Advent (8 page)

 
The book lying face down and open on one corner of the map had a picture of Stonehenge on its cover and was called
Geomancy
. Stacked nearby, interleaved with torn yellow Post-its shelving out of them like fungi on the trunks of old trees, were
Mysteries of Stone Age Britain
,
The Ley-Hunter’s Field Guide
,
Antiques of—
no,
Antiquities of Devon and Cornwall
,
The Track of the Wild Hunt
. . . Around and beneath the map, sheets of paper written over in Aunt Gwen’s cuneiform handwriting spread chaotically. A few appeared to be diagrams with labels; some looked like lists with multiple crossings-out and insertions; most were chunks of written notes he didn’t want to look at too closely. He had a strong feeling that visible energies would feature heavily in them.

 
Each time he stopped to look at anything, the silence became oppressively thick. The thought of Miss Grey wandering in the night outside, watching the house, was like a pair of eyes on his back. He made sure all the curtains were drawn tight.

 
The best way to keep busy while he waited, he decided, was to get himself something to eat. He went back to the kitchen and found a stocky fridge with a big blunt handle, which turned out to hold bowlfuls of what his father liked to call ‘chicken feed’: grainy, persistently brown salads. There was an open packet of biscuits on a counter by the sink, so he took a few of those instead and, spotting a carton of instant hot chocolate, lit a burner on the stove under a battered metal kettle. The clankings and clatterings in the kitchen dropped into the stillness of the house like pebbles in a pond, and were as quickly swallowed.

 
What did she want from him?

 
He meant to take his mug of hot chocolate back to the messy living room, sit down by the fire with any book he could find that didn’t look too forbiddingly weird, and get comfortable. As soon as he passed the front door on his way back, he knew it wouldn’t work.

 
He leaned an ear to the door, held his breath and listened. The only sounds outside were the bodiless sighs of a gusting wind.

 
He slid the bolts back, listened again, then pushed the door open a crack.

 
‘Are you there?’ he said. It came out as a whisper.

 
He swung the door wide and faced the dark.

 
‘Miss Grey?’ he said, louder.

 
The light under the porch was still on, and beyond that the curtained windows illuminated faint swatches of the grassy verge in front of the house, but all the rest was nothing. Hester had said the place where they’d got off the train was only a few miles away. If so, those miles had to be constructed of solid night. There was not even an inkling of the underglow that lit every night sky Gavin had ever seen, the electric afterimage of the city.

 
‘Just go away,’ he said. ‘OK? I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to listen to you. This is my holiday. Leave me alone, all right?’

 
He nearly jumped out of his skin as a swift, small shadow darted out of the blackness towards his feet. A cat. Just a cat, speeding inside the house. He turned almost as fast, pulse racing, and bolted the door behind him.

 
The cat, a scruffy tortoiseshell, sized him up from under the table. He tried to laugh at himself for having been so startled by it. Actually, he should have expected it: he’d seen boxes of cat food in the kitchen cupboards. It looked like it was hungry now. It yowled at him, tail stiff, and followed him to the kitchen. He tipped some dry food into a bowl, but it only nosed at it and then chirruped again, twisting round his legs.

 
‘Fine, then,’ he said. ‘Suit yourself. I’m eating.’

 
The company of another living thing was enough to diminish the eerie feeling that gathered in the silence of the house. Despite the various signs of Auntie Gwen’s weirdness – the hanging crystals, the candles, the shrine, the mistletoe, the mess – Gav had to admit the firelight and the low ceilings and the mismatched, used-looking furniture made it cosy. He took his mug and a plate of biscuits and pushed back through the heavy green drape into the living room. He sat down in the chair nearest the fire. Half a second later the cat appeared, jumped into his lap and began kneading his legs.

 
Next to the arm of the chair was a box covered in a scarlet blanket, doing duty as a side table. This too was piled with Auntie Gwen’s reading. He picked through the books, not very hopefully.
Wicca Almanac
. He thought he recognised that one; it must have come with her to London once.
The White Goddess
.
Moon Magic
. Et cetera. There was also a big, expensive-looking photo album.
Treasured Memories
, it said on the cover, embossed in gold. Slightly guiltily, Gav picked it up. He felt like Mum, poking around someone else’s things, but he needed something to look at while he waited, and he was curious about what kind of photos Auntie Gwen kept. He couldn’t think of anytime he’d seen her holding a camera.

 
But it wasn’t a photo album; it was a scrapbook.

 
There were quite a few newspaper cuttings, some fading to sepia brittleness. There were photocopies of pages from books, and more bits of paper in her writing. She’d made notes on the pages of the album in many places. There were a few photos, all with a note written beneath them recording the date they were taken. There were a couple of postcards as well, carefully glued in. With a start, Gavin saw among the scraps a sheet in his own handwriting, in a scrawly version from years ago. It was a letter he’d sent her, just a couple of lines, with a bad scribbled drawing beneath them. He’d completely forgotten it. Why had she kept it, stuck in here with everything else?

D. A.G.

Thank you for the picture. That is not what she looks like at all. You have made her much too smooth. Here is my drawing of Miss Gray though I am not too good at drawing, I only got a 63 in art.

Love from Gavin

On the facing page was the picture Auntie Gwen had sent him. He remembered it now. Memory jogged, he glanced across at the framed photo on the desk. It was the same face. Auntie Gwen had more or less copied the photo. Her drawing showed the same head in the same pose, but with eyes open, the lips tighter, the cheekbones sharper, the whole face rendered more elfin and fantastical. She’d sent it to him as a present, with a note asking if it looked anything like Miss Grey. It was embarrassing to see his reply again, his childish handwriting, his fixation with marks, and beneath the message the even more comically childish pencil drawing representing the best Miss Grey he could do at the age of ten.

 
On the next page of the album another letter was stuck in. Above it Auntie Gwen had again pencilled the date, two weeks later than the previous letter.

D. A.G
.

Thank you for the postcard. That is much more like Miss gray, though she looks a lot nicer. And she isnt made out of wood or her name would be Miss brown. I am much too busy to write any more letters now.
[That came straight from Dad. He chewed his lip in shame as he read it.]
How are you.

Love from Gavin

And there it was, the postcard she’d sent, or at least another copy of the same picture, pasted in next to the letter. A picture of a wooden statue, a woman’s head and raised hands, angular and grotesquely emaciated. It was supposed to be a bit like his own crude drawing; he could see that now. But it didn’t actually look much like Miss Grey; he must only have said it did to stop Auntie Gwen sending him any more pictures. It occurred to him that maybe this had been the last postcard he’d had from her. Years ago – five years.

 
Under the postcard she had written, neatly,
Donatello, Maddalena
. The name, or names, didn’t mean anything to him. He couldn’t remember Auntie Gwen ever talking about anyone Italian.

 
Gavin began to flip through the album.

 
Then he wasn’t flipping at all, but reading.

 
He read some of the pages over and over again.

 
He didn’t look up until he was startled by the wheezing and chiming of the clock on the mantelpiece. Seven o’clock. He probably should have been wondering seriously about where his aunt had gone, but instead he was wondering what she’d been doing in this house all these years, whether there really was some point to all the mysteries she’d collected in this book.

 
He was also thinking about Hester Lightfoot.

 
The very last items in the scrapbook were two small clippings from newspapers. Over the first Auntie Gwen had written,
Oxford Mail
, 18 November
. It read:

Professor Hester Lightfoot has resigned her position as fellow in anthropology at Magdalen College.

Professor Lightfoot became a controversial figure earlier this year when she admitted on a radio programme that she had cause to doubt her own mental health. Despite the support of colleagues and students, who maintained that her remarks had been taken out of context, there were calls for her to be suspended from teaching. The
Mail
has now learned that she has resigned voluntarily. Neither Professor Lightfoot nor Magdalen College is making any comment, although sources at the college privately insist that it continues to support the professor and that the decision is entirely her own. Barry Squibb (19), a student of

And there the column ended. The second clipping was labelled,
Western Cornishman
, 21 November
. This time the headline was included:

‘NUTTY PROFESSOR’ RESIGNS

Falmouth-born Hester Lightfoot, a professor at Oxford University, has resigned. Dubbed ‘the Nutty Professor’ after she made public reference to her mental-health problems, Lightfoot has surrendered her prestigious post before the end of the university term. No one so far has commented on the reasons for her decision. In a BBC programme broadcast in April, Lightfoot confessed that she sometimes ‘heard voices’ but claimed she was not delusional because she knew the voices were not real. She owns a house in Mawnan Smith, where villagers describe her as a regular visitor.

Beneath this article Auntie Gwen had written,
Hester Lightfoot, born Falmouth 29/11/62. Grandniece of John Nicholls. Authority on shamanism
. And John Nicholls had his own page, earlier in the album. Gav flipped back to check and found two photocopies of the same signature and a sheet of paper on which she’d transcribed some sentences from somewhere else: he’d been a local eccentric of some sort, back in the 1920s. Something about pagan rites and taking a vow of silence.
Never heard to utter a syllable
, it said.

 
The whole album was in the same vein. Almost all of it consisted of records of exotic or weird things connected, however distantly, to this part of the world. Some of them were legends Auntie Gwen had discovered in old books. There were summaries of theories about standing stones, and pictures of field patterns that, seen from high above, made the shapes of dragons. There were accounts of witchcraft trials, holy wells and saints’ apparitions. Some were relatively recent stories, like the ones about the ghost of a small girl spotted in the woods at the edge of the river (accompanied by fuzzy magnified photos), or the man whose terminal cancer had been cured by a local priest, or UFO sightings out at sea. It all began to blend together into an indiscriminate fog, names and places that Gavin didn’t know, many of them sharp with the sounds of a remote world: Coverack, St Keverne, Manaccan. But then he was there too, and Hester. Whose birthday was tomorrow. Who told him she’d been kicked out of ‘school’. Who’d apparently said something a bit like what he’d said to Mr Bushy.