As the lads left, the van rocked back on its shock absorbers and the side door mechs power closed, Margaret pulled forcefully at her vape. The mini screen on the side chimed in celebration of her reaching 10,000 puffs. Through the van and window she watched the head torch beams lurch between grass and gorse bushes like drunken lighthouses. She exhaled the cloud of cherry scented vapour, just as she caught eyes with Pete’s in the distance.
Sinking back into her chair she couldn’t remember a time she’d felt as nervous about the mob being out on their own. Perhaps it was a series of poor night’s sleep following her injury from Woeborn, but she couldn’t shake the feeling there was something really, very wrong going on. She absentmindedly rotated the wrist on her injured arm, feeling the pull of the fractures deep within her forearm.
Margaret reached for her iPad with her good arm and called Glenda. The selfie camera sprung to life revealing an unflattering upshot of her wrinkled chin replete with stubbornly elusive wisps of white hair. With a grimace she poked at the screen to close down the camera.
“I turn more into my grandmother every bloody day,” muttered Margaret.
Glenda wasn’t picking up. To be fair, it was pretty late, and any time after 9pm Glenda was usually dead to the world. But Margaret couldn’t help but feel abandoned by all the people who she could talk to about this mess.
“Stop bleating, girl,” she reprimanded herself, “and do some actual work.”
Opening the tracking app she saw her ‘Friends’ as blue blobs on an almost featureless grey map. The blobs moved slowly away from her location. Scrolling, she saw the area Glenda had marked almost a mile from where they were and (surprisingly) the blobs were still heading in the right direction.
Her earpiece crackled as the blobs were reaching the edge of communication range.
“Keep on lads,” Margaret said into the mic. “I can track you pretty well from the iPad. Find My Friends has its beady eye on you, despite being in the middle of nowhere. You should reach the ley-fracture in about another kilometre… Or half a ‘mile’ in old money. Over and out.”
I’m sure they’ll be alright, she thought to herself as the wind began to nudge the van into a gentle rock.
—
Margaret’s mind wandered over the facts at hand.
Her Morris training camps had taught her that Alfred Watkins had definitively identified and mapped a nascent leyline network in the early 1900s. During the first world war, Watkins, and his team, had burrowed deep behind enemy lines in the Black Forests of Germany. Using hand-built measuring devices disguised as surveying tools, they had investigated what the Germans referred to as Heilige Linien or ‘holy lines’ under the guise of helping the German war effort.
Even with Heath-Robinson technology, the ‘holy lines’ were clearly visible and Watkins was able to trace the magickal autobahns across Germany, through northern France and back towards blighty.
Margaret knew Watkins’ research was conducted by a murky sub division of the Ministry of Defence, but she also knew that the Morris have eyes and ears everywhere. It wasn’t long before word got back that the government was on the verge of stumbling across the power network that wasn’t merely a military opportunity, it was the network that kept humanity safe.
Centuries of seers, healing folk and ‘the weird’ knew how to tap into the super-highway of primal energy crisscrossing the globe. Margaret’s own ancestors had passed on the knowledge from generation to generation. The energies flow around the world in a perpetual cycle of ebb and bloom as the earth rotates around the mother-star.
Those in touch with the ley-energy could wield its power to enhance their own natural abilities. Margaret gained her powers without the need of any tools, the ley-energy seeping up from the soil beneath her chair. Whereas Martin, Barry and Pete channelled and amplified the ley through their drums and sticks.
The power of the ley-energy was long-forgotten by the general non-weird populace.
Alfred Watkins would have blown the secrets of the ley-lines 1920 but, luckily for the Morris, he had become increasing vocal about the lack of interest in his discoveries. It didn’t take much for his ambitious colleagues in the MoD to take the opportunity to discredit him and bury his research before it saw the light of day.
No one had mentioned to Margaret that the ley-network was anything other than ancient, powerful and permanent. She couldn’t shake her fear nagging at the back of her brain. If the network broke, then what might come flooding out? …Or in?
An eerie howl wrenched Margaret from her pondering. She froze, a shiver ran down her back, her blood ran cold as the howl hung in the air, defying the northern easterly wind. Wolves in North Yorkshire was not something she expected to hear. To add to the sensory overload, the straw doll she gripped comfortably in her palm began, unmistakably, to get warm.
—
Margaret swiped on the iPad, placing the straw totem in the armrest of her chair. ‘Updating…’ was all the app would say under a perpetually rotating symbol. The friend-blobs barely moved from their previous location. The totem gave an unmistakable pulse on the arm rest.
“Got something to say, do you?” she mumbled.
Not wanting to risk summoning a deity within the confines of a van, she scooped it up and opened the rear doors. The wind exploded into the van, howling across the opening and stressing the German-engineered hinges to their limit. Margaret pulled her woollen shawl around her shoulders, took a final drag on the vape and rolled into the darkness.
Low-powered headlights on her chair flickered automatically to life, illuminating the gravel as she moved gingerly towards a suitable clearing. Margaret squinted into the wind, her thin grey hair blown into a grey flame behind her. Plunging a cold wrinkled fist into her shawl pocket, she retrieved the angrily pulsing straw-totem and said the words.
Instantly the darkness was banished by a blinding white nothingness. The sound of howling wind (and wolves) was instantly replaced by deafening silence. Margaret blinked as her head jolted forwards with no wind to brace against.
“Took your bloody time. Did you not hear me calling?”
“Well, hello to you, my love. I’m not always sitting around holding your totem wondering when you’re going to call, you know,” lied Margaret.
“I know… that’s not what I meant. I mean. What are you doing here?” asked Tyr. If a deity could look flustered, he definitely did.
“What do you mean? We are here looking for the source of the ley-disturbance,” said Margaret, her initial relief at seeing Tyr was rapidly giving way to her more normal snark. “I don’t have to ask your permission.”
“Of course you don’t… Look, if you’d just…” Tyr held his temples between his thumb and middle finger of his one remaining hand and took a deep breath. “I can’t stay long, Marge. The ley here is barely a trickle. All I was going to say is that you’re in the wrong place.”
“Glenda said-”
“Glenda isn’t infallible Margaret,” he interrupted. “She has been known to get the wrong end of the stick sometimes. And this time, she has firmly grasped the wrong end.”
“What do you mean?” she said, rolling her chair towards him.
Tyr looked weaker than usual. Beads of sweat pearled his pale brow. His grey/blonde hair lacked any lustre and Margaret thought he looked like he wasn’t taking care of himself. Which was ridiculous for a god.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap Margaret. But I worry about you.” said Tyr
“No, no – that’s very nice and all – but go back to the wrong end of the stick part.”
“Glenda’s right that this ley-tributary has a disturbance.” he replied.
“Wait, can you hear through that totem? How do you know what she said? Can you see me too…”
“Look, that’s for another time,” His breath was starting to become ragged. ”But cleaning your pockets once in a while wouldn’t go amiss. Anyway, Glenda was right, but she was wrong about the direction. The energy is being tapped from the other end.”
“Good grief, and I thought we were about to be attacked by magic death wolves or something.”
“Magic, what now?” said Tyr with a quizzical eyebrow raise.
“Never mind. Let’s be quick. Okay, so we need to follow this line in the other direction. And where might that be?” asked Margaret.
“France,” he coughed and wiped spittle on the back of his wrist.
“France?” Taking her turn to employ the quizzical eyebrow.
“Yes, that’s what you call it now isn’t it. Seems to change names every few hundred years but-”
“Yes, yes, France. Why there though?”
“I can’t tell you. I don’t even know myself. But, I can feel it… it’s a chalk hillside… in my time they called it Nemetocenna,” he sank to his knees and began to fade away, “but now the people call it Arras.”
—
“Did you not hear us, Marge?” asked Barry, shaking the water from his grey hair as he slumped into the front seat of the van. “Marge?” He turned in his seat to look down the length of the empty vehicle, “Aw, Christ”
Bursting back into the squall, Barry held onto the brim of his hat, steadying himself on the bonnet of the van.
“Margaret!” he shouted, his voice cracking into the battering wind.
The recent field-ops training evening fresh in their minds, they circled out from the fulcrum of the van, a great maypole encompassing the parking area to the footpaths beyond.
Within seconds, Martin shouted over the boiling wind, “Got her!’ Margaret’s crumpled form lay sunken in her chair.
“Not again,” gasped Martin as he checked her bird thin wrist for a pulse and maneuvered her into a more comfortable position.
Baz was next to arrive at Margarets chair. Out of breath, he spluttered, “You okay Marge?”
Martin pulled her sodden blanket around her and heaved the dead weight of her chair around towards the van.
“We need to get her back into cover. This is too much for her, Barry.”
“I know Mart. I know.”
“She okay?” gasped Pete, arriving last to the sorry scene of two elderly men hunched over a bedraggled form in a stranded wheelchair.
“I’m fine,” croaked Marge. “But this… this is getting… ridiculous. Get me back in the van. This roadtrip is not over.”