by Susan Cooper
They both looked at the motionless figure of the Walker, still standing caught in frozen movement at the side of the road as Maggie Barnes had left him.
“That’s an awfully uncomfortable position,” Will said.
“He feels nothing,” said Merriman. “Not a muscle will even grow stiff. Some small powers the Old Ones and the people of the Dark have in common, and one of them is this catching a man out of Time, for as long as is necessary. Or in the case of the Dark, for as long as they find it amusing.”
He pointed a finger at the immobile, shapeless form, and spoke some soft rapid words that Will did not hear, and the Walker relaxed into life like a figure in a moving film that has been stopped and then started again. Staring wide-eyed, he looked at Merriman and opened his mouth, and made a curious dry, speechless sound.
“Go,” Merriman said. The old man cringed away, clasping his flapping garments around him, and shambled off at a half-run up the narrow path. Watching him as he went, Will blinked, then peered hard, then rubbed his eyes; for the Walker seemed to be fading, growing strangely thinner, so that you could see the trees through his body. Then all at once he was gone, like a star blotted out by a cloud.
Merriman said, “My doing, not his own. He deserves peace for a while, I think, in another place than this. That is the power of the Old Ways, Will. You would have used the trick to escape from the witch-girl, very easily, if you had known how. You will learn that, and the proper names and much else very soon now.”
Will said curiously, “What is your proper name?”
The dark eyes glinted at him from inside the hood. “Merriman Lyon. I told you when we met.”
“But I think that if that had really been your proper name, as an Old One, you would not have told me it,” Will said. “At any rate, not out loud.”
“You are learning already,” Merriman said cheerfully. “Come, it grows dark.”
They set off together down the lane. Will trotted beside the striding, cloaked figure, clutching his bags and boxes. They spoke little, but Merriman’s hand was always there to catch him if he stumbled at any hollow or drift. As they came out at the far curve of the track into the greater breadth of Huntercombe Lane, Will saw his brother Max walking briskly towards them.
“Look, there’s Max!”
“Yes,” Merriman said.
Max called, gaily waving, and then he was close. “I was just coming to meet you off the bus,” he said. “Mum was getting in a bit of a tizz because her baby boy was late.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Will said.
“Why were you coming that way?” Max waved in the direction of Tramps’ Alley.
“We were just —” Will began, and as he turned his head to include Merriman in the remark he stopped, so abruptly that he bit his tongue.
Merriman was gone. In the snow where he had been standing a moment before, no mark of any kind was left. And as Will looked back the way they had walked across Huntercombe Lane, and down the top curve of the smaller track, he could see only one line of footprints — his own.
He thought he heard a faint silvery music, somewhere in the air, but even as he raised his head to listen, it too was gone.
PART TWO
* * *
The Learning
• Christmas Eve • Christmas Eve. It was the day when the delight of Christmas really took fire in the Stanton family. Hints and glimmerings and promises of special things, which had flashed in and out of life for weeks before, now suddenly blossomed into a constant glad expectancy. The house was full of wonderful baking smells from the kitchen, in a corner of which Gwen could be found putting the final touches to the icing of the Christmas cake. Her mother had made the cake three weeks before; the Christmas pudding, three months before that. Ageless, familiar Christmas music permeated the house whenever anyone turned on the radio. The television set was never turned on at all; it had become, for this season, an irrelevance. For Will, the day brought itself into natural focus very early. Straight after breakfast — an even more haphazard affair than usual — there was the double ritual of the Yule log and the Christmas tree.
Mr Stanton was finishing his last piece of toast. Will and James stood on either side of him at the breakfast table, fidgeting. Their father held a crust forgotten in one hand as he pored over the sports page of the newspaper. Will too was passionately interested in the fortunes of Chelsea Football Club, but not on Christmas Eve morning.
“Would you like some more toast, Dad?” he said loudly.
“Mmm,” said Mr Stanton. “Aaah.”
James said, “Have you had enough tea, Dad?”
Mr Stanton looked up, turned his round, mild-eyed head from one to the other of them, and laughed. He put down the paper, drained his teacup, and crammed the piece of toast into his mouth. “C’mon, then,” he said indistinctly, taking each of them by an ear. They howled happily, and ran for boots and jackets and scarves.
Down the road with the handcart they went, Will, James, Mr Stanton, and tall Max, bigger than his father, bigger than anyone, with his long dark hair jutting in a comical fringe out of a disreputable old cap. What would Maggie Barnes think of that, Will wondered cheerfully, when she peeped roguishly as usual round the kitchen curtain to catch Max’s eye; and then in the same instant he remembered about Maggie Barnes, and he thought in a rush of alarm: Farmer Dawson is one of the Old Ones, he must be warned about her — and he was distraught that he had not thought of it before.
They stopped in Dawsons’ yard, old George Smith coming out to meet them with his gaping grin. The going had been easier along the road that morning, since a plough had been through; but everywhere the snow still lay unmoving in a constant, grey, windless cold.
“Got you a tree to beat all!” Old George called joyfully. “Straight as a mast, like Farmer’s. Both Royal trees again, I reckon.”
“Royal as they come,” said Mr Dawson, pulling his coat tight round him as he came out. He meant it literally, Will knew; every year, a number of Christmas trees were sold from the Crown plantations round Windsor Castle, and several came back in the Dawson farm lorry to the village.
“Morning, Frank,” said Mr Stanton.
“Morning, Roger,” said Farmer Dawson, and beamed at the boys. “Hey lads. Round the back with that cart.” His eyes slid impersonally over Will, without so much as a flicker of notice, but Will had deliberately left his jacket swinging open in such a way that it was plain there were now two crossed-circle Signs on his belt, not one.
“Good to see you looking so lively,” said Mr Dawson breezily to them all, as they heaved the handcart round behind the barn; and his hand rested briefly on Will’s shoulder with a faint pressure that told him Farmer Dawson had a good idea of what had been happening in the last few days. He thought of Maggie Barnes and searched hastily for words to frame a warning.
“Where’s your girl friend, Max?” he said, carefully loud and clear.
“Girl friend?” said Max indignantly. Being deeply involved with a blonde-tressed student at his London art school, from whom enormous blue-enveloped letters arrived in the post every day, he was totally uninterested in all local girls.
“Ho, ho, ho,” said Will, trying hard. “You know.”
Fortunately James was fond of this kind of thing, and joined in with enthusiasm. “Maggie-maggie-maggie,” he chanted gaily. “Oh, Maggie the dairymaid’s sweet on Maxie the great artist, oooh — oooh. . . . ”Max punched him in the ribs, and he lapsed into snorting giggles.
“Young Maggie’s had to leave us,” Mr Dawson said coolly. “Illness in the family. Needed at home. She packed up and went early this morning. Sorry to disappoint you, Max.”
“I’m not disappointed,” said Max, turning scarlet. “It’s just these stupid little —”
“Oooooh — oooooh,” sang James, dancing about out of arm’s length. “Oooh poor Maxie, lost his Maggie —”
Will said nothing. He was satisfied.
The tall fir tree, its branches ti
ed down with bands of hairy white string, was loaded onto the handcart, and with it the gnarled old root of a beech tree that Farmer Dawson had cut down earlier that year, split in half, and put aside to make Yule logs for himself and the Stantons. It had to be the root of a tree, not a branch, Will knew, though nobody had ever explained why. At home, they would put the log on the fire tonight in the big brick fireplace in the living room, and it would burn slowly all the evening until they went to bed. Somewhere stored away was a piece of last year’s Yule log, saved to be used as kindling for its successor.
“Here,” Old George said, appearing suddenly at Will’s side as they all pushed the cart out of the gate. “You should have some of this.” He thrust forward a great bunch of holly, heavy with berries.
“Very good of you, George,” said Mr Stanton. “But we do have that big holly tree by the front door, you know. If you know anyone who hasn’t —”
“No, no, you take it.” The old man wagged his finger. “Not half so many berries on that bush o’ yours. Partic’lar holly, this is.” He laid it carefully in the cart; then quickly broke off a sprig and slipped it into the top buttonhole of Will’s coat. “And a good protection against the Dark,” the old voice said low in Will’s ear, “if pinned over the window, and over the door.” Then the pink-gummed grin split his creased brown face in a squawk of ancient laughter, and the Old One was Old George again, waving them away. “Happy Christmas!”
“Happy Christmas, George!”
When they carried the tree ceremonially through the front door, the twins seized it with cross-boards and screwdrivers, to give it a base. At the other end of the room Mary and Barbara sat in a rustling sea of coloured paper, cutting it into strips, red, yellow, blue, green, and gluing them into interlocked circles for paper-chains.
“You should have done those yesterday,” Will said. “They’ll need time to dry.”
“You should have done them yesterday,” Mary said resentfully, tossing back her long hair. “It’s supposed to be the youngest’s job.”
“I cut up lots of strips the other day,” Will said.
“We used those up hours ago.”
“I did cut them, all the same.”
“Besides,” Barbara said peaceably, “he was Christmas shopping yesterday. So you’d better shut up, Mary, or he might decide to take your present back.”
Mary muttered, but subsided, and Will half-heartedly stuck a few paper-chains together. But he kept an eye on the doorway, and when he saw his father and James appear with their arms full of old cardboard boxes, he slipped quietly away after them. Nothing could keep him from the decorating of the Christmas tree.
Out of the boxes came all the familiar decorations that would turn the life of the family into a festival for twelve nights and days: the golden-haired figure for the top of the tree; the strings of jewel-coloured lights. Then there were the fragile glass Christmas-tree balls, lovingly preserved for years. Half-spheres whorled like red and gold-green seashells, slender glass spears, spider-webs of silvery glass threads and beads; on the dark limbs of the tree they hung and gently turned, shimmering.
There were other treasures, then. Little gold stars and circles of plaited straw; light, swinging silver-paper bells. Next, a medley of decorations made by assorted Stanton children, ranging from Will’s infant pipe-cleaner reindeer to a beautiful filigree cross that Max had fashioned out of copper wire in his first year at art school. Then there were strings of tinsel to be draped across any space, and then the box was empty.
But not quite empty. Riffling his fingers gingerly through the crumbled handfuls of packing-paper, in an old cardboard container nearly as tall as himself, Will found a small flat box not much larger than his hand. It rattled.
“What’s this?” he said curiously, trying to open the lid.
“Good heavens,” said Mrs Stanton from her central armchair. “Let me see that a moment, love. Is it . . . yes it is! Was it in the big box? I thought we’d lost it years ago. Just look at this, Roger. See what your youngest son’s found. It’s Frank Dawson’s box of letters.”
She pressed a catch on the lid of the box, so that it flicked up, and Will saw inside a number of ornate little carvings done in some light wood that he could not name. Mrs Stanton held one up: a curved letter S, with the beautifully detailed head and scaly body of a snake, twirling on an almost invisible thread. Then another: an arched M, with peaks like the twin spires of a faery cathedral. The carvings were so delicate that it was quite impossible to see where they joined the threads from which they hung.
Mr Stanton came down from the step-ladder, and poked one gentle finger into the box. “Well, well,” he said. “Clever old Will.”
“I’ve never seen them before,” said Will.
“Well, you have really,” his mother said. “But so long ago that you wouldn’t remember. They disappeared years and years ago. Fancy them being at the bottom of that old box all the time.”
“But what are they?”
“Christmas-tree ornaments, of course,” Mary said, peering over her mother’s shoulder.
“Farmer Dawson made them for us,” Mrs Stanton said. “They’re beautifully carved, as you see. And exactly as old as the family — on our first Christmas Day in this house Frank made an R for Roger” — she fished it out — “and an A for me.”
Mr Stanton pulled out two letters which both hung together from the same thread. “Robin and Paul. This pair came a bit later than usual. We hadn’t been expecting twins. . . . Really, Frank was awfully good. I wonder if he has time for anything like this now?”
Mrs Stanton was still turning the small wooden curlicues in her thin, strong fingers. “M for Max, and M for Mary . . . Frank was very cross with us for having a repeat, I remember . . . Oh, Roger,” she said, her voice suddenly softening. “Look at this one.”
Will stood beside his father to look. It was a letter T, carved like an exquisite little tree spreading two branches wide. “T?” he said. “But none of us begins with T.”
“That was Tom,” his mother said. “I don’t really know why I’ve never spoken to you younger ones about Tom. It was just so long ago. . . . Tom was your little brother who died. He had something wrong with his lungs, a disease some new babies get, and he only lived for three days after he was born. Frank had the initial already carved for him, because it was our first baby and we had two names chosen; Tom if it was a boy, Tess if it was a girl. . . . ”
Her voice sounded slightly muffled, and Will suddenly regretted finding the letters. He patted her shoulder awkwardly. “Never mind, Mum,” he said.
“Oh, gracious,” said Mrs Stanton briskly. “I’m not sad, love. It was a very long while ago. Tom would have been a grown-up man by now, older than Stephen. And after all” — she gave a comical look round the room, cluttered with people and boxes — “a brood of nine should be enough for any woman.”
“You can say that again,” said Mr Stanton.
“It comes of having farming forebears, Mum,” said Paul. “They believed in large families. Lots of free labour.”
“Speaking of free labour,” said his father, “where have James and Max gone?”
“Fetching the other boxes.”
“Good Lord. Such initiative!”
“Christmas spirit,” said Robin from the stepladder. “Good Christian men rejoice, and all that. Why doesn’t someone turn some music on?”
Barbara, sitting on the floor beside her mother, took the little carved wooden T from her hand and added it to a row she had made on the carpet of every initial in order. “Tom, Steve, Max, Gwen, Robin and Paul, me, Mary, James,” she said. “But where’s the W for Will?”
“Will’s was there with all the rest. In the box.”
“It wasn’t a W actually, if you remember,” said Mr Stanton. “It was a kind of pattern. I dare say Frank had got tired of doing initials by then.” He grinned at Will.
“But it’s not here,” Barbara said. She held the box upside down then shook it. Then
she looked at her youngest brother solemnly. “Will,” she said, “you don’t exist.”
But Will was feeling a growing uneasiness that seemed to come from some very deep faraway part of his mind. “You said it was a pattern, not a W,” he said casually. “What sort of pattern, Dad?”
“A mandala, as I recall,” said Mr Stanton.
“A what?”
His father chuckled. “Pay no attention, I was only showing off. I don’t imagine Frank would have called it that. A mandala is a very ancient kind of symbol dating back to sun-worship and that kind of thing — any pattern made of a circle with lines radiating outward or inward. Your little Christmas ornament was just a simple one — a circle with a star inside, or a cross. A cross, I think it was.”
“I can’t think why it isn’t there with the rest,” said Mrs Stanton.
But Will could. If there was power in knowing the proper names of the people of the Dark, perhaps the Dark could in its turn work magic over others by using some sign that was a symbol of a name, like a carved initial. . . . Perhaps someone had taken his own sign in order to try to get power over him that way. And perhaps, indeed, this was why Farmer Dawson had carved him not an initial, but a symbol that nobody of the Dark could use. They had stolen it anyway, to try. . . .
A little while later, Will slipped away from the tree-decorating and went upstairs and pinned a sprig of holly over the door and each of the windows of his room. He tucked a piece into the newly-mended catch of the skylight as well. Then he did the same for the windows of James’s room, which he would share for Christmas Eve, and came downstairs and fixed a small bunch neatly over the front and back doors of the house. He would have done the same to all the windows, too, if Gwen hadn’t crossed the hall and noticed what he was doing.