Authors: Robert Holdstock
‘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.
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 circles 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.
Then suddenly they’d slipped down a bank and over the edge of a rocky cliff, falling quite a way into a narrow gorge. They splashed into the water and sank a long way down before surfacing. Rubble and dirt were falling after them from the precipice and a piece of stone hit Greenface and she started to sink again. She was choking. I could feel her beginning to swallow water, then Greyface had swum down and grabbed her. The river was running very fast, surging over sharp rocks, but he hauled them both to a ledge, turned her face down and she started to be sick, then breathed in, gasping for breath. He went back into the water and rescued the pack. For a moment I thought I was drowning. I was so close, so
inside
them both. And then it was like falling asleep again. It always ends with me falling asleep.
He shrugged to indicate he’d finished. But Ruth was fascinated.
‘I want to hear more!’
He had been five years old when the bull-runners first smashed through the walls of space-time and plundered his inner eye.
He was on a hillside, looking out over scattered woods, down-land and fields golden with late summer wheat, hazy in the strong sun. Behind him, in the shade of tall trees on the knoll, his father sat cross-legged and contemplative, staring into the distance, while his mother read a fat book, lazily turning the pages.
The remains of the picnic were scattered on the white cloth, where two finches darted in to feed.
Jack suddenly wanted to run down the hill, arms wide like a plane, until the wind took him and lifted him, to float out across the fragrant land. It was a dream he often experienced, though he was usually hunched up, arms round his legs, skimming the tree tops, turning sharp angles, circling above and around his home. Now he wanted to run. He could hear running, the sound of gasping breath. His legs felt compelled to move as the sound of people running came pounding close behind him.
He glanced back in fright, just as the shadow-shapes leaped across him, making him cry out. In the trees behind his parents, an enormous red-faced bull bellowed; he glimpsed the spread of its horns, the wet glistening around its mouth.
If he was aware of his father’s cry of alarm, he later forgot it. Suddenly he was running – running down the hill – then towards the sandstone cliff, to the overhang, where deep shadows on the sun-baked red rock suggested shelter, safety. The tall, dark man in his swirling cloak was ahead of him, the
woman in her leopard skins and flayed leathers running at his shoulder, her green face grimacing with fear.
On he ran, towards the cliff, above the wide, parched land, descending fast, his legs threatening to give way.
He started to scream. An animal’s breath was hot and hoarse behind him, bellowing suddenly as the ground thundered beneath its hooves.
The bull-runners had fled into the shadows against the rock wall. Jack stumbled, rolling towards the precipice – falling heavily down the hill until strong arms grabbed him, halted his uncontrollable tumble. Breathless, he gazed at the sky. His father’s ruddy face loomed close.
‘What are you doing? You’ll hurt yourself, you silly boy! What was all that screaming?’
He didn’t know what to say. He watched a floating cloud, felt the warm drops of sweat from his father’s face on his own.
‘The running people. Running before the bull. Red cliffs …’
‘You’ve been daydreaming,’ the strong man said. ‘Come on. It’s a long way back to the knoll.’
He stood, hauled up by his father. He heard his mother’s voice, distantly, and his father shouted, ‘He’s fine. Just acting on impulse. Get the heart massage machine ready for me, though.’
He grinned down at the wheezing boy. ‘You certainly run fast!’
‘Bull-runners. Running from the bull.’
They began the hot walk up the hill.
His story about two running people was put down to a blossoming imagination. His cousin Roland was much the same, an older lad who delighted in constructing wild tales, usually concerned with the grotesque murders of the Victorian Age, from Burke and Hare to the Ripper, but often with that abiding obsession of the young: buried treasure.
Jack liked Roland’s company, he liked the stories, he liked the hidden camps in his cousin’s huge family garden in Devon,
a tract of land that opened onto fields, and the river shore. He especially liked fantasizing about building a raft and floating away down the wide river and out to sea.
It was here, two years after the incident known in the family as ‘running-down-the-hill’, that Jack glimpsed the two hunted people for the second time. He was sitting with Roland on the upturned rowing boat that belonged to Roland’s family. It was a cool autumn day, heavily overcast and showery and the river was grey and choppy.
They’d been sitting in silence for a while, caught in that restless
ennui
that comes from being aspiringly adventurous, but constrained by the conditions of the weather. They certainly didn’t want to go up to the house, where the parents and grandparents would be talking endlessly about things the boys had no interest in. They wanted to go exploring, but Jack had to leave in thirty minutes for the return drive to Exburgh.
With a shift in the wind came the smell of fire and the sound of flames, huge flames, like a forest burning …
The man and the woman were suddenly stumbling towards him, the wood behind them brilliant with the conflagration. Both of the bull-runners were coughing violently, the woman crying out in her distress. She was carrying a flaming torch, which she cast aside, throwing it into Jack’s face, it seemed. They ran past him, smoke streaming from the fire that burned them, brushing at their smouldering clothes. Jack heard the roar of an animal beyond the wall of fire, the shaking of the earth as it ran towards him. In terror, he turned and ran after the hunters, the heat making him sweat, the smoke making him gag. The land gave way to water, an angled drop down rocks, and he scrambled down to the cool river, where Greyface and Greenface were already immersed and swimming strongly in the current. As he followed them in, splashing helplessly as the river swept him round and down towards the sheer sides of a gorge, he looked back and saw the swaying shape of an immense horned animal, standing on the rocks above the water.
Behind it, white stone towers gleamed! The ruins of a castle,
he imagined, reaching right to the river, half fallen into the river itself.
This was all he glimpsed before the current tugged him down and he felt water in his lungs …
And was suddenly being dragged up by the hair, pulled to the shore amidst screaming voices and confusion.
Roland was half crying, half shouting.
‘He just suddenly ran into the water! I couldn’t stop him. He shouted, “It’s burning!” and ran into the water. But I can’t swim! I can’t swim!’
A soothing voice calmed the boy. Then Jack’s father’s voice,
‘Was
something burning, Roland?’
‘No. I
did
smell woodsmoke, just briefly, but there wasn’t a fire. He just ran away from the shore. He was splashing so hard, but he was in deep water in no time. I can’t swim. I’m sorry …’
‘It’s OK, Roland. You did the right thing, fetching us as quickly as you did. Everything’s all right. Jack’s OK, now. Aren’t you, Jack?’
Jack sat up, shivering. It was beginning to rain again. He stared at the ring of solemn, adult faces. Their expressions seemed to demand an explanation.
‘I thought there was a fire. I followed the running people, the bull-runners. I think they’d started it – the fire – to stop the beast – but they got caught in it …’
‘The runners, again,’ his father said, shaking his head and looking away in exasperation.
His mother said something sharp to her husband, then helped Jack up and placed a heavy towel around his shoulders. He huddled inside it, shaken and confused, as he followed the procession back up the five wooden steps from the shoreline and through the long garden, to the welcome warmth of his grandparents’ house.
* * *
After this incident, running-from-the-fire, Roland became very aggressive toward his cousin. The friendship that had been close and comfortable now became a distanced challenge, Roland always putting the younger boy down, stalking off on his own, seeking separate company.