The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [203]
The point of the old, nibbled knife pricks the underside of my chin.
‘Lie still’ he snarls, pushing the whole of his weight down on top of me, the way he used to when we played as eight-year-olds, so that the side of my face is squashed against the scratchy hessian carpet. He adjusts his position so he’s kneeling on my back, my ribs threatening to crack under the pressure
Then there is no breath left, all I can manage are small, terrified gasps, and the knife plays with the soft skin around my jaw and the side of my neck, while my body’s forced so hard into the floor that the pressure seems to turn inside out, and instead of being pushed down I’m dangling, again, floating over an immense void that opens up beneath me, feeling the suck and swirl of the dark greedy vortex…A bird is singing somewhere far away, and now I’m leaning right over Steve’s face, his eyes huge and black and blank, the oozing blood from his wound giving off a metallic stink that makes my nostrils tingle, then the red rises to drown me as I fall into his eyes…
Cold on the back of my neck. My shoulders and arm are chilled too. The smell of chalky earth in my nose, crumbling soil in my mouth, a hard, knobbled surface under me.
Buried alive…
Everything spasms and a thin stream of acid pours out of my mouth onto the damp ground. But the unbearable pressure forcing me down has lifted. I can breathe. That’s cold air, not cold earth, on my back and shoulders. My eyes open, and instead of pitch darkness, there’s light, of a sort, a strange electric-blue rippling.
Somebody is moving around, not far away. I’m lying on my side, legs bent, knees drawn up, in a wide, deep depression. The ditch? No, not that deep, and this is bare soil, not grass. More than bare soil: ground so hard it feels like bedrock. Turning my head cautiously to look upwards, over the lip of the depression I can see the dark, wavy line of the henge banks, some distance off, and above them, curious ripples of light that are like ribbed sand glistening on a beach as the tide retreats. It’s a sky like none I’ve ever seen before, beautiful but chilling because I don’t understand what’s causing it.
But when I shift my head a fraction of an inch further, at the corner of my eye, the rippling light is cut off abruptly by a huge shadowy bulk.
And now I understand exactly where I am.
In the stone pit.
Above me is the massive megalith the students raised last week. Keir must have taken boltcutters to the padlocks on the metal barriers Ed and Graham put up round the excavation, then carried me into the trench where the stone lay buried. He must be nearby, though I can’t see him, because I can hear movement, rustling. It sounds like he’s behind the stone, where something is rubbing and creaking and–
The ropes. The hawsers made of twisted honeysuckle. He’s trying to saw them apart with that horrible little knife of his. Every muscle tenses, screaming at me to get out of the pit as fast as I can, but something’s constricting my arms, something rough and chafing. He’s already cut at least one length of rope from the stone to bind me. I try to pull my wrists apart, but the honeysuckle is extraordinarily strong. It doesn’t give at all. Are my ankles bound too? No, I can move both feet independently. I stretch one leg gently, and the ball of my foot touches something hard. It’s too dark in the pit to see what it could be, but my eyes are gradually acclimatizing to the lack of light. There’s a glimmering greyish shape not far from my face…
He’s laid a ring of stones around my body.
I have to get out of here right now, while he’s the other side of the stone…
But it’s too late, he’s already moving round this side, sawing away at one of the honeysuckle strands with–
It’s not the useless little Bronze Age knife. This is the real McCoy, reflecting the weird light from the rippling sky, a gleaming, wicked, sharp hunting knife about three times the size of the other.
Fuck.
The thin, dry sound of sawing seems to double in volume,