The Shaftesbury Chronicles is an alternative history of Shaftesbury from 1989 to 2000, in which the town succeeds Glastonbury as a New Age centre. This is made possible by a revival of the ancient Byzant water ceremony, and the removal of the Town Hall. Led by a philanthropic foundation, the town develops as both ecologically sound, and with an economy and society making use of neglected ideas from before the rationalist Enlightenment takeover in the eighteenth century, such as alchemy, the Hermetic tradition, and the work of the Elizabethan magus, John Dee.

Volume One, The Flow Restored, recounts how two local boys release a Merlin-like figure from a mental and spiritual paralysis, and with him initiate and activate the process that will enable Shaftesbury to develop as a centre for the New Age. The full text is in the dropdown menu, MY BOOKS.

Ch. 1 : Encountering the Old Man

p1. It had changed, of course it had. So much had happened since. But I remembered it as it was then, had dreamed about it so often, had wanted to tell Dominique, had intended to bring her here on our first walk.
And yet here I was, on my own, peering through the hedge like one locked out, and Dominique was at the Centre, being appraised by my mother, flirted with by my father, while the twins explained in grave alternations the nature of their work (their “Work”) and its importance.
The statues were gone. The rampant, tangled undergrowth through which we had, with such labour, cut the paths, was now trimmed and ordered. The paths themselves were laid with bark chippings, edged with wood. The Savonius rotor and Archimedes screw awaited wind and rain to resume their water circulation. There was a bench, now, over the place where we’d buried the old man. On it sat a young woman, stylishly dressed, reading intently, one of the Master’s texts no doubt, her foot tap tapping on the spot where we had laid the old man’s head. I kept watching.

It had always been a place to be frightened of.
When we were little the older kids would terrify us with tales of the ogre man who’d boil you in a pot until your eyeballs popped out and your brains dribbled from your ears like muesli.
When we were older, we’d tell the little ones the same stories, delighted when their lips trembled and they began to sob, then scream as we dragged them towards the rusty gates as if to throw them in.
We’d watch, hands over mouths, hearts dropping into our stomachs as the treacherous wind snatched our ball and carried it floating over and we’d stare through the bars at it, shiny, perfect, inaccessible. And the next day (here early), sometimes it would be back, magically returned to our side; and sometimes not, just gone, leaving a dent in the grass.

Later, when I started my solitary walks, found that walking, just walking, was the only way I could find a space around me that felt okay, and sometimes just right – so often people, family, even friends, either came too close so I felt invaded, suffocated, or kept back and left around me a gap in which I floundered and felt desperately lonely; whereas while I was walking, the air made a transparent form around me exactly my shape – this was one of the places I’d visit.
I had a number of such places, each in some way special – a stone horse-trough half way up the steep hill where I imagined the toiling beasts taking relief; a bedroom window with a gap between the curtains; the dark silent place beneath a churchyard yew tree; a viewpoint overlooking the Vale from where I could see a dreamed-of road going somewhere.
Sometimes I would plan my walk from place to place to create a crescendo, or a diminuendo, or some pattern that pleased my mood. Other times I walked quickly between them, randomly, in mindless even desperate jazz improvisations. (In my – mercifully brief – Jesus phase I called them my Stations of the Cross, and ended up outside the Town Hall where I looked up at myself nailed on the high cross, everyone screaming hatred, my parents hiding, me being beatific. Once I jabbed my palm with a compass, imagining the nail being hammered in. It hurt like hell and went septic).

I liked it, the garden, being overgrown, the bright green stinging nettles everywhere, the brambles tangling everything up, the shrubs grown wild, shooting in all directions now they weren’t pruned, unrestrained, the fruit trees all blossom and no fruit. I liked the twisted gates and the rusty chain, the pillars moss-covered, askew, ready to topple. And the eagles, on top: when the pillars fell, would they fly? No, they’d crash and smash and I’d have a souvenir, a piece of wing maybe.
I liked the grass-grown drive, the stillness and decay. I imagined a little world, self-contained with the big world locked out, in which there was no future – no expectations, no disappointments, no fears. Sometimes I’d glimpse the old man, shuffling around, muttering, envy him his circumscribed world. Twice he looked up suddenly, stared straight at me as if he could see me, (I drew back instinctively), although I knew he couldn’t, then he scuttled away.

That day, the day it began, was the same day someone in Glastonbury was writing: “The writing of this Prophecy from Alpha to Omega is completed upon the feast day of Joseph of Arimethea and St Patrick, 17th May, 1989”. My GCSE year at school.
My hand pushed aside the vegetation that hung like a curtain, and I peered through the hedge – and found myself face to face with someone staring at me. I leaped back in shock. It was a girl, completely naked, very still. My heart pounded. I wanted to run away. I was used to looking unobserved. I had to see her again. I approached, peered, carefully.
It was a statue, pink stone. I stared at her. She was beautiful. I imagined folding her in my arms, holding her, loving her. I imagined kissing her lips, hard and cold at first but then soft and warm, yielding, her arms reaching round, her body softening, melting into mine. I pressed through the nettles and brambles to reach her, not caring about the stings and pricks, welcoming them, the price, unstoppable. And yet, as I approached her, she didn’t melt and yield. She stared back brazenly, without modesty. I suddenly felt exposed, out-faced, ridiculed. I pulled away in manufactured contempt and walked away in pretended nonchalance, denigrating her with coarse epithets.

I didn’t know what to do. I wanted a place where there was warmth and understanding. Home wasn’t it. (There had been such a place, but that had gone three years, a lifetime, before.) Mum was only interested in her new job – in the mornings she was fresh and keen, well made-up and her hair done lovely, a strong perfume I liked, dressed really well in a slim suit and white blouse. But it wasn’t for me and dad, it was for her new job. In the evenings she’d be tired, though eager to talk about work. But dad would quickly silence her, saying he had enough work at work, it was okay for her because it was new, he was tired couldn’t she see, it was more like they shared the house than were married, bla bla bla. Mum would stiffen then apparently relax and carry on as if nothing had happened. But if, sitting on the settee watching a TV programme, he cuddled up to her she would turn to stone and he would go sullen or bang out of the room. Five minutes later there’d be the sound of his exercise bike going at fifty miles an hour and mum’d be on the phone to a friend talking too loud and laughing a brittle, unnatural laugh. The livelier she became, the deader he went. He’d gone grey, all except his hair (I found the dye bottle in his cupboard). He’d sit for hours staring at the television, criticising. Sometimes he’d try to muscle in on my interests, but I wasn’t having that. The next day I went back.

She (what am I saying? – it. She) was gone. There were two new statues, visible through the gates. Facing each other, one with his back to me, the other offset so I could see her clearly. I forgot the girl. She’d been pretty, yes, but a girl, insipid. This was a woman – beautiful, magnificent, unbuttoning her dress, revealing herself, an excited look on her face, who would embrace me and crush me to her, excite me and teach me. I pushed against the gates – I’d have toppled them, pillars and all, if necessary – the rusty chain snapped, I was through. I stepped into the garden. I walked towards her, iron drawn by the magnet in her breast.
But when I got close, I saw her eyes weren’t for me, but for the other figure. I looked at him – he was broad, heavy faced, with small horns and an enormous curved prick. I started back, away. Then I saw the leer on his face, the way his hands reached rapaciously for her. I stepped between, facing him, protecting her. I pushed against him. He didn’t move. I picked up a piece of iron from the fence and held it like a defensive quarter staff. I prodded, tapped, hit him, felt a sudden surge of power and struck him blow after blow (feeling the woman safe behind me) until he began to totter and – oh glory! – like a great tree, he fell. Bits broke off. But now my blood was up and I was raining blows on him, striking limb from torso, head from neck, waiting for the touch, the whispered thanks – enough! – the embrace from behind. It didn’t come. Blow after blow – each now resounding in a terrible emptiness, on and on. Until I collapsed exhausted, into the emptiness, across the fallen figure, looking up at the standing figure who was still reaching out. But not for me.
Great spasms began tearing at my chest. Like a fist punching me from the inside. As if a demolition ball was trying to burst out of me. As if my body was trying to turn itself inside out. Sobs. I began to cry. I hadn’t cried for years, my body couldn’t understand what was going on, resisted – then remembered, and the tears came, floods of them, in great sobbing waves. I sobbed because I was alone in the world. I sobbed until I was empty of tears. I lay sprawled over broken stone, lost.

‘Oh dear, oh dear.’ A bony hand on my shoulder. A thin, confused voice. Gusts of bad breath on my cheek. My insides turned to water. I clenched my eyes shut, held my breath, wishing (three wishes – just one wish, please) he’d go for help, go away, give me chance to escape. He wasn’t going to go away. He was fascinated by this thing that had come into his world, a strange creature washed up on his beach. Words came between gasps of breath: ‘oh dear … Dionysus slain … not by Zeus … not by Semele… no … an Endicott of the rites … doesn’t care …’

‘I do care,’ I said angrily, sitting up. ‘He … She …’ But I had nothing to say. What I’d felt had disappeared with the tears, as if into sand. I just felt empty. I looked up at the woman, now just a statue, down at the shattered god, then at the old man. He blinked watery blood-shot eyes at me. There was dried white spittle at the corners of his mouth. His teeth were brown. His breath stank. He was a mess. But instead of being disgusted by him, I felt sorry. He stooped, stroked the broken statue as if it was a dead pet. He was sad and forlorn. And lonely. I imagined the loneliness I felt for maybe half an hour, that would disappear with a nice pudding or a funny television programme, I tried to imagine that going on forever. That’s how lonely he looked.

‘Can it be repaired?’ I asked, pathetically. A little kid’s question, all wishful thinking.
‘Eh?’ He turned his blue eyes, across which expressions had been passing quickly, like reflections of clouds across a window – incomprehension, the beginning of meaning, the attempt to grasp its flight – on me. He focussed on me as if I’d just appeared. But with urgency, as if he knew he had to hold onto this one thing that was real. ‘Eh? You can’t repair,’ he said slowly, as if reading each word as it appeared, ‘such as this.’ (Pause). ‘You can only – remake.’ he chuckled, pleased with himself. Then the vagueness returned.
‘Is it valuable?’ I asked, trying to move things along.
‘Priceless.’ A wheezing chuckle, and he slapped his knee.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, because that was what you were supposed to say. He leaned towards me, looking round slyly then fixing me with his blue eyes:
‘Sorry, are you? Sorry won’t pay. How will you pay? Eh? Eh? Shall I tell your father? Shall your father pay?’ Bad breath – halitosis and alcohol – puffed into my face.
‘No, don’t tell him. I’ll work.’
‘Work, will you? What can you do, eh? Can you knap a flint or flense a fox? Can you weave a basket watertight? Can you read the runes, and have you the geomancer’s art? Can you handle axe and adze and draw knife? Eh? Eh? Or can you just – press buttons?’
‘I can work. Show me. I’m going now. I’ll come back.’ I was surprised how definitely I said all this. I started to get up and he backed away, confused again.
‘Come tomorrow,’ he said. He tried, unsuccessfully, to make it sound like a command; it was more like a plea.
‘I’ll come back.’
I turned and looked at him as I stepped out between the gates. His eyes were on me. He looked lost. Then he pulled back his cuff, stared at his wrist – he wore no watch – slapped his head as if at some forgotten engagement, and walked off.

Ch. 2 : Beginning the Work in the Garden

p7. I didn’t go back the next day. But I did the day after. Not because I was scared – who’d have listened to him? – but because I wanted to. Maybe to help him. Maybe to feel needed. Maybe to have something personal and secret. Maybe just to avoid revising for my GCSE’s.
He looked surprised to see me, covered up by checking his empty wrist and saying,
‘Mm, a bit late, but in time – just in time. The storm’s about to break. You must clear the channels or there’ll be flood,’ squinting up at the cloudless sky. ‘This, you see?’ waving at a patch of overgrown vegetation, ‘tangles and tares. Spirits trapped. Set them free. everything must flow.’ I gathered from this nonsense that he wanted me to clear the undergrowth. He gave me an axe, a sickle, and a knife on a stick he called a bill-hook.
‘What, with these?’ I asked. ‘Where’s the strimmer?’
‘Mm. Strimmer. Odd word. Mm,’ he said, and wandered off.

It didn’t look much and, sure I’d see it off in an hour, I laid into it with the bill hook. I began by demolishing old Marshall’s sweet shop. I kicked open the door, the bell flying off the curve of spring steel and sliding across the floor to stop at his feet, the clapper lolling like a puppy’s tongue. I filled the doorway, slapping the massive billy club into the palm of my massive hand. I was – Robocop – half man, half machine. All avenger. Marshall squinted, light glinting off his spectacles, pulled his hand through the thin strands of his hair, cowered, whimpered ‘you couldn’t … you wouldn’t … it’s my life.’
‘I can. I will. Your life has been cheating children,’ I said, my voice sonorous and measured, rattling the sweet jars with its thunder. He’d done us all in his time – short measure, short change, sweets gone yucky. I’d been seven, just starting to go into shops on my own, had just moved here, handing my 20p for a sherbet fountain, holding my hand out for the change that never came as he shook his head saying, ‘no, it was a 10p you gave me. Perhaps,’ he added, with a malicious twist, ‘you’ve already spent the other 10.’ And smiled his thin, wet-toothed smile of triumph. I was so shocked, still so believed adults, that for a moment I doubted myself; but knew I was right – could do nothing about it. I stumbled out of the shop, the bottom fallen out of my world. 
Walking home, through a world that had become suddenly enormous, monstrous, and alien, I kept repeating: ‘life should not be this unfair. When I grow up I’ll put everything right.’ Wham! A dozen sweet jars atomised, their multi-coloured contents flying as from a cluster bomb. Wham! The thick glass counter split with a single blow. Wham! The large Easter egg in the window smashed like a melon. And – ‘please, no!’ – Wham! A chocolate orange lofted into the air, slammed with perfect baseball precision through the plate-glass window, the glass hanging, then falling like unhooked curtains. ‘Come in, kids. Mr Marshall is giving everything away – everything,’ I said, looking meaningfully at the sweating, drooping, nodding broken figure. My boots crunched on glass and sweets as I strode out between yelling, cheering kids.

I stood, panting, hands red raw, as my vision cleared. I looked back, at the vast swathe I must have cut. I’d hardly touched it. I’d bounced of the undergrowth as if I’d run into a fatman. It was comic, pathetic, ridiculous. The old man was stupid. His tools were useless. I stormed towards the house. He was curled up in a hammock, snoring, a thread of spittle hanging from the corner of his mouth to a damp patch on the canvas, his face content. I threw down the tools noisily. He woke with a start, smiling at me, an open smile; then collecting himself, recollecting, he shrank; before pulling himself together and slowly, deliberately, putting his feet down. It was as if he’d been dreaming he was someone else and woken to find he was just himself.
‘These tools. They’re useless,’ I said, in a ‘what are you going to do about it?’ voice.
‘Useless, eh?’ he said, rubbing his stubbly chin, the loose skin moving freely under his hand. ‘Mm,’ his eyes at first cloudy, then clearing. It was as if, hands gripping the hammock, he was, in his head, reaching out and gathering up his shredded, scattered thoughts, to piece them together to make a lost sense. It was heroic and pathetic.
‘Bill hook and axe useless. Mm. Thousands of generations. Millions of acres of forest cleared – Hercynia – thousands of acres worked as renewable resources. Now – useless.’
‘They’re out of date.’
‘Timeless. The timelessness we left behind when we stepped onto the treadmill of history, started believing the myth of progress,’ gaining a remembered articulacy. ‘Wanting a life that’s easy rather than one in which one’s at ease. The skill no longer in us but in the machine. Go on, push buttons, be a spectator all your life. Mm.’ And he turned to the side, examining the edges of the tools, tut tutting. I clenched my fists, said ‘stupid’, kicked the tools and walked off.

As I was running my red-raw hands under the cold tap, mum asked what I’d been doing. ‘Baseball. A new team’s getting together.’
‘That’s good, that you’re doing things with your friends,’ mum sure that if you spend more than two consecutive minutes on your own you’re becoming terminally weird. ‘Will you go again?’
‘Dunno. Might. Dunno.’ I dropped the towel on the draining board instead of hanging it up, and slumped down at the table.
‘Baseball,’ dad said, ‘why baseball? Cricket’s our game.’
‘That’s why everyone stuffs us.’
‘They wouldn’t if kids like you played. In the West Indies they’re playing with oranges and bits of sticks, while you’re playing an American game off the television that’s all marketing. I remember …’ Switch it off. Just look at yourself and switch it off. Four bloody Yorkshiremen. He’d hardly even played beach cricket with me.

That night I dreamed I was working at my computer when I saw a faint reflection in the screen. I turned round and a Neanderthal, all hair and skins, stone axe raised, was about to smash my head in. I woke up quick, trembling.

Ch. 3 : Learning to use the Tools

p10. When I got there the next day, he was sharpening the axe on a big treadle-powered stone wheel, sparks flying in long plumes.
‘You can tell by the way the sparks fly,’ he said, holding the blade against the wheel as I treadled. ‘There, see – like a pheasant’s tail. Perfect.’ He lifted and looked along it several times before pronouncing himself satisfied. He continued:
‘In Japan, an apprentice works for four years sharpening tools before he’s allowed to work on wood. But we’ve so little time. All I can teach you is how to keep an edge.’ He swept the whetstone along the blade. ‘The molecules, see – you’re stroking them out, spreading them, shaping them, thinning them to an edge an atom thick that can slice a hair. Stop often to use the whetstone. It’ll save you time,’ handing me the whetstone. He tested the axe edge with his thumb. ‘Your axe would be the measure of your life – how sharp, how ready; the amount worn away showing how much work you’d done, what you’d put into your life. Your life measured by absence.’
Then he ground and honed the sickle, and handed me the two tools. ‘Axe and sickle, sun and moon, male and female; one hard and direct, one sharp and curling. You need them both. You need to know when to use each. And of course the yeoman bill-hook.’ He beamed. Then he sagged. Like a fireman’s hose when the water’s turned off. He crumpled onto the hammock, staring up at me, confused, swamped – as if he’d fallen from the thin edge of his concentration into a morass of mixed-up thoughts. He waved me away and curled up like a sick old dog.

I worked with the unfamiliar implements (but not so strange now) steadily, trying to use them as tools rather than weapons.
I threatened my ankles with the sickle, my head with a rebounding axe. I lopped and chopped and slashed. I felt as if I was burying myself in the undergrowth, like someone digging into a hillside – but when I looked back I saw I’d cleared an area, made a space, there was light and air. I was making progress.
I began to be more methodical, making separate piles of trunks and branches and brush. I differentiated sounds – the soft almost watery hush of sickle through grass, the sharper rasp through brambles, the click of branch lopping, the hard, implacable toc of axe into wood. I saw the flesh of wood laid bare; but it was necessary.

I became aware of the life in this little patch of wood, imagined the creatures having fled my monstrous arrival, now returning at my more measured presence. A slash of the sickle – and there, as if blinking in the light, a delicate crocus-like flower, purplish, pinkish, on an almost-white stem, alone, individual, hidden but now revealed in all its delicate glory, seeming to glow just for me. (I bathed myself in the “falseness in all our impressions of external things” of Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy in joyful ignorance that day). The body of a shrew, evidently dead, and yet its body quivering with life – then I realised the movement was of grubs beneath the skin eating the flesh – one appeared through the ear hole; I shivered and dropped a large stone on it to conceal it forever and moved on. Fungi, food for a different sort of life. A butterfly, released from its camouflage on a fallen bough, fluttering mazily, as if drunk, then settling, sinking into another patch of bark. When I stopped to sharpen my tools – and the clean sound of stone on steel seemed to clear the air, too – I could hear rustlings, fast and slow, of creatures in the undergrowth, bird song all around, see the light brightening into beams then fading back as clouds passed, smell the green of sap, the blue of mint, the brown of earth. I imagined working with strimmer or chain saw; encased in armour, visored, deafened, all happening as on a soundless screen, at the end much done, little experienced, nothing learned.

Arms leaden, skin torn, mind fogged with fatigue, I met the tree, the big tree, the enormous tree, and with the habit of weary necessity I raised the axe – and held it there, stayed by a voice:
‘Sometimes, you know, when something stands in your path, it’s not an obstacle to be overcome but an opportunity to be taken, not a foe to be vanquished but a friend ready to help. And isn’t this tree magnificent?’
It was a voice I’d never heard before. I knew it was the old man behind me, but instead of his thin, reedy voice, this was deep and resonant, as if it was coming from deep inside a person bigger than him, someone from long ago. I opened my eyes. It was a beech tree, its grey trunk smooth and rippled, like the leg of a giant elephant, soaring up, its branches spreading wide, its roots (I could feel them) sinking deep.
‘Embrace. It has been waiting for you.’ A shiver ran up my spine, ran right through me. I wanted to run away. I wanted to fall into it. But I stepped forward, pressed against it, stretched my arms round as far as I could; felt strong arms enveloping me, protecting me, keeping me safe, strong certain arms; felt through my body pressed against the tree a dark rooted energy, a light reaching energy, ascending and descending flows of energy. I felt safe.
I wanted to sink into it, lose myself in it. But it would not permit that; it would hold me, support me, give me strength; but only while my two feet were placed firmly on the ground. I held, was held, for a long time. 
The tree didn’t let me down, never would. I could imagine not being an orphan. 
When I turned round, the old man wasn’t there.
I’d cleared the patch of woodland, the tree at its centre.
‘Good,’ he said when I returned the tools and he’d checked the edges. ‘Tomorrow we can start work.’

That evening I gorged myself on junk food and watched every mindless television programme on offer. About ten I suddenly felt ill and just made it to the bathroom before I threw it all up. As I lay in bed shivering, mum said, ‘no baseball for you tomorrow – you’ve been overdoing it.’ When she brought hot lemon and honey, I asked her to get out my old night light from when I was small, a pottery house with the light shining out through the windows, like a beacon in the night, and to please leave it switched on. I imagined myself wandering through a wasteland, like the area I’d cleared, and coming upon this warmly-lit cottage, coming home. I sweated and shivered through the night, sleeping fitfully, dreaming a lot – weird dreams of giant exploding shrews, trees turning into snakes, a small sickle swinging at me. In the early hours I dreamed of the woman, the statue, a really hot (oh, delicious!) dream, and came in my pyjamas, which woke me up. I cleaned myself with tissues and then settled down, feeling much better, and slept dream-free to the morning. I was up, breakfasted and out before my parents stirred. It was Sunday.

Ch. 4 : The Malefic Force

p14. The town was empty. I cycled fast along clear streets, between curtained houses heavy with sleep. Fast down the hill, my shape defined by the cool slipstream. I had somewhere to go. ‘Tomorrow we can start work’, he’d said. I skidded to a halt, nosed my bike between the gates – and stopped.

The garden was lost in thick mist. Cold, it shrouded everything. I shivered.
But not just at the mist. As soon as I stepped into the garden, I felt helplessness, hopelessness sweep over me. The overgrown garden, the dilapidated house, all of it neglected, from which for too long the spark of life had gone – what was I doing here? As if a voice was whispering, ‘don’t you see he’s a loser, this place is lost? Can’t you feel it sinking? He’ll pull you in and drag you down. Do you want to end up like him? Get out while you can.’ I thought of home, my room, my computer, my books. I looked around – nothing could sort this place out. The area I’d cleared, been so proud of, I saw as tiny, insignificant, the brambles already invading, drawing it back into confusion. This is his stuff, not my stuff.

I headed back towards the gate, feet lightening. And yet – the work I’d done, the feeling, the tree, the voice … I turned again, towards the house, determined.

I felt as though I was walking into a gale, wading through mud, that hands were grasping at me, holding me back, a threatening presence just behind me, doubt filling my mind.

I got to the door, shaking, hammered, kept hammering until he opened it. Just a crack.
He looked terrified. His eyes twitched around, he kept flinching as if a flying creature was attacking him. I could feel its cold wings. ‘Things … fall apart,’ he mumbled, ‘anarchy loosed … slouching towards … to be born … the darkness – drops again,’ an idiotic, almost dreamy look coming onto his face, his eyes vague, as if he was going under. I shook his arm, poked him at each word: ‘Do something. You must do something!’ He looked at me curiously, as if he was having difficulty seeing me. Then he focussed – I could see myself reflected in his eyes – he recognised me. ‘Yes,’ he said, his thin hand bony but alive. ‘Yes,’ he nodded. And closed the door.

I sat on the step. I filled my mind with the feel of the tools, the smell of mushroom and wild strawberry, the look of the tree. The fog thinned, to a mist through which sunbeams shone and birds flew, cleared. The panic subsided. I looked around: it was broken, but it could be fixed.

At last he came out, walking slowly, deliberately. He was like a man I’d seen on television with Parkinson’s disease who, by focussing on each action separately, by controlling each movement with intense concentration, could prevent the wild flailings of involuntary spasms, could function almost normally. When I started to speak, he put his finger to his lips. He pointed to the tools. ‘Now we can start work.’

We didn’t speak of it for a week, not until we’d finished what he called “The Preparation”. I went there every day. Why? Partly because of GCSE’s. That was like being in a sausage machine, each subject a sausage, its size your mark, being extruded one by one then shrink-wrapped and labelled. I’d already determined to do the absolute minimum to get by – now I had a reason to bunk off study leave.
But also I was engaged. For all his vagueness, I felt there was a plan somewhere in his head, something buried that I, archaeologist-like, could help uncover, put together; that I could be the expression for his intention. I felt useful.

So I did what he told me, cleared where he said. Usually it wasn’t areas but paths – some straight, some curved, some so sinuous and involuted that they were like mazes. And I came upon things as I cleared – a stone with markings carved; an Aztec-looking statue; an exotic tree; a small lake almost lost in undergrowth and weed. And found new places – a grotto constructed of water-worn limestone, with, above it, a little gothic sanctuary; a classical-looking summer house on a knoll, hexagonal, all glass, mostly broken.
When I asked about these, he’d stare at me as if I was speaking Martian; he was so frail, had to focus so narrowly, that nothing outside that focus made sense to him.
He spent a lot of time just staring, as if trying to see what had been, or what should be, trying to remember or to envision, then moaning, stamping, smacking his head so hard I’d flinch.
Sometimes he’d use a pendulum. A couple of times he brought out a compass with Chinese characters on it. Between times I’d find him curled up in his hammock in an exhausted sleep. Or swinging backwards and forwards in a child’s swing, singing nonsense songs. I worked obediently, strangely trusting. And with a nice sense of playing truant, of doing something that no-one else knew about. And enjoying the physical work, getting stronger, getting browner.

The next Sunday, after walking the paths and watching the pendulum and checking alignments, he nodded and said ‘put away the tools and meet me at the summer house.’

All the doors of the summer house were open, the warm air and light filled it, and on a small table was a jug of real lemonade and by it a large plate of hot cakes. I wolfed through the cakes, buttery and spicy, as he sipped his lemonade quietly. His face was grey, there were black rings under his eyes, he breathed in short gasps.
Then, as if calling up deep, long forgotten reserves, he pulled himself up straight and looked directly at me, smiling, his eyes shining, his hand on my shoulder, gripping it. ‘Well done, young ‘un. You’ve done good work. Without you …’ He squeezed – and then staggered, as if hit by an electric shock, the glass fell from his hand and shattered. I pulled up a chair and he sank onto it, his head down, mumbling.
‘Come on,’ I said, ‘you’d better lie down. Then I’ll go.’
‘No,’ he said, swimming through the fatigue, ‘we must talk, now. We’ve stirred things up and we must act quickly. We’ve a malefic force to deal with. And it’s  only just beginning.’

Ch. 5 : The Nature of the Malefic Force revealed

p17. I’d heard such talk before, a long time (not a long time – three years – a lifetime) ago, in a world I’d closed the door on, walked away from, should walk away from now if I was to prevent that door opening, the pain – so heartbreakingly stamped on, smoothed over, sealed – returning. (You think you can do that when you’re young. But you don’t leave it behind; you drag it behind you, it slows you down, keeps you off balance, knocks you off track, poisons you. I was lucky that day, in the summer house – not that I’ve always felt it, through the stuff that followed the changes we helped precipitate that summer.)

‘Last Sunday, see?’ he said, ‘I thought I understood. A number of things, all working together: the mist rising from the Vale as the sun heats it, gathering here before it’s burned off; the reaction that follows a day of action, when the novelty’s gone, both of us tired, the real hard work still to do; the effects of stirring things up – if you clear land the weeds grow quickly and profusely, and you have to keep hoeing; when you begin to meditate, all sorts of thoughts come into your mind, because the silent contemplation of nothing stirs things up, like stirring up the mud at the bottom of a clear pool in a stream – you have to keep stirring till the mud’s all gone. These things combined.
‘But it was more than that. In clearing the paths for healing energies, we’ve drawn in a malefic force. We must find it, neutralise it.’
‘What sort of thing will it be?’
‘You know how some people get ill living under electricity lines? Well this place is sensitive, it amplifies. It’ll be recent. A satellite communication centre, maybe – there are so many satellites orbiting, transmitting, they distort the telluric forces, especially near ground stations.’
‘Of course!’ I cried, ‘Jones Hall! Jones, the financier. Since the big bang and world-wide stock market trading, he’s had an enormous dish installed.’
‘You have to shut it down.’
‘What? What am I supposed to do – blow it up?’
‘Just neutralise it. I’d need two hours. I can rig up a defence in that time – but if it’s not shut down, it’d be like trying to dam a flowing stream.’
‘But what am I supposed to do?’
‘Oh,’ he flapped his arms dismissively, ‘you youngsters are into computers, and hacking – aren’t you? you’ll think of something.’
‘But that place’ll be like Fort Knox. I wouldn’t know where to begin. I only know,’ my heart sinking, ‘one person …’
‘Get him. Otherwise everything’s doomed.’
‘I have to go now.’ I slouched away, stone in my belly, knowing I had to face something I’d avoided for three years. The garden was no longer a refuge – in it I’d been brought face to face with what I thought I’d been, at last, escaping from. I didn’t look back – it was no longer just him who depended on what I did; it was me, too.