Phyllis had seen photos of the great monument but, now that she was here at the actual place, she realised that no picture could do it justice.
‘It’s . . . it’s . . . fantastic,’ she murmured, gazing at the stones that seemed to have thrust themselves up out of the ground and frozen in place.
‘Fantastic it is,’ agreed Wallace.
Phyllis stood still, and let herself be totally undistracted as she viewed Stonehenge. She stopped hearing the birdsong that was drifting gently from the hedges and trees; she even became unaware of Daisy sniffing the bushes. She wanted to experience the starkness and the beauty of what lay before her—that and nothing more for the next few minutes.
The dark, blue-grey stones appeared old and wise and majestic out there on their cleared plain. Phyllis let the sense of them fill the air around her. As the seconds passed silently by, she began feeling a sort of serene indifference to the rest of the world. You may come and go, the monuments seemed to be telling her, you may live and breathe and fight and love and the world may be plunged into calamity and nonsense . . . the earth may quake and the skies crack open . . . but we shall always be here, undisturbed by these events . . . these events that, with the great sweep of Time, will seem little in the mighty scheme of things.
Then Daisy stopped sniffing and barked impatiently.
‘Come here, four-paws,’ Wallace called to her.
She scampered back to him and he scooped her up into a gentle cuddle. ‘See?’ he whispered. ‘Phyllis is captivated.’
Daisy looked at Phyllis, who seemed to be in another world. ‘Arf!’ she yapped loudly.
Phyllis blinked and shook her head. She smiled at Wallace and Daisy. ‘Well, what’re we waiting for?’ she asked. ‘Let’s get down that road and into Stonehenge!’
‘Lead the way,’ said her great-grandfather. ‘We are at your side, like the loyal moths drawn to the flame of grandeur’s bonnet.’
Phyllis didn’t even give him a quizzical look, so eager was she to get to the site.
At exactly the same Time as Phyllis, Daisy and Wallace Wong were journeying into Stonehenge, but also at a Time far removed, Clement was about to enter into a state of great perplexity.
He was sitting in his room with the lights turned low as he battled online alongside a boy named Juan who lived more than ten thousand miles away. They had been long-time compatriots in the saga known as Zombie Wars of the Seventh Parallelicon, and this afternoon things were turning particularly nasty.
Clement and Juan had both risen to the rank of Imperial Zombie Thwarter, Third Division—a ranking of some accomplishment. They had worked side by side, and it had taken them six months to achieve this elevated status in the realm of Zombie Wars.
Now Clement, wearing a natty false grey handlebar moustache, had uncovered the crypt headquarters of the sludge-dripping Stealth Zombies of Pynedale. The creatures were feeding from the stagnant, sewer-like underground river that flowed beneath the miserable little village of Dreggsby-on-Pyne, and this vile concoction was giving them new strength and power—the likes of which Clement and his Imperial Zombie Thwarter friend Juan had never before encountered.
‘Man,’ Clement whispered as he saw one especially grisly-looking specimen rising up at them, ‘diabolical!’
Quickly he typed a message to his co-IZT, Juan: Have you got much power in your flamebazooka? I’m down until the next level.
Seconds later, Juan’s message appeared in the top corner of Clement’s screen: Abt 50 rounds, IZT Clem. I told you you shouldn’t waste so much fire on that giraffe.
Clement fired back: Yeah, IZT Juan, but we weren’t to know it wasn’t infected!!!! It’d be just like this game to have a zombie giraffe. How fast could they gallop, and they could sludge you from on high with those long necks—
IZT Clem!!!!!! Watch it!!!!!!
Clement had been too busy typing about the zombie giraffe to see the single, shrivelled, mouth-gaping zombie woman with a hairdo that would have been ghastly even when she’d been alive. She was rising up from the toxic underground river, and she had Clem and Juan directly in her vacant, empty-socketed sights!
Clem typed as if his fingers were aflame: Take command! Take her out! No firepower here! Blast 20 rounds!!!!!!!!
He held his breath as Juan took control. The viewfinder of their joint artillery came into focus; the scope on the front of the flamebazooka followed the zombie with the bad hairdo as she lurched across the screen, disappearing and re-emerging from behind a shattered tree stump. If she sludged Juan and Clem, it was disaster—they’d drop back three levels and lose their IZT rankings.
That would be unbearable.
The scope homed in on the zombie’s face . . . her mouth was gaping wide, her sockets glowing, ready to attack, ready to sludge her vile, purple vomitacious mess directly at Clem and Juan!
Clement’s heart almost stopped as he watched what happened next.
The zombie hurtled forward, rushing at the screen . . .
Juan’s scope focussed directly at her chasm of a face . . .
Clem heard the CLICK of the flamebazooka . . .
and . . .
. . . the screen went blank!
‘Whaaaaaa?’ Clement jabbed at the return key frantically, stabbingly, bang bang bang bang bang, but nothing happened.
All he had before him was a blank screen.
Desperately he turned the computer off. It powered down normally. Then he switched it on again. It came to life as it usually did.
But there was no internet. Every window he tried to open on his browser presented him with the same sort of message: ‘Internet access unavailable’, ‘Gateway denied’, ‘Source unknown’, ‘ERROR’.
He tried his email accounts. The same messages greeted him.
He grabbed his phone and punched in Phyllis’s number. It rang and rang, but she didn’t answer.
He tried another friend, a kid who, like himself, was forced by his parents to learn how to play the xylophone. Clement asked him if he had access to the net. After a moment the boy replied that he didn’t.
‘Oh, man!’ Clement moaned, ripping off his handlebar moustache and hurling it across his bedroom. ‘This is really . . . really . . . uuuuggggghhhhhh!’
As Phyllis, Daisy and Wallace came nearer to Stonehenge, they were passed on the access road by some horse-drawn carts going the other way. In the carts, sitting on benches along the sides, sat rows of well-dressed people—the women in wide dresses with bustles, and some of the men wearing smart homburg hats or derbys.
‘Tourists,’ Wallace informed Phyllis. ‘This is how people come to see the place in 1898. A bit different to your day, my dear, when hundreds of huge buses come and park at the visitor centre, which is far off from being built.’
‘They all look so dressed-up,’ Phyllis observed.
‘The fashion of the day.’ A third cart trundled past them, also heading away from Stonehenge, the big horses huffing out steam from their wide, hairy nostrils. W.W. glanced up at the sun, which was moving ever-slowly towards the horizon. ‘The afternoon is drawing to a close. A good time for us to have our visit . . . we shouldn’t be disturbed by the chatter and the distractions of tourists.’
Phyllis was glad about that; she wanted the place all to themselves.
‘Let me tell you a little about this wonderful place,’ Wallace said as they walked along. ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote, in his History of the Kings of Britain, that Myrddin built Stonehenge using huge stones which he brought over from Ireland. It came about because Myrddin was giving Ambrosius, the conqueror of the Saxons, advice about how to make an everlasting tomb to honour the dead, which Ambrosius wanted to build. Myrddin told Ambrosius that he should get the stones from the Circle of Giants on the mountain of Cillara in Ireland. He should bring the stones here and arrange them in a circle, and they would last forever.
‘Ambrosius asked Myrddin why they needed to go all the way to Ireland to get the stones, when there were other stones in England. Myrddin replied that the stones from the Circle of Giants were mystical stones, ancient stones endowed with wonderful curative powers. In the long-distant past, Myrddin said, the giants had brought these stones to Ireland from Africa, and they had used them in their baths to cure them of illnesses. The stones possessed secrets the likes of which the world had never known.
‘Ambrosius sent his brother Uther Pendragon and his army to Ireland, where a fierce battle against the Irish king ensued. Finally, Pendragon’s army won, and the soldiers tried to move the stones to their ships, ready to sail home. But they could not budge them. In the end Myrddin himself used his magic to spirit the stones onto the ships. They sailed them back to England, and erected them, thanks to more of Myrddin’s spells, right where you are seeing them.’
‘Do you think that really happened?’ asked Phyllis.
Wallace smiled. ‘Ah. One thing I do know: scientists discovered that some of the stones here were brought from Pembroke in Wales, hundreds of miles away. And that means that the stories about Myrddin transporting the stones from a long way away are perhaps grained in the truth.’
Phyllis let that seep into her mind.
They were nearer the monument now. Phyllis stopped and let the view of the stones, at this closer distance, fill her eyes.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said quietly. ‘Timeless and beautiful.’
Wallace stopped alongside her. ‘That it is, my dear. I thought the very same thing the first time I laid eyes upon it. And I still think that every time I revisit here.’
Daisy was busy sniff-patrolling up ahead, darting from one side of the road to the other.
Now the sunlight’s dancing rays were thinning, and the surfaces of the standing stones seemed to swallow up the feeble golden beams, sucking them deep into their cold, hulking forms. The megaliths loomed dark and deep grey against the fading light.
‘Stonehenge is the most remarkable group of standing stones, Phyllis, and the most famous. And it’s the only stone circle—and there are more than a thousand of them in Britain—which has many of the lintels still in place.’
Phyllis let her gaze wander across the stone slabs that capped many of the standing stones.
‘Come,’ said Wallace, ‘before the sun goes completely.’
They started walking again, and Wallace continued his briefing: ‘Most experts on stone circles believe they were made as places where astronomy could be practised, and this fits in with what we know of Myrddin. He built an observatory for himself at a stone circle site somewhere, which the people knew as Myrddin’s house. It had seventy windows and seventy doors, through which Myrddin could watch the sun, Venus and the stars. From this place he studied the movements of the planets and the constellations.’
‘Ah,’ said Phyllis.
Up ahead, Daisy stopped, turned and gave a hurry up, you’re going too slow yap.
‘And before we arrive,’ Wallace said, pulling out a notebook from his coat pocket, ‘here are the bare and basic facts, as I jotted them down from a guidebook left behind by a careless tourist on one of my previous visits.’ He winked at Phyllis, flipped open the notebook, and read:
‘ “You see before you 150 gigantic stones set out in a definite circular pattern. The outer circle includes 17 enormous sarsen stones of hard limestone, many of which are capped with a lintel stone . . .” ’
Wallace read on, sharing with Phyllis details of the stones—their height, weight and the arrangement of the outer and inner circles. When he’d finished he closed the notebook and slipped it back into his pocket. ‘Now you have the facts,’ he said, ‘and the legend, go and have the experience.’
Phyllis gave him a huge grin, then a quick, sudden hug. ‘Just try to stop me,’ she said. ‘C’mon, Daisy!’
Off she rushed, straight towards the inner circle. Daisy followed at her heels. Wallace went and rested against one of the sarsens, leaning his staff against the cold, ancient rock. He shut his eyes and tried to feel the presence he was searching for.
Phyllis wandered amid the standing stones, taking in what it was like to be in a place that was so old, so mysterious, so enigmatic. Everything was quiet—not even the warbling of birds or the gentle rustle of the wind could be heard—and the sense of calmness, of great, gentle soothingness, was even stronger in here.
She came to the centre of Stonehenge and stopped by a large block of sandstone that Wallace had described from his notebook. She slung her shoulder bag onto the grass and stood perfectly still.
She shut her eyes and tried to sense if Myrddin was about.
Daisy watched her as she remained statue-like, concentrating.
Everything was still and silent and secret.
After a few minutes, the small dog wagged her tail and barked loudly. Phyllis’s eyes shot open and she crouched down and patted her four-legged friend. ‘Do you like it here too, Daisy? Can you feel something special about Stonehenge?’
Daisy wagged her short tail more quickly and licked Phyllis’s hand.
Phyllis sat on the grass next to Daisy. Overhead, the sky was filled with a flurry of bright crimson and orange streaks as the sun gave its final bursts of light to the dying day. The young conjuror studied the lintel stones against the vibrant sky, and she felt happy and special to be here right now.
‘Do you think Myrddin really made this place?’ she asked Daisy. ‘Do you think he actually put these stones here? Did he watch the stars from inside all of this?’
‘You know,’ came Wallace’s voice from across the sarsens, ‘I’ve seen a drawing in a very old manuscript, showing Myrddin being assisted by a giant as he builds Stonehenge. That history was written in about 1155. Even back then, people believed Myrddin made this place.’
‘I didn’t know you could hear me,’ Phyllis called out to him.
‘Ah. One of the funny ways I get affected by Transiting. For a few hours afterwards, my hearing is extremely acute; I can hear the pin dropping from the very bosoms of infinity’s haystack . . . oh, I know what I mean.’
Phyllis smiled.
‘Another thing that may tickle your fancy,’ Wallace called, ‘is that somewhere in all of these stones there’s supposed to be an inscription, carved by Myrddin himself. I’ve never been able to find it, though.’
‘What’s it supposed to say?’ asked Phyllis. She could see her great-grandfather between two of the standing stones. He’d taken a deck of cards out and was fanning them back and forth, spreading them and closing them with astonishing smoothness.
‘We believe it was a warning from Myrddin to King Arthur, that the mortal battle for the end of the world would take place on this plain.’
‘Jeepers,’ said Phyllis. ‘And did it?’
‘Not yet, my dear, not yet.’ Wallace held the cards in his right hand and, with a flick of his wrist, sent them flying, one by one, up into the air, over his head and into his left hand. ‘We’re all still here, aren’t we?’
‘Do you think if you can find this inscription it might give you a clue to Myrddin?’ Phyllis asked, her eyes twinkling at W.W.’s wonderful dexterity.
‘Perhaps. It is something I hope for. Any clue is a clue to be examined carefully, my dear. Any little sign of the wizard is—’
But that was all she heard.
There was a sudden grinding of rock against rock and then a flat, heavy rush of air and the enormous lintel slab above Wallace Wong came crashing down!
The ground shuddered as the lintel smashed deep into the grass.
The playing cards shot into the air in all directions.
‘NO!’ Phyllis screamed, her voice like shattering glass. ‘W.W.! NOOOO!’