19

Stonehenge

If the sun had been able to crash through the clouds, it would have appeared directly overhead. Salem was unaware of its position, or its feeble heat, or the chilly breeze whispering at her neck, or even the handful of visitors talking in a clot, blocking the path leading away from the private parking lot they’d been ushered into.

All she cared about was connecting to that beautiful stone structure again.

A hill hid Stonehenge at the moment, but the initial glimpse had stolen her breath away. Photographs of the monoliths were a pale shadow of their majesty, even from the road. It was epic, stunning, awesome.

Stonehenge had awoken something true in her blood, almost a song, not quite a story.

She tightened her parka’s belt, yanked the shoulder strap of the B&C on one arm and her purse on the other, and pushed through the crowd.

“Salem! Wait up.”

She didn’t turn. He could hurry up. She needed to examine the rocks. Her feet crunched on gravel. Her eyes ate the fields billowing to her right and left, chewed on the poppies that dotted them. She inhaled deeply, smelling cow and country, prairie and field. She’d felt this grounded, this comfortable in her skin, only once before, and that had been in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The bustle and aroma there had made her feel both anonymo//us and part of something bigger.

The land around Stonehenge was different.

Stonehenge made her feel powerful.

She crested the hill separating the private lot from the beginning of the interpretive trail and beyond that, Stonehenge. Her shoulders relaxed when it was again in sight. The field of scarlet poppies ringing it was even more glorious at this height. They reminded Salem of the flowers surrounding Muirinn Molony’s house and decorating the sachet she’d been given. It hung off her jean’s belt loop. She patted it through her coat, speed walking toward the structure.

“Quite the eyeful, yeah?” Charlie caught up with her, out of breath. He was hunched against the wind. He nodded toward the stones and the security guards who were opening the rope gate for them. “They’re expecting us.”

The thrill of entering the ancient circle heightened Salem’s senses. “We have free rein?”

“Almost.” He held out a hand to indicate Salem should enter the rope circle first. “The only rule is that we can’t touch the stones.”

Salem scowled. If there was a code hidden in one of the rocks, as there had been inside of Emily Dickinson’s grandmother’s gravestone, she would need to lay hands on it.

She’d cross that bridge when she came to it.

Salem stood just outside of the stones, suddenly hesitant. Once she entered, she sensed she would not be the same. “Does it matter which stones we enter through?” she asked a guard.

He shrugged and pointed at a well-traveled path separating the base of the nearest trilithon. It looked like a doorway through time.

She nodded.

She stepped through the megalithic arch.

She held her breath and closed her eyes.

Time and space interacted differently inside the stones, trailing against her skin like a broken cobweb. She knew when she was inside the circle because it was warmer. The temperature change was dramatic. Probably just the stones blocking the chilly wind.

The caw of a bird startled her, and her eyes flew open. A blue-eyed raven had settled on the Altar Stone, a greenish-purple rock the size of a sedan that rested inside the circle of Stonehenge. Another movement caught the edge of her vision, but when she turned, she saw only the stones. It must have been a trick of the light.

“It’s something, isn’t it?”

Salem was almost surprised Charlie had been able to step through. It seemed too precious in here, too magical. But of course it was just her head playing tricks on her. Twenty-six tourists were allowed in here twice every day, once at dawn and once at dusk. They were called special access tours and were the reason there were paths in and out of the stones.

“Yes,” she breathed.

He held up his watch. “Clock’s ticking.”

She turned to take it all in. There was no clear beginning spot.

Her dad’s voice found her, suffused her with warmth. Start with what you know. Once you’d inventoried the familiar, you could find what didn’t belong.

Well, rocks were familiar. Salem counted ninety-three of them making up this incarnation of Stonehenge, a mix of broken lumps and free-standing rocks.

That told her nothing.

Next, she evaluated shape. The original structure was a circle of stones around a horseshoe shape. Salem was currently standing inside what remained of the formation. Beyond the stones lay a circle of embankment, and even farther, burial mounds. The Heel Stone lay approximately 250 feet northeast, a lumpy, fifteen-foot-tall rock shaped like an eel poking its head out of the ground.

Her research had verified what Charlie told her on the drive, which was that on the summer solstice, if she stood in the center of Stonehenge, she’d see the sun rise directly over the Heel Stone. The winter solstice sun set opposite that.

Charlie strode to the Altar Stone behind her. He knelt beside it. “They don’t think anyone was sacrificed here. Just a fanciful name.”

Salem turned and nodded. She had number and shape. Now she needed surfaces. All the stones were pockmarked, gray and green, three tons each and as large below the earth as above. The rocks were ancient and timeless, witness to five thousand years of humanity: feasts and festivals, rituals and rites. These stones would not give up their secret lightly. She felt that, and below that certainty the friction of discomfort itched at her brainstem.

She recognized it: she needed to find a pattern. She needed to soothe herself. She stepped toward the nearest stone, her hand raised.

“Stop that!” The guard stared at her fiercely. “You can’t touch the stones.”

Salem dropped her hand but felt no shame. Normally, getting in trouble would drown her in embarrassment, but she was a different woman inside the stones. Or maybe her perspective had shifted now that she was responsible for Mercy getting kidnapped.

“Nothing like the fear of finger oils destroying a five-thousand-year-old rock, eh?” Charlie said under his breath.

Salem’s lip twitched. She wasn’t alone in here, and that felt good, but knowing how closely they were being watched made their impossible task even more difficult. She would have to crack this using only her mind. She didn’t know if the code train had been put in place by the Neolithic builders or if it had been placed here later, camouflaged for hundreds of years. It could be a disguised drawer, a cipher carved into the stone, something buried below the soil, or any of another thousand possibilities.

She turned on her heel, studying the stones as if they were old-fashioned slides and she in the center of the projector. It only took half a turn before she spotted it.