The Paradise War by Stephen R. Lawhead Read Free Book Online Page B

porridge! We’ve been conned. Let’s give it up and go home.”
    He turned his head and regarded me placidly. “ You’re the one who asked about the cairn,” he said. “Never would have occurred to me.”
    Simon would drag that in. “Okay, the excitement of the moment got to me. So what?”
    “So it was your idea. We’re going to see the cairn.” He downshifted and we barrelled along.
    “We don’t have to do this on my account,” I pleaded. “I’ve changed my mind. Look, it’s barely nine o’clock. If we leave right now we can be back in Oxford by tonight.”
    “It’s less than a mile up the road,” Simon pointed out. “We’ll swing by, take a look, and then we’re off. How’s that?”
    “Promise?”
    “Yes,” he said.
    “Liar! You don’t have any intention of going home yet.”
    He laughed. “What do you want, Lewis? Blood?”
    “I want to go home!”
    Simon took his right hand from the steering wheel and pointed at the atlas. “See if you can find this cairn thingy on the map.”
    I retrieved the atlas and scanned the page quickly. “I don’t see it.”
    Me and my big mouth. The cairn thingy in question had come up because, as we were sitting in Farmer Grant’s kitchen, my head filled with thoughts of iron-age spears and extinct oxen and such, I suddenly blurted out, “Is there a cairn nearby?”
    “Och aye,” Farmer Bob had said. “Near enough. Used to be part o’ this steading, but ma grandmother sold off the bit wi’ the cairn. The Old’un was of a superstitious mind.”
    Then he had gone on to tell us how to find the cairn because Simon had immediately insisted that we should go and check it out since we were in the area. Farmer Bob seemed to think this a proper line of investigation and was only too happy to tag along. Simon cautioned him against that, suggesting that more university chaps might show up any moment, wanting to have a word with him. We had then made our farewells, promising to keep in touch and pop in again soon for a visit.
    And now we were on our way to see this heap of rocks or whatever passed for a cairn in this dank hinterland, following one of those narrow, twisting, brush-lined farm roads built for head-on collisions. We met no one on the road, however, and in due course came to the gate Grant had told us to look for. Simon stopped the car and we got out. “It’s across this field, in the glen.” He pointed down the hillside to a line of treetops just visible above the broad descending curve of the field.
    We stood for a moment gazing across the field. I heard the bark of a dog and swiveled toward the sound. Behind us, the way we had come, I saw a man approaching with three or four good-sized dogs on leads. They were still too far away to see properly, but it seemed to me that the dogs were white. “Somebody’s coming.”
    “It’s just one of Robert’s neighbors,” Simon said.
    “Maybe we’d better go back.”
    “He won’t bother us. Come on.”
    Without further ado, we climbed over the gate and jogged across the field. It felt good to work my legs and feel the crisp air in my lungs. At the lower end of the field we came to a stone wall, scrambled over it, and slid down a dirt bank into the glen.
    It was little more than a crease between two hills, deep and narrow. A lively brook ran among the roots of the bare, twisted trees that lined the sides of the glen. Mist rose from the brook to seep among the trees. Away from the sun and light, the dim glen remained chill and damp.
    In the center of this hidden pocket of land stood an earthen mound: squat, roundish, perhaps nine feet tall, with a circumference of thirty feet. But for a curious beehive-shaped protuberance on the west side, it would have been almost perfectly conical.
    “How did you know there would be a cairn?” Simon asked. His voice sounded dead in the still air of the hollow.
    “I guessed. With a name like Carnwood Farm, I figured there must be a cairn in a wood around here