Free Quatermass by Nigel Kneale

mo—”
    “I know that one!” Sarah was sure of herself again.
    “Of course you do.”
    “It’s for counting.”
    “Yes.”
    “To make Debbie go out of a game. I mean—if she’s been bad or something. I mean, if it’s time for her rest. I mean, you can trick it.”
    “Try it on the Stumpy Men,” Clare said. “It was theirs.”
    “Eena, meena—?”
    “The people who made them, anyway. That’s how they counted, or we think they did. Their words.” She turned to Quatermass again. “It’s true. Prehistoric numeration, a remnant.”
    “You couldn’t do it on the Stumpy Men,” objected Sarah.
    “Mm?”
    “They wouldn’t go out of the game.”
    “No, of course they wouldn’t, I wasn’t thinking.”
    “Silly Mummy!”
    Clare’s eyes were still on Quatermass. He was puzzled by the strange excitement behind them. Expectancy, that was it. There was something she wanted of him. If he had been young, young woman to young man, he would have known what it was. But young to old—
    “Clare,” he said, “how far is it to Ringstone Round?”
    He saw instantly that he had got it right. For some reason she had wanted the suggestion to come from him.
    “Oh, it’s about half an hour, I think,” she said.
    Now he had to go on with it. He crossed to where Kapp was frowning over technical diagrams. “Joe, would you mind—could we take a look at this place?”
    “What?”
    “Ringstone Round.”
    Kapp muttered: “You mean now? I’m right in the middle of—look, Tommy’s over there waiting for me to—” He turned to Clare. “For God’s sake, why?”
    So in spite of the diagrams, he had been listening to every word.
    “It was the sight of those kids, wasn’t it?”
    “Not just that, Joe—”
    Quatermass said: “I’d like to see what’s going on. If you can spare the petrol. I don’t know, it just might be important.”
    “How?”
    “It’s possible.”
    Kapp looked at Clare and she nodded. He glanced down at the diagrams again. They were going to go there, of course. There was no choice and he knew it.
    “Okay.”
    It was agreed that Alison should stay with the children. She was still too shaken to be able to perform much effective work on the correlation receivers.
    The waggon had gone when Debbie got up, fat-eyed, from her afternoon sleep.
    She felt cheated out of a ride when she heard about it, and became very disagreeable. She had chewed the photograph of Hettie almost to pieces—“That old man give it me”—and she waved the little straw figure challengingly at Alison. “My daddy give me this, it’s from London. It’s nicer than your kind!”
    Sarah was subtler. She ran to find the old Kate Greenaway book that had been her mummy’s when she was little. And snuggled up to Alison.
    They found the rhyme. It was accompanied by a pallid illustration of two Victorian children in trouble with a breeze in front of some staid standing-stones.
    “That’s what it looks like,” said Sarah.
    “I expect so,” Alison said. She read out: “ ‘Huffity, puffity, Ringstone Round—’ ”
    Debbie grizzled: “I don’t like this book.”
    Quatermass sat in the back seat of the waggon and listened.
    “It’s even older than Stonehenge,” Clare was saying. “Three or four hundred years older, by radiocarbon dating. Cruder, of course, and not so big. It might have been the prototype.”
    “For Stonehenge?” Quatermass kept trying to picture it but all that came to mind was the sticky face with ice-cream round its lips.
    “That was one theory. It’d have been them again, the Beaker Folk.”
    “Five thousand years.”
    A meaningless number, too far outside human span. Plus or minus so many hundreds, bristle-cone corrected. Symbolism, the attempt to extend the brain beyond its own life. He suddenly remembered clearly what his wife had worn that hot day. A New Look dress, that’s what it was called. Long, almost to the ankles, and she was ridiculously pleased with it, so full and lavish after