The journey back down the A1 was as uneventful as it had been on the way up. Pete called ahead to arrange a late check in at a Premier Inn for them all to defrost with a hot shower and a decent night’s sleep.
But Margaret couldn’t switch off. Her wrist still throbbed with pain. Waves of cold, followed by numbness kept her tossing and turning -trying to find a position to escape the discomfort. Her mind looped over Tyr’s words. The last time she’d been to France was an ill-fated jaunt on the Eurostar with Grandson Kevin to Euro Disney. Three hours stuck in the Channel Tunnel on the return leg, without working air-conditioning after spending an excruciating day with a child over-stimulated on sugared churros and syrup drinks was not an experience she remembered with fondness.
Her family hadn’t been overseas travellers. “Why go all the way to Europe when we’ve got beaches here?” her first husband would mutter from behind his paper, with a tone that meant that was the end of the debate.
After the kids had flown the nest, she’d plucked up the courage to leave her husband, but that Euro Disney trip had left her reluctantly thinking he might have been right. Subsequent Granny-Grandson time had been spent in domestic theme parks with far greater success.
Margaret’s mind roamed aimlessly as the clock ticked slowly towards 4am. Would magick even work in France? They don’t have the Pound do they? And they speak a different language, so maybe their ley-energies are different. Who’s to say what’s ‘normal’ anyway? Maybe their energy is more potent than ours? What if there’s an exchange rate and British ley magick is only equivalent to 50% of French ley magick. Bet they call them ‘Le Lines au Lay’ or something and they taste a bit off like that red wine she tried from Tescos. I hope it doesn’t end up with the same splitting headache…
Across the corridor, Peter and Barry were sharing a king-size bed with Martin (as the youngest) confined to the sofa. They were all deep in sleep, their minds blissfully empty of such (or any) thoughts. Typical, Margaret would have thought.
—
Anxious not to relive the Euro Disney trauma – Margaret insisted on a ferry across to Calais.
The morning ferries were all booked up, but Martin sweet-talked the booking staff – inferring that Margaret might be at death’s door and this might be her last chance to see her estranged children before her sad demise – and by early afternoon they were at sea.
Margaret sat out on the deck, wrapped in a blanket in her wheelchair. Puffs from her vape were blown away instantly as the brisk afternoon wind whipped across the channel. Martin and Barry queued for overpriced coffee and cake below decks with ten other weary looking travellers. Pete sat on the viewing deck, arms folded over the railing, gazing off into the distance as the grey patch on the horizon slowly took shape as Calais.
Pete had been a member of the Morris for fifteen years now – late forties seems to be the optimum era to cultivate an interest in folklore – but this was the first time they had toured overseas. Spending an unplanned night away from Clare and the kids didn’t go down well on the phone, but his wife understood how important the Morris was to him. “We all need our little hobbies” she’d said somewhat patronisingly as she gave her blessing. Pete hadn’t told her about the whole ‘saving Blighty from spectral perils’ part quite yet.
The twins were going to university next year, and the nagging worry of how they were going to afford it all had bubbled up to the front of his mind. Now, at 65, his career would come to a dignified but unmemorable close at the end of the year. Decades of pushing paper for the council had provided the family with a steady income, and enough spare for a Spanish summer holiday every now and then, but lacked any real meaning to him.
At the retirement send off there’ll be an awkward speech to people who don’t really know who he was, and someone will hand him a gift he doesn’t really want. But that’ll be the end of it. As soon as he retired he would be glad to have more time for the Morris.
But, depressing reality seeped back in. Retirement was a luxury of his parents’ generation. Who was he kidding? There was no foreseeable end in sight to paid labour of some kind. Perhaps trying for a family late in life wasn’t the best idea. But, twins! Who could have predicted that withIVF? Somehow they would muddle through – maybe he’d get a job at B&Q? He was grey and grumpy enough to be a surly greeter at his local temple to DIY. Home Improvement Merchant during the week, Britain-defending, drum wielding, Morris-Warrior at the weekend. Could be worse.
A tap on the shoulder from Barry nudged him back to the present.
“Here’s you,” said Baz, handing him a cardboard cup of scaling dishwater from the coffee shop. “I better take Marge her caramel macchiato. You know how she gets.”
Martin took a perch next to Pete on the ferry railing and sipped at his tea,
“You alright, Pete?”
“All good mate, all good,” replied Pete with a thin lipped smile. “Just thinking about Spurs,” he lied.
Martin replied with a non-committal hmm and grimaced at his cup. “How can you get tea… wrong? Honestly? Maybe they’re French or something.”
A comfortable, familiar silence settled between them.
—
Pulling out of passport control at Calais the van’s phone rang. Margaret answered it from her chair and cast the audio feed to the speakers.
“Bonjour mes amis,” dead-panned Glenda. Baz snorted with delight as he watched Margaret eyeroll in the rear-view mirror.
“We’ve successfully landed on the continent. Any update while we’ve been off grid?” Margaret asked. All they had to go on up until now was ‘somewhere near Aras’ which was less than useful to work with.
“Some intel, yes,” replied Glenda. “I’ve been trawling my sources on the dark web. Well… the slightly dim web… more like the ‘bits of the light web that no one looks at closely’ … anyway. I’ve had a tipoff from a hag that—”
Martin spat luke-warm Fanta down the back of Barry’s chair, “A hag?”
“Don’t interrupt, Martin. We might not be on the same land mass, but you will still observe protocol. Yes, ‘a hag’. You haven’t met one and, believe me, you don’t know what one is. Now is not the time.
“Anyway, they told me that something rotten has been going on all around Aras for quite some time. Trouble seems to be converging on a point within a cemetery in a place called Maroeuil.”
“Permission to—”
“Yes, Barry” said Glenda.
“How do you spell that, ma’am…? For the sat-nav, ma’am.”
One deep intake of breath and a long exhale later, Glenda’s voice returned over the speakers.
“Your navigation has been updated already, Barry. Follow the blue line, there’s a good chap. Try not to think too much.
“I’m afraid we don’t have much more to go on than that. Seeing as the bingo hall has gone AWOL with my tech, see what you can find.”
“What happened to the bingo hall?” asked Margaret.
“Gone, I’m afraid. Sink hole yesterday. Whole kit-and-kaboodle. They’re keeping it off the news for now, but I suspect someone will notice a missing building.” replied Glenda.
“Good job we weren’t still in it, eh?” said Martin, shaking his head at the near-miss.
“Indeed. Well, crack on. And give me a buzz once you’ve cleaned this mess up. Glenda out!”
—
The final leg from Calais to the cemetery took just over an hour. They could have made better time, but Barry took the back roads to avoid any unpleasant toll costs. No one was sure whether this whole trip was a legitimate tax-deductible or not, so best to keep sundries to a minimum.
The van rolled quietly on, a weak late-afternoon sun hung low above the horizon, casting lengthening shadows across endless empty fields.
Pulling up at the entrance, Barry was first to take in the scene and drew a quick intake of breath. High white painted brick walls enclosed the entrance, but where the entrance punctuated the walls, one half of the large iron gate was twisted off its hinges with the other side laying buckled on the grass. It looked like an explosion had blown the gates outwards with an efficiency Michael Caine would have approved of. A police tape hung limply across the damaged entrance, but there were no police – or anyone else for that matter – to be seen.
“This looks like the place” Barry quipped, pulling the van up alongside the ruin just as the sun dipped behind the low hills.
The back doors of the van opened and Margaret’s ramp extended out to the gravel driveway. The group gathered around the back of the Mercedes, Peter and Martin glanced around at the ruined entrance and beyond into the glow, the eerie scene seemed to demand a reverent silence.
Margaret stretched her arms wide
“Good to get outside, eh? I was going do-lally cooped up in there,” she pulled her iPad from the arm of her chair and swiped it to life.
“So what do we know? According to intel, this seems to be the source of the ley-line disturbances. And by the look of that—” Margaret gestured as they all turned towards the buckled gateway. “There certainly seems to be something going on here.”
“It won’t have escaped the more observant of you, that this is a war grave. The area ‘round here is teeming with them. A jumble of soldiers, civilians, horses and god knows what else is housed under the sod. The grim result of what humanity does to itself,” Margaret peered into the darkening shadows behind the fluttering police tape. “We can only speculate whether that fact is important. But I’m guessing it is.”
“We’lI take this one on as a group. Let’s all kit up and roll out in 2 minutes. And lads…” Margate added, “Bring all the kit on this one.”
—
The East Sussex Morris Society – in full battledress – strode (and rolled) towards the battered cemetery gates. Pete snapped off the police tape, the others followed him through in silence, the only sounds coming from the gravel crunching beneath them.
Just inside the gate, a deep crevasse gouged into the pathway, zig zagging across the courtyard and passing to the left of a towering angel perched on top of a plinth. Each side on the pale stone was patterned with ripples that, on closer inspection, resolved into innumerable names of the fallen carved in a tiny typeface.
“What are we looking for, Marge?” whispered Barry.
“I think we’ll know it when we see it,” she replied hoarsely. “Follow the gully for now and let’s see where it leads.”
Barry eyed the statue warily as he passed by, half expecting it to burst into life
“It’s like Ghostbusters, eh?” muttered Martin.
“I hope it’s like them nice remakes rather than the terrifying originals—”
“Shh” hissed Margaret, cutting off Barry mid-flow. “Eyes front, mouths shut.”
A light breeze was picking up, lightly swaying the low box hedges and neatly trimmed trees that lined the cemetery walkways. The tear in the ground was widening. Here it measured five or six feet across, Martin leaned over the edge, but couldn’t see any bottom to it. He could feel heat rising from the trench though, a warmth pressed pleasantly against his face. It was also starting to smell.
“Yeesh, you whiffing that?” he whispered. “Smells like the bottom of my black bin.”
“Decay,” replied Martin quietly. “Smells like a great deal of decay.”
“Warm decay at that,” said Martin, holding his hand in the rising current.
Margaret rolled her chair to the edge and felt the same warmth. The straw totem of Tyr pulsed in her outstretched palm.
“Press on lads.”
—
Following alongside the trench deeper into the cemetery brought them to the nexus. A great maw had opened around a patch of two foot high, white gravestones. A single stone stood untouched in the centre, the stones to either side were knocked into oblique angles or twisted out of place like the teeth in an Englishman’s gumline.
Barry gingerly pulled his Morris sticks from his quiver.
“Good thinking, Baz.” said Margaret. “Mutes off lads and form-up. I think we’ve arrived.”
Pete popped the clip on his braces and his compressed drum swung round his neck into position at his waist. Martin dropped to one knee to loosen his mutes over his bells, and pulled his batons from his belt loops.
Margaret raised an eyebrow and smiled to herself. They almost looked, well, competent. She flicked a protective cover from a bank of switches on her wheelchair arm and poked two of the switches down. A quiet whine indicated the schmooly batteries were charging up. The chair sank into a more defensive position. Red lights cycled to green across her armrest.
“Baz,” she ordered, gripping tightly to Tyr. “You’re up.”
Nodding, Barry inched towards the edge of the crater, his sticks held in a defensive cross in front of his chest. The crater was dark, hot, and stank. The putrid heat rolled over his face and arms, causing him to gag at the stench.
“Oh fer Christs—” he spluttered. Squinting into the pit he could just make out the carving on the white gravestone. “Capt. Tom Banks. 1916.” Barry turned to tell the others.
But then the sky turned blood red.
A wave of heat and stench burst from the maw like a great wave. Barry was rocked off his feet and landed painfully and awkwardly on his shoulder. Martin and Pete, with a precious second to prepare, leaned into the onslaught as Margaret’s chair skittered backwards in the gravel.
The gravestone in the middle of the pit began to rise from the ground. As it rose, a piercing beam of red weir light blazed into a cross directly beneath the stone. Chunks of broken statue parts and headstones slid across the gravel towards the centre. As each piece fell into the pit, they swirled around the ruined bowl like a cauldron. Broken lumps of masonry, fragments of blasted memorials broiled and coalesced as they rotated beneath the central stone which hovered fifteen feet above the ground.
Barry had recovered to his knees, the others remained frozen in awe of the power forming in front of them. Pieces of stone crashing together. Huge chunks meshed into place as smaller fragments, dust and gravel filled in the gaps. What was forming was… a man.
A stone soldier in battle dress made from pieces of crumbled statue and grave. The white headstone that had marked Capt. Banks’ grave now embedded firmly into his back. Debris formed into webbing as a great splinter of rock grasped in his stone hand congealed into a rifle.
The soldier raised his head, his face a mass of grave sand shimmering and shifting between features and expressions. Some faces were deeply lined, with sunken empty eye sockets. Others were pitifully young, their eyes wide, eyebrows raised in shock and disbelief. The cycle of features flickered until it locked into a single, fixed face. A face of someone in their early 30s, proud and square jawed, with the dusty hint of a moustache.
The face looked back at them.
And then the face screamed.