“I’m talking about the Old Straight Track-Neolithic pathways. In short, I am talking about ley lines.” He studied the younger man’s expression. “Am I to take it you’ve never heard of them?”
“Once or twice,” hedged Kit.
“Not even that.”
“No,” he confessed.
“Oh, dear. Oh, dear.” The old man regarded him with a glance of disapproval. “You really ought to have applied yourself to your studies, young Cosimo.”
Kit drank some more, reviving a little more with every sip. “So, what are these ley lines, then?”
Into the invisible square the old man drew a straight diagonal line. “A ley line,” he said, speaking slowly-as one might to a dog, or dull-witted child, “is what might be called a field of force, a trail of telluric energy. There are hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, all over Britain, and they’ve been around since the Stone Age. I thought you might have stumbled across them before.”
Kit shook his head.
“Early man recognised these lines of force and marked them out on the landscape with, well, any old thing, really-standing stones, ditches, mounds, tumps, sacred wells, and that sort of thing. And, later on, with churches, market crosses, crossroads, and whatnot.”
“Hey, hold on,” said Kit, breaking in. “I think I know what you’re talking about-New Agers out in Wiltshire on bank holidays traipsing around the standing stones with witching sticks and tambourines, chanting to the Earth Goddess and-” He looked at the frown on the old man’s face. “No?”
“Not by a long chalk. Those poor deluded dupes, spouting all that neo-pagan poppycock, are to be pitied. No.” He shook his head firmly. “We’re not talking New Age nonsense; we’re talking science-as in ‘There are more things in heaven and earth… than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ et cetera.” His eyes took on a slightly manic light. “Truth, dear boy. Science!”
“R-right,” said Kit warily. “I thought you said they were some kind of intersection between worlds.”
“Precisely,” replied his great-grandfather. “You see, this universe we inhabit is made up of billions of galaxies-literally beyond counting-and this is only one universe.”
“There are others?”
“Oh, yes-possibly. Maybe. We’re not sure.”
“We?”
“The Questors-but never mind, I’ll come to that later.” The old man brushed the word aside with a stroke of his hand. “Now then, where were we?”
“Billions of galaxies,” said Kit, staring into his tankard. If he had for a moment allowed himself to feel that sitting in a friendly pub conversing with a genial old man who was, by any reckoning, well over 125 years old, might be a reasonable activity… that feeling evaporated, replaced by a steadily mounting anxiety. And it was not only due to the outlandish nature of the old codger’s demented ramblings. The thing that had him in a sweat was this: in spite of everything, he had a sensation of being told a secret he knew to be true, but which would be far, far easier-and much safer-to ignore; all the more so since he strongly suspected that acknowledging the truth meant his life would change utterly.
Then again, what Cosimo had said was right: he was nothing but an overworked drone in a cube farm, a minor cog in the dreary machinery of a third-rate mortgage mill, overlooked, unloved, a sidelined player in the big game, and-how did the old man put it?-a lonely bachelor with the love life of garden gnome. What then, really, did he have to lose?
“Look, no offence,” said Kit, rousing himself, “but if you really are my great-grandfather, why aren’t you dead?”
“I suppose the simplest explanation is that all the popping back and forth between one world and another does funny things to one’s aging mechanism; ley travel seems to inhibit the process in some way.”
“Oh.”
“If we can continue?” The old man dipped his finger in a little puddle of ale and drew a large circle on the tabletop. “The visible universe with its many galaxies occupies one dimension of our common reality, but there are other dimensions-many of them.”
“How many?”
“Impossible to say. But each dimension has its own worlds and galaxies and so forth. And we know that these dimensions impinge on one another. They touch. They interpenetrate. And where one dimension touches or passes through another, it forms a line of force on the landscape.” He glanced up and saw his explanation was falling short of total comprehension. “Ever played with soap bubbles in the bath?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, you could think of these different dimensions as clusters of soap bubbles. Where one bubble touches another-or passes through another-it forms a line. It’s true. Look the next time.”
“I’ll try to remember to do that.”
“Now then, if each bubble were a different dimension, you could move from one to the other along that line.”
“A ley line.”
“Precisely.” His great-grandfather smiled. “I knew you’d understand.”
“I can’t say I do.”
“By methods yet to be explained, we have travelled, you and I. Crossed from one world, one dimension, to another via a ley line.”
“Stane Way,” surmised Kit, beginning to grasp the smallest part of what the old fellow was telling him. “The ley line was the alley?”
“Was and is.” The old man smiled triumphantly. “Stane-from the old Saxon word for stone-is literally the Stone Way, named for the row of standing stones that in a former age marked out the path. The stones are gone now, but the ley is still there.”
Kit took another swallow and, fortified by the ale, attempted a rejoinder. “All right. Assuming for argument’s sake that what you’re saying is in some cockeyed way true: how is it that such a monumental discovery has gone completely unnoticed by any reputable representatives of the scientific community?”
“But it isn’t unnoticed at all,” replied the elder gentleman. “People have known about this since-”
“The Stone Age, yes, so you said. But if it’s been around so long, how has it been kept a secret?”
“It hasn’t been kept a secret by anyone. It is so very ancient that man in his headlong rush to modernity and progress has simply forgotten. It passed from science into superstition, you might say, so now it is more a matter of belief. That is to say, some people believe in ley lines, and some don’t.”
“I’m thinking most don’t.”
“Quite.” The old man glanced up as Molly appeared with a wooden plate heaped with slices of brown bread and a few chunks of pale yellow cheese. “Thank you, my dear.” He took the plate and offered it to his great- grandson. “Here, get some of this down you. It will restore the inner man.”
“Ta,” said Kit, taking up a slice of bread and a chunk of crumbly cheese. “You were saying?”
“Consider the pyramids, Cosimo. Marvellous achievement-one of the most impressive architectural feats in the history of the world. Have you seen them? No? You should one day. Stupendous accomplishment. It would be an heroic undertaking to build such structures with cranes, earthmovers, and the kind of industrial hydraulics available today. To contemplate erecting them with the technology available to the ancient Egyptians would be unimaginable, would it not?”
“I suppose.” Kit shrugged. “What’s the point?”
“The point, dear boy, is that they are there! Though no one remembers how they were built, though the methods of their construction, once considered commonplace, have been lost to time, the pyramids exist for all the world to see. It’s the same with ley lines-completely dead and forgotten like the people who once marked them and used them-until they were rediscovered in the modern era. Although, strictly speaking, the leys have been rediscovered many times. The latest discoverer was Alfred Watkins.”
“Who?”
“Old Alf was a photographer back in the day-quite a good one, actually. Nice chap. Had an eye for landscape. Travelled around on horseback in the early days of the camera, taking photographs of the brooding moors and misty mountains, that sort of thing. Helped enormously with his discovery,” explained the old man, biting off a bit of
