Undercurrent by Frances Fyfield

soldier who got beyond the outer walls had to face the next and then the next, and no invader had ever made it. No foreigner had ever breached the safety of the central keep, although now they came in gentle hordes to pay their money and look.

    For Maggie, there was something indescribably touching about being inside a place which had once housed an aggressive village of hungry fighting men and now housed nothing other than a few of their souvenirs. It was as if the walls could only live and breathe with the help of occupants to warm it, and at night closed itself down in an enormous sulk. She knew why Neil appreciated company on the last round of the evening whenever he could get it, especially when they descended into the base of the third bastion.

    He might detest the tourists and love the place by day, but after dark he was afraid. Neil knew there were ghosts waiting for those prepared to recognize them, and he saw himself as cursed with that propensity. He saw ghosts everywhere; it made him an excellent storyteller, prone to wonderful embellishments for tourists, but each time he told stories about ghosts, he invented another and as soon as the creature was created in his mind, it remained in real existence. By now the place was teeming with them, especially in the runs.

    The 'runs' were the corridors at the very bottom of the bastions, below sea level, leading from the centre in a curve round the base of the structure to rejoin it at the other end. Y ou will pass fifty-three small windows before you reach the next tunnel . . . count as you go . Maggie could hear the words of the tourist audiotape, imagine shuffling footsteps. The lights illuminated white damp on the walls, a lump of something vaguely fungoid she would not have wanted to touch. He warned her to sidestep a puddle of water as she followed him round the narrow passage. He walked ahead, confidently, with deliberately noisy footsteps, shoulders braced, and she knew if he had been alone he would be whistling as loud as he could to warm them, whoever they were, to get out of the way.

    He was a good-looking man, from behind. It was a pity he and Angela had divorced. A terrible waste. The shoulders of him almost touched the walls on either side in the runs. Medieval man was so much smaller. She could see miniature soldiers, shorter than her own five feet four inches, running around here on the double, each ready to shove the musket through his own window, and fire. Fifty-three to each bastion, two hundred and sixty-five men with muskets, and on the level above, the cannons. Under siege, they would surely have died of noise alone; now there were only footsteps.

    There were no more sweet papers, no signs of vandalism, no missing persons. They walked up the exit tunnel to the outer door, Neil obviously relieved, closing the door with a satisfied clang. She wondered what he would do if the smoke or burglar alarms went off at night and he was the only keyholder when the warden was away. He would hardly relish a nocturnal visit all by himself and she supposed if he were paged, he would call the police to go with him. They might not be enthusiastic either; it seemed to be men who were afraid- of ghosts.

    Neil gave the door an extra shove, to make sure. It was studded and bound with enough iron to keep out an army of foreign barbarians, but spirits and ghosts did not recognize such flimsy restrictions, and no door would keep them inside. She was always slightly surprised at the inconsistency of his superstitions. It seemed unreasonable to believe in the ghosts while refusing to concede that their supernatural nature meant they could not be confined.

    If they liked his company, or simply wished to torment him, they were surely at liberty to follow him home if they chose, but then maybe he thought that ghosts, like burglars, tended to stick to their own territory. They would be uncomfortable in Neil's tiny terraced house near the leisure centre. Like the distance