Ancient Echoes Read Free Page A

him, smoke streaming from the fire that burned them, brushing at their smouldering clothes. Jack heard the roar of an animal beyond the wall of fire, the shaking of the earth as it ran towards him. In terror, he turned and ran after the hunters, the heat making him sweat, the smoke making him gag. The land gave way to water, an angled drop down rocks, and he scrambled down to the cool river, where Greyface and Greenface were already immersed and swimming strongly in the current. As he followed them in, splashing helplessly as the river swept him round and down towards the sheer sides of a gorge, he looked back and saw the swaying shape of an immense horned animal, standing on the rocks above the water.
    Behind it, white stone towers gleamed! The ruins of a castle,he imagined, reaching right to the river, half fallen into the river itself.
    This was all he glimpsed before the current tugged him down and he felt water in his lungs …
    And was suddenly being dragged up by the hair, pulled to the shore amidst screaming voices and confusion.
    Roland was half crying, half shouting.
    ‘He just suddenly ran into the water! I couldn’t stop him. He shouted, “It’s burning!” and ran into the water. But I can’t swim! I can’t swim!’
    A soothing voice calmed the boy. Then Jack’s father’s voice,
‘Was
something burning, Roland?’
    ‘No. I
did
smell woodsmoke, just briefly, but there wasn’t a fire. He just ran away from the shore. He was splashing so hard, but he was in deep water in no time. I can’t swim. I’m sorry …’
    ‘It’s OK, Roland. You did the right thing, fetching us as quickly as you did. Everything’s all right. Jack’s OK, now. Aren’t you, Jack?’
    Jack sat up, shivering. It was beginning to rain again. He stared at the ring of solemn, adult faces. Their expressions seemed to demand an explanation.
    ‘I thought there was a fire. I followed the running people, the bull-runners. I think they’d started it – the fire – to stop the beast – but they got caught in it …’
    ‘The runners, again,’ his father said, shaking his head and looking away in exasperation.
    His mother said something sharp to her husband, then helped Jack up and placed a heavy towel around his shoulders. He huddled inside it, shaken and confused, as he followed the procession back up the five wooden steps from the shoreline and through the long garden, to the welcome warmth of his grandparents’ house.
    * * *
    After this incident, running-from-the-fire, Roland became very aggressive toward his cousin. The friendship that had been close and comfortable now became a distanced challenge, Roland always putting the younger boy down, stalking off on his own, seeking separate company.
    Jack missed the older boy, partly for his sense of direction, his knack of always knowing what to do, what to suggest for fun; but mostly for his gruesome stories.
    A year after running-from-the-fire, however, he met Angela, the daughter of friends of his own parents, and at once found a willing pair of ears for his own versions of the ‘gruesome’, discovering that he could satisfy his own imaginative craving by copying Roland, by evoking memories of Roland’s tales, and by describing, in as much detail as possible, his odd, occasional visions of the bull-runners. He could see and remember in such fine detail the various exotic landscapes that the hunted couple inhabited as they ran from the immense, red-faced beast which pursued them, and from the furious men who followed that beast, that his descriptions were awe-inspiring.
    ‘It’s as if you’ve really been there!’
    And in a very real way, Jack had.
    Angela was a tidy girl, orderly in her habits, precise in her thinking. She hated sports, preferring to read books about the mind, astronomy and bizarre events; so-called past-lives, which were fashionable parapsychology when she was nine years old, absorbed her thoroughly. She believed in them totally, but was unwilling to accept