Falconer admits this now.
As a follower of the Green Man.
Falconer is a weak man with no original thoughts. She is his superior, but he has betrayed her, and she turns at last to the Green Man. When he enters her room at dusk, she is crying. And bitter.
She asks the Green Man to lie with her.
On the tape an owl hooted.
‘Where’s he recorded this one, do you think?’ Bobby Maiden hit the stop button.
‘Same place as all the later ones. When I tire of his mock-heroic ramblings, I study the background. You notice that, although it’s obviously exterior as shown by noises like that owl, there’s also a hollow sound. A vault-like sound. We should have realized. It’s High Knoll itself.’
‘He wouldn’t fit inside.’
‘His tape recorder would. And his head and chest. I think he’s lying in the entrance. So proud of this, he is, that he’s giving his voice some resonance, making sure the Earth hears, telling it in Her temple. And he’s letting the chamber absorb it too. Stone records, see.’
‘Thinking, maybe, that one day some EVP enthusiast will capture remnants of the Green Man himself. That it?’
‘Imprinting his life’s work upon the great earth-memory. Been missing the obvious, we have, the final link. We hear him talking about a place, we assume that’s where he is. But he isn’t. The Knoll has become his psychic confessional. He’s been bringing as much as he can back to the Knoll. Storing it all there, abomination upon abomination.’
‘Like a database?’
‘If you like. And also restoring a tradition, which he sees as having been damaged by the holy vision of Annie Davies. It’s become a vaguely acknowledged “healing place”. Which he would see as feeble and womanly. It needs to be reinstated as Black Knoll. Now let’s hypothesize, Bobby, that he was dictating to the stones a chapter of his memoirs … say this very chapter … on the night of your death. He sleeps at the Knoll — on the Knoll, laying himself out like those corpses of criminals — night after night. He dreams of the time when it was a sacrificial stone, a hunter’s stone. His dreams are running with blood and steaming with putrescence. And by now, see, he’s developed a certain amount of control. He’s conditioning his dreams. And, at the same time, consciously feeding into the Knoll his accounts of such blood and darkness as it has not known in many centuries. This … all this … the foul contents of the tapes … is the black light perceived by Mrs Willis. This happens, Bobby, don’t look unconvinced, these places have been, for thousands of years, the receptors of the Earth.’
She disgusts him. Once, he was attracted to her … to the power of her spirit, the intensity of her longing to know. But now, as she lolls about on the edge of her bed, with her skirt plucked up to her thighs, he sees that underneath she’s little more than the rest of modern womanhood, flawed and weak and unstable, a prey to lower desires.
She has been drinking. There is a brandy bottle on the dresser, three quarters of its contents consumed. She can hardly stay upright. She’s repulsive, a disgusting mess.
‘You want me,’ she says, ‘I know you want me. You’ve wanted me from the start. So go ahead. Have me. ‘
And yes, he thinks, yes, I will have you. In spite of it all, I’ll help you. I’ll free that deep and questing soul from the squalid desires of the shell. I’ll free it to rise up and pursue its finer goals.
‘I’ll make some tea,’ he tells her.
She giggles. ‘How profoundly, goddamn English of you. ‘
‘I’m proud to be English. ‘
‘Well, listen to you. ‘
‘Yes. You should. ‘
The Green Man puts the kettle on the electric ring. She giggles and lies back on the bed, her eyes closed and her skirt ridden up. The Green Man turns away in revulsion. From a pocket he takes a screw of paper containing the mixture he has prepared including the sedative herbs from the healthfood shop in Hereford and the psilocybin mushrooms he has picked at the foot of Black Knoll.
When the herbal tea is made, he sits on the bed and lifts her up to drink it, tolerating her sweating face against his shoulder. She grimaces. He tells her it will help her. Soon she is rambling. She insists that the Knoll is a place of utter, profound evil.
Talking nonsense.
‘Magic mushrooms.’
‘Britain’s best natural hallucinogen. Used by generations of witches. Magic mushroom tea, with God knows what else in it. After all that drink.’
‘A more merciful death than any of the others got.’
‘It’s not over yet, Bobby, I’m very much afraid.’
‘Grayle! ’
‘Oh, hi.’
‘Gosh, I’m delighted you came!’ Matthew Lyall, to her surprise, wore a morning suit, with tails. Traditional English wedding outfit. OK, maybe the white T-shirt underneath was a mite irregular …
‘Compromise.’ He fingered the white rose in his lapel. ‘Everything’s a compromise today. My parents are both here, with their respective spouses. And Janny’s mother. They all wanted a traditional old church wedding, and we said, well, you won’t find an older church than this one! And Charlie’s the real thing, so where’s the problem?’
The relatives, stiffly obvious, stood outside the circle, near the hut where you left your courtesy-donations to animal charities. In memory of the poor, sacrificed spaniel maybe.
Matthew said, ‘Er, have you …?’
‘No.’
‘Oh gosh, I’m so sorry. But there are loads of people here who might’ve run into her.’
‘I already asked around,’ Grayle told him. ‘A little.’
‘No luck?’
‘Uh huh.’
‘Suppose I get Charlie to make a special appeal after the service. How about that?’
‘That would be kind. You haven’t seen Janny today?’
‘No, that’s another compromise. We wanted to spend the night here in the circle … in a chaste sort of way. In spiritual preparation. And to see what our dreams might tell us about our future together. But Janny’s mother …’
‘May be better not to know,’ Grayle said. ‘Maybe marriage should be an adventure.’
‘That’s one way of looking at it. Could be quite an adventure today, actually. Just look at that sky.’
‘It’ll hold off, Matthew. After all the favours you did for Mother Earth, it’s the least She can do.’
It is nearly two a.m. when he carries the woman to the organic tomb. She falls to sleep in his arms and still slumbers as he brings her, perspiring freely and smelling disgustingly of drink, to the place.
A cloudy night, but sufficient moon. It glitters in the fluted tin roof of the helicopter shed, which screens the place from the house.
His night-vision is pretty remarkable by now and he can see the egg-shaped hole from twenty yards away, on the edge of the freshly concreted base. Soon after dark, he lined the hole — three and half feet deep and oriented east to west — with alternate layers of moss and gravel, and then added a bed of soft grass-cuttings, warmly mulching. Beside the hole lies the mound of excavated soil and a heap of local gravel. Between them, a spade.
The Green Man places the woman in the hole, on her side. She awakes and giggles and reaches out for him and he forces himself to caress her and she moans and drifts back into sleep. She needs to be awake,
