by Liz Williams
The man who is cold. The ancient.
“Sorry,” Bee said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He’ll reach his power when the comet comes. You need to be careful.
But the elder would say no more. Irritated, Bee went back into the house through the fading light to find a message on the answerphone. Stella’s voice: we’re on our way back.
The expedition reached Mooncote an hour later, as Bee and Serena were in the kitchen. A casserole simmered in the oven; Serena had opened the wine. Bee found that she was dreading the return of her sisters, and Sam; she felt as though she was sitting on a bed of pins.
“Stop twitching,” Serena said, without looking up. “This isn’t like you.”
“I know. Sorry.” Then the half door banged and Sam and Luna poured in. A moment later, Stella followed.
“Where’s Nell?”
“Having a bath. Did you –”
“We found her. Well. We think we have. She was definitely down there – she was using the name Linnet.” Stella flopped into a chair. “Can I have some wine, please? Cheers.”
Bee felt her heart hammer and jolt. “You’re sure it was her.”
“Luna saw her.”
“What?”
“In a wood. Wistman’s Wood. I didn’t see her, neither did Sam.”
Luna looked sulky and defensive. “I did see her. I didn’t make her up.”
Stella leaned across the table and put her hand on her sister’s wrist. “I didn’t say you did, Lune. No one’s saying that. We believe you, so chill out.”
“She didn’t look like she used to,” Luna said. “She had red hair, but it was dyed. I could see the edges. She had tattoos but they were old ones.”
“She had that butterfly on her arm,” Serena said.
“These were round her wrists. Old and blue. And she looked younger, too.”
“Are you sure it was Mum?”
“Yeah, I’m totally sure but it was like – another version of her,” Luna said. “A parallel version. And she spoke to me. She said we were in danger, and that you ought to look after the house, Bee.”
Bee felt the slight sting of implied injustice; it was her turn to become defensive. “What the hell does she think I’ve been doing?”
“She said she’d come back when the comet comes. And,” Luna added, turning to Bee, “There was this thing. This shape. We talked about it in the car and it’s the same as the one Stella saw.”
“It’s a horned god-style entity,” Stella said. “But not the sort of neo-pagan one that looks like a rock star. More basic than that. Creepy as fuck.”
“Someone – a tree – told me to be careful of a man who is cold,” Bee said. Stella’s mouth fell open.
“I got told that, too. By an olive.”
“An olive spoke to you? What, like out of a dish?”
“An olive tree, you muppet!”
“This was in Ibiza?” Bee asked.
“Yeah. Up on the hillside near the club. I asked it what it meant but it wouldn’t tell me.”
“Neither would the elder. They seem to think we should know what they mean.”
“At least they talk. Not like the star spirits.”
“Grandpa doesn’t think Alys is dead,” Stella said.
“Now, neither does anyone else,” Bee told her.
*
That night, Bee woke with a start. Someone was standing over her, bending low. She flailed out and the person hissed, “It’s me!”
“Stella!”
“Shhhh! There’s someone outside.”
“Where?” Bee got out of bed and, clad in her chaste white nightgown, padded across to the window. A new moon hung above the trees, still too slender to cast any light, but the outside yard light shed a glow over the buildings. “I can’t see anything.”
And Dark had not alerted her. Why not?
Stella leaned against the wall like a spy and peered round the edge of the curtains. “Don’t let them see you!”
Bee kept obediently still and after a moment saw a shadow slink around the edge of the old stable. “See him?” Stella whispered. Bee wanted to say: maybe it’s Luna or Sam, but somehow she knew that it was not, that it was an enemy. It did not have Luna’s sturdy shape, or Sam’s ambling grace. “Downstairs!” Stella said. For the first time, Bee realised that her sister was dressed, or at least wearing tracksuit bottoms and a t-shirt emblazoned with a band logo. Stella’s jaw was set. Bee snatched up a navy dressing gown. They went quickly down the stairs to the hall, where the clock was ticking with that peculiar echoing resonance characteristic of clocks at night: a secret marking of the minutes and hours. The back door was still closed; the kitchen peaceful and dark. Stella herded the spaniels into the hall and shut the door.
“Ever thought of keeping Dobermans, Bee? Rotties?”
Bee had. The spaniels, feathery and melt-eyed, were perhaps not as effective as guard dogs as they might be and more of a liability. Very gently, Stella eased the half door open and they slipped through. A very faint sound came from the old stable. Stella held a finger to her lips. Then there was a sudden warbling, yodelling yell and a long grey shape shot past Bee in the darkness, nearly knocking her flat. She yelped in turn. Moth, Luna’s dog: Bee had not even known he was out. Maybe the shadow was Sam, but then why would his own dog bark, for Moth’s cry had been challenge.
“Christ!” Stella said. “What was that?”
“Sam’s lurcher.” But Stella was running towards the stables.
Stella
Inside, the stable was like a refrigerator and Stella paused. It had not been this cold outside, even in the autumn chill. She blinked. The pallor from the yard light fell over her shoulder, and she could see the large, placid shapes of the piebalds, munching hastily-gathered straw. They had put them in the stable after all, for a break, Sam had said. But beyond them was shadow, and something moved within it. Stella called out sharply, “Who’s there?”
There was no reply. She could not see the dog. She went between the piebalds, breathing in warmth and the odour of horses, her footsteps muffled by the hay. But the warmth was soon gone, leaving Stella in the black. She blinked. No, it was possible to see, after all – the stable went back much further than it should have done. Like a Narnian wardrobe, and then Stella began to be really scared. She turned. The door was gone. An immensity stretched behind her, a wasteland covered in a pale blanket of snow. She looked up. A full moon hung overhead, a white eye. Down the slope, a river raced black with boulders of ice, in full spate, but as Stella watched, horrified, it slowed and froze. It was like watching a film, now speeding up, now slowing down. Her knees actually started to knock, something she thought only happened in metaphors. She was standing on a ridge of land, snow crunching beneath her feet; she was glad she had thought to pull on her trainers, but the cold still burned and bit. She looked behind her and saw a ring of huge grey boulders, standing like teeth in the snow. Something was crouched beside them, a ragged black shape.
“Who’s that?” Stella shouted. She wished a golf club was to hand, anything. The figure did not reply, but Stella thought she had startled it, for it lurched to its feet and bolted down the slope, stumbling unevenly through the snow. A long cloak, made of skins, streamed out behind it. Then there was movement from behind one of the stones and Moth, barking, raced down the slope. Stella saw the dog hit the figure from behind. It threw up its arms and went down into the snow. She heard Moth growl, but then the dog turned tail and ran back up.
“Moth!” Stella cried. “Come here!” The dog skidded past her; Stella turned and found a star spirit standing in the snow. Sirius: the dog star was blue above her head, bright-chasing the heels of the Hunter. Orion strode across the sky and Sirius held out her hand. A sprig of berried juniper twined about her fingers; she wore a coronet of beryls, a pale blue-green in the white blaze of her hair. Something about her face reminded Stella fleetingly of Caro Amberley, but of all the spirits, Sirius looked the least hu
man, like a drawing by Richard Dadd. Her long mouth curled in a smile; she beckoned to Stella. Come. So Stella did, staggering through the soul-stealing cold in the star’s wake, and out into the fusty warmth of the stable.
Three o’clock in the morning and all’s well. Stella and Bee sat silently over steaming tea. Stella had dropped a shot of whisky into her mug, saying that this was no time to be worried about turning to drink. The lurcher Moth lay at their feet, beneath the table. In the nearby hall, the clock spoke the hour.
“It was Tam Stare out there at first,” Stella said. She felt that she might never be warm again. “I’m sure of it.”
“Did you get a look at his face?”
“No. I just know.”
She was grateful that her sister forbore to ask how she knew; she could not have answered that question. Nor could she have said how she understood that what she had just seen, what she had experienced, had not been real. She had walked into someone’s mind, someone else’s magic, and it had the sense of Tam Stare: darkness and white, the pale fierce blue of the moon, or an eye. By degrees she anchored herself back into reality: the residual heat of the Aga, the presence of Moth under the table, and the ticking of the clock.
“We’ve got a week or two,” Bee said now.
“For what?”
“Until the comet comes. Until Mother comes back. Until Apple Day.”
A week or two, Stella thought. A lot could happen in a fortnight. Until the comet came.
Part Two
White Horse Country
Luna
He’d rarely spent so long in one place, Sam said, not for quite a while. Luna shot him an anxious glance. They were sitting on the low wall outside the terrace of the house, still in sunlight, but the air was cold and the morning had seen the first frost.
“Do you want to – move on?”
“Did I say that? As long as your family’s cool with us being here.”
“I think so.”
Serena had gone back to London and so, Luna knew, had Ward Garner. She did not know what was happening there, or with Ben, but that was Serena’s business. She did not want to interfere. Nell was busy writing; Bee was busy cataloguing books and Stella, too, was spending a lot of the time at Amberley, helping to organise the Apple Day. The only people who were not technically busy were Luna and Sam, but Sam had made himself useful around the house, bagging the windfalls, which now stood in neat sacks beneath each tree in readiness for the cider press, and cutting the grass. In exchange for board and lodging, he said, and he had made a run to the some co-operative farm behind the Tor (rather than evil Tesco) and bought a box of vegetables as a contribution, which had now become a weekly occurrence. The piebalds now grazed in the back field and the wagon stood, moored for the time being, in the old stable.
One evening, Sam had come into the kitchen and said to Bee, “There’s a bloke in the orchard.”
Bee had blushed. “Oh. I know.” She had not pretended to misunderstand him.
“A dead bloke.” Sam was not accusatory or even greatly perturbed; he sounded intrigued. “Elizabethan. Must have had an amazing life. Says he sailed with Drake.”
“I didn’t know until recently that we had an Elizabethan ghost,” Luna said. Bee went even pinker.
“I used to see him sometimes when I was a little girl. Then he started appearing more often, a few years ago now. And then – well.” She was now full-on beetroot red.
“Bee! You didn’t say anything.”
“He was my secret,” Bee said. Luna nodded. She understood that. She had a secret of her own, now.
But it wouldn’t be a secret for much longer and although she hadn’t told Sam, she wasn’t sure that she was going to have to. She thought he already knew. She wasn’t suffering from morning sickness, and there were no visible sign as yet, but Luna felt that she was sinking down into the earth, becoming gravid.
Sitting on the wall, she glanced up to find that Sam was looking at her. “So, what do you want to call it?”
“I don’t know.” It was as if they’d already had the first part of the conversation, the important part, and were now into the calmer waters beyond those rapids, but she wanted to make sure. “Do you – mind?”
“No, I think it’s amazing. You know what? If it’s a boy, I think we should call him Ned. After Dark.”
Dark had become Sam’s hero. It amused Luna; she’d never seen Sam in male-worship mode before, but he was spending a lot of time with the spirit, sitting in the orchard late into the cold evenings, talking about running away to sea, and other things.
“If it’s a girl, we should call her after your gran,” Luna said. “Vervain.”
He nodded. “That’s good with me. So when do you think it’s due?”
“I think I must have been pregnant for about a month. So probably it’s due in June.” She wished she hadn’t been drinking, but she hadn’t drunk a lot. The occasional glass of wine. She hoped it hadn’t hurt.
“A summer child,” Sam said. “Like its dad.” For Sam was Leo. “Have you told your sisters?”
“Not yet. I will do, though. I don’t want a lot of fuss.”
“Is this why you’ve seemed to – not want to move on?” For Luna had resisted any suggestion that they go back on the road, and Sam had not pressed the issue. From not wanting to come here, now she did not want to go; perhaps this would change when the baby came, or the spring. It worried Luna: Sam was not the landed kind, but she simply did not want to move. For the moment, however, he seemed to accept this.
Among her remaining sisters, Serena being in London, there was a tacit understanding of two things. One was that they would follow Alys’ instructions, no matter how little they liked them, and wait for the comet – which should be appearing in the eastern sky any day now, if the newspapers and Abraham’s ghost were to be believed. The second was that someone should be at the house at all times, and this was why Bee had been grateful to Luna and Sam, for staying put and allowing everyone else to get on with their jobs. Luna was not sure how much Bee had told Nell, but Nell too had become part of the household, a quiet semi-permanent presence. Sometimes she went across to Amberley to help Bee with the book collection, and sometimes she went up to London, staying with Serena and haunting the British Library, but mostly she stayed at Mooncote. She had not mentioned noticing anything untoward.
Tam Stare was around a lot, in the village. Sam had run into him in one of the garage yards, when picking up a spare wheel for the Landrover, and they had gone for a pint: to get the measure of the man, Sam had said.
“And what did you think?” Bee had asked, that night at dinner.
“He’s got a high regard for himself,” Sam said. “Full of himself, you might say. I think they call it ‘entitled’. But seemed to think we were the same. I didn’t agree. I didn’t say so.”
“I think he’s really shady,” Stella said.
“Yeah, I’d say you were right, at that. I’ve spoken to a couple of people, who might know him. They did.”
“And?”
“He and Dana were brought up in Norfolk somewhere. No one seems to know where the family’s from. The mother’s English, but not the father, but I don’t know what he is. Or was. They’re both dead, apparently. The old man had a reputation for violence, which is saying a lot. The mother – now that’s interesting, because a couple of people said she was originally posh, like landed-gentry posh.”
“I can’t place his accent,” Stella said. “Or his sister’s. Sometimes it sounds like he’s trying to be working class and sometimes it sounds genuine. There’s something underneath it.”
“Perhaps they moved a lot. Maybe that explains the way they speak,” Bee said.
“I don’t think they did. I heard – conflicting reports, as they say in the newspapers. Someone said they’d been to the house when the kids were growing up and it was proper posh, a real old school stately home out in the middle of the fens. But then I spoke to another bloke and he said he’d been ther
e and there was nothing but a caravan or two. Maybe he was thinking of somewhere else, though. He said it was a long time ago. It sounded like they weren’t popular. And the people I asked – you know, they’re no saints themselves. But there are limits.”
Luna was grateful to her sisters, that they hadn’t launched into self-conscious, class-guilty justification. Of course, you’re different, Sam. We’re not prejudiced against travellers, you understand, it’s just that… All Stella had said was, “I don’t like the bastard.”
“Neither do I,” Sam said.
So now Luna and Sam were waiting. For the comet, and the baby, and anything else that might be on the way.
Bee
Bee had been expecting trouble around Hallowe’en. That seemed to fit in with her ideas about the season. It was Samhain, which some people said was the old festival of the dead and stolen by the Christians, though Bee had heard other versions. A tricky time, when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead, between those of fairy and of men, were supposed to grow thin. In Bee’s imagination it resembled a net curtain full of holes, through which things might slip. She went to Tesco all the same and bought some bags of sweets, in case of local trick or treaters. The house felt on edge, as if waiting, but the comet was not due for a while yet and Alys had said – well, they would just have to repel any boarders, said Stella, who seemed to be picking up a nautical vocabulary from Dark.
When the day itself dawned, it was clear that it was going to be wet. The sky was lowering halfway through the morning and they had left the kitchen lights on.
“Should put the kids off, anyway,” said Stella. “Maybe we should dress up.”
“As what?”
“I dunno. Ghosts?”
“We could just get Dark to answer the door. And make sure he’s see through.”
Stella looked seriously tempted by this option and Sam grinned, but said, “I like the way you think but maybe keep it under the radar, yeah?”