Advent (41 page)

 
But if he didn’t do that, if he went out into the road to join her, he’d be doing what she’d told him to do.
Come
. He’d be giving in.

 
He looked around. It was past midnight. His parents weren’t even in the country. He was in a village he couldn’t name, hundreds of miles from home, standing on the doorstep of a house full of singing masks that belonged to a woman he barely knew, a woman who’d rescued him from a place where he’d been locked up in the dark with a monster.

 
It was fairly obviously time to stop trying to know better than Miss Grey.

 
Even that name felt stupid for her now. A childish joke. No name felt right, he thought, as he wriggled around Hester’s car into the silent road. She looked like she was beyond names.

 
‘Gawain,’ she said.

 
Confused, he stopped in the lane. He hadn’t expected her to talk. She never talked. She wasn’t the kind of person who spoke in that kind of voice, a normal talking voice.

 
The sound of her speech was peaceful and certain as old stone.

 
‘You left a door open behind you,’ she said.

 
He turned round dumbly, saw Hester’s front door half open, then turned back.

 
‘Take off your shoes.’

 
He was in the middle of the road, ten paces from her. Another indeterminate pause and then she stepped towards him, her cloak rustling over the tarmac. Small bare feet poked from under it. He saw the tight set of her mouth, the familiar gaunt, faraway face, the unfathomable eyes. The worn white light and the perfect darkness all around drained her of any colour. When she was close enough to touch, she pushed back the cloak and knelt down by his feet.

 
She undid his shoes. Velcro crackled.

 
She lifted each foot in turn and slid the shoe off. Then, one after the other, she held his feet up and pulled off the socks. Her fingers were deft, unhurried, their touch slightly warm. She put the shoes and socks aside, carefully, laid her hands gently on his two feet and held them for a moment, as if confirming they were bare. As she leaned back to sit on her heels, she looked up at his face. The tumble of hair over her cheeks fell open.

 
‘Don’t put them on again. Let the earth hold you up.’

 
He might have nodded, or whispered ‘OK,’ or neither. He was too entirely lost to know. Time itself seemed to fall into the darkness of her gaze and be held motionless there. His heartbeat sounded like a distant echo in his ears.

 
‘I . . .’ he began. It seemed like he ought to say something. ‘I . . . um . . .’ He looked up and down the street. No one and nothing moved. His own stammering words sounded absurdly small, lost in the night. What was he even doing trying to talk to this . . . this thing? This phantom, this mistake? She rose to her feet again.

 
There was a difference in her eyes too. They were less like a wild bird’s. A person was looking back at him.

 
‘I thought you were . . .’

 
She waited. Her stillness was inhuman.

 
‘Gone,’ he finished.

 
‘I am gone,’ she said, in that voice dark with age. ‘Through the door you left open walks my end.’

 
He stared, mouth half open.

 
‘Will you take my burden from me, afterwards?’

 
In the desert of his thoughts he stumbled across a fragment of something the Corbo beast had said.
Old mad witch
. She seemed so calm, but she was just the same as on the train after all. A malfunctioning mouth.

 
To his astonishment she slipped her hands out from her cloak and closed them over his. They were dry, knuckly. She took a step closer, raising their hands between them, fingers knotted.

 
‘Gawain,’ she said. He was amazed at the warmth of her. She was so small and frayed he thought she’d be as insubstantial as cobwebs. She had never touched him before, except in dreams. ‘You are free to choose. We all are, though the road-goad watches the road. Will you take my burden from me?’

 
He couldn’t look at her, couldn’t look away from her. He was coming unmoored. ‘What did you call me?’

 
‘The name your mother gave you.’

 
It was the way she always said it, in his dreams, but he’d never heard it aloud before, clear in the cold air. Every word she said made him feel like he was hearing language for the first time.

 
‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

 
Her fingers tightened over his. ‘Nor I,’ she said. ‘Will you take it and let me go free?’

 
His answer came to his tongue unexpectedly, a complete surprise, although as soon as he said it, he knew it was true. ‘I don’t want you to go.’

 
She turned her head to the side and lay it on his chest, next to where their hands were intertwined. All he could now see of her face was her nose sticking out of the tangle of hair. He felt her head rise and sink with his breathing.

 
‘What do you mean,’ he said, ‘your end?’

 
‘Who can answer that?’ Her head nestled against him. ‘It is the mark I cannot see beyond. I’ve lived so long, Gawain. So long.’

 
Old old old
.

 
‘What’s happening?’ The question dropped of its own accord from the block of his bewilderment, a fragment calving from a glacier.

 
‘This,’ she said. ‘And then the next. And so it goes on, next and next and next, all down the endless road. You’ll see.’

 
‘See what?’ All he seemed to be able to do was echo her.

 
‘Everything,’ she answered. She looked up. ‘That is the burden. Will you bear it?’

 
Because her face was so close, the face he knew better than any other in the world, and also because he remembered at that exact instant that it was the face he loved better than any other in the world, the fact that she’d asked him a question four times finally sunk in, and so he answered it.

 
‘OK,’ he said. ‘All right. Yes.’

 
A silent change rippled through her. Her eyes closed, her lips opened slightly to release a breath – he saw all these details with perfect clarity; he remembered every tiny motion, even years later – and, as if the warmth of sunrise had just fallen on her, she gave a barely perceptible shiver of relief.

 
‘Um . . .’ he began, as she leaned her head on his chest again. Now he was afraid she was going to go to sleep. He pictured himself stuck there till morning. People would come out of their houses and find him standing there in the middle of the street with no shoes on, propping up an old mad sleeping non-existent witch. ‘What burden?’

 
‘It will come to you today.’ Her eyes didn’t open. He watched the lines at the corners of her mouth, etched in the harsh lamplight. A catch came into her voice, as if talking was suddenly uncomfortable. ‘You will bear it on your back. You will not know it. You will lose it. Lost in whiteness. You must go and find it. You must go, Gawain. Across sea and land, on the other side of the night, where an ocean girl tends it. An ocean girl tends it. An ocean girl.’

 
When she’d gone quiet long enough for him to be sure she was finished, he said, ‘What are you talking about?’

 
‘The truth.’ She swayed back, disentangling her fingers from his. He noticed that his bare feet were incredibly cold.

 
‘What truth?’ Hazily it occurred to him that he’d probably never spoken a stupider sentence in his life, which was saying something.

 
‘There will be fire and blood.’ She shivered. Her hands vanished inside her cloak, clutching it to her tightly. ‘Truth hurts. It’s a heavy burden, Gawain. One took it from me before and could not bear it. The world will find it a bitter weight.’

 
His head was spinning. He wanted to go back indoors, get warm, go to sleep. He couldn’t believe this was happening.

 
‘What do I do?’ It was all he could think of to say. For years he’d imagined her as his guide and guardian. ‘What am I supposed to do?’

 
She stared quietly back at him for a while and then answered. ‘Will you kiss me goodbye?’

 
‘Goodbye?’ His mouth shaped the word without a sound.

 
She stepped close to him and turned up her face.

 
It was like kissing moss. She smelled of dry earth. Breath from her nose tickled his cheek.

 
‘That is the last true kiss you will receive,’ she said, as she dropped back onto her heels.

 
‘When—’ he began, but he couldn’t get hold of what he thought he’d wanted to say. While their lips had touched, he’d closed his eyes, and in the momentary darkness he had felt, distinctly, the motion of the whole earth around him, and the inconceivable ancientness beneath his feet and above his head, between which life flickered and flowed as gaudy and slippery and thin as an iridescent film of oil on the surface of the ocean.

 
‘And my last also,’ she murmured peacefully. ‘My death comes.’

 
A red light flared behind him, throwing stark shadows across the road. With a gut-wrenching shock Gav realised they were standing in the middle of it and were about to be run over. He was still so stupefied by her kiss that the coming car registered painfully slowly, as if he had to construct the thought of being about to die piece by piece. The light grew intensely bright. He spun round, throwing his hands up, turning in useless slow motion. He wondered why the car was making no noise. He wondered why he couldn’t accelerate his chilled limbs to push Miss Grey out of the way or jump before he got crushed.

 
Then he stood facing dumbly down the lane, all those thoughts skidding away as crazily as they’d arrived.

 
There was no car. Headlights were white anyway, not orange-red; he remembered that now. The light had faded almost to nothing. He couldn’t see what had caused it. There was nothing there. All that remained was a hazy shimmer in the air like the evanescent tongues of flame around the charred wood of a dying fire. The glow was concentrated around Hester’s front garden. For all he could see it had fallen from the sky and was now dissolving into her house. It dimmed, a miniature sunset, and was gone.

 
Gav turned back to Miss Grey, half expecting to see her prone and crumpled in the road. She regarded him as solemnly as before.

 
‘I think,’ he began. He stuck his hands in his pockets, looked up at the now empty sky and then down at his toes. ‘I really think . . . you should tell me what’s going on.’

 
‘A door is open,’ she said. ‘For a long time it was closed. It shut me out.’

 
‘No,’ he said, before she could go on. ‘No, listen. What’s going on here, now? I need to know.’

 
A thud came from somewhere behind him, inside Hester’s house, but Gav couldn’t take his eyes off Miss Grey. Though she was standing still, she seemed to stagger. The cords in her neck tightened. Her eyelids fluttered.

 
‘A woman sleeps,’ she said. ‘Other women sleep. Men sleep. Children sleep.’ Her eyes closed tight as if something had hurt her. ‘A woman who is no woman sits awake. She sits by the light of a fire that is no fire and dreams of salvation for the world. A death that is no death waits for her in the water.’ Gav wanted to interrupt, but the mad monologue was gathering speed like a tumbling boulder. ‘A boy sleeps. The water waits for him. He will bear my burden.
O o kakka
.’ Flickers of pain creased her face. ‘
Iew iew
. In the branches the feasters dream their feast. Gawain. Gawain. A boy stands in the road. The road is dark before him and behind.’ A dreadful stain of panic spread through her voice. ‘A long road. A long road!’ Gav stepped towards her, suddenly and absurdly worried that she was going to wake the neighbours. ‘
Otototoi!
A boy stands at the beginning of a long road. It will scratch and tear his feet. It will flay his back. It will hold him up. Let the earth hold him up. Behind him my end comes out an open door.’ She was shaking like wheat in the wind, hugging herself. ‘At last. At last. Destroyer. The final arrow is loosed. The empty quiver. My death. My death! My death! My—’