The Buried Circle (30 page)

So it’s a house in Swindon, an anonymous terraced house in a row on the north side of the town. Respectable, characterless. Behind it is a park, with trees, which seems nice, only when I look closer it’s not a park after all: it’s a cemetery.

I let myself in with the key Mr Cromley gave me. A long, dark, spooky hallway that smells of furniture polish. Kitchen at the back, abandoned in the middle of a meal. There’s a plate on the oilcloth with half a piece of buttered toast, an eggcup of white powder covered with a saucer, a cup in the sink. But maybe I wasn’t supposed to go in here. Upstairs, Mr Cromley said. Front bedroom.

The curtains are already drawn across the bay windows, worn crimson damask. The satin eiderdown on the bed is a purply red that clashes. The carpet is dark blue with swirly gold leaves, not quite enough to cover the room so there’s a border of stained dark brown floorboards round the edges. It’s a large room for such a little house, hardly any furniture except a wardrobe with a mirrored door and an old-fashioned dark oak washstand in the corner, but still the bed seems to fill most of it. Someone’s left a long white nightie on the pillow, freshly washed and ironed. I slip off my shoes and sit down on the end of the bed to wait.

The village turned out to watch the wrecking crew bring down Mam and Dad’s guesthouse. The first people were already gathering on the road outside at half past seven when I came downstairs, and they looked surprised to see someone coming out of the empty house. Mam and Dad had moved out weeks ago, gone to Devizes with all their furniture and bits in a van, apart from what was thrown out for the rag-and-bone man. I’d found lodgings less than a mile down the road at Winterbourne Monkton, under the roof of a widowed lady who rattled around in a house she couldn’t afford to keep up. I had my own gas ring and she let me have the back sitting room all to myself, so I never saw her unless it was on the way to the bathroom. She didn’t seem to care about my comings and goings. The night before they was due to knock down the guesthouse, I’d gone home with a stub of candle and blankets and slept on the bare boards of my old room.

Mr Cromley had said it took time to arrange these things. He said it wouldn’t be the same as the ritual on the stone under the trees. That was a makeshift demonstration of what the energies could do; this had to be more formal, like, more special. It should take place near the autumn equinox, when light and dark were in balance, between summer and winter, to help us slip between worlds.

He’d never taken me into the circle again, but sometimes he caught me in the corridor in the Manor, and would press me against the panelled wall and kiss me, slipping his hand under my skirt. It excited him all the more if there were people not far away. Once, we heard Mrs Sorel-Taylour’s little feet clacking down the wooden staircase, and I tried to push him off but he kept sliding his fingers against me and only stepped away a moment before her shape blocked the light at the end of the passageway.

‘Mr Cromley!’ I said, a little breathless, the minute she’d gone. ‘That was–’

‘My lovers call me Donald,’ he whispered in my ear. ‘But you still can’t bring yourself to do that, can you, Heartbreaker?’ His fingers resumed their relentless circling. He never called me Frances or Fran, and he never finished what we were doing. That was for the equinox.

I’d had cold feet about it since September blew in and swept the stone circle with drifts of golden leaves. What was I letting myself in for? This wasn’t black magic: Mr Cromley was clear on that. I wasn’t putting my soul in danger, oh, no, there was a long tradition of Christian magicians, like John Dee, whose magic mirror Mr Keiller kept in his study. Occult didn’t mean bad: it meant secret, hidden. Knowledge that had to be hidden from ordinary people because it was powerful and, in the wrong hands, dangerous. Like electricity, from Mr Rawlins’s generator: it lit the house, but it could kill you too, if you pushed in a plug with wet hands.

Had to be done with proper ritual, he said. They would wear robes and masks. I was to be masked too, dressed in white. Masks were important, to make us not entirely ourselves: we would become vessels for the forces we were calling on. I was to be the Goddess made flesh, and I would draw down her power into me.

What you will shall be

Between worlds.

The front door rattled with the key in the lock, the hall light went on downstairs, and I jumped up and threw off my coat because I wasn’t undressed yet like he’d told me.

‘Hello. You there?’ Mr Cromley’s voice floated up the stairwell. I didn’t answer. He muttered something, then I heard a foot on the stair.

‘I’m here,’ I called. ‘Getting myself ready’

‘Good.’ I could hear the relief in his voice. The floorboards creaked as I took off my coat and dress, my fingers fumbling with the buttons. I was in a panic. I wouldn’t be ready, they’d come up and find me in my vest and knickers…But they could hear me moving around, and they wouldn’t come straight up because they were getting ready too, in the front room downstairs.

Robes and masks. Masks make you free, Mr Cromley had said. You can do what you like wearing a mask. Mine was tucked under the white nightie. I’d imagined it would be a little black Burglar Bill mask, just covering the eyes, but it was a great sparkly thing with sequins and feathers, and it came down over my nose and cheeks, so there was only my mouth exposed. I’d put on red lipstick before catching the bus to Swindon, but it was all eaten off now. I looked for my bag that I’d kicked under the bed, but I heard their feet on the stairs.

There was only the two of them, like he’d said. They had hoods on their dark blue robes, and under them masks, like balaclavas made of leather, that covered the whole head. A smell came off them, a tannery smell overlaid with whisky fumes, a hot chemical stink of excitement. Eyes gleamed through the eyeholes, lips glistened in the wide oval cut in the masks for the mouth; they looked like blacked-up minstrels from an end-of-the-pier show. One was taller, one was younger; and anyway, I’d have known which Mr Cromley was because he spoke, he said the words, he told me what to do, and he was first.

The dagger, he’d told me, is called an athame, a ritual tool from earliest times. The dagger and the cup. You mix the fluids in the cup with the dagger. A little mead, a little blood and, afterwards, a little seed. We shall smear it on your forehead, Heartbreaker, and on your breasts, and call down the Goddess into you. In the space that hangs between worlds, you shall have infinite power. What you will shall be. Demand the universe gives you whatever you desire.

At the empty guesthouse I woke before the dawn, and washed my face in cold water from the jug I’d brought in from the pump the night before; the mains water had been turned off when Mam and Dad left. No power, either, and the range was long out, so I drank water from the jug for my breakfast and ate the bread and jam sandwiches, soggy now, I’d made at the widow’s house. The early sun was coming through the kitchen window, making patterns on the dusty flagstones where Mam had danced. There’d been a frost in the night–no wonder I’d been cold under the thin blankets–and the stalks of the runner beans had turned black.

I took out my rosewood watercolour set that Mr Keiller had given me in the summer, filled the little tray with water, and began to paint what I could see. Beyond the fence at the back of the garden, the trees on the main road hid where the workmen was still busy with the digging. At the end of the field was a single stone, trussed and bound and propped with planks. A cement mixer and a wheelbarrow stood a few yards away, ready for making the concrete base so it’d never fall down again. Mr Keiller had said he’d carry on till November if need be, so he could say he’d finished the first half of the circle by the end of 1938.

We all understood why he was in a rush.

Mr Cromley’s dagger was an old bronze thing. He’d stolen it from a museum in Oxford where he’d worked for a time. He had a pewter cup, and he mixed the stuff in it with the dagger. It wasn’t like before, at the stone, when I could feel the control radiating from his hot skin, and the strange dreaminess carrying me along with all the weirdness. This time something was making him tense, like he was afraid of getting it wrong. He’d lit candles all round, fat white ones like they have in church. They dragged the double bed away from the wall, into the middle of the room. Then Mr Cromley opened a circle around it, like he had around the stone. North, East, South and West. Earth, Air, Fire, Water. The tall, older man stood watching, nodding, like he approved. He didn’t say a thing.

I was scared, but I couldn’t help myself laughing, because Mr Cromley was so solemn. In the cut-out eyeholes his eyes narrowed like he was cross with me for not taking it more serious. There was an insect, a big late-in-the-season blowfly, buzzing round and round the room, swooping at the candle flames and bumping into the windowpane.

They laid me back on the bed, and I went limp like Mr Cromley had told me to, while they lifted my arms above my head and tied a cord round my hands. He had explained what would happen weeks ago, but it had sounded special then. Now I could see myself in the cloudy mirror on the wardrobe door: I looked like a plucked chicken, shivering in the unheated bedroom, goose-bumps on my skinny arms and legs. Mr Cromley drew a pattern on my stomach, and on each breast, and on my face, with the dagger. His hand was shaking so much I was afraid it would slip and cut me. Then he stood up with a sigh of relief, unravelled the cord around his waist, and opened his arms wide, so that his robe fell open. The other man, silent still, lifted the robe off his shoulders, picked up the cord from the floor and, as Mr Cromley leaned over me, lashed his back with the knotted end.

It hurt like a dagger, and he couldn’t seem to get it in properly, and then it was all gush and stickiness.

He collapsed onto me and I brought my bound arms down over his head in a clumsy embrace, because it seemed like the thing to do. His back was rigid under my fingers like a boy who’s messed up.

The tall man was angry, I could tell. Donald had spoiled the ritual. He didn’t say anything, but his eyes glinted through the eyeholes of the mask, and his mouth was set hard beneath it.

But the tall man was gentle with me. He smoothed my hair, and he let his finger trail over my dry lips.

‘Spit,’ he said, a whisper. The first time he’d spoken. ‘Lick my finger.’

The wrecking ball was there by half past eight. I stood outside with the others, the wind nipping at me through my thin cardigan. Old Walter was letting himself out of his little cottage across the road. He shuffled through the wooden gate, and smiled a bleak smile when he saw me in the waiting crowd. He didn’t stay to watch but shuffled down Green Street towards the crossroads.

This time the crowd was silent, not like when the blacksmith’s place came down. There was dread in the air, a dull resentment, and a sense of awful expectancy, like they were waiting for an execution.

‘Anything on the wireless this morning?’ I asked the woman standing next to me, Mrs Paradise, the blacksmith’s wife. She shook her head.

Yesterday Hitler’s troops had rolled into the Sudetenland. The BBC had broadcast the sound of an air-raid siren, an awful howl that set your teeth on edge. We were expecting to be at war any day now, though Mr Keiller’s view was that Hitler and Mr Chamberlain probably had a secret understanding, and would carve up the world between them. ‘Let ‘em have Russia,’ he’d said, standing outside the caravan on the dig site, hands on his hips, as he often stood when he was making a pronouncement. ‘That’s what the Germans would really like to get their hands on, to give old Joe Stalin and his Communists their marching orders.’ He spoke like he knew what was what. Mrs Neville Chamberlain had been to see the dig in August; maybe she’d let slip something over lunch.

Three men set ladders against the side of the guesthouse, and began to strip the lead off the roof. When they had finished, the wrecking ball was trundled into place.

I turned my face away, felt as much as heard the swish of air, the crumbling impact. Someone put an arm round me. When I looked up, there was my bedroom, a yawning cave with smashed floorboards and torn flowered wallpaper.

Couple of days after the guesthouse came down, Mr Chamberlain was on the radio and in the newspapers. Peace for our time, he says. Flapping a piece of paper like a magician producing a dove.

‘You lied to me,’ I said.

Mr Cromley, still in his leather mask, was coming out of the bathroom, a towel round his waist. The other man had already gone.

‘Don’t pretend,’ I went on. ‘Who was that? I know it wasn’t Mr Keiller.’

Mr Cromley sighed. He reached up, unfastened the back of his mask and took it off. His hair was damp and flattened to his head.

‘It was my uncle, of course. You’re very lucky, Heartbreaker. Your virginity was taken by the best ritual magician in Europe.’ There was bitterness in his voice because it should have been him.

‘He smelled wrong for Mr Keiller,’ I said. ‘I’m not stupid.’

‘No, of course you’re not,’ he said, his voice as cold as his uncle had felt, pushing into my warm core. ‘A stupid girl is one who doesn’t understand how fragile her grip is on what she holds dear. How easy it would be, for instance, to lose her job because of a careless mistake, a thoughtless word to the wrong person. How disappointed her parents would be in her. How shocked people in Avebury would be if they knew what she had allowed herself to do.
Begged
to do, as I recall’

I was barely sixteen, and I believed him.

PART FOUR
Fire Festival

Beltane–May Eve, the night of 30 April–is a fire festival. It marks the point in the agricultural year when cattle were moved to new pasture to graze the spring grass. Bonfires were lit; young men and women jumped over them to prove their bravery, then paired off in the darkness.

Today May Day is associated with jolly folk customs: maypole dancing, morris men. We have a vague sense that all this phallic symbolism must be something to do with fertility, and indeed it is. The main concern of agricultural societies is always fertility.