The Stone Book Quartet. Alan Garner

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      Mary held her candle low. At the bottom of the wall she saw the beginning of a band of clay, the Tough Tom red marl that never let water through. She went forward slowly into the wet. The floor was stiff and tacky under her boots, and behind her the silk floated in curves. But the crack went no deeper. The ground was level, and her light showed a hump of Tough Tom above the water, glistening.

      Mary stopped again. There was nothing else, over, behind, below; only the Tough Tom humping out of the water, and the white dimension stone. And the crack finished at the end of her candlelight.

      ‘Father!’

      There was no reply. She hadn’t counted how much silk had unwound.

      ‘Father!’

      There was plenty of candle left, but it showed her nothing to explain why she was there.

      ‘Father!’

      Not even an echo. There wasn’t the room for one. But she turned. There hadn’t been an echo, but her voice had sounded louder beyond the Tough Tom.

      Mary scrambled up the hump, slithering in the wet. Then she looked around her, and saw.

      The end of the crack was as broad as two stalls and as high as a barn. The red Tough Tom was a curved island above its own water. The walls were white and pale yellow. There was no sound. The water did not drip. It sank through the stone unheard, and seeped along the marl.

      Mary saw Father’s mason mark drawn on the wall. It was faint and black, as if drawn with soot. Next to it was an animal, falling. It had nearly worn itself away, but it looked like a bull, a great shaggy bull. It was bigger than it seemed at first, and Father’s mark was on it, making the mark a spear or an arrow.

      The bull was all colours, but some of the stone had shed itself in the damp air. The more Mary looked, the bigger the bull grew. It had turned around every wall, as if it was moving and dying.

      Mary had come through the hill to see Father’s mark on a daubed bull. And near the bull and the mark there was a hand, the outline of a hand. Someone had splayed a hand on the wall and painted round it with the Tough Tom. Fingers and thumb.

      Mary put the candle close. A white dimension hand. She lifted her own and laid it over the hand on the wall, not touching. Both hands were the same size. She reached nearer. They were the same size. She touched. The rock was cold, but for a moment it had almost felt warm. The hands fitted. Fingers and thumb and palm and a bull and Father’s mark in the darkness under the ground.

      Mary stood back, in the middle of the Tough Tom, and listened to the silence. It was the most secret place she had ever seen. A bull drawn for secrets. A mark and a hand alone with the bull in the dark that nobody knew.

      She looked down. And when she looked down she shouted. She wasn’t alone. The Tough Tom was crowded. All about her in that small place under the hill that led nowhere were footprints.

      They were the footprints of people, bare and shod. There were boots and shoes and clogs, heels, toes, shallow ones and deep ones, clear and sharp as if made altogether, trampling each other, hundreds pressed in the clay where only a dozen could stand. Mary was in a crowd that could never have been, thronging, as real as she was. Her feet made prints no fresher than theirs.

      And the bull was still dying under the mark, and the one hand still held.

      There was nowhere to run, no one to hear. Mary stood on the Tough Tom and waited. She daren’t jerk the thread to feel Father’s presence; he was so far away that the thread would have broken.

      Then it was over. She knew the great bull on the rock enclosing her, and she knew the mark and the hand. The invisible crowd was not there, and the footprints in the Tough Tom churned motionless.

      She had seen. Now there was the time to go. Mary lifted the thread and made skeins of it as she went past the white dimension, foxbench and malachite to the candle under the fall.

      Father had moved to make room for her.

      ‘Well?’

      ‘I’ve seen,’ said Mary. ‘All of it.’

      ‘You’ve touched the hand?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘I thought you would.’

      They went back to the shaft, and up, and out. The sky seemed a different place. All things led to the bull and the mark and the hand in the cave. Trees were trying to find it with their roots. The rain in the clouds must fall to the ground and into the rock to the Tough Tom.

      ‘That’s put a quietness on you,’ said Father.

      ‘Ay.’

      They came over Glaze Hill.

      ‘Why did you set your mark on?’ said Mary.

      ‘I didn’t. It was there when I went.’

      ‘When did you go?’

      ‘When I was about your size. My father took me same as today. We have to go before we’re too big to get past the fall, though I reckon, years back, the road was open; if you knew it was there.’

      ‘When did you go last?’ said Mary.

      ‘We go just once,’ said Father. ‘So that we’ll know.’

      ‘Who else?’

      ‘Only us. Neither Leahs nor Allmans. Us.’

      ‘But there were ever so many feet,’ said Mary. ‘The place was teeming.’

      ‘We’ve been going a while,’ said Father.

      ‘And that bull,’ said Mary.

      ‘That’s a poser. There’s been none like it in my time; and my father, he hadn’t seen any.’

      ‘What is it all?’ said Mary.

      ‘The hill. We pass it on: and once you’ve seen it, you’re changed for the rest of your days.’

      ‘Who else of us?’ said Mary.

      ‘Nobody,’ said Father, ‘except me: and now you: it’s always been for the eldest: and from what I heard my father say, it was only ever for lads. But if they keep on stoping after that malachite the way they’re going at the Engine Vein, it’ll be shovelled up in a year or two without anybody noticing even. At one time of day, before the Engine Vein and that chap who could read books, we must have been able to come at it from the top. But that’s all gone. And if the old bull goes, you’ll have to tell your lad, even if you can’t show him.’

      ‘I shall,’ said Mary.

      ‘I recollect it puts a quietness on you, does that bull. And the hand. And the mark.’

      Mary went to wash the Tough Tom from her boots in the spring when they reached home. The spring came out of the hill and soaked into Lifeless Moss, and Lifeless Moss spilled by brooks to the sea.

      Father СКАЧАТЬ