Lights in a Western Sky Read online

  And with the raw blow of the sun against his eyes he was gripped by a feeling of desperation. Ask them again, he implored Richard, what they saw. No, Bwana, it was not an animal they had seen before. Then was it a man? But this was a superfluous question, because Rupert the zoologist knew that no ordinary man could have accomplished such an ascent.

  As they bumped back along the track to the house Rupert said nothing, realising the magnitude of the lost opportunity.

  ‘Could it really be,’ he asked Catherine when Richard had left the room, ‘that there is a creature out there in the forest still unknown to science?’ Then he grew angry. ‘Why did you make me stay?’

  ‘Your choice,’ she said, ‘not mine.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘It gave me satisfaction. That’s why.’

  ‘I can’t believe what I’m hearing.’

  ‘Frankly, Rupert, I do not care.’

  They were the words that had dismissed him all those years before.

  Richard drove him to the station where the liberated train stood waiting. He looked around for Jackson, but he was not there.

  ‘On the train… someone lent me a bible,’ Rupert said. ‘I have it here,’

  ‘Hair the colour of the book?’

  ‘Jackson, yes.’

  ‘Our local boy made good. Give it here, I’ll return it to him.’ He paused. ‘On second thoughts I’ll give it to Catherine. She’s something of an admirer of his. He’s often at the house, you know.’

  ‘She said she knew him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  As far as he could recall it was the first time Rupert felt pity for Catherine’s long suffering husband.

  Two days later, under a cloudless sky, the same little train steamed back from the lake. As it sped through the township Rupert recognised the railway shed and the platform, now deserted, and the piles of logs from the tree that had blocked the line. He looked for the gap in the forest edge where Jackson had taken him but saw only an impenetrable green wall. He checked in his bag for the fragment of skin in its bottle of fixative, thought once about Catherine and in a terrible mood of despondency searched for a pen with which to finish the report to his sponsors in London.

  The squeal of car brakes on Cromwell Road jolted him back to the present. He rose from the bench and looked for one last time at the building that had been his temple, trying in vain to fight off whatever it was forcing him not to go back. In a dream he wandered towards the subway leading to the underground.

  A party of Japanese tourists – probably ones he had passed on the stairs of the museum – looked down upon him from the pavement above. He could feel their eyes following him down the steps into the tunnel which once, with the naivety of youth, he’d likened to a sewer carrying human effluent. Yet, over the years, he’d come to relish its shrill echoes because the unintelligible snatches of human voice reminded him of the forlorn cries of the animals that were the subject of his trade.

  It is curious how the memory plays tricks, drawing upon past experiences and playing them back in distorted but recognisable forms. As he walked through the tunnel those piercing utterances diminished until all that remained were barely audible threads of sound, then… nothing. He stopped still, fearful of the silence. He looked down, half expecting to see at his feet the decaying vegetation of the forest floor. And with that came the recollection that told him what he must do.

  He continued to walk slowly to the point where the tunnel turned abruptly towards the station. Then, supposing himself out of sight, he broke into a run. When he paused again, breathless, the hubbub within the concourse of the station was as it had always been. ‘You are getting old, ex-curator Rupert,’ he said to himself between gasps, ‘to believe such nonsense.’

  Yet he had not escaped. He stood on the platform where the carriage doors would open, knowing that their closing would mark both the end and a new beginning. But until that moment came the platform edge was as finite as the bars of a cage. His fingers closed over the vial in his pocket.

  The voice at his elbow was not unexpected, nor even unwelcome.

  ‘Dr Murchison, I believe you have something that belongs to me.’

  The hair was white now, but the face was little changed. The benevolence was still there, the quiet assurance as forceful. Against his will Rupert was withdrawing his closed fist, knowing what the loss would mean.

  ‘Reverend Jackson.’

  ‘Indeed. How could you forget? Dr Murchison, I once thought you a fortunate man, but you did not grasp the opportunity that was offered. As a result I was – how shall I put it? – condemned, for my cross – if you will forgive the euphemism – I have continued to bear. But that is my problem, not yours. Before we finally part I want to show you this. It should at least lay some doubts to rest.’

  In one swift decisive movement he pulled up his sleeve almost to the elbow, and Rupert saw there on his forearm the pallor against the blackness of the skin that was the scar.

  Shep Stone

  No-one knows what induced Graham Onslow to return to the Shepton Circle. Some of his colleagues in the History Department even claim to have heard him say that he never would. Whatever the reason, it must have had something to do with the anniversary – the tenth – of Rebecca’s death. Otherwise it would have been too much of a coincidence.

  That mid-summer day had started fine, so perhaps it was on an impulse that Graham had decided to join the Department’s outing to the iron-age settlement at Shepton Magna. His secretary recalled him smiling as he gave her last minute instructions before boarding the bus. On the other hand Jim Meredith, sitting next to him, thought he was subdued; but then they were rivals in the field of early English mythology and never got on. Still, it is difficult to explain why, when the bus departed from the site at the end of the day, no one realised – or chose to notice – that he was not on board.

  The earthworks at Shepton are for the most part the stuff of dry papers in the county archaeological archives. They lie in a green and fertile valley between high heather-clad hills where wheeling buzzards and kestrels seem permanently to pepper the sky. The public passing through on its way to Manchester would remain oblivious were it not for the splendid stone circle – and the equally enticing picnic spot some two hundred yards away at the foot of the eastern escarpment.

  Had any of the party thought to look back as the bus left the car park they might just have seen, half way up the cliff and illuminated by the sunlight that was fast becoming denied to the valley floor, Graham’s ant-like figure on its way to the top.

  Graham, for his part, had been well aware of the bus’s departure. In fact, he had stayed with the group until the very last minute before sidling away just as the remaining stragglers were boarding. At first he had climbed quickly, remembering the route he had taken before. But ten years – and early corpulence – had slowed him down. When he paused to watch the bus go he was already breathless and perspiring.

  As he turned back to face the rock wall he remembered that it was at this precise spot that Rebecca had overtaken him. He had watched her lithe body making light of the difficulties of the climb, stretching high for each new handhold and exploring the rock intimately with her thin brown legs. In passing him she had exposed details of her body that were still unfamiliar – in spite of their previous intimacies.

  There had, of course, been constraints. As a university teacher he had responsibilities towards his research students and for the most part he observed them. But with Rebecca things had been different. It was a relationship that could not have continued unresolved.

  Not that he had brought her here deliberately. Quite the reverse. One day she had knocked on his study door and he had opened it to find her flushed and eager. ‘I have a theory,’ she had told him, ‘about the Shepton Circle.’ ‘And what is that?’ he had replied, amused but sceptical. But
she had refused to answer. ‘I’ll have to show you,’ was all she would say. And that was the reason they had ascended the cliff on which Graham now found himself.

  He remembered his surprise when, reaching the summit, he had found her standing erect and expectant, nostrils slightly flared, her proud grey eyes engaging his in anticipation of a final judgement on her intellectual journey. Then he saw that she was standing before a pink-white slab of rock, square, and creased gently and vertically along its centre like an open book. The sun was low over the hills on the other side of the valley, so that the valley itself appeared to be in darkness; but here, high up, the light was still bright, forcing her shadow hard into the stone. Around them white daisies studded the tufted grass. In the soft air Graham thought he could detect the fragrance of wild strawberries. ‘Feel the stone,’ she whispered. To his surprise he found it warm against the back of his hand.

  She took that hand and led him beyond the rock, turning him around so that they were looking together down the length of the depression in its surface, and beyond into the valley below. ‘Look!’ was all she said, and it was enough. Graham could see that the line of vision led precisely to the centre of the circle. And at the centre was another slab of rock, deliberately placed to be in alignment with this, their stone.

  So powerful were the forces reaching across the ages that, without thinking, he led her back to the foot of the stone. As if according to some arcane rite in which they were passive players, she lay back upon it, her body fitting snugly within its folds. For Graham there were no moral obstacles to overcome: it was the practical testing of his student’s hypothesis, and when their passion was over he thanked her solemnly for the honour of sharing her contribution to the advancement of archaeological knowledge.

  They idled away the time lying in the long grass, making daisy chains, which he threaded into her long black hair. Then Graham noticed the shadow creeping up the base of the stone.

  ‘There’s a village up here somewhere,’ he said. ‘We’d better make for that. Get a drink before the light goes completely, then think about a taxi back.’ ‘Just a few minutes longer,’ she said, and Graham wandered away to hunt for the wild strawberries that he would collect and give to her.

  When he returned to the stone he was alone. He searched in the long grass for yards around. For a brief moment it had to be a student prank, but his relief was short-lived. He tried to climb back down the cliff but it was too dark and he almost fell. Then he ran, hard, to the nearby hamlet, to the inn called the Shepton Stones where they called the police for him. But it was only in the light of dawn that they found her body, broken by the fall, at the bottom of the cliff.

  All his had happened exactly ten years before, to the day, to the hour.

  Graham had paid his respects to her memory before scaling the cliff and was in control. But on reaching the top he was drawn to the slab of rock, pink and warm in the dying sun, just as it had been before. He knelt down, then lay prone upon it, squeezing into its fold as if the crevices and fissures might exude their memory of Rebecca’s form. And perhaps they did, for there surfaced in his mind the worm of doubt that had lingered all these years. So again he examined the edge of the cliff at the point where she must have slipped. There was no clue, no hint, no prospect of resolution. But in the act of seeking there was a finality that lightened his spirits as he set out for the nearby hamlet. He could return home with a troublesome ghost laid to rest.

  A narrow ribbon of trodden brown earth almost lost to encroaching stands of nettle and bracken led down towards the small cluster of buildings a few hundred yards away. The distance seemed longer than he remembered from his crazed sprint of ten years before. Away, now, from the escarpment and the highway it concealed, the moor was silent and still. Midges danced in the warm evening air. Once a partridge rose up on clattering wings. As Graham approached the hamlet he sniffed the scents of honeysuckle and jasmine, then saw the climbers themselves clothing the walls of the inn.

  He had no reason to reflect on what sustained this remote community on the moor, nor why it should need an inn at all. But he had cause to do so later.

  Outwardly the Shepton Stones had not changed, but it was odd that the beer garden was almost deserted on such a fine summer evening. A figure dressed in black motor cycle leathers lounged within the frame of the doorway. He scrutinised Graham carefully as he approached.

  ‘Where you from?’ he asked.

  ‘Sheffield,’ Graham replied blandly.

  This seemed to suffice and the man moved grudgingly aside.

  To Graham’s surprise the interior was crowded, but there was little of the noise he had anticipated. A score or so of mainly well dressed, middle-aged men were clustered around the bar. Their talk was animated, but the voices seemed held unnaturally low. In contrast, the floor of the room was bright with tables that appeared to have been set for an occasion. There were flowers in profusion, and lit candles in spite of the residual daylight. At each table sat a man and a woman whom Graham judged to be in their late twenties or not much older. Although the women were in summer dresses and the men were casually dressed, all had taken particular care with their appearance. They had obviously dined well.

  Graham felt himself an intruder. There was a need to be careful, to take stock. The bar was inaccessible without making his presence obvious, so he made his way to the only vacant place he could see, on a high-backed settle near the chimney piece. Its only occupant, a small spare man in his fifties, shuffled aside to make room for him, then extended a hand.

  ‘George, by the way. They give you trouble at the road block?’

  ‘Graham. No… no trouble at all.’

  ‘Must have recognised you then, Graham. Come to think of it you do look familiar. About half an hour ago a bus full of strangers came up. Took a while to persuade them they weren’t welcome.’

  ‘That couldn’t have been easy.’

  ‘Did it gently, mind. Won’t suspect anything. By the way what’s your chapter?’

  Graham was now out of his depth. He checked that the line to the door was at least clear.

  ‘Sheffield.’

  ‘Thought it had gone quiet up there. But with so many members now it’s impossible to keep track.’

  ‘It’s not exactly the most active,’ Graham said apologetically.

  The activity at the bar suddenly increased. From behind it a figure rose up above the level of the heads. The hair was black and the eyes dark and deep-set, the demeanour magisterial. Every head in the room turned towards him. Those close to him were smiling, but the couples at the tables looked apprehensive. It was clear to Graham that this was no party game. The man spoke with an authority in keeping with his bearing. He was no barman.

  ‘This year the competition has been – how shall I put it – as fierce as any we have seen in recent times. You will appreciate that coming to a decision has not been easy, but we trust you will agree that your committee has made the correct choice. As has often been the case, the need to balance presentation against individual circumstances has caused particular difficulties. For all their good looks some here have harrowing tales to tell. It’s just a pity there can be only one winner. But let’s not prolong the suspense: this year it is… the couple at table number six.’

  At the burst of applause the couple rose to their feet and embraced one another across their soiled plates. A knife on the man’s side fell to the floor, but no-one seemed to notice. Many of the men from the bar crowded round. Graham noted with amusement that their only purpose seemed to be to steal a kiss from the lucky lady. She relished the attention, not minding that her carefully coiffured hair was now awry. Her companion looked on with pride and – curiously, Graham thought – with deep relief.

  ‘In a way that’s a pity,’ Graham’s companion exclaimed.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘She’s pretty –
such a bloody waste.’ He leant across to whisper in Graham’s ear. ‘It’ll be a good one though. I can promise you that.’

  ‘You had a hand in the decision?’

  ‘Deciding vote.’

  Graham smelt the alcohol on the man’s breath and wondered if he was giving too much away.

  ‘Think of it,’ George continued. ‘Every year, infertile couples competing to have their way with each other on that stone. Every year for thousands of years. And all kept secret.’

  ‘Do you think it works?’

  ‘Whether it works or not is irrelevant. It’s the deeper meaning that counts.’

  ‘I suppose that’s right.’

  ‘And then, every tenth year… to satisfy the greater powers…’ His voice became hushed. ‘Well, no need to tell you what happens.’

  The couple were at the centre of a cluster of bodies that was quickly becoming an entourage. The man who had spoken from the bar now had a chain around his neck and a multi-coloured staff in his hand. The group moved towards the door, which Graham noticed had to be unlocked to let them out. They left to the sound of gently tinkling bells and the braying of an unseen and not particularly melodious horn.

  ‘You need to keep your eyes peeled to appreciate the subtleties,’ George said, getting up and walking towards the tables. He stopped at the one vacated by the successful couple, picked up the card bearing their names and read it. As if by accident a napkin fell to the floor. He bent down, fumbling to retrieve it, and replaced it carefully on the table. Graham thought he put something into his pocket, but could not see what it was. Then George followed the others out into the night.

  Through the window Graham watched the party melt into the darkness of the moor. With the last faint call of the horn he turned to survey the room. The tables were being cleared and there were fewer people at the bar. Graham wandered to the table where the winning couple had sat. Brian and Fenella Browning, the card said. He tried to imagine what had led to the couple’s participation. A waiter came to collect the plates. With his arm loaded the man paused for a moment, as if looking for something, then shrugged and walked away.