Eight Days of Luke

by Diana Wynne Jones

  David was so ashamed that he could hardly look at Cousin Ronald coming up the line. He did not mind too much what the young men thought—and it was clear what that was—because they were strangers. But Alan was not exactly a stranger, and Alan was trying not to laugh at Cousin Ronald’s disgraceful progress. Cousin Ronald bumped and bounced up the line to that slow derisive clapping. He tried to dodge. He yelled. He cursed them. He tried to break out through the line and was hauled back. He groaned. He squeaked. He pleaded. Then, about the middle, he tried to put a stop to it by falling down and pretending to faint.

  There was a great roar of derision. Everyone knew he was faking. Alan laughed in earnest, and the boy who had hit David in the stomach helped Cousin Ronald up with a boot in the rear which must have been quite painful.

  They pushed him on again. And this part made David even more ashamed, for the second half of the line hardly hit Cousin Ronald at all. They made great swipes at him and ended up scornfully flipping him. They laughed, made catcalls and shoved and jostled him onward. When Cousin Ronald staggered whimpering to the end, the dragon young man simply put a hand between his shoulders and shoved. Cousin Ronald ran in a helpless rush into the fruit machine, which he hit with a great bang, and then folded up in a heap with his eyes shut. David thought he was really hurt, until he saw Cousin Ronald open one eye to see if anyone was going to hit him again. Somebody made a playful swipe at him and he hastily shut it again. Everybody except David laughed heartily.

  “Now, what did you want to ask me?” said the young man with the dragon.

  David turned his red face up to him and encountered a very sympathetic smile, which soothed his shame a little. “I have to find something,” he said carefully, “but I mustn’t know what it is or who hid it. The three Knowing Ones said you knew where to look for it.” The young man looked polite but mystified. David’s heart sank. “It’s important,” he said. “Luke showed someone how to hide it, and he’s going to have to go back to prison if I can’t find it by Sunday. Are you sure you don’t know about it? It belonged to the ginger-haired man—I know that because he caught Luke last Thursday and asked him about it.”

  “O—oh!” said the young man, and it was clear he now knew what David was talking about. “That,” he said. He looked extremely unhappy. David could tell that his question had brought up a whole number of things the young man would much rather not remember. “If I’d known that was what—oh, it’s not your fault, I suppose. Do you know my name?”

  “No,” said David.

  “Then I can tell you that I took it,” said the young man. “But I don’t know where it is. I gave it to—to a lady to hide.”

  “And where is she—this lady?” David asked. The young man hesitated. “I’m not sure,” he said sadly. “But I think if you went to Thunderly Hill you might find news of her.”

  “The hospital?” said Alan. “She ill then?”

  “I don’t think so,” the young man was saying, when there was a stirring among the other young men. He turned round, and so did David, and there was Mr. Wedding standing by the fruit machine, looking rather troubled. The young man with the dragon seemed unhappier than ever. “Oh, hallo, sir,” he said.

  “So you took it, did you?” said Mr. Wedding. “I begin to understand. Why I didn’t see it was you before, I can’t think. Whose idea was it? Yours or hers?”

  “Mine,” said the young man. David knew he was lying. So did Mr. Wedding.

  “Hers, I see,” he said. And he waited for the young man to say more.

  The young man’s face became even more unhappy. He looked away from Mr. Wedding and stared at the painted dragon coiled round his arm. At length he said, “She came and asked me to steal it. Afterward—when I thought everything was over.”

  “What? She came here?” Mr. Wedding said sharply.

  “No, no,” said the young man. “I was on my way here. But she stopped me. She said it was the least I could do for her after the way I’d treated her. You see—she seemed to think it was all your fault—what had happened—and she said I owed her some revenge.” He ran his finger along the coils of the dragon. “I don’t see what else I could have done,” he said awkwardly, “except agree. And I was about the only person who could have got it for her.”

  “So you were,” Mr. Wedding said dryly. “Why did you tell David Thunderly Hill?”

  “She told me,” said the young man unhappily, “that she was going back to—where I found her—afterward. Wasn’t that right?”

  “Yes, you were right,” said Mr. Wedding. “Though you weren’t supposed to know even that much.” The young man looked desperately unhappy. Mr. Wedding, seeing it, put his hand on his shoulder. “It’s all over,” he said. “Long ago.” Although this did not seem to comfort the young man much, David could see Mr. Wedding meant it kindly. He could see this young man meant a great deal to Mr. Wedding, possibly more than all the other young men put together. And David, who up till then had not thought of himself as liking Mr. Wedding particularly, wished with all his heart that he could be as valuable to him as the young man with the dragon round his arm.

  Still sadly, the young man wished David luck and went back to his pin-table. Mr. Wedding said: “I’ll meet you at Thunderly Hill, David,” and left the hall.

  David looked at Alan, and both of them turned rather dubiously to the collapsed heap of Cousin Ronald.

  Two young men were bending over him. “What’s up with this old geezer?” one of them asked David. David knew at once that he was just an ordinary young man, nothing to do with Mr. Wedding or the others.

  “Somebody hit him,” Alan said.

  “Yours, is he?” said the second young man. “Like us to help him to the First Aid post for you?”

  “Could you help him across the bridge?” David said. “Our car’s there.”

  “Wherever you like,” they said obligingly, and they heaved Cousin Ronald up and marched him out of the hall. Cousin Ronald moaned and sagged. By daylight he did look battered, and the young men exclaimed over it. That made Cousin Ronald sag and moan even more. David could see that Alan knew Cousin Ronald was making the most of his hurts, and he was ashamed of him again. He had not realized that Cousin Ronald was so like Uncle Bernard.

  14

  THUNDERLY HILL

  When they came to the bridge, Cousin Ronald drew himself up with great dignity and said he could walk by himself. He added pathetically that if he took David’s arm he could make it to the car. Rather grudgingly, David let him take hold of his arm and thanked the kindly young men, which Cousin Ronald had forgotten to do, and he and Alan took Cousin Ronald the rest of the way.

  Astrid and Luke were at a table outside the pub, and the man with ginger hair was there too. He had his elbows on the back of Luke’s chair. They were clearly enjoying themselves. Luke was finishing a vast ice cream with chocolate sauce, which he told David later was probably his seventh, possibly his eighth. They looked up when Cousin Ronald approached between David and Alan. The ginger-haired man bit his lip in order not to laugh. Luke did laugh.

  “Oh dear!” said Astrid. “What happened? Didn’t they tell you where the—?”

  “Watch it!” said both her companions.

  “And you’ve cut your lip, David,” said Astrid.

  “Made you run the gauntlet, did they?” said the man with ginger hair. “Did he tell you after that?”

  “Yes,” said David. “Thunderly Hill. There’s a lady—”

  He was interrupted by a roar of delighted laughter from the ginger-haired man and Luke, and Luke cried out: “So that’s it!”

  “I can help you there,” said the ginger-haired man.

  “But David,” said Luke, grinning wickedly, “you must get your Cousin Ronald to hospital. He looks in a very poor way to me.”

  “I don’t mind telling you,” said Cousin Ronald, sinking dramatically into a chair, “that I’ve had the most awful shock. Who are these people, Astrid? We were set upon by a band of appalling roug
hs in an amusement arcade. Of course, I had to put myself in front of the two youngsters and take the brunt of the attack, and I got very truly mauled. But I couldn’t let them beat up the boys, could I?”

  Alan’s mouth came open, but he was speechless. Luke’s face grew redder and redder and he snorted quietly into his ice cream. Astrid looked from Alan to David.

  “Tiresome for you,” she said. “Do you boys want an ice cream?”

  “So I think,” said Cousin Ronald, peevish at not getting the right reaction, “that I ought to go to Thunderly Hill at once, in case I’ve suffered some internal injury.”

  “Quite right,” said the ginger-haired man gravely.

  “When the boys have had their ices,” said Astrid. “You can wait ten minutes, can’t you?”

  “I doubt it,” Cousin Ronald said anxiously, and Luke choked. David thumped him on the back.

  Alan, with a long, wondering stare at Cousin Ronald, said he thought he would go home now.

  “Not till you’ve had an ice cream,” said Astrid. “Something tells me you’ve earned it.”

  “What about me?” said Cousin Ronald.

  “She’ll buy you one too, if you ask,” Luke said politely.

  But Cousin Ronald insisted more and more loudly that he needed a doctor. Astrid gave Alan the money for an ice cream and Alan left—in a mixture of embarrassment and disgust, David suspected. The ginger-haired man bought David an ice cream, which turned out to be the best he had ever tasted, and he left also, saying he would see them at Thunderly Hill. Luke and Astrid loaded Cousin Ronald tenderly into the Mini and they set off.

  As David sat beside Luke in the backseat, enjoying the ice cream, Luke said: “This part’s in my control, David. I promise I’ll make it as easy for you as I can.”

  “Thanks,” David said. “Do you think I’m going to find it in Thunderly Hill?”

  “I should be very surprised if you didn’t,” said Luke.

  “But,” said David, “how shall I know that it’s it when I see it?”

  Luke thought. “If it’s where I think it is,” he said, “you’ll know it because it’s the odd thing out. Everything else will be rather different.”

  “That means I’m going to look it right in the face and not see it,” said David. “I knew it!”

  “I hope not,” said Luke. “My word, I hope not! Perhaps I’d better get the owner to give you a hint of some kind.”

  Thunderly Hill Hospital was on the outskirts of Ashbury, built in the grounds of somewhere much older, and the old gardens were still kept up, so that they drove among flowers and lawns under a streaky blue fair-weather sky to find this mysterious lady. David asked where she was.

  “Through the building,” said Luke. “Let’s help the poor crippled relative in first.”

  Cousin Ronald had acquired an artistic limp. He needed to acquire it, as Luke unkindly said, because the drive had revived him completely. Apart from a sweetly ripening black eye, he was right as rain. But he would not admit it. He had Luke and David support him on either side into a large clean hall full of unwell people waiting for doctors. There he told them irritably to leave him be. They left him sitting on a bench beside Astrid, who was evidently not enjoying herself now.

  “I wish they’d hit him twice as hard!” said David.

  Luke briskly led the way to a door which said Visitors Only. “Leave it, David,” he said, pushing this door open. “If he chooses to make a fool of himself, it’s nothing to do with you.”

  “You didn’t hear the way they jeered in that hall,” David retorted.

  “But I can imagine,” Luke said, setting out down a long corridor smelling of hospital. “They’re like that. But they weren’t jeering at you or Alan, were they? To hear you, you’d think you were your Cousin Ronald’s Siamese twin.”

  David laughed, and felt a good deal less sore about it. He fell into step beside Luke. They wheeled smartly at the corner and strode down another corridor, past stacks of cylinders, trolleys, and dark brown doors labelled E.C.G. This Way; Ear, Nose and Throat; Nightingale Ward, and so on. Halfway along, David found the ginger-haired man walking beside them.

  “I am going right, aren’t I?” Luke asked him. “It’s such a long time since I was here.”

  “Quite right,” said the man. “You want Firestone Ward these days. And you’d better have these, in case someone asks you what you’re doing.”

  He handed David and Luke each a round metal disk with Firestone 7 stamped on it. David turned his over and found it said Visitor Admit One on the other side.

  “Ah,” said Luke. “Official stuff. By the way, can you give David some kind of hint or sign? He’s afraid he won’t recognize the thing when he sees it.”

  “I’ve been wondering,” said the ginger-haired man. “I think he will, but to be on the safe side, David, if you think you’ve found it, look at that disk. If you have got it, you’ll see the right word under the name of the ward. If there’s nothing, you have to look again.”

  They walked on. David was expecting to see Mr. Wedding too, but though they passed a number of people—one on a trolley being put into a lift marked Operating Theater—none of them was Mr. Wedding. And at the end of the next long corridor was a brown door marked Firestone Ward.

  The ginger-haired man pushed it open for them. “I’ll see you,” he said. “Do your best for him, Luke.” The door bumped shut in front of him and left David and Luke on their own.

  The door led straight on to a hillside covered with pale grass. All round and very near, big purple-gray clouds came driving past and shed gusts of small icy drops on Luke and David. The grass bent and whistled in the wind, but, in spite of this it was not cold, because the hillside was on fire. David thought they were on the edge of some great forest fire. The flames were fully twenty-feet high, forked, and fierce orange. They bent under the gusting wind, streaming across the sky, roaring and crackling, shedding pieces of themselves into the clouds, hissing in the rain, and leaping up more fiercely after each wet gust. At any moment it looked as if the whole hillside would be burning and David and Luke forced back through the hospital door again. The grass in front of them caught, in little running flames, and David put his hand on the door, ready to push it open again. Then came another gust of rain. The great flames leaned and roared. The flames in the grass died into blue smoldering and left the grass none the worse for having been alight. The tall flames stood straight again and stayed where they were at the brow of the hill.

  “Why didn’t the grass catch?” David asked. “Is it too wet?”

  “No,” said Luke. “This fire is something of a special job. It won’t move and it only consumes itself.” He was looking uphill much as he had looked at the burning building, gently and fiercely, with the flames reflected in his red-brown eyes.

  “Did you do it?” David asked.

  Luke smiled. “Long ago. Yes. And it’s going to burn to the end of time, and maybe beyond that.”

  David began to suspect what he might be in for. “Where do I have to go?” he asked.

  “Through, I’m afraid,” said Luke. “The whole lot is beyond time, you see, and I’m sure that’s where it is. I can’t put the flames out for you, but I can help you get through. Do you want to go now?”

  “Yes,” said David, knowing that the longer he stood and looked, the more horrifying the flames would seem.

  They climbed the hill together. The rain seemed warm and the heat from the flames reddened David’s face, while Luke’s became narrow, white and exultant. But it did not seem too hot to bear. Even when David was standing right beside the fire, looking into the whirling, changing heart of it, he was no more than uncomfortably hot. He looked at Luke to ask him why and saw that Luke had gone small and pale and strained.

  “Not too hot are you?” said Luke.

  “Not,” said David.

  “Then go now, if you’re going,” said Luke. “I can’t hold this heat forever.” He dropped to a crouch on the grass and David could
see him shaking slightly with some huge hidden effort.

  “Thanks,” he said. With his arms across his head and face, rather as Alan had run the gauntlet, he plunged forward into the fire. He heard his hair frizzle. He could see smoke coming from the soles of his shoes as he trod the red-hot ground, and he smelled his clothes burning, but he still felt no more than rather too hot. There was none of the pain of burning that he had been dreading. “Perhaps I’m going to die without feeling it,” he thought, and he was very grateful to Luke.

  Then the flames parted ahead and he was through. Or rather, he was inside, in a hot, lurid cave surrounded by racing flames. Above, he saw a snap of stormy sky from time to time, but mostly the flames arched across and hid everything else. Dazzled by the glare and constant movement, David looked round. There seemed to be a tomb in front of him left over from a church—the tall square kind that has a statue lying on top. Otherwise, apart from a circle of grass, there was nothing else there.

  “That grave, I suppose,” David said to himself, and he went over to it.

  It was not strictly a tomb. It was more a heap of rocks piled up to mark the top of the hill and now holding the statue. David looked down at the statue and, with a jump of horror, found it was a body. It lay on its back, as statues do on tombs, and it had been arranged so that one hand had been clasped round a queer old spear with a wide flat head which the flames made the color of copper. The other hand was empty, but it looked as if it ought to have been holding something too. The body was wearing queer old armor, not quite like that of a knight of old, but not unlike, and the flames made that look copper too. David guessed that if whoever it was had been alive and standing up, he would have been as tall as Mr. Wedding.

  Then he looked on to the body’s face and found it was a lady. Somehow that upset him. It was not simply that she was dead without reason and lying in the middle of timeless flames; it was that she had the most beautiful face he had ever seen. Even with her eyes shut and red in the flames she was beautiful. In a way, she reminded David a little of the lady who had driven Mr. Wedding’s car, except that this dead face was full of living feelings. It was a face that had no business to be dead. David gazed at it, and it dawned on him that he had never seen anyone look so sad. When the lady died, she must have been more unhappy than he had known anyone could be.