She giggles. ‘How profoundly, goddamn English of you. ‘
‘I’m proud to be English. ‘
‘Well, listen to you. ‘
‘Yes. You should. ‘
The Green Man puts the kettle on the electric ring. She giggles and lies back on the bed, her eyes closed and her skirt ridden up. The Green Man turns away in revulsion. From a pocket he takes a screw of paper containing the mixture he has prepared including the sedative herbs from the healthfood shop in Hereford and the psilocybin mushrooms he has picked at the foot of Black Knoll.
When the herbal tea is made, he sits on the bed and lifts her up to drink it, tolerating her sweating face against his shoulder. She grimaces. He tells her it will help her. Soon she is rambling. She insists that the Knoll is a place of utter, profound evil.
Talking nonsense.
‘Magic mushrooms.’
‘Britain’s best natural hallucinogen. Used by generations of witches. Magic mushroom tea, with God knows what else in it. After all that drink.’
‘A more merciful death than any of the others got.’
‘It’s not over yet, Bobby, I’m very much afraid.’
‘Grayle! ’
‘Oh, hi.’
‘Gosh, I’m delighted you came!’ Matthew Lyall, to her surprise, wore a morning suit, with tails. Traditional English wedding outfit. OK, maybe the white T-shirt underneath was a mite irregular …
‘Compromise.’ He fingered the white rose in his lapel. ‘Everything’s a compromise today. My parents are both here, with their respective spouses. And Janny’s mother. They all wanted a traditional old church wedding, and we said, well, you won’t find an older church than this one! And Charlie’s the real thing, so where’s the problem?’
The relatives, stiffly obvious, stood outside the circle, near the hut where you left your courtesy-donations to animal charities. In memory of the poor, sacrificed spaniel maybe.
Matthew said, ‘Er, have you …?’
‘No.’
‘Oh gosh, I’m so sorry. But there are loads of people here who might’ve run into her.’
‘I already asked around,’ Grayle told him. ‘A little.’
‘No luck?’
‘Uh huh.’
‘Suppose I get Charlie to make a special appeal after the service. How about that?’
‘That would be kind. You haven’t seen Janny today?’
‘No, that’s another compromise. We wanted to spend the night here in the circle … in a chaste sort of way. In spiritual preparation. And to see what our dreams might tell us about our future together. But Janny’s mother …’
‘May be better not to know,’ Grayle said. ‘Maybe marriage should be an adventure.’
‘That’s one way of looking at it. Could be quite an adventure today, actually. Just look at that sky.’
‘It’ll hold off, Matthew. After all the favours you did for Mother Earth, it’s the least She can do.’
It is nearly two a.m. when he carries the woman to the organic tomb. She falls to sleep in his arms and still slumbers as he brings her, perspiring freely and smelling disgustingly of drink, to the place.
A cloudy night, but sufficient moon. It glitters in the fluted tin roof of the helicopter shed, which screens the place from the house.
His night-vision is pretty remarkable by now and he can see the egg-shaped hole from twenty yards away, on the edge of the freshly concreted base. Soon after dark, he lined the hole — three and half feet deep and oriented east to west — with alternate layers of moss and gravel, and then added a bed of soft grass-cuttings, warmly mulching. Beside the hole lies the mound of excavated soil and a heap of local gravel. Between them, a spade.
The Green Man places the woman in the hole, on her side. She awakes and giggles and reaches out for him and he forces himself to caress her and she moans and drifts back into sleep. She needs to be awake, but not yet.
It came to him, as always now, in a dream. He dreamed of a green land of mounds and standing stones and gaily dressed people horse-trading, racing, making merry.
While, in the Earth, not far below the merrymaking, a woman screamed for all eternity.
Next day, in the university library, he found an account of a burial at a place called the Curragh, in County Kildare, where gypsies and tinkers traditionally gather for their fairs. In a henge there, about fifty years earlier, an oval grave was found, less than four feet deep and packed with gravel. In this grave was the skeleton of a young woman, on her back, facing towards the rising sun, the skull pressed hard down upon the chest and the arms tight against the sides of the grave. The bones were in a contorted and unnatural posture, suggestive of writhing.
In the hole, the woman whimpers, rolls onto her back and wiggles her fingers, in the throes of some hallucinatory semi-dream.
She seems to be beckoning.
It is the sign.
The Green Man loads his spade with good, red border soil, the flesh of Her body. The woman chokes as the soil enters her mouth and her eyes open — fear pushing through the psychic membrane of the drugs — to meet the second spadeful…
Cindy had to slam on the brakes and pull over onto the verge, and Bobby Maiden almost fell out of the car, rolled over in the grass, producing enormous dry heaves, mouth open fishlike and hands at his gut.
He’d be fine. Cindy watched him through the windscreen and the tape played on, the unbearable details only half registered. What did register was the tone of voice. On top of everything the Green Man remained the most insufferable prig.
After a minute, Bobby rolled over onto his back below the car’s weak, yellow headlights, and Cindy got out under a spreading fungus of dark brown clouds. It was a dull country lane, open fields and hedges, not a house nor a steeple in sight.
Cindy stood where Bobby had been. Nothing but dented grass. No evacuation. It had all come out last night. It was in an envelope. Nothing left other than what remained in Bobby’s head. And now it was in the manageable part of his mind, no longer buried deep.
Why then, bearing in mind the circumstances of its entry there, had his subconscious mind not seen it from Fraser-Hale’s side of things, letting him experience the perverse ecstasy of unspeakable, self-righteous cruelty? Because of what he was. He had experienced it only from the side of the victim.
Bobby held on to a signpost to pull himself to his feet. The sign pointed left to Long Compton and straight ahead to Great Rollright: two miles.
Which meant they were less than half a mile from the Rollright Stones.
Cindy thought of the day when, back home in the caravan in Pembrokeshire, he’d let the pendulum dangle over the map and asked the question: Where will it happen next? The pendulum had gone into a violent anti-clockwise spin not where it was expected to go, among the Black Mountains, but over the area where Oxfordshire met Gloucestershire and Warwickshire, and Cindy, hoping for the Welsh border, had dismissed it.
‘Sorry.’ Bobby produced a smile which contrived to be both bashful and bitter. ‘Something went down the wrong way.’
‘When we see Grayle,’ Cindy said, ‘don’t tell her, will you?’
‘You’re joking.’ Bobby brushed grass from his jacket.
‘For what it’s worth,’ Cindy said, as dispassionately as he could make it, ‘it was another of his failures. She was supposed to have been buried alive, like the woman in prehistoric Kildare. But when the soil went into her eyes, she came out of it and began to scream. At which, our man felt obliged to finish her off. With the spade. In her throat.’
‘He can’t get anything right, can he?’