angela pulled and stretched his tired fingers. ‘She tricked me – she’s afraid to come back, but I have a hold on her. I’ve got to try again …’

‘For the moment, just relax,’ Steve said, passing him a glass of water.

‘I’d rather have a beer.’

‘I’m sure you would. But no alcohol until we’ve debriefed your Midax shadow.’

‘Hurry, then. Hurry. I’ve got to get rid of this taste of fish gum!’

But there was something wrong, he could sense it in the atmosphere of the room, he had known it from the moment the Midax state had terminated – and it was transparent in Angela’s demeanour. They had called him back from the Deep because there was difficulty at home.

‘Natalie? Is it Natalie?’

Angela encouraged him back to the couch, calming him. ‘Natalie’s fine. The ghost of Greyface has been back, more funny stories, but she seems fine.’

‘Seems
fine?’

‘She’s
fine.
There’s nothing to worry about!’

‘Then why was I called back? I’d almost reached the woman. We even spoke for a few minutes. If you hadn’t interrupted, I might have made a better contact.’

Steve was watching him solemnly, arms crossed. ‘You have a slight problem. Something we hadn’t expected.’

Angela helped Jack to stand and led him to a mirror. At once he realized he was in
real
pain, not remembered pain, the sting of thorn, an itching on his right leg where a small arrow had grazed his flesh. In the mirror he could see the marks of briar-rose on his cheeks, forehead and chin, all of them iodined and treated. Every wound he had inflicted on himself in his escape from the cage was open and had been bleeding in his
real
-world body.

‘Like stigmata …’ he breathed.

‘Exactly
like stigmata,’ Steve said from across the room. ‘As I said, we hadn’t expected this. We could almost follow your disasters by the bruises and wounds that erupted or appeared on your body.’

It was a shocking thought and Jack stared across the room, trying to understand the full implications of the phenomenon. ‘Then I’m in actual physical danger in the dream?’

‘So it would seem. And it’s
not
a dream, Jack.’

‘I know. I know. But … if I get killed, I don’t come back … Is that a fair assumption?’ He rubbed the more painful of the cuts, which was still seeping.

‘That’s hard to say. A difficult experiment to set up, as I’m sure you appreciate.’

‘But if I
did
die in the Deep – it now looks like I’ll die on the couch!
Shit
!’

‘We don’t
know
that, Jack. Everything on your body is
superficial – deeper trauma may be prevented by your mind’s own will to live, its own defences. Not
everything
that’s happened to you is detectable. No food in your gut, or changed blood sugar, for example, just a certain ‘fishy’ taste in your mouth …’

‘Fish gum! God, it
didn’t
go away.’

‘So relax. But next time, treat rose bushes with more respect. Please?’

Jack agreed, too tired to argue further, too weary to confront Steve’s apparent complacence. But he was thinking of
stigmata,
those marks that could spontaneously appear on the bodies of devout, deeply religious, entranced or hypnotized subjects.

What journey into the unconscious, what events beyond their own Hinterlands, might be the reason for the appearance of such wounds? He had a sudden, appalling vision of journeys towards crucifixion, the pursuit of self-sacrifice in the deeper mind, where a dream-time torture could result in a spiritual suffering in the ordinary world.

But what if they died there, hanging on the tree? Or drowned in the crystal waters of a lake?
Or
crushed by the feet of creatures from prehistory?

The ‘reports’ he had made whilst in the Midax Deep were fragmentary. His account of the Hinterland was very clear, his experience transmitting to the sleeping body, with its wired-up pen and paper, and producing an eighty percent coherent description of the events there. But almost from the moment he had passed the waterfall the periods of automatic writing had become sporadic.

Watching the pattern of the writing, the frequency of the fragments, Steve had begun to form the intriguing idea that within the pre-conscious realm there were ‘echo channels’ (for want of an as yet better description), echo channels to the conscious mind, like small, breezy passages through which
echoing and enhanced glimpses of the pre-conscious could be achieved. He likened them to the seepage of water down a mountain-side which drained the hill despite the full, raging tumble of a river. The river carried the potent symbolic and representational sensory experience from the pre-conscious; the drainage pores simply relieved the pressure.

Jack’s real-time experience beyond the Hinterland had occasionally ‘echoed’ through these pores in the mind/undermind barrier, and because of the Midax conditioning, the sleeping body of the journeyman had scrawled an account of what was happening for those few minutes, before relapsing into a motionless, coma state.

To get the full story, Jack would have to re-live the whole several days, and he did this now, in as much detail as he could remember.

Later, he watched Natalie as she and six other children, two of them boys, danced a circular dance to music from
The Jungle Book
played on a tape recorder. It was an hilarious experience. Natalie always took one extra pace to the left when the rest of the group had swung to the right. And one extra step to the right when the rest of the group …

The confusion, the expressions of concentration and anxiety on the children’s faces, reminded Jack of his own attempts at dancing as a teenager, at school and at Exburgh’s two discotheques. A flamingo in failed flight, Angela had described it. ‘But you’re so cute – it doesn’t matter’.

He’d never understood ‘cute’ – it was an imported expression that for a while found popularity with the girls in his school. He just knew it was a good thing to be.

He was called away from the crèche and back to the brainstorming session in the conference room, where a book of prehistoric animals now lay open among the scattered sheets of the transcript of his journey.

Earlier, there had been a great deal of amusement at the
transformation of his clothing into bathing trunks. There was a ‘wild card’ factor in the process by which the central self rose independently in the Hinterland, but it seemed that whatever reality had been bent going in, it remained immutable for the duration.

More intriguing was the apparent circularity of the deeper world. Jack had certainly imagined that he had been travelling
away
from the cathedral and the Bull-temple, only to turn up on its far side. This phenomenon may have been linked to the Eye.

The world within had been shaped by his own imagination, his experience, and the experience of his life and his race. There were more puzzles than there were likely to be answers: why did the Fisherfolk and the Ice Age adventurer not speak his language, yet communicate with surprising facility in sign and gesture, whereas Greenface and Greyface spoke an
accented
English. Their origins must have been different to the other human forms populating the Midax Deep.

One by one he identified the extinct mammals he had witnessed. Some of them had held a special fascination for him as a child, when he had visited natural history museums in Washington and Arizona, travelling with his family.

‘The small horses you saw,’ Angela turned the book towards him, ‘two small toes beside the hoof, were probably
hipparion,
early grazers, extinct about two million years ago.’

‘I’d remembered. William wants to tame them.’

‘The huge creature might have been an elephant of some sort, but more likely
indricotherium:
a hornless rhinoceros, foliage browser, found in Asia, biggest land mammal that ever lived, which is why it’s probably being generated in the Deep.’

The picture of this giant was indeed a reasonable reflection of the crushing monsters that had come down to the lake to drink at dawn.

The question, now, was the extent to which these
reconstructions were behaving according to evolution, or to imagination. If the latter, then he might, for future journeys, ‘evolve’ a tame horse, and easily-hunted sources of fresh meat. He might de-construct the
smilodonts
, the sabre-tooths, and the beady-eyed hyenas.

The love affair between William and the elder sister was curious, because it was a story, romantic, vengeful, noble, passionate, but still a story. What did it reflect? Aspects of Jack’s own sexuality, and experience? His fears, frustrations, buried concerns, secret hopes? Or was it an element of early myth, part of the core of legends that had arisen with awareness in the early human populations?

The one thing that seemed quite clear was that the woman, Ahk’Nemet, was a free agent in this landscape; she and her companion had travelled here, but by all the signs were as alien to the world within as was Real-Time Jack himself.

It had been a long, long day, and Jack was exhausted. He went to the crèche and Natalie came running from the room, face glowing with effort and enjoyment. She was startled by her father’s cuts and grazes but let herself be picked up, prodding painfully at the wounds.

‘Where’ve you been?’

‘Fishing,’ he said, carrying her towards the exit. ‘And hunting tiny horses with black stripes and three toes. And running away from giant elephants with short trunks and no tusks and legs like huge trees. And shouting at hungry hyenas and sabre-toothed tigers. And watching forests swallowed into a whirlpool in a valley. And dodging darts blown at me by a woman with a blow-pipe and green tattoos all over her body–’

She closed his lips with two, tight fingers, curious: ‘What were the tiny horses called?’

I might have known. Horse-obsession!

‘What were they called?
Hipparion,
family
equidae.’

Natalie thought that was a silly name for a horse. ‘Can I ride one?’

‘Got to tame one first. They run very fast. And they kick very hard,’ he added ruefully. ‘Also, you’ll need a time machine to about two million years ago.’

The girl suddenly wrinkled her nose. ‘You’ve been eating fish.’

‘Unfortunately.’

It was astonishing how his ‘dream’ had changed his breath.

‘You need to brush your teeth.’

‘I intend to do a damn sight more than that to them.’

Sand-blasting the inside of his mouth came to mind. But he felt it would be inappropriate to mention this to his daughter.

Natalie’s arms were around his neck and she was getting heavy, but seemed to need this comfort. He had been ‘away’ from his family for four days. As he carried her from the research building to the car park, Angela walking behind with Steve and still in intense discussion, the child placed her hands on her father’s face and stared at him with a look that was neither childlike nor adult – a simple stare that froze his blood, accompanied by the words, ‘You shouldn’t have given up.’

‘Natalie?’

But he knew that this wasn’t his daughter.

‘This is going to cost the girl,’ she said coldly. ‘How much time do you think I have? You fool! I’ll kill everything you love unless you open the gate!’