Advent (38 page)

 
The lodge at Pendurra was only a couple of hundred yards eastwards along the lane. He didn’t like to bother Gwen at this time of the evening. She might not even be there, he reminded himself, though in the woozy aftermath of the crash he found himself wondering why he thought that was so. But borrowing one of her endless candles would help light his way home.

 
The darkness reminded him of something. He looked up, nervously.

 
It must have just been a big bird, he thought. It must have flown down against the windscreen somehow. Gave me a fright. Ridiculous.

 
He set off towards Pendurra.

 
He went slowly. His shoulder hurt more than he realised. Each step seemed to jog it. After a little while the lane made a gentle bend, and the faint illumination from the car vanished from the tarmac in front of him. Without it there was nothing in any direction but a few distant spots of light from houses beyond the high fields.

 
He was busy persuading himself to start walking the last thirty yards when he heard steps, and a small, flickering, bobbing light appeared ahead. From out of the gate of Pendurra someone came into the road, holding a lantern in which a single fat candle burned. The lantern was shaded so that it shone only ahead, towards him.

 
‘One comes, master,’ said a rich warm voice.

 
The lantern wobbled, its chain clinking. Then it swung sideways and for an instant its dim light flowed across something beside it. Something huge, something that should not have had the power of motion. Something that should not have had anything resembling a face.

 
Owen dropped to his knees in the road.

 
‘Jesus Christ,’ he said.

 
The lantern settled again. Now everything was shadow behind it, dark, like the dark that had plunged towards the car and made him crash. Not a big bird.

 
The silence was broken by another voice, a woman’s, but cracked, harsh, tight. It said, ‘He takes me for his saviour.’

 
The arm that held the lantern raised it higher to cast its light further along the road.

 
‘Is this a holy man?’ the same person said.

 
‘I cannot tell,’ murmured the first voice, the beautiful one, invisible behind the lantern.

 
‘You!’ A grotesque bark. ‘Do you have power of speech? Do you understand me?’

 
Owen pushed himself unsteadily to his feet. The only thing he was aware of was fear. He’d never known what the word really meant before. It washed all over him in one merciless flood, driving everything else out.

 
‘Beware, master,’ hummed the invisible voice.

 
‘Jesus,’ said Owen, without knowing he’d spoken. His feet were backing away, tiny trembling steps. ‘Jesus.’

 
‘He welcomes me.’

 
‘It may be, master.’

 
‘You.’ The lantern twitched. ‘Do you welcome me?’

 
Owen stopped. The fear roared in his ears.

 
‘An imbecile,’ the harsh woman’s voice said, after a moment. ‘Drive him away. Guard this gate afterwards. Let no one enter.’

 
There was another noise, abrupt and loud, a hollow thrashing in the air. Owen flinched away from it, raising his hands. The light vanished. Something scratched on the road ahead.

 
The darkness spoke to him, a third voice.

 
‘Go.’

 
His legs wouldn’t move. Nothing moved.

 
‘Go,’ it said again, toneless. ‘Now. Back.’

 
The darkness rattled on the road again. As if it had feet. As if the feet were coming closer.

 
Owen screamed. The shout pierced his terror. He staggered backwards. The dark cried out in reply, a horrible squawking cry. In the instant before he turned and ran Owen thought he saw it moving, spreading, a misshapen black mass opening arms to enfold the world. Still screaming, he fled.

Gav woke in absolute darkness with no idea where he was.

 
He panicked. He knew he wasn’t at home in his own bed. He couldn’t remember why not. He’d woken instantaneously, with no memory of having slept. Time and the world had fallen away and left nothing at all.

 
He flailed his arms wildly. He was tangled in something. His hands struck cardboard boxes. For a split second he felt nothing but invisible walls around his head, as if the darkness itself were solid and closing in. He was enwombed in it, or buried alive. Then the heartbeat passed and he remembered what the cardboard boxes were. In that same moment a sound came, the first sign of a world outside.

 
A bell struck.

 
It struck again. A morose church bell.

 
And again. The clang, its dissonant decay, then another. Time came back to him, measured by the tolling.

 
Midnight.

 
Gav lay still. Stupid to have freaked out like that, he told himself. He remembered bedding down in Hester’s spare room now. The blankets had got twisted around him.

 
Someone had said not to be frightened.
Don’t be afraid
.
You have come home
. Who was that? Must have been Hester. He was in her home. But he felt like it hadn’t been her. Hadn’t it been someone right here, beside him in the dark?

 
He must have dreamed it.

 
He was possessed by a sudden and overwhelming conviction that he’d forgotten something. It was that feeling of having left something behind by mistake. He needed to go back and get it, then everything would be OK. If only he could remember what it was.

 
As his breathing slowed he began hearing another sound, very quiet, somewhere in the house. Disentangling himself from the invisible blankets, he propped himself up on his elbows to listen.

 
Must be Hester snoring, he thought, a funny humming snore. But it didn’t quite have the rhythm of human breath. Maybe something downstairs like a dishwasher running overnight. Downstairs was where it seemed to be. Hester didn’t have a dishwasher, though, and the sound wasn’t steady enough to be anything mechanical.

 
He decided to ignore it and roll over and go back to sleep.

 
He noticed then that he was very awake. Completely alert, as if he’d slept for hours, though it was only midnight.

 
The feeling of something forgotten was prodding him insistently. It was just on the edge of his thoughts. He hunted after it. Maybe it was because he’d rolled up at Hester’s house without his wallet or his keys or any of the stuff that he normally patted his pockets to check for whenever he went out.

 
Strangely, as soon as he had that thought it was answered by the complete certainty that he didn’t need them. He didn’t need his wallet. He didn’t need his keys. He’d never – the thought made him dizzy, as if the floor had vanished under him – need either of them or anything like them (phone, train ticket, his watch, toothbrush, change of clothes) ever again.

 
How could that be?

 
The faint noise seemed to be moving downstairs. It sounded almost like someone poking around on the ground floor, muttering and humming to themselves.

 
Gav sat up, feeling around him for the piles of boxes. Hadn’t Hester mentioned that some of her masks were valuable? Could there be a burglar down there?

 
He got to his knees and groped in the dark. He couldn’t remember the shape of the room at all, only that it was tiny. His head knocked against a box, making something rattle.

 
He remembered scrabbling for light against the inside of a closed door, a wooden door. That must have been a dream. The memory was so vivid he could taste the panic again in his throat, but he couldn’t ever have been locked in a place like that. With a thing like that.
Oh come on Gav
.

 
He crouched, squeezing his head between his hands.

 
Don’t be afraid
, someone had told him. Hester, or someone else, or maybe both of them. But he was. He was terrified. He felt as if he was on the brink of some huge dark drop. He couldn’t understand why he was so sure that it no longer mattered about his wallet and his keys and his watch and his life and the world. That was supposed to be the stuff you couldn’t do without. He was only fifteen. What else was there? Just this darkness? Nothing at all?

 
He inched forward and his probing fingers found a door instead of cardboard. He pushed.

 
A nocturnal glow appeared. The world came back into position. He saw the top of the stairs, and another doorway adjacent: Hester’s room. The glow came creeping up from a nightlight she’d left on in the kitchen.

 
There was definitely someone down there, making odd quiet rustles and murmurs.

 
‘Hello?’

 
Nothing. He’d barely called out loud enough to hear his own voice. Stupid if it was a burglar, he told himself. He should shout or bang the floor, frighten them off. Or wake Hester up. Call the police.

 
But it didn’t sound like a burglar. It didn’t sound like a body moving around. It was more like a whispered conversation in a weird language, with snatches of muffled singing. Did Hester sleepwalk?

 
‘Hello?’

 
He stood up and took a couple of deliberately heavy steps along the hallway so whoever was below would know someone was awake in the house. The faint noises continued untroubled, no change at all.

 
He put his ear to Hester’s door. Slow, heavy breath. She was asleep in there. He thought about waking her up, but it was the middle of the night and he felt stupid. All that had happened was that he’d had some weird dream (hadn’t he?) and couldn’t get to sleep, and now he was scared in the dark like a child. Stupid. Now that he thought about it, he realised what must have happened. She must have gone back downstairs after he went to sleep and listened to the radio, then forgotten to turn it all the way off. Perfectly straightforward explanation. The noise sounded like a mix of static and fragments of music and talking from a remote station, not quite tuned in.

 
Might as well go down and switch it off, he thought. (The thought resonated weirdly in his head like a suggestion from outside,
switch it off switch it off switch it off switch it off
. . .)

 
In the kitchen the dim frosty nightlight picked out glossy passages in the poster. The old man and the whispering angel at his shoulder looked as if they were painted out of moonbeams. The weird radio noise was coming from the front room. Gav had reached round the door and was feeling for a light switch when he remembered this was the room where the masks were.

 
He pulled his hand away. Far better not to see them at all. He prodded the door open a little wider and leaned his head in nervously, looking for the telltale light of a radio.

 
There wasn’t one.

 
Of course there wasn’t. There weren’t things like that any more. He’d gone over the brink and left them behind.

 
There were only voices in the darkness.

 
Invisible, inhuman voices.

 
The voices called or whistled or sang from far away, very far. It was as though he’d stepped in through the broken door of an abandoned palace, and from rooms deep within or high above, from cells at the top of the loftiest and remotest towers, the cries of stranded survivors drifted down to him, in languages no one but they had ever understood.

 
One jab at the light switch, he told himself, and he could turn it back into Hester’s front room. He imagined the light flaring up, blinding him for a couple of seconds, and then as he blinked and shielded his eyes the space would come back as he remembered it, a bit crowded and messy, the horrible ranks of faces staring from the walls.