Ancient Echoes Read online

  ANCIENT ECHOES

  Robert Holdstock

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Prologue: The City

  Part One: Shadows in Stone

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Two: Through the Bull Gate

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part Three: M.I.D.A.C.S.

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part Four: Beyond the Hinterland

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part Five: Flesh and Shadow

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Part Six: At the Maelstrom’s Edge

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Part Seven: The Moon Pool

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Part Eight: Abandoned Cities

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Part Nine: Remembering

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Author’s Note

  Website

  Also By Robert Holdstock

  Acknowledgments

  Author Bio

  Copyright

  Between the idea

  And the reality

  Between the motion

  And the act

  Falls the Shadow

  For Thine is the Kingdom

  T. S. Eliot: The Hollow Men

  Woe to the bloody city!

  It is all full of lies and predation.

  Its prey departeth not!

  Book of Nahum, 3:1

  PROLOGUE

  The City

  The man who had spent his life dowsing for lost cities eventually came to Exburgh, drawn by the shadow of ancient Glanum, a place of sanctuaries and sacred groves which had suddenly become visible to him among the office blocks and churches of the modern age.

  For the next fourteen years, John Garth prowled the boardwalks around each site, supervising the excavations with little more than a murmured word and gentle encouragement. To his own eyes, as the flint walls, the fallen trees and the forgotten shrines were exposed, the buried town of Glanum grew above him and around him, engaging all his senses as its ghosts seeped up from the excavation.

  He took photographs and made sketches, but his gaze was as often in the middle distance, above the foundations, as on the cold remains below. A tall man, he wore his long, greying hair in a ponytail, below a wide-brimmed, black oilskin hat which helped to hide the deep and ugly scar between his eyes. Rain or shine, he dressed in boots, jeans and a long, olive-green raincoat. His eyes weakening as he approached the last years of his forties, he now wore gold-rimmed glasses. He had stopped smoking cigarettes, but regularly indulged in the luxury of a half-corona. The students and assistants who worked on the dig, scattered across the town, referred to him as the Sixties Kid, an affectionate nickname that amused him.

  On a stifling, hot summer’s day, he crouched on the muddy boards around the edge of what had been named the ‘Hercules pit’ and surveyed the shattered signs of the temple that were slowly coming to light. An archaeologist from Cambridge was supervising the site, which was being extensively photographed; and a detailed drawing was being made as four students with trowels and brushes did their gentle work in the dry clay, below the lines of white labels that tagged the levels.

  As with everything that was emerging from Glanum, nothing was right about what Garth could see. The attribution to ‘Hercules’ was for convenience, based on little more than fragments of statue – muscular and male – and the base of what was unmistakably a granite phallic column. And yet there were clear intrusions of a second shrine, fragments of vast, carved stone vessels more familiar from the Minoan culture. And a mud-brick wall, almost inserted into the limestone of the Hercules shrine, suggesting either an earlier or an eccentric addition to this part of the city.

  Nothing was right, and Garth was not surprised. Like the bones of prehistoric men, the bones of ancient cities could be mixed, mingled and confused in the grave. Garth, though, was entertaining another possibility, one that had little to do with the compression of time.

  And then, as he tried to smell, see and hear the true life of this strange place, his mind drifting through the ghostly walls, there was a shout from below.

  ‘There’s something here!’

  Drawn back to reality, Garth stood and strode quickly round the boardwalk.

  There’s something here!

  How many times in his long life had he heard those words? It was a phrase he never tired of hearing.

  He slipped down the ladder to the lower level of the pit and crossed to the flash of colour that one of the students had revealed. She was kneeling, sitting back, shaking her head as she stared at the wall.

  ‘What have we got?’

  ‘Two masks,’ she said, using the brush as a pointer, outlining the faces. ‘Pecked out of the mudbrick, I think, thinly plastered and painted. The colour is very strong, though the plaster’s loosening.’ She seemed uncomfortable. ‘There’s something not right about them.’

  ‘Not right?’

  ‘They make me nervous. I don’t want to work on them any more. If you don’t mind.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Garth said, and took the brush from her.

  Gently, then, over the next two hours, he revealed the faces, one decorated in black and white, the other in whorls and stripes of green. The eyes of both had been gouged out and the mouths gaped. The green mask had a ‘fema
le’ feel to its shape.

  ‘Well, well. Hello again …’

  Eventually, he couldn’t resist the impulse: he reached out with both hands, one to each mask, and touched the dead eyes.

  It was nearly three o’clock in the afternoon.

  For the first time in ages, he felt a city shift below him …

  PART ONE

  Shadows in Stone

  1

  Ten minutes before the end of the class, the unmistakable and pungent aroma of dense, dank forest began to emanate from Jack Chatwin.

  It was a bright day and he was sitting by the open window, staring vacantly out across the playing fields. The room was filled with the sweet smell of newly-cut grass, coming off the sun-warmed football pitch. The class was drowsy with warmth and the dullness of the lesson, which was on the subject of Language, Literature and the Representation of the Primitive. Miss Pierce paced up and down, reading from Golding’s The Inheritors, punctuating her reading with sharp, critical points that a few of the pupils were lazily noting, their enthusiasm for the dissection no match for their enjoyment of the book itself.

  The sudden, alien smell of musty woodland made Angela Harris look up sharply from her notes. She was sitting behind Jack and her first thought was that the school’s drains had flooded; but she caught the faint illumination around her friend and leaned forward sharply.

  ‘He’s shimmering!’ she hissed to the girl sitting next to her. ‘It’s happening again.’

  Instinctively, she glanced at the classroom clock. Ten minutes to three. She scrawled the time on her pad then again leaned close to Jack.

  Around the boy’s wavy brown hair, a ripple of strange light had formed. It was so thin it might have been a film of moisture, but Angela could see flashing greens and reds, and something white in that faint halo, moving left to right then back. There was the faintest sound of shouting, so distant it might have been a child playing across the fields, but it was coming from Jack Chatwin, who sat still and silent at his desk!

  The wildwood blew at her, and she breathed the other world, drawn to it, drawn to Jack through the almost ecstatic nature of her curiosity.

  Deborah had slipped from her chair and tip-toed to the front of the class, halting the intense reading from Golding, drawing Miss Pierce’s attention to the boy.

  ‘He’s shimmering.’

  ‘Are you sure? Then fetch Mr Keeble.’

  As Deborah went for the headmaster, the teacher opened the resources cupboard, where a video camera was set up and ready to run. She pulled the camera and its trolley into the room, focused it carefully on Jack in full close-up and set it recording.

  Around the silent, dreaming boy, the rest of the class had drawn back, shuffling on their chairs, delighted at the break in routine and fascinated by the odd phenomenon. Angela had reached out her hand and was trying to touch the shimmering. As she brushed Jack’s hair the boy moaned, then raised his voice in a cry that was more akin to pain than pleasure.

  ‘Move away from him, Angela,’ Miss Pierce said quietly, and the girl drew back her hand.

  ‘I was just seeing if I could feel it,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t want him disturbed.’

  ‘It’s very close,’ Angela murmured. ‘They’re very frightened. Several people. I can hear them shouting …’

  Miss Pierce frowned at that, but again insisted, ‘Move away for the moment.’

  The headteacher came quickly, quietly into the room and walked over to the boy, leaning down to stare at the film of light. He sniffed the air. He carried the reek of pipe-tobacco about him, but he still wrinkled his nose at the scent of rotting forest.

  ‘Has he said anything? Do we know where the hell he is now?’

  Miss Pierce was touching absorbent paper discs to the skin of Jack’s neck and cheeks, where the shimmering was most visible and moisture was forming. ‘Use the trigger word,’ she whispered, putting the discs into a sterile bottle.

  After a second, Keeble agreed. He spoke slowly, steadily. Tell me about the hunters. Jack? Tell me about the hunters.’

  ‘Greyface,’ Jack said. He was almost inaudible, the word, which he kept repeating, no more than a breath.

  ‘Tell me about the hunters. Jack? Tell me about the hunters.’

  ‘Greyface,’ Jack said, aloud this time. He became agitated, looking away from the window and into the class, a watery, frightened gaze that swept past teachers and pupils alike. ‘Greenface is lost. She’s sinking … in the river … too deep, too fast … Greyface swimming down for her. Hitting the rocks, bruising, bleeding. The stone beast is close. The bull is close. It’s so cold …’

  ‘Where are they, Jack? Can you tell me where they are?’

  ‘Running … hunters being hunted … so far to travel … Greenface is drowning …’

  ‘Is it our world, Jack?’

  ‘Not our world.’

  ‘Can you tell which world it is?’

  ‘Far away place. Very far away. But closer now. Running closer …’ He began to gasp for breath, half choking, hands flapping at the air. Around him, no one moved. The video camera whirred.

  A second later, before Keeble could continue to speak to him, or act, Jack flung himself to his feet with a howling cry, followed by a long, loud inhalation. He stood rigidly, eyes staring, his head tilted up. As he sucked in breath it was as if he had surfaced from water and was struggling again for life.

  The moment of drowning had passed. Greenface was alive. And Jack fell into the headteacher’s waiting arms, a limp figure still shuddering with the aftershock of the encounter.

  2

  Camera and tape-recorder running, his pulse connected to an oscillograph, Jack sat in the technician’s room of the physics lab. The headmaster leaned against one of the benches, Angela next to him, her notebook ready, her gaze intense and curious as she waited for the session to begin. Opposite Jack sat a psychologist from Exburgh’s General Hospital, a woman who was fascinated by the paranormal and who had agreed to be on call should the shimmering effect occur again. He was to call her Ruth. Jack was slightly intimidated by the fierceness of her blue eyes and the sharp authority in her voice, but she spoke reassuringly, now, calming him as she explained what she was doing, how she wished to proceed.

  It was not a lie-detector, she pointed out as she finished taping electrodes to his wrist and temples. She was simply looking to see where the memory of his encounter was sharpest, and where his own imagination might be filling in gaps in perceived detail.

  The chemical samples from his skin had already been passed to the hospital’s forensic section to see if there were traces of the sort of chemicals – terpenes, esters – that would be found in a dank wildwood.

  Jack was impatient to get on with the ‘debriefing’. It was nearly five, now, and he wanted to earn some money. His friend Simon and the others would be waiting outside; and his parents would want him home by seven. They’d already called to agree the session and for it to proceed without them. Neither could get away from work. Finally, Ruth said, ‘Now. I want you to describe what you saw, how you saw it, every detail that is familiar to you from this encounter. Don’t worry about repeating yourself. Just say it as you felt it, and saw it.

  ‘Begin now, please.’

  Angela looked over at him and smiled, giving him a supportive thumbs-up.

  They’re like humans, but they’re not human. The man is tall and very fast on his feet; his face is painted grey, his hair looks silver and he wears a thick, black headband with animal teeth stitched into it. He carries a heavy leather pack, and two long spears. He has a foul cloak made out of scalps and feathers, mostly black, some coppery, so that they gleam in the twilight. It’s a twilight world. The sun seems so big, the sky so red. It’s not always like that, I just don’t think they come close when the day is hottest. But I’ve seen blue sky, and the tall towers, but just in glimpses. In the dreams it’s always twilight.

  Greenface is tall too. Her face is covered in lines and ci
rcles of green marks, running up from her chin, over her mouth and fanning out on each side. Her eyes are really dark. Her hair is long and shining black. She ties it to a brooch on her shoulder when she’s running. Sometimes she ties it into strands with blue glass beads. She glitters with amber and green stones, very polished and shiny. She carries two long pipes which she uses to shoot darts when the strange-looking creatures attack them. She plays them too, and Greyface does a twirling dance with his eyes closed. The tunes aren’t very interesting. Sometimes, at the end of the twilight, she goes and crouches by rivers and lakes and watches the flocks of waterbirds. I think she’s crying.

  Greyface lopes through the woods like a wolf. He’s a good hunter. He only ever seems really afraid when he sees the tall, stone towers, or hears the creatures. They don’t have horses or carts or anything like that, just running all the time. Sometimes there are sounds like machines coming and going, a deep vibrating noise, and the running people are very wary.

  I don’t know who’s following them, who’s chasing them, but they’re running for their lives. They’re looking for a gate made of ivory, I think, and Greenface sometimes gets upset. She doesn’t think they’ll get there before the hunters hunt them down. Greyface keeps shouting at her, encouraging her to run. She finds paths and escape routes, but she’s very sad.

  There’s something else:

  I think they did something terrible. A long way away – very far away – in a city. They did something that means they can never go back. The people from the city are following them. It’s the city people, I think, who build the watching towers which frighten the runners.

  That’s just a feeling.

  I saw them really clearly this time. They were in a thick wood, very hot, very humid. There was something behind them, running on hindlegs, but so big it was getting caught in the undergrowth. There was a lot of briar with small, red flowers on it. Greyface was hacking his way through it with a big, stone blade with a heavy wooden handle.