The Guardian Stones (5 page)

Chapter Eight

Edwin had always been a reticent and private man, more comfortable with books than people. Since his wife's death, however, he found he was prone to talk too much, to develop too much intimacy too quickly. A vital part of him had been torn away leaving him open and exposed, functioning strangely, dangling wires making unwanted contact with the world. He supposed it was grief but he had not yet managed to regain control of himself.

Yet he had to keep moving.

Runaway children were certainly not going to stop him.

He needed to begin investigating Noddweir's stone circle, starting with the barrows the vicar had described in their correspondence. They may have been built by the same people who erected the standing stones. He could have begun with the stones themselves, but he was still exhausted from the trip and interrupted sleep. He was never comfortable confronting the most difficult part of a job unless he felt he was functioning at one hundred percent. He was meticulous about arranging his work to insure maximum efficiency.

Besides, his initial glimpse of the stones, as dusk was falling during the search for Isobel, was unsettling. He was reluctant to plunge straight into the forest again after the unnerving search for the missing child. It was better to familiarize himself with the terrain first.

According to Mr. Wilson's hand-drawn map, the barrows were located in a field to the southwest of the village.

As soon as he stepped outside, the peculiar clarity of the morning air, so unlike city air, struck him. It might have been scrubbed clean while he slept.

Edwin went down the High Street and then took the path that curved around the back of Emily Miller's shop. Trying to interpret the spidery lines on his map he almost ran into Jack Chapman coming through the gate in Emily's fence, a hammer in one massive hand and two horseshoes in the other.

“Morning,” the blacksmith grunted.

Edwin saw the door of Emily's burnt shed had already been replaced and boards were nailed up over some of the charred spots. A horseshoe now hung over the door.

“I nailed one up for all the good it'll do anyone,” Jack told him. “My smithy's covered with horseshoes. There's so many on my roof, a gale wouldn't budge it. Issy throws them up there. For luck, she says. More like she just loves heaving them up there. What luck have I had?”

Isobel's father had not shaved and looked very much the worse for wear. He scowled at Edwin. “What are you staring at? Come to ask more questions? Nosing about, are you? I won't have it!”

“I assure you, Mr. Chapman, that—”

Jack threw his hammer down, barely missing Edwin's foot. “Oh, you talk pretty but that Grace Baxter's a worse gossip than Emily Miller. Loves to talk, yak yak yak. I'm sure you've heard all the scandal about my family.”

“No, I—”

“That's bad enough, my character blackened and no defense possible being as I wasn't there, but now I'm suspected of causing me own child to run away.”

Edwin began to reply but Jack cut in. “That fool Green's just been grilling me. Thinks I mistreated her and that's why she ran off. Why isn't he getting help from town? Craven Arms has real police. Now I suppose Grace's sent you to see what you can find out. I saw Green coming out of her house on the way over. He didn't see me. Thinks I don't know what's what, I'll be bound. She knows I wouldn't give her the time of day, so she sent you instead. Go on, admit it.”

Jack moved close enough that Edwin could smell the alcohol on his breath.

“I'm actually on my way to look over some barrows,” Edwin told him, taking a step backwards.

“Why would you be interested in some piles of dirt? You professors are a funny lot, you are!”

Jack shook the horseshoes he was holding. Edwin sensed they could mean very bad luck for him. “Grace has no say in what Constable Green does. She doesn't necessarily approve of his methods.” True or not, Edwin needed to cool the brawny blacksmith down.

Jack drew back and stooped to pick up his hammer. “I'm feeling poorly this morning. Haven't slept since Issy vanished.”

“Grace says Isobel is sure to be picked up soon, most likely walking down the railroad tracks or at a station.”

Suddenly Jack was crying, wiping his eyes with the back of a grimy hand.

“She might have got a lift into town,” Edwin said, uneasily. Who was he to give reassurances? What did he know about life in this tiny, out-of-the-way village? How had he become an unofficial assistant to the village's unofficial deputy?

“She couldn't stay in Craven Arms this long. She ain't got no money.” Jack snuffled. “Last time I saw her was around midday. She'd just burnt the dinner again. Useless lump, she is.” Maudlin tears streamed down his stubbly face. “I shouldn't have spoke to her so harsh. Where can she be?”

“I'm sure—”

Jack's eyes narrowed. “You think it was because I beat her? Isn't that it? You think I done it on account of the burnt dinner so she ran away!”

“No, not at—”

“Let me tell you, Professor. Issy is a bad girl. Bound to be, being as she was born when the moon was waning. And having her, it killed my wife. Them born under the horns of the moon always comes to a bad end.” He waved his hammer. “Don't believe everything you hear. I never touched my daughter. Maybe if I had she'd still be here. I should have taken me belt and beaten the badness out of her.”

***

Noddweir turns away from the forest.

Perhaps it is afraid to meet the gaze directed upon it from behind the trees. It prefers to pretend it is not being observed.

From behind, the village takes on a different aspect. Instead of neat housefronts, well-tended hedges, and painted fences, the ends of the gardens show rotted, crooked palings, crumbling walls largely concealed by crawling vines. Black, twisted trees, revenants of long-lost orchards, reach arthritic limbs toward the cultivated beds on the other side of the half-ruined barriers. Bushes escape from cultivation to grow rank and noxious, scrape at the walls and fences.

Homeowners do not see the ghastly trees or the rampant brush. Their worlds end at the back of their gardens. The wild vegetation beyond is a backdrop signifying nothing.

There is much to be seen in the back of Noddweir at night. A girl pushes quietly through a rear gate and creeps along beside the fences to where a boy is scrambling over another. Then both vanish together into the darkness. A young lad stands behind a shed, smoke from a stolen cigarette a pale phantom rising into the sky.

One shed shows evidence of scorching.

Now, in the day, through black crisscrossed limbs and a welter of leaves, some dark, others translucent, a pond and surrounding field look like a green and blue stained-glass window. At one place near the edge of the water, grass, and mud is churned up. Footprints are visible. Reeds are broken. A few still float on the still surface of the water. Aside from that there is no motion except for darting dragonflies, no sound but humming of insects.

Noddweir cannot guess what happens beyond its garden walls.

First there was the girl, but now the girl is gone.

The girl was not what she could be.

She was not enough.

Not nearly enough.

Chapter Nine

Edwin consulted the vicar's hand-drawn map again. The barrows should be on the right hand side of the road.

They weren't there.

He saw nothing except a flat expanse of tall grass. It was discomfiting.

He walked further, feeling the hot sunlight on the back of his neck, stopped to scan the field once more, then moved the map closer to his face and peered at Wilson's maddening squiggles.

Neither the map nor the landscape had changed.

The air hung utterly still. Unseen insects clicked and burred and chattered. Edwin could smell the dry dust of the road and a faint perfume. Wild roses?

Had he taken a wrong turn? The fact that signposts had been removed to thwart German invaders rendered some of the map's notations useless.

Jack Chapman upset him. He didn't like confrontations. He hurried away from Isobel's overwrought father. Had he gone left when he should have veered right? Did he stray off the roads shown by the map onto one that the vicar hadn't drawn?

What had looked like an easy walk in two-dimensional pen and ink felt totally different in three-dimensional reality.

How had the philosopher Alfred Korzybski put it? The map is not the territory.

Edwin kept walking. At this rate, he thought, I shall end up in Wales. Not that I'll know where I am with all the signposts taken down.

The road he was on dwindled to a narrow track flanked by fields behind hedges.

He found himself at the corner of a field demarcated by a line of fence posts, all leaning at crazy angles, and apparently held up by the barbed wire strung between them. A couple of horses gazed over the ruined fence. A heavyset, balding man with a bright red face knelt beside a horse-drawn mower that might have been used by Queen Victoria, in the unlikely event the diminutive queen had ever mowed hay. The rusty metal contraption consisted of a excruciatingly uncomfortable looking seat perched high behind two wheels and a cutting bar with blades the size of fossilized dinosaur teeth. The fact that the bar stood in the safe upright position rather than being lowered for cutting made it look even more menacing.

The red-faced man, who pushed up and glared at Edwin, was not welcoming. He wore grubby corduroy trousers and a sweat-soaked collarless shirt. Edwin's shirt was neater but just as damp.

“You're here to tell me Jack Chapman's too drunk to work today,” the man growled.

“No. Actually, I spoke with him earlier. He didn't seem drunk to me.”

“He said he'd be here an hour ago to look my equipment over for me. I'll need to be cutting early this year, what with all this heat.”

The man turned back to the machine.

“I seem to have got lost,” Edwin displayed his map.

“Got a map, I see,” came the suspicious reply. “We don't see many strangers around here. Where are you going?”

Edwin told him.

“Barrows, eh? I can show you a couple of wheel-barrows if you like!” The man laughed and thrust out a calloused hand. “You're the Yank staying with Grace, studying our quaint ways and such, so I hear. Name's Harry Wainman.”

“Edwin Carpenter.” They shook hands. Wainman had a strong grip but he made no effort to grind Edwin's bones, as some of the most bookish of his academic colleagues had a habit of doing. “The boys who ran away were staying with you, weren't they?”

“That's right.” Harry hitched up his trousers and scratched his chin. “Since you just come from the village, any news of them?”

“I'm afraid not.”

“Damn! Just when we need the extra help! Not but what they had to be watched every minute or they'd help themselves to anything left lying about.” Harry shrugged. “But what can you expect? Them Finch boys are nothing but budding criminals. The wife's convinced they killed Emily's dog as a two-fingered farewell. She's still angry about her eggs. Sooner they're old enough to be called up the better. If the war lasts long enough, we can loose them against the Germans.”

“You may be right,” Edwin replied. “But about these barrows…”

“Oh, them. Damn things get in the way of plowing. You need to go back the way you come. Turn right at the next road. Then keep on for a couple of miles.”

A couple of miles? Edwin gazed disconsolately at his map. Obviously not drawn to scale. He folded it up. “Thanks. I'm particularly interested in those barrows as well as the Guardians.”

“Nothing but trouble, them stones. You hear about the midsummer celebrations up there years ago?”

Edwin shook his head.

“Used to dance around naked, so the old folk say.” Harry winked. “That wasn't all neither. A lot of kids them days was born in the spring. And sometimes there were strange noises in the forest at night. You could hear them clearly if you was anywhere nearby.”

“You've heard them yourself?”

“No, but I've heard about them from my father and grandfather. Lot of rubbish, if you ask me. Nothing but owls or a rabbit caught in a snare. Waste of breath even talking about it. What use is all this ancient stuff anyhow? I'll tell you what'd be useful. Some of you Yanks could come over and give us a hand against them Jerries.”

“It well may come to it,” Edwin replied.

Harry scratched his chin again. “I wonder. Let everyone else bleed and keep out of it yourselves, that seems to be the way you Yanks think. Never mind sending soldiers, we'll send some old geezers to take in the sights.”

“I appreciate the directions,” Edwin said. “I'd better start back now.”

“You planning to write a book?”

“I may.”

“God help us! Then those damn stones will have us overrun with tourists. Talk about a curse. 'Course, by then they might be German tourists. I'd charge them twice the going rate, the swine.” Wainman spat and knelt back down beside the mower.

“Hell,” he muttered, as much to himself as Edwin. “Maybe I ought to tell old Radbone to send that cripple of hers to help me. He'd be better than no help at all.”

Chapter Ten

Reggie Cox lay on his stomach on the bank of the pond behind his lodgings at Susannah Radbone's house.

His inconvenient leg with its metal brace stretched straight out behind him. He stayed still as death, barely breathing heavy air that smelled of stagnant water and decayed vegetation. Clumps of coarse grass with blades sharp enough to cut the skin hid him. Delicate, straggling plants covered with tiny blue flowers spilled out over the bank. Reggie had never seen such flowers in Birmingham and they did not interest him.

What interested him was catching a frog.

His gaze was fixed on the water, or rather the lumpy green mat covering the pond near its banks. Reeds thrust up from the scum and, in places around the edges of lily pads, water caught sparkles of sunlight.

Catching frogs was one of the few things he liked about the countryside. It was something a boy with a bad leg could do, unlike roughhousing with his playmates or kicking a ball around, or much of anything else children did for amusement in city streets, a great deal of which required very fast running afterward. All frog-catching required was patience, a quick hand, and the proper technique.

Frogs were a revelation to Reggie. There weren't any in Birmingham in the area where he had lived before being evacuated. In fact, there wasn't much of anything in that rough part of the city as unobservant, soft, and defenseless as a frog.

From the cracked front window of his family's flat he could see the bombed-out ruin that had once been the building where his best friend lived. Not far away was an anti-aircraft gun which kept him awake most of the night. He spent time waiting anxiously in the dank, foul-smelling air raid shelter underneath the nearby school. Because of his weak leg it was difficult for him to rush to safety when the sirens started to wail. Usually he had to be helped, and that was difficult to endure as well.

He never saw the monsters that terrorized him and the rest of the city, only their planes, as far overhead and unreachable as the moon. Nazis, Germans, the Boche, Hitler, Himmler, the Luftwaffe, were all names for a formless evil that lurked everywhere. Polio was another name for the evil. An even worse name, a grownup word he heard his parents use only when they didn't know he was listening. He knew now that it was a disease, but when he had first heard it, at a younger age, he had the impression it was the sort of thing you feared might be waiting for you under your bed when the lights went out.

A hideous dragonfly swooped at his face, buzzing and whirring. He managed not to flinch.

Reggie scanned the scum in front of him, searching for the green turret of a frog's head. The frogs blended in, unlike Reggie. And unlike him they were sleek and fast. That was part of the reason he enjoyed catching them.

In Birmingham the day had come when he joined a group of children who were being evacuated. His mother cried at the station while his father looked somber, reminding Reggie to carry his gas mask at all times. Reggie suspected they were both happy to see the back of their defective offspring. Each child was given a brown paper bag holding tins of sardines and Spam. It was raining, and the train journeyed through an endless, dismal countryside. Occasionally Reggie would glance out the window but he would always see the same barn, or the same field, or the same trees he had already seen five times before.

He was dozing when a faint clanking brought him awake with a start. His seatmate, a gangly boy with a face not unlike a grinning skull, was tapping the cage around Reggie's leg with the flat of his knife blade.

“Can you swing this thing?”

“Swing…?

“Swing yer leg. Be like having brass knuckles but on yer leg, see?” He grinned his horrible grin.

“I suppose I could swing it, if I got mad enough.” Reggie tried to look fierce and failed utterly. “I never thought about it.”

“No? Soon as I saw it, I thought about it. I'm a thinker. I think of all kinds of things. Stick with me and you'll see.” He clicked his knife shut and stuck it back in his pocket.

“Sure,” Reggie said. “I'd like to stick with you, er…”

“Len Finch,” the boy answered Reggie's questioning look. “I'm here with my brother Mike, only he's chatting up some girl.”

“I'm Reggie Cox.”

“No, yer called Gimpy. Got it? Gimpy. Every gang needs a cripple. No one suspects a cripple, see?”

With that Len Finch settled back in his seat, closed his eyes, and said nothing more.

What felt like a long time later, when they must have reached the end of the world, the train pulled into a station and children were bundled into wagons and hauled, like so many sheep, into Noddweir.

Assembled in the church, they were given biscuits to eat while their escort lectured them on rural life and proper behavior. Reggie paid no attention. He sat with the Finch brothers. The three whispered and snickered as they tried to decide what animal was ugly enough to resemble the lecturer, a middle-aged woman dressed as if for a funeral.

A crow,” suggested Reggie.

“Naw,” Mike said. “Crows is all shiny black, not dull like her. A vulture maybe.”

“You ain't never seen a vulture,” snorted Len. “I know what she looks like. I seen some kid get hold of a cat once and beat it with a board and burn it. That's what she looks like, an old, beat-up, burnt cat!”

Reggie wanted to stay with the Finch brothers, but before long the evacuees were ushered into the street and lined up as if they'd joined the army.

A handful of men—farmers, Reggie understood later—had come into the village for the first pick. Farming was important to the war effort and manpower in short supply. Len and Mike went off with a fat man with hardly any hair. When the farmers were done, Reggie was the only boy left behind older than a toddler. Even the lump of blubber with sticking plaster on his glasses had been chosen. Bert someone had called him, went with the Finch brothers.

Then the Burnt Cat, as Reggie now thought of her, humiliated as he was, led the girls and young kids and Reggie, all carrying their suitcases and gas masks, from house to house. A woman would emerge from each and walk up and down the line, peering and ruffling hair and turning heads this way and that. Reggie felt like a vegetable at the market. And who would want a tomato with a worm hole? As soon as anyone saw Reggie's leg brace they immediately looked away and didn't glance in his direction again.

Most of the older, stronger girls were chosen before the pretty ones.

Finally even the crying toddler in threadbare, stained shorts was taken.

Limping painfully by now, Reggie followed the Burnt Cat from door to door, meeting with one refusal after another. “Why would you billet children like this on us?” one woman scolded. “What do you expect of us? There's a war on, you know.”

They arrived at a single-story cottage that looked like a picture in the book of fairy tales Reggie had stolen from the library. He recalled the boy who had gone into that house had been baked into a pie or suffered some equally horrible fate. As the door swung open, Reggie hung back but the Cat got her claws into his shoulder and dragged him around in front of her.

The woman who appeared in the doorway towered over the Cat. She was scrawny, with a mean face and wore her hair cut as short as a man's.

“I am sorry to have to ask—” the Cat began.

“Polio,” the homely woman said, interrupting her. “Poor child.”

“Do you suppose you—?”

“I have retired from teaching, madam, but I will never retire from looking after the welfare of children. Come in, young man.”

Reggie supposed he should have felt more grateful to Miss Radbone, as her name was. Perhaps he was an ungrateful little bugger like his old man always said. Not that he wasn't grateful at all. Still, it would have been better if Miss Radbone hadn't immediately shaved his head and burned his clothes. “We don't want lice or fleas, do we?”

Now, as he lay on the bank of the pond, the sun was beginning to burn Reggie's bare scalp. Where had the frogs gone? He surely couldn't have caught them all. Perhaps they weren't as dull-witted as he supposed.

As usual, as soon as he was sure the hunt would be futile, he spotted the green periscope of a head push up a scrap of pond scum. Two bulging eyes, half submerged, goggled at him.

Reggie's hand shot out into the water. The frog instantly vanished. He didn't aim for where he saw the frog, but where he guessed it would be in a second or two, as it thrust its powerful legs to propel itself away. You couldn't hold onto a slippery frog, Reggie had learned, unless you got hold of its extended legs. That was the frog's vulnerability. You clamped your fist tight around those long, bony legs.

And he would have done so, except for a rustling in the brush behind him. A shadow fell across the scummy water, reaching to the widening hole opened in the green algae where Reggie's hand had plunged through.

In the rippling water Reggie saw a reflection.

A face.

Grotesquely distorted.

Almost the face of a huge, nightmarish frog.