Voices in Stone - Emily Diamand Page 0,40

hit by a car and killed. She didn’t listen to what Gray and Merlin were saying, her only interest was in the stone itself. And when Gray froze, wide-eyed and staring, she barely noticed.

Her memories fluttered, but couldn’t give her an answer to the desperate feelings, which had brought her here. Only the standing stone could tell her.

Gray called her name but only the stone mattered, her fingertips reaching out to touch it. Cold and gritty, slicked with damp…

Everything flipped.

Isis was looking at herself. Her own face, her slightly widened eyes, the stretch of her arm. She could also see Gray and Merlin, the grass and the encircling trees. She had a goldfish-bowl view of things, and when she attempted to pull her hand back from the rock she couldn’t work out how to. She was immobile, pinned in place.

What’s happening?

She tried to cry out, but couldn’t find her mouth or lungs. Arms, legs, body, head – those all belonged to the girl she could see standing in front of her. Isis herself didn’t seem to have them any more. Instead she had the hills dreaming beneath her, and if she dipped her mind downwards…

I have to get out!

She fought to reach her body but even as she struggled Isis saw herself back away from the stone. And now it was Gray who had his hands on the rock, mouth open and eyes blank. Then Merlin, his arms stretched around the standing stone – around her. Merlin vanished, and a small boy slapped his palm on the standing stone, on her, turning back to shout at someone Isis couldn’t see.

A succession of people materialised: men, women and children, on their own and in groups. Fingers tapped her, hands brushed casually past. Some clambered to sit on top of her, others leaned against her, posing for photos. Ones and twos soon added up to hundreds. The days peeled backwards into weeks, then years. Hundreds of people became thousands. All the people who’d ever visited here.

Isis was caught inside the standing stone, and she was able to distinguish accompanying phrases for every touch, people’s thoughts jumping from skin to stone.

I won the race with Daddy!

Thought this would be bigger.

Look at me, I’m on the top!

Well that was a long walk for not much.

What a beautiful place.

Better hold my stomach in when they take the picture.

She wanted to screw her eyes shut against the torrent, but she didn’t have eyes any more. Instead the thoughts continued pouring in, while the clothes of her visitors changed from ones she recognised to ones she’d seen in photographs, to garments she only knew from history books. Victorian ladies in long skirts; a shepherd in his smock; children wrapped in rough cloth without any shoes.

The years blurred into centuries, time moving differently, backwards and forwards at the same time, as if she was living in a far wider stretch of time than the tiny moment of present that she’d had when human. If Isis concentrated, she could still see Merlin and Gray in the clearing, even see herself, but it was hard to fight the babble of thoughts coming at her from everyone visiting the standing stone in her thousands of years of now. She tried to remember the feeling of her own body but it was lost hundreds of years ago, or maybe hundreds of years in the future.

For long periods she was alone with the weather and the passing seasons. The only touch of human hands came on moonless nights, when people placed bunches of wild flowers at her feet or tied lengths of cord around her, twisted with wishes.

Let him love me.

Make my child well again.

Bring them home safe.

Stop her cow giving milk, the stupid old hag.

People’s language changed, but she understood their meanings from the pictures in their minds, the forms that come before words. A Roman legionary put a coin at her base and asked for warmer weather.

On and on, backwards and forwards, until the hands on her were the ones that had carved her out of the ground and set her in place.

Special, came the thoughts as she was put in position. Now there is a place for you.

And the thoughts of these people were vivid and bright. Memories filled their minds with a sound like the roaring of a storm, and a perfect circle punched through a cloudy sky. They remembered looking up from their crops and animals, and crying out in fear and wonder.

Their hands stayed on her after