The Second Wish and Other Exhalations Read online

  Oh, Gavin loved his sister, all right — indeed he had transferred to her all of his affection and protection when their mother died three years ago — but having lost his mother he wasn’t going to lose Eileen, too, not if he could help it.

  Gavin was twenty-two, Eileen seventeen. He was over six feet tall, narrow-hipped, wide in the shoulders: a tapering wedge of muscle with a bullet-head to top it off. Most of the village lads looked at Eileen, then looked at Gavin, and didn’t look at Eileen again. But those of them who looked at her twice reckoned she was worth it.

  She was blonde as her brother was dark, as sweet and slim as he was huge and surly; five-seven, with long shapely legs and a waist like a wisp, and blue eyes with lights in them that danced when she smiled; the very image of her mother. And that was Gavin’s problem — for he’d loved his mother a great deal, too.

  It was 5.30 p.m. and brother and sister were busy in work clothes, loading stock from the back door of The Old Stage onto a trolley and carting it across the park­ing lot to The Barn. Joe McGovern ticked off the items on a stock list as they worked. But when Gavin and Eileen were alone in The Barn, stacking the last of the bottles onto the shelves behind the bar, suddenly he said to her: “Will you be here tonight?”

  She looked at her brother. There was nothing surly about Gavin now. There never was when he spoke to her; indeed his voice held a note of concern, of agitation, of some inner struggle, which he himself couldn’t quite put his finger on. And she knew what he was thinking and that it would be the same tonight as always. Someone would dance with her, and then dance with her again — and then no more. Because Gavin would have had “a quiet word with him.”

  “Of course I’ll be here, Gavin,” she sighed. “You know I will. I wouldn’t miss it. I love to dance and chat with the girls — and with the boys — when I get the chance! Why does it bother you so?”

  “I’ve told you often enough why it bothers me,” he answered gruffly, breathing heavily through his nose. “It’s all those blokes. They’ve only one thing on their minds. They’re the same with all the girls. But you’re not just any girl — you’re my sister.”

  “Yes,” she answered, a trifle bitterly, “and don’t they just know it! You’re always there, in the background, watching, somehow threatening. It’s like having two fathers — only one of them’s a tyrant! Do you know, I can’t remember the last time a boy wanted to walk me home?”

  “But … you are home!” he answered, not wanting to fight, wishing now that he’d kept his peace. If only she was capable of understanding the ways of the world. “You live right next door.”

  “Then simply walk me!” she blurted it out. “Oh, any­where! Gavin, can’t you understand? It’s nice to be courted, to have someone who wants to hold your hand!”

  “That’s how it starts,” he grunted, turning away. “They want to hold your hand. But who’s to say how it finishes, eh?”

  “Well not much fear of that!” she sighed again. “Not that I’m that sort of girl anyway,” and she looked at him archly. “But even if I was, with you around — straining at the leash like … like a great hulking watchdog — nothing’s very much likely to even get started, now is it?” And before he could answer, but less harshly now: “Now come on,” she said, “tell me what’s brought all this on? You’ve been really nice to me this last couple of weeks. The hot weather may have soured some people but you’ve been really sweet — like a Big Brother should be — until out of the blue, like this. I really don’t understand what gets into you, Gavin.”

  It was his turn to sigh. “Aren’t you forgetting some­thing?” he said. “The assault — probably with sexual motivation — just last week, Saturday night, in Lovers’ Lane?”

  Perhaps Eileen really ought not to pooh-pooh that, but she believed she understood it well enough. “An assault,” she said. “Motive: “probably” sexual — the most excitement Athelsford has known in … oh, as long as I can remember! And the “victim”: Linda Anstey. Oh, my, what a surprise! Hah! Why, Linda’s always been that way! Every kid in the school had fooled around with her at one time or another. From playing kids’ games to … well, everything. It’s the way she is and everyone knows it. All right, perhaps I’m being unfair to her: she might have asked for trouble and she might not, but it seems hardly surprising to me that if it was going to happen to someone, Linda would be the one!”

  “But it did happen,” Gavin insisted. “That kind of bloke does exist — plenty of them.” He stacked the last half-dozen cans and made for the exit; and changing the subject (as he was wont to do when an argument was going badly for him, or when he believed he’d proved his point sufficiently) said: “Me, I’m for a pint before I get myself ready for tonight. Fancy an iced lemonade, kid?” He paused, turned back towards her, and grinned, but she suspected it was forced. If only she could gauge what went on in his mind.

  But: “Oh, all right!” she finally matched his grin, “if you’re buying.” She caught up with him and grabbed him, standing on tip-toe to give him a kiss. “But Gavin — promise me that from now on you won’t worry about me so much, OK?”

  He hugged her briefly, and reluctantly submitted: “Yeah, all right.”

  But as she led the way out of The Barn and across the car park, with the hot afternoon sun shining in her hair and her sweet, innocent body moving like that inside her coveralls, he looked after her and worried all the harder; worried the way an older brother should worry, he thought, and yet somehow far more intensely. And the worst of it was that he knew he was being unreasonable and obsessive! But (and Gavin at once felt his heart hardening) … oh, he recog­nized well enough the way the village Jack-the-Lads looked at Eileen, and knew how much they’d like to get their itchy little paws on her — the grubby-minded, horny …

  … But there Gavin’s ireful thoughts abruptly evapor­ated, the scowl left his face, and he frowned as a vivid picture suddenly flashed onto the screen of his mind. It was something he’d seen just this morning, across the fields where they were laying the new road; something quite obscene which hadn’t made much of an impression on him at the time, but which now … and astonished, he paused again. For he couldn’t for the life of him see how he’d connected up a thing like that with Eileen! And it just as suddenly dawned on him that the reason he knew how the boys felt about his sister was because he sometimes felt that way too. Oh, not about her — no, of course not — but about… a boulder? Well, certainly it had been a boulder that did it to him this morning, anyway.

  And: Gavin, son, he told himself, sometimes I think you’re maybe just a tiny wee bit sick! And then he laughed, if only to himself. .

  But somehow the pictures in his mind just wouldn’t go away, and as he went to his upstairs room in The Old Stage and slowly changed into his evening gear, so he allowed himself to go over again the peculiar occurrences of the morning …

  Three

  That Friday morning, yes, and it had been hot as a furnace. And every member of the road gang without exception looking forward to the coming weekend, to cool beers in cool houses with all the windows thrown open; so that as the heat-shimmering day had drawn towards noon they’d wearied of the job and put a lot less muscle into it.

  Also, and to make things worse, this afternoon they’d be a man short; for this was Gavin McGovern’s last morning and he hadn’t been replaced yet. And even when he was … well, it would take a long time to find someone else who could throw a bulldozer around like he could. The thing was like a toy in his hands. But … seeing as how he lived in Athelsford and had always considered himself something of a traitor anyway, working on the link road, he’d finally decided to seek employment elsewhere.

  Foreman John Sykes wasn’t an Athelsfordian, but he made it his business to know something about the people working under him — especially if they were local to the land where he was driving his road. He’d got to know Big Gavin pretty well, he reckoned, and in a way envied him. He certainly wouldn’t mind it if his Old Man owned a coun
try pub! But on the other hand he could sympathize with McGovern, too. He knew how torn he must feel.

  This was the one part of his job that Sykes hated: when the people up top said the road goes here, and the people down here said oh no it doesn’t, not in our back garden! Puffed up, awkward, defiant, little bastards! But at the same time Sykes could sympathize with them also, even though they were making his job as unpleasant as they possibly could. And that was yet another reason why the work hadn’t gone too well this morning.

  Today it had been a sit-in, when a good dozen of the locals had appeared from the wood at the end of Lovers’ Lane, bringing lightweight fold-down garden chairs with them to erect across the road. And there they’d sat with their placards and sandwiches on the new stretch of tarmac, heckling the road gang as they toiled and sweated into their dark-stained vests and tried to build a bloody road which wasn’t wanted. And which didn’t seem to want to be built! They’d stayed from maybe quarter-past nine to a minute short of eleven, then got up and like a gaggle of lemmings waddled back to the village again. Their ‘good deed’ for the day — Goddam!

  Christ, what a day! For right after that … big trouble, mechanical trouble! Or rather an obstruction, which had caused mechanical trouble. Not the more or less passive, placard-waving obstruction of people — which was bad enough — but a rather more physical, much more tangible obstruction. Namely, a bloody great boulder!

  The first they’d known of it was when the bulldozer hit it while lifting turf and muck in a wide swath two feet deep. Until then there had been only the usual stony debris — small, rounded pebbles and the occasional blunt slab of scarred rock, nothing out of the ordinary for these parts — and Sykes hadn’t been expecting anything quite this big. The surveyors had been across here, hammering in their long iron spikes and testing the ground, but they’d somehow missed this thing. Black granite by its looks, it had stopped the dozer dead in its tracks and given Gavin McGovern a fair old shaking! But at least the blade had cleared the sod and clay off the top of the thing. Like the dome of a veined, bald, old head it had looked, sticking up there in the middle of the projected strip.

  “See if you can dig the blade under it,” Sykes had bawled up at Gavin through clouds of blue exhaust fumes and the clatter of the engine. “Try to lever the bastard up, or split it. We have to get down a good forty or fifty inches just here.”

  Taking it personally — and with something less than an hour to go, eager to get finished now — Gavin had dragged his sleeve across his brown, perspiration-shiny brow and grimaced. Then, tilting his helmet back on his head, he’d slammed the blade of his machine deep into the earth half a dozen times until he could feel it biting against the unseen curve of the boulder. Then he’d gunned the motor, let out the clutch, shoved, and lifted all in one fluid movement. Or at least in a movement that should have been fluid. For instead of finding purchase the blade had ridden up, splitting turf and topsoil as it slid over the fairly smooth surface of the stone; the dozer had lurched forward, slewing round when the blade finally snagged on a rougher part of the surface; the offside caterpillar had parted in a shriek of hot, tortured metal.

  Then Gavin had shut her off, jumped down, and stared disbelievingly at his grazed and bleeding forearm where it had scraped across the iron frame of the cab. “Damn — damn!” he’d shouted then, hurling his safety helmet at the freshly turned earth and kicking the dozer’s broken track.

  “Easy, Gavin,” Sykes had gone up to him. “It’s not your fault, and it’s not the machine’s. It’s mine, if anybody’s. I had no idea there was anything this big here. And by the look of it this is only the tip of the iceberg.”

  But Gavin wasn’t listening; he’d gone down on one knee and was examining part of the boulder’s surface where the blade had done a job of clearing it off. He was frowning, peering hard, breaking away small scabs of loose dirt and tracing lines or grooves with his strong, blunt fingers. The runic symbols were faint but the carved picture was more clearly visible. There were other pic­tures, too, with only their edges showing as yet, mainly hidden under the curve of the boulder. The ganger got down beside Gavin and assisted him, and slowly the carv­ings took on clearer definition.

  Sykes was frowning, too, now. What the Hell? A floral design of some sort? Very old, no doubt about it. Archaic? Prehistoric?

  Unable as yet to make anything decisive of the pictures on the stone, they cleared away more dirt. But then Sykes stared harder, slowly shook his head, and began to grin. The grin spread until it almost split his face ear to ear. Per­haps not prehistoric after all. More like the work of some dirty-minded local kid. And not a bad artist, at that!

  The lines of the main picture were primitive but clini­cally correct, however exaggerated. And its subject was completely unmistakable. Gavin McGovern continued to stare at it, and his bottom jaw had fallen open. Finally, glancing at Sykes out of the corner of his eye, he grunted: “Old, do you think?”

  Sykes started to answer, then shut his mouth and stood up. He thought fast, scuffed some of the dirt back with his booted foot, bent to lean a large, flat flake of stone against the picture, mainly covering it from view. Sweat trickled down his back and made it itch under his wring­ing shirt. Made it itch like the devil, and the rest of his body with it. The boulder seemed hot as Hell, reflect­ing the blazing midday sunlight.

  And “Old?” the ganger finally answered. “You mean, like ancient? Naw, I shouldn’t think so … Hey, and Gavin, son — if I were you, I wouldn’t go mentioning this to anyone. You know what I mean?”

  Gavin looked up, still frowning. “No,” he shook his head, “what do you mean?”

  “What?” said Sykes. “You mean to say you can’t see it? Why, only let this get out and there’ll be people coming from all over the place to see it! Another bloody Stonehenge, it’ll be! And what price your Athelsford then, eh? Flooded, the place would be, with all sorts of human debris come to see the famous dirty caveman pictures! You want that, do you?”

  No, that was the last thing Gavin wanted. “I see what you mean,” he said, slowly. “Also, it would slow you down, right? They’d stop you running your road through here.”

  “That, too, possibly,” Sykes answered. “For a time, anyway. But just think about it. What would you rather have: a new road pure and simple — or a thousand yobs a day tramping through Athelsford and up Lovers’ Lane to ogle this little lot, eh?”

  That was something Gavin didn’t have to think about for very long. It would do business at The Old Stage a power of good, true, but then there was Eileen. Pretty soon they’d be coming to ogle her, too. “So what’s next?” he said.

  “You leave that to me,” Sykes told him. “And just take my word for it that this time tomorrow this little beauty will be so much rubble, OK?”

  Gavin nodded; he knew that the ganger was hot stuff with a drill and a couple of pounds of explosive. “If you say so,” he spat into the dust and dirt. “Anyway, I don’t much care for the looks of the damned thing!” He scratched furiously at his forearm where his graze was already starting to scab over. “It’s not right, this dirty old thing. Sort of makes me hot and … itchy!”

  “Itchy, yeah,” Sykes agreed. And he wondered what sort of mood his wife, Jennie, would be in tonight. If this hot summer sun had worked on her the way it was beginning to work on him, well tonight could get to be pretty interesting. Which would make a welcome change!

  Deep, dark, and much disturbed now, old Chylos had felt unaccustomed tremors vibrating through his fossil­ized bones. The stamping of a thousand warriors on the march, roaring their songs of red death? Aye, perhaps. And:

  “Invaders!” Chylos breathed the word, without speaking, and indeed without breathing.

  “No,” Hengit of the Far Forest tribe contradicted him. “The mammoths are stampeding, the earth is sinking, trees are being felled. Any of these things, but no invaders. Is that all you dream about, old man? Why can’t you simply lie still and sleep like the dead thing you ar
e?”

  “And even if there were invaders,” the revenant of a female voice now joined in, Alaze of the Shrub Hill folk, “would you really expect a man of the Far Forest tribe to come to arms? They are notorious cowards! Better you call on me, Chylos, a woman to rise up against these invaders — if there really were invaders, which there are not. “

  Chylos listened hard — to the earth, the sky, the distant sea — but no longer heard the thundering of booted feet, nor war cries going up into the air, nor ships with muffled oars creeping and creaking in the mist. And so he sighed and said: “Perhaps you are right — but nevertheless we should be ready! I, at least, am ready!”

  And: “Old fool!” Hengit whispered of Chylos into the dirt and the dark.

  And: “Coward!” Alaze was scathing of Hengit where all three lay broken, under the luststone …

  7:15 P.M.

  The road gang had knocked off more than two hours ago and the light was only just beginning to fade a little. An hour and a half to go yet to the summer’s balmy darkness, when the young people would wander hand in hand, and occasionally pause mouth to mouth, in Lovers’ Lane. Or perhaps not until later, for tonight there was to be dancing at The Barn. And for now … all should be peace and quiet out here in the fields, where the luststone raised its veined dome of a head through the broken soil. All should be quiet — but was not.

  “Levver!” shouted King above the roar of the bikes, his voice full of scorn. “What a bleedin’ player you turned out to be! What the ’ell do yer call this, then?”

  “The end o’ the bleedin’ road,” one of the other bikers shouted. “That’s where!”

  “Is it ever!” cried someone else.

  Leather grinned sheepishly and pushed his Nazi-style crash helmet to the back of his head. “So I come the wrong way, di’n I? ’Ell’s teef, the sign said bleedin’ Affelsford, dinnit?”