“That’s a Jesus.”
“We’ll take that. Might be silver.”
“There’s something else.”
Marina heard paper being pushed around. The people outside went quiet again for a few seconds.
“Acorn,” said the man.
“What’s it made of ?”
“What’s it made of ? It’s made of bloody tree, it’s a bloody acorn.”
“Can we sell it on— Can we sell it?”
“Course we can’t, idiot. They grow, don’t they.”
“Why’d they hide it in a box, then?”
“How the bloody hell do I know? They were all bloody nutters living here. Bloody Christians. Probably their holy acorn.”
“Should we take it?” Amber asked. “If it’s holy?”
Her father took a while to reply. “What else d’you find?”
“Nothing.” She said it nuffing, like Horace did; Marina wondered for a moment whether these people might know where he’d gone, and whether she ought to go out and ask them. “Just books and stuff.”
“What sort of stuff ? I told you to have a proper look.”
“Just books.”
The man grunted. “Might do for burning. All right. The good stuff’s up in the big house anyway. Let’s have a look. Come on.”
“What about that acorn?”
“Rubbish.” His voice was farther away already. “You’d better learn what’s rubbish and what isn’t if you want to keep coming with me.”
“Dad! Wait!”
Then all she could hear was footsteps and mumbles, and then nothing except the steady clatter of the flooding stream. She worried for a while that she’d missed her chance to find out about Horace or the village where he lived, but when she tried to imagine feeling her way out from her dark corner and saying hello she couldn’t do it. There was no background, nowhere to start. She’d hardly understood anything the girl and her father had said to each other. She knew all the words but they didn’t add up, like a nonsense poem. Only the acorn stuck in her head. She curled herself up again, thinking of the word acorn, a small, hard, solid living thing. She remembered what an acorn felt like in her hand, and in her head too: the wonder of knowing what grandeur lay hidden in a thing small enough to fit under her tongue.
• • •
She didn’t remember it becoming light so she supposed she must have slept. She felt achy and tired and hungry, not at all the way waking up usually felt. She tried reading for a bit like she normally did in the morning before going down for breakfast, but it didn’t help. There was nowhere to go down to. There was no breakfast. She wasn’t even wearing her pajamas.
She did find her shoes and socks and coat and sweater outside, lying in a puddle. She wondered who’d have been stupid enough to leave clothes in a puddle, and why someone hadn’t picked them up and put them away. It took her a few minutes to arrive at the idea that they were there because that was where she’d dropped them the night before; the night had come and gone and they’d stayed where they’d been put and now they were wet and smelly, especially the sweater. This kind of thinking—this, then that, so the next—was called logic, and she’d always liked it before, when she’d been doing math or puzzles with Gwen. Now it seemed dingy and horrible. She hadn’t meant to ruin her clothes, so why were they ruined?
Her shift had dried out a bit so she put that on instead, though it was getting smelly too. She had spare socks in the bag, and her shoes weren’t too bad on the inside. There was a pickled onion left, going soft. She ate the bits that weren’t mushy.
She wondered where to go to pee. The room was like a room from a dollhouse before you arranged it, or after Grey Mouser had stuck a paw in and knocked everything over. There was proper furniture, chairs and things, but lying around so you couldn’t use any of it. A lot of it was sideways or upside down. There were pictures on the wall like pages from oversized books, big sheets of paper stuck on with tape or pins. She didn’t recognize the places or the words on them, except for one that showed a sort of glowing sunrise over a mountain and had the words “I am the RESURRECTION and the LIFE” printed along the bottom. That was a line from a book she’d read once. She remembered it because she’d had to ask Daddy what resurrection was.
Outside there were other buildings arranged around a square of mess. If someone had thrown together in one space the untidiest bits of the garden, the inside of the stable, and the old office, added some other things that didn’t belong, and then poured water over the whole pile, they might have ended up with something like this square. A tall wooden pole was attached to the side of one building, and pieces of thick black cord trailed down from the top of it, snaking through the mess like the first abandoned threads of a giant cobweb.
One of the things by her feet was a battered metal box with a broken padlock. Sheets of typewritten paper were stacked inside it, and more stray sheets lay around, wet and disintegrating. She looked at them.
This, then that. All the things she sort of remembered from the night must have happened, here, where she was standing. She remembered the man and the girl talking about boxes and papers and breaking locks. The two of them had vanished as completely as dreams but their words had left traces behind, like writing: a box, papers, a broken lock.
She found a corner of the mess to squat in. From there she saw a proper house farther up the slope—tall, grey, and rain-streaked. She walked up a sort of path toward it and came out in an area of leaf-strewn grass so wet underfoot that every step sucked at the heel of her shoe. The windows of the house were mostly broken. She walked around it a couple of times until something sank in. No one lives here. Some of the other things the man and girl in the dark had said came back to her, and she put the pieces together: people lived here once but not anymore. It was the same as Gwen’s house. Gwen had lived there once, when it had been neat and whole and warm; now it was wrecked and burned and Gwen was gone.
What had happened to Pendurra (she shivered and closed her eyes and made little noises between her clenched teeth to stop herself thinking about it) must have happened everywhere else too, then. Horror and ruin. Abandonment. Owen had been telling her stories like that but she’d only thought of them as stories, if she’d even been listening.
The wind blew, and in a moment or two the sun came out, low in the sky, turning the wet world into a dazzle too bright to look at. It made Marina think about drying out her clothes, so she went back down to the messy buildings. Across the square from the one with the jammed door where she’d slept there was a windowsill and a patch of wall beneath catching the full force of the sun. She took her soggy sweater over and was arranging it to hang there when she happened to look in through the cracked glass above the sill. A man stood inside, looking back at her.
Marina froze.
The man wasn’t like Daddy or Caleb or Owen, but he wasn’t like the man who’d been shouting at the dog either; he was yet another person, different again. He had a strong face, and eyes that were hard to look at, intense and unforgiving. He was standing in a corridor that was dusty and dirty and cold-looking, but he himself seemed somehow bright and clear. Maybe that was because of his coat: it was as yellow as the sunlight. Or maybe it was just the way he was standing, still, arms at his sides, as if nothing could make him uncomfortable.
“Hello,” she said. She’d been standing holding her wet sweater for a while, and it felt odd not saying anything. The man didn’t answer.
“Do you live here?” she said. “Sorry.”
He opened his mouth. His teeth were very straight.
“I am,” he began. His voice was lovely, full, slow; he spoke as if reading aloud from a book, with that funny emphasis nobody ever used in normal talking. But he only said those two words. Perhaps he’d forgotten how the book started.
Marina felt awkward. “I was just going to hang up my sweater here. In the sun.”
“The sun,” the man repeated, and took a step toward the window. He bent down and put his face to a gap in the glass. His skin wasn’t speckly like grown-up skin, but smooth-looking, like her own, except browner, as if he’d been sunbathing. But it was definitely a grown-up face.
“To dry out,” she explained, wondering whether she was doing something wrong. She felt, suddenly, much younger. She had a memory she hadn’t thought of for a very long time: she remembered how she used to be a little scared of Caleb, when she only came up to his waist. “I’m going soon,” she said, looking away.
“You’re lost,” he said.
She thought it was a bit of a rude thing to say, although as soon as he said it she knew it was the truth. “I’m going to Mawnan,” she muttered, not wanting to admit he was right.
“You don’t know the way.”
“I’ll ask someone.”
“Ask me. I know the roads.”
“Do you? Is this your house?”
He smiled, very beautifully. “No.” He disappeared from the window. She heard him stepping through clutter in the building, and he came out through an empty doorframe into the open square. The sunlight seemed to gather around him. She felt thin and grubby, like another piece of the discarded wreckage underfoot.
“I just stopped here to wash the mud off and go to sleep. Do you want me to go away?”
He looked down at the mess, then bent and picked something up in his fingers. He held it up to the sunlight for both of them to see: an acorn. He smiled again, with obvious pleasure.
“Oh,” Marina said. “Were you looking for that? Some people found it in that box in the night. They must have thrown it away.”
“Away,” he echoed again, though in his deliberate rich voice it sounded like two words, a way. “I know the ways.”
Horace was always telling her that she didn’t know anything. She’d always suspected it was something he did to make himself feel bigger and older and cleverer than her even though he was none of those things, not that she minded. She’d never guessed that it would turn out to be literally true: outside Pendurra she didn’t seem to be able to understand anything anyone said, even when the words were as plain as anything.
“The way to Mawnan?”
“All the ways. All roads. I am . . .”
“I’m Marina,” she said, to fill what had become (for her at least) a rather embarrassing silence.
“You are double,” he said, “and lost. I’ll send you a guide. What do you have to offer me?”
“Did you say a guide?”
“Yes.”
“To Mawnan?”
“Wherever you’re going.”
This bit she was sure she understood properly. “Really? Now? Here?”
“Here,” the man said, “and today.” He put the acorn in the pocket of his jacket.
“That would help,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Thank me.” He made it sound like a command. “And make an offering.”
She fingered the sleeve of her shift nervously. “Do you mean give you something?”
“Yes.”
Once more she thought he was being rather rude. On the other hand, when he put it that way, so simply, she felt she didn’t have a choice. It was again like when she’d been smaller and the grown-ups made things so just by saying them.
“I don’t really have anything. Sorry. I only brought some clothes and food. And a book. There’s a bit of cheese left?”
“You have your maidenhead.”
Half understanding, half not, she felt her face going hot. She looked away.
“Or there’s lots of stuff here,” she mumbled, waving at the mess. “I could try and find something nice.”
“There’s no offering more precious,” he said, “since it’s only given once. I’ll help you in return. You’re lost, and alone, and I am the helper. Where I am, roads meet. Who do you want to speak with?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t understand. I think I ought to go.”
“Come with me.” She looked back involuntarily and saw that he was holding out a hand.
“No.” She crossed her arms. “Thank you.”
“This way.” He hadn’t moved. The hand looked twice the size of hers.
“I don’t want to give you that,” she said, her head bowed.
“Shall I tell you a story, Marina? Look.” His voice seemed to pull her chin up. His hand was flat now, and the acorn was resting on the palm; he’d taken it out without her seeing. “A woman fled from me once. She took this, this seed. She fled by night, hiding. She fled here. She prayed for deliverance and hid, for two summers and a winter. In the next winter I came. I came, I fell on her as the sunlight falls on this wall. I am necessity. I am what happens. Come, then. Your tribute is accepted and I will give you what you want and need.”
“You’re not a man at all. You’re like my mother.”
“I am,” he began, closing his palm over the acorn; but instead of him saying anything else a bell began to ring.
It was startling enough to make Marina jump. It wasn’t muffled and echoey like the bell in the church tower across the river; it was sharp, snapping on and off in a regular rhythm, and loud.
“What’s that?” It sounded like it was inside one of the buildings, where she’d first seen the bright strong not-man.
“Someone calling you,” he said. “Come and answer.” He turned and went back in the open doorway. She was relieved to see him go, and yet when she started moving herself she found that she was going the same way.
The building had a floor made out of hard squares stuck together. There were more chairs, thin metal ones, and other things like big white cupboards with no doors. There were boards with white writing on them but she didn’t stop to look. The ringing was even louder inside, unpleasantly insistent and repetitive and shrill. It was coming from a corridor beyond the big room she’d entered. The not-man in the yellow coat beckoned from that direction.
“What’s that?” She almost shouted to make herself heard over the sound. “Can you make it stop? Please?”
“You can.” He was standing next to a dull yellow box attached to the white wall of the corridor. The noise was coming from the box. “When you answer.”
She stepped over a broken broom handle and icy puddles of fragmented glass. The yellow box had a handle on top. The not-man rested his big sun-browned hand on it.
“That’s a . . .” She’d seen pictures. “One of those things. It means ‘faraway voice.’ ”
“A telephone,” he said. She knew the word, she’d just been too surprised to get it straightaway. “Answer.”
She remembered what you were supposed to do as well, from the pictures. “You have to pick up that bit and hold it.”
He smiled encouragingly. “Speak into the emptiness. And listen.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Close your eyes, Marina.”
She did. It was as though sunlight had hit her full in the face; she had to.
His hand took hold of hers, shockingly warm and tight. “Who is it,” she heard him say, “you want most of all to talk to?” He moved her hand up and put it on a smooth, dusty, curved thing, pushing her fingers closed.
Daddy, she thought, with a dreadful lurch of pain. Gawain. Horace. No—
Eyes closed, she picked up the handle. The jarring rings stopped. There was a wonderful silence.
“Gwenny?” she said, cautiously. “Gwen?”
16
Marina?
“Gwenny?”
Marina.
“Gwenny! I can . . . I can hear you. Where are you? I can’t see you.”
Don’t stop talking.
“No. All right. I won’t. I’ll try, I’ll— Can you see me? Can you really hear me? I’ve been waiting for you. I though
t you’d never come back. Where did you go? Gwenny? Where are you?”
Please. Don’t stop.
“Sorry. Sorry. I’ve missed you so much. Everything’s been horrible. What do I do? Do I keep holding this bit? I still can’t see you. Are you behind this wall? I’ll come and find you wherever you are.”
No. You mustn’t do that. Don’t come here. Whatever you do.
“But where are you?”
There’s— I don’t know. There’s dark water. Everything’s on the other side of it. Stay away. Are you listening? Marina?
“Yes, it’s all right.”
Just talk to me.
“You sound sad.”
We all get sad sometimes, remember?
“When are you coming back?”
I don’t— Don’t worry about that for now. Tell me something. What’s something funny you thought of today?
Marina!
“It’s all right! Sorry. I’m still talking. I couldn’t think of anything.”
Tell me something you saw. Three things. We’ll think of a connection.
“All right. Three things. Let me think.”
No. Don’t stop to think. Let’s not do that game. Tell me something easy. Tell me what you’re looking at now.
“What’s wrong? Something’s upset you. Where are you?”
Anything. Something from the garden, or the house, it doesn’t matter. Anything at all.
“There’s a man here—”
Marina?
“Sorry. There was a man here, but he’s gone. He was standing here a moment ago. I didn’t hear anything.”
I love you so much.
“Don’t cry, Gwenny. It’s all right.”
I want to cry but I can’t. Everything’s dry. And dark. You mustn’t come any closer. I mustn’t let you talk to me.
“What happened? Gawain said you got lost.”
Gavin. No, I mustn’t. You’re just children. Leave me here, both of you.
“But where are you? I don’t understand!”
It’s so good to hear your voice. I love you so much I don’t know how to tell you. You mustn’t come any closer. Can you hear the water? Don’t go near it. Let’s say good-bye now.
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