She snorted laughter. "No. Even better. A magic stone."

I stopped flicking water. "What?"

Jessica smiled in triumph. "A magic stone. A sort of stone circle, up on the hill. It's probably been there for millions of years."

"Let's go and see it!"

"Wait." Jessica caught my arm as I prepared to gallop away. "We have to tell them we're going. Mummy told me off for going walking on my own yesterday."

               It was about a twenty minute walk to the stone, a hard slog up a stony track that became almost vertical at one point. We slithered over loose flints in our summer sandals and rested halfway up, leaning against a rock warm from the sun.

"This had better be worth it," I said, panting.

I'd like to say that the place gave me a cold chill when first I saw it. That I had a premonition, an inkling of what was to come. It didn't. Instead, the emotion I was aware of on my first sight of the Men-an-Tol was delight. We stood looking in silence at the stone. Through the hole, I could see blue sky and, as I watched, a solitary crow flapped its slow dark way across.

“If you walk round here,” said Jessica, demonstrating. “This stone lines up with the hole. Go on, do it.”

“It does!” I said, amazed.

We stayed there for hours that first day, watching the stone shadows creep across the grass with the movement of the sun. The stone with a hole was furred with moss and lichen, one side warm beneath our palms, the shadow side damp and cool.

From the start, this holed stone fascinated us. We didn’t know its name then – we just called it the magic stone. We were standing before it that afternoon, watching the clouds blow across the space in the middle, and I put my hand out to reach through the hole.

"Don't!" Jessica cried.

I nearly shrieked. "Why? What's wrong?"

"Don't reach through the hole. You don't know what powers it has. Your hand might disappear... or when you pull it back, you might just have bones."

She had that look I knew well; half mischievous, half earnest. I knew that at least a small part of her actually believed it.

That was when we started to believe the legend. Jessica's words planted a little seed and day by day, our homespun tale began to grow. Soon the stone would become all-consuming to us - a grey monolith of myth and legend. We would draw it and photograph it and talk about it endlessly. But that first day, we just wandered about, circling the Men-an-Tol and its companion stone, and watched their shadows move like long black fingers over the whispering grass.

Chapter Fifteen

 

               Most days, Jessica and I would wander up to the stones. We were fascinated by the ever shifting view through the centre of the Men-an-Tol. We'd stand, one on each side, and look at each other through the hole. As our tales and fantasies grew, there was always the small fear that one day I would look through at Jessica and she wouldn't be there. Some days we walked down to the tiny beach to swim and, from the little crescent of pale golden sand, we could stand and look back at the hill and see the faint grey smudges that were the two standing stones.

              "I don't want to go home," said Jessica, one day.

I misunderstood. "We don't have to be home for ages. We can stay out until supper, Angus said so."

"No, stupid. I mean I don't want to go home. Back home. Our real home."

That made me sit up and open my eyes. I was aware of a little finger of cold nudging me. "What do you mean?" I thought for a moment and then spoke again. "I mean, why don't you want to go home?"

Jessica was silent for a moment. She still had her eyes shut and her blonde hair was splayed out against the grey surface of the rock, drying slowly into stringy little rats’ tails.

"I just like it here," she said, eventually. "I like it here with the stones and it always being sunny and never having to go to school. Mummy isn’t so cross with Daddy here.”

I glanced across at her. “What do you–”

She didn’t let me finish. “I just wish it could be like this forever," she said.

I hugged my knees and stared out at the shifting blue sea. I was vaguely troubled by her words.

"We have to go back to school," I offered. "It's the law."

Jessica sat up abruptly. "Hey," she said. "I've got it."

"What?"

"It's easy. We have to harness the power of the stones. You know."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, come on. You know. We do a magic ceremony, just like we've been talking about."

I felt another little cold nudge. She sounded so serious. For a moment, I wavered; I wondered whether I could ask her what she meant. But we'd spent days discussing the magic rituals that the stones had been used for - I knew she wouldn't believe me if I pleaded ignorance.

"Yeah, we could," I said, trying for enthusiasm. I looked back at the stones on the hilltop. My eyes fell on the distant ellipse of the Men-an-Tol and I felt a little shudder pass through me.

Jessica stood up, stretching her arms above her head. She flung her head back and shut her eyes against the sun.

"We'll do it at midnight," she said. "That's the most powerful time of all. We'll sneak out just before midnight and go up there and do our ritual. And you know the Men-an-Tol will be open to the other side, then. Hey Maudie, perhaps we’ll even go back in time!”

I thought of being there at midnight. The enormous black sky stretching overhead. The stones looming up through the darkness, solid, somehow implacable. The cold wind, the blank white light of the moon. I looked down and saw my arms had humped up into gooseflesh, despite the warmth of the sun.

Jessica picked up her towel from the rock and wrapped it around her shoulders.

"I'm going up there," she said. "I want to see what kind of ceremony we can do. I know it won't be the same as it will be at midnight, but I still want to do it. Coming?"

I shook my head. "I'm going to go home. I'll see you later."

I gathered up my beach bag and towel and began the slow struggle up the hill. The grass was slippery beneath the soles of my sandals and once my foot jagged backwards and I banged my knee on a rock. Eventually I reached level ground and the path that led back to the village. When I looked back, I could see the little moving dot that was Jessica, making her way up the circle. She shimmered in my vision.

The stone track gradually led to the rutted, dried mud of the lane which ten yards further grew a skin of tarmac. Despite the heat, I began to run, the soles of my plimsolls slapping against the road. My ponytail bounced and grew looser as I ran faster, past the groups of pink-faced walkers, bent underneath their rucksacks. Soon I was puffing but somehow my legs carried me forward towards home, the home that that been known by that name for two short weeks. I stopped briefly outside the garden gate to tie my shoelace and get my breath back.

I don't know what made me stop and look up, before putting my hand to the gate. If I hadn't, the gate would have given its long, tortured squeak as I pushed it open and the sound would have alerted them to my presence. But I didn't push it, and so I looked up and saw them, Angus and Mrs. McGaskill, framed by the kitchen window, locked in an embrace. They were kissing in the way that people kissed on TV, or in the films that I'd seen; liplocked, pressed up against one another, his hand underneath her jaw.