Keith Geaney

He parked on a short gravel track leading down the hill. The rain had hammered down ever since he had left home four hours ago and showed no sign of abating, so he jammed his hat down over his ears and stepped out into the downpour. He tried to summon any of his favourite memories of Martin to accompany him on this pilgrimage, but he could not scrub the uncomfortable, foreign images from his head: Martin’s elastic, bony frame decorated in the trappings of a suit. His absent face resting on the pillow of his coffin like a placeholder. The eulogy from people who knew only the surface veneer of the man. Above all, Arnold was troubled by the realisation that Martin had never told him why The Huddle was so important. He had carried out his own research, of course, but that had failed to yield anything constructive. The site was venerated by certain pagan groups but nothing in the materials he had found had hinted at why.


The ground under his feet was treacherous, melting more into slurry with every passing minute. He clung onto passing trees and stumpy outcrops as he made way down to the clearing. There was a palpable change in the energy as he trod uncertainly onto the stage framed by the trees. He suddenly felt weighed down under a concentration in the density of existence. There was some frequency of power here, although Arnold could not tap into it or even comprehend it. He turned to his left to look at the dry-stone wall that he had passed on his way down and that threaded its way through the meadows like a keloid snake. He blinked, and a smudge of colour came into view. If he wiped the rain from his eyes and peered keenly, the shape looked conveniently familiar: it was Martin’s pipe cleaner frame, draped in the olive-green oilskin that he used to don when roving off on his week-long hikes along the coastline. Arnold had offered to come with him once but had been hopelessly outpaced by the man’s stilt-like strides; he had sat on a rain-worn bench and watched him pace out over the cliffs, flinging his arms wide and summoning some silent magic from the elements. This, then, must be Martin’s final prank: a will sacrificed in favour of a scarecrow with some withering note pinned to its chest. Arnold quickened his pace and made straight for the figure tilting slowly from side to side with the pressure of the storm. He got to within a dozen feet of it and could start to see the petrochemical rainbows of the oilskin’s wax when the figure stood up and walked off.