by Susan Cooper
“Of course it is,” said Jane.
“Then here,” said the huge voice. “Take it.”
Jane never knew afterwards what she had been at that moment doing in her dream: standing or sitting or lying, indoors or out, in day or night, under sea or over stone. She remembered only the great wave of astonished delight. “Greenwitch! You will give me your secret?”
“Here,” said the voice again, and there in Jane’s hand was the small misshapen lead case, that had fallen into the sea at the end of the adventure that had achieved the grail—and that held inside it the only manuscript able to unravel for them the secret of the grail. “Take it,” the Greenwitch said. “You made a wish that was for me, not for yourself. No-one has ever done that. I give you my secret, in return.”
“Thank you,” said Jane, in a whisper. All around her was darkness; it was as though nothing existed in the whole world but herself, standing in emptiness, and the great disembodied voice of this strange wild thing, a creature of the sea made of branches and leaves from the earth. “Thank you, Greenwitch. I shall find you a better secret, instead.” A quick image came flashing into her mind. “I shall put it in the same place where you found this one.”
“Too late,” said the great sad voice. “Too late. . . .” It boomed and re-echoed, fading gradually away. “I go to my mother now, to the great deeps.” Away into the darkness the echoes died, a last whisper lingering. “Too late . . . too late. . . .”
“Greenwitch!” Jane cried in distress. “Come back! Come back!” She ran blindly into the darkness, reaching out helplessly. “Comeback!”
And in the same moment, the dream dissolved, and she woke.
She woke into the small white room bright with sunshine, gay as the cheerful yellow curtains at the windows, and the yellow quilt pulled up to her chin on the bed. The curtains shifted gently in a small breeze from the window she had left part-open the night before.
And clenched in Jane’s hand was a small misshapen lead case, patched with green stains, like a rock that has been a long time under the sea.
CHAPTER TWELVE
TOUSLE-HEADED FROM SLEEP, RUMPLED PYJAMAS FLAPPING, THE children rushed unceremoniously into Merriman’s bedroom.
“Where is he?”
“Try downstairs. Come on!”
Merriman and Will, looking as though they had been up and dressed for hours, were calmly eating their breakfast in the long low living-room. As Simon, Jane and Barney tumbled into the room Merriman lowered a large rustling stretch of newspaper, and peered at them over a pair of gold-rimmed half-spectacles perched startlingly on his high-arched nose.
He said, looking at the battered leaden cylinder that Jane mutely held out to him, “Ah.”
Will put down his toast, grinning all over his round face.
“Well done, Jane,” he said.
Jane said, “But I didn’t do anything. It just—it just appeared.”
“You made a wish,” said Will.
She stared at him.
“Aren’t we going to open it?” Barney said impatiently.
“Come on, Gumerry.”
“Well,” Merriman said. He took the small lead case from Jane’s hand and set it on the table, dark eyes glittering in his deep-lined face. “Well now.”
Jane was still staring, her gaze flickering between Will and her great-uncle. “You knew I had it. You knew.”
“We hoped,” Merriman said gently.
Simon put a finger on the case as if he were saying a prayer. “It’s been in the sea so long. Look at it, there’s weed and stuff all over it. . . won’t the water have got in? That would be my fault, from last summer. I opened it just once, to see what was inside, and then closed it again. Imagine if the manuscript’s all ruined in there, if I didn’t close it tightly enough . . .”
“Stop it,” said Jane.
Merriman took up the case in his long wiry fingers, and gently he tugged and turned the green-splashed grey metal until suddenly one end of it came away in his hand like a cap. Inside, a small roll of heavy parchment projected from the longer part of the case like a pointing finger.
“It’s all right!” Simon said hoarsely. Hastily he cleared his throat and put his shoulders back, though it was hard to recover dignity in pyjamas.
Barney hugged himself, jiggling with impatience. “What does it say? What does it say?”
Very slowly, and with immense care, Merriman drew the rolled manuscript from the little leaden case. He said, as he unrolled it gently on the table, flat under one large hand, “We shall be able to do this twice, at the most, unless it is to crumble into dust. So this is the first time.”
His long fingers held the cracking brown parchment open on the white cloth. It was covered with two blocks of heavy black marks. The children stared, dismay chasing horror over their faces.
“But it doesn’t say anything! That’s not even a language!”
“It’s gibberish!”
Jane said slowly, more cautious, “What is the writing, Gumerry? Is there any kind of alphabet like that?”
She looked without hope at the series of black marks: upright strokes, slanting strokes, single and in groups, like the random doodling of a tidy madman.
“Yes,” Merriman said. “There is.” He lifted his hand so that the manuscript rolled itself again, and Will, who had been looking over his shoulder, went quietly back to his chair. “There is an ancient alphabet called Ogham, not intended for our kind of writing—this is something like that. But still it is a half-writing, a cipher. Remember, it cannot mean anything until we have the grail—it was written to go with the inscription on the grail, to show its meaning plain. The one will give light to the other.”
Barney wailed, “But we haven’t got the grail!”
“The Dark,” Simon said bitterly. “The painter.” Then he stiffened, his face full of wild hope. “But we can get it, we can go and take it from his caravan. They took him to—”
“Morning! Morning!” Mrs Penhallow came bustling in with a tray. “I heard your voices, m’dears, so here’s your breakfasts.”
“Super!” said Barney at once.
Very gently, Merriman let his newspaper droop over the manuscript and its case.
“Well,” Jane said, pulling helplessly at her rumpled dressing-gown. “We aren’t exactly dressed, but thank you.”
“My goodness, who minds about that, on holiday? Now you just help yourselves and relax, and I’ll use the time to do your rooms.” Leaving the tray, she bounced out into the kitchen; then reappeared with broom and dusters. When she was safely creaking away up the stairs behind the cottages’ connecting door, Simon let out a long breath and burst out again, taut and excited.
“They took him to hospital, so we can go to the caravan, he won’t be there! He—”
Will hissed sharply between his teeth, holding up a hand in warning. A stumbling and mumbling came at the other door into the room, and through it appeared Bill Stanton, yawning, blinking, tying the belt of an improbable dressing-gown striped like a deck-chair. He looked at the Drews, covering the last of his yawns. “Well,” he said. “I’m glad someone at least looks the same way I do.”
Simon sat down hard in his chair and began fiercely slicing bread.
Barney said, “Did you get on all right last night, Mr Stanton?”
Will’s uncle groaned. “Don’t talk about it. What an evening! That crazy guy we were taking to hospital ran away.”
“Ran away?” The room was suddenly very quiet.
Mr Stanton sat down and reached greedily for the teapot. “I hope he’s all right,” he said. “But he sure gave us enough trouble. He was as quiet as anything there in the back seat, I’d have sworn he was still out like a light. Never made a sound. Then when we were about halfway to St Austell, very bleak part of the road, something ran out in front of the car, and I hit it.” He took a long drink of tea, and sighed gratefully. “So I stopped, and hopped out to take a look. I mean, you don’t want to leave an animal in pa
in, do you? And while I was out there in the dark, this fellow in the back seat jumped up and opened the door on the other side, and was off out over the fields before Frannie knew what was happening.”
“But he was hurt,” Jane said. “Could he run?”
“Ran like a hare,” Mr Stanton said, pushing back the hair wisping over his bald head. “We could hear him crashing about, through hedges I suppose. We looked for him for quite a while, but we didn’t have a light and it’s none too friendly out there in bad weather in the dark. So in the end we drove on to St Austell and told the police what had happened.
Fran thought we should, after getting Captain Toms to tell the Trewissick cop. Though it turned out in the end he didn’t, eh, Merry?”
“We tried,” Merriman said blandly. “P.C. Tregear was out of the village.”
“Well, the St Austell constabulary thought we were nuts,” said Mr Stanton, “and they were probably right. In the end we came back here. Very late.” He drank some more tea, and sighed again. “English-born though I am,” he said plaintively, “I do wish our good Mrs Penhallow would make coffee for breakfast now and again.”
“What was the animal you hit?” Barney said.
“We never found a sign of it. I suppose it was a cat. It looked bigger—might have been a badger perhaps. By the time we were through”—he chuckled—“we’d decided it was just a good old Cornish ghost.”
“Oh,” Jane said faintly.
“Well, enough of that,” Mr Stanton said. “We all did our Good Samaritan bit, and I presume the guy’s all right somewhere. Hey, this is your last day, kids, isn’t it? Looks like it’s going to be a nice one. Frannie was wondering if we could all take a picnic on to that big beach the other side of Kemare Head.”
“That sounds delightful,” Merriman said swiftly, before they could react. “A little later this morning, hmmm? There’s one thing I want to show them all first.”
“That’s fine. It’s going to take me a while to recover from last night. I don’t think Fran’s even awake yet.”
“What do you want to show us, Gumerry?” said Jane, more from politeness than enthusiasm.
“Oh,” Merriman said. “Just an old farm.”
* * *
They bounced through the village in Merriman’s big car: Jane and Captain Toms in front, the boys behind, with a happy, fidgeting Rufus. All the windows were open; with no wind, and the sun rising high already, it promised to be an uncommonly hot spring day.
Simon said, “But he’ll be there waiting for us! He’s bound to be, that’s why he ran away! Gumerry, how can we possibly just drive up in a car?”
A note of frantic worry was rising in his voice; Will looked at him with sympathy, but said nothing.
Merriman said at last, without turning his head, “The man of the Dark will not trouble us again, Simon.”
Barney said, “Why not?”
Simon said, “How do you know?”
“He tried once more, once too often, to challenge the rights of the Greenwitch,” Merriman said, swinging the car round a corner. “And the Wild Magic, to which the Greenwitch belongs, carried him away.” He fell silent, in the kind of silence that they knew meant an end of questioning.
“Last night,” said Simon.
“Yes,” Merriman said. Jane, glancing sideways at his eagle-bleak profile, wondered for a cold moment what exactly had happened to the painter of the Dark, and then, remembering what she had seen, was glad that she did not know.
And before they realised they had gone so far, the big car was turning off the road on to a narrow side-lane, roofed by low-branching trees, past a notice that read: PENTREATH FARM.
Simon said nervously, “Shouldn’t we walk?”
Wilfully misunderstanding, Merriman waved one hand airily. “Oh no, don’t worry, this old bus has stood a lot worse bumps than this in her time.”
Simon tried to swallow his uneasiness. He stared out of the window at the green banks of grass and the thick-swelling trees; at the lacy branches brushing the windows. Unconsciously he clenched his hands together as they approached the last turn in the lane before they would see the painter’s caravan, and at the last swing of the car tightened his grip and fought the impulse to close his eyes.
And squinting unhappily out at the green bush-scattered field, he saw that the caravan was not there.
“Stop a moment,” he said, in a high unfamiliar voice. Merriman stopped the car without question, and Simon tumbled out, with Barney close behind him. Together they hurried to the spot where, they both knew very well, the glittering Gipsy caravan had stood; where the horse had moved lazily cropping the grass; where the man of the Dark had used Barney’s mind for his own ends. There was no sign that anything or anyone had been there for months. Not a blade of grass was bent, not a branch flattened. Rufus, who had jumped out of the car after them, moved restlessly over the ground with his nose down, casting about in circles, finding no scent. Then he paused; lifted his head, shook it from side to side in a strange undog-like manner, like someone with a ringing in his ears, and made off at a swift trot round the next corner in the road.
“Rufus!” Simon shouted. “Rufus!”
“Let him be,” said Captain Toms clearly from the car.
“Come back here, and we shall follow him.”
On down the lane the big car purred, and then they were round the last corner and facing the farm.
The low grey building seemed even more decrepit than Simon had remembered. He looked with more attention now at the beams of wood nailed cross-shaped over the front door; at the new growth of creeper reaching over windows unhindered; at other windows, here and there, black and broken like missing teeth. Long grass rose lush and new round rusting pieces of farm equipment left in the yard: a skeletal old plough, a harrow, the remains of a tractor with its great tyres gone. In the pen of a deserted pig-sty, nettles grew tall and rank. Somewhere behind the farmhouse, Rufus barked shrilly, and a flurry of pigeons flapped into the air. There was a wet smell of growing things.
Captain Toms said softly, “The wild is taking Pentreath Farm, very fast.”
Merriman stood in the middle of the farmyard, looking about him, perplexed. The lines in his face seemed deeper-carved than before. Captain Toms leaned against the car, gazing at the farm, one hand absently tracing patterns in the damp earth with his stick.
Will peered in through one of the front windows of the farm, straining to see through the murk. “I suppose we should go inside,” he said, without much conviction.
“I don’t think so,” Simon said. He stood at Will’s shoulder, and for once there was no tension between them, but only the studying of a common problem. “Somehow I’m sure the painter never went in there. It looked absolutely untouched last time. He seemed just to be living in the caravan on his own. He was a separate sort of man.”
“Separate indeed.” Merriman’s deep voice came to them across the yard. “A strange creature of the Dark, that they sent out as a thief only, to take the grail and hide it. It was a good moment to choose, for we were off our guard, thinking them too preoccupied with licking their wounds after a great defeat. . . . But the creature of the Dark was willing to betray his masters, having greater ideas. He knew the tale of the lost manuscript, and he thought that if he could secretly get that for himself as well, and thus complete one of the Things of Power, he could by a sort of blackmail make himself one of the great lords of the Dark.”
Jane said, “But didn’t they know what he was doing?”
“They were not expecting him to over-reach his commission,”
Merriman said. “They knew, better perhaps than he did himself, how hopeless a fate lay waiting any lone figure who might venture on such a quest. We think they were not watching him, but simply waiting for his return.”
“The Dark is indeed preoccupied, for a time,” Captain Toms said. “They have damage to repair, from certain happenings midwinter last. They will make little showing of themselves, until the time of
their next great rising.”
Simon said slowly, “Perhaps that’s what the painter meant when he said to Barney, Am I observed? Do you remember? I thought he was talking about you, but he must have meant his own masters.”
“Where is Barney?” Will said, looking round.
“Barney? Hey, Barney!”
An unintelligible shout came from somewhere beyond the far side of the farmhouse.
“Oh dear,” said Jane. “Now what’s he up to?”
They ran in the direction of the shout, Merriman following more slowly with Captain Toms. A great rambling tangle of weeds and nettles and brambles rose at the side of the old house, and all around the outbuildings beyond.
“Ow!” Barney howled from somewhere inside the thicket.
“I’m stung!”
“What on earth are you doing?”
“Looking for Rufus.”
They heard a muffled barking; it seemed to come from the further of the two outbuildings, an old stone barn with a perilous half-fallen roof.
“Ow!” Barney yelped again. “Mind the nettles, they’re fierce. . . . Rufus just goes on barking and doesn’t come out, I think he must be stuck. He went this way. . . .”
Captain Toms limped forward. “Rufus!” he called, very loud and stern. “Here! Come here!”
There was more muffled excited barking from the ramshackle barn, ending in a snuffling whine.
Captain Toms sighed, and pulled his grey beard. “Foolish beast,” he said. “Stand clear a minute. Look out, Barney.” Sweeping his heavy walking-stick from side to side as if it were a scythe, he moved gradually forwards, thrashing a path through the nettles and undergrowth to the crumbling stone sides of the barn. Rufus’ barking, inside, became more frenzied still.
“Shut up, dog,” called Barney, at the captain’s elbow now. “We’re coming!” He wriggled round to a rotting wooden door, hanging sideways from one hinge, and peered in through the V-shaped gap between door and wall. “He must have got in here and knocked something over that blocked the gap. . . . I can get in here, if I. . . .”