Advent (60 page)

 
He knew right then he had to get away. He couldn’t remember what was going on, but he knew it was crazy and bad and he had to get out of it. He slithered along the back seat and reached for the door. He noticed he was covered in the cloak thing, which meant that bit at least couldn’t have been a dream, but forget all that, he told himself, forget all that, just get out of here. Leg it.

 
The door had opened with a scrape of dislodged snow. He tipped himself out almost soundlessly. He was groggy with cold and confusion and his head throbbed but he still knew how to move without making much noise, especially now he was escaping from kidnappers. It was a conspiracy, he remembered that much. He wasn’t worried about what Mum would say any more. She’d just be glad to have him home. He wrapped the cloak around him once he was out of the car. As he fastened it round his neck he touched a silver chain. The thing he’d taken from the angel’s dead hand, the ring on its chain, it was still tucked inside his jumper. So some of that hadn’t been dreams either, though they couldn’t have been anything else. The snow made everything confusing. It fell straight and soft, like static in the air. Forget it. Get going. None of it could be right. Mum would sort it all out.

 
But which way was home? The car he’d just crawled out of had crashed into a hedge. Made sense. That kid had kidnapped him, crashed in the snow, killed himself. And thank God he’d crashed at a junction because there was a signpost and Horace had been able to work out where he was.

 
He pressed on faster, down the clogged road.

 
He made it to the village at last. No one was about. His boat was still there, right where he’d left it. The sight of it almost made him feel himself again. It sat on the whitened shingle, tilted over. The rising tide was maybe ten minutes away from tickling its stern. He jogged down towards the bridge and the mouth of the stream. The screen of snow was by now not quite thick enough to hide the opposite shore. He could just about see the moored boats, the pub, the ferry landing. Long familiarity with the tides told him it was around two in the afternoon, give or take an hour. He was nearly away. Whoever or whatever had done this to him, he’d almost escaped them. Forget about all of it, he told himself. Forget about ever bothering with that freaky place again.

 
He was kneeling on the foreshore, scooping armfuls of snow out of his boat, when a guttural howl ripped through the air.

 
In that one moment Horace’s tenuous determination blew away like dust. He looked wildly around the harbour. Up on the road above he caught a glimpse of a blurry black shape, moving. That was enough to set him heaving and dragging the boat down the few feet towards open water, gasping, swearing. His bladder loosened and soaked his crotch. The hull scraped the stones with a noise like grinding teeth, and the howl answered, closer. His hands shuddered and slipped and his legs lost their footing, but terror also gave him a frantic strength and at last he forced the stern into the shallows. He splashed after it, pushed and ran until he was knee-deep in the river and flung himself into the boat. His relief at discovering he’d forgotten to lock the outboard was so intense he almost fainted. His hands were shaking like a drunkard’s, but it was only a moment’s work to fumble out the pin and tip the propeller down into the water.

 
His head swivelled madly from the outboard to the foreshore and back again. Tears stung his eyes; he couldn’t see properly. The terror was like a living thing inside him, a squirming maggoty knot. He managed to get hold of the throttle and twist it, but the handle of the starter cord kept slipping out of his grasp. He swore in a constant choked whisper, keening in agonised frustration each time his fingers failed him. On the fourth or fifth attempt, he got his fist around it. He yanked.

 
There wasn’t even the slightest cough from the motor.

 
He pulled the starter again, ferociously, and then again, so hard that his hand flew free and he lost his footing. The boat yawed wildly. He got up on his knees, shaking snow off his face, and saw a black stain spotted with firelight on the bridge above the mouth of the stream.

 
Hope, desperation, everything, drained out of him. His face was smeared with tears as he crawled back to the outboard. He hunched over it as if it held the world’s last warmth. Pulling the starter again and again, he looked back at the shore, and whispered, ‘Please,’ a pinched and dry whisper, as if the jaws were already closing on his throat. ‘Please. Please.’ But the outboard was silent. Something was wrong with it, it had died completely. He heard the scrunch of pebbles. The blackness had taken shape. He watched its burning eyes, and its unhurried steps, standing out against the snow. He wanted not to look at it, but it was impossible. The boat was drifting serenely, held near the shore by the tide. Horace imagined jumping into the river and swimming, or screaming at the silent village for help, or heaving the outboard off its hinge and using it to club the dog, but he did none of those things. His will had forsaken him; he was powerless as a baby.

 
The dog came down to the edge of the water.

 
Its lips twisted into a snarl. Fiery saliva flowed over them, spilled, slicked on the surface of the river. It stared, measuring the distance for its leap. Then it paced backwards, steadily, deliberately. Its hind legs tensed and began to quiver. The boat was drifting further away from the shore. The dog sidled after it, keeping the shortest distance, and pawed at the snow for a better grip on the shingle beneath. It coiled and crouched.

 
But the boat’s idle drift had become a steady impulse. Smoothly, without current or engine or paddle, it was sliding out into the harbour, among the empty buoys and the few tethered vessels, carrying its shaking, weeping cargo towards the open river. The dog skittered forward, but the gap had become too wide and it pulled up short as it reached the water. It hesitated, then dashed into the river, only to stop again when it was up to its chin. Now Horace’s boat was gliding soundlessly away, a widening arrowhead of silver ripples in its trail. Already it had passed the moorings. Daring to lift his head, Horace slowly released his death grip on the useless engine.

 
The dog shook itself as it came out of the river. It stared after the boat and then planted its feet, threw up its head and with a gush of oily flame from its mouth howled its thwarted rage.

There were neat indentations in the white plain outside the car. Gawain crouched to examine them. Fat flakes tumbled down noiselessly, already eroding the traces of Horace’s passage. He didn’t know how long he’d slept. The kid had vanished as quietly as if he’d never been there, leaving only the line of small vacancies. Gawain’s dream shimmered behind the white landscape, like a mirage. Waking up hadn’t banished it. He felt half asleep still, not sure which of the things he thought he remembered might also have only happened in his sleep. Only the lingering soreness in his shoulder confirmed that he’d actually carried Horace to this directionless crossroads. Now the kid was—

 
Lost in whiteness
.

 
The words appeared inside him as if spoken by another voice. In his dream there’d been a voice at his ear, invisible. Miss Grey.

 
But Miss Grey was gone, wasn’t she?

 
Lost in whiteness. You will bear it on your back.

 
What was the voice talking about?

 
You will lose it.

 
He put his hands over his ears. There was no one there. No one was talking to him. Miss Grey had never whispered over his shoulder.

 
Then, startlingly, he did hear something. The crunch and squeeze of footsteps in deep snow. He stood up, alarmed, remembering all of a sudden that he had an enemy.

 
A thickly wrapped figure was struggling up to the crossroads from the south. Gawain was about to duck out of sight behind the high snowbank piled against the car when it stopped for breath, raised its head and saw him. Gloved hands reached to wipe snow from its glasses, then pulled down the scarf wrapped over the lower half of its face.

 
‘Gavin?’ it said.

 
The combination of mildly perplexed voice and squinting scrutiny jogged Gawain’s memory: Owen Jeffrey, the priest, the first person he’d seen at Pendurra, unless you counted Marina disguised as a corpse.

 
It was just the two of them, the white nothing all around. Gav thought he could still smell the pines, soft bark rich with rot.

 
‘Not really,’ he answered.

 
Padded in layers of clothing, Owen waddled up to him like an outsized toddler. His eyes travelled down to Gav’s rolled-up trouser legs and bare feet, then back to his face. He frowned thoughtfully, as if an interesting possibility had just occurred to him.

 
‘You’re not God,’ he asked, ‘are you?’

 
‘No.’

 
The priest shrugged, apparently a little deflated. ‘Oh well.’

 
Gawain waited for him to go away. Owen was peculiarly passive, though. There was that inexplicable tranquillity about him that occasionally comes over mad people.

 
‘I don’t suppose,’ he began after a moment, ‘you’d be able to explain’ – his cocooned arms spread – ‘this?’

 
‘No,’ Gav repeated, and then, seeing the wrinkle of disappointment, ‘Sorry.’

 
Owen looked up. The snow went on around them, quietly relentless.

 
‘Do you know what the word “apocalypse” actually means?’

 
‘No,’ Gav said a third time. ‘I don’t.’

 
‘It’s Greek. It means “unveiling”. Literally, taking a cover away. Lifting the lid. That’s what’s happening, isn’t it?’

 
Gav thought about what was happening. ‘I’m getting cold,’ he said.

 
Owen’s eyes refocused. ‘Oh yes. Sorry. Is this . . .’ He waved at the car. ‘Have you been . . .’

 
Gawain stepped round to its sheltered side. If he closed his eyes for even a moment, if he so much as blinked, he could feel the atmosphere of the ocean-fringed forest. He was light-headed with exhaustion and cold and something else, something that had scooped him out hollow inside and unmoored him from the world.

 
‘I came up past here this morning,’ Owen said, as Gawain climbed in the back seat. He spoke in a mildly conversational tone, as if neither of them should be at all surprised to see the other, as if nothing had particularly changed since their first encounter. ‘On my way to . . . Ahh. There.’

 
Gav folded his arms and tucked his chin down. The priest leaned on the open door, looking around irresolutely.

 
‘I got as far as the gate. This morning. I just thought I’d stop in and let them know what . . . Anyway, I looked in the gate, you see. Where. It.’

 
Gawain could almost see the sentence curl up and die in his mouth.

 
‘It told me to go away. It had a voice like an angel. It sang.’

 
When Gav didn’t answer, Owen sighed, came to a decision and got himself in the driver’s seat, wiggling awkwardly as he loosened a couple of his layers. ‘Do you mind?’ he said to Gav’s reflection in the rear-view mirror.

 
Gawain didn’t mind anything at all. That was part of the light-headedness. Everything was fading away from him, going out of focus. He wondered whether he ought to be going after Horace to make sure the kid was OK, while there were still tracks to follow, but then he didn’t know how long ago the kid had snuck out of the car.
Lost in whiteness.

 
‘The thing is, I know the words. Of the song.’ Peeling off a scarf, he chanted something churchy-sounding in a wavering voice. ‘It’s an antiphon. That’s a piece for a choir, sort of a call and answer. It’s the one for Advent. We had it last Sunday in fact. It’s about God coming. “Drop down, ye heavens, from above and let the skies pour down righteousness.” She sung those words. They’re from the Bible. Isaiah. A prophecy about when God comes back to the earth. That’s why I, er . . .’ He twisted round and looked hopefully at Gawain. ‘Anyway. I’m sorry if it seemed a weird question.’

 
Gav was trying to hear another voice.
It will come to you today.
He rubbed his forehead. He felt he ought to be able to make Owen disappear just by blinking. Gone in the blink of an eye, like Miss Grey.