‘In the end, the identity of the victim is not important?’
‘He believes the Earth will choose. This is underlined for him by the killing at Avebury, when he discovers his victim is a hairdresser, thus providing a link with the famous medieval Barber-Surgeon whose skeleton was found beneath one of the stones after, presumably, trying to damage it. A reverberation, through the ages. Vindication.’
‘You notice, how, although he might know his victim — Ersula … Grayle — as soon as he sets out to kill them, as soon as they become the quarry, he depersonalizes them. They become “the woman”. Like “the fox”, “the pheasant”. He’s not a murderer, he’s just a hunter.’
‘Not just a hunter, Bobby.’
‘Cindy, I’m going to have this cunt.’
‘Of course you are, lovely, of course you are.’
Marcus made himself a cheese sandwich and shut Malcolm in the kitchen with a bowl of water and four Bonios to keep him quiet.
He was a good dog, a brave dog. But very, very bad guys?
‘Stay,’ Marcus said.
He went out of the house and prowled the tumbledown buildings, in search of weapons. The best he could find was the head of a scythe, which he couldn’t hold without it biting into his hand, and a wooden-handled pitchfork with rusted tines, so badly eroded, in fact, that it was hard to tell if there was actually any metal beneath the rust.
Marcus straightened his bow tie and climbed over a short, broken wall to the remains of the only serviceable tower, the highest part of the castle. It was no more than about half of a sundered tower in the remains of the curtain wall. Possibly part of a gateway. Perhaps there’d been a portcullis here.
Could have used one now, all right.
Marcus climbed a treacherously narrow, dangerously worn spiral staircase inside the tower. Hadn’t done this in years; bloody steps would be beyond repair soon.
He turned a corner and came out in the sky. Always a surprise, the way the steps simply ended, broke off. A sycamore tree had grown up next to the tower, partly obscuring the view in high summer, but there was still quite an extensive vista of the Black Mountains, for once living ominously up to their name, filling the western horizon, like the massed tents of a dark army.
Once, raiders had come down from the mountains, from the poorer country into the lushness of the Golden Valley. The reason the castle had been built. But now the threat, presumably, was from the east. The only way to reach this place was by road from St Mary’s. From the tower, the road was visible for nearly half a mile before it dipped between the high hedges and the hills.
Marcus sat on the top step, adjusted his glasses and unwrapped his sandwich. Might as well go out on a full stomach. Joking, of course. Maiden and his urban thugs and his bent coppers. Nothing would happen.
The jagged walls of the castle sawed into a sky of sickly yellow, like tallow.
XLV
This was the tape Cindy had found himself dreading the most.
Ersula Underhill.
They’d been playing them at random. Realizing that, with perhaps six hours of Fraser-Hale’s boastful ramblings, there wasn’t going to be time to hear all of it before they reached Rollright. Snatching out a cassette if it didn’t appear to be going anywhere, opening another.
Ersula’s was, as he’d feared, the worst death of all. Worse than Maria, worse than Emma Curtis — that would have been terrifying for her, but it would also have been relatively quick; he was in a hurry that night, frantic almost.
With Ersula, he’d had time to plan.
When he goes to find the woman, he has already prepared her tomb.
And she is prepared for it.
She’s weary of her life and its limitations. Her dreams have shown her better. She has found a fulfilment in sleep … in sacred sleep and dreams surpassing, in their intensity, all her waking achievements. Which, in the superficial world of scholarship and academe, have been considerable.
But such so-called learning, lies passed from book to book, is nothing. A waste of life. Even Falconer admits this now.
As a follower of the Green Man.
Falconer is a weak man with no original thoughts. She is his superior, but he has betrayed her, and she turns at last to the Green Man. When he enters her room at dusk, she is crying. And bitter.
She asks the Green Man to lie with her.
On the tape an owl hooted.
‘Where’s he recorded this one, do you think?’ Bobby Maiden hit the stop button.
‘Same place as all the later ones. When I tire of his mock-heroic ramblings, I study the background. You notice that, although it’s obviously exterior as shown by noises like that owl, there’s also a hollow sound. A vault-like sound. We should have realized. It’s High Knoll itself.’
‘He wouldn’t fit inside.’
‘His tape recorder would. And his head and chest. I think he’s lying in the entrance. So proud of this, he is, that he’s giving his voice some resonance, making sure the Earth hears, telling it in Her temple. And he’s letting the chamber absorb it too. Stone records, see.’
‘Thinking, maybe, that one day some EVP enthusiast will capture remnants of the Green Man himself. That it?’
‘Imprinting his life’s work upon the great earth-memory. Been missing the obvious, we have, the final link. We hear him talking about a place, we assume that’s where he is. But he isn’t. The Knoll has become his psychic confessional. He’s been bringing as much as he can back to the Knoll. Storing it all there, abomination upon abomination.’
‘Like a database?’
‘If you like. And also restoring a tradition, which he sees as having been damaged by the holy vision of Annie Davies. It’s become a vaguely acknowledged “healing place”. Which he would see as feeble and womanly. It needs to be reinstated as Black Knoll. Now let’s hypothesize, Bobby, that he was dictating to the stones a chapter of his memoirs … say this very chapter … on the night of your death. He sleeps at the Knoll — on the Knoll, laying himself out like those corpses of criminals — night after night. He dreams of the time when it was a sacrificial stone, a hunter’s stone. His dreams are running with blood and steaming with putrescence. And by now, see, he’s developed a certain amount of control. He’s conditioning his dreams. And, at the same time, consciously feeding into the Knoll his accounts of such blood and darkness as it has not known in many centuries. This … all this … the foul contents of the tapes … is the black light perceived by Mrs Willis. This happens, Bobby, don’t look unconvinced, these places have been, for thousands of years, the receptors of the Earth.’
She disgusts him. Once, he was attracted to her … to the power of her spirit, the intensity of her longing to know. But now, as she lolls about on the edge of her bed, with her skirt plucked up to her thighs, he sees that underneath she’s little more than the rest of modern womanhood, flawed and weak and unstable, a prey to lower desires.
She has been drinking. There is a brandy bottle on the dresser, three quarters of its contents consumed. She can hardly stay upright. She’s repulsive, a disgusting mess.
‘You want me,’ she says, ‘I know you want me. You’ve wanted me from the start. So go ahead. Have me. ‘
And yes, he thinks, yes, I will have you. In spite of it all, I’ll help you. I’ll free that deep and questing soul from the squalid desires of the shell. I’ll free it to rise up and pursue its finer goals.
‘I’ll make some tea,’ he tells her.