The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [165]
The drizzle stops and the day brightens, so on my mid-morning break I make myself a sandwich and take it to eat at one of the tables under the trees by the museum, like a tourist, waving smugly at Corey when she comes out to clear crockery. It’s been an easy morning in the caf so far. Solstice celebrations put off the more staid National Trust members, and the pagans favour bring-your-own-tofu-burger barbecues on the campsite.
‘Keeping you busy enough?’ I ask.
She makes a face. ‘Why does it knacker you more when it’s quiet? We’ve more than enough sandwiches, I reckon, so you can piss off early if you want.’
The Trust’s Land Rover drives into the staff car park, the back loaded with black plastic bin bags full of rubbish. Ed and Graham climb out: Graham must have turned up, as predicted, after a short kip. They begin to unload them into the skips.
‘That Ed’s stronger than he looks,’ said Corey, with a sly glance. ‘Want a bet he’ll be over this way for a free cup of coffee when he’s done?’
‘He’ll be lucky’
Ed reaches for the last black bag; Graham lays a hand on his arm and stops him. A conversation starts, too low to hear.
‘Anyway, better crack on,’ says Corey. ‘You finished with that plate?’
Graham climbs into the driver’s seat and slams the door. The engine coughs, and the Land Rover heads off up the drive, the single black bin-bag jolting sluggishly in the open back.
As Corey threads her way through the tables with the loaded tray, Ed comes out of the car park heading for the caf, changing direction when he catches sight of me. He sits down heavily at my table. ‘Hi.’
‘You look like you’ve had a good morning,’ I say. The circles under his eyes are, if anything, darker.
‘Marvellous,’ he says. ‘Utterly marvellous. Litter all over the place. Hundreds of bloody tea-lights in the Long Barrow. Soot marks on the stone, which Graham and I had to scrub off. And, to cap it all, a dead dog.’
John has been washing T-shirts when I reach his cottage, hanging them on the line in the front garden.
‘You idiot,’ he says, when we’re nursing mugs of Brummie-strength tea in the living room. ‘You know what the Long Barrow is, Indy? It’s an entrance to the Lower World. The place I start when I’m making the Journey. Why the hell didn’t you tell me that’s where you went that night?’
There is absolutely no way I believe John goes anywhere beyond this room when he does his shamanic thing, the drums and the trance and all that, but all the same it gives me a chill to think of him sitting here bare-chested, chanting, picturing himself slipping between the big stones flanking the Long Barrow’s doorway and passing through its dark chambers into an alternative reality.
‘You ought to have more respect,’ he continues, ‘or at least understand that what you do there can have…repercussions. Sex is one of the most powerful elements of some magics. Under a waning moon, too. Not good Wyrd.’
I shiver, deciding I’d prefer not to know why a waning moon is bad, exactly, and wishing the fire were lit. The brick hearth holds a basket of pine cones around a dried-flower arrangement donated by one of his lovely ladies.
‘Why’s he killed his dog?’
John shakes his head. ‘You’re jumping to conclusions. Maybe it was hit by a car. Your…friend could have left it at the barrow as a burial. Or maybe it wasn’t his dog, someone else dumped it. He’s probably harmless, but from all you’ve said…’ He looks dubiously into the hearth, stretches forward to lift a pine cone out of the fire basket, and tosses it from one hand to the other. ‘I sometimes think the pagan movement is an alternative Care in the Community. And if I were you, I’d retrieve that note from the Swallowhead springs.’
Outside the window, grey cloud has muffled the sun again. John’s newly laundered T-shirts flap in the wind that has risen. One is black, fluttering next to a pair of dark, faded combat trousers.