Advent Read online

  ‘Yeah. In a sec.’ He rubbed his forehead as if he could massage his thoughts into shape. ‘Listen. Remember what your mate Horace said? About Auntie Gwen being all wound up and asking about Horace’s mum and some church meeting?’

  ‘Horace isn’t my mate,’ she said, in a strange voice. ‘He’s my friend. I told you.’

  Gav tried to keep his concentration. ‘Yeah. Sorry. But that’s what he said, isn’t it? He said she asked him about whatever this meeting is. Over and over. For some reason.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘Yeah. Definitely. And wait. Just now, when you were talking to your dad. He said Auntie Gwen was looking for what’s-his-name. Owen. Reverend Jeffrey.’

  ‘That’s right. That’s how he knew where Gwen’s got to.’

  ‘No. That’s not right.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Let me get this straight. OK. So Owen said, this morning, that Aunt Gwen wanted to see him. You weren’t downstairs yet, but trust me, he did. He said Caleb had brought him a message from her. Yeah? You heard that bit, remember? Caleb said she’d asked him to take a message to Owen. Said he’d had to wander all over looking for him.’

  ‘I don’t . . .’

  ‘All right. This is it. Aunt Gwen knew Owen wasn’t going to be at home.’

  Marina looked blank.

  ‘She knew. She asked Horace about it, remember? Loads of times. Whether this meeting was at lunchtime. I’m sure Horace said something about her asking whether he’d be there. Owen. So she knew Owen wouldn’t be at home, but she asked Caleb to take him a message anyway. That’s the point. When did he go yesterday?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Caleb. He went to find Reverend Jeffrey, yeah? When did he go?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Roughly. Morning? Afternoon?’

  ‘Well . . . late in the morning, I suppose.’

  ‘See? Lunchtime. And when did he get back?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know! I don’t understand why you’re asking me!’

  ‘Marina, please. This is the last question, I promise. Then we’ll go. We’ll tell your dad what’s happened.’

  ‘What do you mean, happened?’

  ‘Please. When did he get back? Do you know?’

  ‘No. No. Well, he was away a little while. I helped Daddy with some pruning and he still wasn’t back when we finished. Daddy was wondering why it was taking him so long.’

  ‘Was he? Well, we know why.’

  She just stared at him, leaning over the landing, mute dismay written all over her elfin face.

  ‘Look. It was because Reverend Jeffrey wasn’t at home, where Caleb would have expected to find him. He said so this morning, Owen did. He was at this meeting, the one Horace was talking about, the one Auntie Gwen kept asking him about. So Caleb had to spend ages looking for him. And Auntie Gwen knew. That’s the point.’ He thought he saw a glimmer of understanding in her eyes. ‘She had a plan.’

  Marina echoed him in a whisper, ‘A plan?’

  ‘She knew Caleb would be out for a while. That’s why she sent him with the message. So he’d be gone for a bit. That’s why.’

  After a long pause Marina said, ‘Why would she do that?’

  Gav remembered that he’d promised not to ask her another question. It seemed like a good moment to keep a promise, so he thought carefully before answering. ‘You told me Caleb knows when people are here.’

  He remembered Tristram Uren asking, Do you know when she left, Caleb? Caleb’s answer: ’fore dark yesterday . . . Did you see her go? . . . No.

  Marina nodded.

  ‘Aunt Gwen wanted him to leave so she could go somewhere without him knowing about it. Somewhere around here. And once he was gone, she came in this room. Through that door up there. She came down the steps. We saw the scuffing in the dust. She got down here and she opened that drawer. She knew which one to open. She wrote down the name on the label, Joshua Acres. I know she did. I saw the piece of paper. It’s up at her house. Somehow she found out that’s where the key was.’ Key chap Joshua Acres. ‘Nothing’s in there now. She took it and she went to the chapel, while Caleb was away. She must have planned it all out. Remember Horace said she was totally excited about something? She had an idea. She went there and then something happened.’

  ‘Caleb said she’s not here.’

  ‘I know he did.’ He tried not to shout at her, though her useless faith in Caleb was driving him mad. ‘I know. So after she went there she left. Or maybe she didn’t get there, maybe she took the key and then did something else with it. I don’t know what happened, all right? But I do know she was supposed to meet my train. Yesterday evening, around half past four, she was supposed to be in Truro at the station. She didn’t just forget. I never really believed that. And she didn’t get there. So something must have happened in between. Between her sending Caleb off about lunchtime yesterday and coming right here and opening that drawer and taking the key and unbarring the door over there and going out, and the evening when it got dark and she was supposed to pick me up. She never even left to go to the station ’cos she’d have taken her car. It’s got to be something at this chapel place.’

  He’d tried his very best to keep talking as calmly and reasonably as he could, but even so she looked like she was about to cry. ‘I don’t . . .’ she began.

  ‘OK. It’s OK. Let’s just go tell your dad, all right? All I have to do is tell him that drawer’s empty. He’ll know if that’s where he put the key. Yeah? That’s all we have to do. Then he can sort it out and we’ll find out what happened to Aunt Gwen. Everything’ll be OK.’

  ‘All right,’ she said, plainly not reassured at all. ‘Let’s go.’

  Now it was Gavin’s turn to feel nervous. Having promised to do the talking, he wasn’t at all sure how easy it would be to explain any of this to Mr Uren. Still, if it would make Marina feel better, he’d find a way.

  But Mr Uren wasn’t in his study.

  The book he’d been reading was still there, open and face down on a table beside a deep armchair. The study was a corner room, much more cosily furnished than the rest of the house, almost like a normal if rustic living room, with a scattering of objects and pictures that for a change weren’t centuries old.

  Marina ran upstairs, calling. She came back in less than a minute.

  ‘He’s gone out. His coat’s not hanging up.’

  Gav felt guilty relief. He was increasingly sure that someone had done a thing they weren’t supposed to. He had a feeling he was getting more and more involved in it without having the faintest idea what it was. His name had been at the bottom of that scribbled list, after all. Capital letters, double underlined. He wished he could remember the rest of it. The name Jess? It would be just like Auntie Gwen to have got some totally loopy idea and decided to involve him in it and spoil his week. The longer he could put off having to tell Mr Uren about it, the better.

  ‘What should we do?’

  Gav stared out towards the sea, thinking about his aunt. She might be a paid-up full-time weirdo, but at least he knew she’d have listened to him, without scorn, without anger. She didn’t do scorn or anger. And he knew how eager she would be to tell him whatever it was he didn’t understand about Pendurra and Marina and everything else.

  ‘This chapel . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Where is it exactly?’

  ‘Down in the woods there.’ She waved at the dark band of trees filling the view between the open field below the house and the sea.

  ‘We should go look.’

  ‘What? Now?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He made sure she was looking at him. ‘I know that’s where she went. I’m totally certain. Look, what if she had some kind of accident? Maybe, I don’t know, she got stuck there somehow.’

  ‘But Caleb said she isn’t—’

  ‘For God’s sake, will you please stop saying that?’ She shrivelled. ‘All right. All right, sorry. I don’t know, OK? But that’s defi
nitely where she went, definitely. I need to go see if she’s OK, and you need to come with me to show me where it is.’

  ‘We told Daddy we’d stay here,’ she whispered.

  ‘And he told us he was going to sit and read.’

  He shouldn’t have said that. The notion of being lied to by her father was obviously so apocalyptically distressing to her that it robbed her of speech altogether. ‘Look,’ he went on quickly, ‘we’re the only ones who know the key’s missing. You told me yourself this chapel’s supposed to be kept locked, yeah? And we’re also the only ones who know that’s where Aunt Gwen went. Your dad might not be back for hours. It’ll get dark. I’ve got to go and at least check it out. If you want to stay here, I’ll find it on my own.’

  ‘This is horrible. I don’t like it. This isn’t how things usually are.’

  ‘Yeah. Weird stuff tends to follow me around. Sorry.’ He tried to smile.

  ‘It does . . . it does make sense to make sure the chapel’s locked.’

  He seized on the hint of encouragement. ‘Good point.’

  ‘Maybe that’s where Daddy went,’ she said. He decided this would be a good time to start towards the hallway and the front door. She trailed along behind him like a reluctant puppy.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘But I’m not sure—’

  ‘How far is it?’

  ‘What? Oh . . . only a few minutes’ walk.’

  ‘See? So we’ll check it out quickly and then we come right back. OK?’

  She nodded unhappily. ‘OK.’

  He waited while she pulled on her mud-slicked shoes, then pushed open the burly door. Somehow it felt almost as murky outside the house as in.

  ‘Round this side,’ Marina said, stepping out, taking charge, wanting to get it over with quickly.

  She set off through the garden again. At its far end, where it met the encircling woods, a morass of sticks had buried a wall, except where a gap under them revealed an iron gate. She wrestled it open as if it was made of lead and hurried out into the field of long grass that sloped away in front of the house. Gav followed her along its edge down a path of flattened blades marbled with fallen leaves. The tussocks beside it were still beaded with last night’s rain, the air too chill to dry it and the sun nowhere to be seen. The slope of the field steepened as they left the house behind. Between them and the horizon white shapes wove among black: seagulls, flying higher than the crows, banking towards the sea.

  Marina was subdued. She said nothing at all until they reached the bottom of the field, where a gap in the trees marked a track leading in under the canopy.

  ‘This way.’

  He hesitated before following her out of the light. There was no obvious reason to be frightened. He shoved his hands in his pockets and told himself not to be stupid. The strip of woodland they’d entered couldn’t be all that wide. Looking out of the window at the bottom of the stairs, he’d seen open land beyond, and the river not far below. Yet from the inside it felt like stepping into a labyrinth of bark and moss and shadow.

  Before long they reached a point where the path branched. There was a kind of bridge, just two planks of wood embedded in the mud. A trickle of water ran beneath it. One route followed the streamlet down to the left. ‘The river’s that way,’ Marina told him, and his heart leaped at the prospect of getting out from the cover of the twisting rain-blackened branches, but she led on the other way.

  They’d gone only a minute further when a noise like a pulse of wind passed over them. Instinctively, Gav looked up. The trees had not so much as shivered, but above them was a strange movement like the shadow of a small dark cloud blowing swiftly past.

  ‘What was that?’

  There was no sun to cast shadows. The clouds were unbroken pencil grey.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That noise.’

  ‘Wasn’t it just the wind?’

  ‘There’s no wind. I thought I saw . . .’

  She followed his gaze up into the motionless crowns of the trees. ‘A flock of birds?’

  ‘Maybe, but . . . big.’

  ‘The rooks sometimes fly together.’

  He shrugged, trying very hard to ignore the inexplicable tightness clutching his back and shoulders and guts. He’d have suggested they turn round and go home except for the prospect of trying to explain to Marina why he’d changed his mind. ‘Never mind. We nearly there?’

  ‘Yes, very nearly. Just up the path a little. Wait.’

  ‘What?’

  She raised a hand and stood very still, so he did the same, holding his breath.

  Then he heard it too.

  It was muffled and faraway. It was the kind of oddly sourceless sound you might hear from a very high window in a quiet street, the sash open just a couple of inches and a radio on in the room inside, or someone practising an instrument. Except that in this case the instrument was a crystal harp, or the radio was tuned to the melody of the spheres.

  ‘Listen!’ Marina whispered.

  Or it was a sound blown through an invisible window from another world, the land of lost enchantment. The voice that sang was untouched by earth, like a star fallen in among the trees, calling to its impossibly remote kin.

  Marina’s eyes were shining. ‘Just like Horace said! Come on!’

  But now, finally, Gavin knew something was happening that was not like anything he had known before. The odd atmosphere in the house, Auntie Gwen’s absence, Marina and her peculiar conversation – all these things were strange to him the way everything was strange to him. Being with her had made him accept them. This was her world. If she wasn’t worried about it, why should he be? But now, rooted to the spot by his sudden dread, watching her hurry on up the path, he saw, all at once, that her innocence was fragile and terrible. She feared nothing because she’d never had anything to fear. She knew nothing because she’d never discovered how ignorant she was.

  Something was wrong.

  He wasn’t imagining it. An impossible shadow had flown over the wood, and now there was distant singing under the branches, inhumanly beautiful.

  It begins.

  Come.

  ‘Marina!’

  She stopped for a second, twenty paces ahead, diminutive under the great contorted trees. ‘Isn’t it lovely? Come on!’

  ‘Marina, wait!’ He stumbled after her, but her vacillation was dispelled. She was the eager child again, excited about showing him her world, which she understood no better than he did. She pointed ahead.

  ‘There it is, you can see it now. Hurry up!’

  ‘Marina, hang on.’

  He’d crested a small rise and the trickling stream had come back into sight. Footway and waterway clambered a short distance together, ascending to a hollow scooped out of the hillside. She was already making her way lightly up the steeper slope.

  ‘Wait!’

  ‘It’s just up here,’ she called, without turning round. He scrambled after her until he could see ahead.

  Some thorny-looking growth overwhelmed the bank of earth at the back of the hollow. Half buried in the vegetation, overhung by the same rough-barked knotty trees that dominated the woods, was a roundish building of worn stone with a pitched roof. There were smaller trees screening it in front, dark straggly evergreens. It looked old, lost, silent, secreted away in woods that had grown and fallen and regrown many times in its history, a relic of some pious impulse that had been dead for centuries. Meant to stay undisturbed, like a tomb. The track led nowhere else; the tangled undergrowth beyond was impassable.

  Marina had got ahead and wouldn’t wait for him. ‘Come and look! It sounded like it came from here somewhere.’

  Her peculiar shoes slipped and slid on leaves and earth wet from the night’s downpour, but she was quick, so that when Gav saw something night-dark and cruel-faced and impossible uncurl itself from behind the stone parapet above the chapel door and flit down out of sight, he knew he’d left it too late to stop her. He stumbled forward, trying to shout a wa
rning, but horror had stopped his throat. She was concentrating on keeping her footing and hadn’t looked up, or back, and he was desperately clumsy on the muddy track. There was a rush of sudden noise all above them: a flight of crows shaking loose from the branches, croaking all together as they sped up towards the light. ‘What?’ he heard her say, and she turned back for a moment to see him righting himself, but before he could even catch his breath, ‘Oh look!’ she called excitedly. ‘The door’s open!’

  She had reached the clump of trees in front of the building.

  ‘Stop,’ he heard himself yell. ‘Don’t—’

  Too late. She was no longer listening. She was peering round the open door into the chapel.

  All the excitement drained out of her in an instant.

  Gav saw her mouth one small word, swallowed by the hiss of the woods: ‘Gwenny?’

  She had taken three hesitant steps forward by the time Gavin scrambled and panted his way to where she stood. Without thinking, he grabbed her hand to pull her away. As he did so, his eyes strayed inside the door and he too froze.

  It was the light that stopped him. It rippled and burned dim, like a sunset seen through water. The rest of the interior was night-black. The unearthly radiance glowed around a pool set in the floor, turning the water to dusky fire.

  Silhouetted against that light, a thin woman knelt beside the pool. She was a black outline. The dark concealed her.

  Two things only caught the gleam and shone. Beside the pool, close to where the woman’s hand knuckled on the stone floor, the metal clasp of a small box was glinting, and looped onto a slender silver chain, hanging down from her neck as she crouched forward, something small and darkly glossy reflected tiny star-specks into Gav’s unblinking eyes.

  His mind had gone blank. The earth under him and the air around him, the damp woods and the winter sky, none of it had any hold on him any more. The singing had stopped.