Occasionally he glared at the phone, or scowled at it. Twice he mouthed mock insults at it, making himself smile as Margaret would have done.
‘It’s a damn nuisance.’
‘It’s communication, Arthur, and it’s necessary, so stop swearing at it.’
Yet, as, later, he sat brooding, his curiosity had been aroused. It was unlikely that different people were calling all at the same time. No, it was the same person. But who?
Arthur suddenly remembered something Margaret had shown him but never tried: call back.
Hmmm.
Maybe not.
Maybe just check the number?
Maybe go and see if there was a message?
Maybe just stay right where he was.
The phone began ringing again. He was too late to pick up but he dialled the number to find out who had called. And he saw a message had been left.
‘Humph!’
Frowning and reluctant, holding the phone a little way from his ear as if in disgust, he listened to the message.
It was from the person in the world he least wished to speak to.
A former student, Erich Bohr was now director of one of NASA’s research agencies in an area in which Arthur was a world authority. Bohr was also a Special Adviser to the President of the United States in aspects of astronomy and the cosmos that might have military implications.
Arthur knew perfectly well why Bohr was calling him so insistently here in the outback of Woolstone in England; he wanted something only Arthur had: access to the Hyddenworld.
‘The question is, why now?’ he said aloud.
He went straight to his computer and online to see if he could find out. He had only to see the headlines to know why Bohr had called.
‘Oh, dear God,’ said Arthur Foale, appalled. ‘Oh dear God.’
7
THE SCYTHE OF TIME
At dusk that same day the Fyrd finally gave up waiting for Stort and the others to show up. They never found their hiding place.
‘If they’re not up there tomorrow morning, we’re moving on,’ said Jack.
But they left suddenly and much sooner, while it was still pitch-black, startled awake by sudden violent noise at which Georg was already up and growling.
They heard a menacing hissing and sighing, and the rending of tree trunks and branches living and dead, and Stort said urgently, ‘That’s the Scythe of Time . . . we must flee this place. Now!’
They struck camp in silence, without a word, each to their task. In a few moments they were dressed, their portersacs packed, their bedrolls secure, staves in hand.
‘Follow me,’ Stort ordered them, ‘and you too, Georg.’
The dog ran ahead of them.
‘Georg!’
But he was gone.
‘Stort, slow down, I can’t see you,’ whispered Jack, his hand strong on his stave, ready.
‘Then hold on to my ’sac!’
‘I’m doing the same behind you, Jack,’ said Katherine.
‘Right,’ cried Stort, for the hiss-whisper and loud destruction of trees was getting nearer and louder by the moment. ‘Let’s go!’
Together, struggling up the gully, with the horrible sense that the noise and rending of the trees and vegetation was fast on their heels, they made for the bare slopes above. They hoped that the monstrous thing would not follow where there were no trees.
But it was not like that.
There were no stars, no moon, only a bitter, unseasonal wind. Nothing at all to guide them on their way but for occasional glimpses of the twinkling lights of human settlements in the vale far below, which were no use at all.
‘I can light a lantern,’ said Jack.
‘No!’ said Stort. ‘No time. If the Scythe catches us up we’ll be lost forever. Come on!’
That was easier said than done.
The high fell that had been so bare when they arrived was not so now. As the three hurried on in the darkness they began crashing into gnarled and thorny branches that shouldn’t have been there, their jerkins and ’sacs getting caught in thickets, their hose torn to tatters by brambles, tight branches of trees they could not see arching overhead, banging hard into their foreheads, grabbing their staves. On and on, as if they were in an ancient forest and followed by ancient beasts which rent the very trees behind them, and would tear them apart too if they caught up with them, and scatter their limbs aside.
‘We’ll make faster progress if I do make a light,’ gasped Jack after half an hour of trekking to what felt like nowhere.
‘Try it,’ conceded Stort, whose breaths were short and wheezy, ‘but be quick . . .’
The hissing and sighing crowded in on them, the breaking of root and branch deafening their ears as the wind-blown leaves stung their eyes and faces like hail.
‘Hurry!’ cried Katherine.
Jack’s first lucifer blew straight out.
His second shone briefly, showing only the alarm in his eyes, and died.
At his third, a nearby tree lost patience and whipped a branch like savage fingers down on his head, against his chest and scattered the lucifers to the wind.
Katherine fell one way, Stort moved forward another and Jack went a third, while the hiss-sigh Scythe came on, the screams of dying trees behind them and to their sides, the claws of branches, the savage upended hooks of roots grabbing their arms and pinning them to their sides, tripping them up, pinning them down.
‘Jack!’
‘Where are you?’
‘Stort?’
‘I can’t see you.’
‘Kather . . . ine!’
Somehow they came back together, clasping each other in the murk, blood on hands and faces, clothes in tatters, ’sacs half-torn or half-cut from their backs. Silence fell but for a whispering all around them, so they did not know which way to turn.
Jack’s hand was on Katherine’s arm, her hand on Stort’s. He stood shoulder to shoulder with Jack. Friends as one.
‘We’re stronger together,’ whispered Stort, ‘that’s why it’s abated.’
‘What is it, exactly?’ murmured Jack. ‘If I knew, maybe I could protect you both from it, though my stave’s gone dead. Look!’
They looked as best they could in the near-darkness of the night. Normally his stave had a shine or shimmer where it caught the light, however faint, sometimes of a single star, but now there was nothing. They could not even see the stave.
‘Scholars have spilt much ink over the definition of this phenomenon,’ said Stort. ‘It is not unique to the Malverns, but for reasons unknown it manifests itself very powerfully here.’
‘So if we stay like this, in a closed circle, we’re keeping it at bay?’ said Katherine.
‘A distinct possibility,’ said Stort, ‘but not for the reason you think. It is, I believe, a manifestation of collective thought and actions through time. Hills such as these, perhaps particularly these, have been stripped of life by generations of humans and, I fear, hydden. We have taken from the Earth and not given back. We did not harvest, we stole and diminished our world forever. The Scythe may be our own thoughts of shame and guilt at what we’ve done, resurrecting long-lost trees only to have them scythed down again.’
‘Not us,’ said Jack, ‘but our ancestors.’
‘In the Mirror, Jack, we are them as well, for all reflections meld to one. The Scythe is not good or bad, nor in any way judgemental. It is what has been; it is what has become. It rages along at the very edge of the future, which is why, if we cannot find escape from it now, it will consume us. We will cut ourselves down with our own thoughts.’
The hissing began again, circling them, still giving them no direction of escape.
‘But . . .’ murmured Stort.
‘What?’ said Jack.
‘It has been reported of the Scythe that those who experience it sometimes disappear, as if cut down and carried into a different time from their own. There was one report, in a seventeenth-century manuscript which . . .’
He stopped abruptly.
The hissing was growing louder and more specific in location – not far in front of them.
‘Which what!?’
‘Which said that one hydden in a company of, well, um, three actually, was suddenly gone with the shards.’
‘Shards?’ repeated Jack looking about in the swirling darkness for a clear sign of the danger they heard so clearly. ‘What are they, for Mirror’s sake?’
In his movement his hand slipped from Katherine and hers from Stort. Stort, too, turned, and the circle was broken.
The hissing immediately turned into a roar once more and refocused some yards behind Jack, from where it started to advance, the trees thick again about them, mounting up so hugely that panic overtook them and they could not even move.
Their throats dried, their hearts hammered, their feet were heavy weights too great to lift from the ground. Even their arms were paralysed and their hands, so that they were unable to raise their staves to defend themselves. The so-far-unseen Scythe swung and re-formed to something visible. It manifested as a razor-thin slit of steely light in the sky, that looked so sharp it would turn to slivers whatever it touched, so vast it seemed to reach to the ends of the Universe. The sight of it overwhelmed them with fear.
They tried to cry out but no words came.
Their hearts stilled, their eyes were wide with terror, their last moments come.
It was then, from the corner of their eyes, they caught a movement of russet light through the old trees, accompanied by a drumming of paws. Then out of the roar of the night the growing bark of a dog. Georg appeared, teeth bared and nostrils flared, to take a stance in front of Stort, the others a foot or two behind.
He dropped his head, his tail stiff and straight, his growl turned deep as if it now came from the Earth Herself. He lowered his whole body and began to advance towards the great thing that threatened them. With each slow, deliberate forward step he took, the Scythe squirmed and retreated, thinning in the sky, the ice-blue fading towards white. They felt their limbs relax, their panic going.
Georg advanced further still and they saw that the Scythe, though less than it had been, seemed now to be swirling as a mist to something more, like some creature that has suffered a brief setback in a fight and is gathering its strength to strike again.
‘Georg!’ rasped Stort, his voice returning.
But the dog did not turn back. He growled more, his pace increased as if going for the kill, he began to run into the line of the Scythe’s terrible curve.
‘Georg!’ they cried as one. ‘Come back!’
The hissing turned to a sucking, sighing sound, the Scythe retreated far into the night sky until it was barely visible at all and then it roared its rage. It swung suddenly back towards the Earth, its colour turning to that of blood, its size now spreading right across the dreadful sky. Its hiss was a sound so vile they raised their hands to block their ears.
They saw Georg stop and go back on his haunches.
He seemed to stare at the great thing coming down towards him and around him, and to think, his head to one side. He seemed to see something that puzzled him. He looked back at Stort, his eyes all hazel and russet and filled with love.
Then he turned back and stood up to face the blade of light, puny and helpless before its size and speed, and he barked a savage bark, and he growled, and as he did the blade cut through him.
Hish . . . it went right through his flesh and hish . . . and hish . . . again and again.
Georg’s body slivered to a thousand shards of exquisite light, which held his shape for a brief moment before they whirled away in different directions, like a pack of cards scattered by a gale-force wind. In among the gnarled trees of the ancient hill, cutting as they went, a hundred thousand shining facets of what he had been passed before their eyes and out of sight.
His last growl was a slice as well, melding into the Scythe sound, distorting it to something that was more gentle for a moment: his final offering, making the Scythe pull back for a few moments to give them time to flee once more.
They started running towards the nascent light of day, fighting, struggling through the thick, black trees. Running for their lives again.
Still there was forest where none should have been, for they were atop the hill, the ground falling away on either side on a stretch they had seen when they first arrived, which before was devoid of any vegetation but close-cropped sward. Then at last a shaft of light on the eastern horizon and they saw dawn begin to rise. Suddenly Stort stopped.
‘What are you doing? Come on!’ cried Jack.
‘What I am doing is forgetting that I am a scientist, or at least an inquirer!’ he shouted in Jack’s ear. ‘At the end of this you’ll ask me again what it was and unless I put myself to the test I’ll never be able to do more than offer you theories. We may never have this chance again.’
‘For Mirror’s sake, Stort!’ cried Jack and Katherine, running back to his side. It was for this kind of courage of his they loved and admired him, shown so often before, demonstrated again now. They stood and faced as one whatever it was that manifested behind them.
They saw the dim forms of old bent and broken trees, the branches and twigs that had grabbed at them as they ran, though now bent upwards in pleading supplication, as if the trees were bent and distorted mortal forms, begging not to be cut down.
Then they saw it again and with it the vast form that wielded it. Beyond the trees, dark as the darkest sky, grey in parts, a thin curving line, like a smooth black cloud curving across the sky with an arctic sun that caught its bottom edge with the only light: vast, as powerful as the Earth herself, legs like black tornados against black sky, arms and hands whole mountain ranges, body a great storm, head malevolent as it swept back what seemed to be the Scythe – whish – and brought it curving, murderous and final, back down again but nearer still – hisssss . . .
Jack had seen enough.
It seemed real enough to him and he had no intention of letting anyone disappear that night. He grabbed each of them, turned them, and pushed them onward so that once more they ran and ran.
‘But Georg is left behind!’ cried Stort.
‘Georg may have saved our lives,’ replied Jack, ‘and I’ve a feeling he can look after himself.’
The ground changed to something else that should not have been there up on the hill tops: a sizeable stream.
They tumbled headlong in, one after another, and now instead of running, were swimming for their lives towards a far bank they could not quite see. Cold, wet, gulping in water with their breaths, coughing, helping each other, the Scythe of Time breaking up the water behind them in huge waves, sending spray and spumes of foam right over them.
Until, as suddenly as they had woken into pitch-black night, they were on dry land once more and the shadows of the frightening forest fell away.
‘Where are we?’ wondered Katherine, circling round. ‘If that’s the Severn then it’s flowing in the wrong direction . . . It should be going from left to right.’
One thing was certain: they were now in meadowland. A glance at the sun corrected their mistake at once. In their blind chase over the Malverns they had become confused, thinking east was west and north, south.
Behind them, which meant eastward, was a motorway.
‘The M5,’ said Jack.
In front, or westward, the wide, marshy river.
‘The Severn,’ said Stort.
‘Which means,’ concluded Katherine, ‘that that “stream” we swam over in the dark . . .’
They eyed the wide river and the distant rise of the Malverns and shook their heads in wonder and surprise.
‘But that’s twenty miles at least . . .’
‘More like twenty-five . . .’
Whatever the Scythe had been trying to do, what it had actually done was to drive them back to where they had been four days before.
‘We know the hour,’ said Stort quietly, ‘but what day
is it?’
‘Should be a . . . Tuesday,’ said Katherine, the only one who scrivened a daily journal.
‘Hmmm,’ muttered Stort, ‘should be, but might not be. Time does not feel as if it is behaving as it should. Soon after our journey from White Horse Hill began, did I not say that Abbey Mortaine should be our first destination? I did! We survived the Scythe of Time by collective effort, each of us encouraging the other on, none of us letting one of us stop for long. Scholars have assumed the Scythe is a monster, if only of the mind. But supposing it’s there to guide us in some way, to make us face what we don’t want to?’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning that the Scythe has got us back to where we were meant to be before fear took us in the wrong direction,’ said Jack ruefully. ‘Maybe we should have gone to Abbey Mortaine in the first place and not let ourselves be diverted by worries of the Fyrd or anything else. Those villagers in Cleeve told us how to get to the Abbey easily and safely.’
Again Stort remembered Georg and he looked suddenly bereft. ‘Georg with no E,’ he murmured. ‘I don’t think he’s coming back, not in this life.’
‘He loved you, Stort. He must have thought he was saving you,’ said Katherine.
They stood in silence, in memory of his courageous end.
Then Stort frowned, as he often did when some new thought or insight came to him. ‘ “In this life”,’ he repeated in a hollow, distant voice, his mind elsewhere. He fingered the chime that hung from his neck.
‘The shards,’ he whispered, ‘he became one of them, or rather many of them. Is that the secret of the Scythe’s purpose and of the Chimes? Might Georg have gone to save us somewhere else?’
‘You said that it stops on the very edge of the future, meaning it doesn’t go on into it,’ said Katherine.
‘Or,’ observed Jack, who generally preferred more practical discussions but was engaged with this one, ‘we really have a choice as to whether or not we go forward into it . . .’
‘Or back into the past,’ added Stort excitedly.
‘Or stay right where we are,’ said Katherine.
‘Whatever!’ said Jack. ‘Maybe time is not so much chronological but kind of all over the place simultaneously, all mixed up, and all we do . . .’
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