51  

Within the circle of stones, before the hallowed barrow and stained altar of rock, Tom stands alone.

Out here, the very earth, and all that extends upwards from it, is subdued. Surrounding him, the skirts of scrub are quiet and the perpetual restlessness of the trees has stilled. He wonders if time itself has paused. Perhaps the entire landscape that surrounds the sacred space of the grove has become immobile in respectful fear; receptive yet hesitant, lest any movement or sound draw the baleful attention of what lies beneath the land.

A god.

And to think, that in more innocent times, his daughter and their puppy walked nonchalantly here, thrilled by the glade’s strangeness and the prospect of adventure. Tom marvels at how he’d believed this place to be a mere strip of old woodland that would bring his family closer to nature – a refuge, rescuing them from their existence in a city where the natural world had been entirely absent.

Of the age of this place, its histories, laws and character, all that it has seen and lived through and preserved, he knows so little. And yet he brought his family here. Believed they could just buy a fallen house at auction, paint a few walls and live happily ever after. He’s tempted to roar with laughter at his delusions, until he suffocates.

There is no one left to guide him now. Blackwood has been eviscerated, drawn and quartered, and will eventually be found, piece by piece, once his dismal semi-detached charnel house throngs with flies.

Behind Tom, over yonder where the two houses stand and bow before this furtive and mercurial woodland, his two elderly neighbours are bound and hooded. Their cunning is sealed inside pillowcases while they slowly expire from blood loss; from the wounds he inflicted upon them with a firearm.

Tom shakes his head. His life should never have contained any of this. What did I do to deserve it?

But it was so easy to get drawn in, to go to war. Destruction doesn’t take long, once you get started, and he would be lying if he denied that defacing his neighbours’ trees and blasting them with a shotgun carried its own deep satisfactions. At least at the time.

How swiftly the Moots made him unrecognisable to himself. But there is no more time to think of that.

The torch on the grassy surface illuminates the tracks of the boar’s trotters, the shotgun, the bloodstained rucksack. But Tom’s attention slides to the barrow and to where he must now break ground. And he thinks of Gracey’s tear-stained face, bidding him goodbye. Little Gracey. He sees Fiona’s tired eyes too, welling with tears. The mummified cat. A candle flame in total darkness. A crude throne. Blackwood’s head leaking upon his desk, the eyes open. He sees again those grubby headpieces leering from wooden pegs inside a closet. Archie stiff in his basket, the small eyes lost within ebony fur. Misery and death. All of that came from whatever was drawn from here: a divine draught from old stone.

Freshly gathered flowers crown the stained altar.

Tom grips the spade in one hand and wonders what will happen when he smashes the seals. Beyond scant instruction from Blackwood, and a desperate desire to reverse the curse on Gracey, he suspects, now that he stands before the barrow, that there is another gaping hole in his knowledge; an ignorance of the consequences of what he is about to do.

Will the concentration of infernal power that has been buried and stored for so long just disperse? Released, will such veneficium and maleficium as he has borne witness to no longer be directed at his daughter’s destruction? Could it be that simple?

Blackwood said it was a god. It is a god. Blackwood wanted to banish the god from the enlivened effigy. Effigy. That is what he must dig for, though Blackwood is no longer around to dispel whatever possesses the artefact.

His thoughts divert at another sharp angle to consider the Moots’ terror of what lies below. Should it remain in the ground, as the Moots, its guardians, pleaded? Freed, will the god wreak upon him a far worse fate than the Moots ever had in mind? After all, they remade themselves in its image. And that idea alone makes Tom feel faint and sick.

But then, were they simply stricken by the idea of losing the power that had sustained them for decades? And those savage and bestial custodians, who would desolate and take lives with impunity, in pursuit of favours they siphoned from this ground, must be stopped. He has a duty to end what his neighbours have been getting away with. For decades.

Yes, it must come out, because it remains Gracey’s only chance. That matters most. His little girl. It’s why you’re here. And if he frees it, might he not ask of it a favour?

Wincing from the pain in his shoulder, Tom readies the spade; a simple tool before a force of monumental strength and unnatural power.

Better get started.

* * *

Eventually, steel kisses stone. As if digging himself a grave, lit by white torchlight, he’s hacked the barrow for an hour until the chink rang out and chilled him. The blood on his back running freely with sweat and soil, he’s laboured through exhaustion and his expression has remained a grimace throughout the excavation; a cramp of determination and stifled pain that has watched a pile of black soil slowly accumulate to a hump beside his boots.

Tom now stands inside a great rent in the north face of the barrow, where his eyes widen in awe. This temple’s heart is hard.

Spade wielded over his head, then down with an angled blade, he furiously slices at the remnants of wet soil. Then steps away and scrabbles for the torch, eager to illumine what has just tumbled from the dirt at the base of the mound.

Amidst the clots of dark soil, bones glimmer.

On his hands and knees, he desperately rakes the disrupted earth with his gloved hands to gather the ghastly crop, until he holds a large skull aloft. Though its grotesque proportions and dirty humanlike teeth suggest an otherworldly monstrousness, he thinks it’s a pig skull. One that is faintly inscribed with sigils.

And there are other skulls. One is much smaller than the first. But once his thumbs have scraped away the wet soil, he discovers the bony walls to be similarly decorated. A hare?

The third skull is instantly recognisable as human, also inscribed. He can only suppose that these are the seals, the remnants of what was once interred here, to serve an esoteric and ancient function.

Smaller items, pale as grubs within the moist earth, are also visible. A number of smaller bones and several flat stones that appear to have been marked or etched. He doesn’t examine those. They’ll tell him nothing. They speak a language he cannot understand. So he puts his tortured back into noisily cutting the remaining soil from the base of the stone that lies behind the bones.

Another ten minutes and he can barely get his back straight. His spine, shoulders, elbows, wrists and hips all scream from being worked red and steaming. But he now finds himself partially hooded inside a porch with earthen banks; a crevice that he’s burrowed, a metre deep, into the northern face of the mound.

Mining so far horizontally, he’s also recovered and cleared what appear to be two columns and a lintel of stone, a triolith. A doorway made from granite. And from directly before the aperture, the bones and remains had tumbled like unlocked shackles.

Between the plinths, which stand no more than a metre high, he is able to punch through the clot of soil at the top, then scrape it away from the threshold to create an imperfect hole. A black gap a man might crawl through.

A hollow, lightless space exists beyond the arch. If the patterned bones and stones before the entrance were the seals, then the effigy must be inside.

But it is nothing more than his imagination, surely, that a vague breeze is licking his face and cooling his skin, sweat-lathered and embedded with grit. And try as he might to justify the abrupt change in temperature because it’s the coldest part of the night and he’s stopped exerting himself with the spade, he cannot dismiss the growing stench of an old latrine and residual corruption.

Tom shoves a hand beneath his nose to block the miasma drifting from the bowels of the barrow, then scrabbles for the flashlight to illumine the hollow interior.

Mere moments after switching the torch on, the dim beam of electric light, as well as whatever thin light seeps through the cloud cover, goes out. Soundlessly, instantaneously, every vestige of light is extinguished from around him in the grove.

His own panicked breathing is all he can hear as a void swallows all, below and above him and in every direction he turns. He panics and briefly suspects blindness; yet another curse inflicted upon him by this rotten, infernal hump of earth.

A sound from below stops his fidgeting and twitching. The noise of a stream bubbling under his feet. There is a light too, over where the mound was. Or, at least, where he thinks it stands, because in this oblivion he doesn’t know which direction he is now facing.

Ahead of him, distant, small and flickering like a candle flame, a solitary light grows into existence. And at once it summons a memory of a recent dream: the vision from the night he cut down the Moots’ trees.

Cautiously, Tom moves towards the flame in the void. As his own hands, which he cannot see, reach out to detect obstacles, he’s sure he’s been through this before. He also fears that he has moved out of the glade. There is no turf beneath the rubber soles of his boots now, only stone.

His discomposure and growing disorientation are almost unbearable and he crouches as if to make himself smaller and less likely to walk into something, or to be seen.

How far away is the flame? It had seemed to be a few metres off but now seems to be a conflagration at a far greater distance.

And is he not now hearing the sounds of what must be a vast cave? A place below the world, dripping with moisture, where water torrents in the distance with the roar of a subterranean river. But he cannot have stumbled inside the barrow; the hole in the door was too small to walk through and when he reached for the torch, he could not have taken more than a few steps from where he’d been standing before the triolith. The barrow was never so huge. The grove had no stream.

Ahead, the distant flame leaps higher to illumine the crude cradle of stone from which it blazes. The distance between himself and the light is still impossible to deduce. The rock upon which it rages might still be the one that stands in the grove but enlarged to the size of a house. Or something even bigger.

Dear God, where am I?

A curious animal noise emerges to sniff about him in the darkness. No sooner does he hear the sound than a sloppy mouth sweeps the stone behind his heels.

Tom tenses rigid and gulps at the cold air to suppress his panic. Air that tastes of sewage.

Circling counter-clockwise, the beast shuffles and snuffles. Its heavy respirations suggest a monstrous size, the noise rumbling from deep inside a large throat.

Near hyperventilating with terror, Tom stumbles from the thing before it closes upon him in the dark.

Moving in the direction of the flaming stone, it doesn’t take him long to suspect that he’s being herded towards it. A hound is terrorising a sheep, and when a swinish grunt bleats no more than a metre behind his head, he flees blind.

The subterranean river in the darkness begins to run alongside him. It is close but never visible, nor discovered by any splashes beneath his boots.

Ahead, the great flame now dances upon an altar wreathed in scarlet flowers. It must hold what he came for. The rest is illusion. Magic, he tells himself. Some kind of defence. Hellish visions.

Approaching, he sees the throne behind the fiery shrine, and he stops running. Hacked into shape as if by blind giants, or crudely assembled from fallen dolmens to fashion a huge chair… He’s seen this great seat before.

Or is it small, this rock upon which a wizened figure sits, like a dark monkey in a temple?

The occupant of the throne remains indistinct but in the flash and ebb of flame Tom makes out black legs, hirsute where visible and concluding in a pig’s trotters. The head is hooded by a cowl. A tiara of linked flowers encircles the hood. Ears similar to a hare’s, but much broader and longer, extend through the cowl, their tips lost to sight and disappearing into darkness.

Tom looks down upon something the size of a child.

Then he is looking up at it and it is vast.

The god. The prisoner of the barrow.

From behind the rough-hewn throne, a serpent-like shape rises. A long tail as blanched as a grub, whiskery and plated with scabies, rears like a blind worm. The eyeless tip prods at the air and selects him.

Tom’s entire head, or maybe just his vision – it happens too quickly for him to process – is yanked forward at great speed. A tremendous magnetism pulls his awareness through space, across the divide. His sense of himself, his very consciousness, is sucked inside the cowl. And before he can scream, he’s swallowed whole by the dark cave of the faceless god.

Inside the hood, he’s half aware of a vast depth of freezing space, dotted by distant celestial bodies. Stars that begin to rotate counter-clockwise in a noisome whirlpool. Faster and faster, moment by moment, the rotation accelerates. He can’t breathe. His last fragment of composure unravels.

Passing too fast to be counted come visions. A sense of a life rewound and unspooled.

Arriving at the house. Gracey runs to the flowers… Marrying Fiona… Gracey a swaddled babe in his arms, tiny eyes searching his own… Himself, younger, looking up at himself as he is now, his eyes filled with tears… A boy looking up… He remembers looking up on that very day and seeing… A baby peers up from a basin in a hospital… Red squeezing contractions inside a muscular womb, a heartbeat… A barren moor misted by drizzle and low cloud, a lone pillar of stone… A monument’s silhouette, beneath stars rotating at dizzying speeds until the void descends again.

He’s back before the throne. It stands no bigger than a house brick. He might just pick it up in his hands and break the small clay doll with the covered head that sits upon the rock.

A tiny voice streams from the black hole of the cowl, the vent no bigger than a fingertip. Exposed to the sound, Tom screams and drops and writhes about the wet stone floor. A seizure electrifies his nerves. His head bends to his ankles.

Vaulting thousands of metres into the mist-wreathed stars, the throne is colossal, and the vestments that fall from the occupant form a great waterfall of reeking fabric.

A void.

He’s without body.

An atom of mind persists inside a roaring freeze that extends too far to be understood. His last spark rotates counter-clockwise, building to an impossible speed…

All of me gone .