The Long Earth

they would make when they started to strike the stones.
    He was doing this to make a girl notice him.
    She was on an arts course, and Gareth sometimes saw her on the bus ride into town, but he had nothing to talk to her about. Certainly not his geeky engineering studies. He’d vaguely thought this archaeo-acoustics experiment of his might impress her.
    For centuries archaeologists had been missing the element of
sound
in the monuments they studied. Gareth had once heard a barbershop quartet perform in a Neolithic chambered tomb. Awesome ; the place had obviously been designed for its acoustics. Now he was trying to
play
these standing stones to see if they were laid out for their acoustic properties – an idea that came from the obvious lead offered by their traditional local name, the Singing Stones, and the attached legend that the stones would sing to keep out malevolent spirits. And to explore, vaguely, the way legends of ghosts and spirits and other transients had come to have a whole new interpretation in this age of the Long Earth, when reality had suddenly become porous.
    Maybe it was all a bit too geeky. And he hadn’t achieved his main objective: here he was with Lol, not
her
. But at least it was a more imaginative way of thinking about the new worlds than you mostly got in Britain. This was just a few years after Step Day. Gareth had spent a gap year summer in the US where they were talking about treks out to the remote worlds, of building an infinity of stepwise Americas. Whereas in England, it was all a kind of dull nothingness. The Long Earth just hadn’t inspired John Bull. Of course it didn’t help that the stepwise Englands were uniformly choked with forest, but basically, all you saw in England West or East was little rectangular plots cut into the forest, precisely mapping suburban back gardens where middle-class families popped over to grow beans or to catch the sunshine when it rained at home, or, just occasionally, to get savaged by a wild boar. And meanwhile the disadvantaged, young and old, drifted away from the dole and their dead-end jobs and just vanished into the green, and the cities were dying from their empty inner suburbs outward, and the economy slowly crumbled …
    Lol had been silent for a long time. A long time for him, anyhow. Gareth looked up.
    Lol was staring.
    Something stood at the precise centre of the stone ring, a group of squat stumpy shapes, that hadn’t been there before. At first glance the figures looked like more standing stones to Gareth, more monoliths in a rough circle. No, they weren’t monoliths. They had chimp faces, and black, hairy bodies, and they stood upright. Like children in monkey suits. The light of the lantern was uncertain, the shadows deep black.
    ‘They must have stepped in,’ Lol breathed.
    ‘Is this some kind of joke? Trick or treat? It’s not Halloween, losers.’ Gareth was nervous; he always was around unsupervised kids. ‘Look, if you lot don’t—’
    And, as one, the little people opened their mouths and sang. They went straight into a chord, a multipart harmony. Then, after holding the chord for an unreasonable time, they launched into a kind of song. It was fast-moving, shapeless to Gareth’s ears. But the harmonies were pitch-perfect, and beautiful, so much so they made Gareth’s guts twist.
    Lol, on the far side of the ring, looked terrified. He clamped his hands over his ears. ‘Make them stop!’
    Gareth had an inspiration. He grabbed his mallets. ‘Hit the stones! Come on!’ He whacked the nearest stone with the baseball bat. It
rang
.
    He and Lol hammered the stones wildly. Dull tones rang out, ugly and discordant. Despite his fear of the ape-things, Gareth felt a stab of triumph, of vindication. He’d been right. These stones were lithophones, shaped for the sound they made, not for the way they looked. So he bashed and thumped the stones, and Lol did the same.
    And the ape-things were disturbed. Their tight formation broke up, and those monkey-mask faces crumpled, teeth bared, and their song dissolved into hoots and chatters. One by one they began to wink away, disappearing stepwise. Was this what the Singing Stones were
for
? To make these ugly discords, to stop these singing ape-things stepping into the world – just as the legend said?
    Soon the clearing between the stones was empty once more. Gareth stared around at the stones, at the long shadows. The walls of the world seemed very thin.
    All of which was