Advent (66 page)

 
The door in the old office. The one Auntie Gwen had gone out of after taking the key. After reading his mother’s – no, Iz’s – letter, and realising that Gav was the child born in the woods all those years ago and deciding to break into the chapel to try and find the secret of Pendurra before going to pick him up from the station, so she could tell him everything: who he was, his name, his story, why he was
special in a good way, the best.

 
Marina had told him that door led to the stables and then outside. No one ever went there, she said. The old office was even hidden by a secret door. A hidden door. It opened from the landing at the top of the rickety stairs in the office to the gallery around the hall. And the gallery led to the warren of upstairs rooms.

 
A different kind of cold settled on him. He began circling through the woods, towards the side of the house where the hall was. Its vaulted and crenellated roof stood out like a grey and mossy shipwreck foundering on the rest of the building. The tall windows were empty, dark as stone in the fading light. Beyond them a clutch of low haphazard buildings enclosed a cobbled courtyard adjacent to the house. The stables, surely. The edge of the wood came up close behind them. Gawain looked across fifteen paces of open ground. A quick dash across and he’d be able to work his way along the walls out of sight of any windows.

 
It only looked like a quick dash until he’d reached the limit of the trees. Then suddenly it yawned before him like a white abyss. He crouched, fear battling with the strange queasy cold determination. It felt like his last chance to turn back. Corbo had warned him to stay away; Holly told him to run. If things like that were afraid on his behalf, what business did he have ignoring them?

 
Find my child
.

 
He was halfway to the stable wall before he even thought about what he was doing, and by then it was too late. Now he had to move, and keep moving, no choice; he was on his way in. Adrenaline terror flooded over him. He felt it squeeze his lungs. He flattened himself against the outer wall of the stable block, gasping, appalled by the glaring track he’d left behind him in the snow. Someone would surely notice it. Something. Hurry, then! But now he had no idea where the door into the house would be. Back tight against the stone, he edged sideways until he came to a corner. Peering round with one eye, he saw the house, terrifyingly close. It looked different for some reason. He panicked, convinced he’d lost his bearings and was trapped in completely the wrong place. Then with a dizzying swell of relief he realised what it was that looked different: the sash windows, the perpendicular angles, the dressed stone. The old office. Marina had told him it wasn’t as old as the rest of the house. Suddenly it all fit together: he saw how the newer extension abutted the ancient hall, and where the stable block was joined to it. He’d stood with Marina looking down at those windows and the unbarred door beside them. That door must be . . . there.

 
He’d have to run again, across the courtyard. More tracks. No help for it, and no time to worry about it. He raced across the snow and squeezed under the lintel of a barn door, fumbling at its latch. It clattered horribly but opened, inwards, into a chill dark space that smelled of mud and leather. The dread was so intense it was all he could do to stay upright, but he slipped inside and closed the door behind him.

 
For a few seconds there was nothing but the feeling of stone around him. Then his eyes adjusted to the dimness and he saw thick wooden trestles, low beams hung with brackets and hooks, and everywhere objects whose names and uses were completely obscure to him, things of straps and ropes and brass loops and strange-shaped metal blades.

 
A wide wooden door was set in the far wall.

 
Maybe it’s barred now, he thought. Or there could be someone behind it, waiting. But his feet kept going. It was a nightmare again, inevitable motion even as the brain screamed to stop. His knees felt weak as water. He put his hand out to the door to steady himself. There was a handle on it, a ring of iron like a manacle.

 
He held his breath, put his ear to the wood, listened.

 
An odd thing happened then. There was no sound at all, nothing where he was and nothing coming through the heavy door, and yet in the silence he heard something. At first it seemed like the faintest, most distant snatches of Holly’s music, up beyond the wood, but it wasn’t that. It wasn’t a song, or even a sound at all. It vibrated in some other air, different from the air he breathed. It was infinitely quiet.

 
It had a source, a shadowed corner beside the door. He was looking straight at it.

 
There was a stick there. A walking stick, slightly curved, smoothed by craft and use. It had a voice.

 
Gawain thought of the faraway murmuring of Hester’s masks and remembered how they’d come into focus when he’d touched the faces. There was something about this other music that felt like a glimmer of reassurance. It might not be a bad idea to carry a stick, he reasoned. It would make a good companion, and though he doubted it would do him any good in a fight, he thought he’d still rather not have empty hands, should he come across anything that tried to stop him.

 
He picked it up.

 
Quickbeam
, it whispered.
Lightning tree.
Rowan, sovereign against enchantment.
These were not words. It was knowledge, known the way he knew his face in a mirror. He recalled the boughs with slender leaves and bunches of orange berries tacked above the doors and windows of Auntie Gwen’s house. It was the same wood, the same faded magic. He gripped the staff more comfortably.
Whispertree
,
witchbane
. The names were not names but textures in his hand.

 
He turned the handle. The door hadn’t been barred. It creaked, whined, opened a sliver of musty grey. Through the crack Gawain saw the piled boxes and the faded ledgers shelved from floor to ceiling, exactly as he remembered.

 
He slipped in, bringing the rowan staff with him, and slowly, slowly closed the door behind him, until with an apologetic click it shut him in the house.

 
For a few seconds he stood looking up at the landing as if Marina was still there, nervous and fidgety and very much alive, wrapping the baggy sleeves of her sweater around and around her hands. As if he’d never seen the telltale marks in the dust and the name on the label of a drawer, as if none of the last day had happened at all and he was still wearing shoes and socks and spending a week in the country visiting his scatty, silly aunt while his parents (still his parents) went on their skiing holiday.

 
Then somewhere deeper in the house a door banged.

 
The shock almost toppled Gawain over. The only thing he could think was that someone wanted to kill him, here in this house, behind these walls. Move, he told himself desperately, move. Upstairs, that was it. The secret door, the gallery, the passageway. Find Marina. He started up the flimsy stairs. Their timbers popped and groaned. He felt each noise in his gut like the jab of a knife. His feet looked like they belonged in a morgue, stained and bruised out of any resemblance to living flesh. Another noise in the house: a metallic clang, closer. He cringed, overbalanced and had to clutch the railing to stop himself falling. The staff knocked clumsily on the treads. He swore between clenched teeth, shut his eyes and waited for the enemy to come and massacre him as Holly had promised, but everything went quiet. He resumed the ascent, another tread, another, soft creaks announcing every step like denunciations. He reached the landing and leaned against the wall, clammy with fear. The only way to mitigate the racket of his panting breath was opening his mouth wide, as if readying a scream. He listened again. Now the silence was horribly unnerving. He wiped his hands on his filthy clothes and gave the handle of the landing door the tiniest twist.

 
Silence still. The drapes concealing the door on the other side muffled light and noise. Gav pushed and felt their weight pushing back. He eased through the door on tiptoes, doing his best to disturb the fabric as little as possible. The hall seemed empty. He poked shaky fingers into the gap between the tapestries and put his eye to the crack.

 
Again everything was exactly as he remembered it, except that instead of the dreary and frosty mid-morning light a cloudy gloom hung thick in the hall. The old glass in its windows sapped the expiring afternoon’s remaining strength. Among the beams of the ceiling it was already dark. Gav looked across to the far end of the gallery, the branching stonework and the arched door just visible in the shadows. Tenuous determination gripped him. He was inside. No one had seen him. The house was big and full of obscure corners. Suddenly it seemed plausible that Marina was waiting for him somewhere, that he could steal unnoticed through its shadows and find her. He stepped between the drapes and started along the gallery, lifting each foot high and lowering it heel to toe, testing the boards for discretion.

 
He glanced down at the long table below as he passed along the gallery. When Marina had shown him through the room the morning before, there’d been nothing on it, he was sure. Now five thick candles were arranged there in a circle, unlit. Between them, in the centre, was a wide shallow bowl, gleaming like old silver. He slowed involuntarily. The symmetry of it seemed disturbingly purposeful and strange. He shivered again, tightening his grip on the stick, and then, without warning, the dread became real.

 
Muffled footsteps sounded below, approaching. He was in the middle of the long side of the gallery, at the furthest possible extreme from either door, completely exposed. The steps came on. He dropped to his hands and knees, behind the thin posts that railed the gallery, and pushed himself back into inadequate shadows. Appallingly loud and close, a door scraped directly beneath him.

 
The steps came in. Paralysed, he could only watch, eyes fixed on the space below. There was nowhere to hide or run; he could not so much as shift his weight without making a sound. He was trapped. Sparks danced in his vision, and all he could think was, Please let it be Tristram. Please let it be Marina. Please let it not be . . .

 
The person who’d entered the hall shuffled into view, directly beneath him, carrying something awkward to the table.

 
It was neither Tristram nor Marina. It was, as Gawain had by some awful insight known it would be, Aunt Gwen.

 
It was and it was not.

 
Gav had faced things more hideous than nightmares that day, but this was the worst moment of all, the moment when a knowledge so unspeakable that it couldn’t be admitted finally showed its face. Though he was looking down on her back from high above, in the last light of a grim day, he knew her immediately. His old ally, his childhood friend, his beloved comical aunt, the only person who’d ever shown any sympathy at all for the catastrophe that was his life: how could he not know her? But at the same time something – no, everything – was grotesquely wrong. She was hunched, concentrated, slow and uncomfortable and heavy, moving as if each motion required an effort to remember how it was done, and as if the continuous effort of it had turned her bitterly angry. Gawain saw all this in the two or three steps it took her to come to the table and set down the thing she carried. The one emotion he couldn’t imagine infecting his kind, enthusiastic, naïve aunt was bitterness. Now she reeked of it, even in the mere twist and strain of her arms.

 
It was as well she didn’t turn round, because Gav thought that if he saw her face he’d probably die. As it was, the horror of watching her held him still as death. Only an instinct of self-preservation kept him clinging to the walking stick, or it would have clattered onto the gallery floor and given him away. The thing she’d carried was a jug, a wide-bellied earthenware jug; he’d seen one like it in the kitchen. Full, as was obvious from the way she’d wrestled with the weight of it. Now she bent over its handle, grunted as she heaved and poured its contents into the silver bowl between the candles.

 
The splash of running water broke Gav out of his paralysis. He looked around, trying to think, wondering how to keep himself alive. He didn’t know what had happened to his aunt, he didn’t even want to begin to try and imagine it, but he knew with utter certainty that if he met her eyes – if she saw him – Holly’s worst predictions would come true. The horror would stop his heart. This, here, was the enemy, the thing that was wrong. Marina’s mother (mother!) had somehow known the truth and begged him to help; now he would.
Find my child
, the mermaid said.
You must
, Miss Grey said. It was simple, like turning left or right. Escape or die.