‘Where do we park?’ enquired Laura, slowing as they reached the little wood.
‘Among the trees. Can’t very well drive into the farmyard,’ O’Hara responded. ‘Edge gradually over to your right. Your headlights will show you the opening.’
Doubtfully Laura obeyed, fearful of crashing into tree-trunks, but O’Hara’s topographical sense proved to be flawless, for a kind of mossy passage opened among the trees and she was able to take the car bumpily but with safety off the road.
She put off all the lights except the rear light, felt in the pocket of her tweed coat to make certain that she had her torch, and the three walked out of the wood. Laura, with a curious but half-scared glance towards the dark mass of the farmhouse, followed the others up the muddy, cobbled road which ran through the cartshed, and all three were soon on the miry ascent which led towards the circle of standing stones.
‘Now for it,’ muttered Laura, wondering what her much-admired
‘You can be sure they dance,’ said Gascoigne.
The going was heavy with mud, and treacherous with large, uneven stones. Twice Laura slipped and three times she tripped up, but each time her escort, closing in on either side, saved her and kept her on her feet. Considering that Laura was both tall and well-made and weighed more than eleven stone, their sense of chivalry, she felt, was over-developed.
‘Don’t bother, really,’ she said, as they saved her for the fifth time from measuring her length on the muddy field they were mounting.
‘No, don’t,’ advised a singularly rich voice from a bush on the left of the speaker.
‘Good Lord!’ esclaimed Laura. ‘Ghost of Mrs. Croc.!’
‘Not yet,’ said the reptilian, joining them like the shadow of Lady into Fox. ‘And I wouldn’t make so much noise if I were you. The vultures are gathering above on the top of the rise. I’ve just been up there to see.’
‘The Druids?’ muttered Laura. ‘Sakes alive!’
‘Their congregation, maybe, child. Now, watch, but do not make your presence known. We are in sight of mysteries, and our appearance may not be welcomed.’
‘But suppose they offer a human sacrifice or something?’ demanded Laura. ‘Or suppose one of the corpses is on view? Don’t we do anything then?’
‘My advice… indeed, my urgent request… is that you take no part in the proceedings whatsoever. We are uninvited guests, remember.’
‘Oh, all right, if you say so.’
‘I do say so. And now I am going to leave you for a while. I shall look forward to your report later,’ said Mrs. Bradley, living up to her reptilian appearance by sliding rapidly away among the bushes.
‘Well, I’m dashed!’ said Laura, with the frank surprise which her employer’s doings had still the power to arouse in her. ‘What’s the old crocodile up to now, do you suppose?’
‘We mustn’t queer her pitch, anyway,’ said O’Hara, who had conceived a warm admiration for the elderly lady. ‘So no squeals, my dear Laura, when the sacrificial knife descends!’
‘Ass!’ said Laura amiably. ‘Dry up, now, and let’s get along.’ She looked at the luminous hands of her watch. ‘Although I don’t suppose,’ she added in parenthesis, ‘that they’ll start before midnight, and it’s only a quarter past ten.
How much further, do you think, to the Stones? I’m no judge of distance in the dark.’
‘Half an hour, just about, at the rate we shall go,’ said Gascoigne. ‘Look out! I hear somebody coming!’
The three crawled into the hedge, and a man on horseback, with two others holding on to his stirrups, went slowly but noisily past them. Laura screwed up her eyes, but there was not the remotest chance of recognizing any passers-by, for, in spite of a clear sky, the night was dark, and dawn some hours away.
‘Come on!’ said Laura when the horseman was a blur against the top of the hill. Her cavaliers, nothing loth, went forward with her, and, gaining the summit, all crouched beside the broad posts of a farm gate and saw, ahead of them, a deep gold glow in the sky.
‘Not exactly carrying on their doings in secret,’ muttered Gascoigne, bearing sideways away from the dimmed headlights of a car which was grinding its way on its lowest gear from the farmyard and up the airy road.
It passed between the gateposts beside which the watchers lay crouched, and swayed unevenly southwards across the grass. The three uninvited guests, now keeping close beside a tall, sparse hawthorn hedge, and one of them, at least, thinking uneasily of cow-pats, followed in the wake of the car, and were rewarded at last by the sight of a ring of figures bearing golden torches from which occasional showers of sparks descended and splashed like rain. These torches lighted the ring of standing stones, for a neophyte bearing a torch stood beside each of the nine monoliths. A dark and considerable concourse of people formed a thick belt of darkness outside the circle of the Druids, and a murmur, rising and falling, of polite conversation could be heard.
‘Good Lord! It’s a set of mummers, or folk-lore what-nots, or something!’ said Laura in deep disgust. ‘There’s nothing here for us, and nothing to keep quiet about, either. Oh, well, let’s join the throng!’
‘Not so fast,’ said Gascoigne. ‘Keep out of it as long as we can. This is a wheel, by its shape and semblance. Look at those people going forward to form the spokes! There are sometimes wheels within wheels, and we’d better, perhaps, not forget it!’
So the three went to ground and then gradually crept nearer to the Druids. The ceremony proper, they gathered, had not begun, for a man beside the tallest of the stones was in earnest consultation with three others, and there was still a murmur of conversation among the crowd, although the ranks of those forming the spokes (or, as Laura thought, the rays of the sun), were now completed and still.
‘I should think they’d begin community singing soon,’ muttered O’Hara into Laura’s left ear. She hushed him. They were all three lying now in the shallow ditch which bordered the stone circle, and, as the crowd was thin on this side, they were able to see what went on, although their view was impeded comparatively often by the movements of the (presumably) invited guests nearer the stones.
Suddenly there sounded the blast of a horn. It came from far away, in the direction of the round barrows which O’Hara and Gascoigne had noticed on their first visit to the neighbourhood by daylight.
‘The horns of Elfland,’ said Laura, slightly rearing herself. With a brotherly pressure on her skull, Gascoigne forced her head down again. The note of the horn was repeated from the opposite side of the hill. There was silence from the crowd. The torches burnt smokily, and shrouded some of their holders from view. The air became acrid, and the silence of the onlookers was broken by spasmodic coughing. The horns called and answered again, and then, from various points on the hillside, coloured bands of light began to play across the circle of the stones. The coloured bands wavered and shifted at first, then they were laid upon the ground to form segments of a circle. A horrible greyish colour lay to the west, and to the south-south-west a brilliant green changed to blue-green, and met a deadly white light at full south. To the east the ground was purple, and from north-east towards north- north-east it shifted in bands of light with an effect of dark blots on a white ground very dazzling to the eyes of the watchers. To the extreme north, and round to the north-west, there was a deep and awe-inspiring darkness made intense by the brightness of the lights. The effect was crude but somewhat frightening. The faces of the people looked ghastly.
‘Talk of a Witches’ Sabbath!’ muttered Laura.
‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ said O’Hara suddenly, ‘if they’re trying to raise the devil! I have read of these colours in that orientation before. It is the Celtic circle of good and bad luck they have there. I wonder, now, what they are after?’
‘Do you think they’ll go on all night?’ demanded Laura, aware that she was excited, and therefore trying to give her voice flatness and a casual tone. ‘If so, I don’t see much sense in staying. Nothing much will happen in front of all these people. We’re wasting time! It’s like the Helston Flurry on a Bank Holiday!’
As she said this, the lights went out, and a man holding a torch stepped into the centre of the circle of standing stones whilst the people forming the spokes or rays submerged themselves in the crowd. Another man joined the first. They held their torches high, and a third man stood between them with a sheet of paper in his hand from which he commenced to read.
Laura and the two young men crept closer. Nobody seemed to notice them. The reader coughed once or twice when the reek of the torches caught his throat, but he went on gallantly with the peroration, which sounded remarkably like one of the Hebrew biblical genealogies.
When he had done, the two torch-bearers flung their torches on the ground. All the other torchbearers
