Orkney Twilight (26 page)

She twisted her head, caught his eye. ‘Nothing much,’ she replied. ‘Maybe it goes back to being under the Thames with Jim in the Greenwich foot tunnel when I was a child. It’s pretty creepy down there. You can hear the river rushing past over your head.’

‘I didn’t even know there was a foot tunnel at Greenwich.’

‘Jim knows all the capital’s underground secrets.’

Tom raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, that’s it then. That’s the explanation. Fear of being trapped by Jim’s secrets. Suffocated by his undercover activities.’

She shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think so. Come on,’ she said, avoiding Tom’s gaze. ‘Let’s get on with this.’

The cairn’s entrance was blocked by an iron-grilled sheep gate. Tom fiddled with the key in the padlock, dragged the gate open across the uneven ground, left the padlock and chain dangling and clanking against the metal bars.

‘Over the threshold. Into the underworld,’ she said. ‘You first.’

He ducked below the lintel.

‘It’s a tight squeeze. It would be difficult to turn around in here.’

‘We have to go all the way in to come back out,’ she said. ‘We have to die before we can be reborn.’

They stooped and crawled along the low, narrow passage, hemmed in by the rock, touching the cold stone with hands and knees, scraping along the ground. He shone the torch up and around, throwing a thin beam of grudging light into the gloom ahead, darkness closing in behind.

‘It looks like one unbroken piece.’ His voice was muffled in the enclosed space. ‘A rock coffin,’ he added.

She inhaled the stench of damp soil, mould, decay, sensed the pressure of the stone and clay and earth pressing down on her.

‘Do you think the roof could cave in?’

‘It’s been here for three thousand years, so I don’t see why it should collapse now. Although it must be carrying a lot of weight.’

‘Oh Christ. Get a move on, please.’

She pushed him forwards. He stumbled, caught himself with his hand, stood up, and she tumbled out behind into a reservoir of pitch darkness.

‘We’re in the womb,’ he said.

‘The charnel.’

He cast the pin-beam of light around, picking out the architecture of the central chamber: the corbelled layers of rough-hewn damp rocks curving above their heads, the void of the side chambers.

‘God, it’s dark,’ Tom said.

‘What did you expect?’

‘It’s a deeper dark than I imagined. Not like a dark night. It’s more dense, like being in a black hole.’

‘It is a black hole. We are in the house of the dead, the edge of oblivion. It takes twenty minutes for your eyes to fully adjust,’ she said, searching for comfort in science.

‘I’m not sure I’m prepared to wait that long. Do you think this is what it’s like to be buried alive?’

‘No.’ Her voice trembled slightly.

They were silent; listening to the chinks in the emptiness, the amplified rasp of their breath, the regular drip, drip of water coming from, where? Possibly one of the side chambers. She strained her ears, searching for audible signs of the external world. Somewhere in the distance there was a sharp metallic clink. She listened again, tried to pick out the note above the whispers of their breath in the damp air. But now there was nothing except the murmuring of the phantoms.

Tom handed her the torch. She shone it upward from under his chin, illuminating his face: a disembodied, ghostly head suspended in the dark.

‘We are gathered here,’ he intoned, ‘to bury the dead.’

His voice was eaten up, engulfed. And then it bounced back out of nowhere, a delayed echo: ‘
Bury the dead. Bury the dead.
’

Tom tried again, shouting this time. ‘Bury the dead.’

‘
Bury the dead, the dead
.’

Sam joined in, yelling at the shadows. ‘We are here to bury the dead.’

‘
Bury the dead, the dead, the dead
.’

They cupped their hands around their mouths and hollered into the blackness.

‘Tom.’

‘Sam.’

‘Bury the dead.’

Voices filled the tomb, reverberating around the stones, bouncing back at unexpected angles, noise from every side: clammy walls, cold slab roof, side chambers. A cacophony of voices chanted in her head.
Bury the dead. Bury the dead. Bury the dead.
She turned this way, that, trying to catch the direction of the cries. Her head started spinning. Giddy. Disoriented in the noisy darkness. The voices calling her. Pulling her down. Reaching out to drag her to their underworld. Damp fingers clutching at her neck, clasping her mouth with their silt-filled hands. She tried to catch her breath but the reek of claggy soil filled her lungs, the pungent stench of putrid kidneys, piss, fungus, decay, death choking her. She opened her mouth wider. She couldn’t pull in any air. She was suffocating. Her chest was tight. Her stomach ready to heave.

‘Stop,’ she screamed. ‘Stop.’

‘
Stop, stop, stop
,’ the echo said.

‘Please,’ she whispered.

‘
Please, please
,’ mocked the tomb.

The voices subsided. She listened for her own breathing, felt her rib cage expanding, forcing dank oxygen into her nostrils, through her trachea.

‘Are you okay?’ asked Tom.

‘Not really.’

‘The torch is flickering.’

‘I have to get out of here.’

She cast the fading torch beam around the walls and locked it on the passage, dived, crouched on all fours, ducked her head under the lintel, pushing forward to the square of silver light, crawling towards the day. She reached the end of the tunnel, pushed against the metal grill. It gave an inch, then resisted. She pushed again. It didn’t budge. The chain was wrapped around the gate and post, joined in a loop by the closed hoop of the padlock. She reached through the bars, grabbed the padlock and tried to yank it open. No movement. It was locked.

‘Give me the key,’ she commanded, trying to suppress the panic.

‘What?’

‘Give me the key. I want to unlock the padlock.’

He paused. ‘I don’t have it. I left the key in the padlock. It isn’t locked though.’

‘It is locked.’

‘Well, take the key out and unlock it.’

‘The key isn’t there.’

‘It must be.’

‘It’s not.’ She felt the tears welling.

‘Look on the ground. It must have fallen out.’

Her eyes searched, flitting around frantically. She spotted a metallic gleam, the key lying on the grass three feet in front of the gate. She pushed her arm through the sheep grille, stretched her hand out but she still failed to touch it with her fingertips.

‘Shit. I can’t reach it.’

‘Let me try.’

He squeezed past her, jamming her painfully against the wall, stuck his arm awkwardly through the bars of the gate, stretched, pushing his shoulder against the metal, just managed to reach the key with the tips of his fingers, scrabbled, slowly drew it towards the cairn’s entrance, picked it up and unlocked the padlock.

Sitting on the sheep-shortened grass in front of the cairn, she breathed deeply, gladly gulping brackish air.

‘It must have been a kid mucking around,’ said Tom.

The Watcher, she thought miserably, a reminder, in case she needed one, that she was under surveillance. The shadow of a high-flying bird slid across her face, raced along the sunlit ground; she looked up and saw a hen harrier gliding low over the hillside, searching for a creature to kill. She shuddered. Impending death everywhere. She looked back at the cairn, their prison, their rock coffin, feeling the long entrance tunnel drawing her in. Down. She blinked. Shook her head.

‘I wonder whether the passage is aligned with the midwinter sun,’ she said.

‘Is that likely?’

‘Well, the entrance passage at Maeshowe ,’ she said, ‘is positioned so that the rays of the dying midwinter sun shine through the tunnel and illuminate the central burial chamber.’

‘So?’

‘So, midwinter is the point of rebirth. Midsummer is the time of death.’

‘And?’

‘And nothing.’

Nothing except the obvious, she realized then. The really obvious. The obvious time to visit the Ring of Brodgar was midsummer’s night, when the final rays of the longest day hovered on the horizon, in the endless twilight.

Later that day, much later, she stood in the kitchen slurping tea, listening to the backbeat of the ticking clock. Nearly eleven; it was late already. They were heading out the door as the Renault appeared in the courtyard. The car door slammed. Jim seemed agitated, over-animated.

‘Had a good day?’ he asked.

‘Yes thanks,’ she said.

‘Going out again to celebrate the solstice?’

She nodded.

‘Good idea,’ he said. ‘Make the most of the midnight sun.’ But he wasn’t looking at her as he spoke. He was focusing far away.

The Cortina pulled out of Nethergate, up the hill.

‘Where are we going then?’ Tom asked.

‘The Ring of Brodgar.’

He sighed. ‘Haven’t you had enough of ancient monuments?’

‘It’s a stone circle. Nobody can lock us in.’

She directed the Cortina on a noisy loop round the top of the hill before doubling back on to the main road and heading west, chasing the sinking sun. She checked in the rearview mirror at the road stretching away behind them. No other cars in sight. Nothing but sun-bronzed fleeces on the golden hillsides.

‘This way.’ She signalled right with her hand. Northwest. And then they were surrounded by water, floating on a bridge of land between two lochs stretching away on either side, waves rippling silver.

Twenty-nine, thirteen: the Ring of Brodgar, its stones peaked in an ancient weathered crown. The car park was deserted. The southerly wind buffeted them from behind, pushing them across the springy turf through the ditch, skylarks rising as they passed between two megaliths. The sun was balanced on the horizon now, its rays a dazzling starburst blasting through the stones. A black streak caught her eye; a raven arcing and wheeling, turning somersaults in the air before it dived and disappeared among the heather. At the circle’s centre she was calmer, forgetting the melancholia, the anxiety, the anger. Absorbing the eternal present.

‘What do you think they used this for then?’ Tom asked.

‘Marking the seasons I reckon. Asking the ancestors to make sure the sun returned.’

She pivoted slowly around on her heel, scanning the purple hills. She checked the stones in her head as she rotated.

Tom asked, ‘How many?’

‘Count them.’

She had performed exactly the same ritual ten years before with Jim. It had been supernaturally bright then too; the clarity that comes after the storm. They had skived off together to avoid a day shopping with her sisters and Liz in Stromness. He had told her the stones were sleeping giants, ancient guardians of the islands. And on clear nights, when the moon and the stars bathed the earth in silvery light, they woke and danced, and if you looked out of the corner of your eye, sometimes you could catch them moving. She had twirled around, counting the strange stones while Jim distracted her with his stories. She couldn’t reach the same number twice. ‘See,’ said Jim. ‘What did I tell you? They are alive, they dance when you’re not looking.’ They had strolled around the ring and she had spotted a stone with dark lines etched on its face. Strange runes. She had traced their twiggy arms with her fingers and felt a connection with their carver, the long dead rune-maker.

‘Nobody knows what these runes mean,’ Jim had said. ‘Indecipherable.’ He had gazed wistfully at the rock and then he had added, ‘The dead like to hold on to their secrets.’

She surveyed the ring now looking for the rune stone and, as she searched, she wondered whether Jim believed the stories he told, whether all spies ended up believing the stories that they told, whether he could see the dark forces rising as he patrolled the desolate borderlands between life and death. Or perhaps the dark forces really did exist. She closed her eyes and conjured up an image of a towering magus, brim of his hat shadowing his face, cloak wrapped around his shoulders, hunting horn clenched in his hand. Odin, his dark presence haunting her. She opened her eyes again and stared at the unmoving stones and there, in the distance at the point where the sun had dazzled five minutes previously, she discerned a tiny amber flame flaring and writhing before it fizzled away. The Watcher: he must have followed them; he was lying in the heather waiting, smoking, surveying. But then another flame appeared, and another, reaching higher and brighter, licking the sky, and she realized it wasn’t the Watcher after all. It was a midsummer fire.

‘Twenty-seven,’ Tom said. ‘It’s trickier than you might think.’

‘That’s because they move. They dance.’

‘Of course. They would.’

He slumped down on the turf and she squatted next to him, feeling the damp grass beneath her palm, tasting the acrid scent of burning wood blowing in the wind, watching the swirling patterns of bonfire smoke.

‘Maybe we should be lighting a fire in the circle’s centre and dancing naked around it to mark midsummer,’ she said into the breeze. She waited for the withering riposte.

‘I’ll give it a go if you fancy it,’ he said. ‘Might be a laugh.’

It might, she thought, and she almost forgot why she was there, almost let go of her reasons for distrusting him. A gust of wind brushed her face with its iciness and reminded her that she was waiting.

‘It’s too cold,’ she said.

He shrugged. ‘Don’t say I didn’t offer.’

She wanted to reply, say something. What? She wasn’t sure. She said nothing instead. Let the moment slip. She glanced at her watch. ‘Eleven-fifty. Nearly midnight.’

As she spoke, she caught sight of a movement through the stones on the north side of the ring, a shadow flitting across the heather, growing larger, solidifying. She blinked – surprised as she recognized the figure.

‘It’s Avis,’ said Tom.

Of course, it would be. Now she understood. Avis was Jim’s courier. It was Avis who had left the book with its coded directions in the Battery, and now she had come to the meeting spot: twenty-nine, thirteen, midsummer’s eve. Timed drop. Philby’s guide to twilight tradecraft. Avis was here to pick up the envelope and deliver it to the Commander.