Chapter 01: Exit, Pursued By A Bee - Page 5

She loved this kind of mystery. She looked at her feet imagining the tectonic event hidden beneath, yet it was so local that life continued blissfully ignorant four miles away. She granted that crescendos at the festival would mask the loud rumblings beneath her, and the drivers probably couldn’t hear either. Her cellphone tinkled.

“Are you OK, Kal?”

“Sure. What’s the situation in Glastonbury town?”

“Chaos. The hill slopes right into the back gardens on this side. You can feel continuous tremors. It’s as if they’re ants that have lost their queen. But no one is leaving. I’ve put Blake in a taxi to take him to the guesthouse in Weston. Cost a bomb, but I had an urge to come back to you.”

“Aw, sweet. It’s not so loud now up here, but the vibration seems to be worsening. I’m spitting out flying insects that are in swarms around here. Derek – can you hear me above this racket?”

“Just about. You’ve swapped sandwiches for live insects?”

“Close enough. Bring a shovel with you? In fact buy two.”

“Good grief, Kal. That’s lunacy— oh, all right. And you mean spades.”

The vibration seemed to calm for a moment so she ventured away from the large rock up towards the pile of stones that was Saint Michael’s Tower. Felled like the tower of Babel. Maybe the Kaiser Chiefs overdid the loudness earlier and triggered a fault beneath the tor? Not a chance.

She could just detect the bass of Reheated Coldplay’s new piece, Random Order, and although she wouldn’t make room for it on her own MP3 player, hummed to the chorus. A fragment of normality in this craziness. Randomness could have described the drumming beneath her feet, as if it had a beat controlled by stochastic monkeys.

She spotted Derek using the two spades as walking sticks to steady himself up the quivering hill. Fifty yards from her, he staggered as a thunderous roar preceded a violent shudder sending them both sprawling. She lay on her back as she was an hour before, only now the cumulus clouds angrily gathered. Kallandra felt the ground crumbling and digging into her back, forcing her to struggle to her feet. The rock she had leaned on rose from the surface by several feet before cracking and falling, accompanied by increasing roaring as rock strata ground against each other. The roaring sounds were matched by the tremors in her stomach as she thought she might not survive. This premonition was reinforced as a large crack appeared, as in classic earthquakes, between her and Derek. On her already dirty jean knees, the slope she slowly traversed seemed to rise at a steeper angle than where Derek knelt.