Mandrake by Susan Cooper Page B

unhappily through the town. The few people walking the streets raised their heads curiously as he went by. He thought he heard one of them shout; and then he thought he had imagined it. But for a moment the sound had shaken him.
    He drove up the dark hill out of Amesbury, the Lagonda humming deeply, and out on to Salisbury Plain. The road had been climbing gently for a long time; now, suddenly, he was out on the roof of England. The darkness all round, like a black fog in the air, was the darkness not of enclosing hills or trees but of the open sky. There was no moon. He could see, beyond the down-thrown white path of his headlights, the faint bright points of stars in the night. He felt a sudden oppressive loneliness, and accelerated again.
    The signpost and the forked crossroads were on him before he had remembered to expect them, and fumbling for the proper direction he swung the car squealing and gravelgrating round into the right-hand road. But within a few hundred yards the picture of the map flashed belatedly into his mind, and he knew that he was wrong. This road led up to Devizes; it was the left-hand fork that pointed to Warminster and Bath. He stopped, and began to reverse the car. It slid backwards a little way, with a peculiar unwillingness, and then the engine gave a long diminishing moan, and died.
    The starter howled ineffectually as he pressed it, and he frowned. The fuel gauge still showed the tank two-thirds full. With the beginnings of foreboding, Queston felt for a torch and the dipstick, and got out of the car. The slam of the door made him jump, and he stood for a moment frozen by the silence of the Plain, a silence that hung all round him like an immense motionless force. He had switched off the headlights, and the silence was in his eyes and ears, the voice of the dark.
    He felt for the switch of the torch, and in its small light tried the dipstick in the fuel tank. It emerged dry.
    ‘Damn ,’ he said, aloud.
    He stood still, thinking, and instinctively switched off the torch again. The vast solemn darkness sprang in on him at once. Stepping back to the grass verge, away from the vulnerable ring of footsteps that the road gave, he moved forward through the long swishing stems to see if the lights of a house showed anywhere within reach.
    On the other side of the road a distant prickle of light-dust showed a village far away across the Plain, a graze on the blackboard of the dark. Over his head the stars were fierce now, remote points of fire. He had always liked the stars, in a thousand nights spent open to them; but here in this empty silence they did not seem the same.
    He turned his head, and looked away from the road over the sweep of the dark land; then suddenly he was aware of a darkness more solid than the rest. Things, tangible. His head sang with shock for a moment, until he realized that he had stopped beside the pointing circle of Stonehenge.
    Wariness did not occur to him; only the warmth of recognition. He walked forward again in relief towards the stones. From visits long ago he felt vague memories of fences, and an official turnstile, and souvenir-touting huts; but none of these seemed to stand in the way now. Only the empty grass stretched out to the old silent stones. He was moving without uneasiness, and growing accustomed to the dark. And then it hit him.
    Without warning, he was flung backwards by an impact as fierce as if he had walked into a wall. Fear came simultaneously; a dreadful paralysing terror that brought his blood throbbing up into his chest and ears, and dried his throat. But afterwards he remembered the split second before the fear, when he had felt the overwhelming thrust of an astonishing force of ill will.
    As a man can radiate even in silence a hostility that is vocal, so the place was shouting at him. Go away. Get away. And then the terror drowned it, drowned everything. He knew as he stood there, appalled out of movement, that he had never understood fear