Advent (69 page)

 
‘My servants are as swift as the wind. They will have you soon.’ The handle shook again. Gawain knelt down, feeling for the sprawled body. He grunted with effort as he got his arms under hers and sat her up. It was like wrestling. She toppled into him. Her head lolled and cracked painfully against his ear.

 
‘You are the ward of the prophetess?’

 
With a groan he heaved his back straight, lifting Marina off the floor. He scrabbled around for the staff.

 
‘I slew her, boy.’

 
He stopped. His right hand clutched the walking stick tight.

 
Murder is done already
.

 
‘She lies unhallowed in the snow outside. My servant broke her neck. That will be your inheritance from her. You and she will rot together. Do you understand me?’

 
In place of the gruesome fear, a new feeling began to spread through him. Anger, hard as the frozen ground.

 
‘Unlock the door now or die.’

 
So Miss Grey was dead. He’d known it, somehow. In a way it was better than thinking of her leaving him by choice. She’d known she was going to die. She’d come to say her goodbyes.

 
The prophetess.
Well then. Dead and gone she might be, but she’d left him with a prophecy. She’d given him a future. So he wasn’t going to let himself be hunted down by the horrible thing that boasted of killing her. No matter how exhausted and cornered he was, he wasn’t going to let it happen.

 
The way out was below him. He’d have a head start if he hurried.

 
The handle rattled furiously behind him as he manoeuvered his load down the awkward stairs. He heard a screech of inarticulate rage. Footsteps started away. She’d go through the hall, along the passage to the stairs, down and out the front door and round the house to the stables. He guessed he had maybe two minutes. Maybe one.

 
Marina’s head jolted against the banister. No time to worry about that. He clumped down to the door, yanked it open and limped as fast as he could through the stable.

 
Outside, the light had faded to a deep sullen grey. The snow was turning ghostly. He gulped in the clean air and hesitated a second. He hadn’t quite believed he’d ever see the outside world again, but he’d done it, he was out, he’d got her out. He’d never got as far as thinking about what to do next. It was easy, though, because there was only one thing to do. Keep running. Keep running. Not uphill: his legs wouldn’t make it. Not into the woods: he’d never be able to work through the tangle of wild rhododendron with Marina slung over his shoulder. Down, then.

 
. . . her to the river . . .

 
He pitched himself forward and ran.

 
He ran under the long windows of the hall, the oak and beech crowns arching above, almost touching its parapets. His lungs felt like they were on fire, but what did pain matter now?
Truth hurts.
He reached a corner of the building. Out beyond the sloping field of unblemished snow and the lower woods he saw the coming night, the eastern horizon turning black as his dreams. He loped down the virgin field in long disjointed strides, battling the weight that threatened to tip him forward each time he planted a foot. It was desperately slow, but the wood was desperately close; he saw the opening in the trees marking the path Marina had led him along.

 
There was a furious cry behind him. He faced the smothered dusk and made himself go faster, though the strain cost him tears of agony. Beyond and below was the river. If he could only get her that far he could die in peace. He thought he heard a different voice shouting from the house. It might have been her father’s. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered at all except staying upright until his legs gave way. The cleft in the trees came closer even as the deep snow clutched and dragged at his heels. Twice, three times, he stumbled badly and had to jam the staff ahead of him to brace against a fall, screeching at the pain that shot through his arms. The darkness under the trees beckoned him on like sanctuary. Someone was shouting Marina’s name, but if he stopped he’d be caught. He tumbled in under the branches. The path through the old wood stretched ahead of him. Another entrance reached and they hadn’t got him yet. He risked a look over his shoulder.

 
For an instant the scene was perfectly still, as if winter had frozen them all. A silhouette was framed in the window of the corner room, looking out, the unmistakable tall wild-haired outline of Tristram Uren. Another silhouette was outlined against the snowfield, descending clumsily after Gawain: the thing that had once been Aunt Gwen. She’d struggled a little way down from the house but had gained no ground on him in the heavy snow, and now stood, arms wide.

 
Her hands lifted slowly to the sky.

 
The shout chilled Gawain to the heart. Not a scream of anger or frustration, this time; no empty threat. Its three words held no meaning he knew and yet somehow he understood them immediately for a summons.

 
With a stab of terror he knew she was bringing the black dog.

Two miles or so to the south, an elderly couple looked out of the picture window of a bungalow towards a stony beach.

 
The husband said, ‘Don’t much like the look of that.’

 
He took off his glasses to wipe them on his sweater and replaced them, studying the thing that had washed up on the shore.

 
‘Don’t do that, George. It only makes them worse. Do you recognise her?’ The wife, whose eyesight was (to her good fortune) worse, nosed closer to the glass. ‘Should we call the lifeboat?’

 
‘Bit late now,’ the husband sniffed.

 
The bungalow was one of a shabby row on a low rise overlooking the beach, testament to a species of seaside holiday that was already nearing extinction when they’d been built. The tide, turned now to the ebb, had exposed a grey rim at the edge of the crescent of snow. A battered sailing dinghy was tilted at a forlorn angle on the stones, its creased white sail shuddering weakly.

 
‘Dan Frye’s boat,’ the man said. His wife tutted as if the name itself was unlucky.

 
‘Oh dear.’ She peered again. ‘Are you sure? I don’t know how you can see anything, it’s almost dark.’

 
‘You know you can’t see anything. Of course I’m sure.’

 
‘Dear me. Poor old fellow. Isn’t he the one who—’

 
‘Always took his boat out, in all weather.’

 
‘But wasn’t it because he . . . Oh you know, George. He went a bit mad. That chap. His wife left him because of it. Myrtle knows her. She—’

 
‘Hello,’ the man interrupted, cupping a hand over his eyes against the glass of the window. ‘Look at that old fellow.’

 
‘Look at what?’

 
‘There.’ He pointed. ‘Look at the size of him. He must be half a wolf.’

 
The wife nudged against him. ‘Is that a dog?’

 
‘I don’t know why you don’t just put your specs on.’

 
‘It can’t be out by itself in this weather? Honestly, some people. The poor old chap must be half dead with— Oh! I see him! He is a big . . .’

 
A huge coal-black creature had come padding with eerie purposefulness over the shingle at the very edge of the sea. The reason the wife hadn’t finished her sentence was that she’d noticed its eyes.

 
It was impossible not to. Against the uniform grey of sea and sky, they shone like beacon fires.

 
‘What on earth . . . ?’

 
The massive dog stalked closer, its blunt wedge of a head lowered slightly as if to follow a scent. It never stopped, looked around, fidgeted. There was nothing animal about it except its brute form. It loped up to the dinghy and sprang inside it. They lost sight of it behind the sail, but heard a violent clatter as it began to ransack the hull.

 
‘George?’

 
The black dog emerged with a small, grey, limp-looking thing in its mouth. For a horrible moment the husband thought it was someone’s foot, as if the beast had found Dan Frye’s corpse down there in the bottom of his boat and torn it to shreds. But when it bounded down onto the pebbly strand and released the object, he saw it was just a shoe.

 
The dog bent down, turned it over with its nose, sniffed it.

 
It bared its teeth.

 
The man clutched at his heart as flame spewed over the beast’s jaws. Its lips curled back, back, releasing rivulets of ghastly fire, and then it snarled and lunged. He fell. He didn’t see the dog stab one paw into the shoe and rip it apart, shred it, snap wildly at the fragments it tossed in the air, shake and claw them again. The last thing he heard before the veil closed his ears and eyes and everything was its gigantic, dismal howl.

 
Everyone in the village heard it too, whatever they were doing – everyday things, ordinary things, things they’d later look back on with a helpless nostalgia, as one looks back from the far side of a catastrophe on the vanished happiness that preceded it and wonders how one forgot to notice how happy it was – and stopped. Some of them knew it at once, instinctively, for what it was: a black portent, a warning siren.

 
The howl was all the valediction drowned Dan Frye received. The sea-creatures he had longed to see again – longed unbearably, incurably – had not even noticed him as he threw himself overboard and sank, nor had they helped his empty boat to shore. Only the tide and a faint wind had washed it up, Gawain’s shoes still tucked in the bows.

 
The dog was staring over the water that had a second time denied it its prey when it heard its master’s last summons. At once it turned to the north and began to run, vanishing with deadly speed into the gathering dark.

Thirty-one

When he reached
the spot where the path crossed the streamlet and divided, Gawain made the mistake of stopping. It was only for a second, but a second was long enough. The burning muscles in his legs cramped up. He collapsed into muddy snow, howling, Marina pitching off his shoulder and sprawling uselessly beside him. When he could move again, he hauled the dead weight back towards him. Spasms of excruciating pain shot through his legs, but he couldn’t stop: the dog was coming, and this time its command would be to kill him as Holly’s had been to fetch him, and no word of his would hold it back. He made a couple of agonising attempts to lift Marina again. Both times his legs tightened to iron and then gave way. ‘Jesus, Marina,’ he whispered fiercely, ‘can’t you . . . just’ – he heaved again – ‘wake’ – another heave – ‘up?’ No good. On all fours, bare hands and feet deep in the icy slush, he shifted her until she was slung over his back like a sodden pink sack, but that was the most he could manage.

 
The darkness was closing in. He remembered Marina telling him the downhill path led to the river, but he couldn’t see anything that way. It couldn’t be far, but the best he could manage now was an aching crawl, and the hunter was coming.
Swift as the wind.

 
The other path led up to the chapel, to the well that had saved him and his mother.

 
He thought of how one mouthful of its water had cleared the pain away before. He had another idea too. There was no way of knowing whether it would work, but the chapel wasn’t too far, and the racking pains shooting through his calves and thighs told him he wasn’t going to make it much further the way he was.

 
He shuffled his back and pulled Marina’s arms round his neck, gripping them tight with one arm. The other hand held the rowan staff. He bent his forearm, propped himself on it, gritted his teeth and forced himself to crawl up the slope.