The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [202]
‘Thing is, Bryn, we can’t be together here. This cottage isn’t mine. I don’t live here, I live with Frannie, outside the circle.’
‘I know that,’ he says. ‘We can still be together here, though.’
And everything goes distant and breathless again as he shows me the knife.
It’s a strange old thing, dull and nibbled by time. ‘Bronze Age,’ he says.
‘Where’d you find that?’ I’m trying to push my terror down, keep talking as naturally as I can.
‘Walking on Easton Down, with Cynon. He went nosing round the side of an old hump where rabbits’d been diggin’. There it was, half buried in the soil.’
He’s allowed me to sit up now, though he’s still behind, with an arm across my throat. He turns the dagger in the lamplight, somehow more malevolent than a modern knife would be.
‘You give me the idea, Ind,’ he says. ‘Was you told me about Avebury bein’ the place of the dead.’
I try to summon up everything John ever taught me about yoga breathing, meditation, calming the self for whatever purpose, and not one damn bit of it works. Or, rather, it won’t come back to me.
‘The ancestors,’ I say, at least an octave up on my usual pitch. ‘Not the dead in any…active sense.’ Not sure what I mean by this, except it would be good to disabuse him of the notion that people went around committing mass suicide in the Neolithic.
‘Thought a lot about the woman in the ditch,’ he says.
‘What woman in the ditch?’ My voice is tiny.
‘The one you talked about. Buried in the ring of stones.’
‘That was thousands of years ago.’ Not that I imagine for a second now that rational discussion will save me. This is a man who believes beings from Sirius make crop circles and the government is trying to stop us finding out about it.
‘Do I scare you?’ he asks abruptly, like he’s reading my mind.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Well, yes, a bit, because it hurts, and you won’t let go of me.’
‘No.’ The pressure of his arm eases slightly, though. ‘You have to win my trust back, see?’
The log on the fire has turned to glowing charcoal and collapses with a sigh. A small yellow flame leaps up and dances, as if it wants to partner the candle flame on the hearth, then flickers out.
The candle flame flickers in sympathy, bends…
There’s a draught. The door. The front door of the cottage is still open.
If I can somehow persuade him to relax more, if I could make a dash for it…
‘Keir,’ I say into the silence. ‘I’m really, really sorry about what happened to you. Must’ve been so hard…’
‘They kept her away from me,’ he says. ‘My real mother. She’ll have tried to fetch me back, but they wouldn’t let her.’ The same amorphous They, in Keir’s mind, who lie about crop circles, who send sinister black helicopters to hover over them and release radiation to poison seekers after truth.
‘Yes, probably.’ Humour him. If I can make him let go altogether, if I say I need the bathroom, or something? I don’t want to think about how the Goddess might have become twisted up in Keir’s head with the mother who abandoned him, or for that matter the woman who won’t let him see his son, the woman whose face was scribbled out in the photo Martin found buried in the circle, because intuition tells me Bryn was the person who left it there.
It’ll only work if I catch him off guard, when he takes his arm from my throat.
‘Can I look at you?’ I say.
The arm relaxes, in surprise, and I lash out with every iota of energy I possess, driving an elbow into his stomach, twisting out of his grasp, pain tearing across my scalp as he makes a grab at my hair. I arc backwards and drive the top of my skull up under his jaw, hearing the click of his teeth as well as his grunt of pain. Then I’m rolling over and trying to get to my feet, feeling huge and clumsy like in a nightmare, because he’s caught my foot and is dragging my leg from under me, so I lash out with the other foot and my heel connects with something hard, maybe the side of his head, sending a shock right up my leg, and pushing another grunt out of him, and I’m shouting, yelling as loud as