Ancient Echoes
Authors: Robert Holdstock
ANCIENT ECHOES
Robert Holdstock
In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:
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Part Two: Through the Bull Gate
Part Four: Beyond the Hinterland
Part Six: At the Maelstrom’s Edge
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
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 ‘female’ 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 …
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.