Advent

  The darkness rattled on the road again. As if it had feet. As if the feet were coming closer.

  Owen screamed. The shout pierced his terror. He staggered backwards. The dark cried out in reply, a horrible squawking cry. In the instant before he turned and ran Owen thought he saw it moving, spreading, a misshapen black mass opening arms to enfold the world. Still screaming, he fled.

  Gav woke in absolute darkness with no idea where he was.

  He panicked. He knew he wasn’t at home in his own bed. He couldn’t remember why not. He’d woken instantaneously, with no memory of having slept. Time and the world had fallen away and left nothing at all.

  He flailed his arms wildly. He was tangled in something. His hands struck cardboard boxes. For a split second he felt nothing but invisible walls around his head, as if the darkness itself were solid and closing in. He was enwombed in it, or buried alive. Then the heartbeat passed and he remembered what the cardboard boxes were. In that same moment a sound came, the first sign of a world outside.

  A bell struck.

  It struck again. A morose church bell.

  And again. The clang, its dissonant decay, then another. Time came back to him, measured by the tolling.

  Midnight.

  Gav lay still. Stupid to have freaked out like that, he told himself. He remembered bedding down in Hester’s spare room now. The blankets had got twisted around him.

  Someone had said not to be frightened. Don’t be afraid. You have come home. Who was that? Must have been Hester. He was in her home. But he felt like it hadn’t been her. Hadn’t it been someone right here, beside him in the dark?

  He must have dreamed it.

  He was possessed by a sudden and overwhelming conviction that he’d forgotten something. It was that feeling of having left something behind by mistake. He needed to go back and get it, then everything would be OK. If only he could remember what it was.

  As his breathing slowed he began hearing another sound, very quiet, somewhere in the house. Disentangling himself from the invisible blankets, he propped himself up on his elbows to listen.

  Must be Hester snoring, he thought, a funny humming snore. But it didn’t quite have the rhythm of human breath. Maybe something downstairs like a dishwasher running overnight. Downstairs was where it seemed to be. Hester didn’t have a dishwasher, though, and the sound wasn’t steady enough to be anything mechanical.

  He decided to ignore it and roll over and go back to sleep.

  He noticed then that he was very awake. Completely alert, as if he’d slept for hours, though it was only midnight.

  The feeling of something forgotten was prodding him insistently. It was just on the edge of his thoughts. He hunted after it. Maybe it was because he’d rolled up at Hester’s house without his wallet or his keys or any of the stuff that he normally patted his pockets to check for whenever he went out.

  Strangely, as soon as he had that thought it was answered by the complete certainty that he didn’t need them. He didn’t need his wallet. He didn’t need his keys. He’d never – the thought made him dizzy, as if the floor had vanished under him – need either of them or anything like them (phone, train ticket, his watch, toothbrush, change of clothes) ever again.

  How could that be?

  The faint noise seemed to be moving downstairs. It sounded almost like someone poking around on the ground floor, muttering and humming to themselves.

  Gav sat up, feeling around him for the piles of boxes. Hadn’t Hester mentioned that some of her masks were valuable? Could there be a burglar down there?

  He got to his knees and groped in the dark. He couldn’t remember the shape of the room at all, only that it was tiny. His head knocked against a box, making something rattle.

  He remembered scrabbling for light against the inside of a closed door, a wooden door. That must have been a dream. The memory was so vivid he could taste the panic again in his throat, but he couldn’t ever have been locked in a place like that. With a thing like that. Oh come on Gav.

  He crouched, squeezing his head between his hands.

  Don’t be afraid, someone had told him. Hester, or someone else, or maybe both of them. But he was. He was terrified. He felt as if he was on the brink of some huge dark drop. He couldn’t understand why he was so sure that it no longer mattered about his wallet and his keys and his watch and his life and the world. That was supposed to be the stuff you couldn’t do without. He was only fifteen. What else was there? Just this darkness? Nothing at all?

  He inched forward and his probing fingers found a door instead of cardboard. He pushed.

  A nocturnal glow appeared. The world came back into position. He saw the top of the stairs, and another doorway adjacent: Hester’s room. The glow came creeping up from a nightlight she’d left on in the kitchen.

  There was definitely someone down there, making odd quiet rustles and murmurs.

  ‘Hello?’

  Nothing. He’d barely called out loud enough to hear his own voice. Stupid if it was a burglar, he told himself. He should shout or bang the floor, frighten them off. Or wake Hester up. Call the police.

  But it didn’t sound like a burglar. It didn’t sound like a body moving around. It was more like a whispered conversation in a weird language, with snatches of muffled singing. Did Hester sleepwalk?

  ‘Hello?’

  He stood up and took a couple of deliberately heavy steps along the hallway so whoever was below would know someone was awake in the house. The faint noises continued untroubled, no change at all.

  He put his ear to Hester’s door. Slow, heavy breath. She was asleep in there. He thought about waking her up, but it was the middle of the night and he felt stupid. All that had happened was that he’d had some weird dream (hadn’t he?) and couldn’t get to sleep, and now he was scared in the dark like a child. Stupid. Now that he thought about it, he realised what must have happened. She must have gone back downstairs after he went to sleep and listened to the radio, then forgotten to turn it all the way off. Perfectly straightforward explanation. The noise sounded like a mix of static and fragments of music and talking from a remote station, not quite tuned in.

  Might as well go down and switch it off, he thought. (The thought resonated weirdly in his head like a suggestion from outside, switch it off switch it off switch it off switch it off . . .)

  In the kitchen the dim frosty nightlight picked out glossy passages in the poster. The old man and the whispering angel at his shoulder looked as if they were painted out of moonbeams. The weird radio noise was coming from the front room. Gav had reached round the door and was feeling for a light switch when he remembered this was the room where the masks were.

  He pulled his hand away. Far better not to see them at all. He prodded the door open a little wider and leaned his head in nervously, looking for the telltale light of a radio.

  There wasn’t one.

  Of course there wasn’t. There weren’t things like that any more. He’d gone over the brink and left them behind.

  There were only voices in the darkness.

  Invisible, inhuman voices.

  The voices called or whistled or sang from far away, very far. It was as though he’d stepped in through the broken door of an abandoned palace, and from rooms deep within or high above, from cells at the top of the loftiest and remotest towers, the cries of stranded survivors drifted down to him, in languages no one but they had ever understood.

  One jab at the light switch, he told himself, and he could turn it back into Hester’s front room. He imagined the light flaring up, blinding him for a couple of seconds, and then as he blinked and shielded his eyes the space would come back as he remembered it, a bit crowded and messy, the horrible ranks of faces staring from the walls.

  He didn’t hit the switch.

  He listened.

  He thought perhaps there were five or six different voices. It was impossible to be sure.

  He did, however, know for sure where they were coming from.
<
br />   He pushed the door from the kitchen wide open, letting more of the nightlight’s glow into the room.

  The faces around the walls were drained of colour, reduced to eerie lumps of darkness. The fact that he couldn’t see their eyes made all the difference. He could feel them watching him anyway, but it wasn’t quite as bad. He could concentrate on their voices instead.

  The sounds floated distinctly around him like currents of air. The masks were muttering or chanting or whispering to themselves, or perhaps to someone else, another presence he couldn’t see.

  Edging behind one sofa, the row of shadow shapes arrayed on the wall in front of him, he reached his hands out, carefully.

  Creepy to look at, the masks were wonderful to touch. His fingers felt lines and volumes, the textures of different materials, curves made by mould or knife, precise or rough. Sculpture’s a tactile medium, their art teacher was always saying. Some of the masks were intricate and elaborate. Others seemed to be constructed out of just a few shapes, coherent like stones. Without him really thinking about it, his fingers felt their way along the row, wondering where the voices came from, looking for a match between shape and sound.

  He knew instantly when he found it. It was like an electric shock in his hands. The voice flowed up through them and into him, inside him, filling him.

  It knew him.

  He jerked his hands away.

  The mask he’d touched was a big wooden one, jutting out from the wall as if the bow of a model boat had crashed into Hester’s house. He was still close to the kitchen door, so a smudge of ghostly light fell across it, picking out its crude strong lines, the blunt ovals of its eyes.

  . . . four or five of my menagerie are totemic objects of one sort or another. Not exactly museum quality, but the real thing.

  The weird chorus drifted around him. One particular voice definitely seemed closer now, as though a mouth had turned to him directly. Deep, rich, hollow, heard as if through water.

  Don’t be afraid, said another voice, behind him, in the back of his thoughts.

  Gav extended his hand again and rested it on the long wooden head.

  The voice sang

  hunger, solitude, freedom. It sang the blue light above and the black deep below, the salt currents channelling between clefts of rock to coasts and shallows where forests of mossy hemlock reached over the water’s edge, gathering rain. It hymned fat meat at the surface and swells of food scattering below. Blood and sustenance. It sang its name, a word there had never been an alphabet for

  ma’chinu’ch

  Gav pulled his hands back, reeling, the world spinning around him. The song went on, following its ancient course, but now it was outside him, as if by removing his fingers he’d closed a door on it. It had turned back into mere sound. The language, the meaning, was gone.

  He breathed deeply, tempted for a moment to sink back into that ocean of joyful hunger. He heard the senseless syllables whispering distantly, ma’chinu’ch, ma’chinu’ch. Where, he wondered, were the other voices? He edged along the wall towards the shuttered window, touching very gingerly, ready to jump his fingers away.

  Part of him wanted to go back to bed. The sensible thing to do, it said, would be to close all the doors, go back upstairs, bury his head under the blankets and wait until he got to sleep, no matter how long it took, leaving the inscrutable presences to carry on their mumblings undisturbed. It might be hours. Wait until dawn, if he had to.

  Another part listened to the otherworldly sounds and told him not to be afraid.

  His fingers found a snout of rough wood and twitched again, and his heart jumped. Another voice found him, coming alive, a chthonic mutter tinged with a ferocity that made him pull his hand away almost at once. With that momentary touch something that prowled and pursued had turned to face him. Gav breathed hard, his fingertips still tingling. He peered towards the mask, trying to make out its features in the near-dark. It was the last in the row, furthest from the dim light coming through the kitchen door, and all he could see was the rough shape: a triangular shadow with a thrusting muzzle, slightly open. Parted jaws. Its guttural tuneless chant separated itself from the blended whispers and seemed to circle him.

  Ducking closer, his left hand nudged the slatted blind at the window. It wobbled, exposing a crack of cold white from the streetlight in the road outside.

  Gav felt around for the cord of the blind. Should have thought of that before, he told himself, relieved beyond any obvious reason. His idea was to open the slats of the blind just a tiny bit, letting in as much of the outside light as he needed to see the mask while leaving the rest of the room safely obscure. He’d close them again before he went back to bed. Hester obviously didn’t want anyone looking in on her.

  He found the cord and tugged carefully. The slats swivelled apart. He peered out, looking for the single lamp-post in the lane.

  There beneath it, as still as if she had taken root in the road, her shadowed face raised towards him, was Miss Grey.

  Part IV

  Night

  Seventeen

  A January night 1537, and another night

  Within the still water in the silver bowl, a room appeared. A painted, firelit room, squat columns vanishing up through smoke to an unseen roof. The hiss and spit of the fire and the sound of a chanting voice came very distantly and obscurely, like noises underwater. As the scene grew clearer and a group of white-and-scarlet robed figures became visible between the columns, the magus caught his breath. Bending over the bowl, reflected firelight shone in his eyes.

  ‘They assemble for a rite,’ said an invisible voice, a susurrus of dead leaves. The greatest magus in the world stared into the bowl, transfixed.

  ‘Is that truly Ilium?’

  ‘We show you what you bid us show, Magister. Obedient always.’

  The robed figures moved blurrily, like actors in a dream. He saw their barbarous faces. Narrow, strong-jawed, dark in the oily firelight.

  ‘Shall we conduct you there? Then you may sate your eyes on the woman as you please.’

  His breath caught in his chest. The most beautiful woman in the world, that was what he had commanded the spirit to show him. An idle thought, a whim. He had never imagined it would throw the doors of time open so wide. A mere trick of clairvoyance, and it had led him to this: the brink of legend. Helen. Helen of Troy.

  But then, he reflected, it was testimony to the immensity of his power of command. He was almost ashamed of how unworthy the original impulse had been, how easily and lightly he could make marvels possible.

  ‘That is the royal household?’

  ‘We know nothing of men, Magister. We do your bidding merely.’

  ‘Then show me the woman.’ His eyes hadn’t wavered from the obscure scene, not for an instant.

  ‘We must approach.’

  ‘You will conduct me back?’

  ‘As you wish.’

  ‘It is a great distance,’ he said. ‘Far greater than any we have spanned before.’

  ‘Do you doubt us?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you fear for yourself?’

  ‘I?’ He shook his head. ‘What have I to fear?’

  ‘There are old powers, Magister. Beware them.’

  He laughed shortly, still without looking up. ‘You waste your warnings on me, spirit. I conjure with powers little less than angels. Conduct me now.’

  ‘That is your command?’ The voice with its hundred dry echoes seemed to swell with subtle triumph, but the magus, heart pounding, did not notice.

  ‘Yes. I desire it. Now.’

  The blurred shadows at the edges of the water’s surface rippled and spilled out. The firelight burned brighter, tinged with coppery green; at the same moment the magus was overwhelmed by a rich, astringent savour of Asiatic smoke. It swamped him as the shadows did. He felt himself floating in them, dizzy, light enough to be spun on the currents of scented air. When he came to rest, he was there, in the room where the priest wailed and
poured oil into the fire while the king and his family attended. Although his mortal body had not moved from his laboratory in the cellars of his house, the ghost of that body turned its head towards the gathering of men and women.

  ‘In the second rank, Magister,’ whispered the possessor of the dry voice, who now appeared as a phantom of flickering burning light in the shape of a naked and sexless human.

  But the magus did not need to be told. As soon as his bodiless gaze had fallen on the slender-necked girl standing just behind the queen, he had known her. Her exquisite head was tilted demurely down in honour of the goddess, whose crude bronze image glowed dully from its sooty niche. But there was an assurance in her sly eyes and her settled, faintly smiling lips, which showed all too clearly how well she knew her own unrivalled beauty, and foretold how she would continue to exult in her loveliness even when it had brought years of misery to all the rest of those standing with her in the shrine that night, even when it had brought destruction to the shrine itself, and fiery ruin to the city that housed it. Helen. Her name, after all, meant torch.

  ‘Fix your eyes on her. Feed them.’ The magus scarcely heard his companion’s urgings. Dissolved in wonder, he scanned the smoky room, the rough faces, names destined to live for incalculable centuries, outlasting nations and empires, outlasting even the stone of their own tombs.

  ‘There is peril for you elsewhere,’ the burning spirit warned, a sly whisper. The magus gave it no more attention than one ghost gives another.

  ‘Deadly peril,’ it added. On its blank face, under the lidless and pupilless eyes, a strange smile spread. The magus never saw it. His attention had been distracted by a pair of eyes pointed, unexpectedly, in his direction. They were a little further back from the group, at its edge. They were not roving idly, or watching the goddess dutifully, as all the others were.

  They were fixed on him.

  He returned the look.

  The phantom of naked silent flame whispered a single word: ‘Lost.’