It Would Sound Like Boasting

The barrow is in the middle of a ploughed field. The wheat has been cut and the stubble has been ploughed in to strengthen the soil. It’s a bit whiffy too – so I suppose the farmer has been muck spreading. Now that’s a sight to see – a great tube of a machine, with thick metal spikes throwing up great lumps of manure and flinging them across a field. Nothing hi-tech at all – just brute force and dung. I love it.

We trek across the field, being a little more than usually careful about where we put our feet, and then up – onto the barrow.

Like I said, – it’s nothing special to look at – just a low, oval shaped, grassy hill. We walk up to the top. It’s not a high hill, but it sits on a high roll of land, so from the top you can actually see for quite a long way.

We look out across the Stone Woods. They look a bit dark from here – and not as big as they feel from the inside.

“Is that the Manor, there? Says Cathy, pointing back the way we came.

“Yup, that’s it. Big ugly thing, isn’t it?”

“It’s not so bad. Good chimneys.”

“I heard once it was an Abbey – but Henry the eighth threw out all the monks and gave the buildings to the first Lord Leighton. Reward for some sort of services rendered, I suppose.”

“It doesn’t look like an old Abbey,” she says.

“No. Well, they knocked down a lot of the old buildings and used the stones for the house. Can you see – it’s stone lower down – then brick built on top of the stone. But they say all the underground bits – the old crypts and passages – they’re still there. They were too much trouble to fill in.”

“I see,” she says, nodding. “So,” she says, “Mr Local Expert, are you going to tell me all about this barrow we’re standing on – or not?”

“Nothing much to tell really, Ms Local Ignoramus. Some archaeologists came to check it – years back – I don’t remember, but my dad told me. They poked around a bit, and they said it was probably Bronze Age.

“It doesn’t look very dug up to me.”

“They didn’t dig it up – they used sonar – you know, like they use for hunting submarines.”

“Not many submarines around here,” she says, grinning. “My parents wrote an article about that kind of thing once – not archaeology though – about oil prospecting. The oil companies set up sonar things to check the shape of the rock and stuff under the ground. It helps them to find the best places to drill.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. They were writing about how some of the companies send teams secretly into national parks – looking for oil. That caused a big stink.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s against the law, dim-wit!” I’m not so happy about the ‘dim-wit’ thing, but I suppose it’s just pay-back for the ‘ignoramus’, so I just carry on with the tour guide thing.

“So anyway,” I say, “they do all this sonar stuff, and declare that the hill is a real barrow mound, not just a hill that looks like a burial ground, and It should be preserved and protected – but that there’s nothing down below worth digging up. Maybe some bones – but no treasures or artefacts. Probably the tomb was robbed pretty soon after it was raised.”

“So, it’s never been dug up?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘never’. Lots of local lads have had a try – but it’s hard work – no one’s dug really deep.” I pause. “And then there’s the legends as well to keep people away.”

“Yeah,” she says. I can almost hear her ears pricking up – after all, this is the kind of stuff her parents were working on before they were lost.

“Yeah. It’s much later – but local legend says that they used to hold witch burnings up here, and the ghosts of the murdered women haunt the barrow with their screams of pain – and if you disturb the ground – they try to drag you in – deep, deep underground – to scream with them – forever.”

“Really,” she says, eyes glinting.

I grin. “No, not really – I made most of it up. Good story, though, eh? Ouch!

“Not a bad punch that,” I say, feigning toughness. “For a girl.” I’m already running – even before I say the word ‘girl’ – but she’s surprisingly fast is Cathy – despite the big old boots. She almost gets me. Round and round – around the top of the burrow – I’ve got my speed up now – she’ll never catch me. I risk a glance over my shoulder.

She’s stopped. I can see the glow – all around her – it’s like evening has come early – the sky’s gone dark and Cathy’s glowing like something in a bad movie. All the colour’s gone out of her face and she looks scared. And she’s looking fuzzy, like some sort of ghost.

I rush back – or I try – it’s like running through treacle – not that I’ve ever actually run through treacle, mind you – but you get the picture.

I manage to grab her.

“Sean – what is it?” she says. I don’t know – it’s not like this kind of thing happens to me everyday, is it?

I feel like we’re shifting – like we’re on a boat.

Then there’s a flash – and the shifting stops – and the lights go out.

It’s dark – very dark – and it smells of earth.

“Sean,” she says. “Where are we?” But we both know where we are – somehow, we’re inside the barrow.

OK then, it’s time to come clean a bit. I concentrate – and I do something with my mind – I don’t know what I do – I mean, try explaining how you move your muscles – you just move them, right? Well, that’s the kind of thing I do – but not with muscles – with a different part of my brain – I do something and I make a small light. I push harder and make it stronger. I learned to do this ages ago, but, you know, it’s not really the kind of thing you can just casually mention, is it?

Cathy is looking at me. She looks scared.

“What’s happening Sean?”

“I think we’re inside the barrow,” I say.

“You what?”

“Look around you,” says me. She does. Earth floor, stone walls, and domed stone roof.

“Where’s the light coming from,” she says.

“Er – sorry – I made it.”

“You what?” she says. “What are you talking about!”

I grin. OK, it’s not a perfect grinning situation, but I can’t help it.

“Sorry,” I say, “I should have told you before.”

“Told me what?”

“But there’s not many situations where it just crops up in the conversation.”

“What crops up?”

“I mean, it would sound like boasting, wouldn’t it? ‘Mr Smart Alec’?”

“What, exactly,” she says, “would sound like boasting?”

“Well,” I say, “things like ‘if I concentrate just right, I can make a small light’.”

“‘Things like’,” she says – “You mean there’s other things you can do?”

“Just small things.”

“How about things like getting us out of this barrow?”

“Um, that’s a bit of a big thing.”

“Yeah,” she says. “It would be.”

I have to admit that I am just a tad disappointed. I mean, it’s not every day you reveal to someone that you have (however small) paranormal powers. A bit of astonishment would be nice. Oh well, I think, can’t have everything. So I shrug a bit, and grin (you have to do something, don’t you).

Time to take a look around. The floor is flat – dried mud or clay – hard and dusty. The stone-block walls curve in to make an arch over our heads – high enough to stand up. So I do. Cathy too. She runs her hands over the stone.

“It’s smooth,” she says. “And the blocks join perfectly.”

“Yeah,” I say. I understand what she means – she means the level of the stonework that was used to make this wall is too high for common-or-garden Bronze Age Britain.

 

“So,” she says. “Mr Local Expert – those archaeologists used sonar, right? And they never noticed this bloody great stone chamber?”

“I suppose not,” I say – I can’t really think of anything else to say – “maybe it’s just very deep.”

“Maybe,” she says. “Maybe we should look around a bit.” She looks at me. “Can you make that light a bit stronger?” she asks.

“Not much.”

“Ah –” she kind of sighs. “Nothing else for it, then,” she says – and she makes a light of her own.

Just like that.

I imagine that my mouth is hanging open like a startled goldfish.

“What . . !” I say. “But . . . you never said.”

“Well,” she says, “somehow it never seemed the right time to tell you – and anyway – I wouldn’t want you to think I was boasting, would I?”

Touché.

I’d kind of guessed there was something different about Cathy – the bees at the Stones – seeing the dragons move on the Manor gate – hearing them – the glow that surrounded her before we were sucked down into the barrow. But I’d just assumed it was coincidence, or something unconscious – maybe it was – but there was more to my cousin than met the eye. Maybe she was thinking the same thing.

“Pretty neat,” I say.“ Can you get us out of here?”

“No, that’s too big for me.”

“OK,” I say. “Nothing else for it – time to investigate.”

 

The walls are smooth and unmarked – no doors, no irregularities, no sign of a way out, or a way anywhere for that matter. The chamber we’re in is domed – but it’s not a perfect dome – it’s elongated – not thin enough to call a tunnel, but you can at least say it has ‘ends’. From where we stand, both ends look much the same – so we pick one and wander carefully over to have a closer look. The dusty soil crunches under our feet

The ends of the chamber are a little different from the smooth regularity of the main walls of the dome. They have irregularities – they have, in fact, stones which are carved – shaped. Some of them have what appear to be some sort of writing – not, unfortunately, even remotely related to the Roman alphabet. There are pictures, too. Dragons – humans – some things which look like Egyptian gods – half beast, half human – and there are the monsters. I’d call them demons myself – but it’s just a word for something ugly, evil, and definitely very clever looking.

We sort of hunker down to look closely. The carved stones start at the floor and extend up for about six feet. They are widest at the bottom, and follow the curve of the main dome to make their own sort of arch shape – they remind me of nothing more than the stained glass windows you get in churches – but stone – not glass.

“Well,” says Cathy, “Here we are, stuck in a hole, deep underground, in some sort of ancient barrow, built by who knows who, with weird writing on the walls, with weird pictures of monsters, the writing written in a style we’ve never seen before, with no way out, and, oh, what else – oh yes, in a place which somehow does not show up on the archaeological sonar scans.”

“Not forgetting,” I add, “that we don’t know how we got in – that we were just running around on the barrow – when whoosh, down we came, like the poor people pulled underground by the ghosts of the witches. That part of the story was the real, traditional bit,” I add, cleverly “not like the bit about burning witches on the barrow – that was made up.”

“Well, thank you for keeping me up to date,” she says, a possible, slight touch of acid in her voice. “And, to be honest, I don’t think that ‘whoosh’ really does justice to the severity of the situation. I think what we really needed was a kind of ‘kerblab’ or a ‘kerblam’, or even a . . .”

“ ‘Kerblammy’,” I suggest.

“ ‘Kerblammy’. That’s it. ‘Kerblammy’ just about sums it all up.” She looks at me, “So what next?”

“Dunno,” says I.

So we just sit down and look at the pictures and runes.