Advent (28 page)

 
He laughed a brief laugh of baffled delight. ‘Do you mean to wed me, then,
carissima
?’

 
She stared at the ring with intense concentration and ignored his jest.

 
‘Once I broke a pledge.’ Her voice was barely audible, buried under the weight of ages. ‘This was my punishment. To carry the pledge with me always, and to know it broken.’

 
The magus was used to riddling speech. It was the stock in trade of insubstantial beings. Lacking flesh and lacking freedom, they did not have the capacity to lie and so would often resort to evasions and obfuscations. He had never expected to hear anything of the sort from her mouth, however. He wondered whether she was distracted or feverish, though not once had he imagined she could suffer ordinary afflictions.

 
She took his left hand and opened it, palm up.

 
‘I saw this, long ago.’ She lowered the ring into his palm. ‘The last punishment. Offering my burden to him I love. My gift.’ She withdrew her fingers. The ring lay in his open hand, warm and smooth.

 
Her gift, the magus thought. His head felt as sluggish as the summer river, but through the confusion and surprise a swell of deep excitement was gathering. He knew what her gift was. Everyone did, everyone who could read.
To know the truth.
And he knew how long she had carried it.
Always.

 
Unendingly, beyond time. Deathless.

 
He closed his hand over the ring.

Part III

Tuesday Evening

Twelve

They were rushing
through a tunnel. The noise of it filled his head, and she was there, in the dark. Except now for some reason he wasn’t frightened, and the tunnel wasn’t coming to an end. Miss Grey looked steadily at him from somewhere that wasn’t next to him and wasn’t far away . . . There was a lot of pain, he noticed. The whistling dark began to rub away at everything. It seemed like she and he and the train were all about to dissolve into black sound, and then she said his name. She said it wrong, like she always did: instead of the ‘v’, which made your lips sneer for a moment, there was a liquid run of vowels in the middle, her mouth forming a little circle, a kiss.

 
There wasn’t a train after all. Only her, speaking in the dark.

 
‘Are you afraid?’ he heard her say. ‘Don’t be afraid. You have come home.’

 
She couldn’t make the pain go away, but nevertheless he was reassured.

 
‘The door is opening,’ she said.

 
‘Welcome,’ she said, and smiled. Her eyes looked different, less distracted. Oh, I know, he thought, it’s because she’s seeing right inside me. But where was he? He couldn’t work it out.

 
‘Come,’ she said. Then after a pause she repeated it, more sharply. Her look hardened. Then a third time, now definitely not an invitation but a command: ‘Come!’

 
I can’t tell where I am, Gav thought. How can I go anywhere? He recognised this nightmare now. It was the one where everything got heavy, your muscles stopped working, you had to will each separate movement of your limbs but you could never get them to add up together. You couldn’t make yourself go.

 
‘Come!’ she cried a fourth time, as if something terrible would happen if he didn’t. The rushing got louder; the end of the tunnel was coming fast. Everything was swept away.

He saw his hand in front of his face. He recognised it. I know it, he thought, like the back of my hand. He tried twitching it and saw the fingers flex. He made them touch his forehead, where it hurt. The press of fingertips against his skull scooped out little hollows in the pain. He was lying somewhere hard, cold and almost entirely dark. Something was wrong outside, but he couldn’t remember what, or what he thought he remembered couldn’t be right. Under his cheek and palms was stone. A stone floor. On the floor there had been, kneeling—

 
He pushed his head up and looked around wildly. The ache flared up and out; he scrunched up his eyes and gasped. Going back to unconsciousness seemed like the best idea, but the opportunity had passed. All around his throbbing skull and his scratched arms and his bruised ribs and his dry mouth there was something else pressing on him, a tingling, insistent sense of being under threat.

 
He’d seen . . . He’d heard—

 
Terror seized him, made him pull his knees under him until he was crouching, panting, staring into the impenetrable darkness. A moment later the convulsion took its toll. He tumbled onto his knees and clutched his head and moaned.

 
An invisible voice croaked, ‘Drink.’

 
He cringed backwards, thumping into hard wood behind him. There was a patch of faint light smeared across the stone and he pressed himself onto it. ‘Who’s there?’

 
‘Drink. Water. Take off the ache.’

 
There was something wrong with the voice, horribly wrong. The mouth that made it sounded bone, not flesh. Though the shadows hid it, it was close.

 
‘Who’s there?’ He twisted round wildly, looking for any disturbance in the dark. A second later and he was squeezing his head in his hands and keening with pain.

 
The voice said something like a caw followed by a choke. Then, ‘Drink. Here.’

 
A gentle
plip
came from nearby and suddenly Gav could see water. Little ripples were moving across it, raised edges glimmering. He realised he was desperately thirsty. The water was close, and the dark voice seemed further away. His mouth begged to drink. Slumping onto the cold floor, he pulled himself forward, inching along until he came to a lip of stone, worn smooth. He dipped his fingers down.

 
‘Drink.’

 
In the darkness he had the odd sensation that he was putting his hand into the earth. He cupped some water in his hand, splashed a few drops onto his tongue.

 
Then immediately his eyes were wide open, though seeing nothing. The taste in his mouth was not just chill water, but something else, a memory he knew but couldn’t put a name to, something he’d forgotten for a long time. It was so vivid it drove everything else out of his head, the agony and the fright, and so forceful that it was a few heartbeats before he even noticed they were gone.

 
He lifted his head and looked around. He could hear outside sounds, a muted gusting wind, and also an inside sound, that special kind of audible silence that belongs to old, undisturbed places. A line of dim daylight trickled through a finger’s-width gap beneath a closed door behind.

 
He scooped another handful of water to his mouth, feeling it wash away the last of the pain.

 
‘Feel better.’

 
For a few tenuous heartbeats he’d hoped the water had washed the voice away too. It croaked from the utter darkness, flat, harsh, passionless, much too close. Gavin backed away on his hands and knees towards the strip of light under the door. The shooting stars had gone from his vision. He was looking into sheer black, like the mouth of a stone well opening in front of him.

 
Someone lived at the bottom of it.

 
Something.

 
‘W-who . . . ?’ he stammered. ‘Wh-what—’

 
It moved.

 
Swathes of dark resolved themselves into volumes of shadow. A man-sized blot was gathering. Its shape was badly wrong. It made a dry scraping sound as it came closer. Limbs swayed. A curved black thing touched the floor. There was a little glister there, an opacity hard and smooth enough to shine.

 
Like a claw.

 
Gav threw himself at the door. His hands thudded into it and scrabbled around, banged on it, fumbled for a handle.

 
‘Locked,’ croaked the voice.

 
‘Let me out.’ He found a heavy metal latch and rattled it frantically. Echoes rang around him. The door did not budge. His fingers pressed into the crack beneath, reaching for the outside. ‘Help! Let me out!’

 
‘Can’t. Locked.’ The grim voice was closer. It came from a body that seemed to swallow light. ‘No help.’

 
‘Stop!’

 
‘OK.’

 
‘Don’t— Get back!’

 
‘OK OK.’ The shape slid back into unbroken shadow.

 
‘What . . . what . . .’ Gavin’s palms squeezed against the underside of the door. His fingers curled and clung to the wood. ‘Where . . .’ Each question crumbled away before he knew what he has saying. ‘Where . . . Who . . .’ He knew where he was. The wind outside brought it back to him, that and the thick wood blocking his escape. The stone chapel, abandoned in overgrown woods. With a surge of dread he remembered how he’d stood at its doorway, looking in, and seen something too appalling to think. He thudded his head against the door to try and expel the memory. The molten light had fled and he was sealed inside, with . . . with . . .

 
Absolute darkness. He couldn’t bear it, couldn’t bear the silence it concealed.

 
‘Are you there?’ It came out as a strangled squeak.

 
‘Yes yes.’

 
‘Who are you?’

 
The cawing noise again.

 
‘What?’

 
‘
Corbo.
’

 
‘Wh-what are you doing?’

 
‘Watch. Talk.’ A grating monotone.

 
‘I want to get out.’ His eyes scrunched shut. Tears were leaking out of them.

 
‘Can’t.’

 
‘I want to go home.’

 
‘Can’t.’

 
‘I want to get out. Let me out. Get me out. Get me . . .’ His voice rose to a horrible shrieking whine before he ran out of air and his mouth gagged vacantly. The panic emptied into despair. Knees pulled up, head bowed between them, he curled tight against the door and the unforgiving stone. His shoulders shook weakly for a while. Tiny moans squeezed out of him and vanished into the silence.

 
In a little while everything was still.

 
‘Can’t,’ the voice reminded him, after a long pause.

 
‘Just shut up,’ Gav whispered.

 
‘OK OK.’

 
He raised his head and wiped his nose on his sleeve.

 
He’d been stuck in a lift once, a few years ago. Him and a babysitter. They’d been in there quite a while, in the dark, some sort of power cut. The babysitter got her phone out and used it for light. They’d sat together playing games on its tiny screen, sharing the little rectangle of phosphorescence, just the two of them. Eventually there had been lots of banging and shouting and thumping, and then the point of a crowbar appearing between the doors, prising them open, letting in blinding light and a crowd of busy, anxious faces asking busy, anxious questions.

 
For the next couple of months whenever the babysitter took him out he’d insisted on going in as many lifts as possible, but they never got stuck again.

 
Outside a seagull shrieked. The air seeping through the crack under the door was as cold as its cry.

 
‘Are you there?’ Gavin said, when his breath was steady again.