Tarent could not think of it, or try to imagine it, because there was no verbal or visual vocabulary to describe it.
The Mebsher finally moved out of earshot. Silence followed, the partial silence of the outdoors: wind, movement, foliage and branches. There was no birdsong in this place. The wind was edged with a deep chill, a harbinger of the early winter that threatened. Tarent felt the cold, not only from the wind.
He was alone in the quadrangle of Warne’s Farm – even the men who had been guarding the closed building were gone. With no one now to stop him, Tarent took several photographs of the concrete building where he had identified the bodies. He switched cameras, putting aside the Canon he was most attached to and taking out the Nikon. He immediately took a series of shots of the dark tower by the main gate, checked online that they were in memory at the lab, then went towards to the building and took a few pictures closer up. Pigeons had invaded the building and were squatting on the sills. Moss grew in the many crevices in the brickwork and render. For the first time, Tarent noticed that a placard had been placed on a door at the base of the building, warning that the structure was unstable and that no one should try to enter it. The area immediately around it had been designated as a hard-hat zone.
Again he checked online for the confirmation that the Nikon’s images had been received and were archived.
He walked across the quad to where he had left his bag, then moved it to a less exposed position inside a doorway. His name was shown prominently on the label, following OOR regulations.
He decided he should not attempt to leave Warne’s Farm until he had finished what he planned to do before the Mebsher arrived. Taking all three of his cameras he walked back through the lower corridor of the residential building, then followed the gravelled walkway that led to the fence. At every door or barrier he passed he made sure that his ID card was still functioning – the cavalier way in which Flo Mallinan had suddenly invalidated his passport made him wary of being locked out, but his card still worked.
Tarent passed through the main gate, checking and double-checking that his pass still functioned, then went through to the outside. He turned back, took some shots of the gate, the fencing, the notices and warnings attached. He also photographed the general view of the Warne’s Farm compound, seen from this slight rise of ground, visible through the trees.
As he climbed up the slope towards the ridge he thought at first that someone must have been out with tractors or heavy earth-moving equipment, because the fallen trees he remembered from before, up-ended by the storm, were not there. There had been one particular root-ball which hung over the pathway. That tree alone, a huge beech, would have taken a team of men several hours to chainsaw up and clear away.
Tarent tried to remember how long it was since he had been up here. It was before the Mebsher arrived, while he and Lou were waiting. An hour or so? How could all those felled trees have been removed in that time?
As he approached the top of the ridge he had to leave the pathway, because it curved down and away, so he scrambled up the slope through the undergrowth. There were many clumps of brambles and rhododendrons, and towards the top a tangle of gorse. He pushed through the branches and prickly bushes. Maybe he had climbed a different part of the ridge, because he did not remember so much dense undergrowth up here.
However, when he finally forced his way out he realized he was in much the same place as before, and for the same reason – he had clambered up to the ridge from the highest part of the path.
He looked down at the wide field where he had witnessed the adjacency attack on the Mebsher, where the triangle of annihilated earth had been scorched into the surface of the ground. Two days ago, before the storm? Three or four? He had lost count of those days. But however long it was, there was no longer any sign of it. He clearly remembered the place where the attack had occurred – it was more or less in the centre of the field, and the black triangular mark left on the ground could not be missed. But the crops were growing uninterrupted.
Baffled again, Tarent stared for a long time, wondering what he had seen, or even if his memory had failed him. There were so many contradictions he had to absorb, so much to try and make sense of.
An idea came to him. He switched on the Nikon and selected the infra-red view, an option he rarely used because it caned the battery. With the quantum lens set to telephoto he slowly scanned through the viewfinder the part of the field where he felt certain the Mebsher had been just before the adjacency attack. Most of the image came through neutrally, but there was one spot, slightly to the side of where he expected the adjacency mark to be, that gave a positive register.
It was an area of the ground beneath the growing wheat and it was roughly triangular in shape, perhaps ten or twenty metres across at most. He turned up the gain – the image became clearer. There was something there, even if it was not what he was seeking. He had seen similar traces before, usually when images were taken from above by aircraft or reconnaissance drones – they often revealed historical workings, or the foundations of ancient roadways or buildings, or most commonly areas of violent impact, such as traces of explosions or the sites of crashed aircraft.
The Nikon’s battery failed after that so he took out the Olympus Stealth, keeping the Canon in reserve. He took several photographs of the field, including a few telephoto shots of the area of the old trace, but the central mystery of the adjacency scar remained.
He turned to walk back to Warne’s Farm. He was feeling warm in his jacket, which he had put on when he went out to find the Mebsher. In the erratic current climate sudden temperature shifts were not unusual, but normally they involved unexpected cold snaps. The air was much warmer about him, the sort of feeling he remembered from childhood, the calm evening after a sweltering day, when the air stayed warm long after the sun had set.
The light too had changed. It was around midday when the Mebsher had been at the Farm, a cool but bright day, with broken clouds, a stiff wind. He had walked up through the trees, in their shade. The air was now still, and it was evening. There was a glow in the sky towards the west: high cirrus clouds lit by a setting sun.
How much time had passed? And in what manner had it passed?
Tarent removed his jacket, pulled his camera holdall on over his shirt and pushed his way back through the gorse and rhododendrons to find the path below. Once under the trees, where swarms of midges hovered beneath the branches, he wondered if somehow he had blundered into another place entirely. The shallow hillside was thickly wooded, with trees of all ages and sizes, and a thick, loamy soil below, rich with leaves and twigs and other pieces of vegetation. He vividly recalled the wretched damage caused by the storm, so many fallen trees and broken branches, so much chalky soil and clods of earth bared to the elements.
He continued down the slope through the gathering twilight until he found the path, which at least looked familiar and as he expected it to be. He walked back towards the Warne’s Farm complex, looking for the gate and the fence. A heady smell, sweet and almost intoxicating, drifted up towards him through the trees: gasoline.
2
In the half-light of the evening he passed the place where the gate had been before he realized he had done so. He was walking down through the trees, looking ahead to see the Warne’s Farm buildings, thinking in a confused way about the trees – where had they come from, hadn’t they all been blown down? He realized he had reached the lowest point of the path, where he would cross the compound to go through the corridor of the residential block, but none of that was there any more.
When he looked back he could see no sign of the fence, nothing at all of the gate. The light was failing rapidly, but there was enough for him to see that all traces were gone.
He walked out of the trees – none of the now-familiar buildings were there. The Warne’s Farm compound had disappeared. Tarent, already in a state of mental disequilibrium, did not panic, did not try to find an explanation, did not try to understand. He was
still perspiring after his climb up to the ridge, and confused by the changes he was experiencing, but for years he had trained himself to limit his activities to seeing and observing. Photography was only incidentally to do with the camera – real photography began with the eye of the photographer.
It was as Melanie had said. Photography was a passive art – not an art of creative intervention or making, but of creative receptivity. Tarent had learned as a photojournalist not to become involved: he had been present at street riots, fights outside nightclubs and bars, he had been surrounded by surging crowds at political rallies, he had run alongside desperate people in times of war or natural disaster. A photographer’s work was never about what he did, it was about what he saw.
The world he was moving through now was one that had changed in ways he did not understand, but even in spite of the fading daylight it was one he knew he had to see, and to keep seeing. Nothing else made sense – his cameras were his only hold on reality, or at least they represented a reality he felt he could comprehend.
He clicked the Olympus light receptor to night sensitivity. While he looked around at what was before him, he reached down to the Canon inside its case, and by familiar touch alone switched that also to night use.
Ahead of him there was a small piece of lawn, enclosed by white-painted cobblestones. Beyond that a tarmac path, an expanse of concrete, some young trees recently planted, and two or three nondescript two-storey office buildings with flat roofs. There was another similar building to his left. They all reminded him of the elderly MoD buildings he had seen during his overnight stay at Long Sutton. He took several shots of them, digitally enhanced by the camera. There was a road running down between the two buildings, with a view of another road crossing that one further along, and more buildings in the same functional architecture. Three cars were parked along the road, but without exception they were models he did not recognize. They were cars of a boxy, outdated design, probably from around the middle of the previous century. They were all the same colour: unpolished black paint, or possibly, because it was none too clear in the twilight, dark blue. They were unoccupied, except for the one closest to him – in this a young woman in a military cap was sitting behind the steering wheel, staring ahead. He took more night pictures, using a long focal length – the woman in the car did not react to being photographed, or she chose not to, or she had not noticed him.
Two young men in work clothes came out of the building beside him, carrying mugs of what looked like hot drinks in both hands. They passed close to him – Tarent took several more shots. He smelled tea made with milk, which he found unexpectedly appetizing. They walked on, went into the next building. As the door opened, Tarent heard loud voices inside, someone hammering, something else being drilled. Once the door had closed he photographed the building itself.
He looked to his right. There stood the only familiar remnant from Warne’s Farm – the tall dark tower, vaguely similar to a church tower. It was silhouetted against the evening sky, making it appear darker, but Tarent could see that whereas before it had been in a bad state of repair, in danger of imminent collapse, now it looked solidly built, four-square on the ground, a recent construction. The tall window frames, three on each of the two sides he could see from this angle, contained glass.
He walked towards the tower, intending to take more photos, but suddenly he became aware of a deep-throated roaring noise, getting louder or coming closer, and in the next moment an aircraft swept low overhead, black against the sky. It was a four-engined propeller aircraft, heavily built with a deep fuselage and sturdy wings. Gun turrets were mounted fore and aft. Its wheels were down. The engines made a concussive roar that Tarent could feel throbbing against his face and chest. Then the plane was gone, sliding down towards the ground, too low to be seen, beyond the buildings and trees.
Tarent recognized the aircraft – it was a bomber from the period of the Second World War, a Halifax, perhaps, or a Lancaster. It passed overhead too quickly and unexpectedly for him to be sure which, but when he was a boy he had gone through a period of obsessively learning to identify all the British warplanes of that period.
Using the LED screen on the back of the Olympus, Tarent quickly looked at the shots he had just taken, then pressed the upload key. Almost at once the camera showed a red warning light. Familiar words, always unwelcome, appeared on the display: Network unavailable or offline. He never felt his pictures were secure until they had been uploaded to the lab’s archive so he tried again immediately, with the same result. It reminded him of the worst days in the field hospital in Anatolia: being isolated from everything, including his archive.
He made a third unsuccessful attempt to upload, then decided to change cameras. All three of the cameras used the same archive, but sometimes one of them accessed the lab more reliably than the other two. Or it seemed that way – it varied, so there was probably nothing in it. He tested the Canon and quickly received its own version of the error message.
The sunset was over and the darkness was now almost complete. Although the buildings and paths and roadways were unlit, there was still some light in the sky, presumably from the moon, at present too low to be seen or perhaps because for the moment it was covered by cloud.
Tarent walked towards the building where he had seen the men entering. He paused on the way, regarded it through the night-sight of his camera, which was able to display its enhanced image in colour. From this, Tarent discovered the building was an aircraft hangar. It had been camouflaged in a way that he found familiar from films and TV shows set in the Second World War: great rounded waves of dark green and brown were painted across its walls, and the huge steel doors at the front.
He cautiously pushed open the access door he had seen the men using, and walked inside. Bright lights were glowing down from above, illuminating a great deal of purposeful activity. At least twenty airmen were at work. Notably, the main floor of the building was taken up with two of the four-engined aircraft, which Tarent was this time able to recognize as Lancaster bombers. These were both partly dismantled and the focus of much work. One of the aircraft had all four of its engine nacelles open, while some kind of testing or parts-replacement was going on. The other aircraft had obviously been damaged by gunfire, or by a near-miss from an anti-aircraft shell – the covering of its wings, tailplane and part of the fuselage were in tatters. The rear turret had also been removed and a new one was on the floor of the hangar, presumably soon to be mounted as a replacement.
He was standing there, staring, trying to understand, trying to continue to act as an observer rather than a participant, when one of the men turned sharply towards him, then strode angrily towards the door.
‘Who left the bleeding door open?’ he shouted, and slammed it closed. ‘Was that you, Loftus?’
‘Don’t think so, Sarge,’ one of the airman replied, in a deep Birmingham accent. ‘I thought I’d shut it behind us.’
‘Mind the blackout.’
A mumbled chorus from two of the men: ‘Sorry, Sarge.’
Work resumed.
Using the ambient light in the hangar, Tarent took a series of rapid shots of the two Lancasters, expecting at any moment that he would be shouted at, or manhandled, or threatened with some breach of the regulations covering this place. But it was as if he was not there. Everyone ignored him. He moved towards some of the men as they worked, took close shots of what they were doing. They continued to ignore him. The plane, standing high on its main undercarriage and tailwheel, was at an angle to the ground. Most of it was painted matt black, but the narrow strip at the top of the fuselage visible from below was painted in dark-green camouflage. The tall letters P D and S were painted on the side of the fuselage, aft of the wing, with the RAF roundel between them. Below the cockpit canopy drawings of bombs were stencilled on the black paint, indicating the number of sorties it had so far completed.
Tarent took detailed close-up photographs of everything he saw.
Finally,
he retreated and went to stand by the door again. The network was still down, so he switched off the Canon and slid it into its protective pouch.
It was against all reason, against all logic, against everything rational, but Tarent knew that in some fashion he had wandered on to an operational RAF base, in wartime, an old and mostly forgotten war of a hundred years before. How was that possible?
It was beyond his ability to comprehend. All he could do as a reaction to what had happened was to look, to see, to watch, to take pictures. That damned passive attitude that Melanie had criticized him for, unfairly but accurately, had become his only resort in this time of unreason. To try to think or do anything different was a risk that for the moment he did not know how to take.
He expected it to end suddenly, this vision, this experience, this glimpse of a distant past, this dream, this hallucination – he still could not describe it, even to himself. Until it came to an end, until the unreason was reversed, he had to hold on to what he knew.
He again took out the Canon, his talisman of known reality, switched it on, routinely glanced at the battery level to be sure there was still enough charge, checked the default settings for taking pictures in extremely low light, watched as the automatic dust-cleansing of the processor chip was swiftly carried out. The whole procedure took less than two seconds, and was completed by the familiar electronic beep, confirming the boot-up was correct.
He played back the photographs he had taken since he arrived in this place. They were all there in camera memory. The network and therefore the archive lab continued to be inaccessible. He tried again, twice.
It was hot inside the hangar so Tarent returned outside, this time being certain to secure the door behind him. The mild evening air, with its taints of gasoline and rubber and paint, but also of recently cut grass, was still warm after the day. Thinking that being in the open air and away from the immense metal doors of the hangar the network signal might have been restored, he tried once more to access the lab, but without success.