sea-bed a while. She must have survived much rougher handling than anything she’s getting from me.’
‘I’ll give you a hand,’ said Fern, abandoning her careful indifference to succumb to the lure of a mystery.
After about an hour of rather awkward chipping the name emerged, semi-obliterated but legible. Fern had known what it would be all along, with the strange prescience which comes from that region of the brain they say is never used, a zone of thought still unconscious and untabulated. Seawitch, ran the lettering. The carving did not resemble Alison, for all its flowing hair and parted lips: the improbable bosom was outthrust, the belly a sleek curve, the face as knowing as Dodona. Nonetheless, Fern was unsurprised. Her awareness was touched with an elusive familiarity, but whether from the future or the past she could not tell.
‘She’s wonderful,’ said Will. ‘Those tits look like nuclear warheads.’
‘You’re much too young to notice such things,’ his sister said loftily.
‘You’re just jealous,’ said Will.
That evening Mrs Wicklow left around five. Fern made omelettes and they ate in the kitchen listening to Will’s ghettoblaster pumping out the latest from the Pet Shop Boys. Even when Robin was with them, they never sat in the drawing room: it was always a degree colder than the rest of the house and the stone idol squatted there wrapped in its secret gloating like a diminutive Moloch. Fern did her best to keep the door closed, hindered by Mrs Wicklow’s penchant for opening both doors and windows at every opportunity, in order, so she said, to let in air. ‘There’s air in here already,’ Will had pointed out, ‘otherwise we wouldn’t be breathing.’ But Mrs Wicklow believed air had to be specially admitted.
The sky had clouded over and by the time they went to bed the night outside had grown very dark. ‘We ought to have candles,’ said Will, ‘guttering in the draught, making huge spidery shadows on the wall.’
‘Don’t talk about spiders,’ said Fern.
Slightly to her surprise, she fell asleep immediately, untroubled by nightmares.
She woke abruptly in the small hours to find herself sitting up in bed, intensely alert, her nerve-endings on stalks. The curtains were half drawn but the space between was merely a paler shade of black, barely discernible against the velvet dark of the room. There was no wind and the absolute quiet, without even a distant rumour of traffic, was something to which she had not yet become accustomed. The silence had a quality of tension about it, as if the night itself were holding its breath, waiting for a board to creak, a pin to drop, the warning screech of a bird. Fern’s pulse beat so hard that her whole body seemed to shake with it. And then came the snuffling, just as she had expected, horribly familiar and so loud it might have been directly below her window-sill. The rasping, stertorous breath of some creature that left never a print, an incorporeal hunter who had no existence except to scent its prey. The reluctance that held her back she recognised as fear, a fear that was not only inside her but all around her, a dread that was part of the room itself: she had to thrust it aside like a physical barrier. The floor made no sound beneath her tread; the window, thanks to Mrs Wicklow, was already ajar. She leaned out into the night.
There was something at the foot of the wall, something that was darker than the surrounding darkness, a clot of shadow whose actual shape was impossible to make out. Not a badger: the white bands on its mask would have been visible at that range. Besides, although she had no idea how large a badger was supposed to be she was sure this must be larger, larger than a fox, larger than a sheepdog. It moved to and fro, to and fro, as if worrying at the wall; then suddenly it stopped, and the sniffing was accompanied by a furious scrabbling, the unmistakable sound of paws burrowing frenziedly in the soil, as though seeking to unearth the very foundations of the house. Afterwards, Fern knew she must have made some slight noise to betray her presence. The thing below her froze, and lifted its head. She saw neither form nor feature, only the eyes, slanting ovoids filled with a glow that mirrored nothing around them, a livid flame that came only from within. The terror that rushed over her was beyond all reason, a wild, mindless force not pushing her back but pulling her down, down towards the ground and the waiting eyes. With a vast effort of will she wrenched herself free—and then she was back in her room, latching the window with unsteady fingers, and the silence outside was unbroken, and a board creaked in welcome as she stumbled across to her bed. She thought of going to her brother’s room to see if he was awake and what he had heard, but a great tiredness overwhelmed her and she decided it could wait till morning. Now she needed to sleep…and sleep…and by daylight the horror would be a matter for nightmare and the flower-bed would be pocked with the tracks of some mongrel stray.
But it rained before dawn, and any prints there might have been were washed away.
Fern went to the window as soon as she got up, and there was Will searching the ground, still in his pyjamas and slippers: the latter would be soaked through. ‘Come in and get dressed,’ she called. And: ‘Have you found anything?’
‘No. The rain was too heavy.’ His upturned face was curiously solemn despite a lavish smudge of dirt. ‘You heard it too?’
‘Yes. Come on in.’
He disappeared through the back door and Fern’s gaze lifted automatically to the path straddling the hillside. In the grey morning light there could be no mistaking what she saw. The Watcher had gone.
‘It wasn’t a badger,’ said Fern over breakfast. ‘There were no markings. It was big, and dark: that’s all I could see.’ She didn’t want to mention the reasonless terror that had tried to drag her from the window. Fern disliked both terror and unreason.
‘A dog?’ Will suggested.
‘Maybe.’
‘A wolf?’
‘There aren’t any wolves left in Britain.’
‘It could have escaped from a zoo,’ Will theorised, ‘only…’
‘Why would it want to get into the house? An escaped wolf would be out on the moors killing sheep—supposing it was a wolf, which I doubt. Anyway, I don’t think there are any zoos near here,’
There was a short pause filled with the crunching of cereal. ‘When you have eliminated the impossible,’ Will pronounced eventually, ‘whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle was a great believer in the supernatural. And that’s what we’re left with. There’s something strange going on, something to do with this house. I thought so all along. So did you really, only you’re so grownup and boring that you won’t let yourself believe in anything any more. Remind me not to grow up if that’s how it takes you. Did you know that they’ve conducted experiments in telekinesis in the laboratory? Did you know that there are alternative universes round every corner? Did you know—’
‘Shut up,’ said Fern. ‘I’m not boring, just sceptical. That’s healthy.’ And: ‘Did you know…did you know there’s a boulder on the hill behind the garden that’s shaped like a seated man, and sometimes it’s there, and sometimes it isn’t? It’s been there all weekend—always in the same place—and this morning it was gone. How’s that for a did-you-know?’
‘Perhaps it is a man,’ Will said uncertainly, baffled by the introduction of a new element in the situation. ‘Perhaps it’s a tramp.’
‘It’s a rock,’ said Fern. ‘There’s nothing wrong with my eyesight. It sits there for days, in all kinds of weather, like a rock is supposed to. I think it’s watching us.’
‘Rocks don’t watch,’ Will pointed out.
‘This one does.’
‘It all centres on the house,’ Will reiterated. ‘It could be something to do with the stuff Great-Cousin Ned picked up on his travels. Maybe there’s a magic talisman hidden in the attic, or an amulet, or the green eye of the little yellow god, or—what about that chest? It must be in there—whatever it is.’
‘Too