Advent (59 page)

 
‘To whom does it belong?’

 
‘Stupid boy.’

 
‘What? Answer clearly!’

 
‘Boy. Ward. What Holly said.’

 
The woman gripped her staff and took a moment to compose herself. Her lips felt rigid with cold and despair. When she was sure she could trust her woman’s mouth, she spoke the beast’s name, the word that named the black puka she had conjured into the bird. With brutal pleasure she felt it pulled into her grip, as if the syllables were a cord she had jerked tight round its neck.

 
‘Fly,’ she ordered. ‘Go at once. Search again for each boy, the thief and the ward. Do not touch the earth or anything that grows in it until you can bring me news that you have seen one child or the other, or until you are called. Keep searching even if you must fly until your flesh starves.’ She turned away. ‘Go.’

 
She heard the rustle, and then the great thuds as its unfolded wings battered the air, quickly fading high and to her right.

 
Holly keened softly, so she addressed it next.

 
‘Be silent,’ she said. The gentle groan died instantly. ‘After I leave you here, you will not open your lips in my presence again. Not another word. Not another sound.’ She did not even look at it. ‘Acknowledge it.’

 
‘Master,’ Holly whispered.

 
Last, she turned to the dog.

 
‘Pursue the boy who stole the ring. The Cathay boy. Find him first.’

 
‘Small boy,’ Holly murmured. ‘Wrong boy. A sapling merely. Ignorant, innocent.’

 
The woman did not even trouble herself with its complaint. She went on as if its words were no more than perfumed air. ‘Bring me back the talisman. Then you may pursue this other scent.’ The dog stabbed its muzzle at Gawain’s shirt, pawed the cloth. ‘Hunt it. Kill it.’

 
Holly wailed wordlessly. The woman who was no woman raised her voice to drown it out.

 
‘I will not,’ she said, ‘be denied.’

Twenty-seven

All around
the river, things had come to a stop.

 
To the west and north, snowploughs were out on the main roads. Trails of headlights crawled along behind them. People stuttered and slid their way indoors. Below, in the valleys that twisted down to the river’s sheltered creekheads, the blizzard was impassable. Vehicles had been abandoned. Livestock knelt with their heads down, waiting for the grass to come back.

 
Surely, everyone thought, it wouldn’t stay like this much longer, although no one had predicted it and for some reason the weather people weren’t able to say when they thought it would stop. In fact they didn’t seem to be able to say anything about it at all, other than talking about a ‘freak storm’, as if that turned their bafflement into expert assessment. In the house neighbouring the Jias’s, Myrtle Pascoe tutted as she and the nice man from the newspaper listened to the latest bulletin on the wireless.

 
‘Well now, that isn’t much help is it?’ he said, in his pleasant Irish brogue, as she switched off the set. (For Myrtle Pascoe, any Irish accent was a ‘pleasant Irish brogue’, the same way any country vicar was a ‘dear old thing’ and any three-year-old a ‘cheeky little monkey’.)

 
He sipped the extraordinarily weak tea she’d provided him, marvelling at the speed with which its tepid warmth radiated out through the paper-thin china, leaving the drink with the overall character of a half-hour-old bath run from a rusty tap.

 
‘Looks like I might have to book myself into the Red Lion for the night.’ They’d have coffee at the pub, he thought. In mugs. He’d have to quarry some kind of story out of the trip so the paper would let him expense it, of course. But even if the mad prof next door wouldn’t talk to him, he’d have no trouble coming up with something. Weather emergencies were always reliable that way. Come to that, if this old biddy kept going as she was, he wouldn’t even have to get his shoes wet. It felt like she’d already told him the life stories of half the people in the village. He’d covered six pages of his notebook in doodles while she banged on.

 
‘Dear, oh dear,’ she twittered, leaning forward in her chair. ‘Oh goodness me. Look at it coming down. There’ll be dreadful trouble on the roads. Oh I do wish Hester would get back. She had hardly a stitch on when she went out this morning. I mean,’ she added hurriedly, ‘not for this weather anyway, though it was fine this morning, wasn’t it. That’s what’s so peculiar. Glorious. They said it was going to be fine all day, I’m quite sure. I listened to the early bulletin. I don’t always sleep as well as I used to, you see, Mr Moss . . .’

 
Take cover, he thought. Here comes the stream of feckin’ consciousness again.

 
‘. . . It’s one of those things when you get old like me . . .’

 
Almost time for emergency-exit procedures. He was pretty confident the stream wasn’t going to throw up anything more about the prof next door. He’d never thought there was much of a story there anyway. It had all been his editor’s idea. Professor H. Lightfoot’s mad as a box of frogs, she got the sack, so what? Feckin’ typical of Vicky to send him off to try and squeeze an interview out of a lunatic.

 
He was saved from having to make a run for the door by the ringing of Mrs Pascoe’s phone. Spotting his chance, J.P. Moss set down the saucer and began ostentatious preparations for departure: hand-rubbing, briefcase-packing, the works. He had his coat on and his hat in his hand by the time he realised the call was something to do with his quarry next door.

 
‘Well, this is the terrible thing, you see,’ Mrs Pascoe was saying, making eyes at the phone as if it could transmit some digital impression of immense sorrow. ‘I’ve been trying myself, all day. I’ve tried and tried, oh, I don’t know how many times, but you see, I think she must have unplugged her phone. Poor dear, you can understand it, can’t you – after all the . . . Oh yes. All right. Yes, all right, Mrs Jia – you needn’t worry. I’ll get a message to her.’ She nodded meaningfully towards J.P., or at least he supposed it was meant to be meaningful. ‘Yes, of course . . . No. No one could possibly expect you to be there in this dreadful weather. Dreadful! You think of the money they pay those weathergirls on the telly nowadays. Honestly I don’t know what’s happened to the BBC, I really don’t . . . No. Shocking. Ever since that lovely old fellow retired, what was his name, you know the chap, he always used to wear those cardigans . . . Oh. Yes. All right then, Mrs Jia. Yes, I’ll take care of everything . . . Yes . . . Goodbye, then. Bye. That’s Mrs Jia from next door.’ The flow changed course from the phone to J.P. without interruption. ‘Such a dear. Chinese, you know. I can’t think how she manages. She called to say she’s stuck in Falmouth and won’t be able to come to Hester’s house this afternoon. She does some cleaning in the village, it helps her keep body and soul together. I don’t know that Hester needs the help, really, now that she’s . . . Well, anyway, it’s a kindness, isn’t it? Not having the stress of work on top of—’

 
‘It surely is, Mrs Pascoe, it surely is. Can I help at all?’

 
Flustered by the interruption, Myrtle Pascoe lost her thread. Her hands groped inexpressively. ‘Oh. Ah. Well, you see, Mrs Jia asked if I could just go over with a note to let Hester know she won’t be coming after all. We’ve all been trying the phone but she must have switched it off. But with my old legs in this snow, you see, I wonder, perhaps . . . if you wouldn’t mind terribly . . .’

 
‘Not at all,’ J.P. said, with his most accommodating smile. ‘Why don’t you just write that note and I’ll pop round and ring the doorbell.’ He was already late for lunch. The pub might well stop serving early in this weather and then he’d be royally buggered. He extracted his notebook from the briefcase, tore a page from it and handed Myrtle a pen. ‘It’d be a pleasure.’

 
‘Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. Oh yes, now where did I leave my specs? Oh dear . . .’

 
J.P. kept the smile in place while she fussed. Concentrate on the bright side, he told himself. His car would be buried and the roads were hopeless anyway. There was every chance he’d be overnighting at the pub. A couple of pints out of his own pocket to get him through the afternoon, and the rest of his bed and board courtesy of that fine organ the
Western Cornishman
, God bless it.

 
He got out of the house without being further delayed by Mrs Pascoe’s increasingly chaotic mix of apologies and farewells. Prodding carefully in the snow, he made his way across the lane to the mad prof’s house. He rapped on the door a few times just in case, but though Mrs Pascoe was far from the most lucid of witnesses, she’d been very clear about the fact that she’d seen her neighbour heading off out of town before the blizzard arrived. There couldn’t be any chance now that she’d have made it back. She’d be hiding out somewhere warm and dry if she had any sense at all. Just like he should be.

 
He poked the letterbox open and slotted in the piece of paper. It occurred to him that he couldn’t remember repacking his notebook after tearing the page off for the old baggage’s message, but the very last thing he was going to do was expose himself to another ten minutes of the Pascoe Monologues. He’d go back later if he had to. After he’d fortified himself with a couple of rounds of something a lot stronger than her abomination of the name of tea. Though thankfully that wind had let up. At least a fellow could see where he was going now.

 
The pub turned out to be more or less empty, which meant he could pick his spot by the blissfully authentic fire. He was just about dry and relaxed and content when a tinny rendition of the Darth Vader march struck up inside his briefcase.

 
The boss. He dug out his mobile, giving it a doleful stare before answering.

 
‘Your wish is my command,’ he said into the phone, and then a moment later, ‘Ah, I felt sure you would, Victoria my dear. So what have you got for me?’ He listened for quite a while and then began miming eye-rolling despair in the direction of the ceiling. ‘Well now,’ he told the phone, ‘it is indeed not too far, but there’s the small matter of the Helford River between here and there. Plus, as your finely honed editorial instincts will have noted, there’s a feckin’ blizzard out there.’ More listening, with his eyebrows raised. ‘Of course, send it along. I’ll take a look . . . Is it? . . . Sorry, run this past me again. What is this fellow saying? . . . Right. And how drunk was he at the time? . . . Yes, yes, all right. So since we can’t find lunatic number one, this bloke will do as a back-up, is that it?’ Ah, humour. He ought to know better by now. He sighed while the phone chattered crossly, wondering what terrible childhood accident had got the broom handle wedged so far up Miss Victoria’s backside that she made even average everyday English uptightness seem positively mellow. ‘All right . . . Yes, I’ll have a look at it and then see if I can track the fellow down.’ Right after the steak and ale pie, that is. ‘Send it along. I’ll let you know.’

 
He snapped the phone shut and took a moody swig from his pint. As promised, the phone beeped again, this time with the chime that indicated the arrival of a message. He flicked the tiny screen up and watched the photo assemble itself. All right, he thought wearily. Let’s have a look at whatever’s got Vicky straining at her lead. There’s a path and some trees – that’s all clear enough – and someone standing on the path, a young fellow it looks like, back to the camera. And the other thing, the thing the young fellow’s facing, is . . .

 
Is . . .

 
He cradled the phone and bent over it, then shifted a couple of seats along so that he was next to a lamp at the end of the bar. He stared at the tiny image for a long time.

 
The black shape stared back at him until he could no longer bear its gaze. He turned the phone face down onto the counter of the bar, his hands shaking.

Struggling down a track of virgin snow, Horace tried to push every idea out of his head except one: getting home to his mother.

 
Other thoughts kept trying to break in, terrible ones. Mum would make them go away. Mum would sort everything out.

 
He went as fast as he could, but it was hard going, even for him. Trying to run through the deep snow was like wading in chest-deep water. Still, at least he was going downhill now, and at least he knew the way. When he’d come round, he’d had no idea at all where he was, except that someone had knocked him out and tossed him in the back of a car. He’d lain very still for a long time, afraid to move. When nothing happened, he began lifting his head just inches at a time, listening hard, and that was how he saw that other kid slumped in the front seat. It looked like he was dead. Through the gap between the seats he could see bare feet like a corpse’s.