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abovehim, a dogfight was taking place between a buzzard and a squadron of rooks, but he did not lift his head. A cuckoo called; it sounded like derision.
    He steadied himself and belched, then propelled himself into the blurred overlaps of the landscape.
     
    As stone circles go, the Wringers are not especially thrilling. That hasn’t stopped them being draped in legend; on Dartmoor, you pile three rocks in a heap and there’ll be a legend doing the rounds in less than a fortnight. They say, for example, that the Wringers can never be counted; that no matter how many times you try you end up with a different number. There are fourteen altogether, although one of them has fallen in towards the centre. According to local lore, this, the dawn-facing Altar Stone, is where dreadful things used to be done to virgins, should any be available. In fact, it was toppled in 1763 by a local farmer trying to steal it for a barn lintel.
    The stones are all about a metre wide. They vary in height from just over two metres down to a stumpy 120 centimetres or so, although it is hard to keep track of them because they change places on certain nights.
    The Wringers are sometimes called The Devil’s Clock, Old Nick’s Bedpan or Old Horny’s Freezer. It is said that fresh meat will never go off if it is exposed to the new moon from inside the circle, which might account for the pork-pie gastroenteritis epidemic that racked Flemworthy’s population in 1913. The Wringers have the power to cure rickets, ringworm, scrofula, gout, nailfungus, stammering, baldness in women, heresy and wind. And also impotence, which perhaps explains why there is always a condom or two lying about.
    A strange thing about the Wringers is that although you’d swear they were in the middle of a great stretch of level ground, you never see them until you’re almost up to them. And on this spring afternoon they took Philip by surprise again, although he was glad to see them. He needed something to lean on.
    He felt bad now. He had suddenly put on lots of weight, and there was that numbness at the top of his skull that would later turn into a lobster-shaped headache. The air had thickened, and he was sweating. He relieved himself against Long Betty, the fourth or perhaps fifth monolith clockwise from the Altar Stone. Then he subsided onto the grass with his back against Growly’s Thumb. Very slowly he rolled a cigarette. When he told his hand to lift it to his lips nothing happened because he was unconscious.
    It falls to me, Orberry Volenap, fourth and last of the Five High Scholars, to set this down. Dark and dire though the record be, I must make haste in the telling, for I have now lived two hundred and four Circuits, and already in my dreams I glimpse my ancestors behind the Glass waiting to greet me. When this my last task is completed, when the end of history is written and the Great Ledger is forever sealed, I shall willingly join them. Perhaps then I shall see again. Not that I am ungrateful to the Powers that took my sight. The great comfort of my blindnessis that it hides from me the greater and more terrible darkness cast over the Realm by the foul Antarch Morl Morlbrand and his ever-spawning minions.
    The voice spoke and the hand wrote at exactly the same pace, but Philip knew that they did not belong to the same person. The voice was ancient, and cracked all the way to the heart. The hand that guided the racing pen was not old. It showed no wrinkles, veins, scars or hair. The skin was light with a texture like coarse soap. The fingers were longish, narrow, with pale blue nails. The writing was in a language he didn’t know, but understood perfectly. It consisted mainly of flowing diagonal strokes alternating with patterns of dots – never more than five – inside either circles or rhomboids. The ink continued to form itself into characters after the pen had moved on.
    But blind I am, and needs must I dictate this to my only surviving Clerk, Pocket. He