by F. G. Cottam
‘Where’s Dawn?’
‘She wasn’t Dawn any more.’
Paul nodded his head. ‘So your theory was right. A host is needed. Where is she?’
‘She just disappeared, a few minutes ago. She went like sand emptying out of an hourglass.’
‘Did she say anything to you?’
‘She called me a flatterer. Said a child was an inadequate host.’
Paul was silent, studying her. Then he said, ‘Oh, Jesus. Oh, Christ.’
‘Why are you staring at me like that?’
‘Who are you? Who am I speaking to? Who are you really?’
‘That’s a deep one,’ she said. ‘Who are any of us?’
‘I want the truth,’ he said. There was desperation in his voice. ‘I have to know.’
She got to her feet with a suddenness that made him rear back, and closed the distance between them in one long stride. She took his head between both raised hands and he was aware of the length of her fingernails as they dug into his scalp. She pulled his head forward and down to hers and kissed him, passionately, on the mouth.
Juliet said, ‘That’s who I am, Paul. That’s who I’ll always be.’
He searched her eyes and inhaled the scent of her. He stroked her hair and held her in his arms. He said, ‘I’ll go and get that book from the garden. We need to get out of this place.’
‘It feels contaminated.’
‘Yes, it does. Who was the creature, Juliet? Did you ask it that?’
‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’
‘And?’
‘An emissary from Hell, Paul. A creature come to provoke the final act in the End Times. To witness it. And then to gloat.’
‘But you beat it.’
‘You beat it.’
He smiled at that. ‘We beat it,’ he said.
‘Do you think the world is safe, Paul?’
‘Safer, anyway,’ he said. ‘All we can do now is wait and see.’ But Juliet looked unconvinced. ‘What’s the matter? The Dawn-thing said something else, didn’t it?’
Juliet nodded. ‘As it ebbed away. It said the door had opened a chink, now.’
‘A chink of light?’
‘Of darkness, it said. It said this is the beginning, not the end.’
‘Hubris,’ Paul said.
He went back then to retrieve the Almanac and heard a sound in the garden he couldn’t recall having heard at all on his visit to London. Oxford, maybe, with its picture-perfect vistas and scrolled and filigreed architecture and the glittering charm of its pretty river. But it was a sound totally absent in his experience of a city he now realized he had come to think of as cursed.
It seemed to Paul a small miracle of which he ought to make Juliet aware. And so he went to fetch her so that she could witness it too. And they stood in the darkness together and held hands and listened to the infinitely sweet music of a blackbird singing on a summer night.
‘It sounds so beautiful,’ Juliet said. ‘I’d almost forgotten. Do you think it’s a sign?’
‘Auguries can be omens of good as well as bad,’ Paul said. ‘If the songbirds can come back, maybe in time the people will return. Hope is either a human failing or a measure of our resilience. Right now, I think we have to embrace it.’
‘Come on,’ she said, after the bird had flown away, tugging at the shirt Paul Beck had torn climbing over Dawn Jackson’s garden wall ‘There’s an old priest of our recent acquaintance who can treat us both to a drink.’