Alan Garner - Thursbitch

“You’re learning, Ian. That’s what I came to see. I know it now. Let’s go and sit.”

She turned herself away on her poles.

They went back to the ford and sat against the stone at its head-land above the water.

“Coffee?”

“Please.”

He opened the Thermos flask and kept hold of the lid while she put her hands round his and drank. They ate some of the sandwiches.

“What time is it?” she said.

“Half past eight.”

“I’d better get pilled up. If I go to sleep, wake me.”

She unzipped a pocket in her anorak and took out a dispensing box. She shook several differently coloured tablets from a compartment and swallowed them with the coffee.

“I can see a star!” It was high above the outcrop. As the night closed on the valley, more stars appeared and the one star became a constellation.

“It’s Deneb in Cygnus,” he said.

She watched the sky, childlike, pointing at first, but soon quiet, and looking, and listening, while the sky filled.

“Why is it I don’t forget this place?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“It’s stronger even than I thought. Once I’d remembered, it felt as though things were coming back to me that I had not learned.”

“I’m afraid, Sal, that sounds more like your subjectivity interacting with your symptoms.”

“Probably.”

The sky moved round.

“Ian? How good are you on Quantum Theory?”

“No good at all. It’s an area I feel I should be more aware of. As with most things.”

“I must have touched on it once; otherwise I shouldn’t be able to ask you now.”

“So?”

“It’s gone. But I’ve got this niggle that it could be connected to why this place knows we’re here.”

“You are not still serious about that, are you?”

“Of course I am. Most geologists agree about sentient landscape. If you do enough fieldwork, you can’t avoid it. Some places have to be treated with respect, though that doesn’t get written up in the literature.”

“Come off it.”

“Are you telling me, after all we’ve seen and done here, that this is just any old gritstone anticline?”

“I’d say that it’s a powerful and dramatic sub-Alpine environment. But what I accept as appearing to be a strong atmosphere is no more than our projection of our own experience and emotion onto a circumscribed place.”

“How can a man with your job talk such crap?”

“You have to bear in mind I’m also a scientist.”

“Bollocks. This place scares the shite out of you.”

“Have another sandwich, and watch the stars.”

They leaned their heads against the stone. The sky turned.

“What’s happening at the outcrop?” she said.

“Nothing? The Pleiades are rising to the northeast. Taurus will be up soon.”

“I’m not imagining. That rock’s got a halo.”

“It has to be coincidence.”

A waning moon rose from the outcrop, from the cave within.

“That is spectacular. If we were anywhere else but here, at this stone, we should not be seeing this effect. It has to be coincidence, because the only alternative would be that the stone was put here in order to provoke the phenomenon.”

“I think it’s just a big dick,” she said.

“Mm.”

“Now it’s your turn.”

“To what?”

“To mm.”

They sat and watched, not speaking. A fox came down to drink at the ford, caught their scent and looked at them, and walked, unhurried, away. A hare went up the field across the brook. Taurus lifted from the ridge and its red eye hung above the outcrop.

“Dark and true and tender is the North,” she said. “I must have learnt that. Once.”

“Mm.”

“Mm?”

“A hunch, that’s all,” he said. “Do you think we could go a short way up there?”

“Fine.”

He helped her to stand. They took a torch, but left the bag by the stone.

“Say if it gets too much.”

They wove across the field, up to the wall that marked the rough pasture, to the bellied stone.

“Is this why?” she said. “If so, I’m sitting down.”

“Mm.”

“Ian, what are you humming about?”

“Just a thought. I’m out of my depth. But, if you take the site of the outcrop as fixed then, by observation and the placing of markers, it would be possible to make accurate calculations of time.”

“For what purpose?”

“I don’t know. Whatever. For a reason good enough to lug these stones around.”

“And who would do that?”

“But they probably don’t work now as they were meant to, if they ever were meant to.”

“Why?”

“The earth shifts on its axis.”

“I thought it was just me.”

“That moon really was impressive. And from here, Bellatrix is clearing the outcrop. Which means that Orion will rise, though we’ll scarcely see it. Dawn’s not – Look out!”

He pushed her round and held her against the stone with his body. There was a thumping above in the heather, and rocks crashed into the wall, some bouncing over into the field.

“Fools! Stop it! Stop! You’ll kill someone!”

More rocks came tumbling; and then there was a loud, drawn out cry.

“Sheep,” he said. “They dislodged the scree.”

“There isn’t any scree,” she said. “And that wasn’t sheep.”

The cry came again, desolate. Then silence.

“A fox.”

Something landed in the heather and rolled to the back of the stone. He shone his torch. It was a small lump of rock, but different. He picked it up and gave it to her, lighting it with the torch.

“This isn’t from anywhere near here,” she said. “It’s carbon fluoride. And it’s been hollowed. Stick your torch inside.”

The stone glowed white and violet. It was rough on the outside, but had been polished within.

“It’s a cup. Of sorts,” he said.

“You find this colour only in the carboniferous limestone at Tray Cliff, outside Castleton. The miners call it bull-beef. So there is someone up there. Or there was.”

They waited, but there was neither sound nor movement. Over Cats Tor there was a brightening in the sky. They began the slow way down to the brook.

At the stone above the ford they drank more coffee and finished the food. Orion was waist-high from the outcrop, but faded from their sight before he was free.

“Let’s watch the sun rise,” she said. “Then I shall have known it all.”

He arranged the bag so that the stone cup was protected. Behind them, the light crept down Andrew’s Edge. She sat forward, holding herself with expectation.

The sun rose.

The sun rose clear from the outcrop, as the moon before it.

“It’s functional,” he said.

“It’s wonderful.”

“I simply don’t have the maths.”

“Who needs it? Just look. What day is it?”

“Thursday.”

“I mean, is it significant?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea. But. No, that’s irrelevant.”

“What is?”

He looked in his diary.

“The only thing I can think of is that today happens to be the Feast of the Decollation of Saint John the Baptist. Which doesn’t exactly sit comformably with the notion of problematic stones.”

“I need to move,” she said. “The valley and the pills are telling me.”

He lifted her and they left the ford. The air was all new, and the light fresh, bringing back the colours of the place.

She looked up at the ridge.

“That noise.”

“Wasn’t it?” he said. “But foxes can make frightening sounds.”

“Not a fox. It was a man. I heard him. I heard what he said. He was calling: ‘Wife’.”

“Early monday morning, late on Saturday night,

I saw ten thousand mile away a house just out of sight!