The community had managed to survive another winter of long shadows and harshness. But then the plague had come with the spring. Existence certainly had a taste for irony. Where would it all end?
Arthur Lee bounded in from the kitchen with an urgency that shook her from her dismal thoughts. He was unsettled. With his fur bristling, he tried to bury himself in her calf muscles, body rigid, and he was not a cat prone to fear; indeed, being more than cat, he existed in a state of contempt for everything. Mary's spine prickled in response.
This is a warning, Mary thought.
A quick slug of whiskey fired her, and then she moved from window to window, searching the countryside now bathed in early-morning light. Trees and shrubs were budding; she could smell the season changing. Nothing disturbed the peaceful scene; no figures moving, no shift of vegetation in opposition to the wind. She let her senses envelop her, but all she could feel was that constant background unease.
'What's frighted you, then?' She dropped to her knees to look into the cat's gleaming eyes, but he was too anxious to stay still long enough for her to see. A drop of moisture splashed on to her cheek. Puzzled, she glanced up at the ceiling to search for the source. Absently, she wiped the droplet away, but then grew still when she glimpsed her fingertips: the stain was dark.
In the mirror, she saw a thin scarlet trickle running from each ear.
Thoughts of disease and death flashed across her mind, but she barely had time to consider them, for at that moment the phone began to ring; and it had been dead, like all phones, from the time of the Fall. Her heart began to pound.
Everything shifted at once; shadows in the room altered their position slightly, the light became strangely harsh, the barely perceptible sound of her feet on the carpet now buzzed loudly in her head; heightened sensations were twisted into something a step aside from reality. With a queasy sense of dislocation, Mary approached the phone.
She hesitated, rigid with apprehension, and then plucked up the handset. 'Hello?'
There was a moment of fizzing static and then a hollow emptiness that reminded her of space. Out of it came a questioning voice that was faintly mechanical. '... Sshhh ... hsss ... Are you there? Can you hear me?... hssss ... over. Do you hear? ... sshhh ... not over. It is not over. You have to—'
Mary threw the phone across the room. After a moment, fighting an irrational dread, she marched across the room and picked up the receiver: the phone was dead once more. She stared at it for a second or two while Arthur Lee flattened himself under the coffee table, and then a hammering at the door jolted her alert.
Don't answer it, a shrill voice said at the back of her head. And she had every intention of obeying it, but then her hand was mysteriously on the handle, pressing it, pulling it. Her breath caught in her throat.
A large dark figure stood on the threshold. Oddly, she couldn't make out the face that terrified her so much; it was filled with shadows that moved like smoke. The figure entered and she seemed to float back before it.
Finally, she saw that it was a man, but that provided little comfort. His face had an odd plasticity that hinted at a mask, made worse by the burning, dreadful eyes stretched wide and staring through that masquerade. Yet everything else about him was thoroughly ordinary: his appearance resembled that of someone who had spent a long time on the road; mud-spattered jeans, faded T-shirt, worn jacket, long, greasy hair tied in a ponytail.
'Mary Holden.' The voice appeared to come from some other part of the room; a disturbing ventriloquism, a party trick with added menace.
'Who are you?'
'I come from a place of quicksilver and lightning.' He stood stock still, arms at his sides, and the light and shadows circled him, or seemed to, from her perspective.
The dread in Mary's heart twisted until she thought she would be sick. 'What do you want with me?'
'It is not over.'
For some reason, the words terrified her.
'You shall not walk away.' The eyes peering through the mask burned into her head. 'The girl will need you.'
'Caitlin?'
'Something has woken on the edge of Existence. It has seen you, and everything you are, and everything you will be, and it is moving even now to prevent your awakening.'
Mary's thoughts were cotton wool, swaddling his words so that the sharp meaning could not be felt. But she struggled with them until some semblance of understanding emerged. We're in danger?'
'A time of frost and fire approaches.'
'Why do you care?' She jerked, not meaning for her words to sound so emboldened. When he didn't answer, she said, 'What do you expect me to do?' though she feared the answer.
'Nothing is as it appears. You will need new eyes.' He reached out, and his arm appeared to stretch like melting rubber. Fingers that were not fingers scratched the centre of her forehead and Mary's vision fragmented in jewelled images and starbursts. When she could finally see again, the stranger had raised his arm and was pointing out of the door. 'Go. See.'
She found herself at the village hall without any memory of how she had got there from her cottage. She still had on her slippers, but didn't have a coat, and she shivered in the early-morning cold. Dreamily, she made her way into the hall.
Her hand flew to her mouth at the choking stench. Gideon, the chairman of the parish council, and some teenage boy whose name she didn't recall, dozed in chairs, worn out by futile caring. She tried not to pay any attention to two unmoved bodies that lay blackened by the plague in the centre of the room, and instead made her way to the side room where lay those still clinging on to thin life. But the instant she stepped across the threshold she was shocked rigid.
Tiny figures as insubstantial as smoke danced and twisted above the heads of the woman and young boy lying on the tables. Black-skinned, with a mix of human and lizard qualities, their twirling tails and curved horns reminded Mary of nothing more than medieval illustrations of devils. A malignant glee filled every movement as they soared and ducked, pinching and stabbing their unfortunate hosts. And where they touched the woman and boy, blackness flowed from them into the strange meridians the plague left on the bodies of its victims.
As Mary clutched the door jamb in disorientation, the devils appeared shocked that she could see them. Their malignancy returned quickly, though, and they silently jeered and mocked her with offensive gestures, knowing she could do nothing to stop them.
Mary grabbed a yard brush from the wall and swung it to swat them away, but it passed straight through them; they weren't there, not in any sense she understood.
Staggering back into the main hall, understanding swept through her. Now she knew why the medication didn't work, why the plague was like none seen before; it wasn't of the world at all. And after that, other thoughts surfaced in a mad rush of release, but the most important was this: Caitlin had gone in search of a cure without realising the plague's true nature. She may well have been sent to her death.
chapter four On the edge of Forever
'Remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land.'
Christina Georgina Rossetti
The Oxfordshire countryside was coming alive. Buds were bursting on all the branches and overgrown hedgerows, and burgeoning wildlife scurried everywhere Caitlin looked. The already crumbling roads were camouflaged with thistle and yellow grass. Caitlin fought back a wave of grief at the realisation that Grant and Liam weren't there to experience it with her. Sometimes the despair came from nowhere, like a storm at sea, and she had to battle to keep in control. Other times she was simply numb.
To distract herself, she turned her attention to Mahalia and Carlton while Crowther drove.
'Where were you going when we met you?' Caitlin asked.
Mahalia thought for a moment, then said, 'To meet you.'
Caitlin didn't hear any sarcasm in the comment, but she couldn't be sure. She still hadn't decided whether she liked Mahalia, or if the girl's sullen attitude was simply a defence mechanism.
The boy looked up at Caitlin with wide, innocent eyes that made him seem even younger. She saw in them something of Liam and instantiy wanted to hug him. 'He dreamed about me?'
Mahalia read Caitlin's expression and threw a protective arm around Carlton's shoulders. 'He's special. Aren't you, mate?' He giggled silently as she squeezed him. 'I didn't believe it at first, but he soon showed me. He sees things.'
'Visions?'
'I suppose. He knows all sorts of stuff that he shouldn't. Sometimes he has trouble making me understand exactly what he's saying, but I get most of it. He's got us out of a few scrapes. There was a time in Southampton...' She shook her head to dispel the sour memory. 'I wouldn't be here now if not for him.'
'But why me?' Caitlin said.
Mahalia's contemptuous expression said that she had no idea either.
'What is it, Carlton?' Caitlin asked gently. But all the boy would do was smile.
'He does that sometimes,' Mahalia said. 'He'll tell you in his own good time.'
'So when were you going to tell me this, Mahalia?'
'Oh, soon,' the girl replied lightly.
Caitlin didn't fall for it. She wondered what else lay behind Mahalia's diamond-hard exterior that the teenager wasn't revealing.
They made their way through picturesque villages that belied the advent of the Fall. In many of them, life appeared to go on as normal: wisps of smoke floated up from the chimneys of stone houses and washing fluttered on lines in back gardens. Villagers out on their errands would stop and stare in amazement as the car roared by, wondering what the apparition signified. Other lanes were blocked by horse-drawn carts transporting produce from one village to the next, the drivers yanking the reins tight to prevent their horses from shying at the unfamiliar beast.
Eventually, reaching a minor road along a windswept ridge on the edge of the Cotswolds, Crowther pulled up against a mass of vegetation that had once been the verge.
'We're here?' Caitlin said, looking for some sign of a specific destination. All she could see were untended fields turned wild, and burgeoning hedgerows and copses.
Crowther grunted something incoherent in response and set out along the road without waiting for the others, his staff clattering an insistent rhythm. Mahalia and Carlton crawled out from behind the seats, stretching aching muscles. It was still and peaceful, with insects flitting over the long grass and birds singing in every tree.
As Caitlin, Mahalia and Carlton hurried to catch up with the professor, the chattering at the back of Caitlin's head grew louder as her inner selves became feverishly excited.
Mahalia could feel something, too, for the contempt had left her face to be replaced by an out-of-place uncertainty. 'Where are we going?' she asked. Carlton gave her hand a supportive squeeze; of all of them, he appeared the most at ease.
Crowther pointed to a weather-worn rock rising up in a field to their left. Rusty iron railings imprisoned it. 'Well, there's part of it,' he said gruffly. He turned swiftly through a gate concealed by overgrown vegetation and led them past a small hut with yellowing pamphlets in a dirty display case. And then they were there.
Surrounded by trees and hedges on three sides was a small stone circle forty strides across. Only a few of the pockmarked, eroded limestone pillars still stood tall. The majority were broken stumps. On the fourth side, two gateway stones opened out on to sunlit fields rolling down into a valley.
'The Rollrights,' Crowther intoned. 'A Neolithic stone circle.'
'This is where we get to that other world?' Caitlin asked.
'Where we'll make the attempt to cross over.' Crowther led the way cautiously, his darting eyes searching amongst the trees.
They paused on the edge of the circle, which Crowther defined with a wave of his hand. 'These are known as The King's Men.' He turned and pointed in the direction of the stone now hidden behind the hedge across the road. 'The King Stone.' And then away across the fields to the east, where they could just make out four upright stones and one fallen. 'The remains of a chambered long barrow, now known as the Whispering Knights. Legend says they are a king and his knights turned to stone by a witch. Some of the locals say the stones come alive at midnight, performing strange ritual dances... they even go down to Little Rollright Spinney over there to get a drink. Stories like that are one of the hidden sources of information I spoke of earlier. The suggestion of transformation and magic tells me the ancients believed this place had a special power - that's what we need to tap into, the reason why we're here.'
Caitlin expected Mahalia to make some sneering comment, but the girl remained on edge and watchful.
'I'm not sure I like it here,' Caitlin said.
'You're responding to the atmosphere. This is a special place,' Crowther replied.
'What do you mean?'
'It has a unique ambience, a confluence of subtle alterations to the quality of the light, the scents of the vegetation, the temperature . . . and on an unseen level, patterns of background radiation, ultrasound, anomalous radio signals. What you're feeling is the shock of a new experience. It's quite ... destabilising. You'll get used to it.'
Mahalia didn't look convinced. She put her arm around Carlton again and led him away to one side where she whispered to him insistently, flashing occasional urgent glances at Caitlin.
Crowther moved to the tallest of the nearby stones and held out one hand, as if to touch it. But then he hesitated, as if he were about to plunge his hand into water that could be freezing cold or boiling hot. He steeled himself, then clamped his palm on the surface before smiling. 'Power, you see. Infused in every molecule.'
'What kind of power?' Caitlin asked.
'Ah, that's the question. Something science never quite got to grips with. This place is like a battery ... no, like a node on some national energy grid.' He removed his hat and leaned forward until his forehead was gently touching the cool rock. 'There was a research group called the Dragon Project working here in the late seventies, early eighties, looking into the notion of some kind of telluric energy - earth energy. Airy-fairy, you might say.' He laughed. 'New Age nonsense. But then a Geiger counter picked up sudden surges of radiation, something that only seemed to happen at megalithic sites. And then they found pulses of ultrasound, strange radio signals, short bursts, like a homing beacon. They never did get to the bottom of it.'
Caitlin realised that Crowther was right: she was starting to feel better, attuning herself to the subtle energies of the place. The chattering voices had quietened, and an abiding peace rose in her heart. She breathed deeply, tasting the trees and grass and rock. But there was still memory, tugging her back. 'How long have we got?' she said.
Crowther looked at the sky, an ages-old shaman divining the wind and clouds. 'Not as much time as I'd like.'
'You don't think the Whisperers will leave us alone?'
'No. Do you?' He eyed her cautiously before deciding not to let it spoil his mood. 'It's going to be a lovely day. Make the most of it.'
The morning passed slowly. They lit a fire on rough ground beyond the hut and cooked up a meal of eggs and herbs, stolen by Mahalia from a farm they had passed during the night. Caitlin's plea that they in some way pay for the produce had been cut short by the angry farmer and his sons chasing them furiously away.
The day was warmer than they could have expected for that time of year. Caitlin and Mahalia took turns keeping watch while Crowther busied himself with things he insisted were necessary for whatever ritualistic endeavour he had planned for sunset, though Caitlin was convinced he was simply trying to avoid doing any real work.
It was during her third watch in the early hours of the afternoon that Caitlin became entranced by sparkling lights high up in the trees. Just the pleasing play of sunlight in the branches, she thought, until she realised that the gl
immering moved of its own accord. She watched the glitter trails with distracted curiosity, lost in the dreamy peace that had crept over her since she had become accustomed to the Rollrights' peculiar atmosphere. Even the sickening undertow of grief in the pit of her stomach had abated, and though she still thought of Liam and Grant every few moments, it was with the warm remembrance of happier times, not the sense of loss that physically hurt. Perhaps the lights were another manifestation of whatever caused the odd sound and radiation effects Crowther had mentioned earlier, she speculated.
But after five minutes, she realised with a growing sense of amazement that she could make out tiny forms at the heart of the lights - little people, with wings. The discovery filled her with a pure, innocent wonder that she had not experienced since she was a child. She watched them for a few more minutes until one appeared to notice her and swooped down. The figure hovered on gossamer wings, barely six inches high, its androgynous features incredibly beautiful. The skin itself exuded the golden light.
She reached out to it, but it always stayed a few inches away from her fingertips, examining her with a deep curiosity as if it was reading the depths of her mind. Eventually its puzzled face broke into a sympathetic smile and it dived forward to trace its fingers across her forehead before darting a few feet away. Its touch felt like the wings of a moth, but then a strange syrupy warmth flowed through Caitlin and in an instant even the last vestige of her grief disappeared. The being's smile became broad and warm. It waved to her once, and then soared back up to rejoin its companions in the treetops.
Caitlin could barely believe what had happened. In a rush of excitement, she ran from her lookout to tell the others what had happened.
Crowther was nowhere to be found, but Mahalia and Carlton had just returned from an exploration of the surrounding countryside. She gushed out a description of the event, ending with a passionate admission: 'It cured me! Of my grief, I mean! I'm sure it'll be back ... I know it will ... but for now ... amazing!'
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