Page 60 of The Start of the Story
‘Still only a place to come. To remember.’ Eamonn’s tone was very even, his voice level, but I suddenly had a tremor of intuition. They were having a conversation about something that had been discussed, and I didn’t know what that was.
‘If you lie here at midnight…’ I began.
‘You can hear the fairies under the stone,’ Connor finished. ‘The Little People, partying away. And what do you think that might be about, Rowan?’
I put my hands on my hips. ‘Well, the theory that the fairies might be a folk memory of the earlier peoples of the British Isles has been more or less discredited now. So we’re left with wondering whether they’re a common myth to make sense ofvarious meteorological phenomena or a completely contrived creation for some reasons that we don’t yet understand.’
Eamonn was staring at the stone, his eyes very dark. Connor stood next to him, taller and wirier, but his eyes were also fixed on the slab of gritstone, as though it meant something to both of them.
‘The little people,’ Eamonn said, quietly.
I had a tingle of foreboding. ‘Is this where you perform some ritual and call elemental beings into life?’ I asked, only half joking.
‘He’s a fecking priest, not Aleister Crowley,’ Connor observed mildly. ‘And anybody less likely to perform any rituals you’re never going to see.’
‘Mass is ritual, Connor,’ Eamonn said, not looking away from the stone.
‘Oh, well, if we’re going to bring religion into it…’
‘Will you two stop bickering and tell me what’s going on?’ I used my best ‘getting Chess to do some work’ voice. ‘We’re clearly not up here for our health, and, as we’ve brought a priest with us, I’m guessing there’s a bigger reason for all this than just a nice walk.’
Both of the men looked at me wearing identical expressions of sorrow and sympathy. Connor put an arm around my shoulders. ‘What do priests do, Rowan?’ he asked me, so gently that I began to really worry that the stone was about to split and reveal a Creature from the Pit.
‘They pray,’ I retorted.
‘And?’
‘And exorcise. If that’s why we’re here then I need to go home and get some better underwear on because I amnotwearing my Banish All Evil knickers today.’
Connor snorted and Eamonn looked over his shoulder at both of us, rolling his eyes.
‘Not even a suspicion about what might have gone on here?’ Eamonn asked Connor, nodding in my direction.
‘No, but she’s folklore, not history. Folklore tends to deal a little more with theconjecturalside of things. I’m on the bricks-and-mortar side of the old speculative razor wire.’
‘Show me where you dug.’ Eamonn moved around the edge of the stone and Connor followed him, pointing at the soft ground slightly off to one side, where the boggy, reedy soil did show signs of disturbance and there were still small piles of snow melting slowly in their heaps.
I marched up and caught Connor’s arm. ‘You dug? You didn’t tell me you were digging.’
There was an almost unbearable expression of sympathy on his face now. As though there was some terrible, dreadful secret that the two of them knew – that the wholeworldknew – and I wasn’t in on it.
‘I did tell you I’d been up here, scrabbling about, when I walked up, in the snow. And, to be honest, a bit before that, when I still thought the stone could be a Roman marker. I just did a wee bit of poking around under the edge there.’
‘But…’ I was too confused to be truly annoyed. ‘But this ismystone!’
‘I think…’ Connor led me gently away from where Eamonn was crouched now, pulling at the roots of some reeds carefully and staring down at the soaked earth, ‘…that you might be glad I did. What do priests do, Rowan?’
‘I told you, they pray and they?—’
‘Exorcise, yes. But there are other things.’ He was looking at me as though he was willing me to come to my own conclusions, so he didn’t have to fill in the gaps.
‘Well, they marry people.’
A sudden laugh. ‘And, when and if the time comes, I was thinking a civil ceremony might be more the mark. But there’stime, Rowan. There’s time.’ He hauled me into a sudden hug. I saw Eamonn look up, smile and shrug himself back down into the bog, his jacket scraping the stone. ‘So, what else do priests do, Rowan?’
‘Why don’t you tell me?’ His persistent questioning was raking claws up and down my spine. That feeling that there was a huge joke, an enormous answer that absolutely everyone else knew, was oddly familiar. It reminded me of just after Elliot died, when I lived in a dislocated world, a planet with the centre gone. I’d felt then as though everyone else had the comfortable, settled lives that had been ripped from me, as though they all knew what was going on while I didn’t even know what day of the week it was.
Connor looked at my face. My doubts, my memories must have been showing, because he gave me a gentle kiss on the forehead. ‘I’m sorry about the folklore, Rowan,’ he whispered. ‘But we need to close this story down.’
