This was the one part of his job that Sykes hated: when the people up top said the road goes here, and the people down here said oh no it doesn’t, not in our back garden! Puffed up, awkward, defiant little bastards! But at the same time Sykes could sympathize with them also, even though they were making his job as unpleasant as they possibly could. And that was yet another reason why the work hadn’t gone too well this morning.
Today it had been a sit-in, when a good dozen of the locals had appeared from the wood at the end of Lovers’ Lane, bringing lightweight fold-down garden chairs with them to erect across the road. And there they’d sat with their placards and sandwiches on the new stretch of tarmac, heckling the road gang as they toiled and sweated into their dark-stained vests and tried to build a bloody road which wasn’t wanted. And which didn’t seem to want to be built! They’d stayed from maybe quarter-past nine to a minute short of eleven, then got up and like a gaggle of lemmings waddled back to the village again. Their ‘good deed’ for the day—Goddam!
Christ, what a day! For right after that…big trouble, mechanical trouble! Or rather an obstruction which had caused mechanical trouble. Not the more or less passive, placard-waving obstruction of people—which was bad enough—but a rather more physical, much more tangible obstruction. Namely, a bloody great boulder!
The first they’d known of it was when the bulldozer hit it while lifting turf and muck in a wide swath two feet deep. Until then there had been only the usual stony debris—small, rounded pebbles and the occasional blunt slab of scarred rock, nothing out of the ordinary for these parts—and Sykes hadn’t been expecting anything quite this big. The surveyors had been across here, hammering in their long iron spikes and testing the ground, but they’d somehow missed this thing. Black granite by its looks, it had stopped the dozer dead in its tracks and given Gavin McGovern a fair old shaking! But at least the blade had cleared the sod and clay off the top of the thing. Like the dome of a veined, bald, old head it had looked, sticking up there in the middle of the projected strip.
“See if you can dig the blade under it,” Sykes had bawled up at Gavin through clouds of blue exhaust fumes and the clatter of the engine. “Try to lever the bastard up, or split it. We have to get down a good forty or fifty inches just here.”
Taking it personally—and with something less than an hour to go, eager to get finished now—Gavin had dragged his sleeve across his brown, perspiration-shiny brow and grimaced. Then, tilting his helmet back on his head, he’d slammed the blade of his machine deep into the earth half a dozen times until he could feel it biting against the unseen curve of the boulder. Then he’d gunned the motor, let out the clutch, shoved, and lifted all in one fluid movement. Or at least in a movement that should have been fluid. For instead of finding purchase the blade had ridden up, splitting turf and topsoil as it slid over the fairly smooth surface of the stone; the dozer had lurched forward, slewing round when the blade finally snagged on a rougher part of the surface; the offside caterpillar had parted in a shriek of hot, tortured metal.
Then Gavin had shut her off, jumped down, and stared disbelievingly at his grazed and bleeding forearm where it had scraped across the iron frame of the cab. “Damn—damn!” he’d shouted then, hurling his safety helmet at the freshly turned earth and kicking the dozer’s broken track.
“Easy, Gavin,” Sykes had gone up to him. “It’s not your fault, and it’s not the machine’s. It’s mine, if anybody’s. I had no idea there was anything this big here. And by the look of it this is only the tip of the iceberg.”
But Gavin wasn’t listening; he’d gone down on one knee and was examining part of the boulder’s surface where the blade had done a job of clearing it off. He was frowning, peering hard, breaking away small scabs of loose dirt and tracing lines or grooves with his strong, blunt fingers. The runic symbols were faint but the carved picture was more clearly visible. There were other pictures, too, with only their edges showing as yet, mainly hidden under the curve of the boulder. The ganger got down beside Gavin and assisted him, and slowly the carvings took on clearer definition.
Sykes was frowning, too, now. What the Hell? A floral design of some sort? Very old, no doubt about it. Archaic? Prehistoric?
Unable as yet to make anything decisive of the pictures on the stone, they cleared away more dirt. But then Sykes stared harder, slowly shook his head, and began to grin. The grin spread until it almost split his face ear to ear. Perhaps not prehistoric after all. More like the work of some dirty-minded local kid. And not a bad artist, at that!
The lines of the main picture were primitive but clinically correct, however exaggerated. And its subject was completely unmistakable. Gavin McGovern continued to stare at it, and his bottom jaw had fallen open. Finally, glancing at Sykes out of the corner of his eye, he grunted: “Old, do you think?”
Sykes started to answer, then shut his mouth and stood up. He thought fast, scuffed some of the dirt back with his booted foot, bent to lean a large, flat flake of stone against the picture, mainly covering it from view. Sweat trickled down his back and made it itch under his wringing shirt. Made it itch like the devil, and the rest of his body with it. The boulder seemed hot as Hell, reflecting the blazing midday sunlight.
And “Old?” the ganger finally answered. “You mean, like ancient? Naw, I shouldn’t think so…Hey, and Gavin, son—if I were you, I wouldn’t go mentioning this to anyone. You know what I mean?”
Gavin looked up, still frowning. “No,” he shook his head, “what do you mean?”
“What?” said Sykes. “You mean to say you can’t see it? Why, only let this get out and there’ll be people coming from all over the place to see it! Another bloody Stonehenge, it’ll be! And what price your Athelsford then, eh? Flooded, the place would be, with all sorts of human debris come to see the famous dirty caveman pictures! You want that, do you?”
No, that was the last thing Gavin wanted. “I see what you mean,” he said, slowly. “Also, it would slow you down, right? They’d stop you running your road through here.”
“That, too, possibly,” Sykes answered. “For a time, anyway. But just think about it. What would you rather have: a new road pure and simple—or a thousand yobs a day tramping through Athelsford and up Lovers’ Lane to ogle this little lot, eh?”
That was something Gavin didn’t have to think about for very long. It would do business at The Old Stage a power of good, true, but then there was Eileen. Pretty soon they’d be coming to ogle her, too. “So what’s next?” he said.
“You leave that to me,” Sykes told him. “And just take my word for it that this time tomorrow this little beauty will be so much rubble, OK?”
Gavin nodded; he knew that the ganger was hot stuff with a drill and a couple of pounds of explosive. “If you say so,” he spat into the dust and dirt. “Anyway, I don’t much care for the looks of the damned thing!” He scratched furiously at his forearm where his graze was already starting to scab over. “It’s not right, this dirty old thing. Sort of makes me hot and…itchy!”
“Itchy, yeah,” Sykes agreed. And he wondered what sort of mood his wife, Jennie, would be in tonight. If this hot summer sun had worked on her the way it was beginning to work on him, well tonight could get to be pretty interesting. Which would make a welcome change!
Deep, dark, and much disturbed now, old Chylos had felt unaccustomed tremors vibrating through his fossilized bones. The stamping of a thousand warriors on the march, roaring their songs of red death? Aye, perhaps. And:
“Invaders!” Chylos breathed the word, without speaking, and indeed without breathing.
“No,” Hengit of the Far Forest tribe contradicted him. “The mammoths are stampeding, the earth is sinking, trees are being felled. Any of these things, but no invaders. Is that all you dream about, old man? Why can’t you simply lie still and sleep like the dead thing you are?”
“And even if there were invaders,” the revenant of a female voice now joined in, Alaze of the Shrub Hill folk, “
would you really expect a man of the Far Forest tribe to come to arms? They are notorious cowards! Better you call on me, Chylos, a woman to rise up against these invaders—if there really were invaders, which there are not.”
Chylos listened hard—to the earth, the sky, the distant sea—but no longer heard the thundering of booted feet, nor warcries going up into the air, nor ships with muffled oars creeping and creaking in the mist. And so he sighed and said: “Perhaps you are right—but nevertheless we should be ready! I, at least, am ready!”
And: “Old fool!” Hengit whispered of Chylos into the dirt and the dark.
And: “Coward!” Alaze was scathing of Hengit where all three lay broken, under the luststone…
7:15 p.m.
The road gang had knocked off more than two hours ago and the light was only just beginning to fade a little. An hour and a half to go yet to the summer’s balmy darkness, when the young people would wander hand in hand, and occasionally pause mouth to mouth, in Lovers’ Lane. Or perhaps not until later, for tonight there was to be dancing at The Barn. And for now…all should be peace and quiet out here in the fields, where the luststone raised its veined dome of a head through the broken soil. All should be quiet—but was not.
“Levver!” shouted King above the roar of the bikes, his voice full of scorn. “What a bleedin’ player you turned out to be! What the ’ell do you call this, then?”
“The end o’ the bleedin’ road,” one of the other bikers shouted. “That’s where!”
“Is it ever!” cried someone else.
Leather grinned sheepishly and pushed his Nazi-style crash-helmet to the back of his head. “So I come the wrong way, di’n I? ’Ell’s teef, the sign said bleedin’ Affelsford, dinnit?”
“Yers,” King shouted. “Also no entry an’ works in pro-bleedin’-gress! ’Ere, switch off, you lot, I can’t ’ear meself fink!”
As the engines of the six machines clattered to a halt, King got off his bike and stretched, stamping his feet. His real name was Kevin; but as leader of a chapter of Hell’s Angels, who needed a name like that? A crude crown was traced in lead studs on the back of his leather jacket and a golden sovereign glittered where it dangled from his left earlobe. No more than twenty-five or -six years of age, King kept his head clean-shaven under a silver helmet painted with black eye-sockets and fretted nostrils to resemble a skull. He was hard as they come, was King, and the rest of them knew it.
“That’s the place I cased over there,” said Leather, pointing. He had jumped up onto the dome of a huge boulder, the luststone, to spy out the land. “See the steeple there? That’s Affelsford—and Comrades, does it have some crumpet!”
“Well, jolly dee!” said King. “Wot we supposed to do, then? Ride across the bleedin’ fields? Come on, Levver my son—you was the one rode out here and onced it over. ’Ow do we bleedin’ get there?” The rest of the Angels sniggered.
Leather grinned. “We goes up the motorway a few ’undred yards an’ spins off at the next turnin’, that’s all. I jus’ made a simple mistake, di’n I.”
“Yers,” said King, relieving himself loudly against the luststone. “Well, let’s not make no more, eh? I gets choked off pissin’ about an’ wastin’ valuable time.”
By now the others had dismounted and stood ringed around the dome of the boulder. They stretched their legs and lit ‘funny’ cigarettes. “That’s right,” said King, “light up. Let’s have a break before we go in.”
“Best not leave it too late,” said Leather. “Once the mood is on me I likes to get it off…”
“One copper, you said,” King reminded him, drawing deeply on a poorly constructed smoke. “Only one bluebottle in the whole place?”
“S’right,” said Leather. “An’ ’e’s at the other end of town. We can wreck the place, ’ave our fun wiv the girlies, be out again before ’e knows we was ever in!”
“’Ere,” said one of the others. “These birds is the real fing, eh, Levver?”
Leather grinned crookedly and nodded. “Built for it,” he answered. “Gawd, it’s ripe, is Affelsford.”
The gang guffawed, then quietened as a dumpy figure approached from the construction shack. It was one of Sykes’s men, doing night-watchman to bolster his wages. “What’s all this?” he grunted, coming up to them.
“Unmarried muvvers’ convention,” said King. “Wot’s it look like?” The others laughed, willing to make a joke of it and let it be; but Leather jumped down from the boulder and stepped forward. He was eager to get things started, tingling—even itchy—with his need for violence.
“Wot’s it ter you, baldy?” he snarled, pushing the little man in the chest and sending him staggering.
Baldy Dawson was one of Sykes’s drivers and didn’t have a lot of muscle. He did have common sense, however, and could see that things might easily get out of hand. “Before you start any rough stuff,” he answered, backing away, “I better tell you I took your bike numbers and phoned ’em through to the office in Portsmouth.” He had done no such thing, but it was a good bluff. “Any trouble—my boss’ll know who did it.”
Leather grabbed him by the front of his sweat-damp shirt. “You little—”
“Let it be,” said King. “’E’s only doin’ ’is job. Besides, ’e ’as an ’ead jus’ like mine!” He laughed.
“Wot?” Leather was astonished.
“Why spoil fings?” King took the other’s arm. “Now listen, Levver me lad—all you’ve done so far is bog everyfing up, right? So let’s bugger off into bleedin’ Affelsford an’ ’ave ourselves some fun! You want to see some blood—OK, me too—but for Chrissakes, let’s get somefing for our money, right?”
They got back on their bikes and roared off, leaving Baldy Dawson in a slowly settling cloud of dust and exhaust fumes. “Young bastards!” He scratched his naked dome. “Trouble for someone before the night’s out, I’ll wager.”
Then, crisis averted, he returned to the shack and his well-thumbed copy of Playboy…
Four
“This time,” said Chylos, with some urgency, “I cannot be mistaken.”
The two buried with him groaned—but before they could comment:
“Are you deaf, blind—have you no feelings?” he scorned. “No, it’s simply that you do not have my magic!”
“It’s your ‘magic’ that put us here!” finally Hengit answered his charges. “Chylos, we don’t need your magic!”
“But the tribes do,” said Chylos. “Now more than ever!”
“Tribes?” this time it was Alaze who spoke. “The tribes were scattered, gone, blown to the four winds many lifetimes agone. What tribes do you speak of, old man?”
“The children of the tribes, then!” he blustered. “Their children’s children! What does it matter? They are the same people! They are of our blood! And I have dreamed a dream…”
“That again?” said Hengit. “That dream of yours, all these thousands of years old?”
“Not the old dream,” Chylos denied, “but a new one! Just now, lying here, I dreamed it! Oh, it was not unlike the old one, but it was vivid, fresh, new! And I cannot be mistaken.”
And now the two lying there with him were silent, for they too had felt, sensed, something. And finally: “What did you see…in this dream?” Alaze was at least curious.
“I saw them as before,” said Chylos, “with flashing spokes in the wheels of their battle-chairs; except the wheels were not set side by side but fore and aft! And helmets upon their heads, some with horns! They wore shirts of leather picked our in fearsome designs, monstrous runes; sharp knives in their belts, aye, and flails—and blood in their eyes! Invaders—I cannot be mistaken!”
And Hengit and Alaze shuddered a little in their stony bones, for Chylos had inspired them with the truth of his vision and chilled them with the knowledge of his prophecy finally come true. But…what could they do about it, lying here in the cold earth? It was as if the old wizard read their minds.
“You are not bound
to lie here,” he told them. “What are you now but will? And my will remains strong! So let’s be up and about our work. I, Chylos, have willed it—so let it be!”
“Our work? What work?” the two cried together. “We cannot fight!”
“You could if you willed it,” said Chylos, “and if you have not forgotten how. But I didn’t mention fighting. No, we must warn them. The children of the children of the tribes. Warn them, inspire them, cause them to lust after the blood of these invaders!” And before they could question him further:
“Up, up, we’ve work to do!” Chylos cried. “Up with you and out into the night, to seek them out. The children of the children of the tribes…!”
From the look of things, it was all set to be a full house at The Barn. Athelsfordians in their Friday-night best were gravitating first to The Old Stage for a warm-up drink or two, then crossing the parking lot to The Barn to secure good tables up on the balconies or around the dance floor. Another hour or two and the place would be in full swing. Normally Gavin McGovern would be pleased with the way things were shaping up, for what with tips and all it would mean a big bonus for him. And his father at the pub wouldn’t complain, for what was lost on the swings would be regained on the roundabouts. And yet…
There seemed a funny mood on the people tonight, a sort of scratchiness about them, an abrasiveness quite out of keeping. When the disco numbers were playing the girls danced with a sexual aggressiveness Gavin hadn’t noticed before, and the men of the village seemed almost to be eyeing each other up like tomcats spoiling for a fight. Pulling pints for all he was worth, Gavin hadn’t so far had much of a chance to examine or analyse the thing; it was just that in the back of his mind some small dark niggling voice seemed to be urgently whispering: “Look out! Be on your guard! Tonight’s the night! And when it happens you won’t believe it!” But…it could simply be his imagination, of course.