The Skin Map

  “Who are you?” demanded Kit. “How do you know these things?”

  “But I’ve already told you,” chuckled the old gentleman. “I am your great-grandfather.”

  “Oh, yeah? Would this be the great-grandfather who went down to the shops for a loaf of bread one morning and never came back? The same who abandoned a wife and three kids in Marylebone in 1893?”

  “Dear me, you know about that, do you? Well, lamentably, yes. But it wasn’t a loaf of bread; it was milk and sausages.” The old man’s gaze grew keen. “Tell me, what did you go out for this morning?”

  Kit’s mouth went dry.

  “Hmm?” replied the stranger. “What was it? Tin of beans? Daily paper? This is how it always happens, don’t you see?”

  “No . . . ,” said Kit, feeling more unhinged by the second.

  “It’s a family proclivity, you might say. A talent.” The older man took a step nearer. “Come with me.”

  “Why, in the name of everything that’s holy, would I go anywhere with you?”

  “Because, my dear boy, you are a lonely twenty-seven-year-old bachelor with a worthless education, a boring no-hope job, a stalled love life, and very few prospects for the improvement of your sad lot.”

  “How dare you! You don’t know anything about me.”

  “But I know everything about you, old chap.” The old man took another step closer. “I thought we had already established that.”

  “Yeah? What else?”

  The elder gentleman sighed. “I know that you are an overworked drone in a soul-destroying cube farm where you have been passed over for promotion two times in the last nine months. The last time you don’t know about because they didn’t even bother telling you.”

  “I don’t believe this.”

  “You spend too much time alone, too much time watching television, and too little time cultivating the inner man. You live in a squalid little flat in what is referred to as a no-go zone from which your friends, of whom you see less and less, have all fled for the suburbs long ago with wives and sprogs in tow. You are exceedingly unlucky in love, having invested years in a romantic relationship which, as you know only too well, is neither romantic nor much of a relationship. In short, you have all the social prospects of a garden gnome.”

  Kit had to admit that except for the low crack about his love life, the old geezer was remarkably close to the mark.

  “Is that enough?”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m the man who has come to rescue you from a life of quiet desperation and regret.” He smiled again. “Come, my boy. Let’s sit down over a cup of coffee and discuss the matter like gentlemen. I’ve gone to a very great deal of trouble to find you. At the very least, you could spare me a few minutes out of your busy life.”

  Kit hesitated.

  “Cup of coffee—thirty minutes. What could it hurt?”

  Trepidation and curiosity wrestled one another for a moment. Curiosity won. “Okay,” he relented. “Twenty minutes.”

  The two started walking toward the street. “I’ve got to call my girlfriend and tell her I’ll be a little late,” Kit said, pulling out his phone. He flipped it open and pressed the speed-dial key for Mina’s number. When nothing happened, he glanced at the screen to see the “Network Not Connected” message blinking at him. He waved the phone in the air, then looked again. Still no tiny bars indicating a signal.

  “Not working?” asked the older man, watching him with a bemused expression.

  “Must be the buildings,” mumbled Kit, indicating the close brick walls on either hand. “Blocking the signal.”

  “No doubt.”

  They continued on, and upon approaching the end of the alley, Kit thought he heard a sound at once so familiar, and yet so strange, it took him a full two seconds to place it. Children laughing? No, not children. Seagulls.

  He had little time to wonder about this, for at that moment they stepped from the dim alleyway and into the most dazzling and unusual landscape Kit had ever seen.

  CHAPTER 2

  In Which Lines Are Drawn, and Crossed

  Before his bewildered eyes spread a scene he had only ever glimpsed in movies: a busy wharf with a three-masted schooner moored to the dock and, beyond it, the grand sweep of a sparkling, blue-green bay. The brilliant, sun-washed air was loud with the cackle of seagulls hovering and diving for scraps of fish and refuse as fishermen in the smaller boats hefted wicker baskets full of silver fish to women in blue bonnets and grey shawls over long calico dresses. Broad black headlands rose on either side of the wide scoop of the bay and, between these craggy promontories, a tidy town of small white houses climbed the slopes. Stocky men in short, baggy trousers and droopy shirts, with straw hats on their heads, pushed handcarts and drove mule teams along the seafront, helping to unload hessian-wrapped bundles from the tall ship.

  Gone was King's Cross with its towering office blocks and narrow Regency roads clogged with cars and double-decker buses, with its innumerable coffee shops and takeaways, betting parlours, and news agents, the Betjeman Arms, the post office, the community college. No more the world-beating urban sprawl of metropolitan London with its dense clusters of neighbourhoods and shopping districts connected with traffic-bound streets and four-lane highways.

  Everything familiar that Kit had known with the solid certainty of concrete had vanished utterly—and with it his own concrete certainty in bricks-and-mortar reality. It had all been replaced with a seaside vista at once so charming, so evocative, so quaint and winsome it could have been a painting in the National Gallery. And then the stench hit him—a stringent pong of fish guts, rotting vegetables, and tar. He felt woozy, and his stomach squirmed with a queasy feeling.

  Turning hastily back to the alleyway, he saw that it was still there, still straight and narrow, its length deeply shadowed as if to shield a dreadful secret. “Where . . . ?” he said, gulping air. “Where are we?”

  “No need to speak until you’re ready.”

  Kit turned his wondering eyes to the bustling panorama before him—the tall ship, the muscled stevedores, the fishermen in their floppy felt hats, the fishwives in their wooden clogs and head scarves—and tried to make sense of what he was seeing and remain calm in the face of what he considered a shocking dislocation. “What happened to King's Cross?”

  “All in good time, dear boy. Can you walk? Perhaps we can forget the coffee—have a drink instead. Fancy a pint?”

  Kit nodded.

  “It isn’t far,” the old gentleman informed him. “This way.”

  Dragging his rattled self together, Kit followed his guide out onto the waterfront. It felt as if he were walking on borrowed legs. The boardwalk seemed to lurch and shift with every awkward step.

  “You are doing marvellously well. When it first happened to me, I couldn’t even stand up.”

  They passed along a row of tiny shops and boathouses and simple dwellings, Kit’s mind reeling as he tried to take in everything at once. Away from the fetid alley, the air was cleaner, though still filled with the scent of the sea: fish and seaweed, wet hemp, salt, and rocks.

  “In answer to your previous question,” the old man said, “this place is called Sefton-on-Sea.”

  Judging from what he could observe, the town appeared to be one of those forgotten coastal villages that had been frozen in time by a local council intent on capitalising on the tourist trade; a settlement that time forgot. Sefton-on-Sea was more authentically old-fashioned and picturesque than any West Coast fishing village Kit had ever seen. As a reenactment theme park, the place put all others in the shade.

  “Here we are,” said the elder man. “Come in. We’ll have a drink and get to know one another better.”

  Kit looked around to see that they were standing at the door of a substantial brick house with a painted wooden sign that said OLD SHIP INN. He allowed himself to be led through the door and stepped into a dark room with low ceilings, a few tables and benches, and a tin-topped bar. A f
ew snugs lined the perimeter of the pub, which was presided over by a broad-beamed young woman convincingly costumed in a cap of plain linen and a long white ale-stained apron. She greeted them with a smile. There was no one else in the place.

  “Two pints of your best, Molly,” called the old man, leading his docile companion to a stool in the corner. “Sit yourself down, my boy. We’ll get some ale in you and you’ll begin to feel more yourself.”

  “You come here often?” Kit asked, trying to force some lightness into his voice.

  “Whenever I’m in the neighbourhood, so to speak.”

  “Which is where, exactly? Cornwall? Pembrokeshire?”

  “So to speak.”

  The waitress appeared bearing two overflowing pewter tankards that she deposited on the table. “Thank you, Molly,” said the old man. “Do you have anything to eat? A little bread and cheese, perhaps?”

  “There’s cheese in t’back, an’ I can go down t’bakery for a loaf if you like.”

  “Would you, please? There will be an extra penny in it for you. There’s a good girl.”

  The young lady shuffled off, and the white-haired gentleman took up his tankard, saying, “Here’s to dodgy adventures with disreputable relatives!”

  Kit failed to see the humour of that sentiment but was glad for the drink. He took a deep draught, allowing the flowery sweet ale to fill his mouth and slide down his throat. The taste was reassuringly familiar, and after another swallow he felt better for it.

  “Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?” said the old man, putting down his tankard. “Now then.” He drew an invisible square on the tabletop with his forefingers. “What do you know about the Old Straight Track?”

  “I think I’d know one if I saw one.”

  “Good,” replied his great-grandfather. “Perhaps your education wasn’t entirely wasted.” He redrew the square. “These trackways form what might be called intersections between worlds, and as such—”

  “Hold on,” interrupted Kit. “Intersections between worlds . . . We are talking about trains?”

  “Trains!” The old man reared back. “Great heavens, it’s nothing to do with those smoke-belching monstrosities.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m talking about the Old Straight Track—Neolithic pathways. In short, I am talking about ley lines.” He studied the younger man’s expression. “Am I to take it you’ve never heard of them?”

  “Once or twice,” hedged Kit.

  “Not even that.”

  “No,” he confessed.

  “Oh, dear. Oh, dear.” The old man regarded him with a glance of disapproval. “You really ought to have applied yourself to your studies, young Cosimo.”

  Kit drank some more, reviving a little more with every sip. “So, what are these ley lines, then?”

  Into the invisible square the old man drew a straight diagonal line. “A ley line,” he said, speaking slowly—as one might to a dog, or dull-witted child, “is what might be called a field of force, a trail of telluric energy. There are hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, all over Britain, and they’ve been around since the Stone Age. I thought you might have stumbled across them before.”

  Kit shook his head.

  “Early man recognised these lines of force and marked them out on the landscape with, well, any old thing, really—standing stones, ditches, mounds, tumps, sacred wells, and that sort of thing. And, later on, with churches, market crosses, crossroads, and whatnot.”

  “Hey, hold on,” said Kit, breaking in. “I think I know what you’re talking about—New Agers out in Wiltshire on bank holidays traipsing around the standing stones with witching sticks and tambourines, chanting to the Earth Goddess and—” He looked at the frown on the old man’s face. “No?”

  “Not by a long chalk. Those poor deluded dupes, spouting all that neo-pagan poppycock, are to be pitied. No.” He shook his head firmly. “We’re not talking New Age nonsense; we’re talking science—as in ‘There are more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ et cetera.” His eyes took on a slightly manic light. “Truth, dear boy. Science!”

  “R-right,” said Kit warily. “I thought you said they were some kind of intersection between worlds.”

  “Precisely,” replied his great-grandfather. “You see, this universe we inhabit is made up of billions of galaxies—literally beyond counting—and this is only one universe.”

  “There are others?”

  “Oh, yes—possibly. Maybe. We’re not sure.”

  “We?”

  “The Questors—but never mind, I’ll come to that later.” The old man brushed the word aside with a stroke of his hand. “Now then, where were we?”

  “Billions of galaxies,” said Kit, staring into his tankard. If he had for a moment allowed himself to feel that sitting in a friendly pub conversing with a genial old man who was, by any reckoning, well over 125 years old, might be a reasonable activity . . . that feeling evaporated, replaced by a steadily mounting anxiety. And it was not only due to the outlandish nature of the old codger’s demented ramblings. The thing that had him in a sweat was this: in spite of everything, he had a sensation of being told a secret he knew to be true, but which would be far, far easier—and much safer—to ignore; all the more so since he strongly suspected that acknowledging the truth meant his life would change utterly.

  Then again, what Cosimo had said was right: he was nothing but an overworked drone in a cube farm, a minor cog in the dreary machinery of a third-rate mortgage mill, overlooked, unloved, a sidelined player in the big game, and—how did the old man put it?—a lonely bachelor with the love life of garden gnome. What then, really, did he have to lose?

  “Look, no offence,” said Kit, rousing himself, “but if you really are my great-grandfather, why aren’t you dead?”

  “I suppose the simplest explanation is that all the popping back and forth between one world and another does funny things to one’s aging mechanism; ley travel seems to inhibit the process in some way.”

  “Oh.”

  “If we can continue?” The old man dipped his finger in a little puddle of ale and drew a large circle on the tabletop. “The visible universe with its many galaxies occupies one dimension of our common reality, but there are other dimensions—many of them.”

  “How many?”

  “Impossible to say. But each dimension has its own worlds and galaxies and so forth. And we know that these dimensions impinge on one another. They touch. They interpenetrate. And where one dimension touches or passes through another, it forms a line of force on the landscape.” He glanced up and saw his explanation was falling short of total comprehension. “Ever played with soap bubbles in the bath?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, you could think of these different dimensions as clusters of soap bubbles. Where one bubble touches another—or passes through another—it forms a line. It’s true. Look the next time.”

  “I’ll try to remember to do that.”

  “Now then, if each bubble were a different dimension, you could move from one to the other along that line.”

  “A ley line.”

  “Precisely.” His great-grandfather smiled. “I knew you’d understand.”

  “I can’t say I do.”

  “By methods yet to be explained, we have travelled, you and I. Crossed from one world, one dimension, to another via a ley line.”

  “Stane Way,” surmised Kit, beginning to grasp the smallest part of what the old fellow was telling him. “The ley line was the alley?”

  “Was and is.” The old man smiled triumphantly. “Stane—from the old Saxon word for stone—is literally the Stone Way, named for the row of standing stones that in a former age marked out the path. The stones are gone now, but the ley is still there.”

  Kit took another swallow and, fortified by the ale, attempted a rejoinder. “All right. Assuming for argument’s sake that what you’re saying is in some cockeyed way true: how is it that such a
monumental discovery has gone completely unnoticed by any reputable representatives of the scientific community?”

  “But it isn’t unnoticed at all,” replied the elder gentleman. “People have known about this since—”

  “The Stone Age, yes, so you said. But if it’s been around so long, how has it been kept a secret?”

  “It hasn’t been kept a secret by anyone. It is so very ancient that man in his headlong rush to modernity and progress has simply forgotten. It passed from science into superstition, you might say, so now it is more a matter of belief. That is to say, some people believe in ley lines, and some don’t.”

  “I’m thinking most don’t.”

  “Quite.” The old man glanced up as Molly appeared with a wooden plate heaped with slices of brown bread and a few chunks of pale yellow cheese. “Thank you, my dear.” He took the plate and offered it to his great-grandson. “Here, get some of this down you. It will restore the inner man.”

  “Ta,” said Kit, taking up a slice of bread and a chunk of crumbly cheese. “You were saying?”

  “Consider the pyramids, Cosimo. Marvellous achievement—one of the most impressive architectural feats in the history of the world. Have you seen them? No? You should one day. Stupendous accomplishment. It would be an heroic undertaking to build such structures with cranes, earthmovers, and the kind of industrial hydraulics available today. To contemplate erecting them with the technology available to the ancient Egyptians would be unimaginable, would it not?”

  “I suppose.” Kit shrugged. “What’s the point?”

  “The point, dear boy, is that they are there! Though no one remembers how they were built, though the methods of their construction, once considered commonplace, have been lost to time, the pyramids exist for all the world to see. It’s the same with ley lines—completely dead and forgotten like the people who once marked them and used them—until they were rediscovered in the modern era. Although, strictly speaking, the leys have been rediscovered many times. The latest discoverer was Alfred Watkins.”

  “Who?”

  “Old Alf was a photographer back in the day—quite a good one, actually. Nice chap. Had an eye for landscape. Travelled around on horseback in the early days of the camera, taking photographs of the brooding moors and misty mountains, that sort of thing. Helped enormously with his discovery,” explained the old man, biting off a bit of cheese. “He made a detailed survey of ley lines and published a book about them.”