On the inside the bars were like a small ladder. She’d perched halfway up them quite a few times now, looking out along the empty alleyway of white running left and right between its neatly parallel hedges: the road outside Pendurra.
“It doesn’t hurt me anymore,” she said. “I never used to be able to go by the gate. I couldn’t wear Daddy’s coat before either, it’s got this lining that used to make me tingle. Those things don’t bother me now.”
Holly watched her, unreadable.
“Why is that? Why is it different?”
“This is an altered world,” Holly said. “It can no longer deny you.”
“Yes.” She nodded to herself. “That’s what I thought. I knew it was wrong that everyone tells me I have to go on like I used to.”
“You will not heed me,” Holly said. “You choose wishes, and regrets.”
“Would you try to stop me? If I climbed over the gate one day?”
“If I could halt you, child, I would hold you here beside me, each of us forever fixed. But I am ward, not jailer. Your will is your own.”
“Why? Why would you do that? No one ever tells me why. It’s just the same as everyone else. Daddy, Gawain, everyone, they all say I have to stay here, it’s so important, I mustn’t ever go anywhere except Pendurra, but none of them tell me why and then they all went and left me on my own.”
“You wish to learn why?”
“Yes.” She sniffed, wiped her nose on a cuff.
“No wonder, then, that you will not be satisfied.”
Marina was going to protest but found she couldn’t think of an answer. The gleams of watery sunlight were swallowed by the west. The snow took on its twilight plumage, feather-grey.
“Can you sing now?”
The dryad sang.
14
The bell across the river rang for a long time that night. Lying in her bed she heard a faint impression of faraway clamor. She opened the bedroom window and sat on the stone sill, where she’d sat hundreds of thousands of times. Everything she did, everything in and around the house, had gone stale. The nights were the worst. At night she felt suffocated by the dreadful changeless repetitions of her life, the places she’d sat in and the steps she’d taken and the things she’d touched, all hundreds of thousands of times. At night she was also smitten with appalling memories of the few days of sudden change, when horror and despair had come unannounced to the house. When she did manage to sleep she had awful dreams. And when she woke up the very first thought she had was that she was facing another day on her own, again, hopeless, the hours already wasting away toward the next installment of nightmares.
The distant noise sounded like people shouting to one another in the night while the bell rang. They must be the people she’d been watching from the roof for the last however many (too many) days, little specks and blobs scuttling around their miniature colored houses. Owen called them “pilgrims,” a word she loved; it tasted of her favorite kind of books. They were there, he said, because it was where Corbo had been seen. People kept trying to make them leave but they wouldn’t go. The sight of Corbo had sent people into a kind of madness, he said, though he couldn’t explain it. If she’d known earlier she would have asked Corbo to go and talk to them and find out what they wanted, but Corbo was gone too.
She felt a little tremor of hope. Were they shouting because they’d seen him again? And if he’d come back, then perhaps Gawain had come back too.
The sound of their voices was so small and muffled it was like the noise the ships sometimes made out at sea, but she was astonished to be hearing it at all. People, out there in the world, their mouths making sounds that reached her windowsill. How close they must be, really! Over there where they were was also where Horace lived with his mother, and Horace came all the time, just because he felt like it, as easily as she might walk from one side of her house to the other. How close it must have been for him; how easy!
Used to come.
He wouldn’t come in the morning. Nor would Corbo, nor would Gawain. She’d stopped hoping many days ago, weeks ago.
She closed the window and went back to lie on her bed. She wasn’t sleepy.
• • •
As the next day began—a gusty, showery early March day—she went down to the kitchen as soon as there was enough light to see by and began putting things in a jute bag. She wasn’t really thinking about it; she just knew she couldn’t endure another night awake, deserted. Gwen used to take her out toward the headland for picnics, in the old days, so she packed the bag with the kinds of things they used to take on those expeditions. Some things to eat, some extra layers in case she got wet or the weather changed, a book. She was going to put on her small shoes like she would have for a picnic but they turned out not to fit very well. She must have grown a lot since the autumn. The bigger ones took much longer because they laced right up her calves. She heard drizzle spattering in occasional squalls against the windows so she took her father’s coat with its pull-up hood even though it was far too big for her. Gwen always used to carry the bag but she’d have to do it herself now. Grey Mouser was off somewhere chasing things to eat. She left the front door open for her, slung the bag across her chest, and walked up the driveway.
Holly watched her as she came past the lodge. Only her head moved, neck turning slowly. Marina decided not to come within reach of her limbs just in case. Near the beginning of the snow, Owen said, some people had climbed over the gate and come down the driveway. He’d told Marina that Holly had made them go away. Later she found out the truth: Holly had killed them.
“Good-bye, then,” Marina said, stopping a few yards away.
“So you choose your human half.”
She was never quite sure what Holly was talking about anyway. She’d been glad of the company occasionally, but most of the time she just liked it when Holly sang to her, even if it made her cry. She couldn’t think of anything else she’d miss, except maybe Grey Mouser.
Having Holly watching her made it easier to keep going. It would be embarrassing to have packed the bag and got to the gate and ended up stopping there. She walked up to the cattle grid. The space beneath it had sunk deeper as all but the last of the snow melted. It had become a pit, clogged with leaves and fragments of broken branches; it yawned up at her with dark strangeness. She wondered whether climbing over the gate would make her die. No more nights awake, then, fighting off the memories and dreading the nightmares. Being dead was a bit like being asleep with only good dreams, Gwen had told her once. There were times she’d wanted that kind of sleep so badly she’d twisted her fists into her pillow and pushed it in her mouth to stop herself screaming.
The only thing that happened when she climbed to the top bar of the gate and swung her legs over was a luminous voice calling behind her.
“Fear men,” it said.
She decided it would be best if she didn’t even turn her head.
• • •
There was a road beyond the gate. She’d always known that, but she’d never known what it was like. Immediately above its surface it was like anywhere you walked, scattered with twigs and streaks of mud and snow, but the surface itself was almost like a floor, hard and uncomfortably smooth. It went west and east. East would have been toward the sea. She walked along it a few steps the other way. The whole world seemed to unhinge itself. The hedge on her left lowered and a horizon she’d never seen before appeared behind it, enclosing a shapeless chasm of unknown things, everything out of place, wrongly arranged. Her legs went weak and she squatted down on the damp tarmac, shaking, her breathing shallow and fast.
• • •
Later she went on another thirty steps, pushing her legs as if she were climbing stairs. The road tilted up and the trees on her right, the Pendurra woods, stopped being there. In all her life she had never been above everything before. There’d always been the valley,
folding her and everything else in. A wave of vertigo broke over her. She clutched hard on the strap of her bag, as if it was the only thing keeping her from flying off the ground and disappearing like a wisp of pollen into the enormous sky.
• • •
More distances appeared, other expanses of things. They looked a bit like things she knew, backdrops of uneven hills, hedge-bordered and wood-fringed fields, but they weren’t the things she knew, they were sickeningly strange. There were little buildings scattered like accidents, stark and weirdly shaped as though parts of the houses they belonged to had been cut off. All of it moved when she moved, things appearing and disappearing as if they were made of cloud.
She came to a thing she recognized from illustrations in books: a signpost. It was much taller than she expected. The hard surface she was walking on grew extensions like a branch, splitting into three. Between them was a car that wasn’t Gwen’s, one of those things she’d learned to fear touching so long ago that coming upon it unexpectedly and out of place gave her a throb of instinctive dread. The words on the signpost, though, were familiar. They made her think of voices she knew, Caleb’s way of saying “Saint Anthony,” Horace’s voice speaking the word Helford. From here she could see glimpses of the river in the valley below, so narrow and strangely shaped it was almost impossible to know it for the same river and the same valley. Across the river was the place with the bell and the pilgrims, which was where Horace lived, and also the person Gawain had said he was going to see before he went on his long journey. The name of that place wasn’t on any of the signpost’s four sternly lettered arms, and she couldn’t see the tower of the church anymore.
There was part of a house down the hill to the south. It looked like a toy house, like the houses in cartoons in magazines, all flat and plain. There were words painted in wobbly, smeary, washed-out white streaks on its roof. The bottom three-quarters of them were hidden by the near hedge but you could still read them: forgive us. Someone, she thought, must have gone up there with a ladder and a paintbrush. Someone she didn’t know, someone else. Other people must live inside that house.
There were four directions: back the way she’d come, down closer to that house, down the other way toward the river, or on westward. She thought for a second of standing in the river up to her ankles on a grim December evening. The memory rose like bile. She scrunched up her eyes and fists and hurried west.
• • •
She came to a tiny house beside the road, just one room with no door and a bench inside. It was cobwebby and musty with damp. Words had been written inside it too, but she didn’t understand them. There was a kind of big poster behind a screen of spotted and moldy glass. It had more writing on it, and a picture, like part of a cartoon. It said not to litter, but she didn’t think the message was for her, and the house and the road outside it were filthy anyway, not just with mud. She’d seen colored bottles and boxes and bits of things she couldn’t name poking out of the wet heaps of snow or drowning in puddles of water as brown as her coat. All these words seemed wasted. There was no one anywhere to read them. Earlier on she’d seen the top of some kind of car moving over a hedge in the distance, and heard its sound, a bit like the sound some of the boats on the river used to make, but otherwise the only moving things apart from her were the birds, the trickles of rainwater around her shoes, and the clouds.
The bench in the tiny house was made of slats of wood. Exactly half of them were broken (she counted). She sat down and felt the relief of walls close around her, keeping the strange expanse of the world at bay. She got her book out and read for a while.
• • •
It occurred to her that it was actually quite like reading.
When you opened a book, especially if you hadn’t read it before, you were somewhere else, somewhere you knew hardly anything about, wondering what would happen. Everything was strange and surprising.
She knew how to start a book, she thought. She’d done that thousands of times.
• • •
Not too far past the tiny empty house with no door, she came to another crossroads and another signpost. This one was piled around with a slumped pyramid of unnameable things, like a compost pile except made with discarded dead rather than living matter. From two of the signpost’s arms hung crudely stuffed sacks draped in ragged clothes. Going closer after a long and wary pause, she saw they had heads too, smaller sacks stitched on top of the big ones. They’d flopped over like the heads of the dolls Gwen used to make. A hat was still just about attached to one of them, dangling feebly, a soaked and misshapen piece of felt. She didn’t like them. She wasn’t sure which way was which, but she ducked down the road to the right because neither of the sack-corpses was hanging from the arm which pointed that way, and because the road there was the narrowest, sheltered by high hedges and overhanging trees. Lots of branches had fallen. She had to clamber around them sometimes as if she were walking in her own woods.
She kept on taking steps, like turning the pages in a book. Sometimes you turned the pages more slowly, sometimes faster. It began to feel as if it was happening by itself. It was more like being inside than outside. The hedges made walls like the long upstairs corridor, and from time to time they were broken by gates like windows, letting her see to one side or the other. As in the corridor, some of those windows looked out into the open, others into groups of buildings like the stables with no house attached, jumbled and empty. One of the gates was closed with a chain and hung with a painted board: keep out we are armed we shoot first. She hurried away from that one. It wasn’t so much the message that alarmed her as the presence of writing in the emptiness, as if she’d gone out of her bedroom and found the print of an unknown shoe right by the door.
Not long past the closed gate she heard the noise of water running ahead. The green-walled corridor bent steeply down. The sound grew louder and coarser and then she came to a place where the road was gone. Dirty water surged over its edge, racing fast, as if it were being poured out of a bucket. An uprooted tree had wedged itself in the shrubby tangle at the bottom of the slope, choking the flooded stream into ridges and eddies of perpetual angry motion. A boy—she thought it must be a boy; it happened almost too fast for her to see—started up like a surprised bird from one of the boughs of the fallen tree, dropped himself lightly into the water and vanished.
The brief flicker of movement caught her by surprise, but she barely had time to be startled before it was gone. She looked around, at a loss.
“Hello?”
There might have been another skip of dappled shadows among the half-drowned branches; she couldn’t quite see. The boy, if it had been a boy, had dived away as shy as an animal. He must have been a very good swimmer, she thought, to have disappeared so completely in the noisy turbulence.
She waited a while but no one came out to talk to her. The waiting gave her time to wonder whether she ought to look for another way to go. She could see where the road continued, though, up the other side of the small steep valley beyond the stream, and the idea of retracing her steps felt wrong, like turning pages backward. It might make time run the wrong way too, sending her backward in her own story until she’d be stuck at Pendurra again, abandoned and desperately unhappy and with nothing to do but wait for the next dreadful night alone. So she took off her shoes and socks and skirt and put them in the bag, hitched up her shift to her waist, and felt her way carefully into the water. It tugged at her ankles and then, fiercely, at her calves. She couldn’t see where she was putting her feet. She felt the hard surface of the road come to a crumbled stop under her toes. The next shuffling steps took her into mud and stones and brought the stream suddenly up around her thighs. She could tell what it wanted, all of a sudden: it was trying to push her down to the big river below. She resisted. She wasn’t a child anymore. She steadied her look on the rising road ahead and kept her footing. The deep part was only a handful of small steps acros
s. Her feet found the broken edge of the road again and she clambered swiftly out, breathing hard.
Her shift was all wet around the hem. She always had to change her shift if it got damp, but of course she didn’t have another one to change into. She looked up at the sky. The early-morning drizzle had gusted away and the air felt fresh and sharp. She decided the best she could do would be to hang the damp undergarment over a branch for a while until it was at least comfortable to walk in. She wrapped herself in her father’s coat and sat down by the water’s edge while she waited for the shift to dry.
She was going to read, but she discovered as she opened her bag that she was hungry. A moment later and a series of thoughts worked their way through her for the first time that day: if she ate the picnic now, what would she eat the next time she was hungry? If she finished the book, where would she find another one? How would she wash and dry her clothes when they got smelly? These ideas were so peculiar, they almost made her laugh. Where did the road go? Would the next road be different? What would happen in an hour? In two hours? At bedtime?
With the exception of a few unthinkably hideous days at the beginning of that winter, so alien in the memory that they didn’t feel like part of her history at all, Marina could not think of a time when she hadn’t known what was around the next corner and how the rest of the day would unfold. There was food, there was shelter, there was sleep, all as permanently fixed as the architecture of the house she lived in. These things happened in their natural order like the sun tracking westward.
Sluggishly, she tried to grasp the idea of eating something else, sleeping somewhere else. Those thoughts were like wet and heavy clay. She chewed a corner of cheese. She got the cheese from the larder; that’s where it always was. It was there because people brought it. But now she wasn’t anywhere near the larder, no one knew where she was, the place she was sitting in didn’t have any sort of name, and there didn’t seem to be any people anyway: what, then, would happen when she’d eaten it all?
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