The Greenstone Grail

by Jan Siegel

  ‘No children,’ said Eric. ‘There is old rumour they try, long ago, before sterile begin, but no children come. Force strong in their family. Children perhaps more powerful. Incest common in my world, in strong family. You see … Halmé? You see her face?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nathan. ‘You’re right. She is the most beautiful of women.’

  ‘Your mother beautiful also,’ Eric suggested.

  Nathan glanced up at him, suddenly smiling. ‘Yes, she is,’ he said. Halmé’s beauty was that of Helen, a queen of ancient legend, a goddess – but Annie’s beauty was something closer to the earth, nearer the heart, less perfect, less breathtaking, but not less touching. A beauty that shines from inside, he thought, and he remembered how Halmé was weary of her endless life, and her dying world, and how little she seemed to care for anything. For all her swan-neck, and the poise of her head, and the artwork of her bones, there was nothing inside her that shone any more.

  As they drew nearer to Thornyhill the familiar ripple came snaking through the leaves, and the whispers began. Even with the iron in his pocket, Nathan knew the eternal clutch of fear in his stomach, but he clasped the number tightly, and held it out, and Eric did the same, and they retreated. Not far, never far, and the pressure of their rage and their reluctance was like a tangible barrier, but Nathan and Eric kept going. When they reached the path to the house the gnomons suddenly melted away, their nothingness vanishing into the quiet of the wood.

  ‘You are very brave,’ Eric declared. ‘They follow you, but you have no fear.’

  ‘They aren’t following me,’ Nathan said. ‘And I’ve been to Thornyhill often enough without any interference. They just don’t want me to bring you here.’

  ‘Why not?’ Eric demanded in bewilderment.

  ‘I don’t know. But anything they don’t want me to do, I’m doing.’

  He knocked on the door, wondering what he would say, how he would explain to Bartlemy about the uninvited guest. But when the door opened there was no need for explanations. There was no need to say anything at all.

  ‘I’ve been expecting you,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Come on in. Breakfast is ready.’

  ‘I’ve prepared a room for you,’ Bartlemy told the visitor after they had eaten. Eric had devoured scrambled eggs, bacon, mushrooms, toast and marmalade like a hungry wolf; Nathan, his appetite impaired less by the cereal he had had earlier than inner tension, only managed some toast.

  ‘But – Eric likes to sleep out,’ he said hastily, and then stopped, knowing he sounded ungrateful.

  ‘That’s fine,’ Bartlemy said, addressing the exile. ‘The bed is there if you want it.’

  ‘You are kind,’ Eric said gravely. ‘There is much kindness here. But maybe I bring trouble.’ He glanced at Nathan for guidance. ‘I not want to bring trouble for you.’

  ‘No trouble comes to this house,’ Bartlemy said with quiet assurance.

  ‘There are things we should tell you,’ Nathan began.

  ‘If you wish.’ As with Annie, years before, Bartlemy’s manner was unhurried and incurious.

  ‘Eric comes from another world!’ Nathan blurted out.

  ‘So I assumed. Most unusual.’ Bartlemy inclined his head courteously in Eric’s direction. ‘I don’t think I ever met anyone from another world before. Your English is excellent.’

  ‘I learn too slow. Must read more. Read poetry now: lines that stop before end of page. Mother of Nathan give me book.’

  ‘There are many books here for you to read,’ Bartlemy said.

  ‘We’re not joking!’ Nathan protested, on the edge of frustration and fury.

  Bartlemy gave him a look so serious that his anger died in an instant. ‘Nor I,’ he said. ‘What I would like to know, is how Eric got here. There is only one way between the worlds that I am aware of, and Death alone opens that Gate. So say the Ultimate Laws. But even those laws are made to be broken, so it seems. I gather you arrived on the beach at Pevensey Bay. Do you know how it happened?’

  Nathan had never heard Bartlemy talk in that way before, and for a moment the world seemed to be suddenly fluid, mutating into a different reality. But of course it was not the world, it was himself, growing, changing, making room for new concepts, broader visions. He said before Eric could answer: ‘It was me. My fault. I have these dreams of other worlds – his world – and he was drowning, and I tried to save him. I didn’t mean to, but I brought him here. I know it was awfully irresponsible – I concentrate very hard now, when I dream, so as not to do it again – but if I’d left him, he would have died.’

  ‘Is true,’ Eric confirmed. ‘In my world, I am dead.’

  ‘That old trick,’ Bartlemy said. ‘The cat in the box is both alive and dead. Well, well. But dreams … I have known many strange things happen in dreams.’ He looked thoughtful but not particularly surprised.

  ‘There’s a star that watches me,’ Nathan went on, ‘above our house. Only it isn’t a star, it’s a crystal globe, and it’s in both worlds, I’ve seen it in dreams, and he’s using it, spying on me.’

  ‘Hmm. Not crystal. It could be a globe of interdimensional space, bound by magic. I have heard of such things. Images would pass through it from world to world.’

  Nathan rushed on, eager to tell more, yet still reeling inwardly. Bartlemy’s acceptance of everything made it all somehow both more real and more terrible, because he had always been a comfort figure, a normal adult in a normal universe – and now he too was forever altered. But there would be time enough to deal with the implications later. ‘There are these creatures,’ he said, ‘they’re called gnomons, they come from Eric’s world too. They’re invisible here, only not quite, and they’ve been following us, and if they catch you they get inside your head and drive you mad. We have to carry iron: they’re afraid of it.’

  ‘I think I’ve seen them,’ Bartlemy said, ‘if you can see something that’s invisible.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘The first night your mother came here. You were a baby in a sling around her neck. These – creatures – seemed to be pursuing you both, but I am less sure now. Their purpose, I believe, was to drive her here, where she would find sanctuary. They may be evil, but their acts are not always so. Anyway, this house is a refuge from all such invaders. The door-handles and hinges are of iron, and the window-lattices. Iron is an ancient ward against bad spirits.’

  ‘You seem to know everything,’ Nathan said, increasingly baffled. ‘And I worried about telling you. I thought you wouldn’t believe me.’

  ‘Your uncle is wise man,’ Eric declared. ‘He know what is truth, what is lies.’

  ‘I don’t know enough,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Perhaps you would start at the beginning.’

  Nathan complied, describing his dreams and parallel events in this world, trying to remember everything up to the release of the prisoner in the Darkwood and his other dream that week of the islands swallowed in the storm. Everything but that first vision of the Grail which he couldn’t discuss. ‘The gnomons may have sent Mum to you all those years ago,’ he concluded doubtfully, ‘but they definitely tried to prevent me bringing Eric here today, and freeing that person – whoever – whatever he was – last weekend.’

  ‘Do you know where he went?’ Bartlemy asked.

  ‘He just ran. He could have gone anywhere.’

  ‘Maybe I should prepare a room for him too.’

  He rose to collect the plates, but Nathan jumped up to forestall him. Eric followed them into the kitchen, trailed by Hoover, who had clearly detected an element of difference in the newcomer’s smell. Bartlemy washed while Nathan dried, and Eric moved round the room, examining bottles of vinegar and oil, pots of home-made preserves, bunches of herbs.

  ‘A little while ago,’ Nathan said, ‘you mentioned magic as if – as if it was something quite normal.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not normal,’ Bartlemy responded. ‘If there’s such a thing as normality. But that’s too large a subject for now. I need some time to think about
all this. You needn’t worry about your friend: I’ll take care of him.’

  He was interrupted by a cry from Eric. He had lifted a sealed jar containing a sprig of some dried herb and was smiling a smile of triumph. ‘Sylpherim!’ he exclaimed. ‘Is same – or almost same – as in my world.’ He tried to unscrew the top but Bartlemy stopped him with a hand on his arm.

  ‘Best not in here.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, you are right. Too strong …’

  ‘What do we call it here?’ Nathan inquired, peering into the jar.

  ‘Silphium,’ Bartlemy replied. ‘I grew it in my herb garden, under glass. Otherwise the smell might be a little … overpowering.’

  ‘I never heard of it before,’ Nathan said. ‘Is it very rare?’ Annie had often commented that Bartlemy had many rare herbs in both kitchen and garden.

  ‘It’s extinct,’ Bartlemy said.

  Nathan left after lunch, his mind so full of new ideas, new understandings, new questions, he thought they must be spilling out of his ears. ‘What on earth am I going to tell Mum?’ he asked Bartlemy.

  ‘What do you want to tell her?’

  ‘The truth, of course, but …’

  ‘Then do it.’

  He was trying to work out how to begin when he ran into Hazel. He was conscious of a pang of guilt: he had excluded her, without meaning to, from too much that was important. But at least filling her in wouldn’t be difficult.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ she demanded. ‘I’ve been looking for you all over. Your mum said you rushed off early somewhere-she thought you were with me.’

  ‘Sorry. I had to take Eric to Uncle Barty. I knew he’d be safe there. Is something wrong?’

  ‘It’s Great-grandma.’ Hazel’s expression was at once worried and shut in, the look he knew from her reserved, up-the-tree moods. ‘She’s disappeared. She went into the attic on Monday – I saw her – and she never came out.’

  ‘Knock on the door.’

  ‘No, stupid. I mean, we did. Mum and I. We broke the lock and went in, but she wasn’t there. She never came out, but she wasn’t there. She isn’t at her cottage. She’s just – gone.’

  ‘She’s awfully eccentric,’ Nathan offered doubtfully. He had a feeling there was something more, something Hazel wasn’t telling him, lending an edge of panic to her anxiety. ‘She’s bound to turn up.’

  Hazel jerked her head impatiently and tugged her hair over her eyes. ‘Something’s happened to her,’ she insisted. ‘Something bad.’

  ‘Why should anything bad happen to Effie? I know we asked her about other worlds that time but she isn’t involved. She doesn’t know anything about … anything. She’s the kind of old lady who’s been around forever and will probably go on being around forever.’ Hazel flicked him a curious glance between strands of hair. ‘She’s as tough as … oh, I don’t know. Something old and tough.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Hazel said. ‘She’s been doing things -charms – in the attic. Charms for watching people. Magic.’ ‘But you don’t believe –’

  ‘I don’t want to believe, stupid. I don’t want it to be true! I don’t mind the other-world stuff, that’s science, but magic-if it’s real, it has no rules, it’s dangerous … But Great-grandma thinks she’s a witch, she thinks she’s old – a hundred, two hundred – she says she has power. She’s been mixing with stuff – and I think it’s backfired on her.’

  ‘What haven’t you told me?’ Nathan demanded.

  He could see her withdrawing from him, into one of her moods, behind the tangle of her hair. ‘There’s a lot you don’t tell me,’ she said.

  ‘We need to talk.’

  SEVEN

  An Inspector Calls

  Two dogs found the body wedged under the riverbank, early on Sunday morning. Their owner, an elderly villager who disapproved of mobile phones, walked briskly back along the Glyde to the nearest house, which happened to be Riverside. Michael called the police and returned with him to the spot where the dogs had been left on guard. Uniforms arrived, followed by CID, and there was an unpleasant interlude while those who were ordered to do so got wet and the body arrived on the bank and was zipped into a plastic bag. ‘Well, she’s dead,’ the police doctor said brightly. ‘A good few days, I’d say. Probably drowned. In her mid-late sixties, pretty fit from the look of her. Accident, at a guess. Fell in – hit her head – caught in the weed. Autopsy should tell us more.’

  Michael and the dog-owner were asked if they minded taking a look for possible identification.

  ‘I’m sure I recognize her,’ Michael said. ‘Yes … I’ve seen her around. The local witch, I always thought.’

  ‘It’s old Missus Carlow,’ confirmed the villager. ‘Pretty old she was too. Been around as long as I can remember. Can’t really take it in, her dying. Not like this, any road. She wasn’t the type.’

  ‘Was she getting a bit dithery?’ the police constable inquired.

  ‘Not she. Sharp as anything, she was. Not the sort to slip in the river and get herself drowned.’

  ‘D’you know her next of kin?’

  In due course, two officers paid a call on Lily Bagot, the dog-owner dropped in on the pub and let fall a few cryptic utterances, and Michael knocked on Annie’s door in search of coffee and a sympathetic ear.

  ‘Stupid to be shaken up,’ he said, sitting at the back of the bookshop, closed for Sunday, cupping the coffee mug between his hands. ‘All the same … I haven’t seen too many dead bodies, and none like that. My mother looked peaceful, my grandfather empty, like a waxwork. But Mrs Carlow – there was an expression on her face – rage, fear, horror, any combination. Her eyes wide open and the weed hanging over them. Sorry: sounds such a cliché. She died with an expression of unspeakable horror on her face. I know you think it’s a big adventure, Nat. That’s your age.’

  ‘It’s horrible,’ Annie said quietly. The previous evening Nathan had started to tell her about Eric, dreams, other worlds, and she had listened and accepted, adding her own experience of the gnomons. But she had said nothing about Rianna Sardou or the thing from the river, and now the drowning struck her as more than ordinarily unpleasant. There was too much water about.

  ‘She was Hazel’s great-grandma,’ Nathan said. ‘I ought to go see her.’

  ‘Nathan –!’

  ‘Hazel, I mean. Don’t worry, Mum. I’m not turning into a ghoul.’

  ‘It’s natural you’d be interested,’ Michael said. ‘I expect you’d like it to be murder, but I’m afraid it was just an accident. The rage and horror was probably because she fell in the river, and found herself caught in the weed. That would be enough to horrify anyone.’

  ‘Hazel must have been fond of her,’ Annie said. ‘She’d been staying with the Bagots for a while, hadn’t she?’

  ‘Since Hazel’s dad left,’ Nathan replied. ‘Hazel’s a bit afraid of her – I mean, she was – but so was he.’

  ‘I said she looked like a witch,’ Michael remarked.

  Nathan went round to the Bagots’ house as soon as he could. Lily let him in; she wasn’t crying, but she looked frightened. ‘She thinks Dad’ll come back,’ Hazel explained. ‘She’s scared. I don’t think she was fond of Great-grandma – she couldn’t be, ’cos Great-grandma wasn’t fond of her, she wasn’t fond of anyone – but she protected us. Now, there’s nobody.’

  ‘There’s the police,’ Nathan suggested. Hazel grimaced. ‘Mum’ll help. About your great-grandma – d’you want to say I told you so?’

  ‘I told you so.’

  In Hazel’s room, he gave her back the horseshoes. She sat on the bed, holding one of them, stroking the coarse metal with a single finger. ‘It’s too late,’ she said. ‘We should never have taken them. She needed the iron too. Something got through …’ She hadn’t told him about the face in the basin, and the head emerging into the room. That had been too grotesque, too unnatural – no mumbled charm but a reality that defied belief. She refused to think about it, let alone discuss it, but it fille
d her mind, squashing all other thoughts into the corners. She tried to convince herself that Effie’s death really might have been accidental, but it was difficult, when horrible ideas were crowding into her head. It was hard to keep hold of a failing reality, with only the corners of your mind. In the end she put on some music which sounded eastern, with a twangy instrument that she said was a sitar, and they drank coke because there was no ginger beer. They talked little, but she was glad he was there.

  After Nathan had gone she went back to the attic. Nothing had been done about the broken lock, and the door swung loose. She had a feeling it ought to be fixed – an attic should have a lock – but she didn’t know what to do about it. There was no point in mentioning it to her mother right now. Inside, everything was as they had found it when – with the assistance of a muscular neighbour – they broke in. The herbs and bottles on the table, the smell – very faint now – that didn’t belong in an attic, an outdoor smell, a river smell, the shards of the broken basin on the floor. Hazel didn’t pick them up; she didn’t want to touch them. She had a carrier bag with her and she crammed in all the stuff on the table, quickly and carelessly; the bottles clattered as she carried them downstairs. She had intended to throw them away but her mother was in the kitchen talking to someone and she didn’t want to answer questions about what was going in the bin. In the end, she hid the bag under her bed and left it there.

  Later, Lily talked about Effie’s age (a grey area), and how she must have slipped, and what a tragedy it was for someone who was still so fit and had more than her fair share of marbles. Hazel gnawed on her frustration and a lingering sense of guilt, and said nothing.

  It wasn’t until Wednesday that the detectives came to Riverside House. Michael opened the door to an inspector from the CID and a uniformed sergeant who identified themselves politely, presented warrant cards, and requested a brief word.

  The sergeant, a woman, was black, burly and six feet tall; the inspector was about the same height but much slimmer, with a narrow, intent face that looked both pale and dark, hard eyes and a secretive mouth. His name was Pobjoy. It didn’t suit him. He declined coffee for both of them in the voice of one who would decline any such offer as a matter of principle.