and yellow as ivory, but Fern was oblivious, sitting on the floor to treat her healing wounds and for the first time venturing to rub her cheek against the dense softness of the ruff. ‘Stay with us,’ she whispered. ‘Stay tonight. Make me as brave as a wolf. I need courage right now.’ She didn’t register her own admission of Lougarry’s true identity. She was thinking: this is what it means to grow up, this is how it feels—to be on your own, to have no one to depend on, no one between you and the dark. Belatedly she began to appreciate how much she had always relied on her father, not perhaps on his strength but on the strength of his position, on the certainties that accompany fatherhood and maturity. She might have run the household but he had empowered her, supported her, obeyed her, kept her safe. And now, America was a long way away. She did not even have a phone number. Mrs Wicklow and the Dinsdales were good friends, but they could not deal with Alison. She needed a rock to cling to. But the rock had turned into Ragginbone and told her: Find the key, and now he had disappeared on some errand of his own. Everything seemed to depend on her, yet she did not know what to do or how to do it. She was quite alone.
‘Not quite,’ said Will, squatting down beside her. She must have spoken her thought aloud. ‘We are three.’
Lougarry turned, and licked her cheek.
Gradually, night enfolded the house, an unchancy night filled with a fretful wind that muttered round the walls, and inside the shifting of ill-fitting doors, the creaking of untrodden boards. Glancing through a window Fern saw the moon ringed in a yellow nimbus, trailing a lacework of cloud. Once again, she heard the motorbike, roaring to and fro on the deserted road. It occurred to her that bikers usually hunt in packs, but this one was always solitary, a pariah maybe, a Black Knight of the highways, armoured in leather, anonymous in his helmet. She had never seen him stop the machine, dismount, lift the visor. She had never heard his name. ‘That dratted bike,’ Mrs Wicklow had said once; but she did not seem to know who he was. As if in response to her thought the engine cut suddenly, very nearby. Lougarry rose to her feet, her hackles stirring, showing her teeth in something that was not a yawn. She slipped out of the back door like a swift shadow, returning minutes later even as they heard the bike departing. She had neither barked nor growled—Lougarry was invariably silent—but the danger, if danger it was, had gone. There can’t be any more people ranged against us, Fern thought, verging on irritation. The biker might be a nuisance but not a threat, inquisitive maybe, but surely not malevolent. She closed but did not lock the door and made cocoa for herself and Will, although it was the wrong time of year, because the drink was hot and sweet and comforting.
‘What was Atlantis?’ Will asked, warming his hands on the mug though they could hardly be cold.
‘I don’t really know,’ Fern said. ‘No one knows. It’s one of those legends that’s so old nobody remembers where it came from. I think it was an island, or a city, or both, and it sank beneath the sea. I believe there are archaeologists who connect it with the Minoan dynasty on Crete—you know, Theseus and the Minotaur and the Labyrinth of Daedalus—but although Crete has had plenty of earthquakes it’s still there. I have a sort of recollection of reading somewhere that Atlantis was a great civilisation aeons before Greece and Rome, and they discovered some terrible secret, or invented the ultimate weapon, and so they were destroyed. However, that could be pure fiction. I’ve no idea where I got it.’
‘It’s a good story,’ said Will, ‘or it would be, if we weren’t mixed up in it. So…do we deduce that whatever we’re looking for must have come from there originally?’
Fern sighed. ‘I assume so. That seemed to be indicated on the tape.’
‘It wasn’t a tape. It was real.’
‘Virtual reality.’ Fern’s flippancy went no deeper than her words.
‘We have to find it then, don’t we? Whatever it is. We have to find it before she does.’
‘Yes.’
‘Maybe we could force the lock on that desk in Great-Cousin Ned’s study,’ Will said pensively. ‘Or break into the chest in the attic. You must have searched nearly everywhere else.’
‘This is a big house,’ said Fern. ‘It’s full of corners and cupboards and crannies and hideaways—not to mention the jumble Great-Cousin Ned accumulated. I’ve made a start. That’s all.’
They kicked the subject around in a dispirited manner until their cocoa had cooled. Then they went to bed, staying close on the stair though not hand in hand, leaving Lougarry in the kitchen, apparently asleep.
In the morning, the builder came to collect his ladder. ‘Well,’ asked Mrs Wicklow, ‘did you get in?’
‘We couldn’t,’ said Fern. ‘The window was jammed as well.’
Mrs Wicklow made a noise somewhere between a grunt and a snort. ‘I don’t like it.’
‘Nor do we.’
They avoided the second floor bedroom now, chary of trying the door again or being overlooked from the window, though there was no one inside to watch them. They felt as if the secrets it contained were so huge they might yet burst the seams of the walls and blow away house and hillside, moor and dale in a sudden gust of power, leaving only a black hole with a single star winking in its depths. When Alison came up on the Friday she no longer looked the same to them. It was she who had spoken the word to hold fast the door even in her absence, she who had worn the chameleon gloves that grew onto hand and arm, she who had used an ordinary television set to look into the abyss. Will seemed to see her witchy qualities emphasised: the narrowing of her bright cold eyes, the dancing lines that played about her smile, transient as water, the rippling quantity of hair that wrapped her like a dim mantle. But Fern thought she perceived something even more disturbing, a hunger that was beyond customary mortal appetite, a desire that outranged all earthly desires, as if beneath the flimsy veneer of her physical exterior was a warped spirit which had long lost touch with its humanity. ‘I wonder how old she really is?’ Fern speculated, observing her deadly pallor, the skin stretched taut over her bones as though her flesh had melted away. ‘She might be any age. Any age at all.’ A vision came into her mind of a different Alison, an Alison whose cheeks were as full as her lips, standing in a field of mud with her torn skirt kilted to her knee, gazing with the beginnings of that terrible hunger at a tail house on a far hill. Someone was calling her: Alys! Alys! The call echoed in Fern’s head: Alison met her regard and for an instant her eyes widened as if she too heard it—then voice and vision were gone and there was nothing between them but the supper table. In the hall, the telephone rang. Fern got there first, thankful to hear her father’s greeting, but Alison was on her heels, snatching the receiver almost before she had spoken, her smile a triangle of glitter, her grip on Fern’s wrist like a vice. Fern withdrew, frightened by the strength in those lissom fingers, annoyed with herself for her fright. The thought of Lougarry heartened her: the wolf had stayed out of sight since Alison’s return but Fern had seen her shadow in the garden and her silhouette atop the slope against the sky. She knew they were not abandoned.
‘Sorry,’ Alison said, coming back into the kitchen. ‘I didn’t mean to monopolise Robin like that, but there was something important I needed to ask him, and then I’m afraid he had to go.’
‘What was so important?’ asked Will.
‘It’s about the barn. Incidentally, my friend is coming to look at it tomorrow. Well probably move the boat out then. We have a lot of measuring to do.’
‘You won’t damage the boat, will you?’ Will was anxious.
‘Measuring,’ said Fern. ‘That sounds very important.’
Alison’s stare grew colder than ever, but Fern merely looked ingenuous. She was still young enough, she hoped, to get away with that.
That night, she fell asleep to dream of Alison in the mud-field, barefoot in the dirt, and the one calling her was a gipsy-faced man in patched breeches, but she did not listen: her attention was fixed on the distant house. She raised her hand, and the moisture poured out of the earth and