Darkhenge

I fled in raven’s shape,

As a fast frog.

I ran from my chains with despair,

A roebuck in deep woods.

THE BOOK OF TALIESIN

“Well, something must have made it!” Clare Kavanagh folded her arms in fury. “Could a fox have got in here?”

“I don’t know!” Marcus looked cowed. “Do foxes dig?”

“Of course they do,” Jimmy muttered.

The blond woman stared around. “If it was coin hunters waving metal detectors, they’re wasting their time.”

“No one’s come over that fence, boss. And Max didn’t bark all night.”

“He went to the door though,” Marcus said quietly. “Remember? Made a sort of growl.”

Behind them, Rob pinned a new sheet to the drawing board, keeping his head down. No one took any notice of him; he wondered if they even realized he’d turned up this morning. Then he moved so he could see the hole too. “More like something came out than dug in,” he said quietly.

Clare gave him a look of disgust. Then she said, “Let’s get on. Switch the sprays off. We’ve wasted too much time already.”

It was Saturday, but they worked hard. When there was nothing left to plan, Rob got down in the henge and dug with them carefully around the dark timbers with a fine-pointed trowel. For hours he worked, absorbed in the delicate scraping of granules of soil, their infinite shades of browns and golds and ochers, all the earth colors folded and laid so finely on top of one another, each tiny layer that his trowel cut away a hundred years of time, of people living and dying, of wars and empires. Vetch had said time was a circle in the mind, but it was here too, lying dormant, packed hard in the stinking, drying, fly-buzzed remnants of the peat hollow. As he crouched and lay, sat and knelt, Rob felt the textures of the past grime his skin. There were clotted masses of fiber that he picked out and prized apart, finding minute leaves of long-dead plants and insects still perfect in the deoxygenated watery mass. He became absorbed in the work, just as he did with painting something with a very tiny paintbrush, his face close to the surface, cleaning the fissured edges of the timber posts, the ancient ridges smooth and hard as rock.

Around him the others worked, Jimmy with headphones on, Clare and Marcus talking occasionally in undertones, Max the Alsatian lying out in the field and lifting his head whenever a car purred up the lane.

By lunchtime, when Rob straightened wearily to aching knees, it was clear that the timbers were not isolated from one another. As the soil between them was removed it could be seen that one side of each was shaven; that they joined one another; made a wall, a black fence. Only in one place was there a gap, obviously the entrance, where Marcus was scraping. There had been no finds. No more bits of antler bone, no gold, no charcoal, nothing.

“There must be an object in the center.”

Rob looked around. Clare Kavanagh was standing at his elbow. Today her blond hair was dragged back in a ragged plait, her ill-fitting blue overalls worn through at the knees. As she stared out thoughtfully, he thought she looked older than he’d realized. Tiny crow’s-feet were starting to wrinkle her skin. She turned; Rob jerked his gaze away. But all she said was, “You look at things very closely, don’t you?”

He shrugged.

“So do I.” She turned back. “The central deposit is the key. The ditch and the timber fence were built around it, built tight, so no one could see in, or get in. Only the elite. The priests, warrior-kings, whoever.”

“The sorcerers,” Rob muttered.

She shrugged, absorbed. “Maybe.” Then as if the word triggered something, she said suddenly, “Who were those people I saw you with in Avebury yesterday?”

He froze. “Yesterday?”

“Yes. I thought you said you were going to some hospital.”

“I did. I was.” He sounded panic-stricken, he thought, so he pulled himself upright. “They were friends. They gave me a lift back.” And what business is it of yours? he wanted to add, but she was gazing at him now, a thoughtful scrutiny.

“I thought… There was a man in the front seat. Dark-haired. I thought I recognized him.”

“Vetch,” he said boldly.

She frowned. “Wrong name. Does he live around here?”

“I suppose so.”

“If it’s him…,” she said, almost to herself. Then she rounded. “Look, Rob, I can’t tell you who to see but I’m warning you, if people find out about this dig, then you’re the one I’m going to be blaming.”

“That’s not fair,” he snapped.

“Maybe, but Marcus and I go way back and he vouches for Jimmy.”

“Others know! That girl in the pub!”

“My students. They won’t cross me.” She stepped up to him. “Don’t you, either. This is big for me. Most archaeologists never ever in all their careers come across something as amazing as this. This time no one’s going to get in my way.”

She gave him a hard look and stepped back down into the central area. “Go and put the kettle on.”

In the dingy trailer, he filled the kettle and banged it on the stove in fury. She couldn’t speak to him like that! He didn’t need her stupid job and he couldn’t care less about her stupid career. Unable to find the matches, he slammed the drawer in disgust and leaned on the drain board, glaring out of the tiny window. Then he turned around.

First he closed the trailer door and slipped the catch. Next he went into the office. There was a desk with papers all over it, a finds tray with pieces of bone, a scatter of tools. Invoices and bills were pinned to notice boards. Near them was a hook and on it were keys.

Rob glanced out the window. No one had come through the metal fence. It struck him for a moment that the metal fence was doing the same job as the wooden timbers had done centuries ago: keeping the unwanted people from seeing the mysteries inside.

He turned back, and took down the keys.

The one for the gate was large, easy to find; he’d seen Marcus open up with it in the mornings. But if he took it, they’d know.

He put the key back with the others and opened a drawer. Papers. Pens. A box of clips, erasers, pencil stubs. A brown manila envelope with THURSTAN’S LOCKSMITHS. That shop was by the bus station in Swindon. He tipped the envelope up, and a key slid out.

It was the spare.

“Rob! Can you bring me some plastic bags?”

Jimmy had his head around the fence; instantly Rob shoved the key in his pocket, the envelope to the back of the drawer, and slid out into the kitchen. “No problem!” he yelled, grabbing the matches from the table and cracking one into blue flame. “And the tea’s nearly made.”

All afternoon the key seemed heavy in his pocket. When he managed to forget about it, it stuck in him as he knelt or stretched stiff legs. Clots of peat fell from his sleeves, trouser knees, from the silver foil Maria had put around his packet of sandwiches, from the handle of the chipped tea mug. His hands were black, his nails clogged. As his temper cooled, guilt clogged him too.

He began to wish he hadn’t taken it. Could he get it back without anyone seeing? Or maybe it would just be easier to tell Vetch he hadn’t been able to get it, he thought. But the poet had an uncanny way of knowing things. About Chloe, for instance.

Hour by hour, the soil level dropped. By four o’clock the timber fence was a meter deep and still they hadn’t found the bottom. Crouched in the heat, Rob smelled the enclosing rotting smell of peat; he pulled out a lump with his hands and it cracked open.

A small, gleaming beetle lay within, perfectly preserved.

He smiled, and touched it, and then almost crushed the thing with a convulsion of shock.

The beetle moved. It crawled onto his wrist and stood poised.

It uncreased small wings and flew away.

Rob looked around.

There were hundreds of them. He could see them now. They were crawling out of the buried henge, out of the heaps of soil in buckets and barrows. The air was alive with tiny whirrs and flashes of iridescent carapace, bronze, gold, green as shiny foil.

Like the bird, like whatever had made that hole, they were emerging.

“Do you think,” he said later to Father Mac, sitting in the presbytery garden picking soil off his hands, “that Chloe will ever wake up?”

The priest’s large sandaled feet crossed at the ankle. Lighting a cigarette, he flicked a glance at Rob. As usual, he showed no surprise. After a while he said, “It’s possible. At least things will change.” He shook the match out. “Chloe’s condition is a mystery. None of them understand it, even that specialist your mum flew in. It’s a freak situation.”

“That word again.”

“Word?”

“Freak.” He gave a sharp, painful laugh. “She’s preserved. Like the timbers in the henge. Not living, not dying.”

Father Mac said nothing for a moment. Then he leaned forward and blew smoke into the roses. “Feeling the strain, son?”

“Maybe.”

“There are two options, you know that. She wakes—and that gets less likely as the days go on. Or she deteriorates. Brain activity stops.”

“And they remove the feeding tube? Mum would never—”

“She may have to.”

“You say that?”

The priest gave a heavy shrug. “Rob, if the brain is dead then the time has come. The Church believes death should not be artificially withheld—you know that. As for Katie”—he frowned—“when—if—the time comes, she’ll do what’s right.”

Rob didn’t want to answer. It was as if they weren’t talking about a person, about cheeky, stroppy Chloe, sentimental over cats, bossy with her friends, who wouldn’t eat ice cream because it rotted your teeth, but spent a fortune on sweets. He fingered the key in his pocket, turning it over, until he realized what it was. Father Mac smoked silently. Around them the summer garden darkened, smelling of lavender, and of the candle on the table that the moths dipped into and singed themselves against until Father Mac reached out and snuffed it with his thick, strong fingers. “Get home to bed,” he growled. “Your mother needs you.”

Rob said, “I found Chloe’s diary.”

Mac was silent.

“She’d written this thing … about me. About me pinching one of her drawings and making fun of it. I’d forgotten all about it. She sounded really gutted.”

Mac looked out at the roses. Then he said, “Don’t get it out of proportion. Little girls of that age—”

“But I’d forgotten. What else have I forgotten?”

“You had arguments. It’s normal.”

He nodded. Unconvinced.

The downs were silent. As Rob cycled along the road into Avebury, there was no traffic, though the pub windows were lit. Under the moonlight the great stones stood in their extraordinary cumbersome stillness, vast gray shapes. Their outlines were strange against the early stars, revealing faces and sharp noses, frowning brows. He turned past the church, the tires of the bike skewing loud against dry loose stones, down the silent street lit by one faint lamp, along the high wall, around the corner and over the tiny gurgle of the Winterbourne, almost dry. Beneath the bridge a disturbed duck rustled in the weeds.

The lane to his house was very dark. On each side untrimmed hedges reared, walls of shadow. He rode more slowly. Then he stopped, balanced with one foot on each side of the tipped bike, his breath loud.

Someone was standing near the gate.

He could see only a dark figure leaning against an oak tree there. But he knew who it was.

“How did you find out where I live?” he breathed.

Vetch straightened. His face was a mask of shadow and green glimmer. “As I told you, one of the poet’s gifts. One of the three hot splashes of the Cauldron.” He held up his right hand and turned it over; Rob saw that the back was burned: three fearsome scars lacerated the white skin. “Knowledge costs,” Vetch said quietly. “As you’re finding out.”

He tipped his head, looking at Rob. “You’ve got the key.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes. Look—”

“Did she threaten you?” Rob nodded. “That’s because she feels threatened. She senses me out here, waiting.” For a moment he seemed almost sad; his smile barely there. “Knowledge has to be stolen, Rob. Snatched from under the eyes of the wise, from the Muse’s Cauldron, as Prometheus stole fire from the gods. They punished him. For eons his guts were torn out by an eagle. You know something about that.”

Rob flipped the bike pedal up and rode past him, into the gateway. “I’ve changed my mind,” he said firmly. “I’m not getting involved. I want it all to stop.”

“It won’t stop.” Vetch came up behind him. “Whatever you or I do, the henge is emerging. But it’s a chance. A gateway.” Rob heard his voice alter; the calmness went out of it. “What is it, Rob, you want most in all the world?”

“You know what.” Rob turned.

Vetch nodded. The starlight lit the star mark on his brow, and it shone, silver bright. “Then bring the key, at midnight. Because for me the henge leads home. And for you, it’s the way to the place where Chloe is.”

Rob’s indrawn breath almost choked him. “You’re crazy,” he whispered.

But halfway up the stairs he was stopped by a jolt of memory that went through him like pain, so that he shivered and gasped out loud.

He had remembered where he had seen Clare Kavanagh before.

The hawk, the dog, the otter, the woman.

Hunting Vetch into the circle.