The Buried Circle (29 page)
Steve’s eyes, deep black holes containing the immensity of all space, are haunting my sleep again. I mention it casually to John while he works on my feet.
‘I keep telling you,’ he says, ‘belief’s a powerful thing. Creates crop circles, starts wars.’ He pulls on my toes, one by one, rotating them in their sockets. ‘Way I see it, all of you in the helicopter that afternoon were in the space between worlds. One of you died in the vortex, the rest came out. Whether that’s mysticism or psychology, I don’t give a flick. Nobody’s unchanged after an experience like that.’
As I leave his cottage, he presses something into my hand. A purple crystal.
‘What’s this for?’
Amethyst. Helps you sleep. Also very powerful protection, if you think you’re under psychic attack.’
‘Don’t be daft. Who’d be attacking me?’ I try for a light, sceptical laugh.
‘You tell me.’
Utter, utter crap.
It comes as a shock to find a letter at home, forwarded from London. It’s from Steve’s father, accusing me of putting the crash footage on YouTube.
I storm down to Big Avebury to buy a stamp and post my reply, an indignant rebuttal pointing out that as I no longer work for Mannix TV I don’t have access to their video. The post office is already shut for the day.
I sit on a bench in the churchyard to calm down. It’s a balmy evening, warm for late April. A lawn mower buzzes from one of the gardens off the high street, and the scent of cut grass fills the air. A man on the opposite side of the road is trying to unload a slab of granite worktop from the back of a Range Rover, with the help of a woman in True Religion jeans moaning that it’s too heavy, he’ll have to wait until Joshua turns up from London at the weekend. The stereo is blasting Robert Miles’s
Dreamland
across the street. I’ve never seen either of them before. Avebury is becoming a village of second-homers, with stainless-steel cooker hoods and fridges with water-coolers. I wonder if this couple has yet experienced an Avebury Solstice, and if it will chase them back to London in a hurry.
The letter to Steve’s father is still in my hand. Perhaps I shouldn’t send it or, at least, wait a day and write something more considered. Folding it and tucking it into my pocket, my fingers encounter a smooth, cool shape: John’s piece of amethyst. It’s a deep purple with layers of white streaks folded into it. Margaret used to tuck similar stones under our pillows in the van. Keir was fascinated by Mum’s crystals and used to squat on the floor for hours, lining them up, rearranging them.
As usual, the thought of Keir makes the black crystal, the shiny lump of onyx in my head, twist for the light. Fathers and sons…By an enormous effort, I shove it back where it should stay, in the darkest corner, and reach for one of the brighter memory crystals instead, one that shows Keir and me racketing around the Downs that summer of 1989. We roamed all over by ourselves. In Bristol you had to tell Mum where and with whom and what time you’d be back, and mostly she said no anyway, so this was paradise.
‘You can go anywhere you like,’ she said, tidying away Keir’s sleeping-bag. He’d left it in a heap on the floor of the van in Tolemac. ‘But stay together. And watch out for the cars when you cross the road.’ No problem–we were used to traffic. And don’t go in the church,’ she added, as an afterthought. ‘That’s a
bad
place for pagans.’
So that was one of the first places we went.
* * *
Going into the church was Keir’s idea.
Dare you
.
I’m not afraid
.
I’d never been into a church. It felt wrong. It was where the other people went, Christians. The ones who stole places like Avebury, stamped out the old religion. As we chased each other between the gravestones in the churchyard, I kept hearing Mum’s voice in my head. Mind the traffic on the main road, mind your manners, and don’t go in the church.
Why not?
Because they don’t like pagans.
Frannie had wanted to take me to church once, when I was visiting her, but Mum had found out the night before and kicked up a terrible fuss. Put your grandmother on the phone
this minute
. I’d handed it over, shaking already. Mum’d screamed down the phone, so loud I’d heard all the words. How DARE you docternate her? Frannie had held the phone away from her ear, wincing. Afterwards she said, maybe when you’re older, Indy Or your mam’ll call down forty terrible curses on my head.
Keir stepped out of the sunlight into the darkened porch. His hand was hovering near the heavy iron door handle.
I was afraid. You didn’t know what kind of bad things might happen to you if you went in a church. You might get nailed to a cross.
Don’t, I said. Keir turned his head and gave me a wicked smile from under his tousled fringe, bleached by the sun. Keeping his eyes fixed on me, he stretched out his hand and grasped the iron ring. Slowly he turned it. It made a rusty clunking noise. I could hardly breathe. Mick’ll be furious with you, I said.
Keir stuck out his tongue, leaned his shoulder against the door to open it and slipped through the gap. I waited for the strangled scream that would surely come, but there was silence. I gave it a moment longer, then followed him in.
It was huge inside, much bigger than I’d expected, and not as dark, though there were rows of hard, forbidding pews. Sunlight filtered into the nave from a tall window, but the chancel was much darker, behind a fretted screen of age-polished wood. I nearly yelled when I looked above it: there was a huge metal cross on the wall, wrapped with barbed wire. That must be where they hung the pagans.
There was no sign of Keir, not even a puddle of melted flesh on the floor. They’d got him then.
‘Yaaah!’
I almost wet myself with fright. A figure bobbed up like a jack-in-a-box from the rows of pews, waving its arms. ‘Caughtcha!’
‘Sssh. They’ll
hear!
‘There’s no one. We’re on our own.’
‘That could be…as bad.’ Christians, after all, were people. But Jesus–Jesus was a dead person who’d come back to life. What if Jesus was lurking in the shadows behind the wooden screen? I’d seen
Dawn of the Dead
. They ate you. I said as much to Keir.
‘No, you got it the wrong way round. Christians ate Jesus.’
I hadn’t realized they were cannibals. This was getting worse.
Keir pranced off along the pews, giggling. There was a big book, open on top of a high stand. ‘Double dare me?’ he called.
‘To what?’
‘Touch the book.’
‘No!
He was on tiptoe already, trying to reach up to it. Desperate to distract him from this almost certainly lethal experiment, I ran in the opposite direction.
‘Hey, look at this,’ I called.
I’d only meant to grab his attention with a cartwheel in the aisle, but then I saw it, this beautiful stone tub with a wooden lid, and carvings on the side. It stood in a shaft of sunlight under the tall window.
‘I mean,
wow
. It must be really old.’ I walked round it, tracing the patterns on it. The stone was wonderfully cool under my trailing fingers. ‘There’s a
snake!
I couldn’t have said anything more likely to attract him. He forgot the book and belted after me, thinking I meant a real one.
‘Oh.’ Disappointment in his voice when he saw it was only a pockmarked stone carving.
‘Yeah, but look. There’s a bloke stabbing it with his spear.’
‘Maybe it’s a
dinosaur!
There was another rusty clunk, a rattle. Somebody was turning the handle of the big wooden door, the wrong way, trying to open it. Keir and I looked at each other. There was panic in his eyes. I’d have felt smug, if I hadn’t been scared shitless too.
‘Hide,’ he hissed.
‘Where?’ The tub wasn’t big enough to conceal even one of us, or I’d have lifted the lid. Keir was already darting through the wooden screen, and I followed him into the part of the church that was darker and spookier. I didn’t understand why the seats here faced inwards, instead of forwards, though I supposed the table with a cross must be the altar.
The heavy church door swung slowly open. In came the curly-headed friend of Keir’s father, one of the others camping in Tolemac. He’d been with us when John had made a crop circle, a couple of nights ago, right after Solstice. He had his back to us, looking at leaflets on the stand by the door, but at any minute he could turn and see us through the screen, two splashes of brightness in our yellow and red hippie kids’ clothes. I looked for somewhere better to hide–under the altar cloth?–but it was too late.
‘It’s only Riz.’ Keir was walking out into the middle of the church. ‘Hi, Riz!’
A frown screwed up Riz’s face, only for a second, to be replaced by a wide smile. ‘Whatchoo doin’ in here? You pair of monkeys, Meg’ll give you what-for.’
‘What are
you
doin’ in here, then?’ asked Keir. Hadn’t given him credit for so much boldness: he never had a problem talking to me, but was usually shy with grown-ups.
‘Sizin’ up the opposition,’ said Riz. He pulled open the top of his shirt, revealing a peace symbol on a chain. ‘See, I’m protected. You two got summat like this? If you ain’t, you better get out quick because the old man with the long white beard don’t like pagan kids.’
‘Nothing happened to us yet,’ said Keir.
Riz looked at his watch. ‘How long you bin in here?’
Keir looked uncertainly at me. ‘How long, Ind?’
‘Maybe ten minutes,’ I said.
Riz shook his head slowly. ‘You bin lucky. Good thing I found you. Reckon you got three, four more minutes at most before he sees you. It’s like a searchlight, see–God’s eye swings back an’ forth, but there’s a lot of churches for him to keep his eye on.’
‘I don’t think that’s right,’ I said. ‘My gran told me God can see everything at once.’
Riz’s dark button eyes narrowed. ‘You doubtin’ me, Ind? Because God and pagans is at war, see? You seen that big book up on the stand there? You go take a look in that. Genesis three, thirteen.’
‘What’s that?’ I said.
‘You’re good at readin’, intcha? Flip back near the beginning of the book.’
There was a step behind the reading stand. Riz made me drag it over and stand on it to reach the book. It had flimsy, fragile pages.
‘Keep turnin’ back to the beginning.’ He was at my side, not much taller than me now I was on the step. ‘There–read that bit. From where it says thirteen.’
‘“And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent be–beg–”’
‘Beguiled me,’ said Riz. He seemed to know it by heart.
“And I did eat.”’
‘Go on. What does it say next?’
‘“And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life…”’
‘See?’ said Riz. ‘That’s God cursing the serpent. And you know who the serpent is?’ From the lectern, I could see the stone tub, with the serpents carved around its base. The man sticking his spear into one of them was hidden on the far side. ‘That’s us. The pagans.’ He reached over my shoulder and tore the flimsy page right out of the book, flipping the pages back to hide what he’d done. ‘Upon thy belly shalt thou go, Ind. I reckon you got about thirty seconds left to leg it out of here. Before you ain’t got any legs left to leg it on.’
Keir had turned pale under his tan. He tugged my arm. We legged it and, in our hurry to put distance between ourselves and God, almost collided with the other man in the leather jacket who was coming into the porch.
He was a black man. And that was weird because although there were plenty of black people back home in Bristol, I hadn’t seen a black man in Avebury all summer long.
The sound of the church door scraping on stone hauls me back to the present, shivering, because by now I ought to know that the brighter memories of that summer all turn dark in the end. An elderly woman comes out of the porch, carrying a bucket filled with dead flowers. She nods at me as she comes towards the bench. ‘Lovely evening.’ The nod turns to a smile, and she stops. ‘India, isn’t it? Frances’s granddaughter?’
I vaguely recognize her from the film show in the Red Lion.
‘You’ve been working with that TV crew, haven’t you?’ she says. ‘Someone rang me the other day to persuade me to be interviewed. Said I’d think about it.’
‘You should do it,’ I say, moving up the bench to make room for her. ‘I’ve been trying to talk Frannie into it.’
‘Won’t stop, I must take these to the compost heap and get on home.’ Nevertheless, she puts down the bucket. ‘Those kids running towards the camera in Percy Lawes’s film? One of them was me. Your gran always seemed so grown-up to us–such a pretty girl, she was, quite the young lady, especially after she started at the Manor. And she had spirit, still does. Though it wore her down eventually, I reckon, working for that old devil.’
‘Keiller? What did he do to her?’
‘What I mean is, I shouldn’t have liked it. He used to stand on a box among the stones, bellowing instructions through a megaphone. And in the end he did the same to her as he did to the whole village.’ She picks up the bucket of dead flowers. ‘Tore the heart out of it. I remember it ever so clearly, that September he had her parents’ guesthouse demolished, and we all stood and watched.’
I thought it would be in the Manor. Mr Cromley said that when Mr Keiller carried the chalk phallus out that night in February, the dinner guests made a circle, and they all kissed it before Mr K presented it to the statue of Pan. You could feel the energies swirling and crackling, he said, because the stone circle is like Mr Rawlins’s big Crossley generator, making invisible power that spills over the henge banks through the whole village. But the ritual can’t be there this time: the Manor’s not private enough. If Davey and I could spy, who else might be watching?