SANGREAL TRILOGY

I
THE GREENSTONE
GRAIL

Amanda Hemingway

Contents

Cover

Title Page

The Grail

Prologue: The Chapel

Chapter One: The Fugitives

Chapter Two: Dreams and Whispers

Chapter Three: The Luck of the Thorns

Chapter Four: The Pursuers

Chapter Five: The Man on the Beach

Chapter Six: Iron and Water

Chapter Seven: An Inspector Calls

Chapter Eight: Sing a Song of Sixpence

Chapter Nine: Sturm und Drang

Chapter Ten: On Robbery and Murder

Chapter Eleven: The Grail Quest

Chapter Twelve: Bluebeard’s Chamber

Epilogue: Afterthoughts

About the Author

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Grail

This is the cup the devil made to hold the lifeblood of a god, the cup from which the phantoms sprang that followed where his story trod.

They wrought it in the Underworld – an older world, a younger day – before the God of Gods was born and angels stole the book away.

They filled it with eternal life, undying death, unsleeping dreams; its draught unsealed the shadow-gate between the World that Is, and Seems.

This is the cup to loose the soul, the blood that sets the legends free, and we who dare to drink must taste, each in ourselves, eternity.

PROLOGUE The Chapel

There were three things moving through the wood that evening: the boy, the dog, and the sun.

The slope faced north-west and as the cloud-shadow retreated the sun’s rays advanced through the trees on a collision course with the two companions, who were descending on a more or less diagonal route towards the light. The boy was dark, too dark for the Anglo-Saxon races, his skin a golden olive, his hair so black that there were glints of blue and green in it, and green and blue flecked the blackness of his eyes. His face was bony for his twelve years, a strange, solemn, mature face for someone so young. The dog was a shaggy mongrel, long-legged and wayward of tail, gambolling beside his friend with one ear pricked and the other lopped, his brown eyes very intelligent under whiskery eyebrows. He was known as Hoover from his habit of mopping up crumbs, though it was not really his name. The boy was called Nathan, and that was his name, at least for the moment. He had spent much of his short life exploring the woods, and around Thornyhill Manor he knew every tree, but here in this folded valley was the Darkwood where no paths ran, and he could never remember his way from one visit to the next. He sometimes fancied the trees shifted, rustling their roots in the leaf-mould, and even the streamlet which gurgled along the valley bottom would play curious tricks, switching its course from time to time as such little streams do, but without the excuse of sudden rain. It was very quiet there: few birds lived in the Darkwood. All this land had once been the property of the Thorn family (spelt Thawn in some of his uncle’s ancient books), and they had built a chapel down in the coomb, in the long ago days of chivalry and legend before history tidied things up. It had been struck by lightning or otherwise destroyed after a renegade Thorn sold his soul to the devil, or so it was rumoured, but the ruin was still supposed to exist, in some secret hollow beneath the leaves, and Nathan had often looked for it with his friends, though without success. It said in one of the books that an ancient cup or chalice was kept there, some sort of holy relic, but his best friend Hazel said he would never find it, because it could only be found by the pure in heart. (The other boys said he couldn’t have a girl for a best friend, it wasn’t done, but Nathan didn’t understand why, and did what he pleased.)

He wasn’t really looking for the chapel that evening, just walking with his uncle’s dog, the foot-companion he preferred, sniffing along the borders of some undiscovered adventure. There was a dimness among the trees, more shadow than mist, and as they went deeper into the valley the branches grew gnarly and twined together into nets, or reached out to snag fur and clothes. Nathan had to pick his way, but he rarely stumbled and never fell, and the dog, for all his casual gait, was swift and sure-pawed. Concentrating on the ground, they did not see the cloud-edge passing until it slid over them, and the sun struck, slanting through the leafless boughs, filling their vision with a golden haze. For several moments Nathan strode on, half-dazzled, uncertain where he was going. And then the woodland floor gave beneath him, and he was falling in a shower of earth-crumbs and twig-crumbs, bark-scratchings and leaf-crackle, falling down into the dark.

He fell perhaps ten feet, landing on more tree-debris which softened the impact. He seemed to be in a hollow space, like a cave, but the quick changes from dusk to dazzle, from dazzle to semi-dark, proved too much for his brain and his sight took a while to adjust. He glanced upwards, and saw a ragged hole filled with sunlit wood, and a dog-shaped head peering down. He tried to say: I’m all right, but the fall had winded him and his voice emerged as a croak. His arms and legs felt bruised but not broken; his jolted insides gradually settled back into place and a brief queasiness passed. There was a scrabbling noise from above, followed by a slither as Hoover came down to join him. Nathan’s eyes had adjusted by now and he could see they were in a rectangular chamber some twenty feet long, too regular in outline for a cave. Above them the ceiling consisted of a tangle of roots sustaining loose earth, but beyond he made out stubby pillars curving upwards, into arches, and a glimpse of man-made walls on either side, with pointed window-holes choked with leaf-compost and snarled tubers.

Nathan reached in his pocket for the small torch which had been part of his Christmas stocking. The beam was weak and the gloom was not deep enough to enhance it, but it cast an oblong of vague pallor which travelled over the squat columns and the chinks of wall. The stone looked dry and crumbly, like stale bread. He stood up, rather stiffly, and followed the torch-beam into the dimness, Hoover at his side. The soil underfoot thinned, revealing flagstones, some cracked, some thrust upwards by burrowing growths. The beam picked out fragments of carved lettering on the floor and a strange little face peeping out from an architrave, its features blunted with erosion, leaving only the bulge of pitted cheeks under wicked eye-slits, and the jut of broken horns. ‘This is it,’ Nathan whispered. There was no need for him to whisper, but in that place it was instinctive. ‘This is the lost chapel of the Thorns. That face doesn’t look very Christian, does it?’

Hoover made a snuffling noise by way of agreement and thumped his tail against the boy’s leg.

At the far end they found three steps up to a kind of dais – ‘This is where the altar was’ – and above it a recess in the wall overhung with a fringe of root-filaments and silted up with earth-dust. ‘Perhaps that was where it stood,’ Nathan said. ‘The holy relic …’ He felt inside, but the recess was empty. As he withdrew his hand, he heard a sound so alien he felt his skin prickle. A low, soft growling, deep in the throat. Hoover never growled. But he was staring at the recess, his lip lifted, backing away step by step. The hairs along his spine bristled visibly. ‘What’s the matter?’ Nathan demanded, but the dog did not even glance in his direction. All his attention was focused on the vacant hollow in the wall.

Nathan didn’t say: ‘It’s all right. There’s nothing there.’ He knew that if Hoover sensed something, then there was something to sense. The dog had been his friend for as long as he could remember, and had never been seen to growl at anyone, human or animal. Canine hostilities were conducted in barks. He had always seemed to be the sort of dog who was good with small children, did not bite the postman and would deal with a burglar by licking his face. But he understood everything people said, Nathan was sure of that, and would follow him into every adventure. And he was old. Older than me, the boy thought, and for the first time he wondered how old, since eleven was a fair age for a dog. He found himself backing away too, keeping close to Hoover. Watching the hollow.

Afterwards he couldn’t recall which came first, the light or the voices. Perhaps they weren’t voices, just sounds, soft, whispery sounds, word-shaped though he couldn’t make out the words, thread-like ghosts of noises long gone. Hoover ceased growling and froze; there was froth round his mouth and all his teeth showed. Nathan had a hand on his neck, and found he was trembling. He had switched off the torch and they were both staring at the light, a tiny green mote that had appeared in the back of the recess. But either the cavity was much deeper than he had thought or the light was coming from somewhere else, somewhere dark and very far away. It grew slowly, as if it were drawing nearer, emerging from an abyss of blackness, until they could see it consisted of a nimbus encircling some small object. The whispering increased, becoming a chorus of hissing murmurs. And now Nathan could make out the words, or rather a single word, repeated over and over again: he thought it was sangré, but the voices were so blurred he could not be certain. His heart was beating very hard, bumping against his ribs. His bruises were forgotten.

The green halo filled the hollow and spilled over. The object within it seemed to be floating not resting in the cavity, a cup or goblet with a short stem and a bowl as wide as it was deep. It looked as if it was made of some greenish stone, polished to a metallic lustre, or even opaque glass. There were designs engraved on it that appeared significant, though what they might signify he could not guess, and here and there the gleam of furtive gemstones, but all green. He found he was drawing closer, or being drawn; his body seemed to have no will in the matter any more. Now he could see inside the cup. He had expected it to be empty, but it was full almost to the brim. In that light the liquid looked black, but it wasn’t. It was red.

Behind him, the dog gave a strangled whine of protest. He reached out, and the cup began to drift towards him, and he knew with a knowledge beyond understanding that he must drink. (Only the pure in heart …) It was full of blood, and he must drink … The voices sounded like a host of snakes murmuring with forked tongues. Sangré, sangré, sangreal …

With a supreme effort the dog broke free of the spell and sprang forward, seizing a mouthful of Nathan’s jacket. The boy stumbled backwards. The snake-voices fragmented into a crackle like radio interference and were gone, vanishing on a snarl. The green light was abruptly extinguished. ‘Where is it?’ Nathan cried, and as Hoover released him he flung himself down on hands and knees, groping on the floor for the cup. Then he stopped, and confusion slid like a cloud from his mind. He turned back to the dog, who was regarding him with vivid concern, tail motionless. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

It was easier said than done. Earth-falls and woodland detritus had built up a slope close to the hole where Nathan had tumbled through, but it was steep and sliding soil made purchase difficult. It took at least half an hour before he and Hoover managed to climb back up, enlarge the gap, and scramble back into the open air. Nathan had no idea how long they had been down there but the last of the sunset had faded and the night-filled wood lived up to its name. He switched on the torch but in the dark it was impossible to be sure of his route and he let the dog guide him, trusting to Hoover’s instincts. Only when he had gone several yards did he realize that he had not marked the location in any way. He had found it walking blindly with the sun in his eyes and had emerged into darkness; he hadn’t even registered the appearance of the trees in the vicinity. He tried to turn back but Hoover wouldn’t accompany him, insisting with short staccato barks that they should go on. I know the direction we came, Nathan reflected, and there’s a big hole in the ground now. I can’t miss that. ‘Okay,’ he told the dog. ‘Let’s go home.’ They went on up the slope.

At the edge of the Darkwood where the ground levelled out and the trees changed, becoming taller and friendlier, making way for paths and glades, Hoover suddenly stopped. His fur ruffled though there was no wind. Something like a shadow passed over his eyes and fled, leaving them bright and unworried. When he set off again, it was with his customary lolloping stride, without the air of prudence and purpose that he had shown since they left the chapel. Nathan could not know it, but the whole incident had been wiped from Hoover’s mind.

The boy remembered it – he remembered every detail – but when he tried to speak of it, to Hazel, or his mother, or Barty, the man he always called uncle, his tongue would not form the words, and the chapel and its contents stayed locked in his head, a guilty secret that he did not want to keep. He would dream of it sometimes, and wake to hear the snake-whispers calling to him from the corners of the room for seconds after: Sangré sangreal … Once in his dream he lifted the cup and drank, and his mouth was full of blood, and the sweat that poured off him was red, and when he opened his eyes it was a relief to find himself wet with nothing but perspiration.

He looked for the place again, though always with a friend, not saying what he was searching for, half afraid of finding it. But even the hole seemed to have gone, and the sun stayed out of his eyes, and the chapel had vanished into the secrecy of the wood.

ONE The Fugitives

At the dark end of a winter’s afternoon early in 1991 a young woman climbed down from a lorry on the road through Thornyhill woods.

‘Are you sure?’ said the driver. ‘I can take you on to Eade.’

‘I’m sure.’ He had placed a hand on her knee. That was enough. She had insisted on being set down.

‘It’s a lonely stretch of road,’ he said, hefting her bags out of the cab, too slowly for her taste. She reached up, tugging her suitcase from his grasp and stumbling under the sudden weight. The baby suspended in a sling about her neck woke at the jolt but didn’t cry, only staring about him with wide-open eyes. They were very dark, the iris so large they seemed to have almost no whites, like the eyes of some small nocturnal animal. But the lorry-driver wasn’t watching the child. He thought the woman looked very young to be a mother, little more than a girl, her round face unmade-up and somehow vulnerable, framed in a soft blur of hair, her colouring far paler than her baby. He wanted her to stay in his cab for all sorts of reasons, some kindly, some less so. ‘I thought you were going on to Crawley.’

‘I know where I’m going.’ Her determination belied her softness. She didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. She slammed the door, hooking the strap of her holdall over her shoulder and dragging the suitcase behind on inadequate wheels. After a few minutes, the lorry drove off.

They were alone now. It was a relief the lorry had gone, but one fear was swiftly replaced by others. She had been going to Crawley – she had a contact there, a child-minder, the friend of a friend, and the possibility of a job – but instead here she was, miles from anywhere, with little hope of another lift even if she had the courage to accept one. The baby was quiet – he cried so rarely it worried her – but she knew he would soon be hungry, and it was growing darker, and the road was lonely indeed. The suitcase trundled awkwardly at her heels, swaying from side to side, regularly banging against her leg, and the woods seemed to draw closer on either hand, squeezing the road into a narrow slot between thickets of shadow. She was a country girl with no real fear of the night, but she thought she heard a whisper on the windless air, the crack of a twig somewhere nearby, strange stirrings and rustlings in the leaf-mould. Since the birth of her child she had been subject to nervous imaginings which she had not dared to confide in anyone, dreading to be called paranoiac. There were footsteps pattering on empty streets, doors that shifted without a draught, soft murmurings just beyond the reach of hearing. And now the woods seemed to wake at her presence, so she thought the branches groped, and shreds of darkness slithered from tree to tree. They were there, always following, getting closer, never quite catching up …

When she saw the lights, she thought they too must be an illusion, and she was becoming genuinely unbalanced. Twin gleams of yellow, twinkling through the trees, the yellow of firelight, candlelight, electric light. As she drew nearer she feared they would vanish, but they grew clearer, until she could make out the source. Windows, windows in a house, and the yellow glow between half-drawn curtains. The house appeared to be set in a clearing among the trees: she could see gables pointing against the sky, and the dim suggestion of half-timbering criss-crossing the façade. It looked a friendly house, even in the dark; but she wasn’t sure. ‘What do you think?’ she whispered to the baby. ‘Shall we ask for help? Maybe they’ll offer us tea …’ Maybe it was a witch’s cottage, made of gingerbread, and the door would be opened by a hook-nosed crone who would show them the shortest way to her oven.

Footsteps. Footsteps on the empty road. She looked round, but could see nothing. Yet for a moment they were quiet and clear, soft-shod feet, or padded paws. And in the gloom there was a deeper dark, like a ripple running through the woods, and the sound of breathing, very close by, as if the wind itself had a throat, and was panting on her neck … Her suitcase bounced and lurched as she tugged it up the path to the door. There was a knocker, and an old-fashioned bell-pull that dangled. She tried both.

The door opened, and there was no hook-nosed crone but a large, comfortable-looking man with a looming stomach, shoulders to match, and very graceful hands. His hair was pale, his complexion a faded pink. His face wore an expression of vague benevolence, or maybe the benevolence was in the arrangement of his features, since his manner was initially hesitant, almost guarded. His eyes were periwinkle-blue between fat eyelids.

‘We’re lost,’ the young woman began, uneasily, ‘and I wondered …’

He was looking beyond her, into the night, where the footsteps were, and the breathing of the wind. For a fleeting instant she fancied he too heard or saw, though what he saw she didn’t know; she didn’t look round. Then his gaze came back to her, and he smiled. ‘Perhaps you’d like to come in. It’s getting late, and I was just making tea. If you need to feed the little one …’

‘Thank you so much!’

She stepped into the hallway, and the closing of the door shut out the dark and its phantoms. Long afterwards, she knew she had trusted him without thinking, on instinct. Maybe it was because he was fat, and benevolent-looking, and she was desperate and alone, or because the blue twinkle of his eyes had worked a charm on her, but in the end she realized it was because he had looked behind her, and seen something, seen them. He showed her into a room with oak beams, shabby capacious chairs, firelight. A large dog was sprawled on the hearthrug, a dog with shaggy fur and waggy tail, plainly a mongrel. It got up as they came in, stretching its forelegs, rump in the air, tail waving. ‘Why don’t you leave the child by the fire?’ the man said. ‘Hoover will look after him. I call him Hoover for obvious reasons: he cleans up the crumbs. My name is Bartlemy Goodman.’

‘Annie Ward.’ She lifted the baby out of the sling and set him down on the hearthrug, which was as shaggy as the dog and so similar they might have been related. ‘This is Nathan.’

Baby and dog surveyed each other, wet black nose almost touching small brown one. Then suddenly Nathan laughed – something as rare as his tears – and she imagined they had formed a bond which transcended any differences of species or speech. ‘I’d like to heat his milk,’ she said. ‘Would – would you mind watching him for me?’

‘Hoover will take care of it. He’s like Nana in Peter Pan. The kitchen’s this way.’

Looking back, doubtfully, she saw the dog gently nudging the child away from the fire with his muzzle. ‘He must be awfully well-trained,’ she said.

‘He’s very intelligent,’ said her host. Afterwards, she thought it wasn’t really an affirmation.

The kitchen was heavily beamed and stone-flagged as she might have expected, with an old-fashioned cooking range on which something that resembled a small cauldron was simmering. A drift of steam came from under the lid, bringing with it a rich, meaty, gamey, spicy smell that made her mouth water. She had eaten nothing but a sandwich at lunchtime, and it occurred to her that she was very hungry; but the baby came first. Bartlemy provided a saucepan and she heated milk while he made tea and set out a tray with earthenware mugs, pot and jug, fruit cake. She longed to ask what was in the cauldron, but was afraid of sounding too greedy, or too desperate. The room was of irregular shape and there were many small shelves on every angle of wall, bearing hand-labelled bottles and jars containing pickled fruits, chutney, strange-looking vegetables in oil. Herbs grew in pots and dried in bunches. There was a bowl of onions, white and purple, and another of apples and Clementines. No washing up stocked the sink and the draining board was very clean.

Back in the living room, she gave Nathan his bottle and some bread-and-butter with no crusts that her host had prepared. ‘You’re being very kind,’ she said. ‘You must think …’

‘I think only that it’s dark outside, and cold, and you seem to be in difficulty. You can tell me more when you’re ready, if you wish to.’

She drank the tea, bergamot-scented, probably Earl Grey, and ate a large slice of the cake. Perhaps because she was famished, it seemed to her the nicest cake she had ever tasted.

‘Do you feel you can tell me now where you’re going?’ Bartlemy asked.

‘I was heading for Crawley,’ she said. ‘ There are jobs there – at least I hope so – and a friend of mine knows a good child-minder. Before, we … we were staying with one of my cousins, but things got awkward – I felt I was imposing – and she didn’t really want the baby. So … I thought it was time to move on. Be independent.’ She didn’t mention the pursuing shadows, or the whispers in the night. In this warm, safe haven they seemed almost unreal.

If it was safe. If it was a haven. She trusted him, but that very trust disturbed her, and she feared her own weakness, her cowardice – she feared to go back into the dark.

‘What about your parents?’

‘They’re in the West Country. I don’t see them much since my – my husband died.’

‘I’m sorry.’

He asked her nothing more, nor did she volunteer any further information. They watched the child on the hearthrug, romping with the dog, pulling his floppy ears. ‘Do you want to continue your journey tonight?’ Bartlemy said. ‘You can stay here if you wish: I have plenty of space. There’s a bolt on the bedroom door, if that would make you feel more comfortable.’

She opened her mouth to say that she couldn’t, she couldn’t possibly, but all that came out was: ‘Thank you.’ And: ‘I’m not worried.’ And she knew that, for a little while at least, she wasn’t.

For supper he filled a mug from the cauldron – it was some kind of broth, with so many mingled flavours she couldn’t identify them – and it flooded her whole body with warmth and ease. She slept side by side with her son, on a mattress that was both firm and soft, sliding the bolt because she knew it was a sensible precaution, though she didn’t really feel it was necessary. And somehow they stayed the next night, and the next, and she forgot to bolt the door, and Hoover woke them in the morning, plumping his forepaws on the quilt so he could lick Nathan’s face.

The Goodmans had lived at Thornyhill for as long as anyone could remember. In the village of Eade, about two and a half miles down the road, the most venerable residents claimed they could recall Bartlemy’s grandfather, or even his great-grandfather, but people were vague as to which generation was which: they were all called Bartlemy, or some similar name, and they all looked alike, fat and placid and kindly. None of them ever seemed to be very young, or to grow very old. It was assumed that womenfolk and childhood were details that happened somewhere else, and they gravitated to Thornyhill in middle age. They had money from some unspecified source, and they appeared to live retired, reclusive but not unfriendly, mixing little in local affairs. They were regarded as mildly and acceptably eccentric, part of the scenery, arousing no curiosity, subject to no prying questions. The dog, too, was said to be one of a succession, all mongrels, strays perhaps, rescued from dog homes. If they had been asked, the villagers might have said that one had been part retriever, another part wolfhound, a third had shown traits of Alsatian or Old English sheepdog; but no one would have been sure. Hoover had a retriever’s brown soulful eyes, the long legs of a hound, a coat shag-headed, maned, tufted like anything from an Afghan to a husky. He chased cats from time to time to prove his doghood and slobbered a good deal over friend and stranger alike. It was inferred that the present generation of both dog and master had been at Thornyhill for some twenty years, doing little, staid and respectable as hobbits in a hobbit-hole, aloof from the workaday world. If twenty years was a long time for a dog to live, nobody remarked on it.

Once, Thornyhill had been the property of the Thorns, a family that was ancient rather than aristocratic, tracing their line back long before the Normans. Local historians said there had been a house on the hillside where now the Darkwood grew, a house that dated from Saxon times with a sunken chapel where Josevius Grimling Thorn, called Grimthorn, had traded with the Devil, though what he had traded, or why, remained a mystery. But the tales about him were confused and confusing, stating he had lived nearly two thousand years ago yet died around 650 AD, and the house had been razed, and the chapel was lost, and Josevius faded into legend, and the Darkwood had grown over all. In the Tudor age later Thorns had built the surviving house, where the woodland was lighter and greener, and bluebells carpeted the ground in spring, and there were woodpeckers and warblers, and deer in the thickets, and squirrels in the treetops. The house was criss-crossed with half-timbering, showing glimpses of plaster and brickwork in between, and cloaked in creepers which turned fire-red in autumn, and tall chimneys jutted higgledy-piggledy from the pointed roofs. There, the family had lived for centuries, keeping their secrets, until the eldest son died in the First World War, and his brother in the ’flu epidemic that followed, and presumably it was then the Goodmans came, though none could be found to remember clearly. There were still offshoots of the family in and around the village: the Carlows were known to be descended, on the wrong side of the blanket, from a black sheep of the Jacobean era, and the widowed Mrs Vanstone, now in her late fifties, was invariably called Rowena Thorn in acknowledgement of her antecedents. She would visit Bartlemy from time to time and talk about the past, and she was always impressed by how much he knew, in his unassuming way, about her more distant ancestors. It occurred to her, once or twice, that his residence there seemed to be a kind of guardianship, though what he was guarding, or for whom, she could not imagine, and she put it down to fancy.

Occasionally – very occasionally – Bartlemy had visitors who were not from the village or its environs, visitors who came late at night, and stayed indoors, away from the gaze of locals, and left after one day or many in the pre-dawn hour when no one would see them go. Sometimes an early riser or a reveller returning late from the pub at Chizzledown would catch sight of a hooded stranger striding along the road through the woods, or glimpse an unfamiliar figure on the twisty path to Bartlemy’s door, but gossip took no interest, since there was neither sex nor scandal afoot, and such sightings were too rare to be thought significant. There were beginning to be Londoners in the area now, high-earning, high-spending West End ex-pats, generally with media connections, who bought into the country lifestyle as pictured in the glossy magazines, and installed Agas in their kitchens, and filled their fridges with Chardonnay, and invited their city friends down for summer parties in their carefully sculpted gardens. Some of them made inquiries about the Goodmans, and Thornyhill, but their questions went unanswered, and the house was not for sale. Nothing seemed to happen there for a long, long time, until Annie Ward and her baby came to the door on a dark afternoon in 1991, and found sanctuary.

Bartlemy had a car of sorts, a blunt-nosed Jowett Javelin from the Fifties. It was dirty and tired-looking but it always managed to go, and in it he drove Annie to Crawley, and waited while she visited the child-minder and the job centre, and came away disheartened. ‘What do you do?’ he had asked her.

‘I’m a computer programmer,’ she told him; but it appeared there were plenty of computer programmers, and she was just one in a queue.

‘I’m planning to open a second-hand bookshop in the village,’ he said later that evening. ‘I want someone to manage it for me. I’ve got my eye on a suitable property: there’s a little flat upstairs. I’ll need a manager who’s good with computers to catalogue stocks and keep the accounts; I’m afraid technology’s a little beyond me.’

What about them? she thought. They’re always out there … But when she looked through the window the woods were still, and door and curtain did not stir, and no mutterings came to trouble her sleep.

‘I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘You’ve done so much already.’

‘Exactly. So this is something you can do for me.’

She knew it wasn’t true, but he seemed so matter-of-fact, his generosity unobtrusive, almost invisible, and the property materialized somehow, a tiny slot of a building between an antique shop and a delicatessen for the Londoners, with rooms that went back and back, and queer little stairs going nowhere, and bedrooms the size of cupboards and cupboards the size of bedrooms, all in the best tradition of second-hand bookshops. She moved in, and there was no rent, and her slender salary stretched to cover everything. The villagers assumed she was a relative of Bartlemy’s, a niece or distant cousin, and eventually she almost came to believe it herself, half forgetting, under the spell of his protection, that she had ever been a homeless wanderer, who knocked on his door purely by chance, if chance it was. Nathan would grow up to call him uncle, and Annie walked through the woods on summer nights, and they were gone, vanished like an evil dream in the moment of awakening, until she barely remembered that they had ever been.

But for all her trust, it was many months before she confided fully in Bartlemy. Winter came round again, and on fire-lit evenings at Thornyhill she watched Nathan grow.

‘Is he like his father?’ Bartlemy asked once.

‘No,’ she said. A silence fell, laden with waiting. ‘He’s like himself. Daniel …’

‘Your husband?’

‘He wasn’t my husband. We just – lived together. I took his name when he died for Nathan’s sake, I suppose. I wanted my son to have something of his father to hold on to, something to remember him by. Or maybe it was because my family didn’t … they weren’t happy that Daniel and I didn’t marry, and when Nathan came, they … didn’t want him.’

‘Why not?’ Bartlemy inquired. ‘He’s a beautiful, intelligent child. Exceptionally so, I would say.’

‘Isn’t he?’ For a minute her face lit; then recollection clouded it over again. ‘The trouble was …’ Suddenly, she looked directly at him, and there was a kind of pleading in her eyes. ‘Daniel was white. Nathan’s far too dark – he looks half Indian or something. But I’d never had an Indian lover. There’d been no one but Daniel since we met. We were together eight years, and I was faithful to him. I wouldn’t want to play around. After Daniel died, when I found I was pregnant, I was very happy. And then the baby came, and he was beautiful, so beautiful, but – since then, I never seemed to stop running. Till I came here.’ After a few moments, she went on: ‘Please believe me. I can’t explain why Nathan looks the way he does. I can’t explain any of it.’

‘How very interesting,’ Bartlemy said at last. ‘Don’t fret: I know you wouldn’t make it up. You’re not that type at all. Anyway, why should you? There would be no real point. Can you tell me how Daniel died?’

‘It was a car crash. He’d been working late – he often did – and they said, the police said, he may have fallen asleep at the wheel, but he wouldn’t. I know that. They said at the inquest another vehicle hit him, a van or a truck, and must have just driven away. He only had a little Renault: he was knocked off the road into a tree …’

Her mind was carried back to the pale hospital room, pale as a sepulchre, and the still figure in the bed, with his battered face almost unrecognizable between the bandages, except she would have recognized him however he looked, however bruised and broken. She held his hand, tight, tight, and the tears ran down her cheeks unwiped, and she begged him to live in a running whisper which she knew or dreaded he would not hear. Looking back, she thought she had sat there forever, that a part of her was still sitting there, trapped in a moment of time, with his hand in hers, imploring him in vain: Don’t go, don’t give up, live. Live. And then he had opened his eyes.

They had given him morphine for the pain; the nurses thought he would not wake again. But somehow his body rejected the drug, and he came round, looking at her with love, so much love that she thought her heart would burst, and then the pain came, the price of that instant, that love, because he had shaken off the influence of the morphine. His face was wrung with it, scrunched up in the final agony, and she reached out with all that she had, all that she was, with mind and heart and soul, reached into his pain, into his death, and in that second she would have given life and happiness to save him, to spare him even an atom of suffering. But the pain was smoothed away, and his life with it, and when at last she drew back it was another age, another world.

‘Nathan was born exactly nine months later,’ she told Bartlemy. ‘I always thought …’

‘You thought you became pregnant in the moment of Daniel’s death,’ he said. ‘I understand.’

‘Something happened then, something I can’t remember. I don’t mean there are blanks: it wasn’t like that. It’s as if there’s a scar, a scar in time, or a fold, and inside it there’s the memory, the forgotten thing. Afterwards, I was different. I was … more. I knew I was pregnant, I knew it immediately, though I hadn’t known it before. I couldn’t even grieve properly. I missed Daniel – I’ll always miss him – but the differentness, the moreness, filled me up.’

‘Life out of death,’ said Bartlemy. ‘It makes sense. Yes. There is a Gate we pass when we die –’ she could hear the capital G ‘– a Gate out of this world. What lies beyond it no one knows. Religion invents, philosophers speculate, and the rest of us merely hope. If there are other universes, other states of being, then that is the only way to reach them – the only way we know of. But none may pass the Gate alive, or ever return. So they say. But even the Ultimate Laws may be broken, by the very wicked, or the very rash, or those whose love takes them beyond fear – or by the Powers themselves.’

‘Is this your philosophy?’ she asked him. ‘A Gateway between worlds, and unearthly powers making laws for us to live by?’

‘I’m not so original,’ he responded. ‘Others have done my thinking for me, long ago. I simply follow a well-worn path.’

‘I like the sound of it,’ she said. ‘People say they see a tunnel, but I prefer a gate. A gate opens both ways. Maybe I did pass through, and return … But then, why doesn’t Nathan look like Daniel? Have you a philosophy to answer that?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not at the moment. There could be many explanations. I will give it some thought.’

The years of Nathan’s childhood passed in something close to an idyll. Of course, the trouble with a happy childhood is that you are much too young to appreciate it. Nathan, with the unthinking acceptance of youth, assumed happiness was the lot of most human beings: the unhappy were few and far between, and after a period of suffering they too would be helped to find contentment. He had never known a father so he couldn’t miss him, but his mother’s talk of Daniel gave him a feeling of security, of being watched over by a friendly ghost, though strangely she had no photographs to show him. Otherwise, his Uncle Barty filled whatever space there might have been – filled and overfilled it, his solidity a protective wall, a quiet strength behind his placid manner. And Annie, trying her best always to be firm and fair, determined not to lose her temper under the stresses and irritants of parenthood, found it, much of the time, unexpectedly easy. Money was not plentiful but there was always enough, and the little feuds and fracas of village life could not disturb her comfort. Nathan went to the local school, excelled at his studies, played football in winter and cricket in summer. The other children admired him but were also wary of him, slightly daunted by his effortless intelligence and something about him that set him a little apart, a sort of calmness, an inner certainty. The few who became his particular friends felt themselves somehow special, singled out, though Nathan was friendly to all and never seemed to do any visible singling. His most frequent companions were George Fawn and Hazel Bagot – something which surprised his classmates, since he could have hung out with the most popular boys in the school. George was chubby and shy, regularly picked on by pupils and even some of the teachers, given to stammering when he was nervous, which was often. He was cornered in the playground one day by the school bully, Jason Wicks, when Nathan came to his defence. ‘Leave him alone. He’s never harmed you. Why should you want to hurt him?’

There was a chorus of laughter from Jason’s backing group. ‘’Cos he’s fat, and he s-s-stammers, and his mother’s a –’

‘Don’t talk like that,’ said Nathan, not angrily, but with a kind of set look on his face. ‘I told you, leave him alone.’

‘You’re going to protect him, are you?’ Jason bunched a big fist.

‘I’ll try.’

The fist shot out, knocking him against the wall. George moved to help him and then shrank away, too frightened to aid his champion. When Nathan straightened up, there was blood on his lip.

‘Now fuck off,’ Jason ordered. He had learnt both his manners and his vocabulary from his seniors at home.

‘No.’

This time, Nathan dodged the blow, grabbed the lunging arm, and drove it past him, with both his weight and Jason’s behind it. Knuckles rammed into the wall – Jason screamed as flint cut his flesh to the bone. ‘I’m sorry,’ Nathan said, ‘but in future, let George alone.’ The backing group could have jumped him, but they didn’t. Maybe they had read enough of the right books, or at any rate seen enough of the right movies, to know that this was how a hero behaved. George would have become his willing slave from that moment, if he had wanted one.

As for Hazel, she and Nathan were near neighbours, nursery playmates, squabbling companions, sharers in adventures both imaginary and real. Mrs Bagot worked in the deli, and Hazel was frequently left at the bookshop, in theory under Annie’s eye, the two children chasing each other up steps and stairways in rowdy games, or mysteriously quiet as Nathan showed her wonderful books with yellowing pages and illustrations shielded in tissue paper. Without his encouragement she would have read little: she came from a household where reading was something that happened to other people, her mother preferred the television, her father the pub. She was an only child, given to strange introverted moods when she wouldn’t speak for hours, or would climb a tree and refuse to come down, ‘watching’ she would explain later when asked what she’d been doing, or ‘thinking’. But she would always talk to Nathan. She had occasional outbursts of temper which alarmed other children, but these were rare. To look at she was a little below the average height for her age, sturdily built, with a lot of untidy brown hair which her mother was always trying to restrain in plait or ponytail or twist, but the shorter ends invariably worked loose, and Hazel would pull them over her face to hide behind. Nathan’s male classmates scorned her as a best friend because she was a girl, but it made no difference to him. Both his companions and his mother were learning that nothing anyone said or did made any difference to Nathan, once he had made up his mind.

But before George, even before Hazel, there was Woody. ‘Your imaginary friend,’ Annie called him, and Nathan accepted this, although with a note of doubt, since he thought ‘imaginary’ meant ‘not real’, and Woody was quite real. They would meet in the garden at Thornyhill – a garden that seemed much bigger than its actual size, with trellises overgrown with beanflowers, and herb beds, and rambling shrubs, and curious furtive statues hiding in leaves, and wild corners where wood and garden ran together and an infant Nathan found no boundaries to his playground. Annie learned not to worry about him: Hoover was always around, if he strayed too far. But even Hoover never saw Woody. Woody was very, very shy, an odd little creature with an elongated face, all nose, and slanting eyes that looked sideways from his head, like the eyes of an animal. His body was thin as a twig, his skin brownish and slightly mottled, varying in tone according to his background. Hair bristled on his scalp and straggled down his back. If he wore clothes, they were so close to his skin colour that Nathan never noticed. He explained that he was a woodwose, but if he had a name he couldn’t remember it, so Nathan called him Woody.

‘Have you lived here a long time?’ the child asked him once.

‘Always.’

‘How long is always?’

‘I’m not sure. Not very long I think, but I can’t remember being anywhere else.’

‘Do you have parents?’

‘Parents …?’

‘A mummy and daddy. I have a mummy, but my daddy is dead. And I have Uncle Barty, and Hoover. Who do you have?’

But Woody didn’t seem to have anybody.

‘Then you can have me,’ said Nathan.

They would crawl through gaps in the undergrowth into the woods, where his imaginary friend showed him the secret worlds in the hollows of trees, and under last year’s leaves, and they would watch new shoots growing, and the tiny lives of insects, and the green beginnings of things. Sometimes birds would come, and perch on Woody’s fingers – long, brown, knobbly fingers – or his shoulder, as if he were no more than a sapling sprouting among the roots. When Annie first heard of these explorations she was horrified. ‘He mustn’t go wandering off on his own like this. Anything could happen to him!’

‘He appears to be looked after,’ Bartlemy said. ‘You don’t have to worry. No harm can come to him here.’

And somehow, she believed him.

When Nathan’s friendship with Hazel grew he told her about Woody, but she never met him. And gradually, as he became more preoccupied with school and other activities, he saw less and less of his strange companion, and Woody faded with early childhood, until, without really thinking about it, Nathan came to accept his mother’s definition, that the woodwose had come from his imagination, and had no substance of its own.

When he was eleven Nathan won a scholarship to Ffylde Abbey, a private school run by monks about an hour’s drive from Eade. Annie had dredged up the long-forgotten Catholicism of her youth to enable him to apply: it was one of the best schools in the area, patronized largely by the sons of the rich and privileged, but with high academic standards for those who wanted to attain them and superb sports facilities for everyone else. Nathan went as a weekly boarder: the distance was too great for him to come home every evening. Jason Wicks and his gang jeered at him for being a swot and a snob, but they soon grew tired of it, since Nathan appeared genuinely indifferent to their mockery and never responded to provocation. At the new school he made new friends, and inevitably saw less of some of the village children, but his closeness to Hazel and George was unaffected. They would foregather at weekends in their special meeting place in the bookshop, known as the Den. There was a kind of storage space, like a very tall, thin cupboard, between two stacks of shelving, and they had discovered that if you climbed up inside with the help of a stepladder you would find yourself in a tiny loft area tucked under the slope of the roof, with a skylight through which you could scramble right outside. This was their secret headquarters where they would go to plan games and adventures, or just sit and talk out of the range of grown-up ears. They kept a biscuit tin there with emergency supplies, three mugs for coke or lemonade, and a lantern with coloured glass in the sides for dark winter evenings. Nathan had even made a cardboard screen to put over the skylight at such times, so no passerby would see it illuminated. Annie sneaked up there occasionally and dusted, when she was sure they weren’t around, to prevent them getting too obviously grubby. She didn’t think either Hazel’s or George’s parents would be pleased if an afternoon in Nathan’s company invariably resulted in grey clothing.

Sometimes on clear nights they would extinguish the lantern, and open the skylight to look up at the stars. ‘I wish we had a telescope,’ Nathan said. ‘Then we could see them much bigger and closer.’ He’d been doing some astronomy at Ffylde. ‘Look, there’s the Great Bear.’

‘It never looks like a bear to me,’ Hazel said. ‘More like a saucepan with a bent handle.’

‘Maybe we could see a comet,’ George said hopefully. ‘David –’ his elder brother ‘– showed me one once, through binoculars, but I couldn’t really see anything. I thought it would be very bright, with a tail, like a firework, but there was just a bit of a blur.’

‘Where’s Orion?’ asked Hazel, naming the only other constellation she had heard of.

‘I’ll show you.’ Standing on a box with her, leaning against the edge of the skylight, Nathan pointed upwards. ‘There. That string of stars is his belt.’

‘What about the rest of him?’

‘I’m not sure …’ His pointing finger wavered; in the dark they couldn’t see him frown. ‘That’s funny.’

‘What’s funny?’ said George. There wasn’t room for him on the box, and he was trying to gaze up past the other two, and failing.

‘There’s another star, just below Orion. It wasn’t there before: I’m sure it wasn’t. I was up here last night.’

‘Show me,’ said Hazel. Nathan pointed again. ‘Perhaps you remembered wrong. Or there was some cloud or something.’

‘It wasn’t cloudy.’

‘Perhaps it’s a comet!’ George said excitedly.

‘If there was a comet it would’ve been on the news,’ Nathan said. ‘Besides, it looks like a star.’

‘It’s not very twinkly,’ Hazel explained.

Nathan climbed down, switched on the lantern, and consulted his star map. ‘There’s nothing here,’ he said. ‘There shouldn’t be a star there at all.’

‘It must be a UFO,’ George declared. ‘They can look like stars. Let me see.’ Now the others had come down, he scrambled onto the box. ‘It’ll whoosh across the sky in a minute and disappear.’

But it didn’t.

‘It could be a whole new star,’ Hazel suggested. ‘I’ve heard how they can have huge explosions out in space, and that makes new stars.’

‘A supernova,’ Nathan said knowledgeably. ‘If it is, it’ll be on Patrick Moore.’

But there was nothing about a new star on any programme, and when Nathan looked the following evening it had gone. He didn’t say much to the other two, but on his own he wondered, and would steal up the stepladder late at night to look, just in case. But it was not until the next spring, when he had almost forgotten about it, that he saw the star again.

That winter a new couple moved down from London, causing a minor flutter of interest among less glamorous residents. They were in their thirties: he was a lecturer in history at East Sussex University and a writer of up-market period novels, popular enough to be stocked in most bookshops instead of having to be specially ordered, and she was an actress of the intellectual type who had appeared regularly on stage and television. His name was Michael Addison, hers Rianna Sardou (Rianna reputedly shortened from Marianne), but they were assumed to be married, though she seemed to be away a great deal, on tour with a play or on location shoots for a TV drama or bit-part film role. However, Michael was around most of the time, and the villagers pronounced him pleasant and friendly, and began to call him Mike. He would have a pint in the pub of an evening, and chat to Lily Bagot in the deli, and to Annie in the bookshop. He was rather good-looking, in a tousled, don’t-give-a-damn sort of way, with a one-sided smile which might have been irresistible if he had been inclined so to employ it. He wore country clothes – Barbour jackets, wellies, trainers – and glasses for reading and driving. His wife on the other hand, when actually seen, was something of a disappointment. The rumpled, unmade-up look which suited Michael so well was not what the village expected of an actress, particularly not one with a name like Rianna, and local opinion found her aloof and unapproachable. She had the appropriate cheekbones, but they displayed more angularity than beauty, and her hair, though long and dark, was usually scraped back into a tight coil, with loose ends spraying over the crown of her head. Gossip said she neglected Michael, and local attitudes became tinged with an unexpressed sympathy when he was around.

They had bought an oast house on the edge of the village, with two round towers under pixy-hat roofs, and a long building in between, wood-panelled, antique-furnished, expensively renovated. The River Glyde flowed past it on its meandering way through the water-meadows, and their garden ran down to the bank, with mooring for a couple of boats, though they only appeared to have a dinghy, left behind by a previous owner. The house had been empty for a while before they moved in, and Nathan, George and Hazel had once ‘borrowed’ the dinghy, almost coming to grief in the grip of a current too strong for their oarsmanship. They had had to ram the boat into the bank in order to avoid being swept away – or sinking, since the planking proved far from watertight. Nathan, seeing Michael in the shop one day, felt obliged to mention these hazards, though he would have preferred it if his mother hadn’t been within earshot. ‘You – took – that – boat – out – without – permission?’ Annie had paled from a mixture of anger and terror.

‘It wasn’t stealing!’ Nathan protested. ‘We put it back afterwards – and anyway, it didn’t seem to belong to anybody then.’

‘Boats are dangerous,’ Annie said, dismissing the issue of theft unconsidered. ‘You could’ve drowned. What were you thinking of?’

‘We can all swim. We wouldn’t drown, honestly.’

‘There are weeds under the water which can drag you down …’

‘Never mind,’ Michael intervened. ‘Thanks for warning me, Nathan. That was very thoughtful of you. Actually, I was thinking of getting a boat of my own, just a small one, an inflatable maybe, with an outboard motor. You could come for a ride with me, if your mother doesn’t object.’

‘Of course I don’t, if he’s supervised,’ Annie said hastily. ‘It’s very kind of you, but – I mean, you don’t have to –’

‘I’d like to,’ Michael assured her, turning up the twist of his smile.

‘Could I bring my friends?’ Nathan asked.

‘Nathan –!’

‘It’s okay,’ Michael said. ‘Friends are fine – if the boat’s big enough, and there aren’t too many of them.’

‘Just Hazel and George. When will you get the boat?’

‘Oh – in the spring, I expect. Too chilly on the river now. Don’t worry, Nat: I won’t forget about taking you out, I promise. I’m not a forgetting kind of person.’

‘I wasn’t worried,’ Nathan said. ‘No one calls me Nat, it sounds a bit American.’

‘I won’t if you dislike it.’

Nathan thought about it. ‘I don’t mind,’ he decided, ‘if it’s just you. And if Mum doesn’t mind?’

‘It’s your name,’ Annie smiled.

He told the others about this, in the Den the following weekend. George was both excited and rather scared at the prospect of going out in a boat again, but Hazel looked thoughtful. ‘What’s the matter?’ Nathan asked her.

‘D’you think he likes your mum?’ Hazel said, pulling her hair over her eyes as if to hide from his response.

‘Why shouldn’t he?’

‘You know what I mean.’ She still wouldn’t meet his gaze.

‘He’s married …’

‘Don’t be silly. Married people often like other people; they get divorced; they marry someone else.’ She added, rather gruffly: ‘I sometimes wish Mum would divorce Dad. He doesn’t love her very much. Great-grandma Effie says he’s no good and never was.’

There was a short silence. Mention of Effie Carlow, Hazel’s great-grandmother, always commanded respect, since few people had great-grandmothers, and age had given her opinions the aura of wisdom, whether they deserved it or not. What that age was no one was certain: her piled-up grey hair was still abundant, her walk vigorous, her face wrinkled but not withered. She had a sharp nose and a sharper tongue, and her eyes, under heavy lids, were as keen as a hawk’s.

‘Even so,’ Nathan said at last, ‘I don’t think you should put your dad down.’

‘Only to you.’ She wouldn’t have chosen to confide in George, but Nathan had made him part of their group, and she treated him a little like a favoured pet. George being there counted no more than Hoover. Probably less.

‘Anyway,’ Nathan reverted to the original subject, ‘Mum wouldn’t … she wouldn’t want someone else’s husband.’

‘My mum says Michael’s very attractive,’ Hazel stated. ‘And Annie’s pretty. She ought to have boyfriends.’

Nathan didn’t answer. This was a point which had troubled him occasionally. He had friends with single mums, both at the village school and at Ffylde – even some with single dads – and boyfriends and girlfriends were always a problem. Children had to sort them out, encourage the good ones, fend off undesirables. They tended to buy lavish Christmas presents, woo the children with hamburgers and then shoo them from the room so they could indulge in kissing and fondling while their audience giggled outside. Some new partners brought unwanted brothers and sisters in their train. It was a hazard of modern life. Nathan knew he was lucky not to have these problems, but … but … ‘Do you want a father?’ Annie asked him once.

‘I have a father,’ Nathan responded. ‘He’s dead, but he’s still my father. I don’t need another one. Only … well … if you have a boyfriend that’s all right. As long as he’s a nice person, and he loves you. Is there – is there someone?’

‘When there is,’ Annie had said, ‘you’ll be the first to know.’

And now there was Michael Addison. Who was nice. And Lily Bagot said he was attractive. He had a wife, but she was an actress, and everyone knew actresses had affairs and got divorced a lot: it went with the territory. Still … maybe he loved his wife, and missed her when she was away, turning to Annie only for comfort. Nathan decided he didn’t like the situation whichever way you looked at it. If he starts to give me presents and take me for hamburgers, he thought, then I’ll know.

The years in Eade had turned Annie from a girl into a woman. Time had firmed her softness and tapered the planes of her face; her fluffy hair was cut short and fell over her forehead in light brown feather-curls. She still wore little makeup, but the country air gave her pale skin the glow of health. Once in a while some man would be extra friendly, but she would smile politely and distance herself, in manner if not words, asserting in thought that it was for her son and knowing – in her more self-analytical moods – that Nathan was an excuse. Perhaps Daniel still had all her heart; perhaps there was something else, lost in that fold of time, which kept her alone and separate, unresponsive to all men. When Michael Addison took to dropping in, to browse among the books and chat, she liked him without reserve, confident that liking was all it would ever be. She was not cold, merely absent, like a nun who, wedded to the idea of God, seeks no mortal husband. But Annie had always been doubtful about God – the Catholic God of her childhood, demanding, faintly patronizing, immersed in ritual. She preferred Bartlemy’s theory of the Ultimate Powers, maintaining some kind of equilibrium throughout all the worlds, but exacting neither blind worship nor interminable repentance. Since the moment of Daniel’s death she had known with the certainty of experience that there were things out there beyond the range of ordinary human knowledge, other dimensions – universes – beings, and maybe some of them had a foothold on her memory, and a handhold on her heart.

That Christmas Michael and Rianna went to stay with friends in Gloucestershire, and afterwards went skiing, Hazel’s father got drunk and hit Lily, causing her, for the first time, to consult a lawyer, and George was given a pair of binoculars, which were almost as good as a telescope. Annie and Nathan spent the day as they always did, with Bartlemy and Hoover, eating what was, had they but known it, the best Christmas dinner in the country. Bartlemy could do mysterious and wonderful things with food: children would fight to eat their greens when he had cooked them, his roast turkey was moist inside and crisp outside, oozing golden-brown juices, his potatoes crunched and melted, his plum pudding magically combined both airy lightness and dark fruitiness. Afterwards, Nathan always remembered that Christmas as especially perfect. It didn’t snow, in fact it rained, but they were indoors and the rain was out, and the fire filled the room with warmth and radiance, and his huge dinner disappeared into an elastic stomach and slender body, leaving no visible trace. Bartlemy had a television, which picked up channels no one else ever received, so they watched a fairytale in a foreign language, about an arrogant king who was forced to wander among his people in the guise of a beggar, and learned wisdom and humility, then they played chess, and Nathan almost won, and Annie watched them affectionately and thought: ‘How lucky I am. How lucky.’ And suddenly she was afraid, though she had never been afraid before, in case her luck would change.

And in the New Year Nathan found the sunken chapel, and saw the whispering cup, and then everything was different.

TWO Dreams and Whispers

In February, Michael Addison got a new computer and asked Annie if she would come round to help him set it up. ‘I hear you’re the resident expert,’ he said.

‘In a place like Eade,’ she retorted, ‘that isn’t saying much.’

‘I’ll pay you …’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’d do it for the chance to look at your house. The whole village wants to know if it’s been transformed like on one of those TV makeover shows.’

‘The village,’ he grinned, ‘is going to be very disappointed.’

Annie closed the shop early – Bartlemy had always encouraged her to keep whatever business hours she liked, but since Nathan became a weekly boarder she had tried to stick to ten till five – walked along the High Street and turned into the lane to Riverside House. The route ran between hedgerows that were brown and shrunken in their winter barrenness, with meadows on either side; Annie knew one was a conservation area because of the presence of a rare butterfly or orchid. The house lay beyond: she could see the pixy-hat roofs some way off. From the outside, it presented an image of rustic desirability, but when Michael admitted her, leading her through the hallway into what was clearly the main drawing room, she thought it looked curiously unlived-in. The furniture was too perfectly arranged, the rugs untrodden upon, everything clean, immaculate, untouched. ‘I don’t use this room much,’ Michael said, as though reading her mind. ‘My domain is in one tower, Rianna’s in the other. We meet occasionally in the bedroom.’ Annie assumed he was joking, but she wasn’t sure. She followed him down some steps and into the round chamber which was evidently his study. Units had been designed especially to fit the curve of the wall, and a wooden desk supported the latest in computer technology. ‘Here we are,’ said Michael. ‘Tea first, or work first?’

‘Work,’ said Annie.

In the end, it took far longer than she had intended. ‘To me, this machine is just a glorified typewriter,’ Michael said, so she spent some time sorting out his files, teaching him to use search engines and surf the Internet. When they finished it was dark, and Michael declared it was too late for tea, offering her a drink instead, and a quick tour of the house, if she wanted. ‘So you can tell the village grapevine about all the redecorating we haven’t done.’ Even the master bedroom, Annie thought, looked unslept-in: Michael had a couch in the upper room of his ‘tower’. The bathroom boasted a circular bath almost the size of a swimming pool; there were several guest bedrooms though they never seemed to have guests; the kitchen had the latest kind of Aga but the microwave appeared to have seen more use. Except in Michael’s rooms there was luxury without personality, and a strange coldness, as if the whole house was an exhibit rather than a residence. Annie didn’t get to see inside Rianna’s tower: that was kept locked. ‘Rianna’s very intense about her privacy,’ Michael explained. ‘Even I don’t have a key.’

‘Bluebeard’s Chamber,’ Annie said before she could stop herself.

‘Stacked with the bodies of her ex-husbands?’ Michael laughed. ‘There’s only been one, he’s a producer, I’ve met him. He’s about sixty now and married to a blonde of twenty-three.’

‘Sorry,’ Annie said. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude, or … or nosy.’

‘You weren’t,’ said Michael. ‘I suppose it does sound a bit odd, to people who don’t know Rianna. She’s – I expect you would call her temperamental. Personal space is very important to her. We have a wonderful cleaner, a Yugoslav émigré who comes over from Crowford, but Rianna won’t let her in there; she prefers to do the cleaning herself. Now, what would you like to drink? There’s whisky, gin, beer … whisky, more whisky.’

‘I’ll have a whisky,’ Annie said with a smile.

They had their drinks in the sitting room above Michael’s study, containing the couch ‘for those short kips between periods of not working’, and a couple of worn leather armchairs. Its windows framed a view over the conservation area in one direction, and down to the river in the other. Since it was too dark to see very far, Michael took some pains to explain about the benefits of the view. When they dimmed the light Annie saw a shiny new moon in a sky full of crispy stars, and shadowy fields stretching away towards the village, and the twinkling of illuminated windows in the nearest houses. She turned back, and there was Michael’s crooked smile, soft in the dimness, and his glasses hiding the expression in his eyes. He turned up the light, and she found herself looking at a picture of Rianna on a sideboard, a very glamorous picture, black-and-white, with a cloud of dark hair framing her artistic cheekbones, and deepset eyes darkly made up under the flying line of her brows.

‘She’s very beautiful,’ Annie said politely.

‘I know,’ said Michael. It might have been her fancy that he sounded almost rueful.

When their glasses were empty, he said: ‘I’ll walk you home.’ And then: ‘Damn. It’s later than I thought. I’ve got a call coming in, from the States.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ Annie assured him.

I like him, she thought, but I don’t like the house. Apart from his bit. There’s something wrong about it, something …

Something to do with Rianna Sardou.

She set off down the lane, hugging her coat round her in the cold, lost in her own reflections. The awareness didn’t come upon her suddenly; rather, it was a gradual feeling, a creeping change in the night, a slow prickle down her spine. There was a moment when she stopped, and glanced back, seeing nothing, and felt that the wrongness which she had sensed in the house had come with her, following her, becoming a shadow at her heels, a listener on the edge of hearing. There was a horrible familiarity about it. And then a shiver seemed to run through the hedgerows, as if a darkness slipped between the leafless stems, and she caught the whisper of words that could not be discerned, a whisper quieter than quiet, so close to her ear she expected to feel the chill of its breath on her cheek.

Them.

She didn’t run: there was no point. She walked very quickly, trying not to look back again, counting her paces in heartbeats. The lane dipped as it ran through the meadows and for a few minutes she could see no lights ahead, and she was alone, or not alone, and behind her she knew the shadows were playing grandmother’s footsteps, and the whisper was so intimate she could imagine disembodied lips moving within an inch of her face. She fancied there was a cold touch on her nape, as if a groping hand reached out to seize her – and then she saw the lights of a house in front, and the fantasy withdrew, she began to run as though released from a spell. Past gardens and back gates, into the village street, down the road to the bookshop. She shut and locked the door, but she knew it would be no use: no door had ever kept them out save that of Thornyhill. She stumbled to the phone and pressed out a number with unsteady fingers.

Ten minutes later Bartlemy was sitting in her little back room, filling much of it, a quiet, reassuring presence.

‘After Nathan was born,’ Annie was saying, ‘I always thought I went a little crazy. They were part of the craziness – that was what I told myself. Until now. But you saw them, didn’t you? The night we came to Thornyhill. You saw them following me.’

‘Oh yes,’ he said calmly. ‘I saw them.’

‘What are they? Who are they? Why have they come back?’

‘If I knew the answers to those questions,’ said Bartlemy, ‘I would be a wiser, if not a happier man. I know only what I have observed or deduced. They seem to have no real substance, yet they exist. They are made of shadow and fear. There are always many, a swarm rather than individuals. They are like nothing I have ever seen before, and I have seen many strange things. I was able to keep them away from Thornyhill – my influence is strong there – and I hoped they were gone for good, but clearly that isn’t so. Yet why should they reappear now? Where have they been? In hibernation maybe, until some call or need drew them forth. You were visiting Riverside House?’

‘Yes. I wondered … if they were there waiting. There’s something not quite right in that place. Not creepy, just rather peculiar. A feeling as if – something was out of kilter. I think it has to do with Michael’s wife.’

‘Rianna Sardou … A theatrical name. A name for a witch. I believe she looks like one, too, at least on screen: all darkness and glamour. A storybook witch. But stories can lie.’

‘Do you think there’s a connection between Rianna and – them?’

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t know why they pursued you in the past, or why that pursuit resumed today. As I said, I don’t know any of the answers, but I can think of another question.’

‘What’s that?’ Annie could think of several.

‘Why don’t they ever catch up?’

Annie shivered. ‘Don’t! I thought – something touched me, back there in the lane …’

‘Nonetheless, they didn’t catch you. They followed you for months, all those years ago, and they didn’t catch you. Why not? They are far swifter than humans. They hunted you with darkness and terror, but you always eluded them. Are they chasing you, or simply watching you – spying on you? Or else –’

‘Can we not discuss it any more?’ Annie pleaded. ‘At least for now. I want to sleep tonight.’

‘You can stay at Thornyhill, if you wish.’

‘No, thank you,’ she said. ‘I’ll stay here. This is my place.’

In bed later, she lay awake a long time, but no movement stirred the curtain, and the night was empty and still.

Nathan dreamed. Not the now-familiar nightmare of the cop, with the hissing snake-voices and the taste of blood; this was a dreamscape he had known since early childhood, once vague and surreal, now increasingly vivid. A city. A city at the end of Time. Towers soared up a mile or more, multi-facetted, topped with glass minarets reflecting sky, and spires whose glitter caught the sun. Far below, the ground was unseen beneath bridges and archways studded with windows, flyovers, walkways, suspended gardens. Airborne vehicles cruised the spaces in between, leaving con-trails in their wake that shimmered for a little while and then vanished. And occasionally there were creatures like giant birds, with webbed pinions stretching to a vast span and bony beaks, their human-sized riders hidden behind masks and goggles. Nathan had always enjoyed these dreams because often he travelled in one of the vehicles, looping the towers and diving under the archways, until he went spinning through a hundred dimensions of the dreamworld and tumbled at last into his own bed, waking exhilarated from the thrill of the ride.

This time, it was different. There was a huge dull sun, just risen, glimpsed moving through the gaps between buildings, climbing ponderously towards the open sky. The topmost towers and minarets had already sprung into glittering life and floated like islands of light above shadowy canyons where the dawn had yet to penetrate. Nathan was gliding through the air, an awareness without substance or being, looking through oval windows into an interlocking maze of rooms, all empty, like a termite mound with no termites. The city was enormous but there appeared to be few people and those all far away, too far to see clearly, moving singly or in twos and threes, but never in a crowd.

Presently, he found he was drifting beside one of the birds, but from close up it looked more like a reptile, its beak a pointed muzzle and its wings taloned, its long tail tipped with a spike. Its skin looked hard and had a slight gloss to it, as if it were made up of very tiny tightly-packed scales, steel-blue in colour and sheened with the early sunlight. The rider, too, wore blue, clothed from head to foot in some kind of metallic mesh, his hood close-fitting, with a slit for the mouth, a nose-guard, and opaque goggles covering the eye-holes. His saddle was very high in the pommel, the reins attached not to a bit but to iron rings which pierced the flesh at the corners of the creature’s mouth. Nathan thought it must be very painful but he noticed the rider used only the lightest touches to steer, barely perceptible to the observer. The creature had an extreme fixity of expression even by animal standards; it took Nathan a little while to realize why. The eyes, set under bony ridges, had neither iris nor pupil: they were blood-red from edge to edge, lidless and locked in a perpetual stare.

The flight was very fast, faster than the skimmers, though the wings beat only at intervals; a whisk of the tail acted as a rudder. They came to land very suddenly on a rooftop platform where another hooded figure, this time in a plasticized suit and heavy gauntlets, took the reins while the rider dismounted. The gauntleted man – assuming it was a man – tethered the creature and fed it from a bucket of things that squirmed. Nathan followed the rider to a species of cylindrical kiosk and stepped through a sliding door into what was plainly a lift. They descended a short distance and emerged onto a long gallery with a high-coved ceiling and rows of pillars down either side, not straight but warped and twisted into irregular shapes like distorted trees. There were no windows but a pale glow, like an echo of daylight, came from the ceiling. At the far end they passed into a semicircular room whose curved wall, in contrast to the gallery, was all glass, though shielded in places with translucent screens. There was very little furniture, just a unit which might have been a desk and a couple of chairs. The automatic door closed behind them. Beyond the arc of the window, the sun’s rays were reaching down into the deep places of the city.

A figure stood with his back to them, gazing out. He was taller than the rider by a head, though Nathan had thought the rider exceptionally tall. His silhouette showed wide shoulders, booted feet a little apart, arms presumably folded. He had an aura of power and great stillness. Long after, Nathan would remember this moment, this dream, more vividly than any other moment in his life before, but at the time he did not know its significance, nor guess. The rider waited, saying nothing. Eventually, the man turned.

He wore a black hood, but his face was concealed by a mask of something that looked like Perspex: white as alabaster and moulded into a semblance of human features. The mouth-slit opened between sculpted lips, the nostril-holes pierced an aquiline nose, the enlarged eyes were leaf-shaped, protected by bubbles of black glass. Like the rider and the man on the roof, not an inch of skin was exposed, not even a hair. When he spoke, Nathan understood him; it was only afterwards he realized the language was not English.

He said: ‘Well?’

‘It’s worse,’ answered the rider. ‘Dru didn’t want you to know. He’s afraid Souza will be cut off.’

‘It must be. There is no choice.’ The man’s tone was cool, all trace of feeling carefully extracted. ‘We will cut off the whole of Maali, from Ingorut to Khadesh.’

‘An entire continent?’ The horror in the rider’s voice was imperfectly suppressed.

‘Yes.’ The white mask expressed neither apology nor regret. ‘The contamination will spread beyond Souza in months, perhaps weeks. We have to act now. Our Time is running out.’ And again, with peculiar emphasis: ‘All of Time is running out.’

‘Is there any hope?’ asked the rider.

Behind the mask, Nathan imagined the man smiled. ‘Hope is a chimera,’ he said. ‘I do not clutch at chimerae. I made my plans long, long ago. There is no hope, but there are plans. We will hold to them. Now eat, and rest. You have flown far. Is your xaurian tired?’

‘No, sir. He is strong.’

‘Good. I will summon you later. You will go with the Fifth Phalanx to Maali. You know the coast.’

The rider made a brief bow, and withdrew.

The white-masked man moved one hand in a strange gesture, murmuring a word Nathan could not hear. An image appeared in front of him, life-size, three-dimensional, evidently made of light. It wore a purple cowl and a mask patterned with whorls and lines.

‘Souza is contaminated,’ said the white mask, briefly. ‘Instigate cut-off for Maali.’

‘The whole of Maali?’ said the purple cowl, evidently shocked. His voice crackled, like someone telephoning on a bad line.

‘Of course. Send the Fifth Phalanx and one of the senior practors. Raymor will go with them. He knows the terrain.’

Purple cowl hesitated, as if considering a protest, but refrained. Then he too bowed, vanishing at a gesture from his master.

The man walked towards the window again, resuming his contemplation of the city. Nathan saw him from close up, his chin sunken, the white shapely features gleaming in the daylight, the black bulge of the eye-screens revealing nothing. But behind the mask he sensed a mind at work, an inscrutable intelligence, vast and complex, and focused on a single path of thought, a plan, a goal – whatever that goal might be. Nathan had never before imagined such a mind – a mind so powerful that he could feel it thinking, he could sense the surge and flicker of suppressed emotion, the dreadful urgency beneath the calm of absolute control. Its proximity frightened him and he tried to draw away, pushing at the dream until it began to break up, and he was plunged into a long dark tunnel of fading sensation. He lost himself in sleep, but when he woke at last the dream was still with him, clear as truth, and the memory of it didn’t grow dim.

It was perhaps a fortnight before he returned there. He knew it was the same world, the same dream, though the environment had changed. He was with a rider again, possibly Raymor, though now there were many of them, flying in successive V-formations of thirteen, the infrequent wing-beats of the xaurians almost exactly in unison. Below, the dull glitter of sunlight moved over a huge expanse of sea, stretching from horizon to horizon. He could see the ripple effect of endless waves, and here and there a dimpling of white as breakers clashed in a volcano of spray. Soon, a strip of coast appeared, rushing towards them, growing swiftly. He saw grey cliffs falling sheer to the sea, and beyond an uneven plateau, treeless and bleak.

The phalanx swung left and began to follow the shoreline. On the foremost xaurian he noticed there was a second figure seated behind the rider, dressed in red. What he was doing Nathan didn’t know, but his hand moved in a series of intricate gestures, and the air on their shoreward side thickened into a haze, like a veil dividing them from the land. The cliffs were barely visible now, plunging downwards to a broad inlet spanned by many bridges and surrounded by a sprawling port. There seemed to be boats on the water, and occasional skimmers wheeling insect-like above. One veered round and came towards them, but the veil grew denser even as it approached, and when it hit the barrier sparks ran along its sides, igniting into flame, and it spiralled down into the ocean like a dying firework. The red figure went on with its ritual: Nathan was close enough now to hear the murmur of a chant. Glancing to seaward, he glimpsed another boat, far outside the barrier. Two xaurians broke away from the outer wing and headed towards it. Nathan couldn’t see clearly what happened, but there was a spurt of fire on the boat, and then it had vanished, and the waves rolled on unbroken.

He didn’t like the dream now, for all the exhilaration of the flight. He felt as if merely by watching, by being there, he had become a part of it, a mute participant in some terrible misdeed. He tried to pull himself away from the phalanx, and found his thought was falling, dropping like a stone towards the sea. And then his dive slowed to a glide, brushing the wave-crests, just above the place where the ship had gone down. There was someone in the water, presumably the last of the crew: he saw the grey hood bobbing up and down. The person had no lifebelt, no inflatable jacket; he wouldn’t last long. The xaurian riders, knowing that, had left him to his fate. Even though the drowning man had no visible face Nathan felt his terror, and the need to help grew inside him, strong as rage, until he thought he would burst with it. He drifted lower, reaching out, feeling the slap of cold water on his skin, seizing the flailing hands with a grip that caught and held. Then they were jerked out of the dream with a violence that made Nathan’s stomach turn, landing painfully on a beach of stones. A beach at night, with breakers crumbling on the shingle, and upflung sheets of foam, luminous in the darkness. Nathan released the clasping hands and sensed himself withdrawing, sliding backwards into oblivion. The dormitory bell roused him, hours or minutes later. He sat up, conscious of discomfort, and found the sleeves of his pyjamas were damp.

That Saturday there was a rugby match against another school. Nathan scored two tries, helping the Ffylde Abbey team to victory, and went home late and on a high. He had been planning to tell Bartlemy about the dreams but somehow, when it came to it, he distrusted his own imagination, and was not yet ready to expose himself to anyone’s disbelief. But on Sunday he could see Hazel, and confiding in her was second nature to him. (Not George, he decided, without asking himself why. Just Hazel.) In the morning, he and Annie sat over a late breakfast, listening to the local news on the radio. A projected housing development, a missing person, the risk of flooding in the area. ‘A man discovered three days ago on the beach at Pevensey Bay is believed to be an illegal immigrant. He was dressed in waterproof clothing which covered him from head to foot, suggesting he may have swum in from a boat. He speaks no English and so far his nationality has not been established. Police think it unlikely he was alone and are asking local residents to be on the lookout.’

Annie noticed Nathan had stopped eating his cornflakes. ‘Are you all right?’ she inquired.

‘Yes. Yes, of course.’ He resumed his breakfast, but with less enthusiasm. After a minute, he asked: ‘What will they do with him? Will they – will they put him in prison?’

‘The illegal immigrant? I suppose so. Until they work out who he is, and whether to grant him asylum.’

‘But … that’s wrong. He’s alone. He’s desperate. We should help him.’

Annie was touched by his concern. ‘Yes, we should,’ she said. ‘The trouble is, people are afraid. They’re afraid of strangers, of anybody different. They think immigrants will take their jobs or their homes, even though there aren’t that many of them, and newcomers create jobs as well as doing them. But fear makes people stupid, and sometimes cruel.’

‘Could I go and see him?’ Nathan demanded abruptly. ‘The man on the beach?’

Annie looked astonished. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘They wouldn’t let you. Maybe you could write.’

‘Yes, but … he doesn’t speak English,’ Nathan reminded her. He gave up on breakfast altogether, and asked to leave the table. He wanted space to think.

‘It’s impossible,’ Hazel said that afternoon, in the Den, but she didn’t sound sure.

‘There are meant to be lots of other universes,’ Nathan said. ‘That isn’t just in books; Father Clement told us about it, in physics. There are millions of them, some like ours, some different. It’s called the multiverse. Supposing, in my dream, I was actually in one of them, and somehow I pulled that man out, back into ours?’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ Hazel said, curiously daunted. When they were much younger, the two of them had spent a lot of time exploring wardrobes in the hope of making their way into other worlds; but she had outgrown such fancies now. Or so she told herself, part wistful, part scornful, strangely afraid. She knew Nathan would never lie to her.

‘You’re talking about magic,’ she said at last. She had no opinion of physics.

‘Maybe.’ Nathan was pensive. ‘What is magic, anyway? According to someone or other, it’s just science we don’t understand.’

‘How do we find out more?’

‘I don’t know. I could ask Uncle Barty: he knows about lots of things. History, and archaeology, and all the sciences. Besides, Mum says his cooking is definitely magical.’

Hazel made a snorting noise. ‘Cooking isn’t magic,’ she said. ‘Even if that chocolate cake for your last birthday was amazing … Are there books on it? Magic, not cookery.’

Nathan nodded. ‘They’re called grimoires. Mum had some in once. I thought they would be interesting, but they were awfully dull, just about drawing runes and symbols, and picking herbs at the full moon, and boring rituals for calling up demons. There weren’t even any sacrifices, let alone stuff about other worlds. They wouldn’t be any good to us.’ There was a long silence, filled with frustrated thought. ‘What we need,’ said Nathan, ‘is a witch. Witches were burnt here, hundreds of years ago, in that open space outside the church. Uncle Barty told me about it. I asked him if they were real witches, and he said mostly not – but “mostly” isn’t all. I read the names: some of them were Carlows, like your great-grandmother. Was she born a Carlow, or did she marry one?’

‘Both, I think,’ Hazel said, frowning. ‘Dad’s always telling Mum her family are inbred. He said Great-grandma was barmy, and she married her own cousin, which is supposed to make your children mad or sub or something … He says she’s a witch, too, but I expect that’s just an insult.’

‘We could go and ask her,’ Nathan suggested tentatively. ‘She wouldn’t mind us asking – would she? It isn’t as if witches get burnt nowadays.’

‘She’ll mind,’ Hazel said with conviction. ‘She’s … well, you know.’

Nathan did know. Effie Carlow’s acid tongue and eagle stare did not encourage idle questions. However …

‘If we can’t think of anyone else,’ he said, ‘we’ll have to ask her. We must ask someone.’

Back at school, he tried to listen to the news on the Common Room radio as much as possible, but there was nothing further about the man on the beach. He sounded out Father Clement on alternative universes, but the monk said that to his knowledge nobody had ever visited one, though he assumed it would be feasible. In theory. By Friday night when his mother took him home to Eade, Nathan had made up his mind. On Saturday George came round, so it was not until Sunday that he told Hazel: ‘We have to go and see your great-grandmother. There isn’t anyone else.’

Effie Carlow lived in a cottage on the Chizzledown road about half a mile outside Eade. Built in the Victorian era, weathering had mellowed its façade and climbing plants had overgrown its more commonplace features, rendering it attractive if not picturesque. Too small to be of interest to buyers from London, it had diminutive windows admitting little light into poky rooms and a roof that sagged almost to ground level, while at the rear there was an outhouse which Effie rented to a local artist as a studio. The walled garden was a miniature wilderness in which weeds and wild flowers predominated. ‘We ought to telephone her first,’ Nathan had said before they set out.

‘She isn’t on the phone,’ said Hazel.

It was about four o’clock when they arrived, a well-chosen hour for a casual visit, or so Nathan hoped. After a nervous exchange of glances with Hazel, he tapped twice with the knocker, noticing belatedly that there was also a doorbell hiding behind a tendril of creeper. After a long wait during which they strained their ears for the sound of approaching feet and heard nothing, the door opened a few inches. ‘Well?’ said Effie Carlow.

‘Hello, Great-grandma,’ Hazel mumbled, and ‘We’re sorry if we’re interrupting,’ from Nathan, ‘but there’s something we particularly wanted to ask you.’

The old woman looked him up and down with her raptor’s eye. When he didn’t continue, she said impatiently: ‘So ask me.’

‘It’s about witches,’ he said, feeling increasingly awkward. ‘I read in a local history book there were witches burnt at the stake here, a long time ago, and some of them were called Carlow. We wanted to know about – about witchcraft, and other worlds, and things, and we wondered if you would be able to help.’

There was a change in her expression which they couldn’t define, a sort of sharpening, though her glance was always sharp, a subtle adjustment. Then she opened the door wider. ‘Come in.’

They stepped straight into a sitting room crowded with furniture and bric-a-brac. Pictures and bookshelves jostled on the walls, chairs were squashed arm to arm, small tables supported lamps, teacups, ornaments, an old-fashioned wireless. None of the lamps were on and in the gloom they could make out few details, but the overall effect was that of a jumble sale in a telephone booth. ‘Sit down,’ Effie continued. They sat in adjacent chairs, not quite holding hands, while she made them bitter dark tea with very little milk and added, as an afterthought, a plate of stale biscuits. ‘I’ve been keeping these for a special guest,’ she explained. ‘You can have some, if you like.’

‘Thank you,’ Nathan said politely, ‘but I had a big lunch.’

‘You can have some.’

Impelled by her determination, he took a biscuit. Hazel followed suit. She was still surprised they had been invited in and had lapsed into an apprehensive silence, leaving Nathan to do the talking. He attempted to phrase a question but was foiled by the biscuit, which was tough and required extensive chewing.

‘Why do you want to know about witches?’ Effie demanded. ‘Witches … and other worlds and things. But the Carlow witches were of this world, until they were burned. What goes on in other worlds no man knows.’

‘Nathan does,’ Hazel whispered. Her biscuit had proved more disposable.

‘And what does Nathan know?’

‘I have – these dreams,’ he said, between swallows. ‘There’s this place – I see different locations, a city, and a shoreline, but I know it’s the same place – and there are flying vehicles, like cars without wheels, and people riding on birds which are really reptiles, sort of pterodactyls – and I tried to rescue this man who was drowning, and a few days later I heard something on the news about an illegal immigrant, and I – I knew it was the same man.’

‘How could you tell?’ Effie’s manner was brisk.

‘They described his clothes. He was in a kind of one-piece suit which covered him all over, with a hood for his face and head. And they said he spoke no English, and they couldn’t work out his nationality.’

‘Inconclusive,’ Effie said. ‘An illegal immigrant might well wear a one-piece, a wetsuit or similar, if he had swum ashore. I heard that news item: they said so. As for your dreams – witches know about dreams, I won’t deny that, but it sounds to me like you’ve been watching too many science fiction films. Concentrate on your homework instead of the television.’

‘Nathan does well at school,’ Hazel said bravely.

‘Does he? Then why all this nonsense about other worlds?’

‘Because it did make sense,’ Nathan replied, ‘in my dream. If you didn’t believe me, why did you ask us in?’

The old woman leaned forward, cupping her hands around his face to draw it closer, digging her nails into his cheeks. Her fingers felt all knobbles and bones, but they seemed to be horribly strong. Her fierce eyes stared straight into his. In the poor light he could not tell their colour, only that they were dark, and had a lustre that was not quite human. He fancied she was seeking to look right into his mind, to unpick his thoughts and probe even to his subconscious, but he met stare with stare, trying to remain steadfast, not defiant but unyielding.

At length she released him, and sank back in her chair. ‘So,’ she said, ‘a dreamer, a traveller in other worlds. Well, we shall see. Ancestresses of mine were drowned on the ducking-stool and burned at the stake, and maybe I have inherited something of their Gift. I can read the future, and sometimes even the present, and only a fool would play cards with me. If there is anything to be seen, Nathan Ward, I will see it. Meanwhile, dream carefully. This tumbling from world to world – if that is what you are doing – is bad for the stomach, and worse for the head. Take care you don’t leave your brains behind.’

‘You do believe him,’ Hazel said, ‘don’t you, Great-grandma?’

‘You are impertinent,’ Effie snapped. ‘It is for me to decide who and what I believe.’ She rose to her feet and so did the children, conscious they had outstayed their welcome – if indeed they had ever had one. Suddenly, Effie rounded on Hazel, seizing her by the hair, plucking the loose strands off her face. But unlike Nathan, the girl could not meet her gaze, blinking in the grip of something akin to panic. ‘Remember,’ her great-grandmother said after a minute or two, ‘you too are a Carlow.’ The rasp in her voice might have softened, if she had been capable of softness; as it was, Hazel flinched away, twisting her head in the older woman’s grasp, averting her eyes. Then Effie let go, and the children were thrust outside. A pile-up of cloud was vanquishing the last of the daylight: it seemed as if they had brought the gloom of the cottage with them. They heard the front door shut, not with a bang but a snick, and began to walk along the roadside.

‘Does she have some kind of power,’ Nathan wondered, ‘or does she just think she has? There’s something definitely creepy about her.’

Hazel shivered. ‘Mum says she has the Sight, whatever that means. I remember she knew, the week before, when Uncle Gavin was going to die.’

‘When was that?’

‘Ages ago. Nearly a year. It was while you were at school.’

‘Was your uncle ill?’ Nathan inquired, looking sceptical. ‘After all, if someone is really ill, it’s fairly easy to guess when they’re going to die.’

‘No, he wasn’t. It was a – a neurism, or something. Very sudden.’

They walked on a while in silence. Nathan was frowning. ‘What did she mean,’ he said, ‘when she told you, you too are a Carlow?’

Hazel didn’t reply.

‘She thinks you’ve got power too, doesn’t she? Something you’ve inherited, like a gene for witchcraft.’

‘I’m normal,’ Hazel said abruptly. ‘I’m normal as normal. I don’t want to be like her. Anyway, Mum doesn’t have any powers that I know of. If she did, she’d be able to deal with Dad.’

‘Genes can sometimes skip a generation,’ Nathan said knowledgeably. ‘If they’re recessive. We learned about that in biology.’

‘Look, I’m not a witch, okay?’ Hazel said, her voice growing deeper as it always did when she was upset. ‘I don’t believe in witches – not even Great-grandma Effie. I’m just a girl.’

‘Pity,’ Nathan remarked. ‘Being a witch would be cool. We haven’t made much progress on other worlds, have we?’

Hazel was silent again, scuffing her feet as she walked. She still seemed to be disturbed by the imputation of witchcraft.

I’ll have to ask Uncle Barty, Nathan thought. But not yet. Not unless I have more dreams.

But time passed, and though he dreamed of the cup, and woke with the whispers in his ear, he did not revisit the alien world again for a long while.

Annie, too, neither heard nor sensed her unseen pursuers, though as spring mellowed into summer she often walked alone through wood or meadow, half daring the shadows to follow her. She was friendly with Michael, but she didn’t go to his house again, troubled by her one afternoon there and its consequences. Rianna was seen in the village, between engagements, and once came into the shop. Annie had noticed her a couple of weeks before on television in a repeat of an old drama, and she was privately taken aback at the contrast between her glamorous on-screen persona and the off-screen reality. Her face was gaunt, almost ugly, the eyes naturally shadowed, the mouth, without lipstick, pale and ill-defined. She wore no jewellery, not even a wedding ring. She scanned the shelves with no real interest and then asked for a particular book, but Annie had the impression she was making conversation, checking her out. Maybe Rianna had heard some village gossip, coupling Annie’s name with Michael’s; but she was fairly sure there had been none – and how would Rianna hear gossip, when she avoided local chit-chat and was almost always away?

‘I hear you have a son,’ Rianna said. ‘Twelve or thirteen?’

‘Twelve.’

‘They say he’s very unusual, for a boy of that age.’

‘I think him special,’ Annie confirmed with some warmth.

‘Part Asian, I understand?’

There was a nuance in her words, Annie believed, and she did her best to suppress a tiny spurt of anger. ‘Do you?’ she said.

If she was hostile, Rianna didn’t appear to notice. ‘Who was his father?’ she asked. There was a note of boredom in her voice, as if the question was automatic rather than inquisitive, but the narrow eyes were intent. Or so Annie imagined, though in the sombre interior of the bookshop it was difficult to be sure.

‘He was my husband,’ she answered, and there was an instant when Rianna appeared to freeze, perhaps recognizing the snub, but it passed, and she turned away, and left the shop without further questions.

She seemed more interested in Nathan than in my friendship with Michael, Annie thought, and she found this so baffling that she determined to mention it to Bartlemy, when a suitable opportunity arose.

In the kitchen at Thornyhill Bartlemy listened to the story in his usual unruffled manner. The cauldron of stock still simmered on the stove; Annie couldn’t recall a time when it hadn’t been there, and she had a sudden fancy that it was the same as the night she arrived, its contents stirred, sampled, augmented, but never changed, growing richer and more flavoursome over the years. The smell that drifted from beneath the lid still made her mouth water, and a mug of that broth – something Bartlemy doled out only rarely – satisfied hunger and warmed the heart like nothing else. ‘Do you ever change your stockpot?’ she asked him.

‘Good stock needs time,’ he said. ‘The longer the better.’

‘How long?’ Annie inquired; but he didn’t answer.

‘Don’t worry about this Rianna Sardou,’ he said at last. ‘She’s probably just curious.’

‘Why should she be curious about Nathan?’ Annie persisted. ‘She must know of him through Michael, but … why ask about his father?’

‘It may have been just a shot in the dark. She may be the inquisitive type. Has she ever seen him?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. He likes Michael, so I expect he would’ve mentioned meeting his wife.’

‘Mm. Well, no doubt the truth will become evident in due course. Events – like this stock – take time to mature. You are young, and impatient.’

‘Not that young,’ Annie said. ‘I’m thirty-six.’

‘How old is Rianna Sardou, do you suppose?’

‘Late thirties … forty … Older than Michael, I think. Why?’

‘I just wondered,’ Bartlemy said.

When she had gone, he sat in the living room with Hoover, drinking sweet tea and gazing into the fire. ‘Why did I come here?’ he asked of no one in particular, but Hoover cocked an ear. ‘I read the signs, but I have never been one to follow such things. There have been few portents for me, over the years. All I ever wanted to do was heal sickness, and cook. Two sides of the same coin, Rukush. Drugs and potions cure illness, good food makes the body strong, and great food – ah, great food nourishes the soul. I can prepare a dessert that will turn a peasant into a poet, I can soothe the tyrant’s rage with soups and sauces, I can roast a sirloin so tender that it would make a proud man humble and an atheist believe in God. That was all the power I ever wanted. But when I saw a fantasy in the smoke I came here, and I waited. And the day Annie knocked on my door I knew that was what I was waiting for. Annie and the child. But still I don’t know why. There are always more questions, less answers. I think it is time to draw the curtains close, and make a different fire.’

When the last of the logs had burned down he cleaned out the grate and pinned the curtains together against prying eyes. Even so, it was far into the night before he lit a new fire, feeding it not with wood or coal but with bluish crystals that spat and cracked after too long in storage. The flame they emitted was also bluish, and cold-looking, and it filled the room with a pale chill light. Presently he threw some powder on it which seemed to be damp, turning the flame to smoke, and the room darkened again, and the chimney was closed off so the smoke could not escape, and the eyes of both man and dog grew red from the sting of it. Bartlemy made a gesture, a little like that of the man in Nathan’s dream, and the smoke was sucked into a cloud which hovered in one place, and there was a whirling at its heart. Vague colours flickered in its depths like trails of light. Then the whirling steadied, and the colours condensed, and in the midst of the smoke there was a picture.

A cup. It looked mediaeval or older, with a wide bowl and a short, thick stem entwined in coiling patterns that seemed to shape themselves into runes and hieroglyphs. It was made of opaque glass or polished stone, but it glowed as if endowed with secret life, and appeared to be floating in the green halo of its own light. The thread of a whisper came to Bartlemy’s ears from nothing in the room. Then the light vanished and the cup was falling, clattering onto a floor somewhere, rolling back and forth on the arc of its rim. A human hand descended slowly, and picked it up. ‘The Grimthorn Grail,’ Bartlemy murmured. ‘One of a hundred – a thousand – that lay claim to the ancient legend. But it was sold abroad, and lost in the turmoil of war, and the Thorns who had failed to care for it are long gone …’

The vision of the cup was replaced by a muddle of dim shapes, all unclear, but he thought he could make out a running figure, coming towards him. The image was too dark to see properly but he had an impression of breathlessness and fear, and shadows following, swarming on its heels, and in the quiet of the night there was the sound of whispering, reaching out from the smoke. It seemed to him that it was the same whisper he had heard a few minutes earlier, though louder, and with different words, different purpose. But he couldn’t be sure, since the words were indistinguishable, the purpose unrevealed. The picture sombred and was lost, and other images succeeded it, changing swiftly, some distinct, some vague and blurred. A small chapel with a cloaked man going from candle to candle: the lighted taper picked out his profile as he bent his head, the nose outthrust like a broken spar, the lipless fold of the mouth, the eyes sagging between multiple lids. The candles burned with a greasy flame, showing a gargoyle-face peering from a stony arch, and a low altar without a cross. Then the scene dissolved into a wood with tangled trees, maybe the Darkwood – then the flash and sparkle of a river in sunshine – a cage or grille, and hands that shook the bars – a wood in springtime, with a brown twig-legged creature lurking in the hollow of a tree – the river again, only this time there was a face beneath the water, and rippled sunlight flowing over it, but he knew it wasn’t drowned. Then back to the cloaked man, raising his arm, and a sudden blaze of fire, fire in the chapel, fire in the wood – and lastly, for no reason that Bartlemy could understand, a shingle beach in the drear light of a winter’s morning, and the ebb and surge of grey waves, and a man who seemed to have come out of the water, wearing a hood that covered his entire head.

Bartlemy rose from his chair: he had used few crystals, and he assumed the visions were over. ‘There is a pattern here,’ he told Hoover, ‘if only I could see it. Possibly the shadows that hounded Annie are connected to the Grimthorn Grail – but they pursued her to this place, not from it, and the Grail has not been here for nearly a century. Who sent them – if they were sent – and how? Such a sending would take power. Josevius Grimthorn is long dead; could his influence live on?’

Hoover made a soft sound in his throat, almost a growl, and Bartlemy, who had bent to unblock the chimney, glanced back into the smoke. It was already thinning, but for a few seconds he saw another image there, too dim to identify, a woman with grey hair in a bun, leaning forward over a shallow basin full of some cloudy liquid, and briefly, very briefly, looking up at the woman, out of the basin, a reflection that he knew was his own face.

For an instant his placidity vanished: he spoke one word, and the smoke was scattered into wisps which fled into every corner of the room. ‘Careless!’ he apostrophized himself. ‘I do these things so rarely – I never much liked conjuring – but there’s no excuse for such a slip.’ He removed the screen from the flue, and the smoke sneaked out. Then he took a bottle out of a cupboard – a bottle that was grimed with age rather than dirt, like something retrieved from a shipwreck – unstoppered the neck, and poured himself a very small glass, hardly more than a thimbleful. The liquor was almost black and it smelled darkly fruity and overpoweringly alcoholic. Bartlemy sat down again to savour it.

Hoover raised his head hopefully.

‘No you can’t,’ said his master. ‘You know it won’t agree with you. Well, well. Euphemia Carlow … Where does she fit in, I wonder? Time was when her kind were happy to curdle the milk with a look and cure warts for a farthing, but now … the world changes. Still, she must always have known what I am, or guessed. She’s no fool, if less wise than she wishes to appear. Let’s hope that what she has seen will be a warning to her. Curiosity is no good for either cats or witches.’

In April, Nathan turned thirteen. ‘You were a spring baby,’ Annie recalled. ‘You came with the swallows.’

‘I thought it was supposed to be a stork,’ Nathan said with mock innocence.

Annie laughed.

Michael had bought a boat, not an inflatable with an outboard motor but a twenty-six-foot sailboat which he said he would take down to the sea from time to time. He had done quite a bit of sailing when he was younger, he explained, and a boat this size he could handle on his own. For Nathan’s birthday he offered to take him, George and Hazel downriver, weather permitting. Nathan was obviously thrilled at the idea and Annie suppressed a tiny pang, which she knew to be unworthy, that he preferred an excursion without her. ‘Why don’t you come?’ Michael had said, but Annie declined.

‘I get seasick.’

‘On a river?’

‘I get seasick on a bouncy castle.’

At the last moment Nathan said he would forgo the treat, he wanted to spend a family day after all, but Annie, undeceived, dealt summarily with that. She saw them all off around noon, sweater-clad and life-jacketed for the sea-going part of their trip, and then returned to Thornyhill with Bartlemy. A suitable birthday cake had been prepared, and the sailors had wrapped several slices in foil to take with them, but there was a large section left, and Annie, Bartlemy and Hoover sat by the fire at teatime (it was not yet too warm for a fire to be unwelcome) and munched their way through a respectable portion of it. Annie talked about Nathan, as she so often did, proud of his academic achievements, but still happier at the person she felt he was growing into. ‘I’m being boring,’ she said, catching herself up short. ‘Boring on about my son.’

‘What mother doesn’t?’ Bartlemy smiled. ‘You know I’m not bored.’

‘It’s at times like this,’ Annie continued after a few minutes, ‘birthdays, and family times, that I wonder most about his father. Not – not Daniel, I can’t fool myself that he’s like Daniel. Maybe in nature, in some ways, but not looks.’

‘He could be a throwback,’ Bartlemy said lightly. ‘You shouldn’t worry about it.’

‘A throwback to what? And I don’t worry, that’s not the word. I just feel I ought to know. One day soon he’s going to ask, and I’ll have to tell him, but I’ve no idea what I’m going to tell him. Have you … thought about it any more?’

‘I’ve thought about it a great deal,’ Bartlemy said.

‘Will you tell me what you’ve thought?’ Annie said a little shyly.

Bartlemy set down his plate with the remainder of a piece of cake. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But you must understand this is pure speculation. We may never know the truth.’

‘I understand.’

‘We spoke once before of the Gate of Death. It has always been so called because death was supposed to be the only way to open it, but love, so they say, is stronger than death, and it may be that your love opened the Gate, and in a moment lost to memory you passed through, and returned with a child in your womb. Such unexplained pregnancies have happened before: I need hardly mention the most notorious case.’

Annie glanced up in bewilderment; then her face cleared. ‘I really don’t think Nathan’s the new Messiah,’ she said. ‘My God, I hope not!’

‘I too … but he is special. There is a maturity, a strength of character which distinguishes him. He’s a teenager now: it will be interesting to see if he displays the wayward behaviour usually associated with that age.’

‘What if he doesn’t?’ Annie said. ‘If he doesn’t start being rude to me, and having moods, and playing very loud music in his bedroom, and smoking pot and taking E, and treating me as an embarrassment? Is that when I should worry?’

She wasn’t quite joking, and Bartlemy smiled only a little. ‘If you want to,’ he said. ‘Worrying doesn’t achieve anything, but we all do it. If you need to worry that Nathan gives you no real cause for anxiety … Exactly. Where were we? You passed the Gate, or may have done, and became pregnant, so you believe, in that moment. Not your boyfriend’s child: that seems fairly obvious. There are worlds without number beyond the Gate, Powers which rarely touch our lives so nearly. Once in a while, however, those Powers concern themselves with our immediate affairs. Not in my experience, nor that of anyone I know; but it has happened. Maybe there is some task to be done, some destiny to fulfil – mind you, I’ve always had my doubts about Destiny: she’s a temperamental lady. I feel Nathan was born for a purpose, though I don’t know what it is. Perhaps there is a doom which only he can avert. Time will show. Whatever the truth, it seems clear Nathan has a father from outside this world, a being superior to us, in intellect and quality if not in essence, possibly one of the Powers themselves – anything is possible. You both have enemies, we know that much, enemies on what might be termed a supernatural plane; but a child that unique would attract attention from birth. The circumstances of his conception – the Gate opening for someone still living – would cause ripples that the sensitive might feel. Certainly there is – interest – in him, from many sources.’

‘Now you really are frightening me,’ Annie said. ‘Otherworldly beings – Nathan – a mythical task – all this can’t be true … can it?’

‘Someone sent the things which followed you,’ Bartlemy pointed out. ‘They may even have slipped into this world after you when the Gate opened: such shadows might do that. But of one thing you can be sure, if you have need of comfort. Whoever fathered Nathan has power of a kind we cannot imagine – the power to break the rules – and such an individual would never leave his son unprotected. Somehow, he will be watching over Nathan. Believe me.’

But do I want an alien power watching over my son? Annie asked herself. She finished her cake, and stroked Hoover’s rough head, and tried not to feel the future touching her with its shadow.

The sailors had made it to the sea via the little harbour of Grimstone, and enjoyed themselves very much learning how to tack out in the bay, where a brisk wind whipped the waves into scuds. The river journey back took more than two hours, since the Glyde was winding, and Michael observed the speed limit, so it was dark before they reached the mooring outside Riverside House. They had left the breeze behind in the bay and it was a clear still night with a young moon not bright enough to obscure the stars.

‘There’s the saucepan,’ Hazel said. ‘And Orion’s belt.’

‘Do you know your stars?’ Michael asked.

‘Nathan does.’

‘Not much,’ Nathan disclaimed.

‘You can navigate by the stars,’ Michael said, ‘if you’re out at sea. Look, there’s the Pole Star, and the Evening Star. They tell you what direction you’re going in. It’s like a route map up there.’

‘I thought you had radar,’ said George.

‘Yes, but a good sailor doesn’t need them. Not that I’m a good sailor – I don’t know the sky well enough.’

‘Do you know what that star is?’ Nathan asked, pointing. ‘The one just under Orion.’

‘No idea. I told you, I’m not really an expert. I just remember the easy ones.’

‘Is that the new star we found last year?’ said George. ‘The one that wasn’t on the chart?’

‘You found a new star?’ Michael was amused. ‘Well, it’s a busy sky up there. Maybe it was an old one that had popped out for a tea break when the chart was drawn up.’

Nathan found the opportunity to tread on George’s foot. ‘My star chart’s pretty basic,’ he said.

It was back, the unknown star, hanging above the village; he was almost sure it hadn’t been visible further downriver. He didn’t know why, but he wasn’t prepared to discuss it with grown-ups yet – not even a grown-up as nice as Michael. It was their star, they had located it, a private star shining over Eade.

‘Like the star of Bethlehem,’ Hazel said later.

‘That’s silly,’ George objected. ‘There’s nothing special about Eade. Even if it was the second coming, Jesus would have to be born in the hospital at Crowford, like my cousin Eleanor. That’s where the – the maternity unit is. And the Bethlehem star was big and sparkly: the three kings followed it from another country. Ours isn’t really noticeable at all. I still think it’s a UFO.’

‘Why would a UFO be interested in Eade?’ Hazel retorted scornfully. She thought George was getting much too assertive.

‘Why would a star?’

‘Shut up arguing,’ Nathan admonished. Michael joined them (he had been locking up the boat), and they cut through the gardens of Riverside House and set off along the lane towards the village. Nathan tried not to keep glancing upwards, but sometimes he couldn’t help himself, and he half fancied the star was looking back at him, gazing down from its viewpoint in the night like an unwinking eye.

THREE The Luck of the Thorns

Annie wondered a good deal about her conversation with Bartlemy and his theories concerning Nathan’s conception. On the one hand she dismissed them as bizarre, on a par with the worst of New Age mysticism, crystal power, geomancy, and the sort of people who talked about former incarnations. On the other hand, Bartlemy was not that kind of person, and the fold in her memory – the timeless moment locked away – was something she felt, dimly now, but still real even after the passage of over thirteen years. She could recall clearly the deep shock she had experienced, less from Daniel’s death than from her own involvement in it, her journey to another place, forgotten but still sensed, forever a part of her, forever changing her. It remained always the most intense event of her life … but founded on what? Fantasy – delusion – her imagination overworking in an attempt to blot out the abyss of her loss? No, she decided; in the end, you must trust yourself, because if not yourself, whom can you trust? Besides, she had seen them, she had heard their whisperings, and if shadows walked in this world, then anything was possible, in any world. She sat in the bookshop on a quiet afternoon, her fingers slackening on the computer keyboard, revolving these things in her mind, always returning to the same enigma: Nathan’s paternity. It was strange how she had accepted it, over the years, rarely troubling herself with speculation. And now …

For the first time, Annie found herself trying to go back – and back – into her memory, into the past, into the unopened rooms of her subconscious. She thought she must have been afraid to remember, to even make the attempt, but now it was necessary, it was urgent. She pictured the pallor of that hospital room, Daniel lying there, the bruising on his face dark, dark against the whiteness of his skin, white bandages, white pillow … Daniel slipping away from her … and the sudden opening of his eyes, and the love in them that stabbed her, even now, making a wound that would always be fresh, always raw, as long as her heart beat. She clung to that moment, and shrank from it, because beside it all the other moments of her life were as shadows and half-lights; but this time she knew she must go beyond it, opening up the pain, reaching into death itself. Her fingers slid from the keyboard; her face emptied. There were impressions – colours – a spinning sensation – falling into softness, warmth, touch. There was a love enfolding her, mind and body, filling every pore, eclipsing both heart and thought, absorbing her into its passion and its potency. Daniel’s love – it must be Daniel – but Daniel had given much, and taken little, and this was a love which took everything, all that she was, and all that she had, and gave only on its own terms, in its own way. A great gift, a gift that was worth the price, though she paid with her life and her soul …

There was a violent jolt, and her head was in her hands, and the world slid back into place. She looked up, and saw the bookshop, and her current screensaver, fish swimming through a coral grove, and the spiralling dust-motes caught in a ray of sunshine from a small side window. Gradually her pulse steadied, but she didn’t move. After an hour or more, she got up and went to make tea.

When the tea was ready she returned to the table, sat down, sipped, pressed a few keys on the computer, tapped out an e-mail to other dealers about a rare first edition she was trying to obtain for a client. But her thought was elsewhere. She had listened to Bartlemy’s theory, but hadn’t really digested the implications. Something – someone – had taken her, in the instant of Daniel’s death, and made her pregnant. She had been invaded and violated, when she was open and vulnerable, when she had offered her whole being, to Daniel, for Daniel – but it was not Daniel who had accepted. Some alien power had seized her and used her, drawing a veil in her mind to blind her, leaving her with … Nathan. She loved Nathan as much as she had loved Daniel, though differently, but in that moment it didn’t matter. A slow-burning anger mounted in her, like no anger she had ever known, a white fire with which she could have torn down the walls between worlds, and stormed across the multiverse to find her ravisher. He had imprinted her with his spirit, but she would tear him out, and take back the life he had riven from her, and the love he had poisoned, and the soul he had left broken or benumbed. Her heart raged until the tea grew cold, and the fire died within her, and the tears came and came and would not stop.

Hazel Bagot found her there, when she came round to borrow a book for school. ‘What’s wrong?’ she said, horrified. ‘Annie, Annie, what’s wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ Annie sobbed, struggling for self-control, and Hazel put her arms round her, awkwardly, embarrassed to find an adult weeping with such abandon, though she had seen her mother cry, often and often. Her bracelet caught in Annie’s hair, pulling it sharply, so she started with the pain, and Hazel sprang back, stammering an apology, and ran out into the street. And there was Michael, walking towards her, and she dragged him inside, though he offered little resistance, and left him to do what he could in the way of comfort, while she headed home to brood on the mystery of it, with Annie’s hair snagged on her bracelet.

In the shop, Annie laid her head against Michael’s shoulder, and wept herself to a standstill.

‘What is it?’ he said. ‘Can I help?’

‘No. Thanks. It’s just … something a long time ago, something I never understood … never realized till now.’

‘Can you tell me?’

‘No. Sorry. It’s too …’

‘Too private?’ he suggested.

‘Too difficult.’ She looked up at him, red-eyed, rubbing her nose with the back of her hand, like a child. ‘Excuse me. I need a tissue. Possibly several.’

‘I’ll get them.’ He got up. ‘Where –’

‘Loo paper. In the bathroom. Upstairs on your left. But you shouldn’t …’

He ran upstairs, returning presently with a skein of toilet paper.

‘Thank you,’ Annie said again, feeling helpless and rather foolish. She blew her nose vigorously, wondering what she could say, unwilling to lie when he was being so kind.

But Michael asked no more questions. ‘If there’s anything I can do …?’

‘No, really. I’ll be fine now. I’d just like to be alone.’

‘Sure?’ She nodded. He stood looking down at her, and for once the crooked smile wasn’t in evidence. ‘Okay. But I meant what I said. If there’s anything I can do, ever, you have only to ask. It sounds melodramatic to say you’re alone in the world – I know that’s not exactly the case – but you don’t have a husband or family, at any rate, not round here. I want you to know you can call on me, any time.’

He does like me, Annie thought, and the knowledge warmed her, and unsettled her, more than she would have expected, ruffling what little serenity she had left.

She thought of asking him: How would Rianna feel about that? But of course she didn’t.

Not long after his birthday Nathan went walking in the woods near Thornyhill. He had left Hoover behind, ostensibly because he wanted to watch for birds and squirrels, but really because he needed some time to himself, to think things over. Hazel had told him about finding his mother in tears, and he had asked Annie what had upset her, but all she would say was that it didn’t matter now. ‘I was crying over spilt milk, and everyone knows that’s a waste of energy. What’s done is done. It’s nothing you need worry about.’ He didn’t want to press her, but instinct told him there was something very wrong, something important, one of many nebulous troubles that threatened to disturb the pattern of his life. The vision of the cup – dreams of another world – the illegal immigrant – Effie Carlow – Michael Addison – the star. He sat down on a log some way from any path, his gaze resting absently on the fluttering of leaf-shadows across the woodland floor, primrose clumps around a tree-bole, a mist of bluebells stretching away into a green distance. There was no traffic noise from the road, only the song of unseen birds. It was a beautiful scene, restful to the soul, but he was thirteen and his soul was restless. There were so many things he wanted to know …

The face was watching him from the crook between branch and tree-trunk: he must have been staring at it for some time without seeing it, the way you stare at a puzzle picture until the instant when the hidden image becomes clear. He thought at first that it was an animal, maybe a pine marten – he had always wanted to see a pine marten – but the face, though pointed, was hairless, bark-coloured and thrush-speckled, watching him sideways from a dark slanting eye. He became aware of spindle limbs clinging to the tree-trunk, leafy rags of clothing. Even so, it was several minutes before he said, very softly: ‘Woody?’

The woodwose shrank away, retreating into the shelter of the tree.

‘Please don’t go! It’s me, Nathan. Woody, please …’

‘Nathan?’ It was the slightest of whispers, emanating from behind the oak.

‘Yes, it is. Really …’

‘Nathan … was little. No bigger than me.’

‘I grew up,’ Nathan said. ‘I couldn’t help that. It’s what people do. I’m a teenager now.’

‘You went away.’ The woodwose was still invisible, only a voice among the leaves.

‘I know. I’m sorry. They told me you were imaginary, and I suppose … I got to believing them.’

‘They?’ The tip of a long nose reappeared, followed by the gleam of an eye, the twitch of an ear.

‘People. My mother. Some of my friends. It wasn’t their fault: they didn’t know you. It was my fault.’

‘You’ve grown too big,’ Woody said doubtfully. ‘Too big to talk to.’

‘I’m the same,’ Nathan insisted. ‘Look at me, Woody.’

The woodwose studied him, first from one eye, then the other. ‘You are Nathan,’ he said at last, ‘but you are not the same. You are … more. Perhaps too much …’

‘It feels that way sometimes,’ Nathan said. ‘But you can still talk to me. Honestly you can. Please come out, Woody. Please.’

Slowly, tentatively, the woodwose emerged into full view, staying close to the tree, no longer relaxed as he had been with his child playmate but a nervous, distrustful creature, easily startled, poised not to flee but to fade, back into the concealment of the wood. ‘Do you,’ he murmured, ‘do you have any – Smarties? You brought some once, I remember, in a tube with a lid on. They were small, and many-coloured – all different colours – and they tasted very good.’

‘I’ll bring some next time,’ Nathan promised. ‘I’ll come again soon. What … what have you been doing, all these years?’

But he knew the answer. ‘Being here,’ said the woodwose. ‘Waiting.’

‘For me?’

‘I – yes. You are all I have. You told me so. My parents, my friend.’ And, after a pause: ‘What is imaginary?’

‘It means, I invented you. You came from my mind. Where did you come from, Woody?’

‘From your mind,’ said the woodwose. ‘I think.’

Nathan remembered the man he had pulled from the seas of another cosmos, onto the beach at Pevensey Bay. He had no memory of it, but perhaps he had found Woody, too, in a dream, in the woods of some alternative world. It was an uncomfortable idea, though he hadn’t yet had time to work out why. The two of them sat for a while, almost the way they used to, watching a beetle creeping through the leaf-mould, and sunspots dancing on a tree-trunk, and a tiny bird with a piping call which Nathan would never have seen without his friend to guide him. ‘Would you look out for anything-different?’ Nathan asked at last. ‘There are things happening now, strange things. I can’t explain properly because I don’t understand, but I think you should be wary. If you see-oh, I don’t know – anything unusual, weird …’

‘Weird?’ Woody looked bewildered. There were few words in his vocabulary.

‘Odd. Peculiar. Wrong.’ Nathan paused for a minute, struck by a sudden thought. ‘How do you speak my language, Woody? It isn’t natural to you, is it?’

‘I must have learned from you,’ said the woodwose. ‘I’ve never spoken to anybody else.’

Nathan didn’t say any more. He bade his friend goodbye, and set off back towards Bartlemy’s house. An awful fear was growing in him, that he had brought Woody here, had dreamed him into this world and then abandoned him, and now the woodwose had no other friend, no other place, no other tongue. It was a frightening responsibility, but the wider implications were worse. He had no control over his dreams. (What had Effie Carlow said? Dream carefully.) Perhaps, if he really had this power, this ability, he might find himself bringing other people here, other creatures, unhappy exiles who could never go home, unless he found a way to dream them back again. The idea was so terrifying it made his mind spin. He forced himself to think rationally, to analyse what it was in his dreaming that had transported the man in the water from world to world – if that was indeed what had happened. There had been the urge to help, to save him – a huge impulse of will. After all, he had only brought back one person – not any of the xaurians or their riders, or the man in the white mask. And maybe some similar impulse had drawn Woody to Thornyhill to be his companion. A selfish impulse, a child’s impulse: the desire for a secret friend. ‘And I couldn’t send him back,’ he reflected, remorsefully, ‘even if I had the power. I don’t remember where he came from.’ He resolved that he would dream carefully from now on, he would suppress all such urges, he wouldn’t – he mustn’t – allow his feelings to dictate his actions.

He wanted to tell Bartlemy – he wanted to tell someone – but he feared to be treated as an over-imaginative child, diminished by adult scepticism. Somehow, because she was so old, so eccentric, Effie Carlow had been different: he could have endured her scorn, if she had scorned him. But Bartlemy was the person he respected most in the world, knowledgeable and wise, and in his inmost heart Nathan shrank from the very notion of his disbelief.

Even so, the need to confide might have been too much for him, if he had found Bartlemy alone when he returned to Thornyhill. But in the living room he found Rowena Thorn, Mrs Vanstone to give her proper name, drinking tea and talking earnestly about something. She was a long, lean, tweedy sort of woman in her mid-sixties, with a face which had once been plain, until character and humour had left its impress on her features. She was given to serving on committees, organizing, charitable events, and riding her friends’ horses since she no longer maintained one of her own. In between, she ran an antiques shop in Chizzledown. She greeted Nathan absent-mindedly, though she normally found time to inquire after his progress at school, and reverted immediately to the former subject under discussion.

‘The provenance is clear: they have all the necessary documentation. It is the genuine article, I’m sure of it. You’ve seen our records. That awful little tit Rowland sold it to this Birnbaum chap just before the war – he was a German, too, frightfully bad form if you ask me – and then went and got himself killed, silly business really, survived the Somme and then got run over by a tank or something in the week before the Armistice. Henry died in the ’flu epidemic and that was more or less the end of the family. My father was only a child at the time, besides being just a cousin, and there was nothing left for him to inherit but debts. My grandmother always said that when we lost the cup we lost our luck, but personally I’ve never been sure about that. I remember Great-aunt Verity contended it was our curse, an evil burden the family had a duty to bear. Probably all nonsense, but you never know. The point is, it’s ours, and if it really has resurfaced I’m damn well going to get it back.’

Nathan, who was becoming interested, helped himself to some elderflower cordial from the kitchen (Bartlemy made his own) and sat down unobtrusively next to Hoover.

‘But if Rowland Thorn sold it, as you maintain,’ Bartlemy was saying, ‘I don’t quite see how you can make a claim. Unless you can manage to buy it back from the present owner?’

‘Good Lord, no, it’s practically priceless. According to what I hear, the British Museum is after it, but it may be too much for their budget. Depends on the other bidders, of course: might go for a song, might run into millions. No: I’m trying another tack. I intend to prove the original sale was actually illegal.’

‘How will you do that?’ Bartlemy asked.

‘As you know, old Josevius acquired the cup somewhere back in the Dark Ages. Given to him by the Devil, one story has it; another one says it was an angel.’

‘I read it was supposed to be a holy relic,’ Nathan said. He found it curiously difficult to speak of it, as if there were weights on his tongue. Yet he wanted to. He wanted to say: I found the chapel. I saw the cup. He couldn’t. Hoover, he noticed, merely looked inquiringly at him.

‘Depends which story you favour. Didn’t know you were interested in my family history, Nathan. Good for you. Too many kids your age only want to play computer games and listen to pop music, far as I can see. History’s important. The past belongs to all of us. Where was I?’

‘Josevius,’ Bartlemy prompted.

‘Right. Well, he got the cup, somehow or other. Some sources say he made it, but I don’t believe that. Never been any craftsmen in our family: we haven’t the brains. Anyway, story goes he charged his descendants to hold it in trust, though heaven knows for whom – or what – never to sell it, or lend it, or give it away, or we would lose everything. Should have been kept in the ancient chapel, but that was destroyed, so they had it here, that secret cupboard in the chimney, you’ll have found it –’

Nathan’s eyes widened. ‘I didn’t know there was a –’

‘I did,’ said Bartlemy. ‘Yes, I found it. I always wondered what it was for.’

‘Never saw it myself but my great-aunt spoke of it. Must show me some time. The cup stayed there for centuries; strangers weren’t even allowed to look at it. Lot of odd legends grew up around it, but mostly they stayed in the family. Somewhere along the line it got labelled the Sangreal: couple of historians picked up on that one, said it meant Saint Grail, the Holy Grail, but they got the etymology wrong. The word comes from sang, blood. That’s French, Nathan, but it’s a similar word in a dozen languages. Rumour was, if you were going to die, or some catastrophe was imminent, you’d look in the cup and see it full of blood. Nothing holy about that. It’s all been written down, from time to time, by those of my ancestors who could read and write. Not a bright lot, the Thorns, I’m afraid. Point is, at some stage in the fifteenth century the issue of selling it must have come up, and one of them made the injunction against it legal. I don’t have the document, but there are two separate references to it, one in the diary of a contemporary, the other in the account of an attempted purchase in the Victorian era. The document existed: no question about it. Hopefully it still does. Wondered if you’d mind my having a look for it here?’

‘Of course not,’ Bartlemy said. ‘But I’m pretty sure I’ve been through all the papers in the house, and I’ve never seen such a thing.’

‘Can I help?’ Nathan asked. ‘It could be in another secret hiding place, like that cupboard you mentioned.’

‘Could be,’ said Rowena Thorn. ‘Any help is welcome. Think it’s like an adventure story, do you? Harry Potter and the Cup of Blood, that kind of thing?’

Nathan only smiled in answer. He thought: Harry Potter has magical powers. His friends have magical powers. Me – I have to dream carefully. He ached to tell them about the chapel, and his vision there – if it was a vision – but the words would not come. He reflected that real adventures weren’t about good guys and bad guys. Real adventures were shadows and confusion and doubt, and a terrifying personal responsibility.

Maybe there’s an injunction on my talking of the cup. Not legal, but magical. Or some sort of hypnotism …

‘Who’s got – it – now?’ he inquired. ‘I’m sorry if you’ve already told Uncle Barty, but I missed that part. Or – or is that private information?’

‘Lord, no: it’s public enough. It’s some Austrian chap, father’s a count, Graf they call it, grandfather was in the SS. The Birnbaums were a Jewish family, very wealthy, major collectors, paintings, antiques, the lot. The Nazis did for them, of course, and the grandfather – Graf Von Holsten-Pils or whatever he called himself – pocketed most of the loot. After he died the next count seems to have kept a low profile, hoped the stolen goods would pass unnoticed among the rest of the ancestral heirlooms. He had a stroke last year, family fortunes on the wane, son decides to auction off some of the silver. Gets in touch with Sotheby’s – not sure why he picked on London, maybe there’s a Birnbaum who’s been sniffing around back in Germany, maybe he just thinks he’ll get more money. Apparently a lot of the stuff is originally English. Anyway, he shows them the cup with the provenance – perhaps he thinks granddad got it legally – and a chum of mine there gets hold of me. Wanted to check it out, had no idea I might have a claim. Haven’t told him, of course. Want to get my hands on that injunction first. Never fire till you can see the whites of their eyes, so my father used to say. Mind you, he was talking about stag-hunting, not warfare.’

‘Is this war, Rowena?’ Bartlemy asked mildly. ‘Do you really believe this cup is the luck of the Thorns?’

‘I’m an antique-dealer,’ she said. ‘It’s a valuable antique – could be unique – and it was the property of my family. It should be again. Don’t know about luck. My father believed-my grandfather believed. I’m a sceptic about most things, but the belief is there: it’s in my blood. It always comes down to blood, when you talk about the cup. Supposing it was the Grail – if there is such a thing …’

‘That’s the question,’ said Bartlemy. ‘The blood of Christ-whoever he was …’ His voice sounded very distant.

Nathan sat like a stock, unable to move. His tongue seemed to stick to the roof of his mouth. He wanted to say something – anything – to cry out and break through the spell or trance, but the harder he tried, the more difficult it became.

‘You’re a sceptic, like me,’ Rowena Thorn was saying. ‘No evidence for any Grail, nothing but stories. Great-aunt Verity said Josevius could have been Joseph of Arimathea, the chap who’s supposed to have retrieved the Grail relics and brought them to England. How d’you work that out? said my father. We know Josevius died around 660 AD – forget the precise date, but it’s set down somewhere. If he was around for the Crucifixion he’d have been getting on a bit.’

‘How does family legend deal with that one?’ Bartlemy said.

‘Sold his soul to the Devil – told you the Devil came into it – lived for centuries. Even the stories are rubbish, you see. In charge of holy relics one minute, in the pay of Satan the next. None of it stands up.’

‘What did your great-aunt have to say about it?’ Bartlemy wondered. ‘Do you remember?’

‘Said the Grail was evil, not holy. King Arthur and co. got it wrong. She was a devout Christian: thought it was a pagan thing. Souvenir from the scene of the crime – most terrible crime in history. She thought we had to keep it from doing harm. Went a bit batty in her old age. Still, it made sense to her.’

‘Has the cup ever been carbon-dated?’ Bartlemy said thoughtfully.

‘Shouldn’t think so. Unless the Grafs had it done. Funnily enough, my chum at Sotheby’s was talking about that. If the cup’s two thousand years old, might really be a candidate for the Grail legend. On the other hand, if it was made in the Dark Ages …’

‘Exactly.’

‘Doesn’t make any odds to me, though. Belongs to the Thorns, whatever it is.’ An obstinate look settled about her mouth, erasing some of the humour. ‘Must get it back,’ she muttered to herself.

Nathan, finding he could move again, fidgeted in his chair, extending a hand to ruffle Hoover’s fur.

‘Still want to help me out?’ Rowena Thorn asked him. ‘Not as good as buried treasure, looking for a piece of paper, but it might mean treasure for me. There’d be a reward in it, promise you that …’

‘It’s okay,’ Nathan said. ‘I don’t want a reward. I’ll look anyway.’

‘Good man. Teach you the right stuff at Ffylde, do they? Better than the comprehensive at Crowford, any day. All they seem to do there is take drugs and beat up the teachers.’ As Hazel and George were both there, Nathan knew this was an exaggeration, but he didn’t say so.

‘He gets his principles from his mother,’ Bartlemy said gently.

Rowena Thorn set down her teacup. ‘Better be off,’ she said. ‘Thanks for everything, Bartlemy. You’ve always been a good friend.’

‘You don’t mind my living here, do you?’ he inquired curiously. ‘Your ancestral home …’

‘Good heavens no. Hardly a mansion, is it? The Thorns never had the money for that. Just inconvenient, hell to maintain – never dared ask you about the plumbing. It isn’t as if I ever lived here myself. No sentiment involved.’

‘You never owned the cup, either,’ Bartlemy pointed out.

‘That’s different,’ she said. ‘I told you. That’s a matter of blood.’

At supper that night, Nathan told Annie about the cup of the Thorns – it didn’t appear to be a secret – or as much as he was able to tell, without talking about his vision, or the dreams of blood. Hazel was there; George came later. They both absorbed the story with enthusiasm and determined to search for the missing injunction. ‘D’you think it will be, like, a piece of parchment?’ George said. ‘A scroll or something, yellowing and with spiky writing.’

‘It’s fifteenth century,’ Nathan said. ‘I think they had paper in the fifteenth century. When did what’s-his-name invent the printing press?’

‘Caxton,’ Annie said, ‘in the fifteenth century. There was a lot going on then. Would anyone like some ice cream?’

Not surprisingly, everyone did. ‘Have you ever had a book here as old as that?’ Hazel asked when the ice cream had been shared out.

‘No. I had a seventeenth century two-volume history once: that was the oldest. Anything from the fifteenth century would probably be in a museum. Does Rowena have any idea what this document looks like?’

‘Don’t think so,’ Nathan said. ‘We’ll just have to go through absolutely everything at Thornyhill.’

‘If your Uncle Barty doesn’t mind …’

‘It could be hidden in a book,’ Nathan pursued. ‘Secret papers very often are.’

‘But – Thornyhill is full of books!’ Hazel exclaimed, daunted. ‘It’ll take forever.’ Suddenly, the prospect of finding a missing document didn’t seem half so interesting. ‘Perhaps Mr Goodman won’t want us rooting around there. He might prefer to do it himself …’

‘Is there a reward?’ George asked.

‘Yes,’ Nathan said, looking rueful, ‘but I told Mrs Thorn we wouldn’t want it.’

‘We didn’t,’ George and Hazel chimed simultaneously.

‘You have to find it first,’ Annie pointed out. ‘Then you can worry about the reward. Are you sure it’s actually at Thornyhill?’

‘It must be,’ Nathan said. ‘Please don’t make things more complicated. Anyway, Mrs Thorn thought so.’

They retreated to the Den to discuss the problem further, until Hazel switched to the subject of a forthcoming party which she wanted Nathan to attend with her. ‘There’s going to be a disco,’ she said.

‘I don’t like discos,’ George offered. ‘They’re stupid.’

‘You only say that because you’re too scared to ask anyone to dance,’ Hazel said with devastating penetration. ‘Please come with me, Nathan. Not as – as my boyfriend or anything, just for … moral support.’

‘You – with a boyfriend!’ George guffawed.

‘No reason why Hazel shouldn’t have one, if she wants,’ Nathan said. ‘The thing is, next Saturday I was meaning to start searching –’

‘Not in the evening,’ Hazel said. ‘We could look for the injunction in the afternoon, and then go to the party.’

‘Okay.’ Nathan was not inspired by discos. He hoped, now they were teenagers, Hazel wasn’t going to start acting too much like a girl – or at any rate, like other girls. ‘Will there be drugs and people getting beaten up? Only according to Mrs Thorn, that’s what goes on at Crowford Comprehensive. It’ll be an awful let-down if it’s just dancing,’ he smiled.

Hazel giggled. ‘Jason Wicks got caught trying to sell Es last term,’ she said. ‘But it turned out they were his mother’s pills for cleaning her contact lenses.’

Maybe I could use drugs to control my dreams of the other world, Nathan thought. Maybe if I took sleeping pills …

But he hadn’t had one of those dreams for some time.

His friends left around eleven, and he climbed up to the skylight and sat on the edge, gazing up at the unknown star. He had still been unable to trace it on any chart, and a couple of weeks earlier his astronomy class had spent an hour on top of a tower at Ffylde studying the night sky, but there had been no sign of it. The star was there for him, watching him, a single pale eye effortlessly camouflaged among the constellations. He knew he should be afraid, but it was difficult to feel fear when the night was so beautiful, and the star-sparkle so magical: he could almost imagine it was benevolent, the eye of a secret guardian or kindly angel, not merely watching but watching over him, watching out for him, keeping him safe. But why would he need to be kept safe, and from whom (or what)? And why did he feel that it was all connected – the star, the dreams of the other world, and the cup of the Thorns – the whispering cup – the Sangreal?

‘Nathan!’ his mother’s voice carried from downstairs. ‘Bedtime!’

‘I’m thirteen,’ Nathan objected, sliding off the window frame. ‘I’m too old to have bedtimes.’

‘You’re positively ancient,’ Annie called, ‘and you still need your sleep, especially during the term. Come down now.’

‘Coming.’

In bed, he drifted comfortably into sleep, at ease despite the problems niggling round the borders of his thought. And then some time in the night the mists of slumber withdrew, and he was in the light. The light of the other world, a burning sunset with streaks of cyclamen cloud above a puddle of molten gold that spilled along the rim of the sky. He saw it from the top of a tower so high that it must be the tallest in the city; spires and pinnacles glinted far below him, sparking fire from the sunglow; on an adjacent segment of roof he made out two xaurians tethered, tiny at that distance; another wheeled in the gulf of air between. Further down, he saw the city lights coming on as dusk deepened, window by window, lamp by lamp, creeping upwards out of the shadows until every building was ribbed with beads of glitter, and the moving flecks of far-off skimmers flashed eyelights of green and blue and neon-pink. Then somehow he was inside the tower, descending what appeared to be a liftshaft. He floated through closed doors along the gallery he had seen before with the twisted pillars, and into the semicircular room. But now the night outside was altogether dark, and screens covered most of the curving window. The man in the white mask – ruler, dictator, president, whatever he was – sat at his desk with his back turned. A woman had come in. There was something shocking about her appearance, but it took Nathan a minute to realize what it was.

Her face was naked.

‘There may be some lingering daylight,’ the man said, without looking round. ‘You shouldn’t walk around unshielded.’

‘The light is gone.’ Her voice was cool and differed from that of the xaurian rider and the purple-cowled hologram in one essential: it was not subservient. Nathan found himself seeing her in profile and thought: She is very beautiful. Her hair was hidden under a white head-dress, like some kind of wimple; she wore a long white tunic and trousers, and her skin had the pale golden hue associated in our world with Orientals. The lines of her cheekbone and jaw reminded him of pictures he had seen of the head of Nefertiti, though her neck was longer, slightly too long for an ordinary human, and as she turned towards him he realized the planes of her face were subtly different, though it would have been hard to explain in what way. A millimetre here, a millimetre there, and the whole visage was somehow distorted, though its beauty remained undiminished. But then, Nathan reflected, maybe our faces would look that way to her – as if a fractional adjustment had produced that impression of wrongness, of something out of kilter. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘what does it matter? I have little fear of death, even the sundeath, the shriveller of all that lives. The slow hours weary me, and my breath galls. I would welcome Death, if I could find her.’

‘Don’t be in such haste to destroy your beauty,’ the man said, turning now to gaze at her. ‘It still gives me pleasure to look on it, and there is little enough cause for pleasure left.’

‘To be beautiful,’ she said, ‘it is necessary to have a world to be beautiful in. You wrote a letter to me once, in the far-off days of youth and hopefulness, saying that creation itself was for my benefit. The earth, the moons, the sun, the sea were made only to frame your loveliness. Now, the earth is foul, and the sun poisons the sea, and the three moons of Eos turn red. Without creation, without a place to be, I am nothing. You are so clever, Grandir: make me a world to live in.’

‘I cannot make worlds,’ he said, ‘even I, but maybe … I can take one. Have patience awhile, Halmé, and hide your face from the daylight a little longer. I will find a world for you, ‘I promise.’

The woman called Halmé went to the window, sliding one of the screens aside, and Nathan saw she was right: there was a huge moon, not quite full, hanging in the sky, and it was red, and eastward another moon-sliver had the same blood-stained hue.

‘Close the screen!’ said the man. ‘The moon is too bright. It could be dangerous.’

The woman obeyed, but slowly. The more he looked at her, the more beautiful Nathan found her; it was as if his sight was adjusting to her different facial proportions, and now the women of his own world would look forever wrong to him. He watched her leaving: she moved swiftly and very gracefully, the white ends of her wimple fluttering behind her. Halmé was her name, he was certain, but Grandir, he thought, might be a title, like Lord or Excellency. He was thinking about that when the scene changed.

The masked ruler was climbing a stair. The stair moved, like an escalator but in a spiral, twisting round and round inside a cylindrical shaft, and the man was stepping briskly upwards, perhaps impatient of its slowness. At the top was a circular chamber with no windows: the architects of this world evidently favoured curves in construction. The only light came from a number of clear globes, some smooth-sided, some facetted, which appeared to be suspended in mid-air, though as Nathan drew closer he saw there were no threads or wires supporting them: they simply floated, motionless or in orbit. A pale radiance came from the heart of each, yet it illuminated nothing in the room save the globes themselves. The man moved to the centre of the chamber where a slightly larger globe with many faces revolved slowly in one place. Lances of light emanated from it, sinking into the darkness, never reaching the walls. The man stretched one hand towards it without actually making contact and murmured a single word: ‘Fia!’ A white dazzle flooded the room, so that for an instant Nathan was blinded, even though it was only a dream; then the glare retreated back into the globe, and Nathan saw a picture appear above it, as if projected onto the ceiling. At first it was difficult to make out, since he was looking at it from underneath, but then he realized it was a roof – he could see tiles – with a square hole in it, an open skylight, and a boy and a girl emerging into view, staring and pointing, pointing out of the picture, down at the globe. It was a minute or two before he understood. He was seeing himself, himself and Hazel, looking up at a star that didn’t belong …

He awoke much later with the dream still fresh in his mind. It was still dark, and he got up very quietly and stole downstairs to the cupboard between the shelves, and climbed the ladder to the Den, and opened the skylight, and there was the star, only he knew now it wasn’t a star, it was a globe that shone both in this world and the other one, a watching eye for a man whose face was never seen. A guardian angel – a manipulator – a menace. Nathan didn’t know, and the only way to find out was to dream on. Or maybe it was all pure fancy, a story invented by his subconscious mind to explain something he couldn’t comprehend. For if it was true why – why in all the worlds – would a ruler so powerful, so desperate, clearly facing some cosmic catastrophe, be interested in him?

He closed the skylight, descended the ladder, went back upstairs to bed. But the question followed him, nagging at his mind, keeping him from sleep: the unimaginable, unanswerable why.

Nathan didn’t get a chance to tell Hazel everything for another fortnight. ‘It’ll be easier when the summer holidays start,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll have more time together – time to find the missing injunction –’ they had barely begun searching ‘– and time to sort this out.’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.