Advent (50 page)

 
‘You did!’ Knots of caked hair fell over his eyes as he glared up again. ‘You happened! And then everything come alive! All in the—’

 
And then he was holding completely still, listening.

 
‘What?’ Gav said, suddenly far more nervous. Caleb had frozen as if someone or something had appeared on the path right in front of them, but Gav couldn’t hear anything beyond the trees’ bleak whistle. ‘Caleb? What?’

 
‘One of them,’ Caleb muttered, and peered up.

 
‘One of . . . ?’

 
‘Coming,’ Caleb said.

 
Gawain’s mouth went very dry. He looked around, panic rising.

 
‘Looking for you,’ Caleb added hoarsely, and his eyes peeled wide.

 
Now Gawain’s heart was juddering so hard he could scarcely breathe. Caleb backed away from him, down the path.

 
‘Caleb, listen.’ The man was shaking his head manically. ‘Where’s Marina? Caleb! Is Marina OK?’

 
Caleb’s only answer was to spin round with a gasp of smothered pain and run limping towards the village.

 
‘Wait!’ There was sweat on Gav’s hands, already turning icy. A hollow sound rushed overhead, deeper than the wind’s hissing malediction. He looked up instinctively and caught a blur of shadow in the corner of his eye, blanking the trees; when he turned to follow it, it was gone. He reached down for the branch he’d dropped, trying to force some of the wood’s firmness into his hands.

 
Above the trees the shadow reappeared, moving, so dark it sucked the weakening light out of the day. It grew. It was no shadow; it was solid, a mass of blackness, spreading as it descended. He curled his toes into the mud to stop himself bolting, trying to remember how he’d stood up to the hideous dog. This is what I’ve got to do now, he tried to remind himself.
You must.
This is what I’ve got to get past to find her.

 
The trees above cracked and shivered as the black thing plunged through the branches.

Twenty-three

Unlike more or
less everyone else in what had for hundreds of years until that day been able to think of itself as the rational modern world, Gawain had not grown up with the instinctive sense that there was an absolute difference between possible and impossible things. He’d been baffled and astonished often enough by the previous forty-eight hours, but he’d never had to confront something whose mere existence he couldn’t accept. So when he looked up the path and saw by the full light of day the thing that alit there, he didn’t pass out or lose his grip. He was witlessly terrified, the terror of the cracking ship or the crumbling bridge, but the fear was pure, there was no madness in it, and his utter determination not to flee held long enough for him to survive the first unspeakable moments and so recognise what he was looking at.

 
Its squat blunt head jerked from side to side. It opened a sharp black thing, part mouth, part beak.

 
‘Hairy man gone,’ it croaked.

 
Gawain clutched the branch, squeezing the blood out of his fingers. The beast stood on the path ten paces ahead of him.

 
The aspect of it that was not manlike was, as he’d guessed in the dark of the chapel, all raven or crow. It watched him with eyes like polished stones set in a black head. It stood like a man, but stiff, awkwardly upright, balanced on legs that narrowed to leathery sticks and ended in gruesome talons, four claws splayed over the earth. Gawain saw the spindly arms that had lifted him as easily as if he were a baby, and the finger-claws that had gripped him. The arms flexed and bent at strange angles, making a mass of blackness behind them shiver and compress.

 
‘You go too,’ it added. The head twisted again, each unblinking eye taking its turn to stare at him. ‘Go back.’

 
Out here in the open air, the voice sounded brittle. It worked its throat uncomfortably to make the words come out, the beak stabbing at air.

 
He licked his lips and swallowed. No stammering now.

 
‘No,’ he said.

 
‘Danger. Go back.’

 
‘Hello, Corbo.’ He couldn’t look into its eyes. Their stony brilliance was too predatory. He didn’t like to look at the cruel beak. He tried to fix his gaze on its broad chest.

 
‘Hello hello.’

 
‘Have you come to stop me?’ He wondered about fending off those talons with the branch he’d dropped. It seemed unlikely.

 
‘Avert.’

 
‘What?’

 
‘Avert.’ The neck twisted back. ‘Warn,’ it said, with effort. ‘Bad ahead.’

 
Gawain swallowed again. ‘I . . .’ He heaved a deep breath. ‘I can’t go back.’

 
‘Turn about.’ Corbo demonstrated, hopping and spinning a full circle. To keep its balance, it spread its arms slightly, the wing-feathers opening behind them. ‘Go down.’

 
‘No, I mean . . . I have to go on.’

 
‘Says who.’

 
‘I do. I just have to.’
You must.
He wasn’t sure what he was saying. If he’d stopped to think about the fact that he was having some kind of conversation with this thing, his head would have spun into irreversible disarray. He concentrated on the feel of the ground beneath his feet.

 
‘Bad ahead.’

 
‘Where?’

 
‘Not where. Who. Danger ahead.’

 
‘Danger? What? How close?’

 
‘Soon.’

 
‘What . . . what kind of danger?’

 
‘Bad kind.’

 
‘I mean . . . what is it? What’s wrong? What’s going to happen?’

 
‘Can’t say.’

 
‘Why not?’

 
‘Can’t say.’

 
‘Well, OK, then.’ A monster in my path, he thought. This is who I am now: Gawain, battling monsters. ‘Then I can’t go back. I have to go on.’

 
‘Did before.’

 
‘What?’

 
‘Did before. Ran. Ran away,
aaaaark
. Ran ran ran.’

 
Gawain flushed. He felt himself being mocked, though Corbo had left every word as flat and toneless as ever.

 
‘That was yesterday,’ he muttered.

 
It watched, remorselessly inexpressive. It wouldn’t fill anything in for him. There were no unspoken exchanges with a thing like this. A question, Gav thought. Come up with a question. It always answers me.

 
‘Why are you helping me?’

 
‘No use. Don’t listen.’

 
‘OK, but why? Yesterday, in the chapel. You let me go, I know you did. You could have stopped me. Right?’

 
‘Paid for it.’

 
‘And you said you wanted to leave too.’

 
Nothing.

 
‘Right?’ he prompted.

 
‘You heard.’

 
‘Who’s doing this, Corbo?’

 
‘Can’t say.’

 
‘Why not?’

 
‘Ask ask ask,
kkraaa
.’ Its beak-mouth squirmed and snapped. ‘Waste time. Go.’

 
‘Won’t you . . .’ Gawain swallowed. ‘Won’t you get in trouble?’

 
Corbo shook out its arms abruptly. A ridge of feathers ruffled open on each side, shivering with a noise like rattled twigs. Gawain flinched as the thing swayed, suddenly lighter on its feet, its head stretching up and then swinging down.

 
‘Bad enough now. No worse. Stuck like this,
caaark
. Feather and filth. Day and night. Hot, cold. Hungry,
wraaaak
. Hungry.’

 
The feathered arms unfurled fully, a huge black curtain, and beat the air in agitation as if trying to shake themselves loose. Gav threw up his hands and was saying, ‘No, don’t, sorry—’ but his voice was lost in the rush of noise. Its clawed feet scratched at the earth. It thrust its neck towards him.

 
‘Go. Last chance.’

 
Stupidly, Gawain could only think of the woman in the village. I can’t go back there, he thought. I haven’t got any shoes on. Someone might see me. ‘I can’t!’ he yelled back. It twitched; he almost thought he’d surprised it. ‘I can’t go back,’ he went on, desperate. ‘OK? Or how will I ever find out? I can’t just . . . run away.’

 
The hard bright eyes stared back.

 
‘And, um, I don’t think you can stop me.’

 
‘
Wwrrrkkk
,’ it said softly, wings settling.

 
‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

 
‘Yes yes.’

 
‘Why, Corbo?’

 
It fidgeted before answering. Was he imagining it or did it suddenly look shifty? ‘Soon learn.’

 
‘Will I?’

 
‘Likely.’

 
‘OK, because, um, I want to know. I need to find out who I am.’

 
‘Told you. Stupid boy.’

 
‘Yeah, but apart from that.’

 
‘
Aaarrk
.’ It hopped from foot to foot. It made two gargling sounds that sounded like they were meant to be syllables but made no sense to him, unless maybe it was trying to say, ‘Gawain,’ while swallowing a frog. ‘White Hawk,’ it carried on. ‘Go on then. Up to you. Say you come. Have to. Have to tell.’

 
Up to me? he thought. Corbo backed a little up the path. Suddenly it looked ungainly, bedraggled, defeated.

 
‘I’ll help you,’ he said. ‘If I can.’

 
‘Too late. Holly came.’

 
‘What? Who?’

 
‘
Caaaark
, listen. Stupid boy.’

 
‘Who . . . Is Holly the one who—’

 
It shivered its folded wings and interrupted. ‘Soon see. Snow coming. Get inside. Forward, back, up to you. Go. Man there.’

 
A muted flash lit up the trees. Gawain spun round.

 
There was someone on the path behind, a middle-aged man, an ordinary man. Under a blue woolly hat, his face was white as paper. He held out the phone he’d just used to take a picture. Corbo’s wings filled the woods with a sound like a waterfall and it clattered through the branches above, vanishing behind the canopy.

 
Gawain and the man stared at each other.

 
Without moving his jaw, the man said, ‘What the hell was that?’

 
It had never occurred to Gawain that someone else might be there. This never happened. He had his two lives and they never overlapped. No one shared both with him, not even Auntie Gwen, who’d probably wished she could. That was how it worked. People were like his parents: they didn’t want to know. Looking into this man’s face, Gawain saw something he’d never seen before: the wreck of his two worlds colliding.