Advent (51 page)

 
One of them, he saw, would sink.

 
‘It’s called Corbo,’ he said. The man didn’t blink, but his eyes slowly turned towards the obscured sky. ‘You probably shouldn’t go this way.’

 
The man just stood where he was, as if the power of motion had abandoned him, which at least made it easy for Gawain to start up the hill again, in the other direction. He pulled his jacket more tightly around him as a chill swept through the wood. Swinging the branch beside him like a staff, he had the feeling he was tracing a fault line over the earth and behind him a crack was widening, the world crumbling into it in his wake.

The river was increasingly choppy. Guts churning, Horace smacked the hull of his boat into each wave. I’m not far behind, he told himself. Only a couple of minutes. I’ll catch up. No way some city kid’s going to get there before I do. He wiped his nose with his sleeve and twisted the throttle on the outboard until the boat juddered and bucked as it skimmed the whitecaps. There was a speed limit on the river but so what. He didn’t care. Spurts of bitterly cold spray leaped up from under the bows. He saw freaky old Mr Frye’s boat heading out towards the open sea. Mr Freak. Hope he sinks.

 
There was nowhere to leave his boat at the ferry steps, so he steered into the harbour. There were a couple of old farts up on the road, staring disapprovingly as he came in too fast, his wake setting the buoys lurching. So what. Let them stare. Everyone stared at him. The Chinese kid. OK, you two, here’s something to watch.

 
He aimed the bow straight at the shingly foreshore where the stream opened out into the harbour. Just when it looked as if he was going to ram his boat onto the stones, he threw the motor into reverse. The grating screech of the engine filled the village and out of the corner of his eye Horace noted with satisfaction that the stares of the posh villagers had twisted into frowns. He swung the boat round sharply, holding his balance as it swerved and slowed, and waited for just a second as its shoreward momentum fought against the whining motor; then he flipped off the outboard, and, as the hull drifted inches away from the shore, vaulted out onto the shingle. There was not the tiniest scrape of fibreglass on stone, but the boat had come to rest close and still enough that he could push its stern back out and take hold of the painter without even getting the soles of his trainers wet.

 
With all the insolence he could muster, he looked straight up at the people on the road and took angry pleasure at the speed with which they averted their eyes.

 
No sign of the kid. He must have started walking up already. Horace looped the painter round the struts of the wooden footbridge that crossed the stream’s mouth, then marched up the paved road towards the ridge. He approached each corner carefully in case the kid wasn’t far ahead; he didn’t want to give himself away. The road climbed steeply between the harbour and the hillside houses – all deserted for the winter; they were all rich people’s second homes – and then curved round the shoulder of the hill. He couldn’t risk going too fast. The only thing he had going for him was the element of surprise.

 
Course, there was the shortcut.

 
Horace stopped in the deserted road. He took his cap off again to run fingers through his hair.

 
No one knew their way around like he did. He hadn’t been through the hole in the hedge for a while but he still remembered exactly where it was. All he had to do was jump off the road onto the footpath that ran past the farm, carry on till he got to the gap and then duck through and he’d be in the woods right near Miss Clifton’s house. Cake. And he’d definitely get there before the other kid if he hurried.

 
His feet knew the way. He didn’t have to think about where he was going at all. As he hurried along he fantasised about how impressed Marina would be. He rehearsed their conversation under his breath as he trotted past the farm with its ridiculous barking dogs and came up to the edge of the trees. When he reached the place, it was a simple matter to check quickly that no one was coming – no one ever was – and then slip between the sagging barbed wire in the spot where the undergrowth was thin, and into the bushes beyond, onto Pendurra land.

 
He’d been thinking about sneaking up through the woods to keep an eye on the gate so he could catch the kid coming in. But now he realised he wanted to see Marina straight away. He liked the way she always smiled to see him. She never saw any other boys, or not that she ever said anything about. Nobody ever seemed to come and go. There was something special about the place, there really was, or how come there weren’t any cars or farm machines, and there were no wires leading to the house, like it was lost in time or something, and even though it was really really old and there was all that land around it nobody worked there except Caleb and Miss Clifton? There was something special about Marina too, not just her bright smile and being friendly and pretty. She was so different from the girls at school. It was like she wasn’t even the same species, she was . . . she was so . . .

 
Sadly, Horace Jia was only twelve and hadn’t yet learned a language to describe how Marina was unlike all the other children he knew, or why he liked thinking about her so much. He remembered how she hadn’t listened to him properly last time they spoke, hadn’t seemed to care about how worried he was, and then she’d gone off with that other boy. The liar. The fake.

 
He worked his way through the dense stands of wild rhododendron with the automatic deftness of a gymnast practising a routine. So perfectly did he know his trackless route, in any season of the year, that as he approached the place where the undergrowth thinned out near the driveway, he would surely have noticed the strangely shaped trunk that had never been there any other day, if it hadn’t been for the turbulence of resentment and fantasy whirling through his head.

 
As it was, the first he knew of it was when, quite suddenly, it moved, its true shape becoming clear. By then he was too close, and it was too late.

 
Being a boy of twelve, and the only child of a fiercely strict mother, the very idea of naked femaleness was a thing of paralysing fascination and terror. It was the first thing he noticed and it stopped him in his tracks.

 
He didn’t take in the rest of it, because he couldn’t. It was impossible. It couldn’t be there.

 
He saw a woman’s form, a woman’s face and breasts and hips, but all a dark shining green, except for the eyes and nipples which were blood-red. From the shoulders outwards and the thighs downwards the form became something else, no longer even the image of a person. Its legs and arms grew darker and rougher, streaked and mottled like bark. At the long arms’ ends burst clusters of spiked leaves that could not possibly be hands, though they flexed and stretched, finger-like. The feet were knots of wood, rooting down into the litter of dead leaves. On its smooth head, a crown of tiny white flowers seemed to grow right out of its skull.

 
The feet lifted, lithe and pliant, trailing earth, and as they stepped towards Horace, the mouth opened and sang in a warm, clear alto:

The holly and the ivy, when they are both full grown

Of all the trees that are in the wood the holly bears the crown

One of the branch-arms extended and the leafy twigs at its tip rustled and crooked, beckoning.

 
‘Come, mouse,’ said the voice, a deliciously musical hum. ‘Come, squirrel.’ The root-feet slid closer. ‘Come, little owl. Come and rest in my branches. Warm yourself in my thorny arms.’

 
Some self-preservation instinct triggered itself. Horace spun round and began to sprint. There was a commotion behind him as if a gale had struck the wood. He was tripped hard, and fell, scrambling onto his back as he dropped. He saw the green face, the ruby irises in the black eyes, bending towards him. More in dumb shock than terror, he fainted, and never felt the limb scoop him up, scores of prickles tearing at his clothes.

At that same moment Gawain was hurrying up the old green lane, where for centuries the people of the village by the river had walked to reach the church among the fields above. Its grey tower rose above the brow of the hill as he climbed out of the woods. The sky behind it had turned solid, a wall of cloud. He pulled the map out of his back pocket without stopping and crossed a rutted field to the lane at the top of the ridge. There was a village nearby, a few roofs poking over the hedges. He scrambled away from it, up towards the crossroads. Checking over his shoulder in case anyone was around on the road, he was halted by the view opening behind.

 
Down to the west and south the landscape had vanished completely into the colourless storm. The horizon had drawn in so close he felt like he could touch it. It looked like the end of the world. He pulled his jacket tighter around him and climbed on.

 
At the crossroads the sky opened out around him, the wind stinging. An old mud-crusted car was parked at an odd angle on the strip of grass beside the junction, nestled front first into the hedge. Gawain wondered who’d have left their car like that, and where they were now. Then he saw the crumples and dents behind the front bumper, and the marks of skidding tyres like fat brown brushstrokes in the grass. Another wreck.

 
He hurried on the eastward road towards the gate, feeling unpleasantly exposed here in the high lane, though the only things watching him were occasional crows. He tried not to think about Corbo’s warning. Something more fearsome than itself didn’t bear thinking about. All he had to do was get in, under cover somehow. Then he’d work out what to do next. Find Marina. She’d know. Or at least she’d know more than he did. The thought that he had become more helpless and ignorant than Marina was almost as dreadful as the crow-beast’s threats.

 
He slowed down as he neared the dense laurel hedge and the two stone gateposts. The crows cawed at him from the pines, echoing the monstrosity’s warning.
Go. Go.
But the advancing clouds had taken away any choice he might still have had. He didn’t want to be out in the open when whatever it was that had eaten the middle distance caught up with him.

 
He peered surreptitiously round the near gatepost and watched the house for as long as he could hold still. Auntie Gwen’s car was still parked beyond it. There were no signs of life.

 
Cautiously, he went up to the door and listened. Until that moment he hadn’t realised that he was far, far more frightened that Auntie Gwen might be inside than that she might not be. But the house was as deserted as when he’d first arrived. The door was still unlocked, and when he cracked it open the silence behind it was blanket-thick.

 
He looked down at his feet, scratched, stained, soil between his toes. They told him how far he had come in a day, since he’d last stood here. He’d returned a different person. Rechristened.

 
He was squatting on the floor by his bag, changed into warmer clothes, when he heard a new sound outside. His head snapped up.

 
At first it was no more than a change in the timbre of the wind, its hollowness filling in, a moan becoming a murmur. As he scrambled to his feet, heart thudding, and held his breath to listen again, he realised that it was music.

 
A voice sang outside, the words becoming clear as it approached the house: a woman’s voice.

O the rising of the sun and the running of the deer

The playing of the merry organ, sweet singing in the choir

In the next room, the clock began to chime.

The holly bears a prickle as sharp as any thorn

And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ on Christmas Day in the morn

Gawain crossed to the window. Snowflakes had begun to fall. He looked out into the winter.

O the rising of the sun . . .

Through the window its berry-red eyes met his. His knees gave way. He slumped backwards, a rabbit in an eagle’s glare. There was no light in the eyes, no depth, no watery softness: they seemed blind. Yet the song stopped, and as its dark-lipped mouth curved into a smile, Gawain knew it had found what it was looking for.