Capel’s house the daylight was failing. The cloud-cover had begun to break up and chinks of fire appeared in the far west above a muffled sunset, while eastwards great lakes of pale green had opened up, with a star or two winking in their depths. The motorcyclist Fern had heard the previous night roared past them on the narrow road, a little too close for comfort, his exhaust rattling and a black visor hiding his face. Their temporary home loomed up ahead of them, its unyielding frontage looking no longer threatening but merely solid, sternly dependable, as safe as a castle wall which would keep them from the night. Fern went straight up to her room and gazed out towards the sunset: twilight dimmed the rugged hillside but she could still distinguish the paler thread of the path and the stump or boulder that resembled a seated man on the bank above, maintaining its timeless vigil over the house. Something like a bird swooped past, its wing-beat too swift for the eye to follow, its flight-path erratic. Then there was another, and another. They made a faint high-pitched chittering unlike any birdsong. ‘Bats!’ Fern thought with a sudden shiver, part fear, part pleasure. She had never seen a bat outside the nature programmes on television and although she was not really frightened of them they seemed to her alien and fantastical, messengers symbolising her transition into another world. The teeming man-made metropolis where she had grown up shrank in her mind until it was merely a blob of meaningless ferment, and beyond it she glimpsed a boundless universe, with pock-marked moons sinking behind drifting hills, and blue voids opening in between, and dusty nebulae floating like clouds across the backdrop of space, and at the last a starry sea whose glittering waves hissed forever on the silver beaches at the margin of being. For a moment she was spellbound, panic-stricken; and then the endless vistas vanished from her head and there was only the hillside climbing to the barren moor and the zigzagging of the bats. The sunset had faded from behind the cloud-wrack and in the softened light details were briefly clearer: Fern squinted at the view, striving after uncertainty, knowing that what she saw was against logic, against sense. The solitary boulder had gone. The path was empty, the slope bare; in an eyeblink, the duration of a mirage, the hunched up rock or stump had disappeared. Fern flinched away from the window with a lurching heart and made herself walk slowly from the room.
Tea had been heavy on scones and cake and accordingly the three of them ate a cursory supper and spent the rest of the evening trying to elucidate the rule-book for a box of Mah Jongg tiles unearthed in the attic.
‘Good thing, no telly,’ said Robin a little doubtfully. ‘Makes you create your own amusements. Stretches the mind.’
‘We’ll have to get a TV here,’ said Will. ‘Also a music centre.’
‘No point,’ Fern said. ‘We’re going to sell. Will, you’re cheating. There’s no such thing as a King Kong.’
‘I’m not cheating,’ Will retorted. ‘I’m creating my own amusements.’
It was well after eleven by the time they went up to bed, worn out by the intricacies of the game. Fern tumbled into a bemused sleep where ivory tiles tap-danced along the table and an elaborate Oriental character uncurled into a bat-winged creature which skittered around the room, bumping into walls and lamp-shades. ‘It’s a dragon,’ said a voice in her ear. ‘Don’t look into its eyes’—but it was too late, she was already falling into the hypnotic orbs as if into a crimson abyss, clouded with shifting vapours of thought, and a single iris dilated in front of her, black as the Pit. Then she crossed into a dreamland so crowded with incident and adventure that she woke exhausted, snatching in vain at the fraying threads of recollection. She had a feeling her dream had possessed some overwhelming significance, but it was gone in a few seconds and there were only the raindrops beating on the window-panes like the tapping of Mah Jongg tiles. She slept and woke again, this time into silence. And then below her window came the snuffling noise, bronchial and somehow eager, as if the animal outside was desperately seeking ingress through the steadfast wall. ‘A badger,’ thought Fern. ‘I’d like to see a badger,’ but a huge reluctance came over her, pressing her into the bed like a dead weight, forcing her back into the inertia of sleep, and when she woke again it was morning.
The hot water had come on eventually but there was no shower attachment so Fern had a quick bath. When she finally nerved herself to look out at the view, the boulder—she had decided to think of it as a boulder since the area was virtually devoid of trees—was back in place as if it had never been gone; she could almost convince herself its absence the previous evening had been a trick of the twilight. Will was grubbing around in the flower-bed below, presumably hunting for badger-tracks as instructed by Gus Dinsdale. In the kitchen, Robin was trying to make toast without the assistance of a toaster. Several charred slices on the table bore mute witness to his failure. Fern packed him off to the bathroom and took over; Will came in from the garden, unashamedly earth-stained, in time to appropriate the first round.
‘Any luck?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘Badger-tracking.’
Will set down his slice of toast unfinished, a frown puckering his forehead. ‘No. I can’t understand it. I heard it last night, that same sniffing, really loud, just where the flower-bed is. It had rained earlier, and Gus said damp soil is perfect for holding prints, but there isn’t a mark. Yet I know I heard it. I was sort of half asleep at the time, and I thought about getting up and taking a look, but somehow I didn’t want to, or I was just too tired. I wish I had now. Maybe I dreamed it.’
‘If you did,’ said Fern, ‘then I did too. Both nights.’
‘Perhaps the house is haunted,’ Will said after a pause.
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ Fern asked.
‘Well, Mr Burrows—Physics—he says Science has proved so many impossible things that it would be a great mistake to rule out the supernatural just because we haven’t sussed it out yet. He got us all talking about it one afternoon: he said he’d had an experience which he couldn’t explain, and Rebecca Hollis told us about her grandmother’s house, and this room which is always cold, and something she’d seen there. She isn’t the fanciful type, either, and she doesn’t boast; she wouldn’t even have talked about it if her best friend hadn’t nudged her into it.’ Absent-mindedly, he took another bite of toast and reached for the Frosties. ‘I rather like that idea Gus had, about the house-spirit,’ he concluded with his mouth full.
‘But the sniffing is outside the house,’ Fern said thoughtfully, ‘and it wants to get in.’
For a minute Will stopped eating and stared at her. She contemplated telling him about the boulder but decided against it; he was only twelve, and the light had been poor, she might have been mistaken. ‘I’m imagining things,’ she said, suddenly impatient with her own credulity. ‘It’s the Yorkshire landscape. Overexposure to nature is bad for city-dwellers. We need to get back to the bright lights of reality.’
‘The lights are man-made,’ Will pointed out. ‘Electricity and neon. Only the stars are real.’
And then: ‘What’s that awful smell?’
‘Damn,’ said Fern. ‘Now I’ve burnt the toast.’
They drove back to London after lunch at the local pub, where surly rustics eyed them sidelong and thick Yorkshire accents made the language barrier almost insurmountable. ‘Interesting house,’ Robin said in the car. ‘Must go through all that stuff some time. Quite a collection. Didn’t see the figurehead, did you, Fern? You ought to have a look. She’s pretty impressive. Next time we’re there—’
‘We really have to sell, Daddy,’ Fern interrupted resolutely. ‘We don’t need the house and we’re not likely to use it very much. It’ll be far too expensive to maintain just as a storehouse for marine antiquities.’
‘Of course. Of course.’ Robin’s agreement was too quick and too hearty. ‘Just a thought. We’ll go back in the summer, sort out, tidy up, sell later. No hurry. Market’s still picking up. Best to wait a bit. Invest some time and effort in the place: makes good business sense. James’ll approve. He’s all for investment.’ James was his accountant.
Fern’s