The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [153]
The slope was gentle but I was flagging as I came up to the low wall that bounded the churchyard, its iron railings spared from being melted down for Spitfires. A breeze rattled the leafless branches of the pollarded trees edging the path to the porch. A shadow came at me from the gateway, a hand caught the cloth of my coat, and fingers dug cruelly into my arm, jerking me almost off my feet.
It was all slow and dim, like I was watching myself then, the shadow tugging me through the gate, its other arm snaking round my neck, a knee in the small of my back forcing me up the steps and onto the churchyard path. He said something, but I couldn’t make it out, because the voice was distorted, and I’d caught enough of a glimpse to know why. It was like looking into the empty stare of a black skull instead of a face. He was wearing a gas mask. For a moment, stupid, I thought it was the ARP warden. He’d tell me there was a gas attack tonight, to put on my own mask, and then he’d have to fine me because he’d discover that I had a mess of raw egg in my carry-case instead.
‘I’m sorry…’ I tried to say, but then my brain started working again. The ARP warden wouldn’t have his arm round my throat, nor stink so powerful of beer.
I heard the sound of the bombers then, coming from the south like fat blowflies homing in on raw meat. He half pushed, half dragged me up the path, and now I reckoned I understood what he’d been saying, because when I struggled the arm tightened across my windpipe, cutting off my air. Time stopped and started, came and went. Between the trunks of the trees I glimpsed Victorian gravestones, an angel leaning at a drunken angle on a pedestal. The night was swirling with lights, searchlight beams, sparks behind my eyes, the white moon, the thunder of the raid starting, streams of tracer and the pulsing glow of incendiaries as he hauled me round the side of the church and leaned against the wall, panting, his arm still crooked tight on my throat. The Old Lady on the Hill spread before us a grandstand view of hell, where a bomb must’ve landed on the railway yards. Behind us the old tangled shrubberies of the Lawn were black and empty. No one courting there tonight. No one to hear me, if his arm slackened and freed my throat enough to scream.
Then suddenly he swings me round so our positions are reversed, and it’s me against the wall, the weight of him pushing my face against the rough stone, and his unmistakable intention pressed into the small of my back like a horrible parody of the night with Davey, watching the procession in the Manor garden.
‘Fucking in a boneyard,’ he whispers. ‘You owe me, Heartbreaker.’ His nail rakes across the side of my face and he tears out my earring: he’s opened a vein, because I feel the slow drip of blood trickling down my neck. Then I realize it in’t his nail, it’s the ragged point of his old bronze dagger; I can see it out of the corner of my eye. More magic, then, the dirty sort that’s only about power.
He releases my throat but his hand’s like a claw on my shoulder. This time I hear him loud and clear. ‘You can turn round,’ he says. ‘Don’t be afraid.’
I told myself I wouldn’t be afraid anyway. I’d decide how I’d be, not let him decide for me. I turned round.
Eyes like a fly. The Insect King.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ he repeats. ‘It’s only a mask. And you know about masks, don’t you, Heartbreaker?’
PART SIX
The Sun Stands Still
Without a doubt Solstice–from the Latin solstitium, the sun at a standstill–would have been an important occasion for our ancestors who gathered at Avebury. Unlike at Stonehenge, where the midsummer sun rises over the Heel Stone, there seems to be no obvious solar alignment; but for all agricultural societies, it is a critical point in the year. On 21 June, the sun rises at its most north-easterly degree. Morning after morning, as the days have lengthened, its