progenitor, and their betrayal was as old as Time. Gods demanded constant worship and sacrifice, but what did They do for mere mortals? As far as she could see all you got was forgiveness for the fate God Himself had dished out to you, and that only if you were lucky. She lost herself in imaginary conversations with Mary, and in the end found she was trying to pray for the virgin mother with her lost innocence, because the reflex of prayer is strong in the human spirit. But she didn’t know Whom she could pray to, because with God beyond the pale, there was Nobody left.
The next day, when Nathan telephoned from school, she asked him: ‘Are you dreaming again? About – another world?’
‘A bit,’ he conceded after a pause.
‘Take care,’ she said, ‘won’t you?’
‘Yes, Mum. There’s no danger, honestly.’ Except the Urdemons …
But Annie knew without being told that there was always danger, and it wasn’t in Nathan’s nature to take care.
THREE An Entanglement of Clues
At Crowford Comprehensive, Hazel saw Jonas Tyler and Ellen Carver talking in the corridor after English, and her heart quailed.
‘Don’t know what she sees in him,’ another girl said, but Hazel knew, and gloried in the knowing, because seeing something in him was her secret, and even Ellen Carver would never see what she saw. The hidden sorrow that he bore, the mystery behind his infrequent smile and the blue of his eyes. (He smiled more often when he was talking to Ellen, but Hazel told herself that was forced.)
Back at home she looked again at Effie’s notebook, and the hand-labelled bottles, but still she hesitated. There was a poem she vaguely remembered from an anthology she had read with Nathan when she was a child, the usual sort of nursery doggerel, but the underlying horror in it had made a strong impression on her. In it there was a woman or girl, sitting alone and lonely, wishing – and a body came in to join her, piece by piece, starting with the feet and working up. But at the climax of each verse ‘still she sat, and still she sighed, and still she wished for company’. When all the body was there, something unpleasant happened to the girl, Hazel couldn’t recall exactly what, except that it was nasty. Perhaps she got eaten. Anyway, she couldn’t help feeling she was in a similar position. Still she sat, and still she sighed, and still she wished for company … Fairytales, cleaned up for Victorian consumption, might tell you that if you rubbed a lamp you would get a genie who would obey your every command, but Hazel knew better. Wish-fulfilment always had its price, and the price was always more than you wanted to pay.
She didn’t trust magic, even if it worked (especially if it worked). She didn’t trust Lilliat, with her silver-blue eyes and the unnatural breeze in her hair. Lilliat had called her price trivial, but in her heart Hazel knew what was being asked of her, and it was too much. Even for the infrequent smiles of Jonas Tyler. Besides, what was the point of attracting him by magic? One day the magic would fade, and there would be no reality underneath. Or so she told herself, struggling for rationality. (But one day was in the future, and for a teenager the future was too remote to touch the urgency of present desire.)
Still she sat, and still she sighed …
She wished for Nathan, to take her mind off things, but Nathan wasn’t there.
The evenings were growing longer now, and she went for a walk in the woods by way of distraction, because there was no witch paraphernalia out there to tempt her. When she was much younger and her father was still at home she used to run to the woods to be alone, sometimes climbing a tree and staying up there for hours, wrapped in the quiet and the privacy of her leaf-bound world. Now she was older and her father had gone she preferred her bedroom, but that day the lure of the woods drew her back. She found her favourite tree and scrambled up into the branches, just to prove she still could. And then somehow it was easy to lapse into her former quiescence, back against the tree-trunk, legs crooked, pulling the hush of leaf-murmur and wind-murmur around her like a cloak. She felt her self merging with the self of the tree, becoming bark and root, sap and acorn, reaching deep, deep into the darkness of the earth, listening to the sound of growing, and burrowing, and the tingle of new life uncurling and groping towards the light. And then she was stretching up to the sky, straining with twig-tip and leaf-tip to reach the sun. She didn’t know that this oneness with things was a part of the power she feared to indulge; all she knew was that it made her feel peaceful, and somehow complete. The tiny denizens of the tree-tops came close to her, untroubled by her presence; a squirrel scurried over her thigh.
Presently, she saw the woodwose.
She had met him once or twice before, but only with Nathan, who had been his friend from infancy. She knew he was very shy. He was a stick-thin creature only a few feet high, with a pointy face all nose and the sideways eyes of an animal. His voice was as soft as a rustle in the leafmould; his movements altogether noiseless. She didn’t hear him approach; rather, she became aware of him, one twig-pattern among many, perched on a nearby bough, watching her. Perhaps he had been there all the time.
It was a long while before he spoke.
‘Tell Nathan …’
‘Yes?’
‘He’s here. Hiding in woods, skulking behind bushes. Spying on the house where the wise man lives. He kills rabbits with slingstones and eats them. I don’t know what he wants, but he won’t go away.’
‘Who?’ Hazel asked, quiet as a breath.
‘Him. The hairy one from down in the valley, where the old old house used to be. You let him out, you and Nathan. He stole the thing, and ran away, but he didn’t go far. He sleeps in a fox’s hole, down in the Darkwood. I think he strangled the fox. Tell Nathan.’
The dwarf, Hazel thought, remembering the curious little man she and Nathan had inadvertently released from his underground prison – someone who, Bartlemy claimed, might once have been the assistant to Josevius Grimling-Thorn. He had stolen the Grail, and thrust it back into its native world, though no one knew why.
‘I’ll tell him,’ Hazel promised.
The woodwose gave a tiny nod of acknowledgement. ‘He likes to know … everything that happens here,’ he elaborated unexpectedly. ‘I watch. I listen. I wait for him. He doesn’t come now for many months, but I’m still here. Tell him …’
‘He has to go away to school,’ Hazel said. ‘Even at weekends he has homework, rugger matches, cricket matches, stuff like that. He can’t always find time for everyone.’ She hadn’t seen so much of Nathan that year, and although she knew it wasn’t his fault the woodwose’s words stirred a tiny niggle of resentment. Woody, Nathan had told her, had been his playfellow when he was little more than a baby, an imaginary friend who wasn’t imaginary, tugged from some lost universe in childish innocence for companionship and games, unable to return to wherever he had come from. We’re Nathan’s closest friends, Hazel thought, and now we’re both neglected.
She said: ‘I’ll come back. If you like.’
Woody considered her offer in silence. ‘Do you have Smarties?’ he asked at last. ‘Nathan used to bring Smarties.’
‘I can get some,’ Hazel.
Nathan hadn’t dreamed about the princess for nearly three weeks, and he was desperate to find her again, to help her or merely to see her – there was little help he could offer in his insubstantial dream-state, but he was sure that soon he would begin to materialize, because that was the pattern his dreams had followed in the past. He saw Hazel that weekend only briefly, pleading homework and tiredness. She told him about Woody and the dwarf, and he was pleased she had formed a bond with the woodwose; somehow, it excused him from having to spend precious time with either of them. Not that he saw it that way – his dreams filled his thought, and he wasn’t seeing anything very clearly. He tried