He staggered to his feet in a fumbling panic, staring blindly about him. The broken, crumbling stones half buried in the turf around him were ancient memories of the hulking watchers he remembered from the night before. The great square slab of a table was nothing more than a weatherbeaten expanse of rock glimpsed in scored stretches through the covering earth. The grass on the tumulus was glistening with dew in the glimmering of morning, the air still damp with its passing.
Around him, in a circle no wider than he was tall, the grass was drier than bone.
He stumbled to the edge of the gapped and decrepit circle of senile sentinels and gazed wildly from horizon to horizon. It was largely as it had been the previous night when he stopped to rest: moors broken up by the rise of little hillocks, odd scatters of trees pinned to the landscape here and there amid flurries of irritable brush. The far off road was too distant to be seen as anything more than a light, grey scar. There was no sign of habitation, or indeed life of any kind.
He turned back a moment to the rock exposed by the worn away grass at the centre of the circle. He remembered...
dancing figures lit by firelight sweet spiced honey on his breath laughter like wind chimes his head spinning with their songs and their teasing wit and tawny eyes unblinking bright and feral
...barely any of it, if truth be told. Almost nothing of what was said. His clothes were rumpled and mud stained as though cast off by a riverside. He recalled taking them off at some point in order to dance, heedlessly leaping naked across the flickering open fire.
He checked his phone, suddenly breathless. Still in the zipped inside pocket of his jacket, still on; less than half the battery remained, and no signal. No wifi either, but he wasn't expecting any - and the lack of any signal didn't necessarily prove anything, given the remote wilderness stretching for miles around. Taking a deep breath, he began the long walk back.
When he arrived at the roadside, the car he'd arrived in was gone. The road looked new in the fresh morning light, the cracked blacktop darker and seeming to glitter a little. He looked from left to right, then shrugged and began walking back the way he'd driven the night before.
After barely twenty minutes, he saw a car far ahead along the road's curving length, and stopped in the centre of the road to flag it down. A deep, frictionless hum heralded the vehicle's arrival as it pulled in to the left a few yards ahead. It was like no car he'd ever seen, but familiar enough; a deep blue colour, windscreen and windows tinted a lighter blue, four wheels tracked in a third shade of the same colour.
The man who stepped from the front seat was dressed in an oddly cut two piece coral-pink suit, lavender collarless shirt matched to a purple and yellow tie that seemed clipped to the front. He became aware of how bedraggled he must appear when the kaleidoscopic stranger expressed concern and ushered him into the back seat of the car; he became aware of how exhausted he was when he sank into the heated seat and felt the warm plastic mould itself to the contours of his body. The man had a companion in the driver's seat, an equally brightly-clad woman his own age, a partner of some kind, and the two kept up a continual, cryptic conversational chatter between the two of them, their accents difficult to place. He understood around half of the context, but for the moment he seemed required only to nod and murmur noncommittally in the right places.
The music on the radio as they drove was unfamiliar and dissonant, the station idents virtually incomprehensible. He didn't want to ask the question on the tip of his tongue, the question circling his mind. He knew exactly how peculiar it would make him sound, how much more attention it would draw to him... but no answer presented itself in the couple's cheerful patter or the strangled snippets of information he could glean from the radio.
Eventually - their reactions be damned - he had to break into their chit chat and ask. He leaned back again, dazed. One hundred years. The revelry on the hilltop, the barely remembered snatches of a wild night spent within the mists. He had stepped between the stones in one century, and awoken in the next.
His smile, tentative at first, broadened to a wicked grin. It had seemed an insurmountable problem a week ago. He'd been caught between his own personal Scylla and Charybdis - the authorities on three continents closing in on him, and his own insatiable need for mayhem and bloody havoc. The one could not be stopped, the other could not be denied; well, he'd navigated that strait now. Anyone searching for him was decades dead, and anyone who even remembered his name (and what a Name he'd had) would think the same of him.
He clasped his hands behind his head, beginning to whistle, ignoring the bemused looks from his hosts, thinking of that frantic six days of research; pursued headlong from city to city, safe house to dead drop, a trail of broken bodies like breadcrumbs in his wake, discovery no longer a concern. The location of the hilltop circle found in a poem tattooed to the chest of a taxi driver in Liverpool, and crosschecked for accuracy with the contents of a book written on the burned wall of a cell in the basement of a hospital in the seaside town of Cruelsea.
It wouldn't last, of course. He was already getting the itch. There was no help for it; he was a recidivist, and chaos was his business. Still, he had a nest egg buried only a few hundred miles away, between two landmarks he'd chosen for their permanence - that would set him up in this new lifetime he'd stepped into. In the meantime, he had the blade strapped to his leg and an uncanny facility with fingers and tongue. He'd observed the woman for long enough to have figured how she drove the exotic car - and soon enough the two wouldn't have any use for it, or for anything else.
He cast his mind back to that night among the stones, the fey he'd danced with, eaten with and drank with. He vaguely recalled picking a fight with one over the colour of the moon and opening its throat with his teeth. How they'd all laughed. And then the tallest of the ladies had danced with him alone, and as he’d slipped into a contented, debauched sleep, whispered to him welcome home, little monster
If all else failed, he was fairly sure his new friends would be glad to have him back, and he could try his luck again in the next century. He broke into a happy tune, his whistle harmonising with the radio's insistent, off key melody. He was starting to like the music.
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