by Susan Cooper
“Is she really all right?”
“She’ll be fine, the doctor says. It was a sprain, not a broken leg. She did knock herself out, though, so she has to rest for a week or two. But she’s as cheerful as can be, you’ll see.”
Will looked up the drive. Paul, Merriman, and his father were talking and laughing together. He thought perhaps his father had decided that Lyon the butler was a good chap after all, not merely a manorial prop.
Mary said, “Sorry about you getting lost in the wood. It was all my fault. You and Paul must have been very close behind me actually. Good job Old George ended up knowing where everyone was. Poor Paul, worrying about both of us being lost, instead of just me.” She giggled, then tried to look penitent, without great effort.
“Will!” Paul swung away from the group, excited, running towards them. “Just look! Miss Greythorne calls it a permanent loan, bless her — look!” His face was flushed with pleasure. He held out the bundle Merriman had been carrying, now open, and Will saw lying on it the old flute from the Manor.
Feeling his face break into a long, slow smile, he looked up at Merriman. The dark eyes looked down at him gravely, and Merriman held out the second package. “This, the Lady of the Manor sent for you.”
Will opened it. Inside lay a small hunting horn, gleaming, thin with age. His gaze flicked more briefly to Merriman, and down again.
Mary hopped about, giggling. “Go on, Will, blow it. You could make a noise all the way to Windsor. Go on!”
“Later,” Will said. “I have to learn how. Will you thank her for me very much?” he said to Merriman.
Merriman inclined his head. “Now I must go,” he said.
Roger Stanton said, “I can’t tell you how grateful we’ve been for all your help. With everything, through this mad weather — and the children — you really have been most tremendously —” he lost his words, but thrust out his arm and pumped Merriman’s hand up and down with such warmth that Will thought he would never stop.
The craggy, fierce-carved face softened; Merriman looked pleased and a little surprised. He smiled and nodded, but said nothing. Paul shook hands with him, and Mary. Then Will’s hand was in the strong grasp, and there was a quick pressure and a brief intent look from the deep, dark eyes. Merriman said, “Au revoir, Will.”
He raised his hand to them all and strode off down the Lane. Will drifted after him. Mary said, skipping at his side, “Did you hear the wild geese last night?”
“Geese?” Will said gruffly. He was not really listening. “Geese? In all that storm?”
“What storm?” said Mary, and went on before he could blink. “Wild geese, there must have been thousands of them. Migrating, I suppose. We didn’t see them — there was just this gorgeous noise, first of all a lot of cackling from those daft rooks in the wood, and then a long, long sort of yelping noise across the sky, very high up. It was thrilling.”
“Yes,” said Will. “Yes, it must have been.”
“I don’t think you’re more than half awake,” Mary said in disgust, and she went hopping ahead to the end of the driveway. Then she stopped suddenly and stood very still. “My goodness! Will! Look!”
She was peering at something behind a tree, hidden by the remnants of a snowbank. Will came to look, and saw, lying among the wet undergrowth, the great carnival head with the eyes of an owl, the face of a man, the antlers of a deer. He stared and stared without a word in his throat. The head was crisp and bright and dry, as it had always been and always would be. It looked like the outline of Herne the Hunter that he had seen against the sky, and yet not like.
Still he stared, and said nothing.
“Well, I never,” said Mary brightly. “Aren’t you lucky it got stuck there? Mum will be pleased. She was awake by then, it was when the floods came up all of a sudden. You weren’t there of course; the water came in all over the ground floor and quite a lot of things got washed out of the living-room before we realised. That head was one of them — Mum was all upset because she knew you’d be. Well, look at that, fancy that —”
She peered closer at the head, still prattling gaily, but Will was no longer listening. The head lay very close to the garden wall, which was still buried in snow but beginning to break through the drifts at either side. And on the drift at the outer edge, covering the verge of the road and overhanging the running stream in the gutter, there were a number of marks. They were hoofprints, made by a horse stopping and pivoting and leaping away over the snow. But none of them was in the shape of a horseshoe. They were circles quartered by a cross: the prints of the shoes that John Wayland Smith, once at the beginning, had put on the white mare of the Light.
Will looked at the prints, and at the carnival head, and swallowed hard. He walked a few paces to the end of the driveway and looked down Huntercombe Lane; he could see Merriman’s back still, as the tall, dark-clad figure strode away. And then his hair prickled and his pulses stood still, for from behind him came a sound sweeter than seemed possible in the raw air of the cold grey morning. It was the soft, beautiful yearning tone of the old flute from the Manor; Paul, irresistibly drawn, must have put the instrument together to try it out. He was playing “Greensleeves” once more. The eerie, enchanted lilt floated out through the morning on the still air; Will saw Merriman raise his wild white head as he heard it, though he did not break his stride.
As he looked down the road still, with the music singing in his ears, Will saw that out beyond Merriman the trees and the mist and the stretch of the road were shaking, shivering, in a way that he knew well. And then gradually, out there, he saw the great Doors take shape. There they stood, as he had seen them on the open hillside and in the Manor: the tall carved doors that led out of Time, standing alone and upright in the Old Way that was known now as Huntercombe Lane. Very slowly, they began to open. Somewhere behind Will the music of “Greensleeves” broke off, with a laugh and some muffled words from Paul; but there was no break in the music that was in Will’s head, for now it had changed into that haunting, bell-like phrase that came always with the opening of the Doors or any great change that might alter the lives of the Old Ones. Will clenched his fists as he listened, yearning towards the sweet beckoning sound that was the space between waking and dreaming, yesterday and tomorrow, memory and imagining. It floated lovingly in his mind, then gradually grew distant, fading, as out on the Old Way Merriman’s tall figure, swirled round again now by a blue cloak, passed through the open Doors. Behind him, the towering slabs of heavy carved oak swung slowly together, together, until silently they shut. Then as the last echo of the enchanted music died, they disappeared.
And in a great blaze of yellow-white light, the sun rose over Hunter’s Combe and the valley of the Thames.
* * *
Here ends THE DARK IS RISING, second book of the sequence by the same name. The first book was called OVER SEA, UNDER STONE. The third book will be called GREENWITCH. There will be five books.
• SUSAN COOPER •
SUSAN COOPER is best known for her acclaimed sequence of fantasy novels known as The Dark Is Rising which includes OVER SEA, UNDER STONE, THE DARK IS RISING (1974 Newbery Honor book); GREENWITCH; THE GREY KING (1976 Newbery Award book); and SILVER ON THE TREE. Her novels for young readers also include SEAWARD and DAWN OF FEAR. She has written three books for younger children as well: THE SILVER COW, THE SELKIE GIRL, and TAM LIN, all illustrated by Warwick Hutton. In collaboration with actor Hume Cronyn, she wrote the Broadway play Foxfire and — for Jane Fonda — the television film The Dollmaker, for which they received the Humanitas Prize in 1985. Born in Buckinghamshire, England, Susan Cooper moved to the United States in 1963 and now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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