“Who are you?” I said to the young man.
He didn’t answer, but very sadly got to his feet, left forearm cradled close. The pain would be transforming the limb into something big and hot and beyond placation. With careful effort he bent, retrieved the Magnum, put it back into his coat pocket. Then without a word or further look at me he turned and began trudging away.
I didn’t doubt my reading, my risk assessment, my temporary safety, but those first steps out from the shelter of the doorway called for force of will. I took three and stopped. Pictured the sniper watching through the cross-hairs and, since every mutual understanding gives
The warmth of being watched never left me, but I walked to Gloucester Road without incident and boarded the last Circle Line Tube to Farringdon.
Harley had called and left a message while I was underground. He’d made it to the Foundation safely.
IT’S HARD NOT to think of 1965, the year I saved Harley’s life, as one of rising sexual anarchy. Anti–Vietnam War demonstrations brought young men and women together and revealed the erotic potential of political activism. Mailer’s taboo-breaking
It’s hard not to think this way, but to do so is to succumb to the compressions of popular history. The facts are true, the interpretation false. The 1965 contemporary humans imagine didn’t really come about till 1975, and even by that jaded year what happened to Harley that night would still have happened. It was still happening ten years later, twenty, thirty. It’s still happening now.
Wayland’s Smithy is a five-thousand-year-old megalithic tomb in the Vale of Uffington, a mile east of the village of Ashbury, just southwest of White Horse Hill in the Berkshire Downs. It sits hidden by a little gathering of trees fifty yards off the Ridgeway, a chalk track following the line of the Downs
They’d taken Harley there to torture him.
I shouldn’t have been there. I should have been behind my own bars in the cellar of a purpose-acquired farmhouse a mile away. (Ah, the machinations of those premicrotechnology days! My cell contained a cast-iron safe with the key to the door taped inside it. The safe was welded shut, but with a hole in it just big enough to admit a human hand. A
With a physical gurn and a mental
The initial impulse, to
I left his remains among the blood-drenched cabbages. Slipped from the village back into the woods. Disgust came in the hour after feeding but the years had reduced it to a heavy suave embrace. Disgust doesn’t kill anyone. Loneliness, on the other hand …
At Wayland’s Smithy an hour before dawn I stopped to observe. There wasn’t, really, time to stop and observe. The farmhouse (for current purposes home) was a mile away through sparse cover. This was high ground at the mercy year-round to Valhallan winds. Trees were few. Hedgerows were thin. Darkness, or at the very least twilight, would be required to get home unseen. Nonetheless. Here were the prehistoric stones roused to sentience. Here was the air dense with human stinks, jabbering with primal energies. A Cortina was parked nearby. My flesh steamed. The last of my victim’s life found settlement in me.
By the entrance to the tomb—a soft oblong of deeper darkness between upright sarsens—two men were intent on something I couldn’t see. A third kept lookout where the trees opened onto the track.
“Terry,
The balance of power was evident. “Terry,” in his thirties and older by perhaps ten years than the other two, was in charge. He was the bearer of the torch. The beam swung, picked out the sentry—a small-eyed face of boyish sweetness, fair hair, one hand raised against the glare—then returned with disturbing precision to its original object.
“Arse-bandit,” Terry’s nearer accomplice said, quietly. “He’s probably enjoying this.”
“Get him out again,” Terry said. “Come on, Fido, out you come.”
“Oi, bum-boy, chop-chop.”
“He’s … Gimmie a hand, Dez.”
Between them Terry and Dez dragged their victim into the open. A lean young man with curled-under long hair, a high forehead, slender wrists and ankles. They’d tied his hands and gagged him. His shirt was still nominally on his back but apart from this and one dark sock he was naked. He lay on his side, not unconscious, but beaten to the point where merely drawing his knees up—the reflex to protect the soft organs—was almost beyond him.
“Come on,” the lookout hissed. “It’s going to be fucking daylight soon.”
“One minute he’s moaning about pitch-black,” Terry said, “the next he’s on about daylight.”
“Shut up, Georgie, for fuck’s sake,” Dez said. He took a swig from a bottle of Haig, passed it to Terry. Terry