The Labyrinth in the Village
CHAPTER TWO
By the fourth day the rain had drawn back, so that not even clouds or the pale mistiness of the air remained.
‘Why don’t you go explore a bit?’ asked Helen.
‘Yeah, ok - can I have some money?’ His mother gave him one of the new crisp £10 notes. ‘I’ll leave the key under that flower pot if I go out. I may need to do a bit more shopping’.
‘Ok, Mum, see you later’.
Outside, the sun was warm in a soft blue sky. Pierce kicked a stone along in front of him. It was a relief to be outside, to smell the fresh air. The sounds of sheep baa-ing were carried on the breeze, in the distance dogs barked. He stopped and took in the view. Their cottage was really just the end of a long, low stone building that some time in its past had been divided into three smaller homes. It all looked so well put together. The dark slate roof, rounded and softened with time, the old stone back wall of the dwellings, tucked neatly in to the small lane, backing on to fields and beyond them, woods and further again, the hills. It was all so .. so different to what he had been used to seeing, the ribbon suburbs of Connecticut, and their endless little houses covered in white fake clapboard, or the rawness of MacMansions, cut in to the landscape, but never fitting it. The lane joined a meandering street that sloped downhill towards the village center, where it continued on as its high street with a smattering of shops. Pierce noticed a post office that doubled as a general store and cafe, a hardware store, chemist, and musty antique shop, book-ended by The Red Dragon pub at one end, and The Green Man at the other. An alleyway lead between the antique shop and the pub into a back street, which curved round a rather grand but smallscale Victorian building with a fanlight window that housed the village library. On the other side a dressed and worn stone wall bordered the cemetery with its small, Norman church, grey-stoned and on this side anyway, window-less.
It was all so old, and so small, and so quiet. Anything less like Stamford was difficult to imagine, Pierce thought, remembering the way cars whipped round the four lane road system as he waited for the Walk signal, shivering in the wind that whipped round the monolithic civic blocks which formed the downtown. He hesitated at the lych gate’s squared opening to the cemetery, guarded by two ancient yew trees. Beyond it’s steep dark miniature roof, the sound of birdsong and the humming of insects seemed to grow louder, and the grass was patched with thick rust green moss in the shade. He noticed that many of the graves were slightly uneven, as if the ground had shifted over time, and were both so patterned with yellow ocre lichen and worn so smooth their inscriptions could barely be made out. The door to the church vestibule was opened by a heavy metal latch, allowing in just enough daylight to make out the round handle on the inner door. To Pierce’s surprise this too opened - the church was not locked. A pale watery light filtered through thick leaded diamond panes of two arched windows in the opposite wall. Hesitantly, Pierce stepped over the threshold and into the cool stone interior. For a few moments he hovered at the end of the nave, fascinated by the silent, musty resonant space, sweet with the smell of the now slightly wilted flowers that had been arranged for the weekend services. Slowly he started to make his way towards the altar. The church was a mixture of simple, open architecture, and complex patterns - stone carvings, embroidered hassocks, ornate brass plaques. On the one hand it seemed as if it could all be taken in at a glance, while on the other, it felt like it held endless messages to be unravelled. He caught sight of a pale, stiff figure lying in the gloom against the west wall, it was a life size carving of a knight, eternally asleep on his tomb in the dark of a small side chapel. His sword lay by his side, his helmet and camail neatly arranged around his stone face. Real knights, there used to be real knights here!
Back in the street he noticed another little shop, with a sign that said ‘The Wise Herbal’. In the window were lots of little bottles, crystals and bunches of herbs. He hurried past, not wanting to be seen by Meghan the witch.
The curved road lead him back to the high street, where he felt suddenly bored and depressed. What was he going to do all summer? He bought an ice-cream from the general store, and wandered on further, this time passing The Green Man. There weren’t many people about, a couple of purple rinse old ladies, mesh shopping bags in hand, a young mother with a baby in a pushchair and towing a reluctant toddler, and a couple in their twenties with backpacks and wearing walking shoes who were consulting a map. The high street ran on a ways through the further end of the village, past thick hedges where he could hear the sound of streams gurgling through half hidden stoneways, then it turned into a track and climbed on into a wooded area. It was pretty with the sun glancing down through the trees, and ferns uncurling in the undergrowth, and the air was alive with smells of moist earth and leaf mulch. Pierce supposed if he carried on he would end up in the woods proper, but then on his left he saw two stone gate posts and what looked like a driveway beyond. There was no gate, just the old iron hinges in the stone, and as there was also no sign saying ‘Private’ or ‘Keep Out’ (which there most certainly would have been in Connecticut) he went in.The drive took him first through woods then out into more open land with stately clusters of oaks and he could see ahead of him a white battlemented tower. It was strangely bright and clean, as if built only a few years ago, yet it too was clearly very old. A smaller but similar tower adjoined it, with a cluster of low buildings at its feet and as he walked further round he saw that a high wall, also battlemented ran along in front. His mother had told him that Wales had hundreds of castles, real castles, like real knights, and here was one of them, or at least one old fortification, not a full castle. He noticed the narrow windows set at spiraled intervals up the tower, and similar openings in the wall itself. There was something else too, a bumpy outcropping in the grass a hundred yards or so away from the tower wall. He went over to see, and found himself looking down at a strange stone pattern laid out in a perfect circle on the ground. A stone-flagged pathway wound between smaller upright stones in a series of triangular segments, four in all, like four giant petals, and in the center was a much smaller flower-like shape with six sides. Looking more closely, he realized that it was all one path. He stepped on to the stones, and began walking around. What was it for, and who would go to such trouble to build this here? It was funny to be walking backwards and forwards, like a figure in a clockwork puzzle, but not really going anywhere. He got to the centre, and looked around. It seemed a lot of trouble for not much. He supposed he could just walk over the pattern to leave. He didn’t really have to walk all the way back through the loops. But then he shrugged, why not, there wasn’t much else awaiting him. And he turned and wove his way back. As he stepped out, he looked up, and saw something had changed. The light was different, the sun was low in the east, as if it was early morning again and the blue sky glowed like a projected film of itself. The oak trees had become small and scraggy, while the woods beyond them appeared to have turned into a forest. Perhaps it was just a trick of the unfamiliar, he wasn’t used to seeing any of this yet after all. The tower looked the same, still pristine, but surely the grass had been much more even, now it was longer and scrubby, .. and, wait a minute, the driveway that before had been tarmac was now a muddy track. Pierce started to run, then pelt headlong up along the way he must have come - no gateposts, and soon no road, no hedges, no houses. Just thick woodland all around as far as he could see. He reversed direction and tore back down the track, panic rising in his chest, he could barely gasp for breath, what if - what if that strange pattern had also disappeared? That had brought him here, it must be the only way back. In his haste, he slipped in the mud, and that was when something, some one up on the battlements caught his eye. A motionless silvery figure, helmeted, and holding the pole of a fluttering pennant. Pierce didn’t wait to see more. The stone circle was still there, he hurled himself towards it and hurriedly retraced his steps around the loops, barely breathing, too intent on picking his way along as swiftly as he could to look out around him until he arrived back again at the entrance, the entrance which was also the exit. To his unspeakable relief, all was as it had been. The small shadows of early afternoon pooled the ground from the mighty oaks, there was no one to be seen on the battlements.
For the second time, PIerce ran headlong away, up the track, through the gateposts and back into the village. Only when he reached The Red Dragon did he slow down to a walk, exhausted from the adrenaline rush of dread, as well as the exertion. He walked along in a dazed blur, his chest still heaving.
Two middle-aged women were gossiping together on the pavement just ahead of him. Normally Pierce would not have paid them any attention, but now he felt an unexpected thankfulness just see other human beings, even if they were old. And anyway, there was something familiar amid all this unfamiliarity, that was comforting to him, something he had seen before, and then too late he realized that it was the mass of frizzy black and silver iced hair, whose owner had half turned, glanced and now turned fully to greet him, her little dark eyes reading swiftly his approach even as she
beamed at him.
‘Pierce - hallo - oh my, you look like you’ve seen a ghost!’
‘Uh, hallo.’
‘Betty dear, this is Pierce, he and his mother are staying in one of the cottages up the back lane there - for the summer isn’t it?’
Betty was nodding but her smiling silence expressed a tacit acceptance that no male of Pierce’s age was really going to be interested in meeting her.
‘So - where are you going in such a hurry, Pierce?’ Meghan went on. Pierce was still breathing more heavily than usual, ‘Nowhere’, he gasped, shaking his head, ‘ just, you know the church and up the high street a bit -’
Meghan was beginning to frown, she seemed to have forgotten Betty completely. ‘Did you visit the white tower?’
For the first time Pierce looked her in the eye: ‘Yes’.
Meghan stepped closer to him, speaking more quietly, ‘Did you see the knights then?’
‘What!’ Pierce spoke more loudly than he had meant to, ‘No - no - I didn’t see anything,’ he backed away from her, then turned and started to run again.
© Diana Durham June 2016
By the fourth day the rain had drawn back, so that not even clouds or the pale mistiness of the air remained.
‘Why don’t you go explore a bit?’ asked Helen.
‘Yeah, ok - can I have some money?’ His mother gave him one of the new crisp £10 notes. ‘I’ll leave the key under that flower pot if I go out. I may need to do a bit more shopping’.
‘Ok, Mum, see you later’.
Outside, the sun was warm in a soft blue sky. Pierce kicked a stone along in front of him. It was a relief to be outside, to smell the fresh air. The sounds of sheep baa-ing were carried on the breeze, in the distance dogs barked. He stopped and took in the view. Their cottage was really just the end of a long, low stone building that some time in its past had been divided into three smaller homes. It all looked so well put together. The dark slate roof, rounded and softened with time, the old stone back wall of the dwellings, tucked neatly in to the small lane, backing on to fields and beyond them, woods and further again, the hills. It was all so .. so different to what he had been used to seeing, the ribbon suburbs of Connecticut, and their endless little houses covered in white fake clapboard, or the rawness of MacMansions, cut in to the landscape, but never fitting it. The lane joined a meandering street that sloped downhill towards the village center, where it continued on as its high street with a smattering of shops. Pierce noticed a post office that doubled as a general store and cafe, a hardware store, chemist, and musty antique shop, book-ended by The Red Dragon pub at one end, and The Green Man at the other. An alleyway lead between the antique shop and the pub into a back street, which curved round a rather grand but smallscale Victorian building with a fanlight window that housed the village library. On the other side a dressed and worn stone wall bordered the cemetery with its small, Norman church, grey-stoned and on this side anyway, window-less.
It was all so old, and so small, and so quiet. Anything less like Stamford was difficult to imagine, Pierce thought, remembering the way cars whipped round the four lane road system as he waited for the Walk signal, shivering in the wind that whipped round the monolithic civic blocks which formed the downtown. He hesitated at the lych gate’s squared opening to the cemetery, guarded by two ancient yew trees. Beyond it’s steep dark miniature roof, the sound of birdsong and the humming of insects seemed to grow louder, and the grass was patched with thick rust green moss in the shade. He noticed that many of the graves were slightly uneven, as if the ground had shifted over time, and were both so patterned with yellow ocre lichen and worn so smooth their inscriptions could barely be made out. The door to the church vestibule was opened by a heavy metal latch, allowing in just enough daylight to make out the round handle on the inner door. To Pierce’s surprise this too opened - the church was not locked. A pale watery light filtered through thick leaded diamond panes of two arched windows in the opposite wall. Hesitantly, Pierce stepped over the threshold and into the cool stone interior. For a few moments he hovered at the end of the nave, fascinated by the silent, musty resonant space, sweet with the smell of the now slightly wilted flowers that had been arranged for the weekend services. Slowly he started to make his way towards the altar. The church was a mixture of simple, open architecture, and complex patterns - stone carvings, embroidered hassocks, ornate brass plaques. On the one hand it seemed as if it could all be taken in at a glance, while on the other, it felt like it held endless messages to be unravelled. He caught sight of a pale, stiff figure lying in the gloom against the west wall, it was a life size carving of a knight, eternally asleep on his tomb in the dark of a small side chapel. His sword lay by his side, his helmet and camail neatly arranged around his stone face. Real knights, there used to be real knights here!
Back in the street he noticed another little shop, with a sign that said ‘The Wise Herbal’. In the window were lots of little bottles, crystals and bunches of herbs. He hurried past, not wanting to be seen by Meghan the witch.
The curved road lead him back to the high street, where he felt suddenly bored and depressed. What was he going to do all summer? He bought an ice-cream from the general store, and wandered on further, this time passing The Green Man. There weren’t many people about, a couple of purple rinse old ladies, mesh shopping bags in hand, a young mother with a baby in a pushchair and towing a reluctant toddler, and a couple in their twenties with backpacks and wearing walking shoes who were consulting a map. The high street ran on a ways through the further end of the village, past thick hedges where he could hear the sound of streams gurgling through half hidden stoneways, then it turned into a track and climbed on into a wooded area. It was pretty with the sun glancing down through the trees, and ferns uncurling in the undergrowth, and the air was alive with smells of moist earth and leaf mulch. Pierce supposed if he carried on he would end up in the woods proper, but then on his left he saw two stone gate posts and what looked like a driveway beyond. There was no gate, just the old iron hinges in the stone, and as there was also no sign saying ‘Private’ or ‘Keep Out’ (which there most certainly would have been in Connecticut) he went in.The drive took him first through woods then out into more open land with stately clusters of oaks and he could see ahead of him a white battlemented tower. It was strangely bright and clean, as if built only a few years ago, yet it too was clearly very old. A smaller but similar tower adjoined it, with a cluster of low buildings at its feet and as he walked further round he saw that a high wall, also battlemented ran along in front. His mother had told him that Wales had hundreds of castles, real castles, like real knights, and here was one of them, or at least one old fortification, not a full castle. He noticed the narrow windows set at spiraled intervals up the tower, and similar openings in the wall itself. There was something else too, a bumpy outcropping in the grass a hundred yards or so away from the tower wall. He went over to see, and found himself looking down at a strange stone pattern laid out in a perfect circle on the ground. A stone-flagged pathway wound between smaller upright stones in a series of triangular segments, four in all, like four giant petals, and in the center was a much smaller flower-like shape with six sides. Looking more closely, he realized that it was all one path. He stepped on to the stones, and began walking around. What was it for, and who would go to such trouble to build this here? It was funny to be walking backwards and forwards, like a figure in a clockwork puzzle, but not really going anywhere. He got to the centre, and looked around. It seemed a lot of trouble for not much. He supposed he could just walk over the pattern to leave. He didn’t really have to walk all the way back through the loops. But then he shrugged, why not, there wasn’t much else awaiting him. And he turned and wove his way back. As he stepped out, he looked up, and saw something had changed. The light was different, the sun was low in the east, as if it was early morning again and the blue sky glowed like a projected film of itself. The oak trees had become small and scraggy, while the woods beyond them appeared to have turned into a forest. Perhaps it was just a trick of the unfamiliar, he wasn’t used to seeing any of this yet after all. The tower looked the same, still pristine, but surely the grass had been much more even, now it was longer and scrubby, .. and, wait a minute, the driveway that before had been tarmac was now a muddy track. Pierce started to run, then pelt headlong up along the way he must have come - no gateposts, and soon no road, no hedges, no houses. Just thick woodland all around as far as he could see. He reversed direction and tore back down the track, panic rising in his chest, he could barely gasp for breath, what if - what if that strange pattern had also disappeared? That had brought him here, it must be the only way back. In his haste, he slipped in the mud, and that was when something, some one up on the battlements caught his eye. A motionless silvery figure, helmeted, and holding the pole of a fluttering pennant. Pierce didn’t wait to see more. The stone circle was still there, he hurled himself towards it and hurriedly retraced his steps around the loops, barely breathing, too intent on picking his way along as swiftly as he could to look out around him until he arrived back again at the entrance, the entrance which was also the exit. To his unspeakable relief, all was as it had been. The small shadows of early afternoon pooled the ground from the mighty oaks, there was no one to be seen on the battlements.
For the second time, PIerce ran headlong away, up the track, through the gateposts and back into the village. Only when he reached The Red Dragon did he slow down to a walk, exhausted from the adrenaline rush of dread, as well as the exertion. He walked along in a dazed blur, his chest still heaving.
Two middle-aged women were gossiping together on the pavement just ahead of him. Normally Pierce would not have paid them any attention, but now he felt an unexpected thankfulness just see other human beings, even if they were old. And anyway, there was something familiar amid all this unfamiliarity, that was comforting to him, something he had seen before, and then too late he realized that it was the mass of frizzy black and silver iced hair, whose owner had half turned, glanced and now turned fully to greet him, her little dark eyes reading swiftly his approach even as she
beamed at him.
‘Pierce - hallo - oh my, you look like you’ve seen a ghost!’
‘Uh, hallo.’
‘Betty dear, this is Pierce, he and his mother are staying in one of the cottages up the back lane there - for the summer isn’t it?’
Betty was nodding but her smiling silence expressed a tacit acceptance that no male of Pierce’s age was really going to be interested in meeting her.
‘So - where are you going in such a hurry, Pierce?’ Meghan went on. Pierce was still breathing more heavily than usual, ‘Nowhere’, he gasped, shaking his head, ‘ just, you know the church and up the high street a bit -’
Meghan was beginning to frown, she seemed to have forgotten Betty completely. ‘Did you visit the white tower?’
For the first time Pierce looked her in the eye: ‘Yes’.
Meghan stepped closer to him, speaking more quietly, ‘Did you see the knights then?’
‘What!’ Pierce spoke more loudly than he had meant to, ‘No - no - I didn’t see anything,’ he backed away from her, then turned and started to run again.
© Diana Durham June 2016