No Returns

"We're not getting any of the flush back, can we stop?" the driller had asked.

The water was washing away the marl bands in the Sherwood Sandstone and running away through the fractures. It was meant to be coming back up to the surface, all thick and muddy with pulverised rock. If it didn't do this, there was good reason to stop. It was called no returns.

That Sherwood Sandstone, again.

I knew it had been inevitable.

That with all those far flung places it was only a matter of time until I ended up there. Though it wasn't like I had imagined. No school job for extra classrooms. No looking over your shoulder. No couple of trial pits for soakaways. No awkward silence and foreboding. No shell and auger on the edge of a playing field, and no metallic clang of the drop hammer. Ringing out like a church tower at midnight. And on the back of your site lid, no crudely drawn image of an extinct crustacean. No fitting talisman.

Instead, I'd looked at the job sheet, and then stared at the map...

The land of Galligu. Just over the river. That on your way there you'd become a ghost. A shadow, an echo from another time. Though it didn't seem right or fair, but it never had done.

Just don't anthropomorphise...

To think that I'd had a drilling crew drub around in a gravel path for an hour and a half. An hour and a half looking for additions to the two stone beads I'd found. We only ever found four, and that was by no means enough to have them strung together. So an attractive archaeologist could be the first to wear them after untold years. I remembered the girl. That unlike most, she'd been a lot of places that you wanted to be. Except that barbecue. In that, I made grave mistake.

Was it that damned locust tree? The one overhanging the sunken patio. The false acacia is never to be trusted.

It had all seemed rather civilised. But then it always does to begin with...

There'd been a mother there with her young lad. A small boy running around unyieldingly, constantly exclaiming about his 'rocket boots'. It was endearing in a way, although his mother was unamused. After a while, she'd turned to him and announced in such a disparaging, matter of fact way.

"Oh don't be stupid John, you're talking nonsense."

It wasn't long before some friends turned up from the pub. All of them. En masse. Back from being beaten by Portugal. Although some individuals were clearly all for having the post mortem of English football right there and then. Strangely confused when I'd announced how happy I was now that the madness had ended for another year.

One of her friends had been notable. Perhaps the youngest of all people there. He'd been notable for several reasons, not least the opening announcement that one of his eyes was made of glass. More so that he was one of those people who choose to experiment in case innocuous household items would elicit strange narcotic effects. Pushing the boundaries of drug use. Had one of his friends really overdosed? You could never be sure.

I should have enquired further. How did he justify leaving his job in order to spontaneously write a book? Exactly what kind of book? That and other questions lost amidst his cries of "not the good eye". How could she have mistaken the wrong one?

There was another couple there. The epitome of all that was wrong in the world, because they were perfect for each other. And while she'd busied around disposable barbecues, he'd talked at me. At first it had been a barrage of questions, the smarmy smiling interrogator. Once it became clear that I'd been overwhelmed, you'd hear the tales of her pole dancing lessons and the ungainly age difference that had obviously caused them,

She seemed shallow, and had shovelled half cooked food at me, insisting. The only trouble being that I really wasn't very hungry at all.

It had been so noisy.

Far more noisy than I might have considered civilised at such an hour. Not least for the idiot couple that had arrived with their inbred King Charles spaniel. The one unimaginatively named 'Charlie'. Charlie had proceeded to spend much of the evening barking at a cat located well out of his reach. While the cat sat on the windowsill, unperturbed.

Did the pair realise that their interaction with their treasured pet was counteracting all those expensive obedience lessons they'd twittered on about for a good part of the evening? Slowly undoing the training, because the reinforcement of a real button wasn't there. And they say that dogs grow to be like their owners.

Noisy, not least for all the loud drunken talking outside in the garden, while a church bell tolled midnight. There would have been sense in going inside, not least for the noise. Outside it was cold, and with me not being entirely fortified with alcohol and unacclimatised, I felt that cold. I'd forgotten how cold it was that far north.

She was the only person I knew at that barbecue. The only person amidst a gaggle of people who'd known each other for years. Each one with their own opinions and prejudices. At least one with his own personal agenda, which I appeared to be placed in direct opposition to. Could I get a word in?

At one point in the evening, while the people still there were dwindling away, she'd disappeared. There was a question when she came back with two dark grey pieces of stone. The edges like obsidian. That in some archaeological reserve in Syria, she'd found these curious things. Curious, and out of stratigraphy. That despite a ban on taking things off site, they'd found their way into her pocket.

And I did know what they were. Both tektites. The relics of meteorite strikes in the middle of a desert.

She'd gave me one of those tektites. I sent it back to her because I didn't want to keep it.

I'd have left if I had the chance. That night, with it's bright full moon. Save for the risk of the breathalyser. Or the next morning, when the bright rising sun shone into the sitting room and onto the sofa where I lay. Save for there being no chance to slip away, because the remaining friends were asleep in the front room.

And when you logged the core from Wallsall, you'd find a trilobite and think of her. Think of her running away in her sleep, because the trilobites were chasing her.

There was something left from that time. The relict of an assumption that it wouldn't matter. Forgotten in haste. You'd be back here again and it wouldn't matter. A live set of some singer she liked. Years later, it was still there. Written out in ones and zeros. I'd tried to forget and still thought about it for a long time.

So I walked through the town. Past the dune bedding in the road cutting, that looked exactly the same as in Kidderminster. Past the obelisk across the road from some overpriced restaurant

The purple door was still there. I'd been panicked by the letterbox until I saw it at the bottom of the door. Half expecting to see her staring through the window at me. Which might have been highly awkward and very hard to explain.

So I'd posted the disc through that letterbox, after the trilobites fossilised arse. Then I went back to my van and with no good reason to be in this place, I drove away. Drove away with a hope, that just like drilling through the marl bands of the Sherwood Sandstone, there'll be no returns.

All this happening now, it doesn't begin here.

The last place had looked like a barn. Where bearded men gathered for sake of real ales and low hanging beams. Vintage junk cluttered onto shelves and gathering dust just out of your reach. If there'd been a choice I would have stayed and wasted my time there. It was quiet, civilised and entirely tedious.

I'd known all this the second that the event had been mentioned. Turning up three hours late had been my botched attempt at not turning up at all. Had I been put off by the creeping danger of sly questions while you were drunk? Or was it the scarlet harlot, with her unsuspecting boyfriend hanging on her arm?

There were other good reasons not to attend.

Maybe even that I'd vowed to never set foot inside a part of the Luminar leisure group again. Though technically, I wasn't going back on this. Luminar leisure had gone bust. What had filled this resulting vacuum was far from tasteful.

I was driven into that other place by popular opinion, I felt like one of the herd. The careful alcohol balancing act must have saved me from the full deshielded horror. Although the bouncers were polite and well behaved, largely because the police were stood across the street. Once inside, the truth was all too obvious. You had to shout over what ever noise was emanating from the speaker system.

The drinks had a strange taste to them. The kind of taste you get when you water down coca cola.

I'd never really understood why this messy cacophony constituted 'fun' as most people understood it. Nor that it might be listed as something they were interested in, like it was a legitimate part of culture. But judging from the attire of the people attending, it was because they were stupid or had very bad taste.

Sometime around midnight, he unceremoniously left her and went home to sleep. It seemed a bit uncouth to just leave her there and didn't make sense at first. Then when it did make sense you'd wish you hadn't thought about it.

She was naive.

That should have been the worst of it.

But when the prognosis is naivety, the classical experience is that this is rarely the case. That long and drawn out struggle. Save for the unspoken belief that nothing was ever wrong, until the last dying moments when reality shoves it's way into scene, dragging that ghastly truth behind it.

Underground Echoes

This should have been a dream, in finding my way back through this place.

Along the same steel rails, in the same carriages, the same red jacketed staff and the same upholstery on the same occupied seats. It should have been a different time, but it didn't feel like it. Past the towering plant and gaping quarries of the Rugby cement works, past trees and back gardens. The sun shining though the clouds that rose so high into the sky behind the green fields. Until the buildings choked out the trees and smothered the ground.

Just one long fluid motion and these softly spoken voices. Glazed eyes reflecting an infinity in the window glass. Speaking again, in soothing tones. Look after your personal belongings. Apologies about the seats. Shortly be arriving at Euston.

And in that instant, the world condenses around you. You sit bolt upright. Eyes wide open, the sweat beaded on your brow.

The suit and tie might mask you, another faceless individual scurrying around, but you still feel exposed. With all the glass and steel, there are no shadows to hide in. Nowhere to run, with a thousand barriers to go through, and people milling about like cattle, talking in gibberish. Does a needle in a haystack turn up only when you'd prefer it not to? Another kind of trepidation this time. Not of mosaic tiling, or fluorescent glow. Something deeper than closing doors, and more unsettling than rucksacks full of explosives.

By the tube map there was a blind beggar who knew my name, but wouldn't take my silver, warning that it lead only to sorrow. I told him that was why I was offering it to him.

I walked down the escalator. I can hear the stuttering hum ahead of me, growing louder. The ground is shaking. Along the black line, avoiding Green park, and Baker Street, you can escape at Charing Cross. The world stood still every time the doors opened, but nothing happened.

And it seems foolish now. Like stone arches and vaulted ceilings or half forgotten memories of pissing in a field.

Darkness Falls

The path was less steep here, and the scree and weathered rock had given way to a mulch of leaf litter. It was a relief, although probably as treacherous to the unwary. The air was thick with mist, silently soaking anything the sweat hadn't yet got to. The rocks had been slippy and unreassuring to walk on. The surface in places weathered into a mass of loose fragments, leaving you clutching on all fours.

Farther up here, the vegetation had taken over again, with all the shades of dewy green. Strangely withered looking trees growing out of fractures in the black rock faces, from out between the thick cladding of moss that clung to the bottom of them. The collection of plants, with their strange shapes and curious leaves. Beside the familiar stands of Fallopia, their white flowers atop the stems, the leaves shot holed and half eaten. The vegetation was dense along the path, giving way only to more outcrops of black rock. Their tops vanishing into the mist.

There was a ruined temple at the end of this path. One stone column toppled down the steps to the entrance. The lintel broken thereabouts. The roof partially missing from the fire that had taken hold, the front portion collapsed. Leaving only stone uprights to loft blackened timber trusses with vines hanging from them. Behind the mess and puddles on the flagstoned floor, the giant bronze statue was still there. Surrounded by invasive plants, and covered in moss and algae. As if nature had rallied in its defence, but all too late.

It was still up there, shrouded in mist, waiting to be reclaimed.

But before you reached there, you'd arrive at a plateaux. An almost hidden valley on the side of the mountain where the path had doglegged between two outcrops. On the one side, water spilled haphazardly from out of a fissure in the rock face, the green algae spreading beneath it. Between the soaking plants, and by some fate that had overlooked it all that time ago, you'd see a shrine.

The wind chimes were silent in the misty calm, but the air smelled strongly of incense. Just silence and tranquillity. The lintel showed the Kanji, but underneath it was a painted wooden tourist sign that translated it badly.

"Shrine to the Goddess."

Outside, resting on what looked like four wooden railway sleepers was a large shallow bowl. It's outside had the light green patina of bronze, the inside scorched amidst a mound of snowy grey ash. The mist had cleared a little, hereabouts. This was what he'd come back here for. Searching his pocket for a strange golden coin, still disbelieving that a square hole in the centre was even plausible, let alone functional. On finding one, he threw it towards the centre of the bowl. Being too eager, he missed. It glanced off the edge and the bowl rang with a dull clang.

On the threshold, two eyes silently watched. Watched the fumbling for a second coin. Watched until some basal instinct caused him to look up in order to see.

At the top of the steps, a short man, shaven headed and clad in yellow robes. A long string of beads about his neck. As their eyes met, he reverently drew his hands together and bowed from the waist.

This man hadn't made a sound, and when he'd looked away toward the second coin he'd found, and looked back... In that instant, the top of the steps were empty again. The mist creeping in front of them. Staring for a second, skewy eyed, he threw the coin into the bowl. Such was the force, the swing of his arm, it threw up a curtain of ash where it struck...

In that instant, the flames leapt up from the embers beneath. It raised a smile. This was what he had come to see.