Ancient Echoes, Page 3

  He’d been frightened for a while, certainly, then elated. And he was still revelling in the experience of the encounter with the bull-runners.

  Right now, though, he just wanted to watch TV.

  5

  A week later, Garth came to Jack’s house, climbing the hill from Exburgh slowly and steadily, walking in the middle of the road. It was evening, and the sun was setting behind the town. Garth was a dark shape against the glare from the west, his long coat flung back, his hands in his pockets. A trail of smoke drifted behind him as he chewed on the stub of a cigar.

  Jack saw the man from the window of his room and went out to meet him, walking to the end of the path. He’d had a phone call from Angela about two hours before, saying that Garth wanted to speak to him. Angela’s father had taken photographs of the new frescoes in the pit, and the girl, who’d been with him, was surprised at the similarity between the blinded mask-faces on the east wall, and the sketches of the bull-runners, Greyface and Greenface, that Jack had been occasionally drawing over the years. Her articulated surprise had provoked the dowser’s curiosity.

  Angela cycled slowly behind the man, trying to keep her balance on the mountain bike as she weaved a zig-zag across the road. When Garth emerged from the sun’s glare he tossed the cigar to the road then kicked it to the kerb, where it dropped into a drain. He removed his hat and swept fingers through his loose, long hair, then grinned.

  ‘Are you the boy who sees other worlds?’ he asked as he came up to Jack.

  ‘Yes. You’re the man who dowses for buried cities. I came to the excavation with the school.’

  Garth towered above the boy, reaching out a hand that almost enclosed Jack’s fingers. The pressure was gentle, the skin of the man’s hand coarse and etched. The face that smiled down was deeply lined too, around the eyes especially, which glittered greyly, almost without feature. The smell of the cigar was fresh. There was a fleck of black paper on the man’s thin upper lip, and as if conscious of Jack’s gaze on it he picked it away. Garth hadn’t shaved for a couple of days, and a salt and pepper stubble covered his chin and cheeks.

  ‘How do you find them?’ Jack asked nervously. ‘The ruins …’

  ‘I don’t use hazel rods, if that’s what you mean. Not two sticks. Not like a water diviner.’

  ‘What do you use?’

  The man seemed amused by the question. ‘Emotion. Insight. Magnetism? Christ! I don’t know. Luck? Smell? Dreams. Simple tools, really. All the tools of any hunter! I never really think about it.’

  ‘How do you know when a city’s there?’

  ‘I feel it move away from me,’ the tall man said. ‘They’re clever, but they’re big. They can’t hide that easily.’

  Jack laughed at that. ‘Cities can’t move …’

  ‘Depends what you mean by a city,’ Garth said pointedly, then tapped a long finger on the boy’s shoulder. ‘I came to talk about you. If that’s all right? I’m intrigued by these visions of yours. We’ll talk about hidden cities later. Are your parents in?’

  Rachel and David Chatwin came out to greet their son’s guest, and the three of them talked for a while, mostly about the excavations, partly about the worry of living with a son whose dreaming occasionally turned dangerous. Jack’s father had work to do and excused himself. His mother and Angela brought four garden chairs and a small table out to the front lawn so they could sit and stare down the elm-lined avenue to the sprawl of Exburgh. The river could be glimpsed between the Abbey and the shopping centre. A few barges drifted downriver to the locks at Ashford. The church spire of St John’s still caught the dying light. The breeze was warm and John Garth sipped a cold beer and ate a welcome supper of toasted cheese and grilled bacon. ‘When things are turning up all the time, on the sites, I forget to eat.’

  As Jack described his visions of the running couple and their bizarre landscape, he kept to the actual detail of what he’d experienced, not embroidering, aware that Angela was sitting, watching him with censorious intentness. She was clutching the slim file of notes she’d compiled on her friend and was nervous, her palms leaving moist prints on the red plastic binder.

  ‘Greyface, in a cloak of scalps and feathers, and Greenface, bright with mother of pearl.’ Garth repeated the words as he absorbed the image. He lit a cigar, then thought better of it, grinding the tip against the sole of his patterned boot. ‘Any chance of another beer? I feel I need it.’

  Jack’s mother smiled and went quickly to the kitchen.

  As Garth sipped from the bottle, still contemplative, Angela opened her file and spread it on the garden table. The sun had vanished but it was a bright twilight and Jack’s colourful sketches of the bull-runners were clear against the lined paper.

  Angela said, ‘Jack has been sketching the running couple for seven years, now. These are a selection of his drawings. Mrs Chatwin has lots more, from Jack’s infant years.’

  Rachel agreed. ‘I have dozens. Jack started to draw oddities from about the age of five, mostly these two people, and prehistoric beasts attacking them. We always thought he’d have a career in drawing comics. If you’d like to see them …’

  ‘Please. I’m fascinated.’

  When Rachel returned with the sheaf of childish paintings and crayon drawings, Garth turned the pages, studying each representation with great care. ‘Greyface and Greenface,’ he repeated, running his fingers gently over the crude, increasingly sophisticated pictures. This one looks like a mountain pass. And this … it’s swamp, I would think. These look like Mangroves.’

  Jack agreed. ‘I never seem to see them in the same place. It’s like I get a glimpse when their world comes close to ours, just a glimpse, and maybe years have passed in their world.’

  ‘Where is their world, I wonder?’

  Angela was prepared for this moment and said quickly, ‘I have some suggestions.’

  She pulled the file towards her, watching Garth nervously. ‘I’ve been keeping a record of Jack’s experience, as he describes it, and as I can witness it. I’ve listed a few possibilities – I can outline them for you, if you like.’

  ‘Please!’ Garth agreed. ‘As I said, I’m fascinated.’

  The girl drew a deep breath, pushed back her tumble of hair as she scanned the first page of the file, then began, suddenly seeming years older than her age of fifteen.

  ‘The first, most rational explanation for what Jack is experiencing is temporal lobe hallucination. This is quite common, and can be brought about by tumour, dysfunction akin to epilepsy, drugs, alcohol abuse or physical trauma. Jack doesn’t take drugs, as far as we know.’

  She said this pointedly and Jack answered irritably, ‘I don’t do drugs!’

  ‘Jack doesn’t take drugs, as you’ve just heard. And he hasn’t suffered physical trauma. A tumour would have long since shown itself or killed him, and so we’re left with a possible dysfunction, an inherited trait.

  ‘We really shouldn’t dismiss temporal lobe epilepsy: people who suffer from it have extremely realistic encounters with the imaginary, especially its sounds and smells. However:

  ‘When the encounter occurs with Jack, there is a physical, and witnessable phenomenon associated with it. We call it the shimmering. It’s like a skim of oil on water, reflective and occasional, but it covers his skin. Smells come from it, and distant sounds. His body could produce the odours – a form of psychosomatic-controlled excretion – but it’s hard to explain how the sense of sound could be coming from his skin.’

  She turned the page and drew breath, again pushing her hair back from her face as she read quickly through the next set of notes.

  Garth had been staring at her in increasing astonishment. Now he exchanged a long look with Jack, raising his eyebrows on an otherwise blank face. Jack smiled. The man looked back at Angela, then folded his arms and settled into his seat, awaiting the next instalment.

  Angela went on, ‘The second rational possibility is that Jack is simply daydreaming. Quite literally Day Drea
ming. His unconscious mind, a hurly-burly of images, memories, fears and shadows, is slipping through to his conscious mind during his waking hours, rather than just during sleep. This is so common that it is hardly worth mentioning, except that it may be occurring far more powerfully in Jack.

  ‘And there is research to show that the dying brain creates images from memory/imagination – these seem very real to people experiencing ‘near-death’. Oxygen starvation seems to be the trigger, coupled with sensory input reduction. Jack’s sensory input is certainly reduced during his ‘Visions’, and his breathing is very shallow. Is he having mini-near-death experiences?’

  Jack’s mother Rachel looked horrified.

  ‘Again,’ Angela said emphatically. ‘The shimmering is the phenomenon that puts these explanations into doubt.

  ‘So now we come to the paranormal,’ she said after taking a deep breath.

  ‘Oh good,’ said Garth, with a sidelong glance at the silent boy. ‘I like the paranormal. I use it a great deal.’

  ‘A parallel world!’ Angela said, stabbing a slim finger at the first of four numbered notes. She looked at the older man thoughtfully. ‘If quantum theory is correct, then the possibility that there are innumerable worlds running alongside ours, but existing in one of innumerable, inaccessible dimensions, is very strong. When the boundaries between such worlds come close, then a certain spillage might occur, like two rivers running very close to each other, and intermingling during a flood season …’

  ‘I get the idea,’ Garth said.

  ‘The channel for interactive parallel worlds might be the physical fabric of the external world, or the non-physical fabric of the mind. Question, then: is Jack experiencing a parallel world through his own unconscious mind?’

  ‘Hell of a question!’ Garth muttered.

  ‘And if so, where is that world? Is it Earth? Or is it an alien world, whose own dimensions are running very close to our own, linked to our own by a wormhole effect?

  ‘Is it the past?’ she continued. ‘Is it the future? Or is it a totally imagined world that has been given reality by the mind imagining it?’

  There were a few seconds of silence. Garth realized that Angela had finished her report and was watching him expectantly. ‘I think I’ll have that cigar, now,’ he murmured, and fumbled for a half-corona, lighting up as he reached for the folder, turning it towards him, reading quickly, then checking back through the pages, lingering on each sketch, each paragraph of observation, glancing at the columns of dates.

  ‘This is very impressive. What are the dates?’

  ‘Jack’s visions. His encounters with Greyface and Greenface. As near as I can get them.’

  In the seven years Jack had known Angela, he’d had twenty encounters with the bull-runners, and her record was accurate. Before that, Rachel Chatwin’s letters to her own mother were a fair indication of when the ‘fits’ had occurred. Rachel herself had experienced something strange, a frightening vision of being pursued by huge, red-furred wolves, during the birth of her son.

  Angela stared across the table at Jack. ‘I suppose it has to be from the past. If the faces are on the fresco, then you’re picking up the ghosts of the hidden city.’

  Without looking at her, still staring at the notes in her folder, Garth said, ‘Who says all lost cities come from the past?’

  Angela reacted with a pulled face of surprise. ‘What?’

  Garth patted the journal. ‘May I borrow this? I’ll take good care of it.’

  ‘OK. But I want it back. Jack is my life’s work, although he doesn’t know it yet.’

  ‘Thank you. I’d like to keep the other sketches, Rachel. If that’s OK?’

  Jack’s mother was more than willing.

  ‘Anything! If it helps us understand what’s happening inside this strange head!’ She ruffled Jack’s brown hair and the boy pulled away in embarrassment.

  Garth said, ‘I’ll look after them, I promise. I’ll bring them back in a week or so.’

  ‘What about Glanum?’ Jack said. ‘The excavation.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘You were going to tell me how you found it. Is it a Roman city?’

  ‘There’s some Roman in it, certainly. And some Greek. And Byzantine. And Celtic. Bronze Age, Persian … It’s an odd place. You get the idea? It doesn’t fit at all with what you might be expecting. As you’ll find out when you come and visit.’

  The man leaned across to Jack. ‘What does the fifth of May 1965 mean to you?’

  Jack almost laughed. ‘It’s when I was born.’

  ‘I know. I just saw it on Angela’s list of dates. Do you know what that date means to me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s the day I dowsed Glanum for the first time.’ He leaned close to Jack. ‘Now ain’t that peculiar?’

  Jack was confused. Exburgh’s hidden city hadn’t come to light until nine years ago, in 1971, its discovery due to John Garth, who had been looking in the backstreets and on building sites for five years or more. The man talked in riddles. Garth stood and shrugged into his coat, fixing his hat and working the envelope of sketches into Angela’s folder. He glanced at Jack, half amused. ‘I said “dowsed” it … “sensed” it. Not “found” it. I was a long way away at the time – on your birthday. Thank you for the cheese, the bacon, and the beers, Rachel,’ he said to Jack’s mother. ‘It was good to meet you. I expect I’ll see you again. Angela? You’re an inspiration. And now I’m to take you home.’

  ‘I’d like to talk to Jack for a while …’

  ‘I promised your father …’

  Rachel said, ‘I’ll run her home. It’s OK.’

  Agreeing to that, Garth shook Jack’s hand. ‘Come down to the Hercules pit tomorrow. The excavation behind the shopping centre. I need you there. Can you get a morning off school? No?’ He frowned. ‘Then come after school. To the church. St John’s. I’ll be waiting for you. To give you a guided tour of a very ancient echo. Yes?’

  ‘I’ll be there. Thanks.’

  ‘Don’t let me down.’

  Without being asked, Angela followed Jack up to his room. As he fussed with his computer – a very simple model compared to Simon’s – she closed the door. He was conscious of his discarded clothes, the piles of superhero comics, the posters of his favourite Heavy Metal bands above his narrow bed. Was she looking round? She’d been here before. Oddly, he felt uncomfortable with her in his private space this time. He wondered – as he pretended to do things on the keyboard – whether she was feeling critical of the chaos she could see around her.

  ‘Jack?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’d like to ask you a favour.’ When he turned she was leaning against the door, arms crossed. She was biting her lip, watching him carefully. She walked over to him, still defensive, and lowered her gaze for a moment. Then she looked back at him and said firmly, ‘Don’t lie to me. Promise not to lie. To me.’

  ‘I don’t lie,’ he muttered irritably, trying to turn away.

  She reached for his arm. ‘You lie all the time. But it’s OK. I know you like telling the stories. I shouldn’t have been so annoyed. They’re good stories. I just want you to promise – me – promise me that you’ll only tell me the truth.’

  ‘Yeah. OK.’

  ‘Promise it!’

  ‘I promise,’ he said, again irritably. He was shaking. The look in her large eyes was very earnest, but he could smell soap and her breath, which was warm and sweet. He was getting aroused, and he flushed as he realized it but was helpless to control his body, and he knew that he was beginning to show through the loose cotton trousers of his track suit. Angela aroused him. He’d heard through one of her friends that she’d like to be his girlfriend, but was as shy as Jack himself when it came to making such arrangements, something that amused the bolder members of the school’s tribes. He’d also heard that she thought he lied too much for his own good. This recognition from her that it was all right to tell elaborate stories was almos
t an invitation.

  He suddenly realized she was shaking, but not with nerves, with suppressed laughter. ‘Is that where you keep your Heavy Metal?’ she said, glancing quickly down, then went bright red, a hand to her mouth as she tried to control her amusement. ‘I’m sorry,’ she managed to say.

  Jack twisted away, face burning, but she reached out and grabbed his arm again, stepping suddenly close, putting both arms round him. ‘It’s OK,’ she said, and chanced a kiss, which was soft and nervous, very dry. ‘It’s OK, Jack. I really like you. The stories, that stuff you do, it’s just like earning a living, isn’t it? It’s OK.’

  ‘I know it is.’ He licked his lips. He held her awkwardly, aware of the straining and longing below his waist. When they kissed for the second time it was soft and moist, the tentative then more adventurous probing of her tongue like a shock. She suddenly pushed against him and he tried to pull away, aware of the hardness of her breasts through her thin jumper. She tugged him back by the waistband of his track suit, breaking the kiss to whisper, ‘Let me feel it. Don’t pull back.’

  Damn! His knees were shaking. She’d lost her shyness, he felt he was about to faint. He tightened his embrace, more for support than love, and Angela seemed to sink into him, kissing him again, a surprisingly confident hand suddenly reaching between their bodies to press against his groin.

  He opened his eyes in delighted shock. She was already watching him as her fingers explored the Heavy Metal. And behind her, the door opened and his mother glanced in, made a profuse apology and backed out, but already the kiss was broken as each of them had leapt apart with the sudden surprise of the woman’s voice.

  Angela smiled mischievously. ‘Don’t tell me any lies,’ she said as she ran quickly from the room. ‘Remember – I’ll be keeping my eye on you.’

  6

  John Garth was waiting for him on the steps of the greystone church, St John the Divine. He was pacing up and down, clearly impatient. Jack felt guilty for being late, but he had spent most of the day with Angela, either talking with her in the seclusion of the sports huts, or passing silly notes to her in class. He was basking in the excitement of the relationship that was now beginning to blossom. The touch and smell of her skin had become exquisitely sensuous.