Page 4 of The Start of the Story
‘Where’s Professor O’Keefe?’ I asked the nearest, a capable-looking girl wearing a Barbour with the sleeves rolled up.
‘He’s late,’ she said, looking me up and down. ‘I expect he’s on his way. Who are you?’
I walked over to the Fairy Stane. It lay, innocently attracting moss and lichen and half-overgrown with reedy grass, flat on itsface on the moor, which was exactly where Professor O’Keefe would find himself if he dared touch it.
‘I’m the person who’s here to stop you,’ I said, and sat down, very firmly, on the stone.
‘Stop us doing what?’ The girl looked confused.
‘Lifting this stone.’ I drew my knees up under my chin and tried to look as though this was the sort of thing I did all the time.
A young man wandered over, his hair tumbled around his face by the breeze and a sparse beard decorating his lower jaw. ‘I thought we were here to try to suss out the likelihood of a Roman settlement,’ he said, trying to hold his hair back with one hand. ‘Prof didn’t say anything about stones.’
‘That’s because I’m still making my mind up.’ The Irish accent told me who it was, even though I couldn’t see on account of my view being blocked by students and my own knees. ‘Weighing up our options, you might say. Hello, Dr Thorpe, you all right down there, now?’
‘Fine,’ I replied tightly.
‘Well, then. We’ll go over here and talk about Roman topography, shall we? So we don’t interrupt your… sitting.’
He waslaughingat me. The bastard, the smooth, Irish bastard, was laughing at me! Not with his face, of course, he was too clever for that, but he displayed his amusement in the way he stood, and even his words had held that little swing of irony that let me know he found me funny.
Well, let him. He could laugh all he wanted. What hecouldn’tdo was lift my stone. Especially not with me sitting on it.
The moss that formed little cushions on the stone’s surface held a surprising amount of water, which was now making its way through my jeans. I ignored it and tried to pretend that I came out this way for a quiet sit on it all the time. I leaned back on my elbows and stared up at the sky, which didn’t give me much to focus on apart from a few dots of birds gathering for lateemigration and some ominous-looking clouds fluffing up the horizon. The emaciated grasses that prodded their needle tips around me prevented me from seeing where the professor and his cronies had gone, but I could hear the echo of voices on the wind: laughter and a brogue that broke over words in an unusual way. Casually, and because I didn’t have anything else to think about, I wondered whether he spoke Irish.
Then I wondered whether it was going to rain, because I didn’t have a coat on, just my ‘sitting in the office trying to look smart’ jacket.
Then I wondered what was making that particular scuffling noise in the grass behind me. I didn’t mind mice, there were enough mice at the cottage, but I wasn’t overkeen on rats.
Then I wondered why it had gone so quiet, and stood up.
The bastard had gone, as had all the students and the cars that had been parked in the lay-by. Only mine stood there now, solitary and distant under a rapidly greying sky. I wondered how I hadn’t heard them all leave, although the wind blowing from the moor meant that, if they’d come off the moor from a different direction, I probably wouldn’t have heard the engines start.
I brushed myself down awkwardly. My bottom was soaked from the mossy sponges I’d been sitting on and one of my feet had gone to sleep. Beneath me, the stone lay bland and stretched like a sunbather on a beach. Featureless, just another lump of millstone grit, the same as most of the boulders and rocks dotted around this piece of moorland, different only because of the regularity of its sides. Four feet by two, the dimensions were imprinted in my mind, I’d read them so many times in the stories that gave the place its name and reputation. Four by two. Too regular to be natural. A stone covering the entrance to fairyland. It was said – those words that led me into much of my research – that if you lay down at midnight and put your ear to the stone, you could hear the fairies partying away down in thedepths. I was halfway through a rather neglected piece of work for a folklore magazine about the loose connections between fairyland and hell and the associated tales.
All was quiet and still around the stone now. No signs of fairies, partying or otherwise. Not so much as high-pitched singing or the buzz of tiny wings, unless you counted the lone bee, trundling its way through the last of the heather flowers with the determination of a shopper at the final sale of the season.
The first spots of the rain that had been bubbling under the horizon began to fall.
‘Ah, you’ll be heading back now, then. Can I beg a lift?’
The voice came from behind me, where the moorland devolved into bog, and tussocks jutted out from waterlogged soil, unnaturally green. I didn’t turn around.
‘Can’t you go back the way you came?’
‘Not really, no. And you and I ought to have a word, unless you intend to live on that stone for the next six months.’ Connor O’Keefe moved around to stand in front me, his big black coat billowing in the wind so he looked like a buccaneer on the deck of his ship, stubbled and with the breeze pulling his hair back. He’d done it deliberately, I knew, and I guessed that the windswept piratical look usually had the girls falling at his feet.
‘I’m not going back to York,’ I lied. ‘I’m driving over to Glaisdale. I want to take some pictures of a farm that featured in some stories I’ve been recording.’ I gathered my jacket more closely around me. The rain was beginning in earnest now and the mossy damp had got right through my jeans to my buttocks.
‘All the better. More time for us to talk,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I think you may have got the wrong end of the stick somewhere along the line, Dr Thorpe, and I don’t want you to be giving yourself the pneumonia sitting out here on that stone worrying I’m going to do the dirty and lift it without telling you.’
It had been beginning to dawn on me that I couldn’t, realistically, sit on the stone forever, and that I was going to have to find a more practical solution to the Fairy Stane problem, so I let him fall into step beside me as I turned to head back along the path to my car. I figured there was no point in giving permission, he was going to come anyway, and this way I could always throw him from the moving car.
‘I tried to get your mobile number from your assistant,’ Connor went on, monologuing relentlessly in the face of my silence. ‘To her credit, she refused to give it to me.’
So, that had been why Chess had been ringing me last night – to tell me he’d asked. I should have answered the phone, then I could have used all my saved-up invective.
‘Good,’ I half grunted. I wanted to think about what to do next and this man and his talking were getting between me and the peace and quiet I needed.
