Winter Page 18

  Arthur made his escape under the noses, literally, of the guards in charge of him. One moment he was there, the next he had gone.

  But he did leave more of a clue than he would have wished to do. The Croughton fences were covered by cameras and one of these was angled such that it got footage of Arthur’s escape. This, combined with Bohr’s single memory of Arthur’s much earlier revelation, that to use the henges as portals required some kind of systematic physical movement which could unlock a henge’s power and turn it into a portal into the Hyddenworld, was enough to make him realize that he too might be able to work out how it was done.

  Bohr himself had searched Arthur’s house, including his library and research papers, while specialists had been through his computers and electronic mail. A great deal about his theories was found but nothing very specific about his travels into the Hyddenworld, where he began from and where he went when he was there. Also, Bohr’s own people and the British authorities had searched for Arthur himself. All without result.

  Meanwhile, the natural disasters besetting the Earth, and the Cosmos of which it was a tiny part, continued. Three weeks earlier, in October, the Earth had opened up beneath a town called Half Steeple on the River Severn in the county of Gloucestershire. Thousands of lives were lost. Such events had been happening with increasing frequency but this one, in England, was a tipping point both nationally and internationally.

  Countries had reacted to these events in many different ways: some barely at all, others extremely violently. In the undeveloped regions of the world, used as they were historically to natural disaster, poverty and famine, it had been, until very recently, business as usual. In the West, where there were expectations that standards of living would remain good and where reliance on the utilities and the internet was universal, the systematic breakdown of communications, food supplies and transport produced escalating civil unrest. It was a doomsday scenario in the making but to most observers’ surprise it was in the southern half of England that a general panic first took hold.

  The tragedy of Half Steeple put into people’s minds the idea that more was coming – and it had come, in hurricanes, early winter weather and the rapid breakdown of two things Britain was most famous for: law and order.

  Matters were not much better in the United States. Panic set in at national and state level and an unparalleled state of civil unrest soon took over. Faced by such a crisis, Bohr might have expected to remain very low on the list of Presidential advisers needed at such a time. But then he had felt himself to have been sidelined, along with his agency NASA itself, for months and years before the present situation had arisen. He knew that if anyone in the Pentagon had ever got as far as even considering the possibilities of finding a solution in the cosmological field they would have rejected it. It was too far out and not obviously applicable to what was actually going on globally.

  As for any notion of exploring a solution around something as nebulous and strange as the Hyddenworld, Bohr was too experienced an operator not to know that it would be a lost cause from the moment it was mentioned. Even if such a world existed, how could it possibly help the present situation to explore it? For Bohr the answer lay in Arthur’s notes and some of the things he had revealed elsewhere about the Hyddenworld.

  Far-fetched as it might seem, Foale had found a way of using one or other of the many henge monuments near where he had lived for fifty years in Woolstone, Berkshire, to access the Hyddenworld. He also seemed to offer evidence that people in that world might have ways of controlling natural events and disasters, and the descent into chaos, which all the scientists and funds available to America had signally failed to do.

  In the previous months of escalating natural disasters and earth events Bohr had made it his business to read and research everything he could about the henges. Of the many theories about why they had been built and by whom, Arthur’s seemed as good as anybody’s and better than some. He believed they had been built over the centuries by two distinct groups of ‘folk’, each with different and well-defined roles: the human and the hydden, the giants and the little people.

  Arthur argued, and Bohr had come to agree with him, that the humans were good at the mechanics of building – the sourcing of the raw materials, their transport, their shaping, alignment and erection. The hydden gave the spiritual direction, particularly in making the connection between the henges and the Earth below and the Universe ‘above’. They were responsible for the henges’ primary function which was as portals between different worlds, both spiritual and physical.

  Centuries before, when the humans became too destructive of the Earth the hydden had retreated and become ‘invisible’. It was natural that they should take with them the secret of how to use the henges as portals between the hydden and human worlds.

  Bohr was convinced that any henge, of whatever material, even if newly made and temporary too, could be used in this way as a portal. In that sense they were like vehicles; almost any model or design, if it follows a few basic principles of construction, can be used to transport someone from ‘A’ to ‘B’. So it was with henges.

  The problem was, how exactly was it done? What turned a henge into a portal and how was it used? Bohr was certain the secret lay in Arthur’s working notes and in a visit to Woolstone. But it was a project for which he needed funding and some specialist input. In addition he would need some kind of security and protection in the form of special forces military support if he was to visit the Hyddenworld and return from it safely.

  But until three days before no one had been interested. Then everything changed.

  First, not a single one of the many solutions and policies discussed and enacted in Washington and the White House had seemed to have relevance or effect on the rapidly evolving and changing real-world situation the politicians and military now faced. The disasters and the dangerous perception that politicians were impotent in their defence of citizens and corporations were escalating each day. In consequence the decision-makers knew they were losing their grip and had begun to open their minds to alternatives, however much they might have been discounted only weeks before.

  It was the perfect moment for one of Bohr’s researchers to come in with a blindingly obvious result to anyone who studied aerial views of Woolstone taken at sunrise or sunset: Foale’s large, wild garden had, at its bottom end, its very own arboreal henge.

  ‘Goddammit,’ Bohr had exclaimed when he saw this, ‘he could enter the Hyddenworld virtually from his own house, and he probably did.’

  Secondly, a wider search in the grounds of his property had uncovered papers, maps and notebooks not discovered before.

  Bohr saw a chance to resurrect his long-held wish to uncover Arthur’s secret and persuaded the White House to make the funds and personnel available. Colonel Reece was not his first choice as a fellow head of mission – he was humourless, hawkish, monosyllabic and uneasy with civilians – but Bohr had no choice. They were tasked with the mission together.

  Bohr had little doubt that Reece’s view of him was unfavourable and that he saw him as being soft, out of date with current military techniques, systems and technology, and likely to be indecisive in the face of real and present danger. Certainly he had filled out since the days he was an astronaut and too many years of deals, compromise and the politicking that went with high-end scientific research had jaded him. Maybe he seemed lacklustre to a high-profile serving army officer.

  But there he was, and here they were, in Croughton, with work to do together.

  Now in the field and faced by the team, Bohr did not need to present yet again the evidence for the existence of the Hyddenworld. That had already been done in Illinois at the Scott Air Force Base. Naturally, most were incredulous that such a world might exist of which they had never heard. But when it came to the planning and logistics their combined years of training kicked in. All missions were hypothetical until they happened in real time.

  Arthur’s notes on the Hyddenworld
left no doubt that planning would need to include kit, weaponry, technology and supplies suitable to a world half the size they knew. It was no more extraordinary than many scenarios they had planned for.

  If they thought it crazy they did not say so openly.

  Less easy was the question of how those remaining in the human world would communicate with those who made it – if they did – to the Hyddenworld. Every conceivable option had been covered and provided for.

  Bohr was still a clever enough tactician to save the best evidence till last, or rather until their arrival at Croughton and the necessary brief acclimatization to the place, the mission, the likely locales and each other. It was some security footage taken in Birmingham three weeks previously. It had been temporarily lost when that city went into a state of panic and civil strife, but recovered since by his own people here at Croughton.

  ‘We know that our first objective is to enter the Hyddenworld,’ he said, ‘and find Arthur Foale. Since his escape from this base in August he has not been seen, despite every imaginable search for him. However . . .’ Bohr indicated that the lights needed lowering. ‘. . . the following clips show what he currently looks like and where he may be . . . and they confirm that the Hyddenworld is real and not the imaginings of a future-world cosmologist . . .’

  The meeting fell utterly silent as film was shown of recent scenes in Brum, caught both by day and night on two security cameras near the city centre. One had originally been directed towards public buildings but had been dislodged and covered ground deep in the interstices between buildings.

  It showed a group of small, strangely dressed people and brief action around one of them.

  ‘We have enhanced this footage. It shows an individual, a hydden as I prefer to call him, being kicked and beaten . . .’

  They watched the sickening footage.

  When it was ended, Bohr simply said, ‘A positive identification has been made – by me. That’s my former professor. That’s Arthur Foale.’

  The second lot of clips were night-vision shots of a railway terminal and a train jolting about and nearly derailing.

  ‘Now watch what took place seconds before . . .’

  Two hydden were seen placing an obstruction on the line, which clearly caused the incident.

  ‘Now watch the aftermath . . .’ said Bohr quietly.

  The next clip showed bodies and parts of bodies spewing out from beneath the train as it ground to a halt after being derailed.

  ‘And these clips as well . . .’

  Footage from security cameras located at different positions all over central Birmingham followed. The clips showed a maelstrom of fighting, destruction of property and death.

  ‘We are looking at a war zone,’ said Bohr, ‘right in the heart of Birmingham, which we humans did not even know existed until now.’

  ‘How do we know Foale’s still alive, sir?’ someone asked.

  ‘We don’t,’ said Bohr.

  ‘But sure as hell we intend to find out,’ added Reece. ‘Foale is an asset we need and we’ll do what it takes to get him back.’

  He turned to Bohr.

  ‘Agreed?’

  Bohr nodded but said nothing, nothing at all. If Arthur was dead then all kinds of disasters might be waiting to happen.

  ‘To work,’ said Reece to his people.

  ‘To work,’ echoed Bohr to himself.

  22

  WOOLSTONE

  The Vale of the White Horse, to which Jack was now returning, was one of the most verdant and beautiful in all of Englalond. It was fifteen miles wide from the Cotswold Hills in the north to the scarp face of the steep chalk hills of Marlborough Downs in the south. The River Thames rises between these two ranges, its source being near Cheltenham, from where it meanders eastward for nearly forty miles before entering the flatter landscape of Oxfordshire and flowing on to London and thence out into the North Sea. The Vale is an area of ancient villages and old churches, of pastures and stone-built granaries, of medieval fisheries and modern gravel pits.

  The oldest of the early settlements in and about the Vale lay up on the chalk downlands to the south, which were drier, safer and easiest to clear of forest and shrub by early mortal life, be it human or hydden. Humans have forgotten that part of their history but the hydden version is recoverable in the proto-runic script of indigenous antler folk and the surviving oral traditions of green road and campfire. These leave no doubt that, at that distant time, before blessed Beornamund’s day, hydden lived alongside humans in harmony right across the Downs. They helped each other build the roundhouse settlements, henges, the old ways, farm terraces and the first defensive forts, of which many traces survive. Some of these sites remain and are rather more than traces, as hydden who visit the stone circles of Stonehenge and Avebury know well, for their power and majesty are a continuing testimony to the spirit and faith in Earth and Cosmos.

  But it is the White Horse itself, which still gives its name to the great Vale before it, which is the greatest testimony of all. Sitting as it does above the spring-line villages of Uffington and Woolstone, carved in a place where the chalk forms a veritable wall, hydden remember well its origin, of which humans have no idea.

  It is said that strife had broken out between the humans and hydden living together on the downland. Wishing to avoid division and war, the ealdors of both communities set their weapons aside and gathered at a location very near the highest point of what is now called Uffington Hill. It had been a hard winter and the folk living in those parts wished to put their differences behind them, so that the start of a new spring might be an auspicious one. But, though their fires burnt late night after night, no resolution was found. Then, as darkness fell on the last day of February, which is the end of winter, and all hope seemed gone, a light was seen approaching across the Vale below. The nearer it got the brighter it seemed, as if it had about it something of the Fires of the Universe.

  The bearer of the light rode a great white horse but whether he or she was human or hydden, adult or child, none could tell. They watched in awe as the bearer dismounted and thrust the torch in the ground behind the horse so that its shadow was cast across the face of the hill where the mortals stood. It played over the steep sward, sinewy and strange, shifting with the breeze such that it looked as if its legs were stretched back and fore in a gallop and its head and single eye knew what they were about and where they were going.

  The ealdors began to argue again among themselves, this time about the meaning of the great shadow that played at their feet. Until one came among them who they had not seen before. Without a single word he took up a piece of flint and began to cut the shallow sward so that the shadow outlines of the horse might be revealed by the chalk beneath. Soon others joined their labour to his until all were working in harmony once more.

  It is said that they began the hindquarters of the White Horse in winter and finished the front quarters in spring and that the head and finally the eye were cut into the chalk as the sun rose.

  When they looked up from their finished work they saw the white horse and its rider had gone with the light of day. So too had the one who began carving the horse.

  When someone asked, ‘Who were they?’ no one knew. ‘But they were wise,’ they said, ‘wiser than us all for they brought harmony and shared purpose back into our lives.’

  It was at this spot, this place of legend, which Jack knew well, that Judith and the White Horse, having picked him up along the Ridgeway after his departure from Maldon, now dumped him unceremoniously, as if he should have known he had to go there all along.

  There was no explanation, nor any farewell.

  One moment he was flying through the air, holding on to Judith’s waist for all he was worth, the next she heaved him off onto the grass below right on the edge of the escarpment itself.

  He stood up cautiously.

  Take a wrong step and fall forwards just there and a hydden, or a human, might tumble three hundred feet to the ancie
nt farmlands far below.

  Fall back and the thick sward embraces a traveller, cushioning him so comfortably that it seems the best and only way to take in the great wide expanse of the sky above. Nothing much darkens that vast space in the day, but for skylarks in summer and wandering rooks in winter.

  But at night, lying in the grass when the cloud cover is thin or non-existent, there are too many stars to count, too much of a moon not to feel awe, too much of a depth and wonder to things not to believe that the Mirror-of-All and the White Horse exist.

  Jack lay there in the night, icy wind whispering in the cold grass at his ears, Judith’s laughter disappearing with the soft drum of the Horse’s hoofs into the night sky above. He lay there awhile, not cold, not yet, though he knew that would come soon enough if he stayed too long.

  He remembered the time he lay with Katherine on the same spot. He remembered her kisses and her hands to his neck and face and, with a smile, the taste of dry grass and earth in his mouth as they pleasured each other with all the urgent passion of youth, as if nothing else mattered, which it did not.

  He sat up, suffused with the warmth of the memory, and stared down at the Vale. It was shocking for the lifeless, pitch-black spread it made beneath him. Not a light in sight. He looked at his feet, or tried to, but he could barely see them.

  No matter, he knew the ways off the hill like the back of his hand, even in that dark. He knew them by the sound of the wind along the lynchets below, and in the trees at the bottom of their old garden half a mile away, and the hiss of the breeze up the steep Iron Age earthworks to Uffington Fort behind.