The promise had been a large one. Gideon hadn’t doubted for a second that he could keep it. Lee seldom asked for anything, and his friends—the power of God and of justice in the land, as old man Penyar had put it—couldn’t run fast enough to help him when he did. Gideon had pulled Zeke away from a funeral. DI Lawrence had come to the phone with an irate superintendent yelling in the background about the interruption. Lee needs you, was all Gideon had said, and neither had raised a word of objection. Come to Stranger’s Cove.
“I walked down the sleepy summer lanes,” Lee said softly, addressing none of them. “I walked towards the stone.”
Zeke was magnificent in belted cassock and dog collar. His black preaching scarf must have flown behind him in the wind for him to get here as fast as he had. Old Pastor Frayne’s hearse-like Volvo was parked with two tyres in a ditch by the roadside. He stood beside Gideon, hands on his hips, watching Lee. “Do I need my exorcism kit?”
“I don’t think so. This thing isn’t... evil, nothing like Morris Hawke or whatever it was we met in the basement at Underhill. But it’s taken his vision. He can’t see.”
Lawrence had parked far more sensibly in the gateway opposite, and had perched herself on her Audi’s bonnet to assess this strange scene. “He can’t what?” she demanded, pushing upright and striding over to Lee. She stood in front of him, passed one hand back and forth across his eyes. “Oh, my God, Gideon. We should call an ambulance.”
“No. I have to let him go through this.”
“Not at the expense of...” She turned on him. “I don’t understand. You’re normally so attentive to him, such a good...”
Poor woman. Even with all her training and intentions, she still struggled. “Husband?” Gideon suggested, trying for a smile. “You think I’m not terrified for him, too, that I’d rather not grab him and haul him off back home? That’s not the point, though—not what I want, or you want, or even what he wants. It’s about Clem Atherton.”
“Who’s... here right now, you want me to believe.”
“As I’ve said—never mind what I want. Please just speak to him.”
Lawrence cleared her throat. She came to stand in front of Lee, who didn’t flicker a muscle at her approach. She looked him over carefully, then emitted a sigh, the sound of a practical woman being asked to do business with cobwebs and dreams. “Look, Lee—you know how I respect your gifts. But...”
“Not Lee. Lee’s made room for me inside.”
Lee sometimes disappointed clients who’d seen one horror movie too many. His voice didn’t change timbre when a woman spoke through him, or even on the terrible occasions when he’d laid himself open to a lost child. Something altered, though. Lawrence retreated a step or two. “Shit,” she whispered. “That’s not Lee, is it?”
“No,” Gideon said. “But please just speak to him. Lee’s doing this of his own accord, but I can’t let it go on for long.”
Lawrence braced up. “All right. Clem Atherton, then—why have you asked us to come here, me and Minister Frayne?”
“You both bring justice, in your separate ways. Not the cruel justice of a made-up God, a white-bearded head you’ve poked up on a stick to carry out your own spite and hate. Human justice, to heal the wrongs of the past and the future.”
“We try. Minister Frayne is a man of God, though.”
“Not the head-on-a-stick kind,” Zeke interjected, with a questioning glance at Gideon. “Not now, anyway.”
Gideon bumped one shoulder gently against him. “No. Not now. What do you want Ezekiel and Detective Inspector Lawrence to do now, Clem?”
“To come with me. To see how it was, and how it will be if the head on a stick ever frowns out across this land—this world—again. My name is Clem Atherton. I was nobody. The second great war came, and I was drafted. I was nobody.”
Lawrence folded her arms. “Nobody’s nobody.”
“Ah, you didn’t see us. Packaged up in khaki, ferried out on trains and transport ships. We were all the same, except in those burning places inside where we loved. Where we love. And then I met Michael.”
“Was Michael a... a comrade of yours?”
“My commanding officer. Michael Joseph Grey, a captain in the Plymouth Fusiliers. Lee says you need all these details, so you can prove my story. I came from Warwick Street in the south London suburbs—as I say, just nobody. And Michael came from here.”
“Here, as in...”
“Cornwall. Lamorna. He used to tell me about it—the may blossom, the hedgerows, the campions and the tricorn leeks—by the campfires at night.”
Lawrence frowned. “My grandfather used to own land around here. He used to talk about a farmer called Grey, who’d given it all up and moved away because...”
“Because he lost his only son in the war. Why would I lie to you, Inspector, right out here on the very far rim of my soul? Michael died. And I lived.”
Clem Atherton couldn’t weep for himself. The sudden wash of tears down Lee’s face wasn’t his. Certain of that, heart aching, Gideon went to lay a hand on his shoulder. “Is that why you came back here? To see Michael’s family?”
“No. I knew they were long gone. And they wouldn’t want to see me—I’d only have besmirched his memory, in their eyes. He didn’t try to hide what I’d been to him, you see. He was trusting. He said times would change. When he wrote home to his sister, he told her all about me.”
“I’m glad he did that.”
“So was I, though I begged him not to. He was wrong, about the times and the change. Wrong to trust.”
Gideon let his grip tighten, hoping Lee would feel it. “Not entirely.”
“Ah, no. But what was the use of it—all the noble changes that came after, when half Europe was lying in ruins, and everything was shaken to its core, and the splendid rebuilding began? The welfare state, the new health service, the first tiny beginnings of change for men like me and women like... like...” He paused, drew a rough breath. “Oh. Good Lord.”
“What?” Gideon glanced between him and Lawrence, who for some reason had reddened to her eyebrows. “DI Lawrence here stands for all those good things—don’t you, ma’am?”
She swallowed hard. “Of course. But that’s not what you were saying, Clem, was it?”
“It’s part. But I can see the screens of Lee’s memory. I see a monster across the Atlantic, a monster in Russia, and millions chanting their names. I see Ku Klux Klansmen going unhooded, and I see the young lads—children, they seem to me—dancing in one another’s arms, in the kind of club that used to be hidden in cellars like a dirty secret. And I see those children shot down.” A sob shook him. “What was the use of it all, if you’re going to piss it away in hate and fear of every bloody thing that’s different from yourselves?”
“We don’t mean to. And we’ll fight it, I swear. But you can’t keep using Lee up like this. If you want us to see something, show us. Why did you come back here, if not for Michael’s family?”
“Because I’m dying. I lived through the war, but now my heart’s giving out on me, just like my father’s did. They tell me it’s an inherited trait, but I think I broke it on the Front. I lost my job. I was evicted. I took to the road, just like the thousands of nobodies before me, and I came here, because of Michael and the campions. The hedgerows and the soft sea wind. I wanted to die on the road here, but I saw the top of the stone, and I started to walk.”
***
Gideon, Lawrence and Zeke walked with him. He slung the scarf round his neck, and kept to the very middle of the track. Gideon stayed within catching range in case he stumbled on the tufts of grass growing along the central stripe, but didn’t touch. He knew—his brother and Lawrence too, their conviction a kind of awed hush in the air—that he was watching Clem Atherton’s last journey.
The Spinner stone rose like a dream through a gap in the hedgerow. “Dans maen,” Lee said, in the voice so eerily like and yet unlike his own. “That’s what Michael called them—dancing stones. He taught me some Cornish, as well as the names of the flowers.”
“That’s nice,” Gideon said flatly. “Lee speaks Cornish, too—the two of you can chat. But you mind your manners in there.”
“I won’t break the furniture.” A tiny flicker of animation altered the pale, weirdly immobile face. “Oh, Mike was right to trust in a future that had you and Lee in it, Gideon! I’ll tell him when I see him. I’ll tell him how it was like a sweet fire, the places inside where you two touch. I... I came to the end of the track here, the place where it meets the road. The stone was just in the field ahead of me, but I didn’t know how to reach it past the... past the...”
“The Cornish hedge,” Ezekiel offered. Lee had come to a halt at the junction, and Zeke, after a glance around for traffic, took up position beside him. His tone was conversational, as if he’d met an interested tourist out for a walk. “Built of rocks and earth, with hawthorns often planted on the top to make a higher windbreak. So big and wide that other plants colonise it easily, and they form refuges and highways for all kinds of beasts and birds, a sort of miniature...”
“I do know the word ecosystem, Minister Frayne.” Another flicker, stronger this time. “Lee does, anyway. But how did I get to the stone?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you stood here for a moment and listened.”
“I did. Yes, that’s what I did. And I heard... just the wind in the hawthorns, I thought.”
“What did you hear, Clem?”
Lee—Clem, Gideon had to accept, for now at any rate, even though the idea of such total possession chilled his blood—raised his head and smiled at Zeke outright. “Nonsense, I thought. Here’s how it goes. Eko, eko, Azarak. Eko, eko, Zomelak. As we tread the circle round, so our magic shall be bound. Harra-hya!”
“What on earth is that?”
“Well, I didn’t know at the time. How should I?”
“But... you do know now?”
“Of course I do. It’s the witches, and it’s coming from this direction. Come on!”
He stepped out into the road. A pang of fright seized Gideon, even though he too had been watching for oncoming cars. Clem was locked into a 1950s world, where perhaps a couple of vehicles an hour would have troubled the peace of these lanes, not emmets by the dozen in hired sports cars. The strange thing was that he could hear the witches too, or at least the deep beat of their chant in his skull. Eko, eko, Azarak... “Where are we going, Clem?”
“Up there, towards the gate. That’s where they’re waiting for me.”
The only gate in that direction led to Pascoe’s Farm. “Do they know that you’re coming?”
“I didn’t know myself until I got to this turn in the road. But—yes, they know. Perhaps it’s just the right time, the right season. And I’m the right kind of man.”
“Do you want to go there?”
“Ah, yes. More than anything.”
Gideon cast a dubious glance at his boss and Zeke. Zeke was oddly serene, but Lawrence returned the look with interest. “Is this a good idea, Gideon?”
“I wish I knew, ma’am. I’ve never seen him this deep into a channelling before. Clem really wants to get his story told.”
She pulled a wry face. “I suppose we’d better not keep these witches waiting, then. Lead on, Mr Atherton. Whatever you want us to know about, we’re here.”
“First I want you to know about the woman, the woman who was waiting for me out in the road, to show me I’d come to the right place.” Clem set off, his tired, uncertain stride tugging painfully at Lee’s sturdy frame. “She was the strangest part of this, and not because she was frightening, or dressed in strange robes or a cloak.”
No. She kept those for her ongoing, mind-bending bloody afterlife. “Let me guess,” Gideon said. “Lady in her twenties, looks like she just stepped out of a Marks & Spencer shop window. In no way scary at all.”
“That’s right. And Lee says that’s weird, because he knows Ma Frayne didn’t meet her for years and years after this, to warn her not to wander round the village streets in her witch clothes. Lee’s beginning to wonder if Jana Ragwen isn’t fixed in time, and that makes him wonder about the new little witch of Dark, whether she’ll be able to—”
“Hoi,” Gideon interrupted. “Can I just remind you that he’s meant to be channelling you?”
“I’m sorry. Oh, don’t be afraid. I won’t move in. I am fixed in time, a leaf on a stream, and here’s where the last current washed me to shore.” His smile flashed out again, powerfully charming. “Michael’s western shore! I’m glad I saw it, even if the pain in my chest is like a knife now. And a better blade awaits me here.”
He broke into a run. It was awkward, the action of a taller, thinner man with a failing heart. Even now Gideon knew better than to touch. Zeke made the effort, and was brusquely shaken off for his pains. “What do we do, Gideon?” he demanded. “This is horrendous.”
“He’s dealt with worse.”
“I get that this poor man Clem isn’t evil, but... in that case, why did Lee want me here?”
“I don’t know yet. Just run ahead and grab the gate. Clear the way for him. Make it as easy for him as you can.”
Zeke obeyed. He was in good shape these days, his life transformed by the necessity of running around after toddling twin boys. He still looked like a crow in a high wind when he ran, and Gideon had to choke back a laugh when he hitched his cassock up over his knees to get there faster. He swung the Pascoes’ gate wide. “Come on, then, Clem,” he said, a bright compassion transforming his harsh-boned face. “Come through.”
“Blessed are the gatekeepers,” said Clem—or Lee, deadpan. Still fighting laughter, Gideon followed him in, Lawrence close on his heels. And behind them, Ezekiel closed the gate.