Beneath the Tor (9 page)

She put her hands over her chest and dragged fast breaths in, one after the other, shoving them out again as if her windpipe had narrowed. “Ugh!” She bent forward as if about to puke. “Ugh, ugh!”

I got out my of chair, making my movements steady and smooth. I stood behind her because I didn't want to crowd her in. I put my hands over her shoulders and gave them a steady squeeze, as when beginning a Reiki treatment. “I'm channeling some energy into you, Laura, some calm feelings,” I whispered. “Breathe out; breathe out, as well as in. That will help. Empty your lungs, fill them with fresh air.”

I could see she was trying, but the hyperventilation had overcome her now. She was heading towards a full panic attack.

“Think where you are, Laura.”

“Where—I—am?”

“You're in safety. No one is nagging. No one is telling you anything. No one is …”

“Coming—for—me!” She twisted round. Her face was layered with sweat. “They—were—coming for me!”

“Pardon?”

She shook her head, unable to speak as the breathing rose to a crescendo.

“Would you like to lie down?”

She flung herself onto the floor cushions, curling onto her side, whimpering like hurt dog.

I dropped the fleece over her and touched her forehead with my hands, cleansing her with Reiki. “Don't be afraid. It's almost over, isn't it? Just keep remembering to empty your lungs and gently fill them. It's almost over, now.”

The minutes it took for Laura to be calm again felt endless. Eventually she let her body relax and her breathing steadied and she precipitated into sleep, as if a great release had come over her.

I moved away and began writing my notes—everything I knew and everything I wondered about Laura Munroe.

Five minutes later, I heard her suck in a waking breath and roll onto her back.

“It was Mum, mostly.” She spoke to the ceiling. “She wanted it. She said it would sort everything out. Just a week, and I'd be better. And, I'm like, ‘How? Exactly?' She got Dad on her side. They phoned Daniel and told him I'd agreed, which was a fat lie, of course. They packed my case. I felt like a child again, like when your parents come into your room and you're in bed and they're up and dressed and they're moving around you, telling you how your day will be and putting out the cutesy clothes they've chosen for you to wear. They said Daniel was coming at eleven o'clock and he'd explain things to me and then they'd drive me in. Just for a week. Then I'd be better.”

“Where did Daniel want you to go?”

She was quiet for so long that I didn't think she was up to answering. Then she said, “Juniper Ward, HDU, Weston General Hospital. It's only up the road. It's got a sea view. They said I'd like it.” She shuddered. “I found your card, that Tracey gave me, and rang you. I had to get out. I did leave a note.”

I tried to get my head around what she was saying. “You came here because you were due to be admitted into an acute psychiatric ward?”

“Yeah.” She sat up, crossing her legs. She shook herself as if trying to mask a shudder. “How horrible would such a place be? Filled with ghosts, that's what I think, what I'm imagining. Looney zombies, walking around with glazed eyes. Mumbling to themselves. Accosting you—the sane one, you'd have to think—with crazy notions. It's a
black-and
-white horror film, isn't it? It can't really be like that nowadays, can it?”

“The unknown is always terrifying.”

“Stupid, though.”

“The thing that strikes me, Laura, is that you didn't have an attack. Not in that particular case. You got me on the phone, wrote out a note, got on your bike. You acted. You didn't panic.”

“Not … badly, no.”

“Is that surprising?”

“I guess if I was honest, I've known from the beginning that it's inside me, what causes this. When Mum got chili in her eye, I was fine. Like I was in the Navy. Capable and quick thinking.” She smiled. “That was on my report: ‘Competent and destined to go far.'”

I shook my head. Maybe Laura should have stayed in the Navy. Things had not got better at home, and surely there had to be facilities for sick people in the armed services.

“What happened when you got back yesterday?”

“I didn't go back. I stayed in a B&B.”

“You haven't seen your parents since yesterday?”

“I texted to say I was okay.” She took a deep breath. “I have to go back to it, don't I?”

“I think your work report was right. You're a courageous person.
Clear-headed
. Perhaps better when things are right in front of you. Like an emergency to deal with. But this isn't clear cut; it's impossible to
see
what the problem is.”

“Could you find that out? My problem?”

“I'll try. In the meantime, you should go home. Talk to Daniel. I don't think you've done that yet, have you?” She shook her head, and I continued. “Tell him about me, about where you've been. Tell him you feel capable now of being treated at home. He won't make you go into the ward if you can persuade him you won't hurt yourself and you will take the treatments offered.”

“Okay.” Her face cleared. “Yeah. They can't force me, can they?”

“I'm sure they can't. So, from now on, if you want to keep on seeing me, we should probably arrange a weekly appointment. We would make six appointments, over six weeks. At the end of that time we can evaluate how things are going. How does that sound?”

“We can't do it quicker?”

“You can't hurry the spirit world. If you try, guides and guardians tend to get annoyed and less communicative.”

“Oh. Only … I feel …”

“Despairing.” It was vibrating off her. “Do you remember me saying how shamanic therapy would be a
long-term
solution? Every time I work with you, you'll go home and do some further work yourself.”

She nodded. “Okay.”

“If you don't mind, I'll keep your Pokémon for a while.”

“Raichu,” said Laura. She got up and went over to the desk. She picked up her toy and gave him a snatched kiss. “Call him Raichu.”

nine

the red knight

The Green Knight is
not dead.

The acolyte has scoured the papers for news reports—nothing—no account of a mysterious death or even a short piece on a mugging. The Green Knight has disappeared into oblivion. Yet the acolyte can clearly recall the roughness of the stone in his grip, the wrench in his shoulder as it flew. He'd seen the Green Knight fall. And Morgan had whispered,
your work here is complete.
Hadn't she?

Today he's back in Glastonbury, his first time since … since the day the damsel fell. Since the dolorous blow was struck. The thread pulled and pulled at him until he could stay away no longer.

Morgan le Fay is standing outside the grounds of Glastonbury Abbey. Almost at once, his head is plugged up with her. She takes a hard, long look at him and pain slices through his scalp.

She disappears into the abbey grounds, unheard and unseen, shifting her shape from visible to invisible.

The acolyte waits in a short queue and pays at the booth. He's given a little map of the grounds, which he holds before him. High Altar, Lady Chapel, Fish Pond, Abbot's Kitchen. He moves away from the constant stream of tourists … or perhaps they move from him, as he mumbles the things he needs to be ready to say to Morgan.

All at once, he's at the edge of a cool, green space. Monuments crumble over the lawns. It should be a place of deep peace, but the ruins of the abbey are filled with a shocking clamour. There's bedlam in his head, a noise like dentists and blacksmiths, full of screech. It splits his aching brain into molecules, into atoms; it splits the atoms.

Morgan is waiting beside what must be the Holy Thorn, a magnificent hawthorn, so old it has crutches propping up its boughs. The acolyte lurches towards his mistress.

“You are found lacking, acolyte.” She is seething with anger. “A knight rapes a maiden until she lies there, lifeless. Your only duty was to strike him down.
Not
make him falter.
Not
watch him stumble.
Strike him down!
FALL!
Life from life!”

The Green Knight cannot die. That is the story, the legend. However many times you slice through his neck, he returns. He tries to explain this, spurting words out of his plugged up, tortured head.

Someone skirts by them, then doubles back. “Are you okay?”

A tourist guide, dressed for the part—medieval costume of a rusty red cloak pinned at the neck and beneath it a belted tunic with a heraldic design, a red dragon.

“There's a terrible noise,” the acolyte says.

“Yes, we're sorry for that. They're doing some repairs to the Lady Chapel. Reconstruction work on the crypt. We're trying to prevent winter flooding.”

“Are you a monk?”

“I'm a knight, actually.” The man smiles. “I'm here to answer any questions …”

The acolyte only half hears, his hands over his ears against the dentists and the blacksmiths drilling on and on, dark and bleak. He glances at Morgan. Her face is ablaze with irritation. She mouths at him.
Red Knight
.

The Red Knight is a thief who steals even from King Arthur.

She wants him to take down the Red Knight, he knows it even before she demands it. Strike him down. Not make him falter. Not make him stumble. Fall. Life from life.

The acolyte follows Morgan over the clipped grass and the Red Knight comes too. In fact, he's ahead, talking talking talking as he walks backwards, gesturing with his hands, explaining the disaster of the flooding in the crypt, leading them between galvanized crowd barriers and into the Lady Chapel.

There's no roof. Just the high stone walls and a bridge that spans the chapel's depths. The acolyte clings to the rail, looking down at men in helmets and yellow jackets like something out of a kid's cartoon. There are pneumatic drills, chisels, mallets, and long sharp poles that lift the flagstones laid five hundred years ago by monks, pulling them apart, piece by piece. Above, a scaffolder is building his cage of poles and planks up the walls of the chapel, dangling off his platform, working with a series of thuds and clunks and clangs. An electric hand drill buzzes; he can feel it boring down into his teeth.

And in his ear, the Red Knight, talking talking talking.

He feels shitty. Nauseated, shivery as a newborn pup.

“I know why is the crypt flooded,” he tells the Red Knight. He's shouting, but he only knows this because his throat is raw from the words. “It's the wasteland! The dolorous blow. The land ravaged. Neglected. Everything will die in the land of Britain. It's the story of the wounded king, and the wasting of the land of Logres!”

Morgan slants a look, a message without words.
Get rid of him or I'll toss him over the bridge.
And she could. He knows well the extent of Morgan le Fay's sorcery; she can trap a person with her mind and play with them, using a level of control that allows her to alter bodily movements, speech, even thoughts. For entertainment's sake, she uses her magic on the random herd of humanity, compelling the pedestrian ahead to trip over his own feet, forcing the woman browsing the shop window to weep without warning.

The acolyte uses his shoulder and hip to pin the Red Knight to the bridge rail. “Go now, before she tosses you over,” he hisses.

He means it as a fair warning. He closes his eyes on them, contending with the throb in his head. When he starts awake again, he's alone. Morgan some way off, staring at a metal sign imbedded on a pole in the grass.

“Read it!”

Her constant edge of impatience makes his headache worse. He swallows over a dry throat. He tries to breathe, but he can't. In the end, Morgan has to read it.

“‘
The site of the ancient graveyard where in 1190 the monks dug to find the tombs of Arthur and his Guinevere
… ' King Arthur Pendragon. The only marked grave of the Sleeping King.”

Selkie walks over the grave, which is invisible in the grass, as if bored by this, as if Sleeping Kings were threepence each. His bright cat tongue licks each side of his mouth and his blue gaze stretches away, over the wall of the abbey, over the tops of the green trees. He can see the Tor rising in the distance. The place where the maiden died.

Morgan le Fay lifts the cat from the grave by its underbelly and strokes its head with
ring-glinting
fingers. “This surely must be the place.”

“Place?”

“That day is enshrined in me. The journey across the marshes with Arthur, mortally wounded.” Her eyes glitter. “We sat around him, you know, in the bow and in the stern. Nine maidens of Avalon. Slipped from wetland into roofless tunnels. A river inside the hill, wide and black, deeper, deeper, and then—a vaulted basilica with gilded pillars. Arthur resting on swansdown under silken canopies, his crown bright gold in the light of our flares. His knights hoisted the Bell of Doomsday.”

“The Bell of Doomsday,” the acolyte whispers.

“They lay down, still wearing their arms, feet pointing towards the sarcophagus, and slept. We left him there, his cool cheeks damp with our tears.”

Out of the corner of his eye, the acolyte watches the Red Knight. He's with a party of babbling kids. He leads them into a stubby building with an octagonal roof. The acolyte checks his map. The Abbot's Kitchen.

Inside, the kitchen is garish;
paint-and
-plaster food, raw meat, and bread. The acolyte stays at the door, where the flagstones are loose and broken. A
good-sized
corner chunk snapped off, flat as a book and as easy to hold, but with a deadly edge.

The babble of kids move on, shepherded by their teacher.

“Excuse me?” They signal to the Red Knight as he leaves the Abbot's Kitchen. “We're looking for the gateway to the Tor.”

“Not far. A mile in that direction. Make for the Chalice Well—”

“We don't want the route for tourists,” Morgan spits. “Any fool can find that for themselves. We search for its nucleus. The basilica in the hollow of the hill. The place of the interregnum of Arthur Pendragon.”

The Red Knight gapes. The acolyte remembers that the Red Knight is here only to answer questions. “Where is the tunnel that can take us there?” he asks. “I've read that the old monks used it.”

Since the acolyte warned the Red Knight off, he's been less talkative with them. He tries to walk on, but the acolyte takes a leaf from his book and steps in front of him. “The tunnel to the Hollow Hill?”

The man laughs. “There was a tunnel uncovered, oh, forty years ago. It was nothing but a medieval drain.”

“Monks used it to go into the hollow of the hill!”

“Okay. Well, it was blocked up. Health and safety.”

The acolyte snatches at his russet cloak. “Show us.”

“Look, please, sir; I'll have to ask you to keep your voice down. This is the abbey grounds.” The Red Knight says no more. He walks away, fast, glancing behind to where they are watching him.

Morgan leans in. “I say we should follow the Red Knight, and in a quiet place, take the thing that is to hand, and pound and pound until he drops like a stone.”

The acolyte looks down at the doorstep below his feet. He eases the corner of the broken slab from its place. Yes. It feels right. “Life from life,” he whispers.

Loving Morgan le Fay is like stepping on hot coals. Like lighting a garden fire, watching it grow fierce, and, on the opposite side, visible through the flames, there she is. Silent but calling. He would just … walk through … over the hot coals … there's no alternative. It had been like that from the beginning.

He first saw her at the library. He'd been taking out his usual pile of books. She'd asked if he needed the one on the top, a book on astrology. Sun signs. How to understand the
age-old
method of reading destinies.

“I'm hooked on that sort of thing, aren't you?” she'd said. “I have the sun in Gemini and the moon in Libra. It's a combination that makes me glow bright, but makes me also a little ethereal. What is your ascendancy?

“I … I'm not sure. I won't find out, will I, if you pinch this book.”

She had laughed, so infectious. “I like to travel. I do so all the time. Life is never dull with my chart the way it is.”

The paving stone digs into his palm. They're both moving fast, now, and when the Red Knight glances back, he sees that they are following. The Red Knight begins to run.

“Go!” Morgan whispers. “Life from life!”

He doesn't think about it. He can't, his head is too full of clang. His teeth are throbbing with the drill. He keeps his shoulders low and the bit of paving slab behind his back and sprints, full at the tilt. The Red Knight slips out of sight between
low-lying
bushes. They burst after him into a small copse of trees.

“
Pound and pound,”
Morgan screeches.

The Red Knight glances round. His brow furrows, as if he can't comprehend what is happening and yet knows all too well. The cloak swirls out like a girl's dancing skirt. The acolyte makes a heroic dash and snatches at it, pulling the Red Knight full under the darkness of the trees.

“
Whatchyu-watchyou
-gerrofff …”

The cloak tightens around his neck until the pin that secures it springs away. The guy unbalances. He thuds onto the ground. He lets out a strangled “ugh,” but he's winded only for seconds, then is struggling up.

The acolyte steps in and uses his elbow as a club. The knight topples backwards. His eyes have gone wild, he's swatting his hands at the acolyte, eyeing the corner of paving stone. He lets out a shout of alarm—high—almost a scream. For a second, they are looking at each other. It's a connection. All along the Red Knight set out to mislead and prevent them from finding their way into the Hollow Hill.

The acolyte drives the point of the paving stone into the man's scull. There is a soft sound. Wet. There is a lot of red. It smears his hands and the knight's face. The smell makes him heave. He wipes his hands on the man's red cloak.

“My work here is achieved,” he whispers. He doesn't care if Morgan hears him or not.