Graven Images Ch. 1

Graven Images

Chapter 1 - Dartmoor

Sarah knelt to examine the symbol on the ancient stone, and noticed a coil of rope next to it. Odd. With the curiosity of a cat, she inched over to examine it. The viper raised its mottled head, flicked its tongue at her, and slithered noiselessly into the undergrowth. Her scream soared over the green-brown expanse stretching treeless around her. It rolled over hills littered with rough granite boulders and ricocheted off dimly visible tors of wind-softened granite cubes.

Startled by the shriek, Owen ran over from the centre of the stone circle, and wrapped his protective arms around her. He felt her trembling from the shock of the snake: close, deadly, and unexpected. He tried to ignore the mild arousal triggered by her fear. Knight in shining armour comforting damsel in distress.

He refocussed. “They only attack if you attack them first.”

Her eyes were locked to the spot where the snake had vanished. She shuddered. “Can’t stand snakes.”

“Wish I’d seen it. Never seen one up close.”

“You’ll get another chance.” She turned from him, dismissing primeval fears. “Owen, look at this carving. What do you think it is?”

“How strange - like a circle with a crescent either side. Doesn’t mean anything to me.”

"It’s modern though. See how the stone is still white, with no lichens on it? Pity. I thought for a moment we had a major archaeological discovery. Probably made by some new-age weirdo who fancies himself as a druid.”

“Maybe. Or just some mindless vandal.”

They returned to their measurements. Sarah crouched next to a post, and spoke into the recorder.
“Height one point two seven metres, distance from number 23, one point four three metres.”

As Owen captured the contours of the stone with the digital camera, he wondered who on Earth would come all the way up to this desolate spot to carve that symbol. “Sarah, you remember that guy in the shop in Chagford who went off at us? He seemed to have some fixation about these stone circles.”

She stood as she finished the measurement. “What? I think he was just a harmless old crank who doesn’t like scientists.”

“Possibly – but it seemed more than that.”

He stared at the carving again, and spotted a movement of grass a few steps away. He peered warily at it. Nothing. He gazed, detached, at the circle of stone posts ranged to either side. “I can’t believe how long this circle is taking,” he muttered.

Sarah looked up. “I’m sorry?”

“We’ve been here for two days, and we’re still only half-way through.”

She came over to him. “But at least the rain’s stopped. If this weather holds, we’ll be able to measure the azimuths tomorrow morning. Then we’re done.”

She stared at the clouds on the horizon. He gazed at her, at her windswept hair, her small round body. He stood behind her and put his arms over her shoulders. She snuggled into him as he gazed at the stone circle.

Four thousand years ago, some small group of men and women, struggling for survival through harsh bronze-age winters, had built it at enormous cost to their fragile community. Why? Driven by this single question, he spent his vacations here on this windblown sodden fragment of moorland. But he loved the springiness of the fragrant turf and peat bog, the hills that welcomed him like a mother’s embrace. The solitude, the isolation, the warm summer days when the wind whispered through the long grass, lonely yet comforting. And those autumnal days when the mist, smelling of waterlogged peat, defeated wet-weather gear, insinuated icy trickles between skin and clothing. When the world shrank to an arms-length horizon of visibility, beyond which shadows of forgotten ghosts flitted in the mist: another world, an alternative reality.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

“Oh – nothing – just thinking.”

It had been a long day, and his body ached. He looked at his watch. Nearly six.

They packed up the gear, leaving the survey markers in place, and trudged downhill to a sheltered spot where they had pitched their tent. There, next to the noisy brook, were the remains of a bronze-age village, once occupied by the builders of the stone circle. Even now, a dozen horseshoe-shaped hut circles survived. Once a roof of branches and turves had capped them. Now, only these stone skeletons bore witness to the once-flourishing civilisation. What children played here? What words did they speak? What songs did they sing? What games, poems, ideas, beliefs, religion, science, lay submerged beneath the boggy peat?

A few minutes later, a kettle of stream water was hissing on the camp stove. They pulled off their waterproofs and huddled together in the dry of the tent. Her warmth and softness aroused him, but she rejected his advances.

“Later,” she grinned, “I prefer a cup of tea right now.”

He grunted acquiescence. Always so bloody practical. She took over the tea-making while he pulled out the laptop and slotted in a fresh battery from the pile in the rucksack. He opened the file to enter the day’s data.

“Not much to show for two days’ work,” he grunted, “We don’t even have any theodolite measurements yet.”

She handed him a cup of tea. “Worrying about it won’t help. Anyway, today’s weather was better than yesterday’s. Let’s hope tomorrow will be sunny enough to finish.”

A clap of thunder echoed across the moor. The sky was clouding over, and within an hour, the rain was falling again.

They spent the evening typing the numbers from their recordings into the laptop, as the rain drummed on the flysheet. Their first camping trip together, three years ago, in an ancient leaky tent from Owen’s schooldays, had been an unforgettably wet experience, although their interest in each other had eclipsed the discomfort. But as they and their relationship blossomed and matured, they clothed themselves in the accessories of comfort and respectability. Their tent now not only kept them warm and dry, but even had storage space under the flysheet for pots, plates, and food.

As the sky darkened, Owen lit the stove in the shelter of the flysheet, to reconstitute a packet of dried risotto with the stream-water. He opened the laptop, tapped a few keys, and out of the tinny speakers ventured the first movement of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. By the time the glorious second movement burst forth, the risotto was ready and Sarah poured the gooey mess onto plates while he poured two plastic glasses of wine from a cheap wine box. Despite the weight limit in their rucksacks, wine counted as one of the basic necessities of life. The music soared, the risotto and wine were excellent, and this outpost of reconstituted sophistication stood confident and solitary amidst the crumbling ruins of previous civilisations in this timeless, desolate, moorland.

As if drawn together by the surface tension of their bubble of existence, they found themselves entwined, while the random forces of rain, wind, and wilderness crackled and drummed on the tent around them. They made love drowsily, savouring the fusion of two bodies into one. They fell apart, and half-asleep, crawled into their respective sleeping bags. Owen drifted off, listening to the wind and rain attacking the flysheet. In this hut circle, in this exact spot, the builders of the stone circle had slept aeons ago. He became conscious of the volume in space occupied by his body. Who occupied that space on a rainy night four thousand years ago? Probably not much older - Bronze Age life expectancy was short. Building that great circle, perhaps a prehistoric astronomical observatory, trying to understand the mysteries of the Universe. The irony was not lost on Owen, who had just completed his PhD at Cambridge, in physics, and had made the decision to dedicate his life to understanding the cosmic forces that shaped this Universe. He’d never be rich, but if he could push humankind one little bit along that path of enlightenment, then his life would acquire meaning. One day he would know that he’d made a difference.

Sarah, snoring softly beside him, was also at Cambridge, doing a PhD in biology, working out how early life evolved. But she didn’t seem to define her life in terms of these great intellectual journeys that both were undertaking. Instead, her studies in biology seemed almost a distraction to her. She used the word “career” which he detested for reasons that weren’t entirely clear. She discussed earnestly whether her PhD would lead to increased earning-power. Why did she have this incredibly superficial approach? Life is what happens while you are making other plans. Yet he loved her, deeply and achingly. It was only a matter of time before they married. If only she wasn’t so hesitant about making a commitment.

A crash outside shattered his reverie. They both jumped up. He scrambled to the front of the tent and fumbled with the zip. Under the flysheet, their dirty plates and pans had been knocked over.

“Probably just a fox,” he explained, tidying up, “The noise of the falling pans scared him off. Probably won’t come again.”

He closed the zip and climbed back into the sleeping bag.

“Good-night, love,” he whispered.

“Good night, Owen,” came a groggy murmur from the shapeless sleeping bag. He closed his eyes and tried to drift off again.

A little later came a rattling from outside. He sat up, bolt upright. “Bloody fox.”

Again he opened the tent. This time he tied all the food securely in the rucksack, and balanced a saucepan to fall down on the fox, scaring it away for good.

As he drifted back, the saucepan crashed. Excellent! He waited, holding his breath. Would the fox dare return?

He lay there, listening. Silence. Good.

He staggered awake from a dream in which it was time to leave but he couldn’t get his schoolbooks into his bag. The bus was outside, about to leave, but his books had acquired a life of their own, snapping open and shut, and slithering uncontrollably on the hallway floor. He chased them and tried to force them into his bag, while his friends on the bus laughed at his pathetic attempts. But consciousness summoned him with even more urgency, and as he fought upwards through successive levels of awakening, the laughter morphed into a snarling noise, accompanied by the clanking of saucepans. The fox had been attacking their pans and food for some while. Owen clambered out of the tent once again, and saw that the fox – God knows how – had managed to get into the rucksack, and was now trying to chew its way into a Tupperware box containing bacon.

“That’s my breakfast!” he shouted, and tried to grab the box. The fox jumped playfully away, and at a safe distance continued to gnaw through the box while keeping a wary eye on him.

“You bugger!” He scrambled out, torch in hand, and chased the fox up the hill.

It was pouring, but pale moonlight filtered through the cloud, bathing the scene in a strange half-light. Still naked, he pursued the fox through the icy rain, a sense of absurdity creeping into his mind. But now it was personal, and he chased the fox out of the cluster of huts, up towards the stone circle, the fox pausing every so often to gnaw the box, but always keeping a few metres away from him, taunting him. Then the fox ran far ahead, into the circle.

Owen reached the circle to find that the fox had vanished. Flashing his torch behind each stone, he circumnavigated the circle, hoping to find either the fox or the box of bacon. He sat heavily at the base of a stone. The situation was absurd and anachronistic – naked, reduced to primal elements, man versus fox. Unaccountably, he grabbed the cold stone next to him, and hugged it, placing his forehead against it, and he wept. Reality flooded in from the stone, through his fingers, through his forehead, through every sense, and at once he understood how this great circle of circumstance had now closed, how he was now part of this reality, as much a part of this earth as the fox or the people who built this circle, or the rock itself. The feeling of one-ness was overwhelming, causing him to stagger back. He tripped over, and fell clumsily to the ground. He lay still. What the hell had just happened? He walked over to the stone, and put his hand on it. Nothing. Except - a fleeting glimpse of something remembered, out of reach. The fog rolled in. It was gone.

He trudged back to the tent, his mind still working over the experience. Weird. Very weird. It made no sense at all.

“You were a long time – I was getting worried,” said Sarah, “Catch him?”

“Um – no. He ran off with the box of bacon.”

“Never mind. We can live without it. Why were you so long?”

“ I – er – oh nothing, really. It was all a bit strange, that’s all.”

“Oh – well – hope he doesn’t come back. Good night.”

“Good night.” He crawled back into his sleeping bag. His mind was still buzzing. Probably just wine and fatigue. He drifted into a restless sleep filled with strange half-dreams.

By morning, the rain had faded to a grey drizzle. After a breakfast of tea and marmalade sandwiches, they struggled into waterproofs and trudged up to the circle. Owen paced around the stones, replaying the events of the night. He gingerly touched a stone, and then clasped it firmly. Nothing. He became aware of Sarah’s gaze, and turned to her, grinning self-consciously.

“I must have been half-asleep last night when I came up here. I had the strangest experience.”

“What?”

“Not sure. It was as if I could touch....” A hesitation. “I guess I was spooked. Or half dreaming. It’s funny – it was so strange up here last night, and now it looks so familiar.”

She rolled her eyes, and smiled at him affectionately. “You know, for someone who’s supposed to be a rational physicist, you can be pretty peculiar at times.”

He grinned back. “OK Mizz Rational. What shall we do today?”

“Not much we can do in this rain. Looks like it’s set in for the day. Why don’t we leave the survey markers in place – nobody’s going to come here in this weather – go back to the car, drive into Exeter. We could stay in a motel, enjoy some warm beds and hot meals, and come back in a day or two when the weather improves?”

He wasn’t listening. “Come and see what I’ve found!”

He held up the Tupperware box triumphantly. It was unopened, but the polythene was deeply scored by teeth-marks.

“Stupid fox couldn’t figure it out!” Owen 1. Fox 0. He flipped it open, and sniffed it. “Seems OK.”

“Why don’t we have bacon sandwiches before we leave,” she said, “To give us energy for the walk back?”

“Yeh – excellent idea. Look - I found it in this kistvaen.”

She peered into the shallow coffin-shaped hole in the ground, lined with stone slabs. These bronze-age burial chambers, or kistvaens, were often found next to stone circles, although all were empty, having been raided centuries earlier by treasure-seekers.

“That’s why I couldn’t find the fox – he must have ducked into the kistvaen.”

Sarah crouched down. “What the heck are these?”
He squatted next to her. In the kistvaen were bunches of faded flowers, weighed down by pebbles. Picking one up, he saw it had symbols scratched on it.

“How odd.” He picked up more of the stones. Each was marked with a roughly-drawn symbol.

“They’re like the symbols we found yesterday on that stone. Maybe kids put them here.”

“Yeh – right. In the middle of the moor?”

“Oh – yes – I guess not.”

He examined more of the pebbles. Who would bother coming out here to scratch these symbols? Some local weirdo? Some new-age hippy druid?

Sarah screwed her eyes as she tried to decipher the markings. “Let’s take some back and see if we can find out what the symbols mean.”

He stared at the stone in his hand. It had acquired some ill-defined significance. “Uh – I don’t know whether we should. It might be really important to someone.”

She glanced at him, sharply. “You’re spooked again, aren’t you?”

“No - it’s just that – well, you should respect other people’s beliefs - maybe we’d better leave them here.”

She was studying his face. “OK then,” she said, evenly, “but let’s check out these symbols. I’m curious as to what they mean.”

They copied the symbols into the notebook, and replaced the pebbles on the dead flowers. He felt like a kid caught misbehaving by a teacher, and let off with a warning.

The bacon sizzled in the pan as they packed the rucksacks. They settled down to hot sandwiches washed down with tea.

“I guess we’ll get back to the car by about two,” mumbled Owen, between mouthfuls, “So we should reach Exeter at about four.”

“OK - that’s good. Time to check into a motel, go to a pub and have dinner, maybe go see a movie. Then explore the night-life of Exeter.”

“Or mount a search for it.”

She grinned back. “If the weather’s still bad tomorrow we can explore all the joys of Exeter cathedral and the museum.”

They packed up the bags, and dismantled the tent. With a last search to make sure nothing was left behind, they started the sodden trek back to the car.

Although the journey to the car was only five kilometres by crow, it was wet and boggy by foot, compounded by the notorious Dartmoor mists that could reduce visibility to the point where navigation was entirely by compass. As a result, the journey would take nearly three hours. To avoid the bog that lay directly between them and their destination, they first backtracked up to Hound Tor. Navigating this was easy even in fog, just by walking uphill. As the craggy rock of the Tor materialised out of the mist above, they took a new bearing measured from the map, being careful to skirt the Mire, which had claimed the life of more than one unwary hiker. The slope flattened, and the ground became wetter. Owen splashed along a few paces ahead of Sarah, choosing a path across the tufts of sphagnum. But the ground steadily became boggier, and eventually impassable.

Owen checked the map. Too far to the right. They backtracked and tried further left. Still in the Mire. Bugger. His boots were full of water now. Backtrack again. Let’s go even further to the left. OK – seems to be right this time. We should be there by now.

The boundary rock that marked the ford loomed up ahead. They jumped from stone to stone across the ford, and stopped to take a new bearing. Now uphill to Rippator.

The ground was firm and made easy walking, but the mist thickened until their feet faded into indistinct blurs. Owen checked the compass. “I love it like this - it’s so creepy. Like embryos in a womb – immersed in this little cocoon of existence, insulated from any sound or sight from outside. The whole world might have ceased to exist. But we just keep walking, following the map and compass, and - amazing - we arrive at our destination.”

He smiled at Sarah, searching for empathy, but was rewarded by no more than an expressionless glance. He fell silent and brooded on the ground ahead.

She suddenly stopped. “Hey – listen!”

Someone was coming towards them.

“Hello!” called Owen. The voices hadn’t heard him, but continued talking to each other. A woman seemed to be chatting to a child.

“Hello!” he called again, even louder, but they still didn’t hear him.

“They’re going to get a real shock when they bump into us,” said Sarah, attempting a laugh.

The voices became louder until they seemed within arms length. Now they could hear the steady plodding of a horse too, but still couldn’t see anyone or anything. “Hello there,” he called.

“Where are you,” she shouted, tautly.

They were ignored. The people sounded like they were right next to, even between, Owen and Sarah, and yet were still invisible. The horse coughed with a rasp, and seemed to stumble, and the woman made soothing noises to it. The child laughed. They resumed their conversation, unaware of Owen and Sarah. The voices faded into the distance, leaving the pair standing, motionless, open-mouthed. Owen realised that the hairs on the back of his neck were bristling.

“I guess they didn’t hear us,” he said, glancing at Sarah.

Her face was pale. “Fog does funny things to sounds. They were probably miles away.”

Ancient fears churned within him, eventually subsiding into no more than a shiver.
Retreating to the map and compass, he checked their bearing, and affected a cheerful briskness.
“Once more unto the breach dear friends.”

“Or close the wall up with our English dead!” she responded, automatically, unthinking.

He looked sharply at her. She glanced back, but said nothing, and each peered at the ground ahead as they moved off, wordlessly.

As they climbed the hill, the fog thinned, and the ground became easier, with short fragrant heather between cushions of sphagnum. They reached the broken mess of rock that marked the summit of Rippator. The shortest way back to their car was across Gidleigh Common – a boggy place where unfamiliar hikers could flounder for hours. A more reliable way was to head left to Buttern Hill, and then across the saddle to Scorhill, but this was about a kilometre longer. After some debate, they reasoned that they knew the Common well enough to avoid the bogs, and chose the shorter route.

Half an hour later, they knew they’d made the wrong decision. The rain had made the Common treacherous. Several times they were forced to retrace their steps, and tried to cross again on higher ground, only to be thwarted, their path taking them back into the bog. Finally, Owen, in the lead, found a path that seemed to skirt the soggy mess. They trudged along it, across a mossy clearing in the heather.

“Stop!” shouted Sarah, panic in her voice, pointing.

Owen froze and looked at the ground around him. As he shifted, slow concentric undulations radiated away.

“Shit! How did I manage that?”

These featherbeds, notorious to Dartmoor walkers, were formed by skins of peat and moss that grew over the surface of darkly submerged pools of water. From above, they were indistinguishable from firm ground, but the deceitful layer could split and pitch the unwary into the watery blackness below. The resulting disorientation made it almost impossible to find the way back up through the skin. Bodies of hikers had been found trying to dig themselves deeper into the soil at the bottom of the pool. Owen’s face was pale, and his voice shook as he tried to appear calm.

“OK – you move back first.”

Sarah retraced her steps as if in a minefield. She was close to the edge of the featherbed, and her feet soon found solid ground. She breathed out. Owen’s face sweated in the cold air as he reversed his steps. One at a time, arms spread wide in case he fell through, hesitating before each step in case it was his last. The water was seeping through the moss under his weight, rising up to embrace him, and was now ankle-deep. How long could this skin support him before casting him into the netherworld? Not a word was spoken as his feet gingerly tested the unfirm ground beneath each footfall. After an age, he trod more firmly, and the deadly ripples subsided. He rushed over to Sarah, who put her arms out to him.

“Owen, thank God! Shit - you could have been killed!”

He didn’t reply but sunk his face in the nape of her neck. He remained there, silent, and then looked up.

“Bloody hell! – That’s not something I’d like to repeat.” He stared accusingly at the featherbed. “I could be under there now if you hadn’t spotted it.” He turned to her. His voice quavered. “You do realise you‘ve just saved my life?”

Her laugh was betrayed by the tremble in her words. “Don’t be so bloody melodramatic. Anyway, I think the locals exaggerate these stories to scare away the tourists.”

Maybe. Maybe it wasn’t so deep. But an image haunted him. If she had been in front… As they walked away, the image nagged him, clamouring attention, demanding to be examined, tried on for size.

Sarah under the ground. Sarah dead.

He started singing, noisily, adrenaline-driven, determined to extinguish it. “We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control…”

Sarah joined in and they sang in unison, louder than necessary, driving away the daemons. “The flames are all gone, but the pain lingers on.”

After a frustrating hour trampling around in the bog, firmer ground rose beneath them. As they crossed the grassy perimeter of the Common, the elegant megaliths of Scorhill Circle appeared dimly in the broad valley below. Only a few minutes further to their car, their home-from-home, with food, dry clothes, a heater, security.

“Hey – we’ve got chocolate biscuits in the car. How about a cup of tea before we drive to Exeter?”

“Wonderful,” said Sarah. “And a change of clothes. I can’t wait to get into dry clothes and joggers – I’m soaked through.”

Finally, they spotted the dry-stone wall that delineated the moorland’s edge, and the break marking the entrance where they had parked their car. They turned the corner of the wall and into the small car park. They stopped, aghast. Confronting them, where their car had been, was a burnt-out wreck.