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I left the others to their misinformed lecture and circumnavigated the ring on my own, feeling the press of ground beneath me. Many of the stones were fallen or missing entirely; those that remained were cracked and uneven; nonetheless, the original Ring had been perfectly round. Perhaps that was why, despite its wear, it retained the feel of a precise mechanism, a circle tightly calibrated to enclose and concentrate any worship carried out on this barren and wind-swept hillock. It reminded me of an ancient brass-work device in a museum, whose function remained unimpaired by the surface ravages of time.
Standing in the centre, I looked down to see traces of ash among the grass.
From the Ring's heather-grown perimeter, which had once been ditched and banked to form a henge, I studied the countryside. Water stretched out before me and at my back; to my right, the peninsula between the lochs was littered with standing stones, brochs, and earthen mounds. To my left, peninsula narrowed into causeway before joining the road; on one side were the Stones of Ste
The Dutch were being led away by the guide, tempted after his conversational carrots that seemed to link Vikings and Druids-although I might have been mistaken, I was not listening very closely. I dawdled among the stones, allowing the others to pull ahead, before following them down the causeway towards the Stones of Ste
Perhaps it was the approaching dusk coupled with the racing clouds and biting wind. Perhaps it was the knowledge that, somewhere near, a man with a knife waited to loose blood on the earth. In any event, I was aware of an atmosphere here such as I had seldom felt before: not at Stonehenge, a gloomy and isolated huddle of stones, nor even Avebury-what metaphysical authority it once possessed had long since been overbuilt by barns and homely cottages. This place held another kind of aura entirely: One could feel it brooding.
The Ste
In their centre was the restored altar. According to a guide-book in Mycroft's study, some twenty years ago a well-meaning enthusiast had decided that the half-buried stone in the middle of the circle had originally been an altar-stone, and had raised it, stretching it between a stone that lay to one side and a pair of stones that had been cracked and mounted upright with a gap between the halves.
Although the position of the cracked stone seemed to have a significance beyond that of a support-the gap between its halves would frame the mound of Maeshowe-the massive three-legged table was, nonetheless, most impressive. It did not require the imagination of a Sir Walter Scott to picture it as a sacrificial altar, longer than any man, fenced in by the towering grey granite shards.
My tour companions had been marched away to Maeshowe, our guide having clearly decided that I was unappreciative of his expertise. Alone, I made a slow circuit of the Stones, memorising the arrangement of the upright rocks, letting my feet learn the low depression of the ditch-works and the ground-level bridge that had once passed through ditch and bank.
Under the guise of studying waterfowl, I took out my glasses and aimed them at the saltwater loch to the south. Three swans stretched their wings and thought about di
Its i
Snatches of voice warned me of my companions' return, and I let the glasses wander along the shore-line for a minute before packing them away. I turned for a last look at the nearby proto-circle.
There was an intensity, almost a violence, to these Stones that the Ring on the hill did not have. I had fancied them earlier as having been dropped by the gods, but that was too passive. Rather, they looked as if the gods had seized each sharp-edged slab to drive it savagely into the turf, pulling away a blood-smeared hand.
I caught myself: I'd been away from Holmes for too long, and my imagination was ru
Still, when I looked at that stone altar, I shivered.
I returned to the coach and rode unprotesting to the island's second town of Stromness, but when the others were shepherded in the direction of a restaurant, I slipped away. I walked back the way we had come, taking my time with the four miles so it would be deep dusk for the last mile; three motor-cars passed; each time, I dropped into the grassy verge away from their head-lamps.
The sky was moonless; the hotel was a faint outline against a marginally lighter expanse of clouds. I crept towards the smell of smoke and pressed myself into the wall between the first two windows, trying to hear above the perpetual sough of the wind. In the absence of a stethoscope, I pulled the knife from my boot-sheath and rested its point against the stones, setting the handle in back of my ear. Nothing.
Moving down the wall to the next windows, I tried again, and again heard only the sounds of the night and the thud of my own heart. Around the corner, the wind was loud enough to obscure anything less than a shout, so I kept circling to the side facing away from the loch. Again I listened, again-wait. Not voices, but a rhythmic thump, thump, thump, that then quickened in pace for a dozen or so beats. Feet, coming down stairs?
I moved to the boarded-up back of the hotel, and there I glimpsed motion. A light flickered, danced, and steadied: a candle, half-visible through the boards. A figure moved around the room; I heard the sound of water flowing into a vessel, saw a flare of light as a gas cooker lit beneath the kettle. The shadowy figure pulled open drawers, coming out from the third one with a long knife. He took it to a shapeless lump on the table beside the tea-pot, and began sawing: bread.
All this was with his back to me, so he was nothing but an indistinct shape in a dim room. I considered moving around to the boarded-up door and seeing if I could find a crack, but before I could move, he turned, and the unruly hair and beard identified him: Damian Adler.
If prisoner he was, then a very blasé prisoner indeed, making tea and sandwiches as if living in a burnt-out building with a religious fanatic was the humdrum stuff of everyday Bohemian life.
He turned away to the tea-pot, and I pressed my face closer against the glass, trying to get some sense of the man. Did he, too, burn with the fanaticism of Testimony? Had this rumpled figure participated in the ritual murder of his wife? Was he about to join in the similar slaughter of an i
My nose hovered near the glass, my spectacles dangerously close to tapping its hard surface; without warning, a hand came down on my shoulder.