Humpty's bones

15. Friday Night: 9.30

Eden ran in search of the First Man, the primeval creature, who might be the last of his kind. In her hand she held the two pieces of skull. A welcome gift. Then she’d learn wisdom from the one whom the Romans called Theopolis, the city of the gods. At that instant a shadow sped through the garden gate in the direction of the dyke. The water gleamed there in the deep, straight channel like liquid metal. The colour of lead. The essence of a dull reality, waiting to be transmuted by alchemy into something higher and ineffably golden. The First Man could work a unique change on the body. He’d transform a humanity limited by its mortality and restricted intellect into men and women with minds as precious as gold.

Mr Hezzle pursued her. He shouted warnings as she raced along the side of the water-filled dyke. Yet a giddy elation gripped Eden. She couldn’t stop chasing that swift figure if she’d tried. Thoughts of miracles to come intoxicated. Marvellous possibilities whirled through her head. Excitement made her blaze within. Stars burned in her blood; anything was possible in the next five minutes. Anything. Anything. Anything…

… Eden glimpsed fish gliding through the water of the dyke. Her mind appeared to swim like those creatures through a different medium altogether. The First Father had begun to exert his own particular magic. She remembered Mr Hezzle claiming that the First Father could reach into your head. That he could pipe his own memories, his own dreams, directly into one’s unconscious mind. The water channel ran away into the distance, straight as an airport runway. Twenty feet wide, ten feet deep. Centuries ago it had been etched deep into the face of this land to drain swamp water.

‘Eden, stop!’ Mr Hezzle cried.

But she couldn’t stop. Waves of emotion rolled through her. The urge to run as fast as she could after the shadow had her in a grip so muscular she gasped with something that merged pain with ecstasy. Her thigh muscles ached, pains shot through her feet, but there was a sweetness to it. This sweet pain felt so good after confinement in her aunt’s house. This is good; this is beautiful; this is release.

Ahead, the shadow figure effortlessly sped through lush grass. It enticed her to an extraordinary destination; she knew that. Thunder clouted her ears. It shook the earth. Pregnant-looking clouds: swollen, huge, overwhelming, soon to break with waters unimaginable… how they’d sweep this flat land. A realm of fields, ditches, fences, solitary farmsteads, lonely trees, and, in the distance, the church ruin: clumps of masonry formed hunched goblin forms in the centre of the graveyard.

Eden ran faster, terrified lest the mysterious figure should slip away. If only I could see you properly… You reached out to me. You filled my mind with new worlds of thought. Now I want to look into your face… Yet the gloom of the impending storm still hid him from her. He was shadow — that’s all. Shadow, movement, a distant, half-glimpsed figure. ‘Wait… please wait… I’ve got something for you… ’ She held up the sections of skull. The thick, bony bulge of the brow above an eye socket pressed against the sensitive skin of her palm. ‘Stop.’

Emotion rolled through her with same power of the thunder now pounding the earth into submission. Longing, hope, yearning, excitement, terror, pain, exhaustion, exhilaration — each one vied for supremacy within her; each one triumphing for domination of her soul before being usurped in a near instant. Hope, terror, longing, dread, elation: they pulsed. The flow of sensations made her dizzy. At times she wondered if she’d fallen into a strange kind of sleep as she ran. The dimensions of the world were shifting. Grass blades swelled beneath her running feet. They expanded until they were as thick and as green as cucumbers. The clouds seemed to reach down to run cold fingers through her hair; she felt their icy touch on her scalp. The figure in front of her grew elongated… now it seemed a hundred feet tall. Odd lights burned in its limbs. As if within that body it contained stars won from the heavens. Fragments of memory skittered through her. For a moment, it seemed none of this had ever happened. Eden Page rode the train again, the smell of the fire at home still in her nostrils. When could the builder start work? Would the insurance payout cover the cost of the entire kitchen? The turbaned man in the carriage solemnly intoned, You should always respect omens… beware, beware, beware… Then she was up to her shoulders in the pit in her aunt’s garden. Scooping out bowls of mud. She stood in the grave of one of those creatures. Molecules of decayed flesh, mixed with fertile mud, stuck to her bare hands. Strong odours of burning, wet soil, damp grass, old wine… And that’s when the alchemy occurred. Nothing less than revelation blazed through the fibres of her being. Her old life, the job in the student lettings office, the apartment in a drab quarter of town, the sequence of fleeting love affairs, and the unfulfilling routines of the past were all meaningless. Quite frankly — all of it bloody pointless. Being here at this moment in time — that’s what was important. Because being here in this muddy stretch of rural England went beyond the profound, the monumental and the momentous. Simply, she was poised to be present at the birth of a new world. A time as pivotal as when a primordial ape-creature struck two stones together to make fire. Or uttered the first word of rational speech.

Eden Page vaulted over a fence. The water in the dyke was rising up. Soon it would overflow. Would those lead-hued waters engulf her? Was her destiny to drown here? No she mustn’t let that happen. Already her life had become woven with that of the individual she now so desperately followed.

Mr Hezzle’s words came to her from when he spoke about the First Man in the kitchen just minutes ago: ‘Yet he has this way of making his voice appear from other things… like from those bones. Sometimes when he calls, it comes out of the fields, out of the air, or even out of a storm like this.’

These waves of emotion… the way the world around her had become distorted… how grass stems became plump and bloated… how far off things became near: the ruined church lay a mile away yet she saw its ruins suddenly magnified; the mad profusion of ivy that penetrated cracks in the stones; she saw graves… the hardened soil split open with the ease of breaking apart freshly baked pies… oh, but what kind of fruit lay inside… what fillings… what flavours? Did the First Man really feed those notions into her head? Was he truly responsible for changing how she perceived the world? Had he reached out a mysterious, unseen hand and touched her soul? Eden gasped — a sense of wonder that merged with utter terror erupted inside of her.

Eden didn’t realise when it first happened but she’d fallen. She lay sprawling amongst thick grass that swarmed over her like vines. Her heart pounded. The water in the dyke rose. In that dark liquidity were shapes. Panting, she stared at what drifted there by the dozen. They were pear-shaped vessels… no, it’s more than that… they were like inflated balloons. Completely transparent. A liquid as black as gloss paint filled those sacs. Through the membrane she glimpsed moving things. I’ve seen those before. Back when I had that attack of vertigo in the excavation pit. Even then the First Man must have been showing me visions of the future. He needs me…

And when she looked, from where she lay at the edge of the watercourse, looked while the storm winds tore and rippled the grass, looked as her mind spun wildly on twin streams of horror and fascination, she saw what moved and twisted and pulsated and lived inside the tightly stretched membrane. Inside the transparent eggs, each the size of a beach ball, were figures. The glossy, black liquid washed over the naked bodies, but she discerned baby-like forms, with small arms and legs, yet possessing heads with adult faces. From smeared faces pairs of bright, intelligent eyes gazed through the membrane at her. The current in the dyke carried the shapes downstream. More rose to the surface to present their homunculus cargo to the light of that stormy day before slipping away. The urge gripped her to leap into the water to retrieve those inflated balloons. In her mind’s eye, she saw herself swimming to the bank with one, then tearing open the sac — the black liquid would gush out over her hands — that done, she’d draw out the tiny figure, wipe the black stuff from its face with handfuls of grass then -

‘Miss!’

An iron grip prevented her from leaping into the dyke. Dazed, she turned to see the man there. His prominent nose almost touched hers as he eased her from the water’s edge.

‘Don’t go in. The banks are too steep. You’d never climb out again.’

‘But I’ve got to save them… they’re being washed away… ’

‘Save what, Miss?’ Mr Hezzle kept a grip on her arm.

‘The First Man must have made them… they’re like babies, but have the faces of fully grown adults… ’

‘Remember, what I told you, Miss? Back at the house? About what he can do? He has strange thoughts. Somehow he makes them come out of objects; for instance, sometimes it’s from out of a tree, or the ruins of that church over there. It can seem as if the trees or the walls talk to you, or they look like other things; it can make you feel as if your heart will burst with excitement. Or terror.’

‘I saw them. Little men in transparent bags with something like black oil; as if they were in wombs… they floated down that… ’ She regarded the dyke. ‘They were there.’

Water reflected a grey sky. The stream tugged at strands of green weed; nothing else.

‘He made me see them?’ she asked.

‘He does that to others, too. And me. I heard a call come from your aunt’s house… from those bones… but they’re dead like any bones found in the earth. There’s nothing special about them, any more than the bones of a dead king or a scientist or an artist are any more special than the bones inside us both. But he made me hear the bones call my name. I lay awake at night… all the time I could hear them crying. It gets so you’re excited by the sound — as well as scared.’

She began walking. The shadow figure was far away now. ‘I want to talk to him.’

‘No.’

‘But we’ll lose him.’

Mr Hezzle sighed. ‘You’re a brave one, I’ll give you that. You’ve got guts. Nearly everyone I’ve ever seen, who got anywhere near him, turned and fled. They couldn’t cope with his effect on them. They panicked. I’ve seen grown men jump into that dyke just to get away. More than one poor wretch has drowned doing that.’

‘I’m not frightened of him,’ Eden said with conviction. ‘I’ve been reading about the First Man. What’s more, he’s reached out to me. Mind to mind. Just as you say he can. I figured out what he is. The Gift will transform our lives.’

‘I was right. You are intelligent. But you don’t know everything about him.’

‘He belongs to a different race of humans?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s the last of his kind?’

‘That, too.’ Mr Hezzle released her arm as he realised she’d regained her senses.

‘So, I need to talk to him.’

‘He won’t talk, Miss. He can’t.’

This gave her pause. ‘Why?’

‘Eighteen hundred years ago: there were just two of the First Men left. Brothers. That’s the elder of the pair.’ He nodded at the part-burned bone in her hand. ‘The younger brother knew he’d be the last one. He knew other things, too… ’ Raindrops hit the grass. ‘Miss, we’re going to get soaked if we stand out here. Come back to your aunt’s house. I’ll explain there.’

‘No. Tell me now.’

He shrugged. ‘If that’s what you wish.’ Thunder rumbled. Across the fields a blue vein of lightning burned bright against black cloud. ‘But you’ll get only the basics of it. It’s not safe to be outdoors. When the land is flat like it is here it turns people into targets for lighting. Not many trees, you see.’

She cast yearning eyes along the path; the shadow figure had gone. Eden ached to meet him. ‘The figure we saw today, was that the younger brother?’

‘That it is. Eighteen centuries ago, both knew that their time was nearly up. They lived in a thatched hut just where Dog Star House is now. Inside their bodies was the seed that would transform us Homo sapiens, into a species that would be as wise as them. The things they could do. They could heal the sick. They drained marshes. They knew how to farm the land better than anyone. And to smelt new kinds of metals that never rusted.’

‘What else?’

Lightning flashed closer, and a crack of thunder broke overhead. ‘I said that you’d get the short history. You might not fear this kind of weather.’ He turned up his collar. ‘I do. See that? Lying in the field over there?’ He nodded at a pale blob in a far-off meadow. ‘A cow. Just this minute she got struck by lightning. She’ll have been dead before she hit the muck.’ Rain fell harder. ‘Come back to the house, miss.’

‘No.’

‘Don’t think of trying to find him. You won’t. Unless he wants to be found, then you’ll wish you hadn’t.’

‘Something happened to him, didn’t it?’

He nodded. ‘This is it. The short version. Then I’m going whether you come or not. The two brothers were the last of their species. They lived long lives. Longer than any of us. But then the older of the brothers started to fail. He might have been a hundred years old or a thousand years old. Nobody really knew. So he decided his younger brother must be the keeper of the Gift. They worked together to change the brother’s biology. Whether it was through thought, or by drugs they concocted, nobody knows. To all intents, however, he became immortal. He’d live for as long as it took for human beings to understand his teachings and for him to father enough children to start a new race of human beings.’ He shuddered as the storm grew closer. ‘You know, we might assume that if the body doesn’t age the mind wouldn’t age with it. But when the brother died, and my ancestors buried him, the last of the First Men suffered the solitude. He spoke to us, but didn’t relate to us in the same way as he could with his brother. So although his body never aged, his mind did. Ultimately, he was flesh and blood. Imagine his life: He’d find love with a woman; there were children. I’m one of the descendents. Of course, he would live forever. The human woman inevitably grew old and died. He took other wives. But each time, of course, they aged… they died… they were mortal. The First Man grieved. It reached a point where he couldn’t bring himself to make friends or to take another wife. Although his children were long-lived eventually sheer old age took them. He and only he was immortal. For some reason, he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, repeat the process on others that gave him such longevity. He didn’t age. He didn’t get ill. Generations in this village came and went; he retreated from life. How long it took I don’t know. It might have been a thousand years after he watched the first Romans approach his house and recognise him for what he was, but at last his mind gave out.’ He shrugged. ‘My grandmother said even though his body couldn’t die of grief his mind did. The thinking part of him, the part that reasoned, and remembered, and knew who he was, just evaporated. It left behind a brain with animal instincts only. As far as I know, he hasn’t talked to anyone in generations, or even uttered a single word.’ Mr Hezzle sadly shook his head. ‘See that horse in the field over there? Now the First Man is as intelligent as him. Like a beast he gets hungry, gets tired, gets angry — that’s all. Are you sure you won’t go back home now, Miss? We’ll catch our deaths.’

‘But where does he live? Somebody cares for him, surely?’

‘He keeps to the fields, sleeps in ditches; often he can’t be found at all. There are some of us who think he goes underground into tunnels. We don’t know where, though. Nobody’s found so much as a cave round here.’

‘How many know about the First Man?’

‘Apart from one or two old folks in the village just us — the Hezzles.’

‘So you’re his keeper?’

‘If you want to put it like that. Miss, please go home. The lightning’s getting closer. You don’t know how dangerous it is to be exposed like this.’ As if to illustrate the point, the storm delivered a lightning bolt that shattered a tree at the other side of the dyke. The branches burst into flame.

‘So what now? If you know the secret of the Gift. When are you going to share it with humanity?’

‘I’m sorry, Miss. I can’t stay here. It’s not just me I’m frightened for. I’m probably the only one who can stop him breaking into the world out there.’ Mr Hezzle flung his arm out as if to encompass Britain’s cities, and beyond. ‘He doesn’t know right from wrong anymore. When he gets angry he hurts people.’

‘Then you should tell the world about him. He’ll help us all become better people.’

However, the old man turned and hurried in the direction of Dog Star House. He called back, ‘Please. It’s not safe. The storm’s right on top of us.’

They moved quickly along the bank. Heavy rain drops pounded at their heads. The once placid surface of the dyke shivered as rain struck it. More than once Eden expected to see those sacs floating there that contained the tiny men and women, with bright watchful eyes. Not that there was anything now; had she imagined them? Through veils of rain the house emerged.

Mr Hezzle slowed. ‘Is that smoke?’

Eden paused. No doubt about it. Smoke streamed from the roof. ‘Mr Hezzle, did you see lightning strike the house?’

‘No, but it’s possible.’ He stared as a flickering yellow glow manifested itself through a window. ‘Can you see your family?’

‘They must still be inside the house!’

They started to run along the bank of the dyke, and became aware of another sound. A rushing noise; a huge hissing — something that had the power to make the thunder seem small in comparison.

Mr Hezzle had just had time to shout, ‘He’s coming! He knows the bones are in the house! He’s seen they’re going to be burnt again!’

Eden looked back as a terrific blast of air struck them. A figure sped toward her; a bewildering tumult of shadowy limbs; a sense of a solid object moving so fast it couldn’t properly be seen. Only eyes. They blazed like the headlamps on a car. A suggestion of utter rage pierced her brain. Then the air it drove before itself with such force intensified to the point it bowled her through the long grass, as if she was nothing more than a doll. Then the figure was past them and gone.

Dragging herself to her feet, she dashed toward the house. ‘Come on, Mr Hezzle. I need you!’ The man appeared astonished by her resilience, yet he scrambled to his feet to run after her. A man of one hundred shouldn’t be able to run that fast, heck he shouldn’t be able to run at all, she told herself, but inside Mr Hezzle, isn’t there human blood mixed with that of the First Man?

They reached the garden gate. Mr Hezzle effortlessly maintained the same punishing pace as Eden. By now, smoke bled through the roof tiles of the house. Grey fumes vied with the rain for the control of the airspace.

Once through the gate into the garden, Eden saw that the back door had been ripped from its hinges and was resting at the far side of the lawn. He — the primordial hominid, the First Man, would-be begetter of a new race — had torn away the door, then flung it carelessly behind him.

What she said next was utterly unnecessary, but somehow utterly essential to voice: ‘He’s got inside!’

‘No, Miss, let me go first.’

His plea went unheeded as she sped through the raw, gaping wound of the doorway, its torn frame hanging in pieces; even the surrounding brickwork had been shattered by the force of entry.

‘It’s me, Eden Page,’ she shouted as she moved through the kitchen. ‘I’m here. Don’t worry. You’re safe.’ I’m not talking to Heather and Curtis, she thought in surprise. I’m talking to him.

She found herself engulfed in thick smoke, her arms sweeping before her, as she felt a route through the burning building. After the coldness of the rain the hot air against her face became searing. Its heat dried her clothes in seconds. In the hallway mirror she glimpsed herself through roiling fumes. Her hair steamed. Yet her eyes were bright, alive, eager — disconcertingly eager.

‘Don’t be afraid. I’m here to help you.’

She pushed open the living-room door. There a figure pounced on her.

In the smoke filled room all she could make out were two hands that gripped her throat. Then a voice.

A familiar voice: ‘I should have done this days ago! I’m burning the bloody bones! Did you hear, you idiot girl? Humpty’s bones — they’re going up in smoke!’

‘Curtis. You’ve got to get out.’

Another hand reached up from the floor to grip her thigh. ‘Curtis has set fire to the house.’ Heather couldn’t manage to rise from the living room floor. She coughed, desperately trying to draw air in the smoke-filled room. ‘He threatened to do it before… I warned you not to frighten him.’

‘Curtis. Let me take Heather outside. The smoke’s killing her.’

‘No, we’re staying… we’re staying. We’re going to watch those blasted bones turn to ash.’

There was a thud from elsewhere in the house and his face changed. ‘Where is it? I know it got inside.’

Mr Hezzle stood in the doorway trying to catch his breath, the thick smoke was choking him. ‘He’s in the room with the bones. He’s trying to save them.’

‘Get it out!’ screamed Curtis. ‘Get it out of my home!’

He lunged at Mr Hezzle, pushing him down. Disorientated by terror and smoke he grabbed the ornate walking stick from the stand in the hall then rushed down to corridor to the lab where the bones were kept — and the smoke was thickest. For one panic-driven moment he made one last attempt to tackle the figure that had broken into his house. He shouted hoarsely and waved the stick through the smoke. But his fragile courage only lasted a split-second. With a high pitched shout his nerve broke. He turned and blundered down the corridor, away from the lab. Eden tried to stop Curtis from hurting himself as he crashed against the walls, sending pictures flying and ornaments crashing to the floor in his desperation to escape.

‘No! No! Let go of me!’ Sweat poured down his face. His eyes blazed in pure fear. ‘Don’t let it touch me. For God’s sake! Let go.’ He pushed by, then scrambled out of the house, screeching like an injured pig.

‘Mr Hezzle.’ Eden made her way to where the man was slumped. She helped him up. ‘Get my aunt out of here. The smoke’s killing her.’

He seemed uncertain on his feet, so Eden went into the living-room, pulled her aunt upright, then made sure the pair supported each other as they moved unsteadily toward the back door.

Mr Hezzle coughed, his eyes were streaming; nevertheless, he called back, ‘Miss? Where are you going?’

‘I’m going to help him save the bones.’

He gave her a look that said all too clearly: Please don’t. Save yourself. But he knew the strength of her spirit now.