Miles away and hours before, a boy blinked awake from a warm dream of love to find himself in an empty bungalow, momentarily unsure of his name. The room’s sour smell drove his dream away in tatters. He stared at the wall facing him, pale blue and streaked white where water had leaked down. His pyjamas were too short for him and the polyester slither of the sheet across his bare ankles filled him with a revulsion that drove him out of bed. Barry’s car battery stood on the hall table, casually dumped on top of his photography project, and when he strained to lift it off it left wide black marks across the folder. He remembered it was Saturday, then that his exams were over and his holidays had started early. The thought gave him no pleasure. A note on the kitchen table said ‘Luke, gone to the boot sale. Back later.’ With the last tendrils of the dream still twitching, that did not feel like his name, nor did this thin and flimsy house feel like his home.
He dressed and went out to the garage, feeling a sudden magnetic pole-to-pole repulsion from this place where he had lived his sixteen years of life, knowing he wanted to get away, right away. He pumped up his bicycle tyres and every rubbery push of the pump handle injected escape magic until the bounce of the bike told him it was ready to go with him. The road led east or west, and west seemed the obvious chance with the morning sun behind him.
Leaving the house behind felt better and at the first junction he hesitated, tried one way then another then the third, which seemed the happiest choice in a way he could not have precisely described. So it was at each turning and he made his choices faster and faster, feeling a need to keep going. An hour’s pedalling on empty lanes and thundering roads and then lanes again took him further from home than he had ever strayed before. A second hour wiped the signposts clean of familiar places. His legs were aching but the unknown cheered him on from somewhere far ahead and he even enjoyed the idea that he might not find his way back.
What stopped him was a conical hill, wrapped in trees, presented like a sudden invention of the earth as he laboured up out of a fold. The small tower rising from its summit snared his eye and the moment he saw it he knew he had to climb it, as if this had always been his destination. He thought he might see anything from the top: the sea or lions on a plain or a purple city or his future. On the edge of a village, he chained his bike to a fence and followed a beaten path to the base of the hill.
Where the trees started, the earth angled sharply upwards, and although a zigzag track offered an easier approach the boy scrambled straight up, using roots for handholds as the dry dirt sent his feet skidding. The trees ended before the summit plateau, circling the tower like a monk’s tonsure.
Through its open doorway a hundred stone stairs twisted upwards, spiralling him to a cramped room right at the top where patches of wall-plaster were scored with the scratched spoor of visitors. He ran his fingers over some of the deep-cut words. ‘Riga Latvia’ said one, then below it ‘F & G’, and a heart surrounding the two words ‘Angels – Daisy.’
Square openings barred with iron showed him quarters of the surrounding land and he looked through each in turn, hoping something might be revealed. He saw trees and fields and the distant misty hills and despaired that this might be all there was to show for his efforts, leaving him to pedal all the way back to that loveless house. He felt a scream rising in him and let it out, yelling at the sky in an abandonment that amazed him, yelling at two dots that came from those misty hills and grew into jet fighters coming straight at the tower, hurdling his hilltop wing tip to wing tip. His yell was soaked up into an immense noise that arrived at the same moment they did and persisted long after they had gone. When it diminished it had silenced him and the whole land seemed quieter, as if they had muscled all other sound out of the way.
In that new peace a twist of wind lifted the smell of early summer to his nose and carried with it a gentle murmur of human voices. They drew him back down the stairs and at the bottom he heard laughter, a call, the ring of metal, beckoning him to the far edge of the plateau. He saw red and white tape down below in the black mass of trees, a plastic barrier stretched between their trunks. The sounds came from beyond them in the darkness and they drew him on down. He picked his way, cautious and silent, intending to spy from cover, but the tape marked the start of an even steeper drop and a dead branch, shrouded by leaves, tricked his feet. They shot from under him so that he tobogganed over the edge under the abrupt violence of gravity, feet first and head back.
He fell for long enough to know fear and his lungs flattened as he met the earth below at full length, still on his back, all the air forced out of him. For a moment the world was changed by the concussion. Where there had been trees above, all he could see were purple spheres filling his vision. The shock of impact overwhelmed him and he closed his eyes to concentrate on the fight to fill his lungs. When he opened them again there were faces bent over him with expressions of alarm – three girls’ faces focused on him like a fantasy.
‘Where did you come from?’ said a blonde girl, close enough to kiss, and he tried to say sorry through the head-to-toe hurt but there was still no air to make the words. The purple shapes had gone and he would have searched for them but didn’t even want to move his eyes.
‘Give him space,’ growled a man’s voice. The girls’ faces vanished and a huge head with white hair strapped back in a ponytail took their place. Luke felt unbearable regret and his eyes grew damp with all sorts of pain.
‘Just twitch both feet for me,’ the man said, then, ‘All right, matey, let’s get you on your side.’ Large hands turned him gently over. ‘Pull your knees up all the way. You’re winded, that’s all. You’ll be all right in half a mo.’
Just when he knew he would suffocate he drew a little air, then more, until he was gasping it in.
‘Now,’ said the big man. ‘Where does it hurt?’
‘My back.’ He felt fingers gently exploring.
‘Just a scratch. You landed on my trowel. Lucky it’s made of strong stuff. Can you move everything?’
The boy tried. ‘Yes.’ He lifted his head and saw that he was lying across a strip of bare earth and all around were buckets, shovels and plastic trays. A ring of people surrounded him.
‘Show’s over,’ growled the man with the ponytail. ‘He’ll live. Back to it, you sorry lot.’
Too late, Luke saw the swing of a girl’s hair between all the older people as they turned away. He sat up but she was lost to view. He looked up at the steep face of the slope he had fallen down and the man with the ponytail followed his eyes.
‘Fifteen feet, maybe more,’ said the man. ‘Can you get up? I only ask because we need the trench. If you’ve finished with it, that is.’
Luke took the outstretched hand and stood up carefully.
‘I’m Dozer,’ the man said. ‘You okay?’
‘Yes. What are you doing?’
‘Digging. Just started. All we’ve done is get the turf off.’
The boy looked at the long strip of earth and recognised it for what it was. ‘You’re archaeologists?’
Dozer nodded. ‘So what do we call you?’ he asked.
Part of the boy thought it would be good to get away as fast as he could, to leave his embarrassment far behind and take his aches with him back to the anonymous world below. ‘Luke,’ he answered, and the man laughed.
‘Luke Skydiver,’ he said. ‘Just right.’ Then from behind him another man’s voice said, ‘Hang on, I know you, don’t I?’
Turning, he saw a familiar face – a teacher’s face where there shouldn’t be a teacher. Two hours from his school. That wasn’t fair. Embarrassment would travel home with him now.
‘I’m Luke Sturgess, sir.’
‘Yes, of course. My History Club.’
They stared at each other in equal awkwardness. Luke had signed up for the after-school club entirely because he liked the picture on the poster. He had gone twice and it had gone badly.
‘How did you get here, Luke?’ The man was looking up the hill as if more people might come raining down. ‘Are your parents here?’
Martin. Luke’s memory gave him the name. Mike Martin. They’d hardly come across each other.
‘No, I came by bike.’
‘From Wincanton? All that way? Why?’
And there were so many possible answers to that question. There was Barry, who had his mum in tears. There was his birthday in two days, which would have Barry right in the middle of it for the first time ever – Barry who did sly, small things to get at him. Then there was some sort of fifteen-about-to-be-sixteen sap rising in him, which seemed to have no outlet but physical exercise. Above all there was that feeling of something missing, something he might find if he just looked hard enough. If he just knew where to look. It was an overwhelming certainty that wherever he was it was not the right place, and whoever he was with they were not the right person.
‘I don’t really know,’ was all he said.
‘You’d better come with me,’ said the teacher. ‘Come and see Rupert. He’s in charge. We might have to fill in a form or something.’
The boy didn’t want to move away. He felt that the impact, the moment when there was no breath in his body and the roof of his world had been made up of three girls’ faces, had bonded him to this particular earth, but obedience made him follow the teacher round a shoulder of hillside to where a man was spraying yellow lines on the grass. The boy searched for the girls as they walked but they had vanished like wood nymphs.
‘Rupert,’ the teacher called, and the man with the can looked round. ‘Sorry to bother you but we’ve had an unexpected visitor.’ He explained and the archaeologist looked the boy up and down.
‘Do you feel all right?’
‘Not really’ would have been the truthful answer. Luke was somewhere outside himself, floating above his own head. Nothing was the same any more. ‘A bit sore,’ was all he said.
‘Bad luck. Did you come to see the dig?’
‘No. What are you looking for?’
‘An explanation of why there’s a large hole where no hole should be. Are you interested?’
He nodded.
‘Really? All right. A dog fell into an underground chamber. We’ve peered down it and there’s an echo, so we’re trying to find out what it is.’
And Luke’s mind, still a little loose from its moorings after his fall, conjured out of nowhere a picture of scared men with spades. Burying something? Retrieving it? He couldn’t tell.
‘Why are you spraying the grass?’
‘I’m marking out another trench. We can’t go in from the top because we might ruin whatever is down there, so we’re coming in from the sides.’ He pointed to the spur of earth which stood between them and the other diggers like a buttress to the hill. ‘I suspect our chamber lies right under that.’
The boy stared at it as if it should mean something to him, then shook his head.
‘This is what they call the bailey, this flat area,’ said Rupert, looking around him. ‘It’s the part of the castle where they all lived.’
The purple spheres came back to Luke as bunches of grapes. ‘No it wasn’t,’ he said, ‘this was the vineyard,’ and immediately wished he could pull the words back when the archaeologist swung round and looked at him sharply.
‘Oh, I see. You’re an expert on Montacute, are you?’
‘On what?’
‘Montacute.’
‘What’s a montacute?’ said the boy, though he felt he should know.
‘This is Montacute,’ Rupert said, frowning. ‘Mons Acutus, the steep hill. That’s what the Normans called it.’
The teacher was staring at the boy curiously. ‘You mean you don’t know where you are, Luke? You just happened along?’
‘Yes.’
‘So where did that vineyard stuff come from?’ demanded Rupert. He sounded almost affronted.
‘I don’t know why I said that,’ Luke replied. That wasn’t strictly correct. He had said it because those brief purple shapes, just above him as he lay there, had been grapes.
‘Go easy, Rupert. He’s shocked,’ said the teacher.
‘Did you know about the vineyard theory, Mike?’
‘There really is a vineyard theory?’
‘Well, yes. There were vineyards listed in the Abbey lands and these terraces face the right way. The theory’s common knowledge but only if you happen to be a keen reader of obscure archaeological monographs.’ He turned to Luke and smiled enquiringly. ‘Is that what you read at night, young Luke?’
‘No. I must have heard it somewhere.’
‘Yes, it must be the talk of . . . where do you come from? Wincanton?’
‘Cucklington. It’s near there.’
‘How did you get here?’
‘On my bike.’
‘Why?’
‘I just wanted to go for a ride.’
‘I don’t get it, Luke. You didn’t come to see the dig, you didn’t know this was Montacute, and you start talking about the vineyards?’
The teacher was studying the boy intently and he saw a brief trace of a hunted expression. A deep wonder stirred in him and the chilling edge of an absurd idea. He found he didn’t want the boy to disappear. ‘Rupert, maybe Luke could stay for the day?’ he suggested, and looked at the boy. ‘If you want to, that is. I’ll be heading home about six o’clock. I could give you a lift back.’
‘If you like,’ Rupert said, surprised. He looked at Luke. ‘Would you like to have a go while you’re here?’
‘What, dig? With a trowel?’
‘Yes. Mike says I should do more to educate the young.’
‘You didn’t let me dig anything for ages,’ the teacher objected.
‘You, Michael, have the deftness of a hippo and the eyesight of a mole. This young man, if I’m not mistaken, is in the first bright-eyed flush of youth and treads lightly on this earth.’
Luke suddenly found himself nodding his head, wanting to see under this modern grass into the older secrets.
‘Shall I have him in my trench?’
‘No,’ said Rupert. ‘You stick to teaching things you know about. I’ll put him with Dozer.’
So Luke found himself kneeling in the same trench he had fallen into with the big man who had helped him. Dozer looked strong enough to break rocks with his bare hands despite his white hair. ‘Here you go, kid,’ he said, pulling a trowel from his back pocket. ‘You can borrow Maureen. She’s my spare.’
The boy wished he had gone with the teacher. He could see the girls in the other trench, twenty yards away, standing with their backs to him. The teacher was with them.
‘Come on,’ said Dozer. ‘There’s dirt to shift. Just take it nice and easy, like this. You can’t do much damage.’
Luke crouched, stretched out his hand and pulled a skim of soil towards him as he had seen the man do. He looked up again and saw the girls kneel down to work. He reached out for a second scrape and this time, as the blade touched the earth, he snatched his hand away as something travelled up through it, through his fingers and up his arm. He looked around. Dozer hadn’t noticed. He reached out again and there it was, flowing through him, a flood of light and peace and knowledge and something startling that felt like love.
He knelt there utterly still, letting it wash through him like the best of gifts until it drained away so abruptly that he wanted to chase it down into the ground. There was a sudden commotion. Everyone in the other trench was standing up – the three girls at the far end and the rest of the diggers. Luke found he was touching inert earth with nothing coming from it at all. The others were hurrying towards him.
‘Up, you two,’ said the man called Rupert, who was leading the way. ‘No questions. Just come with us, right now.’ He didn’t stop until they were down the hill and out of the trees where the footpath came up from the village below.
‘Okay, listen up,’ he said, and the diggers gathered round. Luke saw the three girls on the far side, with four boys who were a little older. The other diggers were in their fifties or even sixties and they were all focused intently on Rupert.
‘Conrad had a bright idea earlier,’ he said, nodding at the young man standing next to him. ‘He pointed out that the dog escaped all by itself, which meant there was clearly a second hole in the ground because the owner was still looking down the first one, so we decided he would go and search for it. Five minutes ago he found it. Tell them, Conrad.’
‘It was in the bushes,’ Conrad said. He wore thick glasses and he was sweating. ‘Maybe a badger’s sett, I thought, but it was big. You could crawl down it, like at forty-five degrees. I got a torch and stuck my head in but when I saw what was at the bottom, I got out again double quick.’
He looked around at their faces. ‘There’s a wooden crate down there at the base of a tunnel. It’s a bit rotten, coming to pieces, but you can see stuff inside – round sticks. There’s metal strapping around the crate holding it together, and there are four or five hand grenades wired on to the strapping.’
A murmur went up. Rupert was frowning. ‘It fits with Lucy’s electric cable. We think it’s a wartime bunker of some sort,’ he said. ‘That means the grenades and the dynamite or whatever it is in the crate could be highly unstable by now. No one goes near the site until Bomb Disposal have dealt with it. I want groups of you spaced out around the bottom of the hill to stop any walkers wandering up there. Dozer, can you sort that? Anyone not needed should go down to the campsite and wait. It’s safe there. I’ll go and call up some help.’ He turned to Michael Martin. ‘Mike, I think we need to clear the site of anyone who’s not camping here. I’m sorry. Can you take the lad with you?’