Moonseed

9

Constable Morag Decker swung her patrol car into Viewcraig Gardens and immediately ran into a jam.

She counted three sets of roadworks, a scene of wooden separators and flashing yellow lamps and hard hats and jack-hammers. There were vans belonging to the gas company and British Telecom, and another from a private contractor that looked as if it was responsible for cable repairs, bumped up onto the kerb on both sides of the road. The traffic wasn’t too heavy, in the middle of this Monday morning, with the sun rising high above Arthur’s Seat. But the tailbacks already stretched hundreds of yards to either side.

Maybe she should call the station.

It was unusual for more than one crew to be vandalizing the road surface at any one time. For now, the traffic was moving okay, but she could see the signs of frustration in the way the drivers edged closer together and glared at the crews as they passed. One accident, even something trivial, and the road would be blocked.

Today was April 1st. She wondered if this congestion was the result of some misbegotten joke.

She frowned as she thought it over.

At twenty-five, Morag had had her uniform for just a year. At her last appraisal her sergeant’s most cutting comment had been about the way she refused to take responsibility on the ground. She was always too willing to pass the buck up the line, so he said.

She didn’t entirely agree. She thought reporting up the line was generally pretty responsible, in fact; information to support good decision-making had to be the key to any reasoned response. So she’d been trained, and so she believed.

But her sergeant was of an older school, toughened in the English inner city riots of the early 1980s, when the police were essentially at war with a hostile public. I remember my community policing training. A video shot through the back of a riot shield in Toxteth. My God, the looks on the faces of those yobs …

Her own presence, gliding through here in the marked police car, was having a visibly calming effect. Maybe a copper on the spot wouldn’t be a bad idea during the rush hour, later in the day.

She deferred the decision.

In the meantime she had a more immediate problem: nowhere to park.

She was in luck. Ted Dundas was out in front of his house, prodding vigorously at a garden verge. When she pulled alongside she opened her window and leaned out.

Ted straightened up, leaned on his hoe and nodded. ‘Morag. Come to see me?’

‘No such luck. But I need to get this beastie off the road. Can I –’

‘Use the drive?’ He dropped his hoe and, with an alacrity that belied his years and beer gut, he hopped over a low wall and opened the wrought-iron gate.

That was Ted for you: helpful without pressure or hassle. He’d been one of the most helpful elements in the station when she’d joined last year; she genuinely regretted his retirement from the force.

She briskly reversed the car into the drive. She climbed out, carrying her peaked cap.

On impulse, she looked east, towards Arthur’s Seat. The air was – odd. She thought she could smell ozone, like at the coast, or maybe before a storm. But the clouds were high and thin. And the light above the Seat seemed strange. Yellowish.

Morag reached out to lock her car. As her fingers approached the handle, a blue spark leapt from her fingertips to the metal; there was a tiny snap, and her fingertips burned sharply.

She snatched her hand back, involuntarily. ‘Shit.’

‘Language, Constable,’ Ted said. ‘I’ve been doing that all morning.’

‘Storm weather, you think?’

‘Maybe. What are you up to here?’

‘A call from a Mrs Clark. Lost her cat. Insisted on a personal call.’

Ted nodded. ‘Two doors down. Ruth’s a widow. Be kind to her, Morag.’

‘I will.’ He calls her Ruth. Interesting. Gossip for the station canteen later.

She locked the car without any further static shocks, nodded to Ted, and walked down the road.

Ruth Clark, Ted Dundas’s neighbour, was a slim, intense woman on the upper margin of middle age; evidently the cat meant a great deal to her.

Morag took the cat’s description: a tabby, five years old, female. Unusually intelligent and sensitive. (Right.)

She looked around the boundary of Mrs Clark’s fairly shabby suburban garden. There was no sign of cat droppings – but then, said Mrs Clark, Tammie was too smart to do her business in her own garden and she always used the neighbours’, oh, yes.

On the other hand, there was no sign that anything amiss had happened to Tammie. No rat poison put down by a pissed-off neighbour, for instance.

Missing cats weren’t a police priority. There wasn’t anything Morag could do but assure Mrs Clark that they would circulate the details of the cat, and suggest that she do her own searching – circulate notices to the neighbours, for instance – and then she endured a little routine vitriol at the general incompetence and apathy of the police.

‘Even my phone’s been off since I got up. I had to walk down the road to the public phone box and you wouldn’t believe the filth …’

Morag got out as quickly as she could, reported into the station, and walked back up the road to Ted Dundas’s.

She sat in his kitchen – warm, smelling so thickly of bacon she could feel her arteries furring up just sitting here – and let him make her a mug of strong tea. He boiled up a pan on a battered camping stove, propped up on his gas hob.

‘The gas is off,’ Ted explained. ‘You saw the repair crew in the road. Bunch of bloody cowboys,’ he said amiably. ‘I heard old Dougie at number fifteen complaining about it, and he said he’d heard someone else had called them in to look at a leak. Dougie heard that because they’d come to borrow his mobile phone; their phone was out.’

Mrs Clark’s phone had been cut too. ‘Ted, what about your phone line?’

‘Snafu. But I have a mobile. But you can hang the bloody phone; what bothers me is the cable TV. I was watching the baseball from Japan. Got to the fourth innings before it cut out.’

‘Um.’ Cable and phone lines and gas lines, all out. Morag turned over the possibilities. Was it possible one of those cack-handed crews, doing some innocent repairs, had cut through the other service lines? It wouldn’t be the first time. Or what about deliberate vandalism?

‘You own a cat, don’t you, Ted?’

‘The cat owns me, more like.’

‘I just can’t see what people like about the bloody creatures.’

‘Aye, well, cats are unpleasant and unnecessarily cruel predators. And it’s soggy and sentimental to think anything else.’

‘But you keep one anyhow.’

‘I told you. I think Willis keeps me.’ He poured her more tea. ‘We have a partnership of equals, me and that animal.’

‘Where is he now?’

He eyed her. ‘Not here.’

The house shuddered gently.

Concentric ripples on the meniscus of her tea, like a tube train passing far beneath the foundations. Except there was no metro in Edinburgh. Or maybe like a heavy lorry rolling by, shaking the ground.

But Viewcraig Street was a cul-de-sac.

She glanced up at Ted. He was watching her carefully.

‘Funny weather,’ he said.

‘Yeah.’

‘Listen, do you have a couple of minutes? There’s something I’d like you to take a look at.’

They walked out to the back of Ted’s house, towards Arthur’s Seat. They headed up the slope towards St Anthony’s Chapel. Soon they were off the path and climbing over a rising rocky slope; the grass slithered under Morag’s polished shoes. Once they’d risen twenty yards or so above the level of the road, the Edinburgh wind started to cut into her.

‘I’m not equipped for a hike,’ she said.

‘You’ll be fine.’ Ted’s grizzled pillar of a head protruded from the neck of his thick all-weather rad-proof jacket. His legs worked steadily, hard and mechanical, and his breath was deep, calm and controlled.

It was quiet, she noticed absently. There was the moan of the wind through the grass, the distant wash of traffic noise from the city. But that was about all.

What was missing?

She stopped. ‘Bird song,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘I can’t hear any bird song. Can you? That’s why it’s so quiet.’

He nodded, and walked steadily on.

A few dozen yards further, Ted halted. He pointed up the slope, towards the grey, brooding pile of the Chapel, where it sheltered under the crag, still a couple of hundred yards away. ‘There,’ he said. ‘What do you make of that?’

‘What?’

‘Don’t they teach you observation any more? Look, girl.’

She looked, and stepped forward a couple more paces.

Under scattered fragments of broken orange-brown igneous rock, under green scraps of grass and heather and moss, there was a silvery pool. It clung to the outline of the crag, as if the rock had been painted.

‘Now,’ said Ted, ‘this used to be solid rock. I wouldn’t step much further.’

‘Why not?’

He bent and picked up a chunk of loose rock. With a reasonably lithe movement he threw it ahead of her, into the dust.

It sank out of sight, immediately, as if falling into a pond.

‘Wow,’ she said. ‘How far does this go?’

‘I don’t know. There seem to be other pools, up around the summit, and then the odd outbreak like this one. Like something coming through the rock, somehow.’

‘Has anybody been hurt up here?’

‘Sunk in the dust, you mean? Nothing’s been reported, so far as I know.’

She thought. ‘No, it hasn’t.’ She’d have heard. ‘So what’s caused it?’

‘Well, hell, I don’t know. I’m no scientist. I’m just an observant copper, like you. What else do you notice?’

She looked around, trying to take in the scene as a whole. Her skirt flapped around her legs, irritating her.

‘I think the profile has changed. Of the Seat.’

‘Very good. On the slope we’re standing on, which is no more than six or eight per cent, I’d say there has been a slip, overall, of ten or fifteen feet. And in the steeper slope at the back of the Dry Dam, for instance, it’s a lot more than that.’

‘You think so?’

‘You can hear it. Especially at night. Rock cracking. Little earthquakes, that shake the foundations of your house.’

She stepped forward, cautiously; she had no desire to imitate the fate of Ted’s pebble. When she’d got to where she judged the edge of the dust pool to be – still standing on firm, unbroken basalt, maybe three feet from the lip of the dust – she crouched down.

The dust was fine-grained, like hourglass sand. It seemed to be shifting, subtly, in patterns she couldn’t follow. It was more like watching boiling fluid than a solid.

She thought she could smell something. Perhaps it was sulphur, or chlorine.

Occasionally she thought she could see some kind of glow, coming from the dust where it was exposed. But it was sporadic and half-hidden. She’d once flown over a storm in a 747; looking out of the window, at lightning sparking purple beneath cotton-wool cloud layers, was something like this.

‘Come on,’ Ted said. ‘I need to show you something else.’ He headed down the slope, and started walking around the pool.

She straightened up carefully, and went to follow Ted.

She said, ‘You think this has something to do with the loss of the lines? The TV and gas and phone –’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ he said mildly. ‘Can’t say how far underground it spreads, how far it has got.’

‘But if there are land slips going on, some kind of subsidence –’

‘You could get line breaks. Yes. There have been scientists up here, poking and prodding away. There’s an American chap my son works with … But they’re just recording, measuring. I think someone should be doing something. Taking it a bit more seriously.’

They climbed around the crag. They were paralleling the edge of the funny dust, Morag saw. It made for a rough circle, she supposed, patches of it draped across the breast of the land. But the edge of the circle was rough and irregular; in some places necks of the dust and broken ground came snaking down the hillside, perhaps carried there by some slip or a fault in the basalt, and they had to descend to avoid it.

Now, Morag heard singing. I Wish I Was A Spaceman / The Fastest Guy Alive … It sounded like a TV theme tune.

‘Good Christ,’ Ted said. ‘I haven’t heard that in thirty years.’

‘It sounds like kids’ TV.’

‘So it is, my dear. But long before your time.’

They entered the Dry Dam and came on a line of people. They were dressed in some kind of purple uniform, and they were sitting in a loose circular arc that embraced the hillside, and they were singing.

I’d Fly Around The Universe …

They were mostly slim to the point of thinness. They didn’t seem cold, despite the paucity of their clothes, the keenness of the wind up here. They were singing with a happy-clappy gusto.

There was a boy standing at the centre of the loose arc, age eighteen or so, skinny as a rake. When he saw Ted and Morag approaching he got to his feet, a little stiffly, and approached.

‘Welcome,’ he said. ‘My name is Bran.’

‘Now then, Hamish,’ Ted said stiffly.

Morag glanced at Ted. ‘You know this gentleman?’

‘Used to.’

‘Would you mind telling me what you’re doing up here, sir?’

‘Watching the Moonseed, of course,’ Bran-Hamish said.

‘The Moonseed?’

‘All this started just after that Moon rock was brought to the university. And Venus, of course. Fantastic, isn’t it? Two thousand years of waiting –’

Morag walked forward. The members of the group, still singing, looked up at her. Before each of them there was a small cairn, of broken fragments of basalt. When she looked further up the slope, she saw broken ground, exposed silver dust, loose vegetation floating on the dust. Another pool. The smell of ozone was sharp.

‘Every morning we mark it with a cairn,’ Bran said. ‘And every morning it has come further down the slope.’

‘You’re a fruitcake,’ Ted said bluntly.

‘Maybe,’ Bran said amiably. ‘But at least we’re here. Where are the scientists, the TV crews, the coppers –’

Morag thought she could answer that. She imagined her own desk sergeant fending off nutcase reports from dog-walkers, about an oddity no one could classify.

Morag frowned, pointing up the slope. ‘Where are the other cairns? The ones from yesterday, and the day before.’

‘Gone,’ Bran said simply. ‘Consumed, every morning. Like your fry-up breakfasts, Ted.’

Morag straightened her cap. ‘Sir, I think you’d be advised to come away from here.’

Bran spread his hands. ‘Why? Are we breaking the law?’

‘No. And I can’t compel you to move.’

‘Well, then.’

She pointed to the dust. ‘But it’s obviously not safe.’

‘We’ve never been safer. Not since the Romans came have we been so – close.’

Ted pulled a face at Morag. ‘I told you. Fruitcake.’

Bran-Hamish just laughed, and resumed his seat with the others.

Morag and Ted walked away.

‘Well,’ Ted said. ‘Now you’ve seen it. What are you going to do?’

Morag hesitated.

She’d never faced anything like this before, in her brief police career.

She’d had some emergency training, at police college and since joining the station, with the council’s emergency planning people. It had all been rather low-key, underfunded and routine. Britain was a small, stable island. Nothing much in the way of disasters ever happened.

Morag had not been trained to handle the unexpected.

‘I can’t see this is any kind of criminal matter. And this isn’t yet an emergency.’

‘It isn’t? Are you sure? What if it keeps growing?’ He eyed the horizon. ‘You know, cats are smart animals,’ he said. ‘Sensitive. Sometimes they react before the rest of us when something is going wrong.’ He hesitated. ‘I’ve not told Ruth, but I haven’t seen Willis for a couple of days either.’

‘Something going wrong? Like what?’

There was a sound like subdued thunder.

Morag and Ted exchanged a glance. Then they began to hurry back the way they had come, around the shoulder of the crag. The cultists came with them, running over the basalt outcrops in their thin slippers.

They came around the brow of the hill. They stopped perhaps a hundred yards from St Anthony’s Chapel.

The old ruin was sinking.

The single large section of upright wall, two storeys high, was tipping sideways, visibly, a ruined Pisa. But even as it did so its base was sinking into the softened ground. Its upper structure, never designed for such treatment, was crumbling; great blocks of sandstone were breaking free, and went clattering down the wall’s sloping face, making the dull thunderous noise she had heard. One of the lower wall remnants, she saw, had already all but disappeared, its upper edge sinking below the closing dust as she watched.

It was like watching some immense stone ship, holed, sink beneath the stony waves of this plug of lava.

Around them, the cultists were jumping up and down, whooping and shouting.

Morag shook her head. ‘What does it mean, Ted?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ Ted said grimly. ‘Ask these loonie buggers. I think it’s time you made a report, girlie.’

‘Yeah.’

She lifted her lapel radio to her lips.