Diana Wynne Jones
HEXWOOD

ILLUSTRATED BY TIM STEVENS

Copyright

First published by Methuen Children’s Books Ltd 1993

First published in paperback by Collins 2000

Published by HarperCollins Children’s Books

1 London Bridge Street,

London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Text copyright © Diana Wynne Jones 1993

Illustration by Tim Stevens 2000

The author and illustrator assert the moral right to be identified as the author and illustrator of the work.

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Source ISBN: 9780006755265

Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007440184

Version: 2018-06-21

Dedication

For Neil Gaiman

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

PART ONE

1

2

3

4

5

PART TWO

1

2

3

4

5

PART THREE

1

2

3

4

5

PART FOUR

1

2

3

4

5

PART FIVE

1

2

3

4

5

PART SIX

1

2

3

4

5

PART SEVEN

1

2

3

4

5

PART EIGHT

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

PART NINE

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Other Works

About the Publisher

The letter was in Earth script, unhandily scrawled in blobby blue ballpoint. It said:

Hexwood Farm

Wednesday 3 March 1993

Dear Sector Controller,

We though we better send to you in Regional straight off. We got a right problem here. This fool clerk, calls hisself Harrison Scudmore, he went and started one of these old machines running, the one with all the Reigner seals on it, says he overrode the computers to do it. When we say a few words about that, he turns round and says he was bored, he only wanted to make the best all-time football team, you know King Arthur in goal, Julius Ceasar for striker, Napoleon midfield, only this team is for real, he found out this machine can do that, which it do. Trouble is we don’t have the tools nor the training to get the thing turned off, nor we can’t see where the power’s coming from, the thing’s got afield like you wouldn’t believe and it won’t let us out of the place. Much obliged if you could send a trained operative at your earliest convenience.

Yours truly

W. Madden

Foreman Rayner Hexwood Maintenance

(European Division)

PS He says he’s had it running more than a month now.

Sector Controller Borasus stared at the letter and wondered if it was a hoax. W. Madden had not known enough about the Reigner Organisation to send his letter through the proper channels. Only the fact that he had marked his little brown envelope URGENT!!! had caused it to arrive in the Head Office of Albion Sector at all. It was stamped all over with queries from branch offices and had been at least two weeks on the way.

Controller Borasus shuddered slightly. A machine with Reigner seals! If this was not a hoax, it was liable to be very bad news. “It must be someone’s idea of a joke,” he said to his Secretary. “Don’t they have something called April Fools’ Day on Earth?”

“It’s not April there yet,” his Secretary pointed out dubiously. “If you recollect, sir, the date on which you are due to attend their American conference – tomorrow, sir – is 20 March.”

“Then maybe the joker mistimed his letter,” Controller Borasus said hopefully. As a devout man who believed in the Divine Balance perpetually adjusted by the Reigners, and himself as the Reigners’ vicar on Albion, he had a strong feeling that nothing could possibly go really wrong. “What is this Hexwood Farm thing of theirs?”

His Secretary as usual had all the facts. “A library and reference complex,” he answered, “concealed beneath a housing estate not far from London. I have it marked on my screen as one of our older installations. It’s been there a good twelve hundred years, and there’s never been any kind of trouble there before, sir.”

Controller Borasus sighed with relief. Libraries were not places of danger. It had to be a hoax. “Put me through to the place at once.”

His Secretary looked up the codes and punched in the symbols. The Controller’s screen lit with a spatter of expanding lights. It was not unlike what you see when you press your fingers into your eyes.

“Whatever’s that?” said the Controller.

“I don’t know, sir. I’ll try again.” The Secretary cancelled the call and punched the code once more. And again after that. Each time the screen filled with a new flux of expanding shapes. On the Secretary’s third attempt, the coloured rings began spreading off the viewscreen and rippling gently outwards across the panelled wall of the office.

Controller Borasus leant across and broke the connection, fast. The ripples spread a little more, then faded. The Controller did not like the look of it at all. With a cold, growing certainty that everything was not all right after all, he waited until the screen and the wall at last seemed back to normal and commanded, “Get me Earth Head Office.” He could hear that his voice was half an octave higher than usual. He coughed and added, “Runcorn, or whatever the place is called. Tell them I want an explanation at once.”

To his relief, things seemed quite normal this time. Runcorn came up on the screen, looking entirely as it should, in the person of a Junior Executive with beautifully groomed hair and a smart suit, who seemed very startled to see the narrow, august face of the Sector Controller staring out of the screen at him, and even more startled when the Controller asked to speak to the Area Director instantly. “Certainly, Controller. I believe Sir John has just arrived. I’ll put you through—”

“Before you do,” Controller Borasus interrupted, “tell me what you know about Hexwood Farm.”

“Hexwood Farm!” The Junior Executive looked nonplussed. “Er – you mean – Is this one of our information retrieval centres you have in mind, Controller? I think one of them is called something like that.”

“And do you know a maintenance foreman called W. Madden?” demanded the Controller.

“Not personally, Controller,” said the Junior Executive. It was clear that if anyone else had asked him this question, the Junior Executive would have been very disdainful indeed. He said cautiously, “A fine body of men, Maintenance. They do an excellent job servicing all our offworld machinery and supplies, but of course, naturally, Controller, I get into work some hours after they’ve—”

“Put me through to Sir John,” sighed the Controller.

Sir John Bedford was as surprised as his Junior Executive. But after Controller Borasus had asked only a few questions, a slow horror began to creep across Sir John’s healthy businessman’s face.

“Hexwood Farm is not considered very important,” he said uneasily. “It’s all history and archives there. Of course that does mean that it holds a number of classified records – it has all the early stuff about why the Reigner Organisation keeps itself secret here on Earth – how the population of Earth arrived here as deported convicts and exiled malcontents, and so forth – and I believe there is a certain amount of obsolete machinery stored there too – but I can’t see how our clerk would be able to tamper with any of that. We run it through just the one clerk, you see, and he’s pretty poor stuff, only in the Grade K information bracket—”

“And Grade K means?” asked Controller Borasus.

“It means he’ll have been told that Rayner Hexwood International is actually an intergalactic firm,” Sir John explained, “but that should be absolutely all he knows – probably less than Maintenance, who are also Grade K. Maintenance pick up a thing or two in the course of their work. That’s unavoidable. They visit every secret installation once a month to make sure everything stays in working order, and to supply the stass-stores with food and so forth, and I suspect quite a few of them know far more than they’ve been told, but they’ve been carefully tested for loyalty. None of them would play a joke like this.”

Sir John, Controller Borasus decided, was trying to talk himself out of trouble. Just what you would expect from a backward hole like Earth. “So what do you think is the explanation?”

“I wish I knew,” said the Director of Earth. “Oddly enough, I have two complaints on my desk just this morning. One is from an Executive in Rayner Hexwood Japan, saying that Hexwood Farm is not replying to any of his repeated requests for data. The other is from our Brussels branch, wanting to know why Maintenance has not yet been to service their power plant.” He stared at the Controller, who stared back. Each seemed to be waiting for the other to explain. “That foreman should have reported to me,” Sir John said at length, rather accusingly.

Controller Borasus sighed. “What is this sealed machine that seems to have been stored in your retrieval centre?”

It took Sir John Bedford five minutes to find out. What a slack world! Controller Borasus waited, drumming his fingers on the edge of his console, and his Secretary sat not daring to get on with any other business.

At last Sir John came back on the screen. “Sorry to be so long. Anything with Reigner seals here is under heavy security coding, and there turn out to be about forty old machines stored in that library. We have this one listed simply as One Bannus, Controller. That’s all, but it must be the one. All the other things under Reigner seals are stass-tombs. I imagine there’ll be more about this Bannus in your own Albion archives, Controller. You have a higher clearance than—”

“Thank you,” snapped Controller Borasus. He cut the connection and told his Secretary, “Find out, Giraldus.”

His Secretary was already trying. His fingers flew. His voice murmured codes and directives in a continuous stream. Symbols scrolled, and vanished, and flickered, jumping from screen to screen, where they clotted with other symbols and jumped back to enter the main screen from four directions at once. After a mere minute, Giraldus said, “It’s classified maximum security here too, sir. The code for your Key comes up on your screen – now.”

“Thank the Balance for some efficiency!” murmured the Controller. He took up the Key that hung round his neck from his chain of office and plugged it into the little-used slot at the side of his console. The code signal vanished from his screen and words took its place. The Secretary of course did not look, but he saw that there were only a couple of lines on the screen. He saw that the Controller was reacting with considerable dismay. “Not very informative,” Borasus murmured. He leant forward and checked the line of symbols which came up after the words in the smaller screen of his manual. “Hm. Giraldus,” he said to his Secretary.

“Sir?”

“One of these is a need-to-know. Since I’m going to be away tomorrow, I’d better tell you what this says. This W. Madden seems to have his facts right. A Bannus is some sort of archaic decision-maker. It makes use of a field of theta-space to give you live-action scenarios of any set of facts and people you care to feed into it. Acts little plays for you, until you find the right one and tell it to stop.”

Giraldus laughed. “You mean the clerk and the maintenance team have been playing football all this month?”

“It’s no laughing matter.” Controller Borasus nervously snatched his Key from its slot. “The second code symbol is the one for extreme danger.”

“Oh.” Giraldus stopped laughing. “But, sir, I thought theta-space—”

“—was a new thing the central worlds were playing with?” the Controller finished for him. “So did I. But it looks as if someone knew about it all along.” He shivered slightly. “If I remember rightly, the danger with theta-space is that it can expand indefinitely if it’s not controlled. I’m the Controller,” he added with a nervous laugh. “I have the Key.” He looked down at the Key, hanging from its chain. “It’s possible that this is what the Key is really for.” He pulled himself together and stood up. “I can see it’s no use trusting that idiot Bedford. It will be extremely inconvenient, but I had better get to Earth now and turn the wretched machine off. Notify America, will you? Say I’ll be flying on from London after I’ve been to Hexwood.”

“Yes, sir.” Giraldus made notes, murmuring. “Official robes, air tickets, passport, standard Earth documentation-pack. Is that why I need to know, sir?” he asked, turning to flick switches. “So that I can tell everyone you’ve gone to deal with a classified machine and may be a little late getting to the conference?”

“No, no!” Borasus said. “Don’t tell anyone. Make some other excuse. You need to know in case Homeworld gets back to you after I’ve left. The first symbol means I have to send a report top priority to the House of Balance.”

Giraldus was a pale and beaky man, but this news made him turn a curious yellow. “To the Reigners?” he whispered, looking like an alarmed vulture.

Controller Borasus found himself clutching his Key as if it was his hope of salvation. “Yes,” he said, trying to sound firm and confident. “Anything involving this machine has to go straight to the Reigners themselves. don’t worry. No one can possibly blame you.”

But they can blame me, Borasus thought, as he used his Key on the private emergency link to Homeworld, which no Sector Controller ever used unless he could help it. Whatever this is, it happened in my sector.

The emergency screen blinked and lit with the symbol of the Balance, showing that his report was now on its way to the heart of the galaxy, to the almost legendary world that was supposed to be the original home of the human race, where even the ordinary inhabitants were said to be gifted in ways that people in the colony worlds could hardly guess at. It was out of his hands now.

He swallowed as he turned away. There were supposed to be five Reigners. Borasus had worried, double thoughts about them. On one hand, he believed almost mystically in these distant beings who controlled the Balance and infused order into the Organisation. On the other hand, as he was accustomed to say drily to those in the Organisation who doubted that the Reigners existed at all, there had to be someone in control of such a vast combine, and whether there were five, or less, or more, these High Controllers did not appreciate blunders. He hoped with all his heart that this business with the Bannus did not strike them as a blunder. What – he told himself – he emphatically did not believe were all these tales of the Reigners’ Servant.

When the Reigners were displeased, it was said, they were liable to dispatch their Servant. The Servant, who had the face of death and dressed always in scarlet, came softly stalking down the stars to deal with the one who was at fault. It was said he could kill with one touch of his bone-cold finger, or at a distance, just with his mind. It did no good to conceal your fault, because the Servant could read minds, and no matter how far you ran and how many barriers you put between, the Servant could detect you and come softly walking through anything you put in his way. You could not kill him, because he deflected all weapons. And the Servant would never swerve from any task the Reigners appointed him to.

No, Controller Borasus did not believe in the Servant – although, he had to admit, there were quite frequent dry little reports that came into Albion Head Office to the effect that such-and-such an executive, or director, or sub-consul, had terminated from the Organisation. No, that was something different. The Servant was just folklore.

But I shall take the rap, Borasus thought as he went to get ready to go to Earth, and he shivered as if a blood-red shadow had walked softly on bone feet across his grave.

A boy was walking in a wood. It was a beautiful wood, open and sunny. All the leaves were small and light green, hardly more than buds. He was coming down a mud path between sprays of leaves, with deep grass and bushes on either side.

And that was all he knew.

He had just noticed a small tree ahead that was covered with airy pink blossom. He looked beyond it. Though all the trees were quite small and the wood seemed open, all he could see was this wood, in all directions. He did not know where he was. Then he realised that he did not know where else there was to be. Nor did he know how he had got to the wood in the first place. After that, it dawned on him that he did not know who he was. Or what he was. Or why he was there.

He looked down at himself. He seemed quite small – smaller than he expected somehow – and rather skinny. The bits of him he could see were wearing faded purple-blue. He wondered what the clothes were made of and what held the shoes on.

“There’s something wrong with this place,” he said. “I’d better go back and try to find the way out.”

He turned back down the mud path. Sunlight glittered on silver there. Green reflected crazily on the skin of a tall silver man-shaped creature pacing slowly towards him. But it was not a man. Its face was silver and its hands were silver too. This was wrong. The boy took a quick look at his own hands to be sure, and they were brownish-white.

This was some kind of monster. Luckily there was a green spray of leaves between him and the monster’s reddish eyes. It did not seem to have seen him yet. The boy turned and ran quietly and lightly, back the way he had been coming from.

He ran hard until the silver thing was out of sight. Then he stopped, panting, beside a tangled patch of dead briar and whitish grass, wondering what he had better do. The silver creature walked as if it were heavy. It probably needed the beaten path to walk on. So the best idea was to leave the path. Then if it tried to chase him it would get its heavy feet tangled.

He stepped off the path into the patch of dried grass. His feet seemed to cause a lot of rustling in it. He stood still, warily, up to his ankles in dead stuff, listening to the whole patch rustling and creaking.

No, it was worse! Some dead brambles near the centre were heaving up. A long light-brown scaly head was sliding forward out of them. A scaly foreleg with long claws stepped forward in the grass beside the head, and another leg, on the other side. Now the thing was moving slowly and purposefully towards him, the boy could see it was – crocodile? pale dragon? – nearly twenty feet long, dragging through the pale grass behind the scaly head. Two small eyes near the top of that head were fixed upon him. The mouth opened. It was black inside and jagged with teeth, and the breath coming out smelt horrible.

The boy did not stop to think. Just beside his feet was a dead branch, overgrown and half-buried in the grass. He bent down and tore it loose. It came up trailing roots, falling to pieces, smelling of fungus. He flung it, trailing bits and all, into the animal’s open mouth. The mouth snapped on it, and could only shut halfway. The boy turned and ran and ran. He hardly knew where he went, except that he was careful to keep to the mud path.

He pelted round a corner and ran straight into the silver creature.

Clang.

It swayed and put out a silver hand to fend him off. “Careful!” it said in a loud flat voice.

“There’s a crawling thing with a huge mouth back there!” the boy said frantically.

“Still?” asked the silver creature. “It was killed. But maybe we have yet to kill it, since I see you are quite small just now.”

This meant nothing to the boy. He took a step back and stared at the silver being. It seemed to be made of bendable metal over a man-shaped frame. He could see ridges here and there in the metal as it moved, as if wires were pulling or stretching. Its face was made the same way, sort of rippling as it spoke – except for the eyes, which were fixed and reddish. The voice seemed to come from a hole under its chin. But now he looked at it closely, he saw it was not silver quite all over. There were places where the metal skin had been patched, and the patches were disguised with long strips of black and white trim, down the silver legs, round the silver waist and along the outside of each gleaming arm.

“What are you?” he asked.

“I am Yam,” said the being, “one of the early Yamaha robots, series nine, which were the best that were ever made.” It added, with pride in its flat voice, “I am worth a great deal.” Then it paused, and said, “If you do not know that, what else do you not know?”

“I don’t know anything,” said the boy. “What am I?”

“You are Hume,” said Yam. “That is short for human, which you are.”

“Oh,” said the boy. He discovered, by moving slightly, that he could see himself reflected in the robots shining front. He had fairish hair, grown longish, and he seemed to stand and move in a light, eager sort of way. The purple-blue clothes clung close to his skinny body from neck to ankles, without any sort of markings, and he had a pocket in each sleeve. Hume, he thought. He was not certain that was his name. And he hoped the shape of his face was caused by the robots curved front. Or did people’s cheekbones really stick out that way?

He looked up at Yam’s silver face. The robot was nearly two feet taller than he was. “How do you know?”

“I have a revolutionary brain and my memory is not yet full,” Yam answered. “This is why they stopped making my series. We lasted too long.”

“Yes, but,” said the boy – Hume, as he supposed he was, “I meant—”

“We must get out of this piece of wood,” said Yam. “If the reptile is alive, we have come to the wrong time and we must try again.”

Hume thought that was a good idea. He did not want to be anywhere near that scaly thing with the mouth. Yam swivelled himself around on the spot and began to stride back along the path. Hume trotted to keep up. “What have we got to try?” he asked.

“Another path,” said Yam.

“And why are we together?” Hume asked, trying again to understand. “Do we know one another? Do I belong to you or something?”

“Strictly speaking, robots are owned by humans,” Yam said. “These are hard questions to answer. You never paid for me, but I am not programmed to leave you alone. My understanding is that you need help.”

Hume trotted past a whole thicket of the airy pink blossoms, which reflected giddily all over Yam’s body. He tried again. “We know one another? You’ve met me before?”

“Many times,” said Yam.

This was encouraging. Even more encouraging, the path forked beyond the pink trees. Yam stopped with a suddenness that made Hume overshoot. He looked back to see Yam pointing a silver finger down the left fork. “This wood,” Yam told him, “is like human memory. It does not need to take events in their correct order. Do you wish to go to an earlier time and start from there?”

“Would I understand more if I did?” Hume asked.

“You might,” said Yam. “Both of us might.”

“Then it’s worth a try,” Hume agreed.

They went together down the left-hand fork.

Hexwood Farm housing estate had one row of shops, all on the same side of Wood Street, and Ann’s parents kept the greengrocer’s halfway down the row. Above the houses on the other side you could see the trees of Banners Wood. And at the end of this row were the tall stone walls and the ancient peeling gate of Hexwood Farm itself. All you could see of the farmhouse was one crumbling chimney that never smoked. It was hard to believe that anybody lived there, but in fact old Mr Craddock had lived there until a few months ago for as long as Ann could remember, keeping himself to himself, and snarling at any child who tried to get close enough to see what was inside the old black gate. “Set the dogs on you!” he used to say. “Set the dogs to bite your leg off!”

There were no dogs, but nobody dared pry into the farm all the same. There was something about the place.

Then, quite suddenly, Mr Craddock was not there and a young man was living there instead. This one called himself Harrison Scudamore and dyed the top of his hair orange. He stalked about with a well-filled wallet bulging the back of his jeans and behaved, as Ann’s dad said, as if he was a cut above the Lord Almighty. This was after young Harrison had stalked into the shop for half a pound of tomatoes and Dad had asked politely if Mr Scudamore was lodging with Mr Craddock.

“None of your business,” young Harrison said. He more or less threw the money at Dad and stalked out of the shop. But he turned in the doorway to add, “Craddock’s retired. I’m in charge now. You’d all better watch it.”

“Awful eyes he has,” Dad remarked, telling Anne and Martin the tale. “Like gooseberries.”

“A snail,” Mum said. “He made me think of a snail.”

Ann lay in bed and thought of young Harrison. She had one of those viruses that was puzzling the doctor, and there was not much to do except lie and think of something. Every so often, she got up out of sheer boredom. Once, she even went back to school. But it always ended with Ann grey and shaky and aching all over, tottering back to bed. And when her brother Martin had been to the library for her, and she had read all her own books, and then Martins – Martin’s were always either about dinosaurs or based on role-playing games – she had no energy to do anything but lie and think. Harrison was at least a new thing to think about. Everybody hated him. He had been rude to Mr Porter the butcher too. And he had told Mrs Price, who kept the newsagent’s at the end, to shut up and stop yakking on. “And I was only talking – politely, you know – the way I do with everyone,” Mrs Price said, almost tearfully. Harrison had kicked the pampered little dog that belonged to the boys who kept the wine shop, and one of them had cried. Everyone had some tale to tell.

Ann wondered why Harrison behaved like that From a project she dimly remembered doing at school, she knew the whole estate had once been lands belonging to Hexwood Farm. The farm stretched north as far as the chemical works and east beyond the motel. Banners Wood, in the middle, had once been huge, though it was hardly even a wood these days. You could see through it to the houses on the other side. It was just trees round a small muddy stream, and all the children played there. Ann knew every crisp packet under every tree root and almost every Coke ring embedded in its muddy paths.

But perhaps Harrison has inherited the farm and thinks he still owns it all, she thought. He did behave that way.

In fact, Ann’s real theory was quite different and much more interesting. That old farm was so secretive and yet so easy to get to from London that she was convinced it was really a hideout for gangsters. She was sure there was gold bullion or sacks and sacks of drugs – or both – stored in its cellar with young Harrison to guard it. Harrison’s airs were because the drug barons paid him so much to guard their secrets.

What do you think about that? she asked her four imaginary people.

The Slave, as so often, was faint and far off. His masters overworked him terribly. He thought the theory very likely. Young Harrison was a menial giving himself airs – he knew the type.

The Prisoner considered. If Ann was right, he said, then young Harrison was behaving very stupidly, drawing attention to himself like this. Her first theory was better.

But I only thought of that to be fair-minded! Ann protested. What do you think, King?

Either could be right, said the King. Or both.

The Boy, when Ann consulted him, chose the gangster theory, because it was the most exciting.

Ann grinned. The Boy would think that. He was stuck on the edge of nowhere, being a sort of assistant to a man who had lived so long ago that people thought of him as a god. He felt out of things, born in the wrong time and place. He always wanted excitement. He said he could only get it through talking to Ann.

Ann was slightly worried about the Boy’s opinions. The Boy was always behaving as if he were real, instead of just an invention of Ann’s. She was a little ashamed of inventing these four people. They had come into her head from goodness knew where when she was quite small and she used to hold long conversations with them. These days she did not speak to them so often. In fact, she was quite worried that she might be mad, talking to invented people, particularly when they took on ideas of their own, like the Boy did. And she did wonder what it said about her – Ann – that all four of her inventions were unhappy in different ways. The Prisoner was always in jail, and he had been put there many centuries ago, so there was no chance of Ann helping him escape. The Slave would be put to death if he tried to escape. One of his fellow-slaves had tried it once. The Slave wouldn’t tell Ann quite what had happened to that slave, but she knew he had died of it. As for the King, he also lived in a far-off time and place, and spent a lot of his time having to do things that were quite intensely boring. Ann was so sorry for all of them that she had often to console herself by keeping firmly in mind the fact that they were not real.

The King spoke to Ann again. He had been thinking, he said, that while Ann was lying in bed she had an ideal opportunity to observe young Harrison’s comings and goings. She might find out something to support her theory. Can you see Hexwood Farm from where you are? he asked.

No, it’s down the street the other way, Ann explained. I’d have to turn my bed round, and I haven’t the strength just now.

No need, said the King. He knew all about spying. All you have to do is to put a mirror where you can see it from your bed, and turn it so it reflects the street and the farm. It’s a trick my own spies often use.

It really was an excellent idea. Ann got out of bed at once and tried to arrange her bedroom mirror. Of course it was wrong the first time, and the second. She lost count of the weak, grey, tottering journeys she made to give that mirror a turn, or a push, or a tip upwards. Then all she saw was ceiling. So off she tottered again. But after twenty minutes of what seemed desperately hard work, she collapsed on her pillows to see a perfect back-to-front view of the end of Wood Street and the decrepit black gate of Hexwood Farm. And there was young Harrison, with his tuft of orange hair, sauntering arrogantly back to the gate carrying his morning paper and his milk. No doubt he had been rude to Mrs Price again. He looked so satisfied.

Thank you! Aim said to the King.

You’re welcome, Girl Child, he said. He always called her Girl Child. All four of her people did.

For a while, there was nothing to watch in the mirror except other people coming and going to the shops, and cars parking in the bay where their owners hauled out bags of washing and took them to the launderette, but even this was far more interesting than just lying there. Ann was truly grateful to the King.

Then, suddenly; there was a van. It was white, and quite big, and there seemed to be several men in it. It drove right up to the gate of the farm and the gate opened smoothly and mechanically to let it drive in. Ann was sure it was a modern mechanism, much more modern than the peeling state of the gate suggested. It looked as if her gangster theory might be right! There was a blue trade logo on the van and, underneath that, blue writing. It was small lettering, kind of chaste and tasteful, and of course in the mirror it was back to front. She had no idea what it said.

Ann just had to see. She flopped out of bed with a groan and tottered to the window where she was just in time to see the old black gate closing smoothly behind the van.

Oh bother! she said to the King. I bet that was the latest load of drugs!

Wait till it comes out again, he told her. When you see the gate open, you should have time to get to the window and see the men drive the vehicle away.

So Ann went back to bed and waited. And waited. But she never saw the van come out. By that evening, she was convinced that she had looked away, or dropped asleep, or gone tottering to the toilet at the moment the gate had opened to let the van out. I missed it, she told the King. All I know is the logo.

And what was that? he asked.

Oh, just a weighing scale – one of those old-fashioned kinds – you know – with two sort of pans hanging from a handle in the middle.

To her surprise, not only the King but the Slave and the Prisoner too all came alert and alive in her mind. Are you sure? they asked in a sharp chorus.

Yes, of course, Ann said. Why?

Be very careful, said the Prisoner. Those are the people who put me in prison.

In my time and place, said the King, those are the arms of a very powerful and very corrupt organisation. They have subverted people in my court and tried to buy my army, and I’m very much afraid that in the end they are going to overthrow me.

The Slave said nothing, but he gave Ann a strong feeling that he knew even more about the organisation than the others did. But they could all be thinking about something else, Ann decided. After all, they came from another time and place from hers. And there were thousands of firms on Earth inventing logos all the time.

I think it’s an accident, she said to the Boy. She could feel him hovering, listening wistfully.

You think that because no one on Earth really believes there are any other worlds but Earth, he said.

True. But you read my mind to know that. I told you not to! Ann said.

I can’t help it, said the Boy. You think we don’t exist either. But we do – you know we do really.

Ann forgot about the van. A fortnight passed, during which she got up again and went to school for half a day, and was sent home at lunchtime with a temperature, and read another stack of library books, and lay watching people coming to the shops in her mirror.

“Like the Lady of Shallott!” she said disgustedly. “Fool woman in that fool poem we learnt last term! She was under a curse and she had to watch everything through a mirror too.”

“Oh, stop grumbling, do!” said Ann’s mum. “It’ll go. Give it time.

“But I want it to go now!” said Ann. “I’m an active adolescent, not a bedridden invalid! I’m climbing the walls here!”

“Just shut up and I’ll get Martin to lend you his Walkman,” said Mum.

“That’ll be the day!” said Ann. “He’d rather lend me his cut-off fingers!”

But Martin did, entirely unexpectedly, make a brotherly appearance in her room next morning. “You look awful,” he said. “Like a Guy made of putty.” He followed this compliment up by dropping Walkman and tapes on her bed and leaving for school at once. Ann was quite touched.

That day she lay and listened to the only three tapes she could bear – Martin’s taste in music matched his love of dinosaurs – and kept an eye on Hexwood Farm merely for something to look at. Young Harrison appeared once, much as usual, except that he bought a great deal of bread. Could it be, Ann wondered, that he was really having to feed a vanload of men still inside there? She did not believe this. By now, she had decided, in a bored, gloomy, virusish way, that her exciting theory about gangsters was just silly romancing. The whole world was grey – the virus had probably got into the universe – and even the daffodils in front of the house opposite looked bleak and dull to her.

Someone who looked like a Lord Mayor walked across the road in her mirror.

A Lord Mayor? Ann tore the earphones off and sat up for a closer look. Appa-dappa-dappa-dah, went the music in a tinny whisper. She clicked it off impatiently. A Lord Mayor with a suitcase, hurrying towards the peeling black gate of Hexwood Farm, in a way that was – well – sort of doubtful but determined too. Like someone going to the dentist, Ann thought. And was it a coincidence that the Lord Mayor had appeared just in that early-afternoon lull, when there was never anyone much about in Wood Street? Did Lord Mayors wear green velvet gowns? Or such very pointed boots? But there was definitely a gold chain round the man’s neck. Was he going to the farm to ransom someone who had been kidnapped – with bundles of money in that suitcase?

She watched the man halt in front of the gate. If there was some kind of opening mechanism, it was clearly not going to work this time. After standing there an impatient moment or so, the robed man put out a fist and knocked. Ann could hear the distant, hollow little thumps even through her closed window. But nobody answered the knocking. The man stepped back in a frustrated way. He called out. Ann heard, as distant as the knocking, a high tenor voice calling, but she could not hear the words. When that did no good either, the man put down his suitcase and glanced round the nearly deserted street, to make sure no one was looking.

Ah-haha! Ann thought. Little do you know I have my trusty mirror!

She saw the man’s face quite clearly, narrow and important, with lines of worry and impatience. It was no one she knew. She saw him take up the ornament hanging on his chest from the gold chain and advance on the gate with it as if he were going to use the ornament as a key. And the gate opened, silently and smoothly, just as it had done for the van, when the ornament was nowhere near it. The Lord Mayor was really surprised. Ann saw him start back, and then look at his ornament wonderingly. Then he picked up his suitcase and hurried importantly inside. The gate swung shut behind him. And, just like the van, that was the last Ann saw of him.

This time it could have been because the virus suddenly got worse. For the next day or so, Ann was so ill that she was in no state to watch anything, in the mirror or out of it. She sweated and tossed and slept – nasty short sleeps with feverish dreams – and woke feeling limp and horrible and hot.

Be glad, the Prisoner told her. He had been a sort of doctor before he was put in prison. The disease is coming to a head.

You could have fooled me! Ann told him. I think they kidnapped the Lord Mayor too. That place is a Bermuda triangle. And I’m not better. I’m WORSE.

Mum seemed to share the Prisoner’s opinion, to Ann’s annoyance. “Fever’s broken at last,” Mum said. “Won’t be long now before you’re well. Thank goodness!”

“Only another hundred years!” Ann groaned.

And the night that followed did indeed seem about a century long. Ann kept having dreams where she ran away across a vast grassy park, scarcely able to move her legs for terror of the Something that stalked behind. Or worse dreams where she was shut in a labyrinth made of mother-of-pearl – in those dreams she thought she was trapped in her own eardrum – and the pearl walls gave rainbow reflections of the same Something softly sliding after her. The worst of this dream was that Ann was terrified of the Something catching her, but equally terrified in case the Something missed her in the curving maze. There was blood on the pearly floor of her eardrum. Ann woke with a jump, wet all over, to find it was getting light at last.

Dawn was yellow outside and reflecting yellow in her mirror. But what seemed to have woken her was not the dreams but the sound of a solitary car. Not so unusual, Ann thought fretfully. Some of the deliveries to the shops happened awfully early. Yet it was quite clear to her that this car was not a delivery. It was important. She pulled a soggy pillow weakly under her head so that she could watch it in the mirror.

The car came whispering down Wood Street with its headlights blazing, as if the driver had not realised it was dawn now, and crept to a cautious sort of stop in the bay opposite the launderette. For a moment it stayed that way, headlights on and engine running. Ann had a feeling that the dark heads she could see leaning together inside it were considering what to do. Were they police? It was a big grey expensive car, more a businessman’s car than a police car. Unless they were very high-up police, of course.

The engine stopped and the headlights snapped off. Doors opened. Very high-up, Ann thought, as three men climbed out One was wealthy businessman all over, rather wide from good living, with not a crisp hair out of place. He was wearing one of those wealthy macs that never look creased, over a smart suit. The second man was shorter and plumper, and decidedly shabby, in a green tweed suit that did not fit him. The trousers were too long and the sleeves too narrow, and he had a long knitted scarf trailing from his neck. An informer, Ann thought He had a scared, peevish look, as if he had not wanted the other two to bring him along. The other man was tall and thin, and he was quite as oddly dressed as the informer, in a three-quarter-length little camelhair coat that must have been at least forty years old. Yet he wore it like a king.

When he strolled over to the middle of the road to get a full view of Hexwood Farm, he moved in a curious lolling, powerful way that took Ann’s eyes with him. He had hair the same camelhair colour as his coat. She watched him stand there, long legs apart, hands in pockets, staring at the gate, and she scarcely noticed the other two men come up to him. She kept trying to see the tall man’s face. But she never did see it clearly because they went quickly over to the gate then, with the businessman striding ahead.

Here, it was just like the Lord Mayor. The businessman stopped short, dismayed, as if he had confidently expected the gate to open mechanically for him. When it simply stayed shut, his face turned down to the small informer-man, and this one bustled forward. He did something – tapped out a code? – but Ann could not see what. The gate still did not open. This made the small man angry. He raised a fist as if he was going to hit the gate. At this, the tall man in the camel coat seemed to feel they had waited long enough. He strolled forward, put the informer-man gently but firmly out of the way, and simply went on strolling towards the gate. At the point where it looked as if he would crash into the peeling black boards, the gate swung open, sharply and quickly for him. Ann had a feeling that the stones of the wall would have done that too if the man had wanted it so.

The three went inside and the gate shut after them.

Ann could not rid herself of the feeling that she had just seen the most important thing yet. She expected them to come out quite soon, probably with Harrison under arrest. But she fell asleep still waiting.

Much later that morning there was a violent hailstorm. It woke Ann, and she woke completely well again. For a moment, she lay and stared at thick streams of ice running down the window, melting in new, bright sunlight. She felt so well that it stunned her. Then her eyes shifted to the mirror. Through the reflected melting ice, the road shone bright enough to make her eyes water. But there in the parking bay, mounded with white hailstones, stood the businessman’s grey car.

They’re still in there! she thought. It is a Bermuda triangle!

She was getting out of bed as she thought this. Her body knew it was well and it just had to move whether she told it to or not. It had needs. “God!” Ann exclaimed. “I’m hungry!”

She tore downstairs and ate two bowls of cornflakes. Then, while a new hailstorm clattered on the windows, she fried herself bacon, mushrooms, tomatoes and eggs – as much as the pan would hold.

As she was carrying it to the table, Mum hurried through from the shop, alerted by the smell. “You’re feeling better?”

“Oh, I am!” said Ann. “So better that I’m going out as soon as I’ve eaten this.”

Mum looked from the mounded frying pan to the window. “The weather’s not—” But the hail had gone by then. Bright sunlight was slicing through the smoke from Ann’s fry-up and the sky was deep, clear blue. Bang goes Mum’s excuse, Ann thought, grinning as she wolfed down her mushrooms. Nothing had ever tasted so good! “Well, you’re not to overdo it,” Mum said. “Remember you’ve been poorly for a long time. You’re to wrap up warm and be back for lunch.”

“I shall obey, o great fusspot,” Ann said, with her mouth full.

“Lunch, or I shall call the police,” said Mum. “And don’t wear jeans – they’re not nearly warm enough. The weather at this time of year—”

“Fuss-great-potest,” Ann said lovingly, beginning on the bacon. Pity there had been no room in the pan for fried bread. “I’m not a baby. Two layers of thermal underwear satisfy you?”

“Since when have you had–? Oh, I can see you’re better!” Mum said happily. “A vest anyway, to please me.”

“Vests,” Ann said, quoting a badge that Martin often wore, “are what teenagers wear when their mothers feel cold. You’re cold. You keep that shop freezing.”

“You know we have to keep the veg fresh,” Mum retorted, and she went back into the shop laughing.

The sun felt really hot. When she finished eating, Ann went upstairs and dressed as she saw fit: the tight woolly skirt, so that Mum would see she was not wearing jeans, a summery top, and her nice anorak over that, zipped right up so that she looked wrapped up. Then she scudded down and through the shop, calling, “Bye, everyone!” before either of her parents could get loose from customers and interrogate her.

“Don’t go too far!” Dad’s powerful voice followed her.

“I won’t!” Ann called back. Truthfully. She had it all worked out. There was no point trying to work the device that opened that gate. If she tried to climb it, someone would notice and stop her. Besides, if everyone who went into the farm never came out, it would be stupid to go in there and vanish too. Mum and Dad really would throw fits. But there was nothing to stop Ann climbing a tree in Banners Wood and taking a look over the wall from there.

Get a close look at that van, if it’s still there, the King agreed. I’m rather anxious to know who owns it.

Ann frowned and gave a sort of nod. There was something about this weighing-scale logo. It made her four people talk to her when she had not actually started to imagine them. She didn’t like that. It made her wonder again whether she was mad. She went slowly down Wood Street and even more slowly past the expensive car parked in the bay. There were drifts of half-thawed hailstones under it still. As she passed behind it, Ann trailed a finger along the car’s smooth side. It was cold and wet and shiny and hard – and very – very real. This was not just a fever-dream she had imagined in the mirror. She had seen three men arrive here this morning.

She turned down the passage between the houses that led to the wood. It was beautiful down there, hot and steamy. Mum and her vests! Melting hailstones flashed rainbow colours from every blade of grass along the path. And the wood had gone quite green while she had been in bed – in the curious way woods do in early spring, with the bushes and lower branches a bright emerald thickness, while the upper boughs of the bigger trees were still almost bare, and only a bit swollen in their outlines. It smelt warm, and keen with juices, and the sunlight made the green transparent.

Ann had walked for some minutes in the direction of the farm wall when she realised there was something wrong with the wood. Not wrong exactly. It still stretched around her in peaceful arcades of greenness. Birds sang. Moss grew shaggy on the path under her trainers. There were primroses on the bank beside her.

“Here, wait a minute!” she said.

The paths in Banners Wood were always muddy, with Coke rings trodden into them. And if a primrose had dared show its face there, it would have been picked or trampled on the spot. And she should have reached the farm wall long ago. Even more important, she should have been able to see the houses on the other side of the trees by now.

Ann strained her eyes to where those houses should have been. Nothing. Nothing but trees or green springing hawthorn and, in the distance, a bare tree carrying load upon load of tiny pink flowers. Ann took the path towards that tree, with her heart banging. Such a tree had never been seen in Banners Wood before. But she told herself she was mistaking it for the pussy willow on the other side of the stream.

She knew she was not, even before she came up beside the big leaden-looking container half-buried in the bank beyond the primroses. She could see far enough from beside this container to know that the wood simply went on, and on, and on, beyond the pink tree. She stopped and looked at the container. People often did throw rubbish in the wood. Martin had had wonderful fun with an old pram someone had dumped here. This thing looked as if someone had thrown away a whole freezer – one of the big kind like a chest with a lid. It had been there a long time. Not only was it half-buried in the bank. Its outside had rotted and peeled to a dull grey. Wires came out of it in places, rusty and broken. It looked – well – not really like a freezer, quite.

Mum’s voice rang warnings in Ann’s ears. “It’s dirty – you don’t know where it’s been – something could be rotting inside it – it could be nuclear!”

It did look like a nuclear-waste container.

What do you think? Ann asked her four imaginary friends.

To her great surprise, none of them answered. She had to imagine their voices replying. The Boy would say, Open it! Take a look! You’d never forgive yourself if you didn’t. She imagined the others agreeing, but more cautiously, and the King adding, But be careful!

Maybe it was the solution to the Hexwood Farm mystery – the thing that had fetched all those men to call on young Harrison, the thing he thought so well of himself for guarding. Ann scrambled up the bank, put the heels of her hands firmly into the crack under the lid of the container, and heaved. The lid sprang up easily, and then went on rising of its own accord until it was standing upright at the back of the box.

Ann had not expected it to be that easy. It sent her staggering back down the bank to the path. There, she looked at the open container and could not move for sheer terror.

A corpse was rising up out of it.

The head appeared first, a face that looked like a skull except for long straggles of yellow-white hair and beard. Next, a hand clutched the edge of the box, a hand white-yellow with enormous bone knobs of knuckles and – disgustingly – inch-long yellow fingernails. Ann gave a little whimper at this, but still she could not move. Then there was heaving. A gaunt bone shoulder appeared. Breath whistled from the lips of the skull. And the corpse dragged itself upright, unfolding a long, long body grown all over with coarse tangles of whitish hair. Absolutely indecent! Ann thought, as the long spindly legs rose above her, shaking, and shaking loose the fragments of rotted cloth wound round the creature’s loins. It was very weak, this corpse. For an instant, Ann saw it as almost pathetic. And it was not quite a skeleton. Skin covered it, even the face, which was still far too like a skull for comfort.

The face turned. The eyes, large, sunk and pale under a grey-yellow hedge of eyebrow, looked straight at Ann. The skull lips moved. The thing said something – croaked something – words in a strange language.

It had seen her. It was too much. It spoke. Ann ran. She scrambled into a turn and ran, and her hurtling trainers slipped beneath her. She was down on the moss of the path, hardly aware of the sharp stone that met her knee, up again in the same breath, and running as fast as her legs could take her, away down the path. A corpse that walked, looked, spoke. A vampire in a lead chest – a radioactive vampire! She knew it was coming after her. Fool to keep to the path! She veered up the bank and ran on, crunching and galloping on squashy lichen, leaping among brambles, tearing through strident green thickets, with dead branches cracking and exploding under her feet. Her breath screamed. Her chest ached. She was ill. Fool. She was making so much noise. It could follow her just by listening.

“What shall I do – what shall I do?” she whimpered as she ran.

Her legs were giving way. After all that time in bed she was almost as weak as the vampire-thing. Her left knee hurt like crazy. She glanced down as she crashed through some flat brown briars to see bright red blood streaming down her shin and into her sock. There was blood in the brambles she stood in. It could track her by smell too.

“What shall I do?”

The sensible thing was to climb a tree.

“Oh, I couldn’t!” Ann gasped.

The creature croaked again, somewhere quite near.

Ann found strength she did not know she had. It sent her to the nearest climbable tree and swarming up it like a mad girl. Bark bit the insides of her legs. Her fingers scraped and clawed, breaking most of the fingernails she had been so proud of. She heard her nice anorak tear. But still she climbed, until she was able to thrust her head through a bush of smaller branches and scramble astride a strong bough, safe and high, with her back against the trunk and her hair raked into hanks across her face.

If it comes up, I can kick it down! she thought, and leant back with her eyes shut.

It was croaking somewhere below, even nearer, to her right.

Ann’s eyes sprang open. She stared down in weak horror at the path and the chest embedded in the bank beyond it. The lid had shut again. But the creature was still outside it, standing in the path almost below her, staring down at the scarlet splatter of blood Ann’s knee had made when she fell on the stone. She had run in a circle like a panicked animal.

Don’t look up! Don’t look up! she prayed, and kept very still.

It did not look up. It was busy examining its taloned hands, then putting those hands up to feel the frayed bush of its hair and beard. Ann got the feeling it was very, very puzzled. She watched it take hold of the shreds of cloth wrapped round its skinny hips and pull off a piece to look at. It shook its head. Then, in a mad, precise way, it laid the strip of rag across its left shoulder and croaked out some more words. This time, the sound was less of a croak and more like a voice.

Then – despite all the rest, Ann still had trouble believing her eyes – the creature grew itself clothes. The lower rags went expanding downwards in two khaki waterfalls of thick cloth, to make narrow leggings and then brown supple-looking boots. At the same time the strip of rag on the corpse’s shoulder was chasing downwards too, tumbling and spreading into a calf-length robe-thing, wide and pleated, the colour of camelhair. Ann’s lips parted almost in an exclamation as she saw the colour. She watched, then, almost as if she expected it, the long hair and beard turn the same camelhair colour and shrink away. The beard shrank right away into the man’s chin, leaving his face more skull-shaped than ever, but the hair halted just below his ears. He completed himself by strapping a broad belt round his waist – it had a knife and a pouch attached to it – and slinging a sort of rolled blanket across his left shoulder, where he carefully fastened it with straps. After that, he gave a mutter of satisfaction and went to the edge of the path, where he drew the knife and cut himself a stout stick from the tree nearest the leaden chest.

Even before he moved, Ann was nearly sure who he was. The long strolling strides with which he walked across the path made her quite certain. He was the tallest of the three men who had come in that car, the one who had made the gate open, the one in the odd camelhair coat. He was still wearing that coat, after a fashion, she thought, except he had made it into a robe.

He came back to the path, carrying the stick. It was no longer a stick, but a staff, old and polished and carved with curious signs. He looked up at Ann and croaked out a remark at her.

She recoiled against the tree trunk. Oh my God! He knew I was there all along! And now she was the indecent one. Comes of climbing trees in a tight skirt. The skirt was rolled up round her waist. He must be looking straight up at her pants. And her long, helpless legs dangling down on either side of the branch.

The strange man below coughed, displeased with his voice, still staring up at Ann. His eyes were light, inside deep hollows. His eyebrows met over his nose, in one eyebrow shaped like a hawk flying. He was a weird-looking man, even if you met him in the ordinary way, walking down the street. You’d think, Ann thought, you’d run into the Grim Reaper.

“I’m sorry,” she said, high-voiced with fear. “I – I can’t understand a word you’re saying – and I don’t want to.”

He looked startled. He thought. Gave another cough. “I apologise,” he said. “I was using the wrong language. What I said was, I’ve no intention of hurting you. Won’t you come down?”

They all say that! Mum’s warning voice said in Ann’s head. “No, I won’t,” Ann said. “And if you try to climb up I shall kick you.” And she wondered frantically, How do I get out of this? I can’t sit up here all day!

“Well, do you mind if I ask you a few questions?” asked the man. As Ann drew breath to say that she did mind, very much, he added quickly, “I’ve never been so puzzled in my life. What is this place?”

Now he was getting used to talking, he had quite a pleasant deep voice, with a slight foreign accent. Swedish? Ann wondered. And he did have every reason to be puzzled. There seemed no harm in telling him what little she knew. “What do you want to ask?” she said cautiously.

He cleared his throat again. “Can you tell me where we are? Where this is?” He gestured round at the green distances of the wood.

“Well,” Ann said, “it ought to be the wood just beside Hexwood Farm, but it – seems to have gone bigger.” As he seemed quite bewildered by this, she added, “But it’s no use asking me why it’s bigger. I can’t understand it either.”

The man clicked his tongue and stared up at her impatiently. “I know about that. I could feel I was working with a field just now. Something near by is creating a whole set of paratypical extensions—”

“You what?” said Ann.

“You’d probably call it,” he said thoughtfully, “casting a spell.”

“I would not!” Ann said indignantly. She might look absurd and indecent sitting dangling in this tree, but that didn’t mean she was a moron! “I’m far too old to think anything so silly.”

“Apologies,” he said. “Then perhaps the best way to explain it is as quite a large hemisphere of a certain kind of force that has power to change reality. Does that help you?”

“Sort of” Ann admitted.

“Good,” he said. “Now please explain where and what is Hexwood Farm.”

“It’s the old farm on our housing estate,” Ann said. He looked bewildered again. The one eyebrow gathered in over his nose, and he leant on his staff to stare about him. Ann thought he seemed wobbly and ill. Not surprising. “It’s not a farm any more, just a house,” she explained. “About forty miles from London.” He shook his head helplessly. “In England, Europe, Earth, the solar system, the universe. You must know!” Ann said irritably. “You came here in a car this morning. I saw you – going into the farm with two other men!”

“Oh no,” he said, sounding faint and tired. “You’re mistaken. I’ve been in stass-sleep for centuries, for breaking the Reigners’ ban.” He turned and pointed a startlingly long finger at the chest half-buried in the bank. “Now you have to believe that. You were standing here, where I am now, when I came out. I saw you.”

This was hard to deny, but Ann was sure enough of her facts to try, leaning earnestly down from her branch. “I know – I mean, I did see you – but I saw you before that, early this morning, walking in the road in modern clothes. I swear it was you! I knew by the way you walked.”

The man below firmly shook his head. “No, it was not me you saw. It must have been a descendant of mine. I took care to have many descendants. It was – was one good way of breaking – that unjust ban.” He put a hand to his forehead. Ann could see he was coming over queer. The staff was wobbling under his hand.

“Look,” she said kindly, “if this – this sphere of force can change reality, couldn’t it have changed you, like it changed the wood?”

“No,” he said. “There are some things that can’t be changed. I am Mordion. I am from a distant world and I was sent here under a ban.” He used his staff to help him to the bank, where he sat down and covered his face shakily with one hand.

It reminded Ann of the weak way she had felt only yesterday. She was torn between sympathy for him and urgent worry about herself. Probably he was not sane. And her legs were going numb and needlish, the way legs do if they are left to dangle. “Why don’t you,” she said, thinking of the way she had wolfed down that pan of food, “get the force to change reality and sent you something to eat? You must be hungry. If I’m right, you haven’t eaten anything since it got light this morning. If you’re right, you must be bloody ravenous!”

Mordion brought his skull of a face out of his hand. “What sound sense!” He raised his staff, then paused and looked up at Ann. “Would you like some food too?”

“No thanks. I have to be home for lunch,” Ann said primly. While he was eating his boars head, or whatever he got his thingummy field to send him, Ann was planning to slide down this tree and run – run like mad, in a straight line this time.

“As you please.” Mordion made a sharp, angular gesture with his staff. Before he had half completed the movement, something square and white was following the gesture in the air. He brought the staff down in a smooth arc and the square thing glided down with it and landed on the bank. “Hey presto!” Mordion said, looking up at Ann with a large smile.

Ann quite forgot to slide down the tree. The square thing was a plastic tray divided into compartments and covered with transparent film. That was the first amazing thing. The second amazing thing was that some of the food inside was bright blue. The third and most amazing thing, which really held Ann riveted to her branch, was that smile Mordion gave her. If a skull smiles, you expect something mirthless, with too many teeth in it. Mordion’s smile was nothing like that. It was full of amusement and humour and friendship. It was glowing. It changed his face to something that made Ann’s breath catch. She felt almost weak enough, seeing it, to topple off her branch. It was the most beautiful smile she had ever seen.

“It’s – that’s aeroplane food!” she said, and felt her face going red because of that smile.

Mordion stripped the transparent top off the tray. Steam rose into the dappled sunlight, and so did a most appetising smell. “Not really,” he said. “It’s a stass-tray.”

“What’s the blue stuff?” Ann could not help asking.

“Yurov keranip,” he answered. His mouth was full of it. He had detached a spoon-thing from the side of the tray and was eating as if it was indeed centuries since he last ate. “A sort of root,” he added, fetching a bread roll out and using it to help the spoon-thing. “This is bread. The pinkish things are collops from Iony in barinda sauce. The green is – I forget – a kind of seaweed, I think, fried, and the yellow is den beans in cheese. Underneath, there should be a dessert. I hope so, because I’m hungry enough to eat the tray if there isn’t. I might spare you a taste if you care to come down, though it would be a wrench.”

“No thanks,” Ann said. But since her legs were going really numb, she struggled one knee on to the branch and managed to pull herself up until she was standing, leaning against the tree trunk, with one arm draped comfortably over a higher branch. Like that, she could wriggle her skirt back down and feel almost respectable. The blood still streaked down her shin, but it was brown and shiny by then.

There was a dessert under the hot food. Ann watched, slightly wistfully, as Mordion lifted the top tray out as you do with a box of chocolates. Underneath, it looked like ice cream, as mysteriously cold as the top course was hot. I am in a field of paratypical thingummies, Ann thought. Anything is possible. That ice cream looked luscious. There was a cup of hot drink beside it.

Mordion tossed the spoon into the empty trays and took the cup in both hands. “Ah,” he said, supping comfortably. “That’s better. Now, I want to ask you something else. But, first, what’s your name?

“Ann,” said Ann.

He looked up at her, puzzled again. “Really? I thought – somehow – it would be a longer name than that.”

“Ann Stavely, if you insist,” said Ann. She was certainly not going to tell him that her middle name was, hatefully, Veronica.

Mordion bowed to her over his steaming cup. “Mordion Agenos. This is what I want to ask you – will you help me to make another attempt to break the Reigners’ ban?”

“It depends,” Ann said. “What are rainers?”

“Those who rule,” said Mordion. His face set into the grimmest of deaths-heads. Above the steaming cup it looked terrible, particularly surrounded by the bright spring woodland, full of the green of life and the chirping of nesting birds. “There are five of them and, though they live light years across the galaxy, they rule every inhabited world, including this one.”

“What – even inside this thingummy field?” Ann asked.

Mordion thought. “No,” he said. “No. I am almost sure not. This seems to be one reason why it came into my head to try to break their ban again.”

“Are the Reigners very terrible?” Ann asked, watching his face.

“Terrible?” Mordion said. She saw hatred and horror working under his grimness. “That’s too small a word. But yes. Very terrible.”

“And what’s this ban they put on you?”

“Exile. And I am not to go against the Reigners in any way.” Looking up at her from under his long wings of eyebrow, Mordion had a sinister unearthliness. Ann shivered as he said, “You see, I’m of Reigner blood too. I could defeat them if I was free. I nearly did, twice, long ago. That was why they put me in stass.”

But that’s not true! Ann thought. Humour him, or I’ll never get out of this tree. “So how do you want me to help?”

“Give me permission to make use of your blood,” Mordion said.

“What?” Ann backed against the trunk of the tree, and pressed further against it when Mordion pointed to the place in the path where she had fallen over. It had not dried up like the blood on her leg. Down there it was bright red and moist. There seemed to be an awful lot of it too, spreading luridly among the green mosses and splashed scarlet on the white stone that had cut her. It looked almost as if something had been killed there.

“The field is waiting to work with it,” Mordion told her. “It was the first thing I noticed after you ran away.”

“What for? How?” Ann said. “I don’t agree to anything!”

“Perhaps if I explain.” Mordion stood up and strolled over to a spot just under Ann’s branch. She felt sick, and tried to back even further. She could see the buds on the end of her branch shaking in front of Mordion’s upturned face. She felt as if she was making the whole tree shake. “What was done in the past,” Mordion said, “was to get round the Reigners’ ban by breeding a race of men and women who were not under the ban and could go against the Reigners—”

“I’m not doing that!” Ann almost screamed.

“Of course not.” Mordion smiled. The smile was brief and sad, but as wonderful as before. “I’ve learnt my lesson there. It took far too long, and it ended in misery. The Reigners eliminated the first race of people. The second time there were too many to kill, so they killed the best and put me in stass so that I was not there to guide the others. There must be hundreds of their descendants now with Reigner blood, here in this world. You, for instance. That’s what the paratypical field is showing us.” He pointed once more to the bright blood in the path.

In spite of her fear and disgust and complete disbelief, Ann could not help a twinge of pride that her blood was so special. “So what do you want it for this time?”

“To create a hero,” said Mordion, “safe from the Reigners inside this field, who is human and not human, who can defeat the Reigners because they will not know about him until it is too late.”

Ann thought about it – or, to be truthful, let her head fill with a mixed hurry of feelings. Disbelief and fear mixed with a terrible sadness for Mordion, who thought he was trying the same useless thing for a third time; and horror, because Mordion just might be right; while underneath ran urgent, ordinary, homely feelings, telling her she really did have to be back for lunch. “If I say yes,” she said, “you can’t touch me and you have to let me go home safe straight afterwards.”

“Agreed.” Mordion looked earnestly up at her. “You agree?”

“Yes, all right,” Ann said, and felt the most terrible coward saying it But what could she do, she asked herself, stuck up in a tree in a place where everything was mad, with Mordion prowling round its roots?

Mordion smiled at her again. Ann was lapped in the sweetness and friendliness of it and weakened in her already wobbly knees. But a small clinical piece of her said, he uses that smile. She watched him turn and stroll to the patch of blood, with his pleated robe swinging elegantly round him, and wondered how he thought he would create a hero. His knife was in his right hand. It caught the green woodland light as he made a swift, expert cut in the wrist of his other hand that was holding his staff. Blood ran freely, in the same unexpected quantity as Ann’s.

“Hey!” Ann said. Somehow she had not expected this.

Mordion did not seem to hear her. He was letting his blood trickle down his staff, round and among the strange carvings on it, guiding the thick flow to drip off the wooden end and mingle with Ann’s blood on the path. He was certainly also working on the paratypical field. Ann had a sense of things pulsing, and twisting a little, just out of sight.

Mordion finished and stood back. Everything was still. Not a tree moved. No birds sang. Ann was not sure she breathed.

A strange welling and mounding began on the path, on either side of the patch of blood. Ann had seen water behave that way when someone had thrown a log in deep and the log was rising to the surface. She leant forward and watched, still barely breathing, moss and black earth, stones and yellow roots pouring up and aside to let something rise up from underneath. There was a glimpse of white, bone white, about four feet long, and a snarl of what looked like hair at one end. Ann bit her lip till it hurt. Next second, a bare body had risen, lying face downwards in a shallow furrow in the path. A fairly small body.

“You must give him clothes,” she said, while she waited for the body to grow.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Mordion nod and move his staff. The body grew clothes, the same way as Mordion had done, in a blue-purple flush spreading over the dented white back and thickening into what looked like a tracksuit. The bare feet turned grey and became feet wearing old sneakers. The body squirmed, shifted, and propped itself up on its elbows, facing down the path away from both of them. It had longish draggly hair the same camel colour as Mordion’s.

“Bump. Fell,” the body remarked in a high clear voice.

Then, obviously assuming he had tripped and fallen in the path, the boy in the tracksuit picked himself up and trotted out of sight beyond the pink blossoming tree.

Mordion stood back and looked up at Ann. His face had dragged into lines. Making the boy had clearly tired him out. “There, it’s done,” he said wearily, and went to sit among the primroses again.

“Aren’t you going to go after him?” Ann asked.

Mordion shook his head.

“Why not?” said Ann.

“I told you,” Mordion said, very tired, “that I learnt my lesson there. It’s between him and the Reigners now, when he grows up. I shall not need to appear in it.”

“And how long before he grows up?” Ann asked.

Mordion shrugged. “I’m not sure how time in this field relates to ordinary time. I suppose it will take a while.”

“And what happens if he goes out of the parathingummy field,” Ann demanded, “into real time?”

“He’ll cease to exist,” said Mordion, as if it were obvious.

“Then however is he supposed to conquer these Reigners? You told me they live light years away,” Ann said.

“He’ll have to fetch them here,” said Mordion. He lay back on the bank, looking worn out.

“Does he know that?” Ann demanded.

“Probably not,” Mordion said.

Ann looked down at him, spread on the bank preparing to go to sleep, and lost her temper. “Then you should go and tell him! You should look after him! He’s all alone in this wood, and he’s quite small, and he doesn’t even know he’s not supposed to go out of it. He probably doesn’t even know how to work the field to get food. You – you calmly make him up, out of blood and – and nothing, and you expect him to do your dirty work for you, and you don’t even tell him the rules! You can’t do that to a person!”

Mordion rose up on one elbow. “The field will take care of him. He belongs to it. Or you could. He’s half yours, after all.”

“I have to go home for lunch!” Ann snarled. “You know I do! Is there anyone else in this wood who could take care of him?”

Mordion was getting that look Dad had when Ann went on at him. “I’ll see,” he said, clearly hoping to shut her up. He sat up and raised his head in a listening way, turning slowly from left to right. Like radar operating, Ann thought. “There are others here,” he said slowly, “but they are a long way off and too busy to be spared.”

“Then get the field,” said Ann, “to make another person.”

“That,” said Mordion, “would take more blood – and that person would be a child too.”

“Then someone who isn’t real,” insisted Ann. “I know the field can do it. This whole wood isn’t real. You’re not real—”

She stopped, because Mordion turned and looked at her. The pain in his look almost rocked her backwards.

“Well, only half real,” she said. “And stop looking at me like that just because I’m telling you the truth. You think you’re a magician with godlike powers, and I know you’re just a man in a camelhair coat.”

“And you,” said Mordion, not quite angry, but getting that way, “are very brave because you think you’re safe up a tree. What makes you think my godlike powers can’t fetch you down?”

“You can’t touch me,” Ann said hastily. “You promised.”

The earlier grim look came back into Mordion’s face. “There are many ways,” he said, “to hurt a person without touching them. I hope you never find out about them.” He stared into grim thoughts for a while, with his eyebrow hooked above his strange flat nose. Then he sighed. “The boy is fine,” he said. “The field has obeyed you and produced an unreal person to care for him.” He lay back on the bank again and arranged the rolled blanket-thing at his shoulder as a pillow.

“Really?” said Ann.

“The field doesn’t like you shouting at it any more than I do,” Mordion replied sleepily. “Get down from your tree and go in peace.”

He rolled on his side and seemed to go to sleep, a strange bleached heap huddled on the bank. The only colour about him was the red gash on his wrist, above the hand clutching his staff.

Ann waited in her tree until his breathing was slow and regular and she was sure he was really asleep. Only then did she go round to the back of the tree and slide down as quietly as she knew how. She got to the path with long tiptoe strides and sprinted away down it, still on tiptoe. And she was still afraid that Mordion might be stealing after her. She looked back so frequently that after fifty yards she ran into a tree.

She met it with a bruising thump that seemed to shake reality back into place. When she looked forward, she found she could see the houses on the near side of Wood Street. When she looked backwards to check, she could see houses again, beyond the usual sparse trees of Banners Wood. And there was no sign of Mordion among them.

“Well, that’s that then!” she said. Her knees began to shake.

There were still hailstones under the big grey car, but they were melting as Ann hastened past on her way to the path to Banners Wood. She did not stop for fear Mum or Dad called her back. She admitted that setting out to climb a tree in a tight skirt probably was silly, but that was her own business. Besides, it was so hot. The path was steamy-warm, full of melting hailstones winking like diamonds in the grass. It was a relief to get into the shade of the wood.

Grass almost never grew on the trampled earth under the trees, but spring had been at work here all the same while Ann had been ill. Shiny green weeds grew at the edges of the trodden parts. Birds yelled in the upper branches and there was a glorious smell in here, part cool and earthy, part distant and sweet like the ghost of honey. The blackthorn thicket near the stream was actually trying to bloom, little white flowers all over the spiny leafless bushes. The path wound through them. Ann wound with the path, pushing through, with her arms up to cover her face. Before long, the path was completely blocked by the bushes, but when she dropped to a crouch, she could see a way through, snaking among the roots.

She crawled.

Spines caught her hair. She heard her anorak tear, but it seemed silly to go back, or at least just as spiny. She crawled on towards the light where the bushes ended.

She reached the light. It was a swimming, milky lightness, fogged with green. It took Ann a second of staring to recognise that the lightness was water. Water stretched to an impossible distance in front of her, in smooth grey-white ripples that vanished into fog. Dark trees beside her bowed over rippled copies of themselves, and there was one yellow-green willow beyond, smudging the lake with lime.

Ann looked from the foggy distance to the water gently rippling by her knees. Inside her black reflection there were old leaves, black as tea-leaves. The bank where she was kneeling was overgrown with violets, pale blue, white and dark purple, spread everywhere in impossible profusion, like a carpet. The scent made her quite giddy.

“Impossible,” she said aloud. “I don’t remember a lake?”

“I don’t either,” said Hume, kneeling under the willow. “It’s new.”

Hume’s tracksuit was so much the colour of the massed violets that Ann had not seen him before. She had a moment when she was not sure who he was. But his brown shaggy hair, his thin face and the way his cheekbones stuck out, were all quite familiar. Of course he was Hume. It was one of the times when he was about ten years old.

“What’s making the ripples?” Hume said. “There’s no wind.”

Hume never stops asking things, Ann thought. She searched out over the wide milky water. There was no way of telling how wide. Her eye stopped with a gentle white welling in the more distant water. She pointed. “There. There’s a spring coming up through the lake.”

“Where? Oh, I see it,” Hume said, pointing too.

They were both pointing out across the lake as the fog cleared, dimly. For just an instant, they were pointing to the milky grey silhouette of a castle, far off on a distant shore. Steep roof, pointed turrets and the square teeth of battlements rose beside the graceful round outline of a tower. The chalky shapes of flags flapped lazily from tower and roofs, all without colour. Then the fog rolled in again and hid it all.

“What was that?” asked Hume.

“The castle,” said Ann, “where the king lives with his knights and his ladies. The ladies wear beautiful clothes. The knights ride out in armour having adventures and fighting.”

Hume’s thin face glowed. “I know! The castle is where the real action is. I’m going to tell Mordion I’ve seen it.”

Hume had this way of knowing things before she told him, Ann thought, gathering a small bunch of the violets. Mum would love them, and there were so many. Sometimes it turned out that Hume had asked Yam, but sometimes, confusingly, Hume said she had told him before. “The castles not the only place where things happen,” she said.

“Yes, but I want to get there,” Hume said yearningly. “I’d wade out through the lake or try to swim, if I knew I could get there. But I bet it wouldn’t be there when I got across the lake.”

“It’s enchanted,” said Ann. “You have to be older to get there.”

“I know,” Hume said irritably. “But then I shall be a knight and kill the dragon.”

Ann’s private opinion was that Hume would do better being a sorcerer, like Mordion. Hume was good at that. She would have given a great deal, herself, to learn sorcery. “You might not enjoy it at the castle,” she warned him, plucking the best-shaped leaves to arrange round her violets. “If you want to fight, you’d be better off joining Sir Artegal and his outlaws. My dad says Sir Artegal’s a proper knight.”

“But they’re outlaws,” Hume said, dismissing Sir Artegal. “I’m going to be a lawful knight at the castle. Tell me what they say about the castle in the village.”

“I don’t know much,” Ann said. She finished arranging her leaves and wrapped a long piece of grass carefully round the stalks of her posy. “I think there are things they don’t want me to hear. They whisper when they talk about the king’s bride. You see, because the king is ill with his wound that won’t heal, some of the others are much too powerful. There’s quarrelling and secrecy and taking sides.”

“Tell me about the knights,” Hume said inexorably.

“There’s Sir Bors,” said Ann. “He prays a lot, they say. Nobody likes Sir Fors. But they quite like Sir Bedefer, even if he is hard on his soldiers. They say he’s honest. Sir Harrisoun is the one everyone really hates.”

Hume considered this, with one tracksuited knee up under his chin, staring into the mist across the rippling lake. “When I’ve killed the dragon, I’ll turn them all out and be the king’s Champion.

“You have to get there first,” Ann said, beginning to get up.

Hume sighed. “Sometimes,” he said, “I hate living in an enchanted wood.”

Ann sighed too. “You don’t know your own luck! I have to be home for lunch. Are you staying here?”

“For now,” said Hume. “The mist might clear again.”

Ann left him there, kneeling among the violets looking out into the fog as if that glimpse of the castle had somehow broken his heart. As she crawled through the thornbrake, carefully protecting her bunch of violets in one cupped hand, she felt fairly heartbroken herself. Something impossibly beautiful seemed to have been taken away from her. She was almost crying as she crawled out from the bushes on to the mud path and stood up to trot towards the houses. And, on top of it all, she had torn her anorak, and her skirt, and she seemed to have quite a large cut in her knee.

“Hey, wait a minute.” she said, halting in the passage between the houses. She had cut that knee running away from Mordion. She looked from the dried blood flaking off her shin to the small bunch of violets in her hand. “Did I go into the wood twice then?”

I don’t think so, said the Boy. I lost you.

You went out of touch when you went into that wood, explained the Prisoner.

Yes, hut did I go in and come out and go in again? Ann asked them.

No, they said, all four of her imaginary people, and the King added, You only went in once this morning.

“Hm.” Ann almost doubted them as she limped slowly up the passage and into Wood Street. But the big grey car was still in the parking bay. There were other cars around it now, but when Ann bent down she could still see just a few hailstones, fused into a melting lump behind the near front wheel where the sun had not been able to reach.

That much is real, she thought, crossing the street slantwise towards Stavely Greengrocer.

In front of the shop she stopped and looked at boxes of lettuces and bananas and flowers out on the pavement. One of the boxes was packed full of little posies of violets, just like the one in her hand. Very near to tears, Ann poked her own bunch in amongst them before she went inside for lunch.

Mordion was working hard, trying to build a shelter and keep a watch on Hume at the same time. Hume would keep scrambling down the steep rocks to the river. He seemed fascinated by the fish traps Mordion had made in the pool under the waterfall. Mordion was not sure how it had come about that he was in charge of such a small child, but he knew Hume was a great deal too young to be trusted not to fall into the river and drown. Every few minutes, Mordion was forced to go bounding down after Hume. Once, he was only just in time to catch Hume by one chubby arm as Hume cartwheeled slowly off a slippery stone at the edge of the deep pool.

“Play with the pretty stones I found you,” Mordion said.

“I did,” said Hume. “They went in the water.”

Mordion towed Hume up the rocks to the cave beneath the pine tree. This was where he was trying to build the shelter. It felt like the hundredth time he had towed Hume up here. “Stay up here, where it’s safe,” he said. “Here. Here’s some pieces of wood. Make a house.”

‘I’ll make a boat,” Hume offered.

And fall in the river for certain! Mordion thought. He tried cunning. “Why not make a cart? You can make roads for it in the earth here and – and – I’ll carve you a wooden horse for it when I’ve built this shelter.”

Hume considered this. “All right,” he said at last, doing Mordion a great favour.

For a time then there was peace, if you did not count the thumping as Hume endeavoured to beat his piece of wood into a cart shape. Mordion went back to building. He had planted a row of uprights in front of the cave, and hammered stakes in among the rocks above the cave. Now he was trying to lash beams between the two to make a roof. It was a good idea, but it did not seem to be working. Bracken and grass did not make good rope.

While he worked, Mordion wondered at the way he felt so responsible for Hume. A small child was a real nuisance. Centuries of stass had not prepared Mordion for this constant need to dash after Hume and stop him killing himself. He felt worn out. Several times he had almost given up and thought, oh let him drown!

But that was wrong and bad. Mordion was surprised how strongly he felt that. He could not let a small stray boy come to harm. Oh what does it matter why! he thought, angrily pushing his roof back upright. His poles showed a wilful desire to slant sideways. They did it oftener when Mordion tried to balance spreading fir boughs on top to make a roof. The whole thing would have collapsed by now, but for the long iron nails that, for some reason, kept turning up among his pile of wood. Though he felt this was cheating, Mordion took a nail and hammered it into the ground next to another pole every time his roof slanted. By now, each upright stood in a ring of nails. Suppose he were to lash the poles and nails around with bracken rope—

“Look,” Hume said happily. “I made my cart.”

Mordion turned round. Hume was beaming and holding out a lump of wood with two of the nails hammered through it. On both ends of each nail were round slices that Mordion had cut off the ends of his poles when he was getting them the right length. Mordion stared at it ruefully. It was far more like a cart than his building was like a house.

“Don’t carts look like this?” Hume asked doubtfully.

“Oh yes. Haven’t you ever seen one?” Mordion said.

“No,” Hume said. “I made it up. Is it very wrong?”

In that case, Mordion realised, Hume was a genius. He had just reinvented the wheel. This was certainly a good reason for caring for Hume. “No, it’s a beautiful cart,” Mordion said kindly. Hume beamed so happily at this that Mordion found himself almost as pleased as Hume was. To give such pleasure with so few words! “What made you think of the nails?” he asked.

“I just asked for something to fasten the rings of wood on with,” Hume explained.

“Asked?” said Mordion.

“Yes,” said Hume. “You can ask for things. They fall on the ground in front of you.”

So Hume had discovered this queer way you could cheat too, Mordion thought. This explained the nails in the woodpile – possibly. And while he thought about this, Hume said, “My cart’s a boat too,” and set off at a trot towards the river again.

Mordion dived and caught him by the back of his tracksuit just as Hume walked off the edge of the high rocks. “Can’t you be careful?” he said, trying to drag Hume more or less out of the sky. They were both hanging out over the river.

Hume windmilled his arms so that Mordion all but lost his grip on the tracksuit. “Hallo, Ann!” Hume yelled. “Ann, come and look at my cart! Mordion’s made a house!”

Down below, Mordion was surprised and pleased to see, Ann was jumping cautiously across the river from rock to rock. When Hume shouted, she balanced on a boulder and looked up. She seemed as surprised as Mordion, but not nearly so pleased. He felt rather hurt Ann shouted, but it was lost in the rushing of the waterfall.

“Can’t hear you, Ann!” Hume screamed.

Ann had realised that. She made the last two leaps across this foaming river where there had only been a trickling stream before, and came scrambling up the cliff. “What’s going on?” she panted, rather accusingly.

“What do you mean?” Mordion set Hume down at a safe distance from the drop-off. He had, Ann saw, grown a small curly camel-coloured beard. It made his face far less like a skull. With the beard and the pleated robe, he reminded her of a monk, or a pilgrim. But Hume—! Hume was so small – only five years old at the most!

Hume was clamouring for Ann to admire his cart, holding it up and wagging it in her face. Ann took it and looked at it. “It’s a stone-age rollerskate,” she said. “You ought to make two – unless it’s a very small skateboard.”

“He invented it himself,” Mordion said proudly.

“And Mordion invented a house!” Hume said, equally proudly.

Ann looked from the cart to the slanting poles of the house. To her mind, there was not much to choose between the two, but she supposed that Hume and Mordion were both having to learn.

“We started by sheltering in the cave,” Mordion explained, a little self-consciously, “but it was very cold and rather small. So I thought I’d build on to it.”

As he pointed to the dank little hole in the rocks behind the shelter, Ann saw that there was a dark red slash on his wrist, just beginning to look puckered and sore. That’s where he cut himself to make Hume, she thought. Then she thought, hey! – what’s going on? That cut was slightly less well healed than the cut on her own knee. Ann could feel the soreness and the drag of the sticking plaster under the jeans she had sensibly decided to wear this afternoon. But Mordion had had time to grow a beard.

“I know it gives a whole new meaning to the word ‘lean-to’,” Mordion said apologetically. He was hurt and puzzled. Just like Hume, he thought of Ann as a good friend from the castle estate. Yet here she was looking grave, unfriendly and decidedly sarcastic. “What’s the matter?” he asked her. “Have I offended you?”

“Well—” said Ann. “Well, last time I saw Hume he was twice the size he is now.”

Mordion pulled his beard, wrestling with a troublesome itch of memory when he looked at Hume. Hume was pulling Ann’s sleeve and saying, like the small boy he was, “Ann, come and see my sword Mordion made me, and my funny log. And the nets in the water to catch fish.”

“Hush, Hume,” Mordion told him. “Ann, he was this size when I found him wandering in the wood.”

“But you said, if I remember rightly, that you weren’t going to bother to look after him,” Ann said. “What changed your mind?”

“Surely I never would have said—” Mordion began. But the itch of memory changed to a stab. He knew he had said something like that, though it seemed now as if he must have said it in another time and place entirely. The stab of memory brought with it sunlit spring woodland, a flowering Judas tree, and Ann’s face, smudged and green-lit, staring at him with fear, horror and anger. From somewhere high up. “Forgive me,” he said. “I never meant to frighten—You know, something seems to be playing tricks with my memory.”

“The paratypical field,” Ann said, staring up at him expectantly.

“Oh!” said Mordion. She was right. Both fields were very strong, and one was also very subtle and so deft at keeping itself unnoticed that, with the passing of the weeks, he had forgotten it was there. “I let myself get caught in it,” he confessed. “As to – as to what I said about Hume – well – I’d never in my life had to care for anyone—” He stopped, because now Ann had made him aware his memory was wrong, he knew this was not quite the case. At some time, somewhere, he had cared for someone, several someones, children like Hume. But this stab of memory hurt so deeply that he was not prepared to think of it, except to be honest with Ann. “That’s not quite true,” he admitted. “But I knew what it would be like. He can be a perfect little pest.”

Hume just then cast down a bundle of his treasures at Ann’s feet, shouting at her to look at them. Ann laughed. “I see what you mean!” She squatted down beside Hume and inspected the wooden sword, and the log that looked rather like a crocodile – a dragon, Hume insisted – and fingered the stones with holes in. As she inspected the doll-thing that Mordion had dressed with a piece torn from his robe, she realised that she approved of Mordion far more than she had expected to. Mum had tried to make her stay at home to rest, but Ann had set out to find Hume and look after him. It had been a shock to find Mordion was already doing so. But she had to admit that Mordion had really been trying. There were still strange – and frightening – things about him, but some of that was his looks, and the rest was probably the paratypical field at work. It made things queer, this field.

“Tell you what, Hume,” she said. “Let’s us two go for a walk and give Mordion a bit of a holiday.”

It was as if she had given Mordion a present. The smile lit his face as she got up and led Hume away. Hume was clamouring that he knew a real place to walk to. “I could use a holiday,” Mordion said through the clamour. It was heartfelt. Ann felt undeserving, because she knew that, as presents go, it was not much better than a log that looked like a crocodile.

As soon as Ann had towed Hume out of sight, Mordion, instead of getting on with his house, sat on one of the smooth brown rocks under the pine tree. He leant back on the tree’s rough, gummy trunk, feeling like someone who had not had a holiday in years. Absurd! Centuries of half-life in stass were like a long night’s sleep – but he was sure he had had dreams, appalling dreams. And the one thing he was certain of was that he had longed, with every fibre of his body, to be free. But the way he felt now, bone-tired, mind-tired, was surely the result of looking after Hume.

Yes, Ann was right. Hume had been bigger at one time. When? How? Mordion groped after it. The subtler of the two paratypical fields kept pushing in and trying to spread vagueness over his mind. He would remember this. Woodland – Ann looking horrified—

It came to him. First it was blood, splashed on moss and dripping down his hand. Then it was the furrow in the ground, opening to show bone-white body and a tangle of hair. Mordion contemplated it. What had he done? True, the field had pushed him to it, but it was one of the few things he knew he could have resisted. He must have been a little mad, coming from that coffin to find himself a skeleton, but that was no excuse. And he had a very real grudge against the Reigners, but that was no excuse either. It was not right to create another human being to do one’s dirty work. He had been mad, playing God.

He looked at the cut on his wrist. He shuddered and was about to heal it with an impatient thought, but he stopped himself. This had better stay – had to stay – to remind him what he owed to Hume. He owed it to Hume to bring him up as a normal person. Even when Hume was grown up, he must never, never know that Mordion had made him as a sort of puppet. And, Mordion thought, he would have to find a way to deal with the Reigners for himself. There had to be a way.

Ann led Hume away, hoping that the weirdness of this place would cause Hume to grow older once Mordion was out of sight. It would be confusing, but she knew she would prefer it. Small Hume kept asking questions, questions. If she did not answer, he tugged her hand and shouted the question. Ann was not sure she should tell him the answers to some of the things he asked. She wished she knew more about small children. She ought to, she supposed, having a brother two years younger than she was, but she could not remember what Martin had been like at this age at all. Surely Martin had never kept asking things this way?

They crunched their way up a hillside of dry bracken, littered with twisted small thorn trees and, before they were anywhere near the top, Ann found she had explained to Hume in detail the way babies were made.

“And that was how I was made, was it?” asked Hume.

This was one of the times he pulled Ann’s arm and kept shouting the question. “No” Ann said at last, mostly out of pure harassment. “No. You were made out of a spell Mordion worked out of my blood and his blood.” Then Hume pulled her arm and shouted again, until she described it to him, just as it had happened. “So you got up and ran away without noticing either of us,” she finished, as they came to the top of the hill. By this time she was resigned to the paratypical field keeping Hume as he was.

As they entered woodland again, Hume thought about what he had been told. “Aren’t I a proper person then?” he asked mournfully.

Now she had damaged Hume’s mind! Ann wished all over again that the field had made Hume older. “Of course you are!” she told Hume, with the huge heartiness of guilt. “You’re very particularly special, that’s all.” Since Hume was still looking tearful and dubious, Ann went on in a hurry, “Mordion needs you badly, to kill some terrible people called Reigners for him when you grow up. He can’t kill them himself, you see, because they’ve banned him from it. But you can.”

Hume was interested in this. He cheered up. “Are they dragons?”

“No,” said Ann. Hume really was obsessed with dragons. “People.”

“I shall bang their heads on a stone, then, like Mordion does with the fish,” Hume said. Then he let go of Ann and ran ahead through the trees, shouting, “Here’s the place! Hurry up, Ann! It’s inciting!”

When Ann caught him up, Hume was forcing his way through a giant thicket of those whippy bushes that fruit squishy white balls in summer. Snowball bushes, Ann always called them. They were almost bare now, except for a few green tips. She could clearly see the stones of an old wall beyond them.

Now what’s this? she wondered. Has the field made the castle a ruin?

“Come on!” Hume screeched from inside the bushes. “I can’t get it open!”

“Coming!” Ann forced her way in among the thicket, ducking and pushing, until she arrived against the wall. Hume was impatiently jumping up and down in front of an old, old wooden door.

“Open it!” he commanded.

Ann put her hand on the old rusty knob, turned it, pulled, rattled, and was just deciding the door was locked when she discovered it opened inwards. She put her shoulder to the blistered panels and pushed. Hume hindered in a helping way. And the door groaned and scraped and finally came half open, which was enough to let them both slip through. Hume shot inside with a squeal of excitement. Ann stepped after more cautiously.

She stopped in astonishment. There was an ancient farmhouse beyond, standing in a walled garden of chest-high weeds. The house was derelict. Part of its roof had fallen in, and a dead tree had toppled across the empty rafters. The chimney at the end Ann could see was smothered in ivy, which had pulled a pipe away from the wall. When her eyes followed the pipe down, they found the waterbutt it had drained into broken and spread like a mad wooden flower. The place was full of damp, hot silence, with just a faint cheeping of birds.

Ann knew the shape of that roof and the shape the chimney should be inside the ivy. She had looked at both every day for most of her life – except that the roof was not broken and there were no trees near enough to fall on it. Now look here! she thought What’s Hexwood Farm doing here? It should be on the other side of the stream – river – whatever. And why is it all so ruined?

Hume meanwhile charged into the high weeds, shouting, “This is a real place!” Shortly, he was yelling at Ann to come and see what he had found. Ann shrugged. It had to be the paratypical field again. She went to see the rusty kettle Hume had found. It had a robins nest in it. After that, she went to see the old boot he had found, then the clump of blue irises, then the window that was low enough for Hume to look through, into the farmhouse. That find was more interesting. Ann lingered, staring through the cracked, dusty panes at the rotted remains of red and white check curtains, past a bottle of detergent swathed in cobwebs, to a stark old kitchen. There were empty shelves and a table with what looked like the mortal remains of a loaf on it – unless it was fungus.

Does it really look like this? she wondered. Or newer?

Hume was yelling again. “Come and see what I’ve found!”

Ann sighed. This time Hume was rooting in the tall tangle of green briars over by the main gate. When Ann made her way over, he was on tiptoe, hanging on to two green briar-whips that had thorns on them like tiger claws. “You’ll get scratched,” she said.

“There’s a window in here too!" Hume said, hauling on the briars excitedly.

Ann did not believe him. To prove he must be wrong, she wrapped her sweater over her fist and shoved a swathe of green thorny branches aside. Inside, to her great surprise, there was the rusty remains of a white car bonnet, and a tall windscreen dimly glinting beyond. Too tall for a car. A van of some kind. Wait a minute! She went further along the tangle and used both fists, wrapped in both sweater sleeves, to heave more green whips aside.

“What is it?” Hume wanted to know.

“Er – a kind of cart, I think,” Ann said as she heaved.

“Stupid. Carts don’t have windows,” Hume told her scornfully, and wandered off, disappointed in her.

Ann stared at the side of a once-white van. It was covered with running trickles of brown rust. Further, redder rust erupted through the paint like boils. But the blue logo was still there. A weighing scale with two round pans, one higher than the other.

It is a balance, she said to her four imaginary people.

There was no reply. After a moment when she felt hurt, angry and lost, Ann remembered that they had lost her this morning when she went into the wood. Ridiculous! she thought Behaving as if they were real! But I can tell them later when I come out So—

Using forearms and elbows as well as fists, she heaved away more briars until she could stamp them down underfoot. Words came into view, small and blue and tasteful. RAYNER HEXWOOD INTERNATIONAL and, in smaller letters, MAINTENANCE DIVISION (EUROPE).

“Well, that leaves me none the wiser!” Ann said. Yet, for some reason, the sight of that name made her feel cold. Cold, small and frightened. “Anyway, how did it get this way in just a fortnight?” she said.

“Ann! Ann!” Hume screamed from round the house somewhere.

Something was wrong! Ann jumped clear of the van and the briars and raced off in Hume’s direction. He was in the corner of the garden walls beyond the waterbutt, jumping up and down. So sure was Ann that something was wrong that she grabbed Hume’s shoulders and turned him this way and that, looking for blood, or a bruise, or maybe a snakebite. “Where do you hurt? What’s happened?”

Hume had worked himself into such a state of excitement that he could hardly speak. He pointed to the corner. “In there – look!” he gulped, with a mixture of joy and distress that altogether puzzled Ann.

There was a heap of rubbish in the corner. It had been there so long that elder trees had grown up through it, making yet another whippy thicket “Just rubbish,” Ann said soothingly.

“No – there!” said Hume. “At the bottom!”

Ann looked and saw a pair of metal feet sticking out from under the mound of mess. Her stomach jolted. A corpse now! “Someone’s thrown away an old suit of armour,” she said, trying to draw Hume gently away. Or suppose it was only the legs of a corpse. She felt sick.

Hume would not be budged. “They moved,” he insisted. “I saw.”

Surely not? This heap of rubbish could not have been disturbed for years, or the elder trees would not be growing there. Horror fizzed Ann’s face and hurt her back. Her eyes could not leave those two square-toed metal feet. And she saw one twitch. The left: one. “Oh dear,” she said.

“We’ve got to unbury him,” said Hume.

Ann’s instinct was to run for help, but she supposed the sensible thing was to find out the worst before she did. She and Hume climbed up among the elders and set to work prising and heaving at the earthy mess. They threw aside iron bars, bicycle wheels, sheet metal, logs that crumbled to wet white pulp in their fingers, and then dragged away the remains of a big mattress. Everything smelt. But the strong sappy odour of the elders seemed to Ann to smell worst of all. Like armpits, she thought. Or worse, a dead person. Hume irritated her by saying excitedly, over and over, “I know what it’s going to be!” as if they were unwrapping a present Ann would have snapped at him to shut up, except that she too, under the horror, had a feeling she knew what they would find.

Moving the mattress revealed metal legs attached to the feet, and beyond that, glimpses of the whole suit of armour. Ann felt better. She sprang with Hume up the mound again and dug frenziedly. An elder tree toppled. “Sorry!” Ann gasped at it. She knew you should be polite to elder trees. As it fell, the tree tore away a landslide of broken cups, tins and old paper, leaving a cave with a red-eyed suit of armour lying in it under what looked like a railway sleeper.

“Yam!” Hume yelled, sliding about in the rubbish above. “Yam, are you all right?”

“Thank you. I am functional still,” the suit of armour replied in a deep monotonous voice. “Stand clear and I will be able to free myself now.”

Ann retreated hastily. A robot! she thought. I don’t believe this! Except that I do, somehow. Hume leapt down beside her, shaking with excitement. They watched the robot brace its silver arms on the railway sleeper and push. The timber swung sideways and the whole rubbish heap changed shape. The robot sat up among the elder trees. Very slowly, creaking and jangling rather, it got its silver legs under itself and stood up, swaying.

“Thank you for releasing me,” it said. “I am only slightly damaged.”

“They threw you away!” Hume said indignantly. He rushed up to the robot and took hold of its silvery hand.

“They had no further use for me,” Yam intoned. “That was when they went away, in the year forty-two. I had completed the tasks they set me by then.” He took a few uncertain steps forward, creaking and whirring. “I am suffering from neglect and inaction.”

“Come with us,” Hume said. “Mordion can mend you.”

He set off, leading the glistening robot tenderly towards the door they had come in by. Ann followed, reluctant with disbelief. What year forty-two? she wondered. It can’t be this century, and I refuse to believe were a hundred years in the future. And Hume knows the robot! How?

Well, I know the date is 1993, she told herself, and she knew, of course, that there were no real robots then. It was hard to rid herself of the feeling that there must be someone human inside Yam’s unsteady silver shape. The paratypical field again, she thought. It was the only thing that would account for those elder trees growing above Yam and the way Hexwood Farm itself was so mysteriously in ruins.

With a sort of idea that she might catch the farmhouse turning back to its usual state, Ann looked over her shoulder at it. It happened to be the very moment when the decaying front door opened and a real man in armour came out, stretching and yawning like someone coming off duty. There was no doubt this one was human. Ann could see his bare hairy legs under the iron shinguards strapped to them. He wore a mail coat and a round iron helmet with a nosepiece down over his very human face. It made him look most unpleasant.

He turned and saw them.

“Run, Hume!” said Ann.

The armed man drew his sword and came leaping through the weeds towards them. “Outlaws!” he shouted. “Filthy peasants!”

Hume took one look and raced for the half-open door, dragging the lurching, swaying Yam behind him. Ann sprinted to catch up. As they reached the door in the wall, more men in armour came running out of the farmhouse. At least two of them had what seemed to be crossbows, and these two stood and aimed the things at Ann and Hume like wide heavy guns. Yam’s big silver hands came out, faster than Ann’s eyes could follow, closed on Hume’s arm and Ann’s, and more or less threw them one after the other round the door and into the snowball thicket. As Ann landed struggling among the bare twigs, she heard the two sharp clangs of the crossbow bolts hitting Yam. Then there was the sound of the door being dragged and slammed shut. Ann scrambled towards the open ground as hard as she could go.

“Are you all right, Hume?” she called as soon as she was there.

Hume came crawling out of the bushes at her feet, looking very frightened. Behind him there were shouts and wooden banging as the armed men tried to get the door open again. Yam was surging through the thicket towards them, swaying and whirring. Twigs slapped his metal skin like a hailstorm on a tin roof.

“You’re broken!” Hume cried out.

Ann could hear the door in the wall beginning to scrape open. She seized Hume’s wrist in one hand and Yam’s cold, faintly whirring hand in the other, and dragged both of them away. “Just run,” she told Hume.

Mordion got off his rock hastily when Ann appeared, breathlessly dragging Hume and the lurching, damaged robot. He found it hard to make sense of what they were telling him. “You went to the castle? Are they still chasing you? I’ve no weapon!”

“Not exactly,” Ann panted. “It was Hexwood Farm in the future. Except the soldiers were like the Bayeux tapestry or something.”

“I told them,” rattled Yam. His voicebox seemed to be badly damaged. “Beyond trees. Soldiers. Me for. Afraid of Sir Artegal. Famous outlaw.”

“Mend him, mend him, Mordion!” Hume pleaded.

“So they’re not following?” Mordion said anxiously.

“I don’t think so,” said Ann, while Yam rattled, “Inside. Me for. Famous knight. Cowards.”

Hume pulled Mordion’s sleeve and shouted his demand. “He’s broken! Please mend him. Please!”

Mordion could see Hume was frightened and distressed. He explained kindly. “I don’t think I can, Hume. Mending a robot requires a whole set of special tools.”

“Ask for them then – like the nails,” said Hume.

“Yes, why not?” Ann said, unexpectedly joining Hume. “Ask the parawhatsit field like you did for the aeroplane food, Mordion. Yam stopped two crossbow bolts and saved Hume’s life.”

“He was brave,” Hume agreed.

“No,” Yam whirred. He sounded like a cheap alarm clock. “Robot nature. Glad. Mended. Uncomfort. Like this.”

Mordion pulled at his beard, dubiously. If he used the field the way Ann and Hume were suggesting, he sensed he would be admitting a number of things about himself which he would rather not admit. It would be like turning down a forbidden road that led somewhere terrible, to face something he never could face. “No,” he said. “Asking for things is cheating.”

“Then cheat,” said Ann. “If those soldiers go back for reinforcements and come after us, you’re going to need Yam’s help. Or start being an enchanter again, if you won’t cheat.”

“I’m not an enchanter!” Mordion said.

“Oh blast you and your beastly field!” Ann said. “You’re just giving in to it and letting it make you feeble!” She found she was crying with anger and frustration, and swung round so that Mordion should not see. “Come on, Hume. We’ll see if my dad can mend Yam. Yam, do you think you can get across that river down there?”

“You know Hume shouldn’t go out of the wood,” Mordion said. “Please, Ann—”

“I’m – disappointed in you!” Ann choked. Bitterly disappointed, she thought. Mordion seemed to be denying everything she knew he was.

There was a helpless silence. The river rushed below. Yam stood swaying and clanking. There were tears running down Hume’s face as well as Ann’s. Mordion looked at them, hurt by their misery and even more hurt by Ann’s contempt. It was worse because he knew, without being able to explain to himself why, that he had earned Ann’s scorn. He did not think he could decide what to do. He did not think he had decided anything, until a large roll of metalcloth clanked to the ground at his feet.

“Did you ask for this?” Mordion said to Hume.

Hume shook his head, sending tears splashing. Ann gave a sort of chuckle. “I knew you’d do it!” she said.

Mordion sighed, and knelt down to unwrap the cloth. He spread it across the earth under the pine tree to find every kind of robotics tool in there, tucked into pockets in rows: tiny bright pincers and power drivers, miniature powered spanners, magnifying goggles, spare cells, wire bores, a circuit tester, a level, adhesives, lengths of silver tegument, cutters …

Yam’s rosy eyes turned eagerly to the unrolled spread. To Mordion’s fascination, a sort of creasing bent the blank modelling of Yam’s mouth. The thing smiles! he thought. What a weird antique model! “Old Yamaha,” Yam warbled. “Adapted. Remodelled. Trust. Correct tools?”

“I’ve seldom seen a more complete kit,” Mordion assured him.

“You told me you were old Yamaha before,” Hume said.

“Not,” Yam rattled. “Gone back. Time you first found me. Think everything. Told for first time. Hush. Mordion work.”

Hume obediently sat himself on a smooth brown rock, with Ann on the ground beside him. They watched Mordion roll up the sleeves of his camel-coloured robe and unscrew a large panel in Yam’s back, where he dived in with some of the longer tools and did something to stop Yam lurching almost at once. Then he whipped round to the front of Yam and undid the voicebox at the top of Yam’s neck. “Say something,” Mordion said, after a moment.

“THAT IS MUCH—” Yam’s normal flat voice boomed. Mordion hurriedly twiddled the power-driver. “Better than,” Yam said, and went on in a whisper, “it was before,” and was twiddled back to proper strength to add, “I am glad it was not broken.”

“Me too,” said Mordion. “Now you can set me right if I get something wrong. You’re much older than anything I’m used to.”

He went back to the hole in Yam’s rear. Yam turned and bent his head, far further than a human could, to watch what was going on. “Those fuel cells have slipped,” he told Mordion.

“Yes, the clips are worn,” Mordion agreed. “How’s that? And if I take a turn on the neck pisistor, does it feel worse, or better?”

“Better,” said Yam. “No, stop. That red wire goes to the torsor head. I think the lower sump is wrong.”

“Punctured,” said Mordion. He bent down to the roll of tools. “More fluid. Where are the small patches? Ah, here. Do you know of any more leaks, while I’m at it?”

“Lower left leg,” said Yam.

Ann was fascinated. Mordion working on Yam was a different person, neither the mad-seeming enchanter who had created Hume, nor the harassed monk trying to build a house and watch Hume at the same time. He was cool and neutral and efficient, a cross between a doctor and a motor mechanic with, perhaps, a touch of dentist and sculptor thrown in. In a queer way, she thought, Mordion seemed far more at ease with Yam than he was with her or Hume.

Hume sat seriously with a hand on each knee, leaning forward to watch each new thing Mordion did. He could not believe Mordion was not hurting Yam. He kept whispering, “It’s all right, Yam. All right.”

Mordion turned round to pick up the magnifying goggles before starting on the tiny parts of Yam’s left leg, and noticed the way Hume was feeling. He wondered what to do about it. He could tell Hume Yam did not feel a thing; Hume would not believe him; and that would make Hume just as worried as before, but ashamed of his worry. Better get Yam himself to show Hume he was fine. Get Yam to talk about something else besides his own antique works.

“Yam,” Mordion said, unscrewing the leg tegument, “from what you said to Hume earlier, I thought you implied you’d been inside this paratypical field for some time. Does it affect you too?”

“Not as much as it affects human’s,” said Yam, “but I am certainly not immune.”

“Surprising,” said Mordion. “I thought a machine would be immune.”

“That is because of the nature of the field,” Yam explained.

“Oh?” said Mordion, examining the hundreds of tiny silver leg mechanisms.

“The field is induced by a machine,” said Yam. “The machine is a device known as a Bannus. It has been dormant but not inoperative for many years. I believe it is like me: it can never be fully turned off. Something has happened recently to set it working at full power and, unlike me, the Bannus can, when fully functional, draw power from any source available. There is much power available in this world at this time.”

“That explains the strength of the field,” Mordion murmured.

“But what is a Bannus?” asked Ann.

“I can only tell you what I deduce from my own experience,” Yam said, turning himself round to face Ann, with Mordion patiently following him round. “The Bannus would appear to take any situation and persons given it, introduce them into a field of theta-space, and then enact, with almost total realism, a series of scenes based on these people and this situation. It does this over and over again, portraying what would happen if the people in the situation decided one way, and then another. I deduce it was designed to help people make decisions.”

“Then it plays tricks with time,” Ann said.

“Not exactly,” said Yam. “But I do not think it cares what order the scenes are shown in.”

“You said that before too,” Hume said. He was interested. He had almost forgotten his worry about Yam. “And I didn’t understand then either.”

“I have said it many times,” said Yam. “The Bannus cannot tamper with my memory. I know that we four have discussed the Bannus, here and in other places, twenty times now. It may well continue to make us do so until it arrives at the best possible conclusion.”

“I don’t believe it!” said Ann. But the trouble was, she did.

Mordion rolled away from Yam’s leg and pushed up his goggles. Like Ann, in spite of not wanting to believe Yam, he had a strong sense of having done this before. The feel of the tiny tool in his hand, the piercing scent of the pine tree overhead and the harsh whisper of its needles overlaying the sound of the river below, were uncomfortably and hauntingly familiar. “What conclusion do you think the machine is trying to make us arrive at?”

“I have no idea,” said Yam. “It could be that the people deciding are not us. We are possibly only actors in someone else’s scenes.”

“Not me,” said Ann. “I’m important. I’m me.”

“I’m very important,” Hume announced.

“Besides,” Ann went on, giving Hume a pat to show she knew he was important too, “I object to being pushed around by this machine. If you’re right, it’s made me do twenty things I don’t want to do.”

“Not really,” said Yam. “Nothing can make either a person or a machine do things which it is not in their natures to do.”

Mordion had gone back to work on Yam’s leg. He knew he was not in the least important It was a weight off his mind, somehow, that Yam thought they were only actors in someone else’s scene. But when Yam said this about one not being made to act against one’s nature, he found he was quivering so with guilt and uneasiness that he had to stop work again for fear of doing Yam damage.

Ann was thinking about this too. She said, “But machines can be adapted. You’ve been adapted, Yam. And people have all sorts of queer bits in their natures that the Bannus could work on.”

That was why he felt so guilty, Mordion realised with relief. He went back to making painstaking, microscopic adjustments on Yam’s leg. This machine, this Bannus, had taken advantage of some very queer and unsavoury corner of his nature when it caused him to create Hume. And the reason for his guilt was that, when the Bannus decided the correct conclusion had been reached, it would surely shut down its field. Hume would cease to exist then. Just like that What a thing to have done! Mordion went on working, but he was cold and appalled.

Meanwhile, Ann was looking at her watch and saying firmly that she had to go now. She had had enough of this Bannus. As she got up and started down the steep rocks, Mordion left Yam with a driver sticking out of his leg and hastened after her. “Ann!”

“Yes?” Ann stopped and looked up at him. She was still not feeling very friendly towards Mordion – particularly now that it seemed she had been shoved into scene after scene with him.

“Keep coming here,” Mordion said. “Of your own free will, if possible. You do me good as well as Hume. You keep pointing out the truth.”

“Yam can do that now,” Ann said coldly.

“Not really.” Mordion tried to explain, before she climbed down by the river where she could not hear him. “Yam knows facts. You have insights.”

“I do?” Ann was gratified, enough to pause on one foot halfway down to the river.

Mordion could not help smiling. “Yes, mostly when you’re angry.”

Ann did wish Mordion had not smiled. It was that smile that had entranced her – she was sure of it – into coming back this afternoon. She had never met a smile like it.

“He thinks I’m funny” she snorted to herself as she made her way home. “He thinks I eat out of his hand when he smiles. It’s humiliating!”

She arrived home in a pale, shaken sort of state because of it. Or maybe it was being chased by men in armour – at least they hadn’t followed them down to the river. Or the Bannus hadn’t let them follow. Or maybe it’s everything! she thought.

Dad looked up at her from where he was relaxing in front of the news. “You’ve been overdoing it, my girl, haven’t you? You look all in.”

“I’m not all in – I’m angry!” Ann retorted. Then, realising that she would never get a plain-minded person like Dad to believe in the Bannus, or theta-space, let alone a boy created out of blood, she was forced to add, “Angry at being tired, I mean.”

“This is it, isn’t it?” said Dad. “You get out of bed just this morning, and off you go – vanish for the whole day – without a thought! You’ll be back in bed with that virus again tomorrow. Are you going to be well enough to go to school at all this term? Or not?”

“Monday,” said Mum. “We want you well and back in school on Monday.”

“There’s only two more days of school left,” Martin put in from the corner where he was colouring a map labelled ‘Caves of the Future’. “It’s not worth going back for two days.” Ann shot him a grateful look.

“Yes it is worth it,” said Mum. “I just wish I’d paid more attention when I was at school.”

“Oh, don’t bore on about that!” Martin muttered.

“What did you say?” Mum asked him. But Dad cut across her, saying, “Well if it is only the two days, there’s no point making her go, is there? She might as well stay at home and get thoroughly well again.”

Ann let them argue about it. Mum seemed to be winning, but Ann did not mind much. Two days wouldn’t kill anyone. And that would be two days in which the Bannus couldn’t use her as an extra in somebody else’s decisions. It was good – no, more, a real relief to be back at home with a normal decision being argued about in the normal way. Ann sat down on the sofa with a great, relaxing sigh.

Martin looked across at her. “There’s Alien on the late film tonight,” he said, underneath the argument.

“Oh good!” Ann stretched both arms over her head and decided, there and then, that she would not go near Banners Wood again.

Ann kept to her decision next morning. Yam’s looking after Hume now, she told herself. He was obviously the non-real person she had asked the field to provide for Hume, when Mordion could not seem to be bothered. But the Bannus had done a lot of fancy hocus-pocus to make Ann believe it was the year two thousand and something, and then more fancy work with the men in armour. It seemed to enjoy making people frightened and uncomfortable.

“I have had enough of that machine.” Ann told her bedroom mirror. The fact that she could see the grey car in the mirror over her left shoulder, still parked in the bay, only underlined her decision.

Anyway, it was Saturday and she and Martin both had particular duties on a Saturday. Martin had to go with Dad in the van, first to the suppliers and then to deliver fruit and vegetables to the motel. Ann had to do the shopping. Feeling very virtuous and decided, Ann dug the old brown shopping bag out of the kitchen cupboard and went dutifully into the shop to collect money and a shopping list from Mum. Mum gave her the usual string of instructions, interrupted by customers coming in. It always took a long time. While Ann was standing by the counter waiting for Mum’s next sentence, Martin shot through on his way to meet Mrs Price’s Jim.

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