Advent

  The dog’s mouth was opening soundlessly. No howl, no growl, just the soft percussion of its paws in the snow and the jaws readying. But in the strange slow-motion silence he thought he heard and remembered its dark and hungry voice, its litany of hunt and kill. Hello, my death, he thought. My death. Through the door you left open walks my end. Miss Grey’s voice drifted dreamily into his head. He saw the cruel teeth bared in the long muzzle. It’s to do with maintaining a relationship with the spirit world. Hester’s mild voice joined in. Now his life was flashing before his ears instead of his eyes. The mask is a sort of vehicle for a spirit. Or a dwelling place. Or a mouth. Some other mouth was screaming, a tight-throated, half-choked scream. Maybe it was him.

  Voices around him. He remembered the room swimming with voices. The way they’d seemed to turn towards him when his hands touched the mask. Maybe it was him.

  The fiery eyes were close. Through the door you left open. It was him. The mask was a door. His hands had opened it and the fire had flowed in. That was the kind of door Miss Grey was talking about.

  Close the door, he thought, as the widening mouth leaped, the twin stars filled his vision, and the blackness blotted everything else out. Close the door. The scream was definitely Marina. His own eyes twisted shut. The curtain coming down. End of story.

  He felt the door against his fingers.

  He closed it.

  Marina finished screaming. Something clattered in front of them. Gawain’s heart finished its beat. He opened his eyes.

  The only sound was a weird soft hiss in the air, disembodied. A flare of red-gold light spiralled up and faded away into the sleeping trees.

  The mask that had gone missing from Hester’s house lay on the path at Gawain’s feet, tipped sideways, propped on its blunt snout.

  As if someone had pressed the fast-forward button, the usual ratio of thought to time reasserted itself. A hundred things went through Gawain’s head, but now they were all in one great confused babbling crowd. The only thing he was aware of thinking was that now he’d be keeping his promise, after all.

  ‘What is that?’ Marina said. She sounded as if she was in shock. She’d gone ghost-white, as bloodless as her mother. She prodded the mask with her toe hesitantly, as if it might still bite.

  Among the many things rushing through Gawain’s mind was that he thought he knew the answer to that question, and that it was because he knew the answer that he’d been able to do what he’d done, closed the door through the mask as he’d unintentionally opened it before, and that was why he wasn’t now dead, and that discovering the answer to questions like that was maybe the most important thing about who he now was, who he was destined to be, Gawain, White Hawk, Hawk of May, the stupid boy, the prophetess’s heir.

  ‘Don’t touch it,’ he said. She jerked her foot back at once. ‘It’s a mask. I saw it before. You were right, something was wearing it, something that didn’t belong. It’s gone now. Come on, let’s go. Quickly.’

  She edged nervously around it and broke into a half-run to catch up with him.

  ‘Where did it go?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It was going to kill you.’

  ‘Yeah. I told you, we have to get away.’

  She kept glancing back up the path to where the mask lay, then having to hurry along again. Shock had made her pliant. She scurried behind Gawain as if the worst thing that could happen to her was being left alone in the near-darkness.

  ‘Are you taking me away from—’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But what about Daddy?’

  ‘I don’t know. We’ll think about that later. We have to hurry, she wasn’t far behind.’

  Marina’s voice shrank to an awful whisper. ‘She?’

  ‘Auntie Gwen. But it’s not really her. Quick, this way.’

  They reached the place where the stream flowed under the path. A skin of ice had formed in its tiny pools, catching the last of the light. Gawain set off on the side path, downhill, towards the river.

  ‘Gwenny’s gone wrong.’

  ‘I told you, it’s not really her.’

  ‘She told us what to do. It was like a dream. Even if we didn’t want to. It hurt when I tried to do anything else.’

  ‘Please, Marina. Please hurry up. She wasn’t far behind.’

  She clutched his arm with a death grip. ‘Not this way.’

  He yanked her along beside him. It was getting hard to see the path at all. ‘No choice. Come on.’

  ‘But this is a dead end.’

  ‘You told me it went down to the river.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s beyond the wall.’

  ‘OK, then—’

  ‘No. I can’t.’

  ‘Marina—’

  ‘I can’t. I can’t!’

  ‘You can’t stay. You know that.’

  ‘No, you don’t understand. There’s something wrong with me. I’m different from you. I’ll die if I go away from here. I will, I mean it.’

  ‘You won’t. There’s—’

  ‘No, please. I went once. I snuck away.’ She spoke like she walked, the words coming out in a skipping trot. ‘I trod on the road outside. It hurt so much. Gwen— They heard me screaming down at the house. Then another time—’

  ‘Didn’t you see what that thing was trying to do?’

  A shimmer of dusky purple appeared through the trees ahead. She began to resist more desperately as the view of the water grew clearer. ‘No. No, stop.’

  ‘Just come on.’

  ‘No!’ she moaned, and sagged her knees, almost toppling him over. He didn’t have the strength for it any more. He could barely force himself along, let alone the two of them. But the river was so close now, so tantalisingly close.

  He halted and hauled her straight, rounded on her in desperation.

  ‘Marina. Your mum sent me to fetch you.’

  It was as if he’d slapped her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I saw her. She spoke to me. For fuck’s sake, keep going!’

  But he’d stopped her dead. He might as well have shot her in the heart. He had to grab her shoulders again before she’d move, and he had to steer her down what he could see of the path as if she was blind. They came down into a flatter area of scrubby undergrowth, nettles and sprawling ivy and hazel saplings. He saw the outline of the low wall beyond, the border of the estate. Beyond it was the footpath, and beyond that a small sandy cove.

  ‘Mummy died,’ Marina whispered.

  ‘No. I promise. And you won’t either. She wants to see you.’

  ‘But . . .’ His tactic had worked in one sense: she’d completely lost interest in what might happen to her. Unfortunately she’d also apparently forgotten where she was. He had to push her towards the low earth wall.

  ‘Is that her name?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fux. You keep saying it. For her sake.’

  ‘Jesus wept,’ he whispered to himself, and decided to concentrate on keeping her moving.

  Beyond an overgrown bank of earth and piled stones that marked the boundary, the woods thinned out to become a small glade at the back of the shingly cove notched into the shore. He worried Marina would resist once he started trying to pull her up onto the wall, but she let him half help, half drag her down onto a riverside footpath. A disturbingly insistent feeling was nagging at him: What now? He’d never expected to get this far. He’d never expected anything. He had no idea what to expect. For the moment the woods seemed quiet, but the thing that had once been his aunt was still out there, surely still looking for him, and there wasn’t any further to run except into the freezing dark water itself. Well, maybe that’s what they’d do if it came to it. He led her carefully down to the cove, until they stood by the smear of heaped pebbles and driftwood marking the height of the last tide. Across the river, wide here near its mouth, the fields with their hedge borders were a white quilt laid over the coast. At the top of one round hill a church tower rose above flat-topped pines
.

  The fields, the church, the winter evening. For a few moments, while the boy and girl stood with nowhere to go, it was passive, it was content, it was much as it had been for five centuries: the undisturbed empty world.

  Then a furious shout came from behind them, muffled among the trees: ‘Corbo!’

  She’s found the mask, Gav thought to himself. Another, fainter cry in a different voice followed it quickly: ‘. . . ina?’

  ‘That’s Daddy!’ Marina started and twisted round. But it was the first shout that had stung Gawain into motion. Before Marina could protest or resist he pulled her towards the water’s edge: no other choice. ‘Daddy!’ she shouted, and pawed frantically at Gav’s hand on her wrist. ‘Daddy!’

  Gav gritted his teeth and kept his eyes on the far bank, wondering how cold it would be, whether the currents would drag them out into the sea, how far they’d get. That was why he saw, distant but unmistakable, a huge black stain unfurl from the trees below the church on the opposite bank, its wings spreading, gliding across to answer the call, and then, only a moment later, much closer, just out in the slow-ebbing water beyond the cove, a pale shadow gathering and becoming a shape rising from the river, a glistening white head under trailing fronds of green.

  The thing like a gigantic deformed bird had been wheeling over the valley, back and forth in the dismal twilight, scanning the north shore. It traced its wide gyres in the air, while people at their windows below gaped, went for binoculars, regretted using them.

  Two things drove it. There was the command it could not disobey: watch for the boy who carried the ring, across the river from the house, where the sky spirit said he might be found. Just as imperative, just as unbreakable, there was hunger.

  The hunger was like a chain wrapped round it, tightening with every hour. Hunger was the bolt and bars of the body it had been enclosed in. As it flew, it looked for carrion.

  It circled over the mouth of the river, where the coast bent like a wing. Beating its way back above the northern shore, it saw the church tucked on its promontory in the wing’s crook. A grey speck under the walls of the building caught its eye. It felt for the air differently, unstiffened its wingtips and plunged, cawing greedily. The speck became a heap, then a body. Fallen flesh.

  Corbo was forbidden from touching the earth or anything that grew in it, so it landed atop a tombstone, folding its wings, swaying, clenching its talons on slate. The body was crumpled in the snow beneath.

  Hester hadn’t made it far from the porch. Out that morning, looking for Gawain after he’d vanished without warning from her house, she had been caught by the blizzard on an exposed stretch of the coast path. She’d eventually struggled her way to the church porch, the only shelter she could reach, but by the time she’d got there the clothes she’d hurriedly put on for a bright morning had been soaked through, sweat and melting snow turning icy in the first fierce wind. She’d waited in the porch, getting colder and weaker and more desperate, until as the evening grew dark she’d panicked and tried to summon the strength to battle out through the snow to the road. She’d slipped almost as soon as she’d started out from the porch, and fallen, and not been able to get up again.

  The tumult of Corbo’s landing and the raking of its claws on the upright stone stirred her from her deathly faint. To the beast’s bitter disappointment, the slumped body twitched and let out a feeble moan.

  ‘Not dead yet,’ it grumbled. The pang ratcheted tighter.

  The woman inched her head round. Some instinct told her, perhaps, that a shadow loomed over her, the creeping certainty of being watched. Her half-frozen eyelids struggled to open, then became narrow slits in a face grey as the snow. She looked up to see what had blocked the dying light.

  Her eyes opened a little more and watered. She blinked.

  She tried to scream.

  ‘Back later,’ Corbo muttered.

  The shock had roused Hester’s chilled heart, but only for a moment. Her head sagged back down. Her bloodless lips opened and struggled with a word. It took a long time.

  ‘Help,’ she said, in a dry and tiny whisper.

  ‘Over soon,’ Corbo croaked, but then cocked its head and ruffled its wings. Another smell had caught its attention.

  ‘Man coming,’ it said. ‘Lucky you.’

  On the other side of the church, J.P. Moss heard a guttural mutter.

  If he’d thought there was any chance it was a sound made by the thing whose small wide-spaced steps he’d followed from the village, he’d have turned right round and gone back to the pub.

  He’d actually been about to give up anyway. The lane down to the church had been OK, it had a few streetlights, but everything beyond was rapidly darkening. And at the end of the lane the footsteps quite clearly carried on into the wood beside the church, passing over a wooden stile and heading down the footpath that led through a pine glade to the river shore below. It was as good as night down that way.

  Fortunately the sound had definitely come from the other direction, somewhere round in the graveyard. It had sounded like a choked sort of voice. Maybe someone in trouble. He hesitated for a second and then squeezed through the lychgate into the churchyard.

  It was at that moment that Corbo felt the summons. J.P. came round the west end of the building just in time to see the monstrous man-crow spread its wings and thrash the air into a brief typhoon. The noise of its flight drowned his strangled shriek. It bore itself up to surmount the tops of the pines, so that for a moment it appeared to him as a baleful black angel suspended against the lesser dark of the sky. Then it swooped south, across the river, to where its furious master demanded its aid.

  We are sought no longer, said the deep, spacious voice in Horace’s thoughts.

  He thought it himself. The voice was his; he and it were the same. It wove among the hundreds of other voices all around him. He was part of a chorus, the perpetual choir of things.

  The bird is flown. Go.

  The boy rose from where he had been sitting, under the cover of the pines—

  The pines! The music they made was a faraway harmony, resonant with a different air, belonging to a distant forest, a place where he and the other him wanted to go. It felt like home. Far away, immensely far, along great currents that stirred the world and the skies. Far away from . . .

  Go.

  On his left hand he wore the plain brown ring that looked as if it was made of wood, though it was not. On his head was a whale mask. He was not merely wearing it, the way it had been made to be worn over on the other side of the world, in that other forest, among the fern-green moss and the wet hemlocks and the cold ocean inlets. More than that: its great oval eyes were his eyes, its long mouth his mouth, its voice his voice.

  He went down to the rocks. The trees behind him were thick with crows. They broke their silence all at once, the shore echoing with their chafing uproar. When his feet entered the river he felt an inexpressibly huge joy. He kept going, losing his footing as the tide nudged him.

  Amid the welter of life and sound around him the touch of water recalled a liquid whisper, Find my child, find my child, find my child.

  I made a promise, he remembered.

  Then keep it, he answered with his other voice, as his head slipped under the water and the boy began to drown.

  The mermaid rose from the river, sinuous as an eel, ghost-pale, a nacreous sheen glistening where water slid away. Lank and weedy tendrils clung to her. Gawain and Marina stood at the very edge of the tide. The girl’s fingers were still on the boy’s hand where she’d been trying to prise herself out of his grip. They went limp. Her lopsided mouth fell open.

  This time Gawain saw in the flesh what he’d guessed at before: the family resemblance. Though one face belonged to a terrified and overwhelmed child, and the other was as inhuman as a marble statue dredged up from a thousand forgotten and submerged years, they were mother and daughter.

  The mother knew it. She reached her white arms forward as she came higher up
the beach.

  The daughter had not yet understood.

  ‘Go on,’ Gawain said. ‘That’s her.’ He let go of Marina’s wrist.

  ‘But . . .’ Marina stammered. ‘I . . .’

  She took two hesitant steps into the river, towards the embrace. Then they heard the hoarse and desperate call from the woods again. ‘. . . Marina!’ The mermaid froze, and the boy and the girl spun round. None of them could yet see Tristram Uren, though he was coming down the path from the house in a wild delirium, heedless of his old limbs and wheezing lungs.

  But they did see Gwen.

  She stood unsteadily atop the earth wall bordering the footpath, staff planted in the snow. A burning radiance writhed around its tip. At the sight of her Marina clutched Gawain’s arm in absolute terror. ‘It’s OK,’ he told her, though his jaw was clenched and his heart thudding. ‘Go to your mum. Go on. She can’t come much closer, she belongs in the sea. Quick!’

  Gwen began descending towards them, undergrowth snapping as she forced herself along.

  ‘Daddy—’ Marina began.

  ‘Now!’ Gawain said, and shoved her into the water.

  It was his aunt. He could see her clearly enough now despite the twilight, face on, for the first time. Her face was all wrong. Or rather it was exactly the same face, but wrong on the inside, or put together wrongly; he couldn’t figure out exactly where the wrongness was, but it was so horrific to look at that he wasn’t sure how much longer he could stand in place watching it approach, and he refused to collapse or run away or die of horror until he knew Marina was safe; he refused.