Hard Light (28 page)

But wouldn't Tamsin have taken credit for
Thanatrope
? She didn't sound like someone who'd hide behind her husband's reputation, especially after he ditched her to smoke kef in Tangiers.

“She's crazy, too,” Sam said, as though I'd spoken my thought. “Crazy like a fox.”

Up here the wind roared like a jet turbine endlessly revving for a takeoff that never came. With only a fringe of cropped hair to protect them, my ears ached so badly that I walked with my hands pressed against the sides of my head. Sam did the same. We looked like refugees from
The Scream
.

She gestured to where the broken walls of Kethelwite Manor reared against the sky, perhaps a quarter mile distant. “There's a windbreak over there.”

We crossed an ancient field stitched together by stone walls. It reminded me of the webs woven by spiders given LSD in research experiments, a lunatic crosshatch of rock walls and hedges and the occasional sagging metal fence. Sam clambered over these like a squirrel, but the pointed tips of my Tony Lamas caught treacherously between the rocks.

Overhead, tiny white specks bloomed and disappeared in the blue sky, like flaws on an old film strip: gulls, their cries drowned out by the wind. A ridge topped by tall standing stones aligned with the wreckage of the manor house. Beyond the ruins sloped the highlands, ending abruptly in those cliffs above the north Atlantic.

“People don't know how to watch that movie.” Sam said. “You have to know what to look for, otherwise you won't even know what you're seeing.”

I wondered if this was some rote speech of Tamsin's that she'd memorized. “So what do you see?”

“This.” She kicked through knee-high bracken, jumped onto a broad flat rock, and turned with her arms out, pretending to fly. “The movie's a map of all this, only a map through time. A guy's dying. It's what he remembers of this place over thousands and thousand of years. Tamsin says it helps if you're tripping.”

“I was tripping first time I saw it. Didn't help me.”

“Me, too.”

“Your grandmother gave you acid?”

“Mushrooms. It made me puke. There's these shamans in Siberia, they drink reindeer piss. The reindeer eat poisonous mushrooms and the psychoactive ingredient comes out in their urine and the shamans drink it. Otherwise if they ate the mushrooms they'd die, 'cause they're deadly poison. Fatal,” she added somberly.

I shot her a skeptical look.

“Tamsin's training me to be a shaman.” Sam's tone implied this was as commonplace as soccer practice. “She studied it in Barcelona from Salvador Dalí—that's how she met my grandfather. People like me, we're chosen to be shamans.”

“I wasn't aware that was still a career track.”

Sam glared at me. “It's true.”

I was starting to see why this kid had a hard time in the school cafeteria. She pushed away the anorak's hood, gathered her lank hair in one hand, and pulled it away from her face. The hard light made the angles of her cheekbones and pointed chin appear even more pronounced, her deepset eyes dead black against skin white as bone. She didn't look like a girl or a boy but some unearthly amalgam of both, an eerie rendering of what a human face might be, reduced to its simplest planes.

She let go of her hair and it whipped across her face. “They call it the Man-Woman. At the Furry Dance at Helston. Other places, too. In the movie, there's a scene where they do it. My grandfather played the Man-Woman.”

“I don't remember that scene.”

“That's 'cause you don't know how to watch the movie.”

I was too tired to argue. We continued on, past a tall cairn. Someone had drawn an eye on one of the stones in red paint, so faint I could almost imagine it as a natural feature, except for the skeletal pylon drawn beneath it.

We reached a stone wall. Sam held open a rough-hewn gate. We stepped out onto what looked like an extension of the moor, more thorny vegetation and spiny grass.

Only the ground wasn't earth, but shattered brick and pulverized stone. I picked up a scorched chunk of concrete and dug my fingernail into the surface, drew my finger to my face and sniffed the black residue. Even after forty years, it stank of burning.

“There was a castle here,” said Sam. “Tamsin says it was the real Castle Scream.”

She held out her arms and ran toward a wall of crumbling brick, with the ruins of a clerestory window in the second storey. Without pausing, she clambered up the wall, her black anorak billowing around her. When she reached the top, she let out a piercing shriek, swung herself onto a ledge, then stepped onto the sill of the empty window, bracing herself with a hand on either side.

The wind tore at her hair as she stared down at me and screamed again. Her face contorted and her black eyes fixed on mine as her voice deepened into a howl. Her skinny body shook with the effort.

“Get down!” I yelled, breaking into a run. At the foot of the ruined wall I looked up.

Above me, Sam looked terrifying and beautiful, like one of those figures painted on an ancient Greek vase, half girl and half bird. I grabbed at the Konica around my neck, popping the lens cap and adjusting the focus even before I looked through the viewfinder.

I shot three pictures and lowered the camera. Sam remained within the shattered window, silent, her mouth gaping. She leaned forward, stared down at me, and grinned.

“You better look out below!”

She let go and fell backward.

With a shout, I ran alongside the ruined wall till I found a way through, into a courtyard thick with blackthorn. At the base of the ruined wall, Sam lay on her back atop a sagging trampoline.

“Ow.” She rolled over and got to her feet. The trampoline's fabric slumped beneath her as she hobbled to the edge and hopped down. She tugged at a frayed nylon rope dangling from the bent aluminum frame. “I really need to tighten this.”

“You really need to
not be an asshole.
” I grabbed her hair and shook her. “You want to kill yourself?”

She yelped in pain, swinging at me. “Why the fuck should you care?”

“I don't,” I snapped. “But I don't want to be the one to tell your goddamned father his idiot daughter just jumped off the roof.”

I stormed off across the courtyard. Broken arches rose above the devastation. A dagger of glass pierced a charred wooden beam gone soft with rot. I kicked it, and the wood exploded into a foul-smelling brown cloud. Some ruins are beautiful. Kethelwite Manor was just grim.

I walked to a large, battered dome, its verdigris pocked with lichen—a small fortune in salvageable copper. Given the local economy, I'd have thought someone would have poached the metal long ago. Maybe they really were afraid to tussle with Tamsin.

I picked up a rock and threw it at the dome. It made a hollow boom, answered by a deep, sustained hooting I could feel in my bones, like an oncoming train. I looked back to see Sam atop a pile of broken roof slates, staring at the black crags of Carn Scrija.

“It doesn't like that we're here,” she yelled.

I wanted to tell her to fuck off, but I had a feeling she was right. I shouted back. “Let's go.”

Sam climbed down from her perch and ambled toward me, hands jammed into her pockets. For the first time I saw that her deep-set eyes weren't black or brown but indigo, a color picked up by the delicate capillaries across her pale face. Whatever issues she had with her sexual identity, she was a striking-looking kid and might be a beautiful adult, if she made up her mind to live for a few more years. I replaced the lens cap on my camera, clicked the film transport lever.

“I saw what you did.” Sam looked at me defiantly. “Taking pictures. You don't give a fuck about me.”

I laughed. “I don't give a fuck about anything.”

Her mouth hardened to a slit. But I could see her watching me from the corner of her eyes, as we retraced our steps across a landscape frozen between Leith Carlisle's vision of late-twentieth-century apocalypse and some mystery that seemed to flicker just out of sight.

The sun hung low on the horizon, beginning its plunge into the ocean. The wind had died, so I could hear the sea, mindlessly gnawing at stones and shingle. I started as something flew past my face, a bird or a large insect.

Sam touched my arm, pointing. “That was a chough!”

“What's a chuff?”

“C-H-O-U-G-H.” She spelled it out. “Like a crow, but with a red beak. They're very rare. Extinct, almost.” Her white cheeks were pinked from the cold. “It's bad luck to kill one—they say King Arthur's soul went into a chough when he died at Avalon.”

I looked around, but the bird was gone. I turned to Sam. “Zip up your coat. You're making me colder just looking at you.”

I gazed across the hillside. There was no sign of Kethelwite Farm, nothing that resembled a path among the gray boulders and gorse.

“You know the way back, right?”

“'Course.” She hadn't zipped the anorak, but she pulled it tight around her and drew up the hood. She pointed at a small promontory to the east, where two upright stones rose from what looked like another pile of broken masonry. “Do you want to see the dead babies?”

I blinked. “What?”

“Just over there.” She indicated two standing stones. “But we need to hurry; it'll be dark soon.”

We scrambled down a steep incline and followed a path slick with moss and yellow fronds that fed on a rivulet of black water. A line of knee-high rocks marched up the hillside. Not a wall, but some kind of boundary or marker. At one time they might have stood sharply against the sky, but over the centuries the moor had grown up around them. They looked like all that remained of a city submerged beneath the turf.

Then, as though the earth had swallowed her, too, Sam disappeared.

 

34

“Sam!” The wind threw her name back at me. “Sam, wait—”

I ran until I reached the top of the hill. On the northern horizon the sea glimmered. Directly in front of me was a broad concave space, about twenty feet in diameter and three feet deep, thatched with wiry grass and dead ferns. It looked like the impact crater of a tiny asteroid, but it had been made by human labor. Two lines of small stones formed a path that led to the upper edge of the hollow. Sam stood there like another standing stone, black against the twilight sky. Her hood had dropped, and her hair lashed about her head like a dark flame.

I started to reach for my camera. Instead I let my hand slip beneath layers of clothing until I felt the two bone discs against my skin.

“This way,” Sam called.

I walked to where she crouched beside a doorway set directly into the hillside, its sides formed of stone slabs and capped by a massive rock lintel. The stones were rough and unadorned, the same leaden hue as the surrounding landscape and tufted with dead grass. If Sam hadn't been there, I might have walked right past it.

I stooped to peer into the dark tunnel. A dank, earthy scent wafted from inside, undercut by a very faint smell of something foul—stagnant water or maybe a dead animal. I grimaced. “What is it?”

“A passage grave.” Sam's pale face was taut with excitement. “It's not on any of the ordnance survey maps.”

I nodded. “Your dad said something about that.”

“Our family owns all this land—Tamsin says they never let anyone come here for, like, a thousand years.”

“What about all those people in the movie?”

Her face fell. “Well, except for them.” She brightened. “But they're all dead now, right? I found this myself but I never told anyone. Tamsin doesn't even know.”

I found this hard to believe. The farm was out of sight, but it couldn't be more than a mile from where we were. “Yeah, well, that's very interesting. How about we head back now?”

“You said you wanted to see the dead babies.”

“In
there
?”

“Of course, what'd you think?” She dropped onto her hands and knees. “Once you're inside, you can stand up. Just do it slow so you don't mash your head.”

“It's pitch black—I can't see a fucking thing.”

“I know! I keep a torch here.” She reached into the darkness and a moment later triumphantly held up a flashlight. “It's really brilliant, you'll see.”

Before I could protest, she crawled into the passage. I hesitated, then got onto my knees and crept after her.

The interior of the passage made the twilight outside behind seem bright as midday. I saw nothing but the soles of Sam's Wellingtons a few inches in front of me. Sharp stones bit into my palms as we inched along. After a minute, Sam halted.

“We can stand here,” she said, and scrambled to her feet.

I stood more cautiously, wary of bashing my head against the ceiling, and waited for my eyes to adjust.

The passage was a claustrophobe's nightmare. I could only extend my arms halfway before my palms pressed against cold stone. When I raised a hand, it grazed the ceiling mere inches above my head.

Sam's white face bobbed in front of mine. “You're not claustrophobic, are you?”

I gritted my teeth. “No.”

“That's good.”

She continued on through the tunnel. I stared resolutely at the steel tips of my boots until I realized that Sam was out of sight.

“Slow down!” I yelled.

“Hurry up, then!”

I kept one hand on the wall as I walked, feeling the warmth drain from my fingertips into the rock. The flashlight's beam picked out where the immense slabs had been fitted together. I couldn't imagine the effort it had taken to get them there, or what now kept them from crashing down on top of me. After several yards, the passage widened, and I saw Sam standing in an alcove to one side.

“How the hell did you find this place?” I asked, drawing up alongside her. I wrinkled my nose: The foul smell was stronger here. “Ugh. Is it safe to breathe?”