Ancient Echoes by Robert Holdstock Read Free Book Online Page A

watched a container truck slide past in a cloud of grey smoke. ‘I was in the forest.’
    ‘I know. I caught a hint of the smell as you ran through the shop.’ He was crouching, now, quizzical. ‘How close are they?’
    Jack listened. The traffic growled along the Broadway, but he could hear them. He could hear Greyface shouting.
They were in terrible danger again, alive by the skins of their teeth, by the strength in their legs.
    ‘Close,’ Jack whispered. ‘Coming closer.’

7
    Intrigued and fascinated by the city dowser though he was, the very proximity of the bull-runners, their constant shouting, the constant danger, the overspill of adrenalin from their hunted bodies into his own, pre-occupied Jack totally for a while.
    They were close and coming closer, running through his dreams with moments of intense lucidity, before fading again into the distance. The odd reflectivity of his skin did not occur during these sleeping episodes, nor could Angela, occasionally sleeping over at the house and brought to Jack’s room when the shouting started, hear or scent the otherworld as she had done that day in class.
    During his waking hours the sound of the bull-runners was a constant breathless dash for safety, their running interspersed with fighting for survival, with swimming, with skirting the forests or the mountains where white towers shone, threatening them.
    With his parents, he had two meetings with Ruth at the hospital where she worked. They reviewed the video footage and saw the shimmering of light, like a film of oil around his face as he was ‘dreaming’; analysis of the film showed only normal wavelengths; there was nothing discreet or unusual in the glow.
    The chemical pads from his skin showed traces of complex terpenes and plant esters, chemicals that were alien to the human excretory system, but familiar to marshland. Somehow, then, Jack’s body had produced organic matter reflecting the landscape that he was hallucinating. Ruth was exercised in the extreme by this, almost wild in her excitement, and Jack agreed to have permanent swabs attached to his underarms, to beremoved every day and posted to the hospital. He kept this up for a week, then because of the discomfort and inconvenience resorted to keeping a chemical record one day in seven.
    Even so, he showed traces, on one occasion, of a polypeptide similar to that in the scent glands of a wolf … and he had glimpsed Greyface in a savage tussle with a wounded, lone wolf, while Greenface stabbed down on the creature, eventually driving it away, a scene of attack that had lasted only seconds, a brief disorientation during a class on Economics.
    And the traces of woodland and grassland were there in one swab of every three.
    Garth visited him twice during the summer, but could not persuade the boy to come to the dig and help, although Angela gave a willing hand and regularly reported to Jack on the progress of the excavation.
    By the early winter, the distracting sense of proximity of the bull-runners had faded considerably and Jack felt his life become his own again. Now he risked a second visit to the Hercules shrine, where the revealed masks of Greyface and Greenface were carefully protected behind a frame of toughened glass. As he looked at them this time he felt only plaster and stone, no life at all, no resonance.
    ‘They’re dead,’ he said, and when the glass was opened and he touched the blind eyes he just shrugged. ‘I was frightened before. But there’s nothing to be frightened of now.’
    Garth seemed to have been expecting this. ‘Then come with me,’ he said. ‘Come and see the new find.’
    In late October, telephone engineers laying cable in the area behind Spittlefield, close to Castle Hill, had breached the roof of a deep chamber, ten feet square, eight feet in height, and with a small access portal from the west that had been sealed in antiquity. The room was filled with the bones of animals, mostly skulls. The way to the