Binscombe Tales - The Complete Series (30 page)

Only a few hours before, I’d been electronically shifting funds from London to Tokyo and back. Now I was being invited to enter an entirely different world, just as real but not as safe. By any logical standard, my upbringing, my education, position and present security, should have made the choice an easy one but I found, to my surprise, it wasn’t. I thereby learnt that I was not as at home in the modern world as I’d thought.

‘Well?’ prompted Disvan.

With a shrug, I gestured for him to proceed.

He smiled broadly.

‘Welcome in, Mr Oakley’ he said. ‘I told them you wouldn’t let me down.’

*  *  *

We met, by arrangement, at the sub-station early the following morning (a Saturday). I parked my car a little way off the Compton road and occupied myself, while waiting for Mr Disvan, in watching signs of life gradually appear in the houses of the Binscombe estate. The milkman, his float almost empty, had nearly finished his round. Six-day week or overtime workers were presumably starting to contemplate curtailing breakfast and setting off. Occasional early birds, on their way to the paper shop, crossed paths with familiar looking dogs taking a solo morning constitutional. In short, for everyone except myself, it seemed like the start to a perfectly normal day.

As so often happened, there was a light mist lingering above the low-lying fields that surrounded Binscombe, while the sides of the valley were clear. This covering enhanced the air of mystery now attaching itself to the concrete block that had brought me here, and nullified the mundane practicality of the South East Electricity Board plaque (‘Binscombe Sub S no 2323—DANGER 6,600 VOLTS’) on its side.

Sitting isolated in a pool of mist in the field across the road from me, the building exuded an atmosphere of brooding purpose. I was also strongly struck with the notion that this little spot was both anticipating something and yet somehow out of kilter with present time. Since that had never been conveyed to me in the many hundreds of occasions I must have passed by before, I thought it must have more to do with my imagination and Disvan’s powers of suggestion than with anything real.

Remembering the gentleman in question, I turned in my seat to see what had become of him, only to find that he was already beside the car, looking in with an amused expression on his face.

‘I didn’t hear you come up,’ I said, somewhat startled.

Disvan nodded. ‘Possibly not. I can walk quietly if need be. Besides, I didn’t want to disturb you when you seemed so absorbed in the view. Ready to go, are we?’

I left the car and we walked over to the field gate. Disvan gestured me forward.

‘Go and see what you make of it, then,’ he said.

I stepped boldly forth, as bidden. Even if my bridges were, at that very moment, burning behind me, I was grimly determined not to appear daunted.

Events, however, overturned my resolution. Before I’d gone thirty paces on into the mist, my progress was brought to an abrupt halt. Two men had suddenly appeared: one from a small copse in a neighbouring field, the other silhouetted atop the ridge above me. They were still some way off, but I could not fail to notice that they were both carrying shotguns in a manner that was not entirely casual. ‘Early morning rabbit hunters,’ I thought to myself, without reassurance.

I looked at them and they looked at me. The circumstances did not help, but I still felt that their scrutiny held no good intentions in it. All desire to keep walking evaporated like the dew beneath my feet.

Things remained like this for perhaps half a minute before I heard Mr Disvan catch me up. He went a few yards on from where I stood and with two imperious waves of his arm dismissed the threatening figures. They melted away as quickly as they’d appeared.

‘I’m sorry about that, Mr Oakley,’ he said solicitously. ‘It shouldn’t have happened.’

‘What exactly did happen?’

‘People just got a bit more jumpy than they should, that’s all.’

‘You haven’t answered my question.’

‘Guardian eyes never leave this place, Mr Oakley. It’s too important to be left unsupervised.’

‘But those maniacs were carrying weapons!’

‘They see a need for them. There’s been blood shed because of what this place is—more blood than you can imagine. Can’t you sense it?’

I paused before answering, thinking mostly of the implications of assenting. Like it or not, it wasn’t in me to wilfully deny the obvious.

‘Yes, there is that feeling here,’ I said.

‘Are you succumbing to baseless intuition, Mr Oakley?’

‘I suppose so. Do you see that as a victory?’

‘Progress on your part, rather than victory for us, Mr Oakley. We’re not so unkind as to laugh at people’s faltering steps. You ought to consider it as enlightenment rather than submission—a stage in your pilgrimage, if you like. Consider it logically, if it makes you feel better. Why shouldn’t the configuration of forces that we see as rooms or fields or whatever, have the same capacity for memory as us?  After all, they’re made of the same stuff as us and by and large they last longer and see more. Therefore, just as we are what our past has made us, so too are our surroundings.’

Disvan paused, and I looked around with renewed interest at the landscape which he’d just imbued with animate spirit and sentience. By this theory, the landscape presumably looked back and registered our transitory presence. Perhaps half a minute of silence elapsed before Disvan spoke again.

‘Of course,’ he said reflectively, ‘places have a longer perspective and therefore a different appreciation than us. They can put things in their proper context—and it’s that accumulated wisdom we can sometimes sense.’

‘Wisdom?  But the feeling here is hardly one of...’

Disvan interrupted. ‘Not all memories are pleasant ones, Mr Oakley. And the truths we draw from them are not always comforting.’

Then and there, the notion seemed just about credible, but I filed it away for future, less disturbing, consideration when in a place as self evidently lifeless as, say, the office block in which I worked. The idea of a numinous world, peopled with numberless spirits was too big and too unsafe for the precise moment, and I was resolved to adhere to the matter in hand.

‘What has happened here, Mr Disvan?’ I said.

‘That will shortly become very clear, I think. Walk on, Mr O.’

We reached our destination without any other sentinels revealing themselves. I  tried the heavy door (marked ‘DANGER’) but it showed no signs of shifting. Mr Disvan casually observed my efforts.

‘Do you have the key?’ I asked.

He shook his head, staring absently at and through the door.

‘There isn’t one. The door’s fake. There’s only solid concrete behind it’

‘Then why have a door?’

‘For purposes of deception, to complete the illusion, to maintain the image of something other than the truth.’

I looked up at the various power lines which converged and met at the sub-station.

‘They seem genuine enough,’ I said.

‘So they ought. They were set up by real Generating Board engineers.’

‘Who just happened to be Binscombe men, in on the secret?’

‘Precisely. The lines are quite dead of course but, for obvious reasons, no stranger’s likely to put that to the test.’

I started to slowly walk round the squat ‘building’ and Disvan ambled leisurely after me. Aside from the mock door and the false sign plate, I could see no other distinguishing features worth the mention.’

‘Doesn’t the Electricity Board management ever query all this?’ I said, the inspection now completed. ‘Or do you have more Binscombe people in place there—in the right place?’

Disvan nodded in confirmation.

‘We can ensure that it doesn’t ever appear on any of their maps,’ he replied, ‘but I don’t doubt that one day, one of their high ups will look at an Ordnance Survey map—for we couldn’t get to the Survey organisation last time around— and spot our little deception. Not that it would matter greatly if they did. It’s been other things than an electricity sub-station before now and, if need be, can be so again. We have it in mind to call the place a bomb shelter next time—one of those ones for the golden people in power, that patriotic, lesser mortals are not supposed to be curious about. Either way, concealment is the main thing, Mr Oakley. The precise nature of the camouflage doesn’t really matter.’

He took out his pipe, filled and lit it. A sweet, intoxicating cloud, produced by his particular taste in illicit smoking material, rapidly spread and overcame the neutral, fresh atmosphere of the field. A reflective minute was thus filled.

The only sound that came to our ears was that of birdsong and the occasional passing car. We seemed to be entirely separated from the everyday world only a few hundred yards away. As yet, I had not been apprised of the ‘high’ secret’ which this structure somehow concealed, but a growing sense of tension made me think that moment was not far off—perhaps awaiting some sign from myself. Mr Disvan, however, was minded to speak around the subject further.

‘For instance,’ he said, ‘a few decades back, this was nominally a pill box intended for use against Hitler, and then the Kaiser before him, and then the French invasion scare of 1893 before that. It’s been an out-of-commission Admiralty semaphore station, a Martello Tower, a folly, a strongpoint against the armies of Bonnie Prince Charlie and Charles the First, and goodness knows what beforehand. Each generation of Binscomites has added to it and transformed it in their own way. In our era, it’s an electricity sub-station because ours is a peaceful time, a sort of breathing space. But doubtless the times will change soon enough and this place,’ he tapped one concrete wall with his pipe, ‘will change in tune with them.’

‘But why?’ I said.

‘Why is there change, do you mean?  Well, I suppose that...’

‘No, no. Why this lump of concrete?’

Disvan did not answer this—at least not in any verbal form. Instead, he went to the sub-station’s nearest wall and, with his back to me, probed one particular part of it with his hands. I also thought I heard him muttering or humming some verse under his breath, which was not a habit normally associated with him. Be that as it may, whatever was going on took only a moment to complete. Disvan then turned around to show that a one foot square slab of concrete had somehow been detached from the wall. A brass plate was thereby revealed.

‘I didn’t see that when I walked round,’ I said, somewhat puzzled.

‘Well, no, you wouldn’t have,’ Disvan replied. ‘A lot of workmanship went into seeing that you didn’t see—if you see what I mean, and will excuse the pun.’

‘Is that it, then? Is this the big secret?’

‘Hardly. Wait one further moment Mr O and you’ll have all the answers you require—and possibly more than you require.’

He then took out a very old, worn looking key and inserted it into a hitherto invisible keyhole in the brass plate. The plate swung open. What appeared to be a pane of glass came into view. Mr Disvan waved me forward.

‘There you are,’ he said. ‘It was installed in the seventeenth century but still works well enough—though goodness knows what we’ll do if it ever breaks down.’

‘What is it?’

‘A series of lenses. A sort of giant telescope, if you like. It gives you a view down a shaft in the concrete, deep into the earth.’

‘But there won’t be any light...’

‘Just take a look, Mr Oakley, but be brief. We shouldn’t leave this portal open too long.’

I stepped forward and stooped to stare into the lens. After perhaps five or ten minutes, I straightened up again.