He stopped. There she was again. Across the street, under a dodgy streetlamp which kept flickering on and off, and even when it was on it wasn’t fully on, so you could almost see the filament in the bulb, a worm of blue-white light. She was standing under the lamp and seemed to be going on and off like the light; you saw her and then you didn’t.
There was a roar. Two flat discs of greasy yellow spinning out of Telford Avenue. Turning to blinding white when they came round the corner.
Suzanne screamed, and it was strange; her voice, in extremis, sounded bizarrely refined.
‘Oh Christ, Vic, no, for fuck’s sake …’
The voice diverted him for a moment.
The wrong moment.
In the very next moment, his last conscious moment, two tail lights like dirty red pimples wobbled and blurred before a great and welcome silence came over him like a big, soft blanket.
At 2.37 a.m., Detective Inspector Bobby Maiden died in hospital.
Guardi’s Deli was just around the block from the New York Courier.
‘I mean, Jesus,’ Grayle said, making for the window table. ‘You look at this realistically, I’m the one should be missing. Like, Ersula was always the intense, academic sister, and I’m the crazy bitch with the crystals and the Tarot cards and the Eye of Horus earrings.’
Before Lyndon could even sit down, she was dumping her bag on the table.
‘Then she goes off to England.’ Pulling out the leaflet. ‘Then this.’
The University of the Earth
As we prepare to enter the Third Millennium, many of us feel the need for a deeper understanding of the land around us: how our distant ancestors related to their environment, and what that tells us about how we should respond to it.The countryside of Britain remains a great enigma. We are surrounded by the mysterious monuments of antiquity: megalithic remains, prehistoric burial mounds and chambers … the holy places of the past.In recent years, the study of such remains has appeared to become the preserve of a ‘New Age’ fringe, whose theories about ley lines and ‘earth-energies’ have been scorned by the archaeological establishment.The University of the Earth is the first serious attempt to bridge this gulf, by undertaking a formal but open-minded investigation of the mysteries in our landscape. The project is being steered by the eminent archaeologist and anthropologist Prof. Roger Falconer, presenter of the Channel Four programme Diggers.To help fund the University of the Earth project, and allow for the involvement of interested amateurs, a select series of summer schools has been scheduled, to be based at Prof. Falconer’s farm on the Welsh border, and involving lectures, practical work and expeditions to a number of key sites, including Stonehenge, Avebury, Silbury Hill and the Rollright Stones.Prof. Falconer says, ‘My twenty-five years of study have shown me that there are many lessons to be learned from our most remote ancestors. While I have little truck with nonsense about the Earth once being ruled by aliens or radiant beings from the lost continent of Atlantis, I do believe that the people of the Bronze Age in particular possessed certain skills, allied to a heightened perception of the natural world, of which most of us are no longer aware.‘It is one of the aims of the University of the Earth to study methods of working with the Earth and discover how effective they are in a scientific framework.‘Dowsing, for instance, not only for water but for archaeological remains, has been shown to be surprisingly successful, and we shall be putting its practitioners to the test under survey conditions, as well as giving our guests an opportunity to see if they themselves possess the ability.‘While I am personally convinced that some dowsers have an extraordinary ability, other schemes and theories I find considerably less convincing. However, the spirit of the University of the Earth is one of exploration and my younger colleagues, Magda Ring and Adrian Fraser-Hale, will be conducting experiments on what we might call the outer fringes … notably, the Dream Survey, in which volunteers will sleep at ancient sites and record their dreams in an attempt to discover whether human consciousness is influenced by the alleged electromagnetic properties of stone monuments.‘Although its aims are serious, those of us involved in the University of the Earth have had a great deal of fun. The inevitable arguments between the archaeological purists and the ‘earth-mysteries’ enthusiasts have been essentially good- natured and suggest that we share a common goal: to uncover the deepest secrets of the distant past and use them to develop a more harmonious relationship between the human race and its native planet.’Early application for the University of the Earth summer schools is advisable, as places on the courses are strictly limited. Cost per head for one week is a basic …
Lyndon McAffrey, sitting stately as a Supreme Court judge, put down the leaflet and ordered up some doughnuts.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘You gotta admire the guy’s technique. Like, how we gonna persuade gullible rich folk to hand over megabucks for a week spent shovelling shit out of a trench? Hey, let’s tell ‘em they’re helping a famous TV star unlock the secrets of the universe.’
Grayle thought this was a tad unfair. She’d called her father at Harvard, and he’d called up a friend at Oxford University about Professor Falconer and ascertained that, outside of television, the man was a respected academic with his name on about seventeen books.
‘Just he has the popular touch. Nice-looking, charming, dates actresses … like that.’
‘Uh-oh,’ said Lyndon.
‘This makes him a shyster, necessarily?’
‘Well, no. It just don’t win him instant sympathy from fat old guys such as myself. So your sister is — what?’
‘Not one of your gullible rich folk. Ersula was on the staff for the summer. One of the expert research team. They had several archaeology graduates helping organize the field trips and stuff like that. Of course, they weren’t paying her anything either, apart from expenses and accommodation, but she-’
‘-was allowed to be part of the Great Experiment, too,’ Lyndon said with a wry, fatcat smile. ‘Educated people can be soooooo naive.’
‘Nnn-nn.’ Grayle shook her head. ‘This woman is a believer in neither God nor spaceships. A sober, bookish person. Her father’s daughter, you know?’
Five weeks ago, their mother, folding Ersula’s last letter from England, had said lightly, ‘Well … she’s getting into some stimulating areas. She’s having fun. In her own way. I guess.’
It was true that Ersula’s official letter to Mom had been mostly about what fun she was having and how hospitable and kind the Brits were, not stiff and stuffy like you were led to expect. Her letter to their father, although more academically oriented, would likewise include nothing pertaining to nights spent under prehistoric stone monuments.
That Ersula’s letter to Grayle was more revealing came as no big surprise. Since Mom went off with the younger lover and Dad locked himself in his Harvard tower, they’d become warily closer for the first time in years. The letter began, You may be interested in some of this, but for Christ’s sake, DSF!
DSF: Don’t Show the Folks.
Ersula’s last letter. Before the silence.
‘Run this past me one more time,’ Lyndon said. ‘Your younger but normally more balanced sister has been sleeping in a Stone Age burial chamber. She lose her credit cards, or what?’
‘If you aren’t going to take this seriously-’
‘Jesus,’ said Lyndon, whose job at the New York Courier was all about knowing which stories to take seriously. The waitress arrived with the doughnuts and they helped themselves. The waitress stepped back, studying Grayle. She was a new waitress.
‘No, see, the problem with Ersula …’ Grayle inspected her doughnut then shrugged and took a bite. ‘Balanced? Yeah, OK, in some ways. But also passionate. More than that, obsessive. She gets into something, it’s
