Advent (56 page)

 
For the first time Gav wondered what Horace had been doing at Pendurra.

 
Reminded of what had been chasing him, he backed out of the car, slammed the rear door shut and crawled into the front seat, closing the two of them in. It was an old and battered machine, smelling of rubber and cheap plastic. He locked all the doors. The key was still in the ignition but nothing happened when he turned it. He wriggled across to the passenger seat, leaned back and was still.

 
The only sound was his hoarse breath. The storm was almost entirely muffled. The snow that had battered him now shielded him, making a blanket against wind and cold. He squeezed his hands between his thighs. Even that much effort was almost more than he could sustain. Through half-closed eyes he looked at his bare feet, pink-white and blotched with sickly veins. His trousers were stiff with damp. Between breaths he listened to the tenuous flutter of his heart.

 
He tried to think, but there was nothing for his thoughts to latch on to.
Lost in whiteness.
The words floated in his head like skywriting, fraying into mere cloud. He’d forgotten where they came from. There were lots of words drifting around with them, other words, equally meaningless, blank as snowflakes.
White Hawk.
He’d reached his limit of incomprehension. The world within him was as blank, as silent and erased, as the world outside.

 
Spent, rudderless, he sat in the defunct box of metal and plastic, a senseless child stretched out across the seat behind, while the snow went about its work of burying him, burying them both, them and everything else.

 
His breath quieted. Its rhythm became thin and soft like sleep. Idly, he wondered whether it wouldn’t be a better idea to keep moving. There was something he had to do, something that still wasn’t a dream, though it seemed like everything else was. But that would require energy, and his was all gone, and also it would require having somewhere to go, and he didn’t, he had nowhere. No home and no hope.

 
The cold didn’t sting as bitterly as it had. Now it spread through him like an embrace. Don’t go to sleep, he told himself. You weren’t supposed to go to sleep; that was bad. You got too cold, you went to sleep, you never woke up. Gone, like Miss Grey. Don’t go to sleep. He wiggled feebly in the seat. The weight of his eyelids was unbearable. Don’t go to sleep. The sibilant murmur of the word was like a lullaby hush. Don’t sleep, sleep.

Less than half a mile away, Owen Jeffrey sat alone in the front pew of a village church, staring at the altar. The church was quiet.

 
It was always quiet. Even when he conducted the parish mass here every other Sunday, even when it was warmed by its dogged complement of the faithful echoing the responses and singing the hymns with their slightly embarrassed conviction, there was an underlying silence that wouldn’t be shaken. All these old country churches had it. It was packed in among the timbers of their ceilings; it seeped out of their memorial tablets and bell towers and lady chapels. It was a thousand times deeper and more persistent than any congregation’s reflex devotions. Nothing dented it: no children’s services, no support group meetings, no midnight masses or Advent carols. The silence flowed back and drowned them.

 
The silence of the missing voice, it was. The absent ghost haunting every church. The silence that listened to their hymns and liturgies and prayers and entreaties, and answered – nothing. Nothing, ever.

 
It sang in Owen’s ears.
There’s no one here. There’s never been anyone here. The church is empty, the altar deserted. There will be no reply. No one’s coming.

 
No one was going to answer him. Not even today.

 
He’d been alternately sitting and kneeling there all morning, since before the snow. The clock above had struck ten, eleven, twelve. No sign yet, not even a still small voice. No light from above.

 
He’d entered the church in brilliant sunshine. Now it was twilight-dim inside and the wind hummed around the tower. He ought to be getting going, he thought, though it wasn’t clear where, or why.

 
He’d very much hoped that someone would tell him what to do now that the end of the world had arrived. But God was keeping his counsel, same as always. Everything else had changed, but not that.

 
Or maybe he’d already had all the instructions he was going to get. They’d been clear enough. Unmistakable, delivered by that exquisite voice, and painfully simple.

 
Go. Do not return.

 
Was that it? Was that all he needed to know, at the end of the world? Just to get out of the way?

 
Of course – Owen closed his eyes and shivered – that wasn’t all he’d heard. Before he’d reached the gate, before it had seen him and turned to him and told him to leave, he’d heard the singing.

 
His lips opened and he chanted in a small cracked voice:

Rorate coeli desuper et nubes pluant iustum.

Rorate coeli desuper et nubes pluant iustum.

He wanted to recall the music of the chant as he’d heard it that morning, carolling over the sunlit fields like a blessing. It was like trying to remember a dream of flying.

 
That was when he’d known the end of the world had come. When he’d heard a voice no human creature could possess, singing the Advent antiphon inside the gates of Pendurra. Really there’d been no need to go any further, no need to look in at the gate and see the . . . the creature planted by the lodge.

 
He knew the song, of course. He’d warbled it himself in his services just that Sunday. The Advent invocation, pleading for the descent of heaven to earth.

Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness.

Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness.

And here were the heavens falling, the sky pouring down its relentless embrace. Owen looked out of tall windows and saw the torrent of snow.

 
That’s the justice we’ve earned, he thought. Cold, silent, deadly.

 
Same as always.

 
He stood up wearily and made his way back to the door.

 
‘Still nothing to say for yourself, eh?’ His voice came with the faintest stony echo, as it did when he delivered his sermons. He’d come to think of it as the sound of the church swallowing his words, the way it had swallowed generations and centuries of sermons before him, absorbing all their pieties into granite. ‘Not a word? Nothing? Not even today?’

 
The night before, he’d been assailed by a fragment of the darkness, whirring like a storm and croaking like a death rattle. And then in the morning, in the sunlight, when he’d finally plucked up courage to go back to Pendurra, he’d passed his wrecked car, turned in the gate and seen . . .

 
The end of the world.

 
No more than a mile up the road there was a thing eight feet tall with arms and legs of knotted wood and an evergreen face and a voice of liquid gold.

 
It had looked at him. It spoke to him. It told him to go away. And still God wouldn’t answer his prayers. Not so much as a shuffle of His feet or a clearing of His throat.

 
He sighed and headed for the door. There was no point praying any longer. ‘All right, then. Have it your way.’

 
Outside, the storm assailed him. No letters of fire were appearing in the heavens. No grim horsemen rode by, thundering out the good or bad news. The dead stayed safely tucked up in their coffins. Judgement was descending as obscure and characterless as the snow.

 
One more try, he thought. He’d head up there one more time. Tristram and Marina and Caleb and Gwen were his friends, after all. He wasn’t sure how much that mattered any more. But what else was there to hold on to?

 
Rorate coeli desuper
. He hummed it to himself breathlessly.
Et nubes pluant iustum.
He went home for his coat and scarf and wellies, and then back out to endure the falling sky.

Gawain dreamed of a forest.

 
It was a huge, airy, mossy forest of cedar and hemlock and ferns, lush with the moisture of a grey ocean nearby. The smell was of ankle-deep pockets of pine needles and rotting bark, gathered in the hollows of lichen-spotted boulders. At first, in his dream, he had not himself been in the forest, observing it instead as if it was a picture. Then, gradually, it gathered him in. He grew aware of its clouds of mosquitoes, its damp air, its undergrowth of saplings striving for light. Then he was trying to pass through it, out to the shore. There was a strong and disturbing feeling of familiarity, which grew and grew until it seemed to be the whole point of the dream, and he heard himself saying out loud, ‘Is this where I came from?’ He knew it couldn’t be so, because of the tall straight trees and the nearby ocean, but nevertheless he shouted out the question in fear. Miss Grey answered him:
It’s where you’re going
. He was tremendously relieved to hear her voice in his dreams again, because for some reason he’d been afraid she was dead. He couldn’t see her, though, so he began searching through the forest. He came out onto a long strand of smooth round pebbles beside an ocean inlet, littered with bleached dead wood, and there she was, sitting on the stones, her back to him. In the dream he thought how strange it was to see her somewhere so unlike anywhere he had been before. The name of the place came to him:
Tsaxis
. He came over the shore towards her, but now it wasn’t her after all. It wasn’t even a dream; it was an actual woman sitting on a real shore, the shore of Tsaxis, looking out seawards. She turned when he called. She was a young Eskimo woman in a furred hood. Miss Grey had said her last goodbye.

 
He woke up thinking he was still stranded on that shore, with the cold of the ocean all around him. He was a boulder, curved and hard. He wondered where the ocean girl was. She could turn him back to flesh.

 
The ocean girl was far away. He felt strongly that he needed to find her. Only when that feeling came over him, carrying its charge of urgency, did he wake up properly. He jerked upright in the seat of the car, looking around in confusion for the thing that was missing. Gradually he remembered where he was, alone in the cold little box of blue-grey light.

 
Alone.

 
He sat still for twenty seconds, piecing together what he thought he remembered, filtering out the vivid intensity of the dream, making quite sure that he was right about the fact that there should have been someone with him. Then he turned round slowly and looked into the back seat.

 
Horace was gone.

Twenty-six

The woman who
was no woman leaned on her staff, pulled her strange garments tighter around her strange skin and looked down pensively at the other woman, the one who was dead.

 
Snow had all but submerged the corpse. Only one stiff arm stuck out, rigid fingers open, the hand that had taken the ring mockingly empty.

 
The wind had calmed in the last few minutes. Snow fell thinly and perfectly straight. Still, the woman who was no woman would rather have waited inside the house. Her clothes were inadequate to the winter, though in the absence of the wind the cold had abated. But she could not bear any more waiting.

 
She faced the snow and shouted a word.

 
‘Corbo!’