BONELINES
Phil Smith  & Tony Whitehead 

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In Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage, authors Phil Smith, Tony Whitehead and photographer John Schott lead us on a ‘virtual’ journey to explore difference and change on their way to an unknown destination. They create a pilgrimage we can all follow, even if confined to our homes.

In researching the Guidebook the authors went on an actual journey. Bonelines​ is the secret story of that journey. Given the present circumstances it now appears prophetic, prescient and helpful, so we have decided to bring it into the light.  ​It is written in novel form and will be published online in weekly instalments. Here is the first instalment. 

​(You can find details - and order a copy of - Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage here.)

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Bonelines
  Instalment ​10   (Chapters 53-60)
Tony Whitehead & Phil Smith

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Chapter 53 
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Mandi poured a third coffee from the filter jug, its dark contents mixing in the morning’s fogginess. She needed to get to town and find somewhere that would sell her a Smeg espresso machine. She flicked through the book April had lent her: ‘The Iron Age in Devon’; a thin tome, on the cover an aerial view of “Clovelly Rings” (it said). Inside were numerous plan views of hill forts; as the caffeine took effect she felt herself dropping down into the middle of these, the contours were the uneven ripples from her fall. Mandi wondered how plan views would strike the people who built the forts; thin black lines on flat cream paper from monumental structures of earth? 

Mandi stared into the murky coffee. She was out of her depth. Archaeology, ancient history. Sure, she had a broad picture, school, documentaries, Mary Beard and over-excited over-groomed young women who seemed perpetually surprised that studying Classics had led them hyperventilating into ruins chased by a cameraman. She was already structuring the blog post. Mandi knew the progression of ages, approximately. Stone, Bronze, Iron, which made no sense; bronze sounded so much more progressive than iron. Anything she knew had been sieved through the preoccupations of her bonkers parents and their repurposing of hedges and barrows, mounds and forts to fit their version of spirituality. Mandi had become nostalgic for her parents’ speculations; where others saw monuments eroded away almost to nothing, such smoothed shapes were “blindingly obvious” to Bryan. But that was not April’s archaeology. 

Mandi played them against each other. On the one side, April speculating on the beautiful and mysterious layering of bones and different soils, her father ardently numbering Druidic rights and their duty to repeat the rituals of the sun. Mandi warmed to the way April always stopped short of a conclusion; as if she were drawing Mandi into making one of her own, until Mandi turned away, and then the dance would move on. Their tentative waltz in stark contrast to her father's certainties. The career archaeologist seemed much more at home with mystery than the mystics.

Thinking of April was something that Mandi caught herself doing a lot since their first meeting. Did she fancy her or something? It was an unusual “fancy-ing” in that it had no component of physical attraction, infatuation or identification. She had no fantasies of bodily intimacy with April. In surveys she would always leave the ‘sexual orientation’ box blank; in her head she was fashionably rather than authentically bi. Sheer weight of bodies suggested she write “boys”. But Mandi found herself delighted at the idea of being with April, delighted by their conversations, delighted by the delicious things that April shared with her; she caught herself inventing ways that they might meet more often. For a moment she thought of Googling “crush”, thought the better of it, did it anyway and recognized herself in every stupid detail. 

Mandi looked at her phone. She counted the texts they had exchanged. She scrolled back and re-read some recent ones. Aware that she had done that last night as well. Looking for signs that April liked her. It felt so weak. A hand on an arm when April was excited to show Mandi something. The hug at the end of the last walk. Was there a secret trade in their confidences? But this was ludicrous. If someone liked you, in that way, it got explicit quickly. Sometimes brusque, sometimes charming, but always obvious. And there was nothing obvious about April. Christ! The woman was an enigmatic work of art! Fuck, thought Mandi, had she maybe been “friend zoned”? Which, of course, would be fine. Which, of course, would not. Because she didn’t fancy April in that way, but because she did fancy her in some other way. 

“O, get a fucking grip. Grow up.” 

She finished the coffee in her cup; optimistically pouring away the rest of the jug. She put whirling thoughts of April to the back of her mind and started to look forward to meeting up with April later that day at the Museum’s archeological dig near the Great Hill. Whatever it was she thought about between the last gulp of caffeine and arriving at the site, it vanished into the glowing blue sky and the phosphorous green fields above which floated a massive bulbous figure. Mandi saw it clearly. Distantly at first, moving slowly over the folds of landscape that stretched southwards from the hill fort. The air still; the birds holding their breaths. The figure was about sixty feet tall. Female and naked. Its breasts and belly were grotesquely exaggerated. Not a good look, Mandi thought. As it approached, she saw that the head lacked a face, just horizontal rows of dots. The legs were shrivelled, and pointed. It would not stand upright in the fields. It floated closer to Mandi. It was out of place. Made by human minds and hands. It was not meant to be here. It was not meant to be at all. How did she know this? The people here had once rejected this figure. But here it was again. Now looming close to where Mandi sat. When the waters began, flowing down the insides of the figure’s legs, stained red, they poured onto the green fields, washing away the trees and the topsoil and revealing a whitish limestone. The waters persisted and ate away at the stone, burning grotesque cavities out of the reluctant bedrock. Fizzing and gurgling. Caves were formed; and from the caves, Mandi saw swarming creatures: eyeless pink salmanders, emerging unblinking into the light, their skin scorching in the sunlight.

“This is yours, Mandi?” 

It was not. Mandi felt keenly, indignantly, that this was not hers. She looked up into the branches of the hazel against which she was resting, to see what bird had spoken out of turn. 

“Mandi, your hat, you must have dropped it.”

April threw the broad brimmed straw hat into the air and deftly caught it, before skimming it into Mandi’s lap. 

“You were well gone.” 

“Must have been…” 

April sat beside Mandi. Mandi felt a creeping silliness come on and feared it.

“Great view from here. I was talking to a colleague about the idea of view sheds. Like a watershed, but instead a boundary formed according to how far you can see. You can use it to think about what natural boundaries we might share with former cultures, other cultures, no need to get too linear. About time?”

Mandi started to come round. The caretaker had dropped her off at the hill fort; he had borrowed a truck from one of the pagans to fetch a new tow bar. Mandi had walked to the meeting point and dozed off. 

“You’re worried about linear time because I was early?”

“Well, sweetie, I know you have temporal issues. Maybe if you thought of your appointments more in terms of nested events, different durations, some quick, some slow, hugely slow… the longue durée…” 

“Nested events? What are they when they’re at home?”

“Traditionally historians think in terms of discrete periods of history, with beginnings and ends…”

“That’s how I like meetings. With an end.”

“Think bigger. Bronze Age, Iron Age, Medieval Period, so on. There’s a temptation to see these as absolutely fixed…”

“Is there?

“Among the old school, there is. In popular discourses, absolutely. It’s so convenient! The different periods all have features by which they can be defined. Time’s arrow! They all follow one another along a single trajectory. No one is arguing with that per se; well some eccentrics… but what if that trajectory is only ever one layer of the reality? Within each grand period there are shorter events; Athelstan kicking the Britons out of Exeter, Athelston having lunch...”

April smiled. How old was she? Mandi looked at April’s shining face and it flickered. She had seen her do that before; like a screen when the signal scrambles. She could be early twenties, she could be almost fifty. Her face stapled together different kinds of experience, different “events”, the same as her theory.

“Then there are longer time scales. The longue durée of, say, human cultural development around the Mediterranean over thousands of years. Or the duration of human consciousness? They both enfold us… we are part of immediate ongoing processes, the two us right here, that also take in the folk that walked these fields fifteen hundred or two thousand years ago.”

She is both older and younger than me, thought Mandi, she stands on both sides of me at the same time. I am being triangulated.

“Like music?” Mandi offered, not knowing quite where she was going with this.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure...”

“Go on, it might be interesting.”

“Well, music can be seen as a melody, right. Or melodies… as notes following each other. That’s like what you’re calling an old school linear view of history. And sure, there are probably repeating phrases, refrains, the same tempo for a while, but basically, it’s one note after another. What you’re saying is that there are harmonies too. Not just the journey along the horizontal, but there’s a vertical dimension… layer, simultaneously… that resonate, above or below the melody are other notes, which heighten or disrupt the effect of the melody. And… not sure where this is going… but all the notes are parts of the larger structure of the whole piece?  Sonata or symphony or whatever... You study the individual melody, but unless you can hear the harmonies, or the atonal whatever it is…”

If this wasn’t love, why was she being such a fool? 

“…the relationship between the note, the event, the whole and how it resolves, lingers across a wave of longer time … what did you call it? Have you heard Morton Feldman’s four hour pieces? He said that beyond a certain point everything loses meaning but time itself…”

“I’m sure his audiences agree!”

“They probably do!” 

Mandi didn’t quite know where this had all come from. Or indeed what she really meant. OK, the Morton Feldman reference was unnecessary. She wanted April to know that she was not shallow. 

April smiled.

“I’m not sure I follow?  Say it again?”

Mandi flustered. For fuck’s sake, she always knew exactly what she meant. Crystal Clarity could be her stage name. Now she was rambling.  About music, the sum total of her knowledge of which she had condensed into her first attempt…

Her adoptive father had always wanted to be known for knowing. He idolised “the great writers”. Crowley of course, Waite, Levi, Gardiner, Fortune, Valiente, Starhawk, Cunningham, Spare, and, latterly, Hutton. He liked to talk about them as if he were on nodding terms; probably wanted to be them, be as eloquent as them, do things they did. It was important that others regarded him as an expert. Thing was, Mandi could not be certain that he would not have been just as happy to be an expert in model railways or dog breeds; the important thing was being “the expert”.  Yet he never published anything, words always failed him. Before she found her own hectoring voice, she had idolized great thinkers in the fields in which she moved: Goldmann, Hayek, Rand, Camus… more recently, Wendy McElroy; McElroy was Mandi’s ‘Ronald Hutton’. She was fiercely proud of her understanding of these geniuses. It put capital in her bank. To not know. To fail to understand. That was unthinkable. Later on she realized that the real trick was not letting on that you knew, but appearing to come up with these ideas on your own. To act the individualist you had to become one. Sure, she couldn’t pretend to understand the further reaches of physics or whatever, but she was a Right Woman. She might make a mistake now and again, but she was never wholly Wrong. Rightness defined her, drew her boundary; her Rightness. She was the expert in the Rightness of Mandi Lyon, and April was simply not getting it; and being April, she wanted to get it. So it was that Mandi found herself, on a hill above a deep pink excavation site pitted with oozy cavities, talking shit. It was embarrassing.

“Oh, it’s just… it’s j..j..j…”

Mandi stammered. She didn’t even know she could stammer. Why was she frightened? Was she frightened? Having mostly forgotten what it was she said in the first place, she was struggling to know how to say it in a different way. 

“It’s …”

April leant in to listen; her chequered shirt billowing. A long white feather fell from her shoulder.

“Hey, look at that,” said Mandi. She picked up the feather; relieved to find a lever to change the subject. 

“Must have picked it up on my walk up here earlier,” said April, taking it back from Mandi.  

“It’s lovely, what kind of bird is that?”

April shrugged and flickered. 

“Let’s have a wander down to look at the dig, eh? I can introduce you to Charlie, the county archaeologist, and some of the more… grounded volunteers.”

The excavations had been triggered by a find in a field close to the base of the hill fort. An ornate bracelet turned up by a detectorist; local controversy had ensued. The well defined line between professional and amateur shivered for a while: the pros fretting over people just doing what they wanted, amateurs waving codes of conduct and excited by the chance of getting one over on the Academy. An old story revolving like a prayer wheel. The modest bracelet, originally assumed to be Roman, marked a Dumnonian settlement on a Roman road; it was, to a degree, re-writing what archaeologists knew not only of the extent of Roman occupation west of Exeter (Isca Dumnoniorum), but also of the entwining of occupiers and occupied. 

“Nothing was ever written about the Devon Dumnonii by the Romans,” explained Charlie, peering over a pair of half moon glasses he could have picked up at the BBC Drama costume store; an academic from Exeter, clearly excited by the prospect of new discoveries. “So all we know we have to deduce from finds like these.”

“And what do they tell you? About who the people were? The D… Romano-British, what did you call them?” 

“Dumnonii. That, of course, is the name the Romans gave them; what name they gave themselves we don’t know. Whatever their name, they were the people who were here when the Romans arrived; how long before? Hard to say; the assumption once was that these people arrived as a result of a single violent invasion, sweeping out the previous inhabitants, but that was an assumption based on our own colonial habits; the existing evidence suggests some quite complex arrivals and settlement; perhaps as a result of a climate-based agricultural failure. A few travelers arrived, found a land with a plenitude of empty space and few locals, the word was sent back to Europe and more people came…”

He shrugged.

“We don’t know. After the Romans had gone, the Dumnonii continued as before, building the same kinds of homes, on the same sites, until the Saxons arrived. Thanks to them, and their religion, what remnants of the old Dumnonian culture that might have survived within Celtic-Christianity, so called, were probably… he shrugged, well we don’t know. The one thing you can say for sure about the Dumnonii is that we don’t know much about them…. They left their marks in the landscapes, the hill forts, so called, they are a bit of a mystery, no evidence that they were actually forts, possibly more like market places or holding spaces, store rooms… or... I hate to say it… ritual spaces… the fort here…”

He nodded to the trees that hid the fort on the top of the Great Hill. 

“…has two large burial mounds within the fort, but they were put there by the people who were here a thousand years before the Dumnonii. The Dumnonii seem to have honoured those graves, didn’t destroy them, yet they built none of their own, don’t seem to have gone in for ritual buildings or monuments… left very few artefacts. At least, we haven’t found many. Hardly any jewelry, no coinage – they didn’t have a currency, money-free! – the bracelet we found here…”

Mandi noticed that the lone detectorist had been submerged in Charlie’s narrative.

“…is an anomaly; a copy of a Roman design, made by Dumnonii probably for sale to Romans.”

Mandi thought of the little Dartmoor Pixie figures she had collected as a child.

“Given its position right on a Roman road, this might be the late Iron Age equivalent of a motorway services. But then that’s the kind of dumb, populist analogy that can hide what was unique or distinctive about the Dumnonii. Works on television, though.”

He smiled at April.

“Charlie’s been working on a documentary for BBC Four…”

“Here. Have a look at this.”

Charlie handed Mandi a plastic bag with some rough looking sandy coloured pottery pieces. With Charlie’s encouragement, she extracted a large pink shard with a simple jagged line.

“This is theirs.”

“From two thousand years ago?”

“Give or take a few lifetimes…”

Holding the simple ceramic Mandi felt sensation running up and down her forearm; as if the zig-zag pattern in the clay had translated directly into vibrations in her body. 

“Contrast that with some of the Phoenician ware we’ve found.”

The piece of Mediterranean pottery Charles held up was smooth and subtly decorated. Marks of a culture that could afford, and value, surplus in design. April took the piece of Dumnonian pottery from Mandi and, rather than the tingling ceasing, Mandi felt the ripples released from her forearm and running into the tops of her legs.  

“They are a mystery,” chimed April. “They minted no currency. Built no temples. They lived in dispersed settlements, not even villages. They perhaps had either no, or a very loose hierarchy, were possibly suspicious of displays of wealth…”

“I often wonder,” Charles emboidered, “if one of the reasons there is so little tension with the Romans, for there’s no evidence of them ever fighting each other, is that when the Romans taxed the slightly better off Dumnonii, the other Dumnonii were rather pleased about it! That’s very British isn’t it? We hate success, don’t we! We like to pull down our idols…”

Mandi recoiled a little. She did not hate success, she cultivated and nurtured it. Charlie’s  clichés neutralized her thrilling. She thought momentarily of debating him, but not with April there. She didn’t want to appear too strident in front of her… 

How was April doing this? How could a Right Woman let anyone down by expressing herself? 

The county archaeologist and April continued to explain things to Mandi, but she only heard their words in patches, fragments that she tried to piece together later. She felt herself falling into a spell around April’s voice rather than what it was saying. A mental picture of a Dumnonii who were like proto-hippies intruded. Mandi half remembered the cover of the Incredible String Band’s ‘Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter’ that her adoptive parents had in their room, but seemed never to play; those raggedy folk were Mandi’s Dumnonni now. 

“Fancy a wander?” April asked.

The two said their goodbyes to Charlie, who was poring over some old maps with a group of local volunteers. 

“Have fun, it’s a funny old place this one,” he called as Mandi and April left the dig and started down the lane towards the villages.

“It is a funny old place,” April said to Mandi.

April stopped and began to outline the location of the villages in the distance, identifying them by their church steeples. Then pointed out each one on her ordnance survey map.

“The thing that always gets me with this landscape, is how difficult it is to find your way round. I’ve been coming here for a few years, and I still have to think really, really carefully how to get from, say, Denbury to Broadhempston. Worse still, how to find anywhere in Broadhempston itself! Nine roads in, eight roads out: that’s what they say. I can believe it. Years ago, some ‘League of Gentlemen’ fan scrawled “you’ll never leave” beneath the village sign. These places are so “un-Saxon”, so unconceptual, unpatterned, most of them lack the simple cross layout. And time is really odd round here, too. You can wander these lanes, or doing a bit of field walking, and you’ll utterly lose track of time. And you never see anyone, either…”

“Unless, they’re the hunt policing you…”

“The hunt ‘politing’ you… That was a moment! But there have been other days when I’ve walked here and not seen anyone hour after hour. And then there’s that feeling you get sometimes…”

“What feeling?” 

“Well, more than a feeling, but I’m not sure I know how to… it’s a little weird, I haven’t told anyone this…”

“Go on, you can’t say that and not tell me!”  

The thought that April would confide in her… to have something of her that no-one else had. That was like a relationship thing, wasn’t it? Or a psychopath trophy bodypart collector thing, maybe? Worse, an art collector thing. The squiggle on the pottery was enough for Mandi. She had very little idea of what “relationship” was, other than knowing that she had probably never actually had one. All her ‘relationships’ were events; there was never a longue durée.

“On a few occasions I’ve been walking this place and it’s prompted these… Promise you won’t laugh? The best word I can give you is ‘visions’. It’s not a mystical thing, but I sometimes slip into a dream-like state…”

“It sounds pretty mystical to me.” 

“Shuddup!” Mandi laughed. “Thoughts occur, that’s all. And many of them are of, and this is where you can laugh… goddess figures. Fat, unsexy… according to our values… archaeological artefacts. Sometimes, a bit sinister.”

Mandi did not laugh. She wanted to immediately agree. To wade in and tell April all her visions. To shower her with the details. She held back, stayed cool. Did not want to do that “wow, I get that too all the time, we’re obviously so…” thing.  

“Sometimes they are like the Venus of Willendorf or the Venus of Hohlefels, these huge bulbous figures floating over the fields.”

“No way, I… ” O fuck.

“At other times they are vague feminine forms, shapes in trees that suggest a yoni… you know, those Hindu, yeh…. the trees up on the hill fort are full of them. And then, alongside these figures, I also get the sense of a dragon-like being. Not the Disney, ‘Hobbit’ type, but more like worms, slithery and tentacular.  Moist things I see slipping in and out of the caverns.”

“Freud!!”

“I know!! Whichever one I see, the Venus ones or these creatures, they always end up disappearing underground. And there’s always water. Water seems very significant around here. As if it were exerting a huge influence on the imagining of the place. Does that sound too weird?  It does, doesn’t it? I would never tell Charlie.”

Mandi was quiet. The place was giving rise to identical dreaming. Or April and she were. 

“One line of thought,” continued April, “goes that the Dumnonii get their name from a goddess called Domna or Dumna. Which roughly translates as the goddess of the deep. It could mean deep earth, or it could mean deep oceans. In my most un-archaeological moments, I wonder if I am picking up a subtler trace of something in this place. Something specific to it, its genius loci, a tutelary deity like the Romans had.”

“You think it’s Roman?” 

“No. I think it’s something the Romans might recognize, more than many a modern archaeologist would. Nothing in the standard training suggests giving any credence to fancies like this, but there are phenomenologists, non-representational theorists, it’s not so out there, with the Ley hunters and the earth energy people. I am a human being, I’m here, I’m feeling. If I said I’m an archaeologist, I’m here, I’m analyzing, that would be OK with more people in my field. So I do that. Feeling walks into my work, it does into everyone’s work, but I’m recognizing it, honouring it. I think to myself ‘I know this feeling, I know what this is’. I have to share that. My thinking and writing and publishing and teaching is becoming entangled in the moving of the detail and the vision. But I really worry about it, I try to keep focus, try to hold it all down in analytical patterns; that works most of the time, but some finds, some terrains only open up to feeling. This place is one, I don’t know, you can only go so far with analysis, this place needs something else, but when you go further than analysis can take you, you, yourself, become something else…”

The two walked further, Mandi took a deep breath

“Can I tell you something now?”

“Something nice and straightforward?”

“Well…”

“O…”

Mandi paused, April lent slowly over towards her. Mandi shivered. 

“Look at that again!”

April picked a large white feather from Mandi’s back.

“Ha, now we both have one!”

The strange intensity was broken.

“What was it you were…?”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter now, because, look at that view!”

Mandi and April stood now beneath an old oak at a crossroads. The sun was low in the west. Each, once again, had lost track of time. The fiery sun was painting everything red: the distant church towers, glowing fields of barley, the Great Hill. 

“It’s weird and beautiful,” said April

Like you, Mandi was thinking. She wanted to hold April. Hold her hand, her ear, any part of her. Just to hold on to her before she slipped away. Wrap her arms around her, run her fingers through her hair before she evaporated, like she had in the graveyard. Mandi had not dared to ask April where she had gone. A kiss would not work; she needed a hold, a purchase. Mandi felt a huge pressure on her chest, as if something were pushing right through her from her backbone, a shove as solid as the granite tors. She looked up to where they stood in the distance, the peaks silhouetted in the last of the sunset. She looked about her. Where the hell had they come to? It would be night soon; there were no signs, no one else about, like April said, there was nothing here; just her and April. She couldn’t do this. She was losing her head. 

“C’mon,” said April, “It’s turned. We can walk down to the village and get a taxi from there. I can get a train back from Newton Abbot.  It’s been a lovely day, thank you.”

A lovely day, thank you. Friend-zoned, totally. Why couldn’t she say anything? What the fuck was the matter with her? The village appeared out of nowhere. Pub. Phone. Taxi. She had never been like this with anyone. Nine roads in, eight roads out.  If she wanted something, she always asked and she could always take a “no”. Now, she couldn’t. April’s train pulled out of Newton Abbot; Mandi would rather say goodbye here and get her own train home. April had given her a gentle hug before leaving, and promised to catch up with her soon.  Mandi asked when this might be, and immediately felt like the mostly obviously needy woman ever. April said she would be back down in the Bay area in a few weeks, and would text her. She sat alone on the platform. She could think of nothing but April. She replayed over and over things April had said, for a clue, a sign. It was desperate. “I’ll text you in a few weeks”.  That was not good. A few weeks was an Iron Age, no small nested event.  Pushing things would end in disaster, the knockabout democracy of tiny human beings. “I do like you, but…” She didn’t even fancy April, but she absolutely wanted to connect with her. And the point of which was? 
She reached for her phone, drafted a text to April and deleted it. The station PA announced the imminent arrival of the next train to Exeter; an express going North. April had caught the slow stopper; the express would overtake hers at The Sett. Mandi could catch this one and arrive in Exeter before April. 

The train pulled in, Mandi got on. What was she doing? This was the sort of Hugh Grant thing from shitty 90s romcons before he got caught with Divine Brown at the kerb in LA. She tried to find an excuse – for herself, not Hugh Grant – by replaying April’s descriptions of her visions. If April could describe the same visions as Mandi was having, maybe that was their connection; as characters in a metadrama still in development. She had to alert April, share her visions, tell her about the angels and the sea creature and the kayak and the flotsam shapes. To know if April knew more. If she was infatuated, so what? This went beyond that. This needed to be discussed.  Now.  Not in the next archaeological period. Feelings were a conspiracy, it dawned on her. 

Seventeen minutes later, Mandi disembarked at St Davids Station and hid in St Clements Lane, just outside the Brunel façade. April caught a taxi. Mandi was too nervous to take another and say “follow that cab”. She wasn’t even sure if the drivers would do that anymore. She hung about in the lane, checking her phone; no problem with a signal here. Almost a city. After twenty minutes April posted on Facebook; she was eating out at a vegan cafe, the Well. Mandi took a cab, flashing the café’s homepage. 

During the five minute drive Mandi considered texting April, to say that she was coming up to see her. Passing under a daunting 1960s municipal statue of a saint with a scythe, water bursting from beneath her feet. It was the same as on the Mary statue, when the messiah had tried to kill her. She had no good words, because there was no justification; no way to explain what was happening to her that was not a stupid romantic gesture. She would see the thing through.

The Well had an air of newness; the faces of the customers were bright, but uncertain. There was no routine. The smell of coffee and flowers was strong. Beyond the tables was the old well of pebbly red octagonal sandstone, set within a gaudy installation of plastic plants, animal murals, sparkly pond and glittered rabbits. It made a change from fish tanks and jam jars; not a good one, though. 

April sat at a table, with her back to the door; Mandi went and stood directly behind her, hoping she would turn. 

“April,” Mandi said, her voice stuttering, “I came to tell you something…”

April turned. She didn’t look in the least surprised to see Mandi.

“Pull up a chair, my dear, I wondered when you’d be here. You could have shared my cab.  I’ve ordered you some food, they do a lovely Seitan burger. Do you like…”

“How did you…"
“I just did Mandi. It’s OK. You have come here to tell me about your visions. Your visions of goddesses and angels and monsters. Of course you have.  And you’ve come to tell me that you are strongly drawn to me and that you don’t know why.  And you’ll find it really hard to explain yourself.  I understand. Like when you tried to explain folded time earlier today, and you had started so promisingly... I’m trying to save you time and breath.
Mandi, you’ll make no sense in this conversation, and you’ll end up running out of words. And if I tell you this, right now, hopefully we can sit quietly and enjoy our food? Right?” 

April reached over and took Mandi’s hand.

“Thing is Mandi, things are not as they appear.”

The cafe might have been empty.  Empty of people. Empty of sound. Empty of everything. Everything was now April. She seemed to fill the space into the corners and up to the roof. A feather fell to the table. And then another, and another. 

“I am not as I appear. I don’t only see visions, I am part of them. That’s why you feel you know me, that’s why you feel so strongly connected to me.”
Mandi lifted one of the feathers between the thumb and first finger of her left hand. She held it up to the electric light. In the light it disappeared, in the shadow it was there. 

“An angel?” 

April nodded. 

“How can I be sure that what you are saying is real? Lots of people – gurus and people trying to sell books and conspiracy freaks and deluded people and mystics – they all use language like you; how do I tell if you’re different from the other stuff?’ 

“Would this help?” 

And with a grinding and cracking of bones, a splitting of gristle and a rending of cloth, and a sound like a driving gale, two giant feathered wings spouted from between April’s shoulders and unfolded in great hinged sweeps, sending empty chairs clattering across the cafe floor, customers scrambling for the door and staff cowering behind the counter. No visionary wings, but actual ones. Feathers made of keratin. Wings that worked. They stretched to their fullest extent, sending filigree cracks through the plate glass in the building-length front window, knocking the generic works of the “local painter” askew and sending napkins and newspapers fluttering like small gatherings of white birds. The coffee aroma smelt better than Mandi had ever smelt coffee before; like when you read about coffee rather than drink it. 

April smiled, and gently cupped Mandi’s cheek with her right hand.  

“Sidwella.”

Mandi knew. April need say no more. The table at which they were sitting was swept away. Mandi stumbled backwards. April’s wings began to close and warmth ran through Mandi’s body; the great fans of feathers, bearing many wounds, about to close around her, whisk her away from her quest and transcend its mistakes and wrong turnings. A sharp shining burst of light issued from the chest of the winged priestess; despite its brightness Mandi felt no pain or wish to close her eyes. Instead, she looked into the angel’s eyes, there was no light there, no light of any kind that Mandi recognised; instead there were small wells of darkness like coffee, the best coffee, coffee that was something, coffee that tasted and burnt and fed. Suddenly, the great wings shook like two white waves breaking against the foot of a cliff and they closed, with all their wounds, and a sound like the beating of giant arms upon the surface of the sea. 

“Are you one of the Gurney sisters come back?” 

“We are not envelopes, we are the message.”

“You are their spirits?

“There is no ‘their’ – we pass through ‘their’ and we are the passing through.”

And then she had gone. 

Mandi looked around, expecting to see the cafe returned to normal, but the cracks in the glass were there, the chairs were on their sides, the papers strewn, and the staff beginning to reappear over the counter top. 

She heard April’s voice: ‘They will all tell the story according to their assumptions; some will have seen angry youths, others a raid by criminals, the worst will remember foreigners and unintelligible declarations. Only you saw me. Now you know that I am real, you know how you can see me again.” 
But the angel-priestess had gone. Only her chair, and her untouched cup of black espresso, somehow unspilled, though their table had slid to the opposite side of the room. Mandi waited for the accusations, but April was right; the customers and staff argued among themselves and soon none were sure what they had seen; beginning, even, to blame each other. 

Mandi left three twenties on the counter and picked her way through the disorientated diners. She knew she had to make a journey. Now. There were three white statues in a graveyard. Not so far away; half a day’s walk. But she must find something new, somewhere new. The fourth place on the bonelines map. She had no idea why; the triple-nature of the sisters she had somehow grasped without being able to explain why. But there was something more. A fourth, closer to home.

As she left the cafe:  
​
 “Call the police.”

“A bomb’s gone off!”

 
Chapter 54  
The long grey land was quiet. Only the dry winds whispered and spoke with the sea. In reply barrelling turquoise waves tipped their white peaked caps, but the land, in repose, was silent and still. The sun baked its greyness, but the land held its own. Mountains gleamed and valleys echoed with only a dim innuendo of water far away. If the surface cracked at all, the infrequent storms swept any dust into a hungry expanse of aqua and left the land perfect and barren again. Nothing rooted, nothing moved. 

Beneath the waves the clouds of silt, longing for the bottom, were rarely left in peaceful descent. Long slithering shelled things fought in groping bouts, while heavier complexes clanked about, stabbing their tender-pointed spines at other armoured things. Sex echoed in dull jolts of water; things moved on. These beasts did not know their origins; aliens every one, their parenst were unrecognisable. Their ancestors might be viruses, those aliens over there, or the last thing they ate... It was as if each family, each species could not rest from one generation to another, but birthed monsters every few years; weird things that were monsters even to monsters. 

“It was ever thus” was the thought that communicated itself in the writhing of limbs and the reading of a giant mind that disappeared within them only to rise like a fleshy bulb refusing to flower, age after age, aeon after aeon, generating limbs on limbs, lophophores on lophophores, thinking and thinking, a bubbling, steaming heap of sulphurous sensitivity, a soft city, periodically writhing over an ocean floor at astonishing speed, throwing up clouds of distraction for the giants with tiny scratchy legs, cantilevered jaws and articulated tails. Softness could only prevail by incisive thought and environmental obfuscation; the patterns were laid down, like sediment, by the cephalogods.

Chapter 55
Like a bowed sentinel, the caretaker stood on the dunes and waited for a sign. An hour after giving up hope, but not determination – he knew that hopelessness was the best he could expect from this relationship – the caretaker lowered himself gently into the tall grasses as a single feeler shook itself in the foam at the water’s edge. Its barbs were tangled with fishing line, a tampon applicator, faded crisp packets, kelp, a sprig of sea grass and a length of bright blue synthetic rope. The tentacle thrashed and the detritus was flung about the beach. Then it rose up like a cobra, menacingly. The caretaker knew what this was, and raising himself from his position, setting off orange avalanches, and raced across the hard sand towards the recovered and repurposed art.

The limb glistened; under a gelatinous membrane its colours circulated and its organs winked. It seemed to flop uncontrollably above the mess of flotsam; then with two swipes the lines of barbs flung the parts about and re-entangled them with each other; then the limb withdrew across the sand, through the breaking waves, and back to whatever mass it was a part of.

“I still love you!” shouted the caretaker at the wake left by the limb’s submergence. “I know you are coming! I know you are writing to me! I’ll wait for you!”

The sea was as silent as the Cambrian surfaces, even the tiny waves paused. The millpond sheen was grey and featureless. No dolphins played, no cormorants hunted. Nothing broke the enigmatic dullness. It would not last for long, the caretaker thought to himself. His premonition was shared; shared by the place. The spit where he had stumbled on the mermaid-angel-priestess thing and fallen into its arms, fins, wings and feelers. The sands onto which his daughter has been born. He looked down at the mess of rubbish and pollutant. The message was clear. He looked to the horizon. One more day and then all the power and life out there would come to wash this place away. 

Chapter 57 
 
1352

The priests and monks had appeared as the sun was rising over the Great Hill. The storm from the night before was still washing down the valley and fell in tired sheets over the face of the small cliff. The first smudge of dawn buffed the bright colours of stowaway flowers in abandoned fields. The priests roused the vicar from his cot and dragged him to the small wooden church that was warping already in the first beams of sunlight. Throwing him down at the altar, they insisted on mass immediately; watching and listening like sparrowhawks as he recited the Latin, elevating the host, mixing the cup, alert to any hesitation or alteration from the orthodoxy. The body and blood duly transubstantiated and consumed, the vicar was despatched to the fields to find volunteers – his vestments feared in the fields as vehicles of plague – and an hour later the staggered crossroads that linked the cluster of homes with the farm at Tornewton, the religious house in the valley and the old Roman settlement at Ipplepen was busy with disgruntled but curious labourers, fearful of the arrival of the powerful farmers, already furious and out of pocket with the falling away of labour under the Death. None came. Instead, an enervated priest in cloak and vestments, flanked by broad-shouldered monks in habits and cowls, harangued the men in an untranslatable Cambridgeshire accent about their wives’ devotion to “proud and disobedient Eve and unchaste Diana”, excoriating the men of England in general and the Torbryan labourers in particular for their love of “heathen Latin and Germanic deities”. Then the monks, pushing the Devonian labourers in the back, horded them through the farmstead and past the church to the low and sulky cliff of shining limestone, sparkling in the sunlight, receding to barrenness where it dried, the old Cambrian wasteland returning. In the valley a solitary cow wandered, lost and unattended.

As the men were shuffled off along the valley, their wives and eldest daughters were led, no less roughly, into the church, where, beneath the complaining beams, the vicar demanded confession. The women hesitated, then refused as a weird grumbling grew from within them, ready to blame each other for the sufferings of their neighbours. Their mouths seemed not to move, and yet a chorus of complaint began to fill the dull wooden box. The lower clergy from the bishopric stood guard at the door. Outside, a group of monkish enforcers were preparing the instruments of shaming. A fire was lit and fed from the wooden grave markers in the yard. The vicar insisted and the women stiffened; Catharyne, who was prone to moments of mystical ravishment, fell rigid as a door, crashing to the trampled earthen floor, a trickle of treacly ooze escaping from her rictus. The women began to swirl, like a crowd in a vortex; a dance that decussated the solid form of the church, their feet in swinging patterns, arms aloft and then sweeping the ground, Catharyne stiffly at their centre, as around her the other women flopped and rose with the dry smoothness of slow worms. 

The lower clergy, unnerved, barricaded the door; the monks gathered at the barricade, their scapulas steaming under sun and fire, burning torches held to the sky. When smoke was seen seeping under the door, the clergy tried to dismantle the barricade, but the monks threw the clergy aside and jammed the latch, hurling their torches onto the roof. God would sort out the bones of the priests from those of the witches. Inside, the dance had halted. The women were entranced by the coils of smoke that wove above their heads; they gave a collective sigh; it sounded like resignation, as if they had expected a moment like this.

Barberae, the eldest daughter of the one-armed Loveday and the rigid Catharyne, casually opened the portal that she and few others knew was there, always there, had ever been and ever would be there. The tunnel they would talk about in the pub for centuries, yet never bother to open, too pleased with their tale to live it. Barberae split the boards apart and slipped down between the two layers of the church wall, lowering herself into the darkness, her fingers moulding to the imagined handholds, her prehensile toes reading the smooth and uneven floor like the fingers of a seer. The women followed in a flood. The vicar and the foreign clergy feared to follow into Sheol, rushing to the door where they fought with the monks to loosen the latch; their educated voices too effeminate to convince the monks that this was no female trick. The walls began to burn, the monks began to fear the consequences and planned a local massacre; they could depart the valley silently and discreetly, leaving nothing but misfortune, abandoning one more of the mysteries of God’s taking. He was a shifty, tentacled beast, they knew, but never said.

The women emerged from the darkness of the tunnel into the back of the cave, just as the labourers, under the guard of the cowled monks, hiding who knew what buboes beneath their habits, arrived at the door of the chapel along the ankle-breaking incline. The sickly priest had begun to hand out drills, chisels, wedges and mallets from a pile already in place at the chapel arch. The women flooded around the painted altar and poured out into the valley, dancing and whirling. The monk-police were monetarily nonplussed; the labourers threw up their tools like weapons and the priest staggered. A shepherd from the cliff top howled derisive warnings and Barberae froze his cries with a single stony glance. The Broadhempston boy stood stock still, lost his footing and plunged into the limestone teeth below, a red star on the rock. The monks were galvanised, the labourers confused and their tools dropped to their sides. The priest, seeing a chance, began to yell Latin exorcisms and wave his iron cross.        

Urrsula, the most finely dressed of a rough crowd, commanded the youngest to follow her and they began to march, a procession of girls, backwards towards the stone chapel pillars. Did they think they could hide in the blues and greens of the altar? The working men, a moment before up in arms against the monks, now took orders from them and began to shuffle before the chapel. The priest continued to recite and wave his cross; its metal smelt of blood as it soaked in the acidy sweat of his palm. The women were soon surrounded; their pleas to fathers, brothers and sons falling on frightened minds. The labourers, commanded by the priest, closed in, holding the drills and wedges up before their faces, hiding their shameful excitement. 

Then the desecration began. The men were ordered to the roof of the sacred arch and forced to beat it down with hammers, then to drive their wedges, drills and chisels into the holy orifice itself bringing down shower after shower of limestone chips as the arch to the shrine began to fill up with spill and the oak altar heaved and broke under the weight of falling stone.   

The women churned; they began to dance in a tightness, curling in on themselves, as if they were dragging up a whirlpool in reverse. The priest’s liturgy faltered for a moment; a mere trip upon a difficult word. The formation of women opened like a flower and Eresabet emerged like a pod, opening her serge cote-hardie to reveal a body made of pink roses, drawn by hand in the red of the fields. The village patriarchs and their sons, seeing the drawings, dropped their drills and wedges, scrambled down the cliff and fled, throwing away their hammers and drills as they sped through an abandoned field turning to meadow. The monks gave chase, but abandoned it and instead quickly gathered what quarry tools they could for the battle ahead.       

The oldest of the labourers, last in the retreating mob, cast a glance back to the old grotto and stopped mid pelt, framed by the burning village, and yelled.

“Margrete!”

His eldest daughter, stood with her back to the chapel-cave, her loose cote-hardie flapping like the wings of a strange slug from the depths, her girdle fallen away. Her face transfigured as if she saw a blue heaven in the green field. 

“Margrete!” 

The great neck of arms rolled out from the cave and took her. The writhe of limbs opened up in a maw and sucked her down; her eyes were last to disappear. They left a glint on the sheen of the creature’s hundred tongues; its limbs blushed like flames. The women knelt before the tentacles. A few monks vomited, others fainted away. The wrung priest felt his alb rise, his excited member pushing the tunic material before him. 

The thing spat. The priest shrank back. Many of the women hid their eyes. The priest, his erection withering as quickly as it had risen, expecting a jumble of limbs as oozy and inarticulate as the mound of tentacles, but it was a whole and transfigured Margrete who emerged from the thrashing and gyrating mass. Covered in mucus, she shone bright white in the mid-morning sun, the pupils of her eyes blanched colourless like their orbs, a visionary expression on her face. Her hair gone silvery blonde. 

The priest, tumescent again, edged towards the thing. To him, he imagined, had been given this special moment by God the Father, for He had sent the Holy Womb to be crowned by him, Grimbaldus. Taking a fern he bent its long stem into a rough crown shape and advanced on the writhing, with his left hand stripping off his scapula and tunic and kicking off his chequered shoes. Grimbaldus, with a thin and varicose arm, raised the green crown to the thing; and with an inadvertent shudder the thorny teeth along the sucker pads of its thickest arm reduced the priest to a pile of sullen pieces; his mouth and throat and lungs too slow to cry out, his last words buried under a mound of bits. Elena, the youngest girl there, pressed forward and sifted through the parts of the priest, and finding his metal cross, she lifted it up and shook it at the sun. The thing extended a careful limb, tapped the cross, bathed it in a bluish goo, and then withdrew through the chapel arch and down the throat of the cave, chased by the yelling and singing women, who rejoiced in the cave, though their goddess was gone and they were left to celebrate with a pack of hyenas’ ghosts until the sun fell and they made their way back to their homes and to their frightened men. 

Overnight a second storm broke, and the loosened roof of the cave pitched into what remained of the chapel, bringing down the arch and blocking the entrance, sealing up the hyenas’ ghosts until a few short hundred years later a local boy, a Lyon Widger, lowered himself, despite – or, perhaps, because of – his overwhelming fears of hobgoblins and other enemies of God, and began to, carefully, excavate. On Sundays, the boy would pray hard, straining in his pew to resist the temptation to tell his secret, the one he shared only with The Father on His Throne, fearful of the shapes that were only now re-emerging on the rood screen from under the whitewash of the puritans. Spectrally forming were Saint Catherine prone to mystical ravishment; Saint Margaret, swallowed by a dragon that choked upon her cross; Saint Ursula, a Dumnonian princess who led 11,000 of her unarmed handmaidens against the Huns; Saint Barbara carrying a tiny model of the tower from which she escaped and turned a treacherous shepherd to stone; Saint Elizabeth who opened her robe to reveal a vision of roses and Saint Helena who had found the one true cross under a Temple of Venus in Jerusalem. He particularly avoided the figure of Elizabeth for fear that lust would drag him into the arms of Teignmouth prostitutes and other such demons; but worst was Margaret and the green dragon by her side, tempting him to imagine the saintly woman inside the green and fiery throat, the green sleeve around the pink swollen limb. Passing girls on the lanes all around, in every girl in all the villages about, he felt the drawing of roses and the toothy suckers, far worse than the hairy fingers of hobgoblins or the sweet music of the doom under the fairies’ hill.


Chapter 58
“Let’s try it one more time.” 

“Please! It ain’t workin’, Mandi. If it ain’t workin’ now, it ain’t gonna work, is it, loike?”

“Go on. One more?” 

“Naaah!”

A dullness seemed to hang about the undergrowth. A watery sun barely bled through the shoulder-to-shoulder leaves. There was a bare tightness in the Everglades. No space for anything to get through; even the pores in the tree trunks and moss carpets were closed or jammed with filth. Nothing was emerging. 

“Muddy Mary!”

Mandi tried again. The trees refused to dance. The occasional gusts that ran around the base of the trunks ignored the tops. The louder Mandi shouted the less likely it felt that she could jerk the Everglades. They were resolutely normal.

“Muddy Mary, mother of God,
Killed the Old Boy in his bath,
God went to Hell
And started to smell,
And now all the bad things are back!”

Nothing was back. She tossed a string, feather and twig fetish into the bushes. She had performed all the childish magic that Eddie had remembered, the stuff that worked back in the 1990s. She was unsure if the sickening uncertainty was down to her confusing real memories of what happened with Eddie’s descriptions. Maybe she was trying too hard, trying to push it rather than believe it and let it do its thing. Eddie thought the problem was more fundamental. 

“Yow can’t do ritual whenever yow want! It’s just for its time n’ place!” 

“I thought the whole point of a ritual is that you can transfer it? That’s the whole history of religion and mysticism and juju everywhere!”

“Well, maybe it turns out yow cant...” 

“So, what you’re saying is that everyone who ever started a religion, made a Tarot pack, taught a meditation class, ordained a priest, everyone before us was wrong?” 

“Yep.”

“But this is the place, Eddie!”

“Yeh, but this place moved on, while we was away.”

Somewhere over the railway tracks the frame of one of the rides was creaking. Plugging a gap in the soundscape of the Everglades. When the creaking stopped, it was like the place held its breath, hiding itself, stock still in fear of a passing predator. A car laboured up a hill, distantly. The air above the grove was empty, birdless, an acrid grey had crowded everything out.

“You ‘ave to foind ‘em in their place. When they’re there.” 

“I saw one in a cafe.”

“One what?”

“Angel.”

“There was never any angels. It were much worse.” 

“You haven’t seen these angels! Christ!”

Eddie scowled in disgust. 

“At first I couldn’t stop seeing them. Now, I have to chase them to see them. But I’ve forgotten something. Something I knew when I was a kid. Then I was certain; now I’m.... grasping, snatching at stuff. When I do see something face to face, I worry it won’t show itself again. The more I try and struggle towards them, the further I’m driving them away.” 

“Then stop troying, matie.”

“I think it might be something about... cavities.” 

Eddie laughed, but his yelps of hopeless joy fell dead in the Everglades. 

“Listen, you fuckwit, there was a cave, then in the cafe there was a well, the chapel was like a kind of cave – the tin one with Mary in it – then the mouths with all the teeth, and the teeth being pulled out... that leaves cavities... is there a cavity here?” 

“Yow won’t open it until they want yow tao!”

“A single deep recess where the angels shine with darkness.”  

“Down’t matter ‘ow beautiful yow say it, yow gotta wait for them. Yow won’t call ‘em out!” 

“Jesus. I did my best. I went to where the girls were buried at sea. I nearly drowned myself!”

Eddie took a breath...

“I know, I know!” Mandi interrupted him. “I’m trying to choose it and I shouldn’t. We have to wait, but I don’t think it will be long. I looked up a Nigerian Olokun ceremony. You dress in all enveloping white robes and when the angels come they’re indistinguishable from the women in the robes. So no one knows which is which. They might be here already...” 

Eddie put his head in his hands. 

“They’re not.” He mimed looking about. “See anyfing supernatural?”

 Mandi grabbed up the string, chalk and marbles, thrusting them deep into her pocket. She rubbed away the smeared symbols from the large oval stone and kicked over the model labyrinth of sand. What she had remembered as potent and profound was childish now, and pretentious. Her mouth felt stale from repeating the rhymes. 

“You want to go and get something to drink?”

“Nah.” 

“Why not?” 

“Tomorrow it’s comin’. Yow gonna need yow sleep.” 

“How do you know?” 

“I just dow. It all just happens and all yow have to dow is let it.”
 

Chapter 59
That night Mandi dreamed she was out on the dunes. Some way off the shore, the white snipers were aboard ‘The Loch Ness Cruiser’, leaning over the sides and firing into the water. She could see four white lines of trajectory, like tracer bullets, piercing the blue water and bursting in soft phutts on the ocean floor. Four comic things, like spider crabs, but masked with the faces of C List celebrities, scuttled in confusion. After a while, a tiny plesiosaur, no bigger than a dolphin, floated to the surface, yellowy-pink blood bubbling from bullet holes in its silvery-blue back. The white snipers hauled its cadaver aboard, sat it in a folding chair and began to dress it in the messiah’s clothes, erecting an easel on the deck...     

The moment she woke, she knew they were there. The shapes on the curtains, the feathery silhouettes etched against a watery dawn light, confirming what the dark many-footed head had told her; that the thing deep down in the darkness of dreams had laid things out for her like a map of words, in waves of information. Each gesture of a crab leg, trickle of dolphin blood, line of a bullet’s trajectory had pointed to this. They would be coming; the three, plus one. They would come to fetch her and something final would be enacted. Even in her dreams, Mandi was uneasy with commands and felt her hackles rise. She spoke back to the dark thing, but it silenced her with a twist of its beak; as if to say “even I have no control over this”. 

So, it was with a sense of defeat that Mandi pulled herself out of sleep and went out to meet a determined world. She guessed that the goddesses were unlikely to hang around while she enjoyed a shower; she slipped on her jeans, three tops and her padded jacket, tightened the red laces around her brown boots, swigged some cold tea, pocketed a small banana, and opened the front door. 

She knew approximately what she would see; but nothing could prepare her for the electric presence of all three together. Eight feet tall, another eight feet of wingspan each, Vitruvian women, their giant and single seeing eyes circular and coloured in toy marble swirls, the others milky and tuned within to a vibration longer or shorter than light. The whole of them shone with a self-affirming force. They glowed. Even in the grey light of the dirty morning they found some orange fire; they sparked reflectors on the backs of caravans and discarded drinks cans. The deserted holiday trailers and empty gravel roads, the first measly strings of steam rising from the permanent camp, were set off more brightly by their glimmering splendour.  

The three stood, the cold air shimmering around them; patiently allowing Mandi to do her thing. She was surprised when they spoke. She had expected magical communication, telepathy or something. Instead, they conversed in strong, woody voices, their lips forming the shape of words hypnotically. Mandi followed the movement of their mouths as the speaking shifted from one to another. She had an unfolding impression of the geography of what they were saying; they seemed not to use words to tell a story, but to map out a space and their motion in it. What they said was all about doing and allowing, knowing and being. As they spoke everything else – the gulls, the wind in the wires, the rumble of a bus – fell silent; the only things that mingled with their message were the waves falling against the slope of the beach. A sound that Mandi had never heard this far from the shore.

They set out, Mandi leading. Though she had no idea of how to say where they were going, she knew the way. A curtain twitched in one of the trailers on the permanent camp, a door edged open and two faces, one above the other, eased out nosily. Mandi expected there to be more impact; but when she glanced behind her the angels had folded away their wings, their light was dimmed, and rather than actual Amazons, they looked little different from three tall hikers. The curtain fell back, the door closed; perhaps they had assumed Mandi was redirecting three lost walkers or taking them to one of the camps still renting out. 

Mandi was unclear how she should address the angels. In her head were the images of the three female saints; there was Mary at the chapel, Apollonia with smashed teeth (she had seen her in a dream) and Sidwella from the cafe hiding undercover in April. So, they had names. They also had things; Apollonia a pair of pliers, Sidwella a scythe and Mary a silvery serpent, like a jet of water, which ran beneath her feet. Mandi dared not look back at them again, but she was certain that they would have those things now. Which gave her no comfort at all; for the things morphed into however she was trying to see them. Not that she was changing them; rather, all this morphing was keeping her from knowing who they really were. They were in a constant shuffling; Apollonia’s face reminded her of Jonny; Sidwella’s hand around the scythe had six fingers, then four; Mary’s robe was red one moment and blue the next, her hair a mass of curls and then demure. Yet, Mandi felt no inhibition about their early morning adventure. Instead, there was a kind of pride in marching the three supernaturals along the wide service road between the camps, between their communal buildings, those in a Spanish villa style, others more like Midlands factory canteens, locked up for the winter. The plastic murals of roast dinners shrank back from the angels. Mandi had never been in a gang, not since the Everglades. She had never felt any kind of ‘sisterhood’ with the other women in her business; and she expected neither solidarity nor understanding from them. Even the gym she had joined briefly was too collective for her. Angels, however... with them she experienced a belonging she had not missed until right now. She was infatuated, as she had thought she could only be with April. 

A sulky mist reluctantly raised itself from the surface of the stream that ran along the edge of the Everglades. This was Mucky Mary’s place; and though Mandi feared to look back she could see that up ahead and to the sides something was picking out blue surfaces – a scrap of chocolate wrapper, a top from an Adidas flask, a strip of painted hull leaned against a tarp – and humming with them, jamming their wavelengths so they shimmered against the thick grey-green of the place. Then it all began to seethe; not much, but long enough for the place to show itself. The Everglades was not a simple collection of matters – stream, paths, shrubs, trees and roots, canopy and fence – but a flexing organism responding to its mistress; it was a thing with a dark throat. Mandi suspected that if she looked back now she would see an Everglades Mary, a Mucky Mary, a flurry of leaves and a mouth filled up with fluffy clouds like those puffed up from the stream’s floor.

There was a steady stream of traffic along the Exeter Road. Mandi could tell from the disheartened disinterest of the early morning commuters, caged behind their wheels, even out here their futures in the hands of distant investment managers, that there was nothing they could see – if they saw anything at all but the road ahead – to distinguish the four of them from four women out for a sisterly ramble. How wrong they were. How wrong had she been, she wondered; how many times passing these sororital gangs had she sneered at a supernatural quest? Never she reckoned; if this was happening now and she was not about to wake up in bed in the camp, wonder at the dreamcatchers and put the coffee on, then it was a ‘one off’, a unique event, the exception that improves the rule of the norm. This was all a piece of yeast thrown into the mix to raise things up, put a little space and air into things, but leave them essentially unchanged...

A car swerved across the lanes, almost cannoning into the oncoming flow. It came to rest on the grass verge; the stream of cars paused and then gingerly began to move forward again, bending round skid marks. A hiccup in the spectacle, a tape momentarily caught in the old machine, the picture had flickered. The driver was out of his vehicle, bent over and throwing up into a ditch, his wildly disbelieving eyes were turned firmly on Mandi as she and the three angels slipped across the roundabout, over a stile and – leaving behind a tableau of sleeping motorists suddenly awakened into a dreamworld – dropped down onto the thick grass of the little used public footpath, between two banks of winter-withered nettles. Their passage singed the hairs on the nettle stems. 

Mandi heard three sets of wings unfolding; they flapped against the rows of soggy grass with a squelching sound. The angels began to stride and Mandi was riding a green wave as it swept them along the path. On one side a few solitary figures were strolling tentatively across a giant lawn, hugging cigarettes to their lips, chasing clouds and blearily scouring the ground about their feet. One by one, they picked up their heads and watched the feathery procession move through the stingers, the long hair of the angels lifted in a breeze. A fox fled ahead of them.  As they passed empty skeletons of redundant greenhouses, rampant with brambles, they passed out of the sight of the solitary witnesses on the shaved green. One by one these distant figures extinguished their cigarettes or clicked their vapes, turning slowly back towards the angular white buildings of the forensic mental health facility. Within the caged areas, nothing moved.

It may have been the lingering stigma around psychiatric institutions that had kept Mandi and her childhood pals away from this patch. It was only a short footpath walk and a busy road crossing from the camp, but she had no recollection of ever being close to these fields. For an hour they walked, at first in single file and then side by side; the paths and lanes quiet; almost entirely deserted of humans. Disinhibited, the angels allowed more of their display; their wings spread and interleaved with each other, their useless feet dragging along the road as they slid rather than walked. Twice, at junctions, they saw the rears of disappearing lorries, but there was only one moment when a vehicle passed them on the lane; a white van driven by a woman. Mandi and the angels stepped back onto the muddy verge around a field gate, the supernaturals made little attempt to hide their selves. The driver seemed to awaken and stare, but did not stop; correcting a slight swerve the van hurried on around the next bend and rumbled out of hearing. Something to be filed under ‘one of those funny things’. 

The land here was of the same prehistoric shape as that around the Lovecraft villages. There were no Saxon villages with solid groundplans clustered around a green, a church, a crossroads and a square. Instead there were isolated homesteads, lodges that had become detached from their big houses, one with odd figureheads – a female accompanied by a winged sprite with its bow and arrow primed, a leaping furry thing with a beak for a muzzle – another named after a pilgrimage. On some of the houses there were plasterwork finishes like woven baskets; remnants of old patterns that elsewhere had long ago been replaced. There was also a kind of green misery; bright nitrogen fields dulled in the grey light of the morning, punctuated by redundant concrete structures overwhelmed by yellowish lichen and guarded by long abandoned caravans and railway trucks, all bathed in the same green-greyish slime.  

Looking back towards the secure facility, flanked by trees at the top of a rise was an elegant water tank, its blackness standing out from the shadows, flashes of silver insulation winking from its belly. Redundant now, surely; it stood sentinel-like, gazing malevolently, exquisitely surplus. Before it the sloping and rolling fields a loaded emptiness; everything was waiting for something else. Ancient expanses that had once supported the tramp of giants; indifferent even to the passage of angels. Mandi was furious with the fields; how dare they not even notice. The only things that seemed to have any respect were the pylons, stretched out in a swinging line, from which the flat ranks of forestry had stepped back and left huge corridors. Paths criss-crossed like swollen veins. And then they found the trees. 

There was no introduction, the hedges did not give way to unveil them. But for a break in the brambly weave of a badly thrashed old cut and lay to allow for a vertiginous stile she might not have noticed them at all. The angels, however, could see over the hedges. Mandi heard their sudden shaking of feathers, saw the bursts of illumination from their chests and limbs; there was an agitation in the milky maelstrom of their inner eyes.
“This is the Vale Without Depths”, said Mary, “there is no way here, only a surface.” 

“What you see is what you get?” prompted Mandi. 

“These are the old places, but there was never a cave or a well here. We left such places to the rain.” 

Mandi wondered whether they had kept her away, until now.

“Why here, then?”

The feathers rustled impatiently. The three were already in the field, hovering; leaving Mandi to lever herself like a clumsy crab.

“The springs come on higher ground,” said Sidwella.

They were magnificent. Upwards of thirty twisted colossuses in two sets of parallel lines; a pair of illogical arboreal avenues. These ancient chestnuts were mostly dead, though; a few buds here and there and a ring of suckers around one of the giant crumbled trunks hinted at the lasts throes of a life that was almost gone for good. What must they have looked like once? Yet, Mandi thought they were still pretty sick, as big as electricity pylons, gnarly tower blocks of contorted wood, a spread of dark claws against the steely sky, serpent branches and python-boughs with leathery bark disturbed in ripples. One beast had fallen entirely, its broken boughs reaching out in smooth tentacles, the bottom of its trunk embroidered with torn roots, ripped from the field, a giant cephalopodic maw, awrithe with teeth and feelers and hunting blindly. A few cows, dwarfed, mooched about in the mud; a travesty of whatever grandness was intended once. Coach paths to a missing palace? Wooden corridors, a prelude to paradise gardens, or a manor replete with hidden rooms, priest holes, ice houses and larders hung with maggoty game? Yet there was nothing but a modest farmhouse; old, but no stately home. The landscape made no sense at all; it had been pulled awry. 

The angels were floating back to the road. Mandi had no intention of letting them out of her sight; scampering across the slippery grass and over the stile. She snagged her jeans; turning for a moment to free them from a superfluous metal hinge, she saw the cyclopean ancients shuffle back into languor, extinguishing flashes of ire. Had she disturbed something that should be fixed? If there were no depths, how did the trees stand? By the time Mandi caught up with the angels, her questions were shrouded, there was a turning in the lane; on a corner, yet another lodge and a side road that shortly ran into multiple signs printed on newly laminated boards demanding privacy and threatening dogs running loose.

Mandi had a feeling of dreadful foreboding mixed with a want that was uncomfortably unintellectual; she had to be here, she had to do this. In real life she would have turned this down, as she had done with plenty of other poisoned chalices; indeed plenty of poisoned vessels far less glamorous than chalices. No, she felt it in her, in her liver, in her kidneys. Something was coming, as unstoppable as a storm, and she must be there to endure it, to find shelter in its eye.

“We must hurry”, said Mary. 

“Why don’t you three fly?” Mandi suggested.

“The journey not the arriving”, said Sidwella. “A pilgrim believes that at the shrine they will change, but when they get there they discover it is the road that has already changed them.”

 “We are spirits of place”, added Apollonia, “we drag the caves, wells and springs, chapels and groves. Detach us from our grounds and you reduce us to saints.”

As if to emphasise the point they paused at the gate and gazed, with glassy eyes, down the valley that stretched away from the hidden hall. Mandi only noticed now how high they had climbed on the narrow lane. At the bottom of the vale, a few scattered homes and the outline of a large walled garden marked the transition to the flatter and emptier fields, the demesne without pores. Close to the bottom, a sweeping expanse of meadow blipped; a green shape like a giant upturned soup plate, unnaturally smooth. Something dug and then rounded by the long, long years; something at odds with the formalities of the secret garden; sat side by side, a contradiction in the landscape that it was still working out. The place’s delays and prevarications were finally coming to an end.

Beyond the flat grey-green fields, above the next lip of ground before the sea, a gargantuan purple cloud was reeling towards them, gathering height and darkness as it came. The lodges, lanes and avenue of trees were disappearing under a creeping shadow. The small trees to the side of the vale began to shake, and farther off the trunks of the almost dead giants howled and creaked. The angels swept urgently through the gate, Mandi in pursuit.       

Mandun Hall was unveiled behind a windbreak of tall thin trees. 

Mandi abruptly felt the loss of her adoptive parents; her ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’. At first she thought it was the sight of the Hall that had somehow frightened her; a wave of something bad sweeping up through her legs and into her chest, spreading its fingers around her heart and squeezing until she wanted to bend over in pain. But it was not fear; it was grief. A tall grey slinky grief that amazed her, a lithe and striking thing sashaying up the path, lashing out and into her. 

She was not their flesh, but she felt them now as part of hers; she felt their arms picking her up after a fall, on her tongue she tasted the vegetable soup they always served, her skin goosepimpled under the rough woolly shapeless things they gave her to wear, and deepest of all she felt the shameful guilty protectiveness they had always placed around her, the brittle wall they put between her and the world, she felt its pieces buried into every part of her, the sharp pins of bitterness that poked every time she thought of them. She embraced even her resentment of them. She had had to smash through their butterscotch wall, she had had to leave them, get away from them, not just from the restrictions but from them; yet she could not help loving their memory, pulling their spectres toward and into her, embracing the essence of them and knowing that they were good people who loved her.     

Then she noticed the teeth of the angels; the ruined city skylines from apocalypse movies barely standing beyond their bruised lips. 

“This place incubates spectres,” warned Mary. 

“That is not what you think it is,” said Apollonia, looking at her with a burning eye.     

And the grey thing spasmed and left her, limping back along the path to the Hall. Mandi felt it leave, as if she were flushed of something alien, could see clearly now, things sharpened into focus around her. She had been living in the past, just playing tough in the present without actually being in it. No wonder she was so indestructible; she had not even been there to get hurt. 

Sidwella looked hard at her, as if she knew that Mandi’s revelations were bullshit.

Her sudden becoming present – to the green of the lawns, the yellow of the sandstone, the footprint of the gardens as sharp as HD – came with a flood of vulnerability. Now she was in the here, stepped through the door of now, everything would wound her now. Mandi the armoured one had fallen apart at her first brush with fake grief; it did not bode well for the battle to come. The angels’ only human warrior was a born-again ‘snowflake’.

The front fell off the building.

“That was quick”, thought Mandi. 

It was like the destruction of the Chapel of Eve and Diana... Mandi shot her angel a glance, but Sidwella’s wings were pricked in concentration on the innards of the Hall. The stone hacked and the arch undermined, the mouth closed up. What invisible miners had the three angels employed; but when she turned to ask them, they seemed perplexed and were picking their way carefully, in the clouds of dust, towards the rubble piled around the formerly grand front entrance, its ornamental pillars now fallen into a wonky ‘X’.

The ripples of the monstrous “crack!” were still running down the valley sides. A great cloud of sediment was pouring from the opened rooms of the Hall and rising into the sky. It drew Mandi’s eye upwards, and for the first time she could see, high up, a grid of buzzards, picking at the fringe of which was a herring gull, snapping at the tail feathers of one of the hovering raptors. The attack pulled the grid out of shape for a moment, and then, the gull repelled, it snapped back into place. Inside the Hall, white-coated figures and disoriented men in business suits staggered over upturned chairs and broken workstations; exposed to the vista they emerged from the dust and then, after a glance, withdrew, choking, back into the haze. Mandi followed the angels up the heap of broken lintels, crumbled plaster, ripped wood and torn wallpaper, trailing behind their giant bounds. By the time she had made the top of the pile, the angels were on their way down the long hall and Mandi sprinted after them. She was quickly on her own; suddenly aware that she was among enemies. 

A light haze hung about the upper reaches of the tall corridors. Temporarily deserted, Mandi scoured the place for possible weapons. Possible weapons? Angels? The front of a stately home falling off? The weapon she needed most was some kind of retreat; but no, Mandi did not do rehab. Mandi won, Mandi survived, Mandi prevailed. On her own.

There was surprisingly little that she could find in the Hall. She had expected the Hexamerons’ HQ to be full of antiquities, treasured objects from their long years of failure and resilient eccentricity, but there was nothing but chandeliers, arsenic-green wallpaper and long Persian carpets. No cabinets of curiosities or framed portraits of their leaders. But for the floating debris, it might have been a property prepared for sale.

“There she is!” 

Mandi stepped back into a room and ran through door after door, in a movie that had run out of ideas. The deeper into the house she got, the less like a deserted mansion and more like a company the place became. Soon she was dodging workstations and water coolers; she took a chance and slipped inside a service lift, clearing the fallen hatstand jamming the doors, she pressed the button for the top floor. The motion of the lift stopped, but the doors stayed shut. Mandi hammered the ‘open’ button and the doors creaked apart. 

Other than a few pillars supporting its false ceiling, this whole floor of the mansion was a single open room. Mandi felt its chill. She could still just about make out the formerly ordered ranks of servers that had stood here, but there were other things. The viewing devices like digitised camera obscura for observing the manipulated flocks of birds, and trading desks like those Mandi had seen in The City. Now, the whole place was wrecked; something had been amongst it, got into it, smashed it and soaked its electrics in a transparent ooze. The servers were fallen, their ventilators shut down; outer casings were ripped open and dripping with a membranous goo, cables were thrown into spaghetti piles and soaked in thick gobbets of muck. But there was something else there that was not the work of whatever – and Mandi had a pretty good idea what that whatever might be – had destroyed the things; for along with the recognisable machine parts and electronics, the spilled motherboards and trampled flash drives, there was an organic stratum that was different from the gelatinous residue of its nemesis. 

The harder Mandi looked, the more she could see a machine that was partly made of a kind of orchid that imitated a wasp; that what had been gathered here was not simply information, but DNA. Mandi knew they had hers; stung in the shadow of the Great Hill; she had been harvested. Floral and digital technology combined; and crushed with a watery goo. Petals bent and broken, processors embedded in the carpets, a set of speakers torn, a memory stick – “BIRDSONG” in indelible marker – sat in a pool of funk. What had they been making here? Had the Hexamerons saved something from the nurseries of their old members, the Veitches and the Luccombes? 

“Life”, said Mary. “Of a kind. What you create, you control. That is why saints and angels suffer.”  

“I can’t see any control here, I can’t see any plan at all,” Mandi complained. 

“This is but the surface of the machine; it runs through all the floors and into the foundations, out along the fields; the birds and wasps are its evangelists among the lanes and hedgerows.” 

“But what did the Hexamerons get from it?”

“You don’t get it, do you?” chastised Apollonia. “The Hexamerons do not operate the machine, they are not even the servants of the machine...” 
“They have become machines!” guessed Mandi.

“No, far worse! The Hexamerons are the sexual apparatus of the machine, they are nothing more than its bio-prosthetics...”

“So,” Mandi interrupted the angel, “all those ideas, evolution, race, science, spiritualism...?” 

“Scripts written by a keyboard without the help of an author.” 

Apollonia waved a wing in a gesture figuring helplessness. 

“True believers become the pattern of what they believe; what had seemed and felt to them like a leap of faith, turns out to be a murderous push from behind.”

Those who had believed themselves to be the spiritual fathers of the messiah-machine had turned out to be the mechanics of their own shabby affair.   

“Those of us who have taken shape in the medium of religious discourse have grown to understand that belief is a work, not an acceptance. Those who accept god have not raised themselves from human to angel, but lowered themselves from angel to human.”    

The room of servers – so broken now – had replaced the desks of the automatic writers and interpreters of the classical allusions of the dead who had once frequented Mandun Hall; their mummified bodies were preserved in the back rooms that Mandi had failed to reach, surrounded by a few discs to which their yellowing records had been committed. Stooping to magic in order to defy the cosmic chaos they had hated and fought for centuries, from the earliest days of their involvement in scientific palaeontology and the destruction of Christianity to their patronage of ‘beyondist’ eugenics in the twentieth century, the Hexamerons’ machine was the ultimate expression of their plans, the kerygma of their rationalist religion. It was a mechanism to subject human peccadillo and perversity to the symmetries of Platonic plantation and information harvest; but it had fallen foul of the necessity for mimicry. Unable to siphon perfect order from the stank and funk of matter; in order to raise the material to the ideal, it had become necessary to construct a vehicle of such mimetic intervention, to give nature a nudge, so that lesser races might be raised up by invasion, lower classes elevated by correct teachers and the most distracting role models. Lost in an orchid forest, they had been stung by their own intentions. A philosophy of non-interventionist evolutionism had drawn them, absurdly, into interference at the cellular and synaptic levels, in political alliances with insects and birds. Confusion, even, had been recruited to their cause; and now they had goaded the Beast of the Deep to rise and destroy their toy. And that she had.

Mandi remembered the words of the green undertaker, about the illusory nature of belief becoming a kind of belief in itself. Trapped under a collapsed desk, one of the Hexamerons’ programmers wheezed out a cry for help. Kneeling by her side, Mandi held her hand. “You invented and built and programmed it,” she mused over the woman, “but you are no more than the dull impulse to survive that it needs to maintain itself.” 

The woman, uncomprehending, lapsed into unconsciousness. 

“Have we won?” asked Mandi. “Have they all run away?” 

“They have not begun to fight.” 

“Then what has happened here?” 

“The servers? That devastation was the work of the goddess of the deep”, explained Mary. “But this is not her place, she cannot have a victory here; this is their place and she has driven them from it; that is the most she can do.” 

“Where are they?” 

The angels shrugged and flounced from the room of servers, Mandi jogging behind them, down three flights of ever widening stairs until she was picking her way around fallen plaster and moaning Hexamerons and out through the grand hallway and onto the gravel path, framed with borders of purple-blue Asters. Mary, Sidwella and Apollonia paused at the top of the stone staircase to what had been the grand entrance; they had folded their wings behind their backs and were gazing over the vista, down to the valley below. Apollonia swung her pair of pliers by her side, Sidwella shouldered the scythe and the watery snake that seemed always to play about Mary’s feet had been joined by a deep pink rose and thorny stem. 

Beyond the angels, where the Asters ran out, stood a small group of suited Hexamerons. Mandi recognised the Chairman from the meeting at the Bay Museum; she noticed for the first time the black disc badge that he wore on his lapel. His tweedy three piece and the staid sports jackets of his supporting tyros, inverted red triangles on their lapels, at odds with the samurai swords and machetes that dangled from their hands. They were flanked on one side by a number of ‘POLITE’ men and woman from the hunt, mounted on huge horses, brandishing cattle prods instead of lances. Hounds swarmed around the legs of their mounts, and around the pack clustered young execs and CEO’s some on horseback and in hunting pink, others in paintball camouflage gear. On the other side, the white snipers, masked and nonchalant, toted TAC-15 crossbows. A group of Hexameron elders had fallen to one knee, raising identical handguns – Mandi doubted they had licenses for them – compact Glock 19s by the look of them. Behind the leaders stood the ranks of their forces, assembled in the estate’s grounds ranged between the Capability Brown lollipop trees and atop the raised mound Mandi had noted on her way in. 

They were a strange confabulation; their absurdity made them all the more scary. As if someone has assembled all Mandi’s childhood fears and called them up for a reunion. 

The ghoulish female mummies of the Hexamerons’ automatic writers lined up alongside the turncoat Grant Kentish and his straggling band of Bank Holiday sensualists; surrounded by the rather more daunting thousand-strong ranks of Bulwer-Lytton’s subterranean ‘coming race’ – blanched giants glowing with auras of Vril – and a sordid alliance of Necroscopes and Wamphyri Lords. Despite their obvious supernatural talents, these were all outnumbered and outbullied by a massive ghostly Saxon army of bigoted soldiers convinced of their moral superiority, stretching beyond the cluster of village hall and secret garden. Led by a cavalry of Angle nobles, Saint-King Athelstan the ethnic cleanser of Exeter rode at their head, preceded by a large detachment of junior priests and servants brandishing a thousand holy relics including a piece of the still smoking Burning Bush, enough pieces of the true cross to build a galleon, two skulls of John the Baptist (one as a young boy, the other the one presented to Salome) and Longinus’s spear of destiny, with an honour guard of Bund Deutscher Mädel, still dirty with pig’s blood. The nitrogen green of the fields was hidden by all the flags and uniforms. On the fringes – policed by hi viz yellow tabarded security guards – skulked denizens of the Nihils of Tarturus who had armed themselves with portable amps and speakers, while spreading across the fields, beneath the electricity pylons and to the tops of the rise that hid the view to the sea, were zombie-armies of employees, in office skirts and tops and warehouse overalls, conscripted workers of the Hexameron bosses, bewildered, cold, chattering and unbelieving of their orders; confused about their evacuation and the talk of flooding and storm and the faint unreality of what they could see in the distance around Mandun Hall.

Mandi could see that the lanes were crammed with works vans and employees’ vehicles and more were arriving every minute, filling up the far fields, while above, despite the breaking of the Hexameron machine, the grid of buzzards was now complemented by sweeping murmurations of starlings and a surveillance flight of parakeets, under a mountain range of barrelling purple-black clouds.

“Holy crap”, breathed Mandi.

“Speaking as a martyr”, laughed Sidwella and smiled at Apollonia, “it’s nothing more than we have come to expect.”

Under the darkening sky the phones of the employees began to flicker like an incoherent congress of fireflies; then they seemed to jolt collectively and, irrespective of pencil skirt or blue overalls, the employees began to form up in phalanxes, more orderly than the Saxon spectres. Had the pylons just moved? Mandi was unsure whether the pylons were mere bystanders or part of the troops ranged against her and her angels. 

“Why me?” she whispered to herself. 

It all took her aback.

“They are still communicating,” she said to the angels, desperately. 

“Don’t make the same mistake as Her, Mandi.” Sidwella looked remarkably like April now, despite the feathers and scythe. “The Hexamerons long ago transferred the software to their followers’ phones.”

“Mistake? I thought that She... if you mean who I think you mean... but...”   
     
“She is a very old thing. She makes mistakes. Your Mother doesn’t understand apps.” 

Chapter 60
At Lost Horizon, with the storm rising, the caretaker was ushering the last residents away to higher ground. Their vans, mobile caravans, kooky Beetles and antique hatchbacks were overloaded with their prized possessions. The caretaker stood sentinel as the carnival of retreat wound its way out of the camp, along the main road, past the bending trees in the Everglades and then up the hill towards higher ground. They were joined by similar, if less esoteric, processions as the local authorities moved to respond to the urgent emails from the Met Office. The less popular sites away from the coast were suddenly doing good business.

The final vehicle paused at the gate; an Iveco LWB. The passenger window wound down with an electrical whirr. Mimir tried to lean over from the driver’s seat, but Cassandra pushed him back.

“You know that we know about you,” she said, shouting above the howl of the wind, “and that we frittered away our chances, but...”
She shot a guilty glance at Mimir before continuing. 

“He’d come with you now, if I let him. He always wanted to do what you’re going to do. But I was always too close to being poor to dare to take the risk and do what I believed in. What if none of it’s true? That’s what I kept saying to myself. How much have we really seen? That we couldn’t explain?”
The caretaker was reactionless.

“Maybe you never needed to? Being a professor... Anyway, we thought we better let you know that we know what you’re up to. We can guess now who you might be! Well, good luck, may Pan and all the others be with you, Christ you’re going to need them, man! Anyway, thanks for organising our safety. And whatever happens you can go knowing you did well by your girl; she’s going to be wonderful, you know. You can feel proud.” 

“Thank you.” 

 “Scared?” 

“Happy to be going home. When you’ve been... down to the deep, once, it’s hard to live in the shallows. I was never really happy after that. I came back here, just to be close again. Just on the off-chance, but tragedy has brought us together.” 

“There’s no tragedy. Everything is intended.” 

“Not everything. Beauty just happens. Shit just happens. No god, no conspiracy has any hand in it. It just is. That’s who I am going to meet now... again – a terrifying and shitty beauty that just wonderfully is.” 

“She loved you, you know. I saw how she looked at you.” 

“Amanda?”

“Yes! Who do you think I mean?”   

 “Sure, sure. I wish I could have said ‘goodbye’ properly. Explain to her, will you?”

“She’s not stupid. I think she knows that you did.”

“Yes.”

He looked at his feet. Cassandra’s work done, she pressed the switch and the window slid back into place. Mimir saluted and gunned the big white vehicle, swinging it into the road and chasing the tail of Lost Horizon up the hill towards safety. The caretaker watched the van, increasingly startling under the darkening sky until the last of its shimmer disappeared around the brow. He looked down again. A shallow body of water had crept around the welts of his boots; its edge, pushing tiny twigs, leaves and scraps of discarded wrappers. It was coming quicker than he expected; but more importantly, it was coming.

Splashing through the gently foaming flood, the caretaker ran to the far edge of the camp, to the summertime mobile homes nearest the sea, and levered himself onto the flat roof of the furthest one. From there he could see over the railway tracks, and beyond the dunes to a wrestling sea that had already overwhelmed the sandy spit. The gale caught in the white burst of his hair. The force that had once swept sixty houses off their blasphemous foundations was coming back for the dune; the breakers so mixed with sand they crashed into the lagoon like slithering dolphinsTumbling in their rolling spume were cuboid gabions of wire and rough cobblestone. The most radical of human efforts had been disposed of in seconds. The rangers’ hut was thrown up and smashed, a suspension of splinters hung briefly in the air before being swept away by the racing winds, thrown like darts into the rising bayou. The caretaker, his hair plastered to his skull, could barely stand. His clothes, soaked with spray, ballooned, filled with wind; he unbuttoned his jacket and overalls to stop himself from floating off like a rogue inflatable. The flapping garments whipped him mercilessly. It was not the calm demise he had hoped for. 
​
With a bitter effort, the caretaker shook his eyes from the rising waters around him, empty mobile homes pulling free of their electrical moorings, permanent homes sparking and emitting small puffs of smoke that were swiftly ripped away by the gale. Further down the coast, despite the dampening of the waters of the estuary the rising flood had already underdug the track ballast of the railway line; rails and sleepers swung above the gaping chasm like the set of a bad jungle movie. The caretaker had expected something more spectacular and less relentless; one giant wave rather than this bully’s pummelling. The metal shell of an amusement parlour folded up like a crumpled paper cup and games machines were swept down the path towards the dodgems. A following swell lifted the giant concrete skull from the pirate-themed crazy golf course and buoyed it up for a few moments before it broke and sank, torn wire rigging and cracked mannequins sucked down with it.  


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