When the panic faded, he slowed to a walk again, ashamed at his own reaction. Whatever was happening, the rational, methodical, patient mindset he had developed as an adult was what he needed now, not the knee-jerk terror of a teenager in a horror film.
The sun withdrew its last yellow-orange tendrils, and darkness rolled in behind it. As John's eyes struggled to adjust to the rapid change of light, he caught sight of something man-made ahead and quickened his pace. When he got closer, he put his hands on his knees and stared in disbelief.
He was looking at a gate. Next to it was a metal postbox. Sally Cottage.
Shaking his head, and taking long, slow breaths, he opened the gate. In the semi-darkness, the cottage looked sinister and withdrawn, its windows like eyes, its door a gaping mouth.
He moved forward, acknowledging his fear, but overriding it. He visualised himself reaching the door, turning the handle and walking in.
As his hand reached out for the door handle, the light changed, a glow illuminating the small garden.
He stepped backwards and looked up. The light was on in Ash's bedroom. The master bedroom, he corrected himself, not Ash's bedroom.
As he looked up, shadows flitted across the window as if someone were moving around.
John went inside.
Twenty
Closing the door behind him, John stood for a moment, listening. The cottage was silent. The bedroom above, even back when it was carpeted, had been a soundstage of creaks and groans from the old floorboards. Now, stripped back to floorboards, curtains gone and all soft furnishings removed, every sound echoed around the cottage.
Silence. Or, rather, the usual array of tiny noises from inside and out. John took a few steps of his own, and the floor creaked below his feet. He stopped and listened again. Still nothing, but the glow from above spilled onto the landing. The light hadn't been on when he'd first seen the cottage from the gate. He knew the most likely reason was faulty wiring. Yes. It must be faulty wiring.
His watch, and phone, now agreed that it was 11:17pm. Another two-and-a-half hours lost in the last ten minutes.
With a show of bravado he didn't feel, he squared his shoulders, turned, and crossed the room to the stairs. The light was stronger now, and the flickering was not that of a faulty bulb, but something passing in front of it.
John gripped the bannister. He found he was watching his actions at a remove as if through the lens of a camera. He wondered if this was how the brave gathered their courage, by acting as if they were observing someone else. As he climbed the stairs, he knew that if this were a movie, the score would now introduce an ominous wash of low strings, discordant and unnerving.
At the top of the staircase, he forced himself to drop his distancing tactics. The door to the bedroom was half open. Now he was closer, he could hear muffled sounds. Music. There was something familiar about it, a rhythmic pulse filtered of any frequencies that made it recognisable.
He put his hand on the door, leaned forward, and pushed it wide open.
The instant his foot touched the floor, the sound changed into the chorus of Don't You Want Me, by The Human League. It was loud, but other sounds were louder. Laughing and shouted conversations sprung up around him.
The room had changed. It was at least double the size. The light came from a single standard lamp in the corner. He was standing on a carpet. On the far side of the room was a staircase. People occupied every step, some in earnest conversations, some kissing in the desperate way only the young or drunk do, others waiting to get to the bathroom.
John had walked into a party. Not just any party. He looked to his left and saw, through a serving hatch in the wall, a big kitchen. Every surface was covered in bottles, some empty and others full. The full ones were being passed through the hatch to a cluster of eager girls who handed them round and drank straight from the bottle.
Blue Nun, thought John. Yegods.
He walked to the serving hatch and someone passed him some beers. Then he was pushing through a mass of dancing bodies, holding three bottles over his head. He hadn't decided to do it, but he had lost all agency. His body was no longer his own to control.
Another John was in charge now. John knew him well because it was his twenty-year-old self. He remembered this party, he remembered this song, and he remembered the next ten minutes.
This was his friend Simon Hodge's house in Clifton. Or, rather, Simon's parents' house. They were in Spain and had left their student son in charge of a six-bedroom home and an extensive wine cellar. Simon, John remembered as he reached the knot of bobbing figures around the record player, died in a car crash the year after graduating.
It was 1986, and he was minutes away from seeing Ash for the first time.
"Johnny! You're the man!"
Chris grabbed two of the bottles, handing one to Alison. They were all English students. Alison was the brightest of the three. Chris was loud and funny, his puppy-like energy so unlike Alison's quiet intensity it was inevitable they would end up together. John was the third wheel, but he didn't feel awkward. Well, no more than usual. He and Alison shared shyness, a love of Blake's poetry, and a worldview which gravitated towards the pessimistic. Chris had announced he and John would be friends the first day of freshers' week, and it had been easy to go along with him. John knew, when they parted company the following year, Chris would promise to stay in touch but wouldn't, and that was fine.
"Cheers!"
They drank, the cold beer tasteless but refreshing.
John knew he should, as Chris put it, be 'scoping the room for birds'. John had sworn he would speak to a girl tonight. As plans go, it had seemed simple and unambitious while he'd been rolling up his jacket sleeves and putting borrowed mousse in his hair. Now he was in a room full of women, it was impossible. John could only speak coherently to a woman he found attractive if one of two conditions were met:
1) they were on the other end of a phone, or
2) he was very drunk.
At twenty years old, John was still a virgin.
Two burly, rugby-playing lads had commandeered the record player. The sleeve on the top of the pile was Two Tribes by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. John was, by his own admission, a terrible dancer, which was another obstacle to his romantic ambitions. He tried to avoid it whenever possible, but there was something about the groovy pomposity of Two Tribes that made him want to move his body around. Unfortunately, he did this in a jerky, uncontrolled way guaranteed to amuse anyone far enough away not to be hit by one of his flailing limbs.
He took another sip of beer, concluding that he wasn't anywhere near drunk enough to make a fool of himself. Then the DJ tag team dropped the needle, the orchestral opening began, and he found his fingers twitching against the cold bottle. Before he knew it, his head was bobbing in anticipation of the guitar riff.
Chris looked at him. He had witnessed John's dancing skills on previous occasions.
"Mate," he said, an urgent note of caution in his voice, "you're not thinking what I think you're thinking, are you? Tell me you're not. No, no, no, John... MATE!"
Too late. Handing Alison his beer, John made his way into the mass of bodies in the centre of the room. He was bouncing on his toes as he went, and the nearest knot of girls parted to let him through, exchanging glances and giggling.
John shut his eyes. His shoulders moved, then his elbows shot out as if he was being puppeteered by someone having a seizure. The first line of the song was coming up, and he took a lungful of air, ready to sing along.
At the point when the lyric kicked in, he opened his eyes for a second, the bodies between him and the door parted, and he saw her.
She was wearing... something, John assumed, otherwise she would have provoked more of a reaction from those nearer to the door. But he didn't notice any clothes. That wasn't to say she was naked, just that—had you pinned him down the next day and asked him to describe her, which is precisely what Chris did—John would not have been able to recall any deta
ils about her clothing. Her face, though, was another matter. He was sure he stared at it for ten minutes straight, but when he found himself standing inches away from her, Frankie still hadn't finished the first chorus.
If there was a part of the brain dedicated to lust, that part had gone from zero to a hundred percent in milliseconds and had told the rest of his cerebrum to take the night off.
She had long auburn hair, thick, braided, a few strands falling across her face. Dark-green eyes. A strong face, direct, uncompromising.
John had always been adamant he didn't have a 'type' when it came to women. To his friends, he claimed he would be delighted with anyone intelligent, awake, and facing in his direction. In private, however, his fantasies had gravitated towards an unfashionable Rubens-esque ideal. If the rest of his prefrontal cortex had still been allowed a say, John might have thought, hang on... pre-Raphaelite face, body by Rubens - you're not worried that this woman looks pretty much exactly what you imagine when your hands are down your pants?
John took his eyes off her for a moment as someone banged on the window. When he looked back, the woman had gone.
He blinked in confusion, looking from left to right. She wasn't there.
"No," he whispered, only now noticing his erection and moving his hands to cover the evidence of his straining jeans.
He turned his head to scan the rest of the room, despite knowing there was no way she could have got past him unnoticed.
That was when she'd come up behind him and, standing on tiptoe, her breasts pushed against his back, said, "If I asked you to come home with me, would you do it?"
The resumption of activity in his jeans made him gasp, and he didn't answer immediately. Just tipsy enough to be brave, and unbelievably horny, he put one hand behind him. Her fingers interlaced with his, then she traced her thumbnail across his palm, and he moaned.
Did I just moan? he thought, but out loud, he said, "Yes."
The moment after John said "yes" to his fantasy woman at the party, the house, music, Chris, Alison, and another fifty drunk students vanished, along with Clifton itself.
The woman in front of him opened a high, iron gate. He didn't even know her name. When should he ask her what her name was?
"Ash," she said, and he wondered if she could read his mind, before realising he had spoken out loud.
"Um, right, Ash. Um. Good." She stopped walking in front of the cottage door. There was a key in her hand. John was still confused about what she was wearing. He made an effort to pay attention to her clothes, but as soon as he did, he forgot why and imagined her naked. Why was she looking at him like that? Had she changed her mind?
"No, I haven't," she said. Still speaking my thoughts out loud, then? Smooth. He froze, wondering if he had said that out loud too. She gave no sign of having heard it, but she hadn't unlocked the door.
"Um..?" he said.
"Do you have a name? If not, I'm calling you Um."
"A name? Yes, yes, I do, yes."
Still looking at him.
Shit.
"John, John, it's John. John. That's my John. Name."
"Well, John, come in."
Another missing piece of time, and he was sitting on the biggest bed he had ever seen in his life, a Gothic nightmare made of iron. Ash was in the bathroom. He wasn't sure whether he should get undressed, or if that would be too forward. But Ash had taken him up to the bedroom, told him she wouldn't be long. And she'd kissed him before leaving the room, the kind of kiss that suggested a hunger he doubted he'd be able to satisfy, but was prepared to try very hard to do so. She wanted sex. With him. Tonight. Here. He was sure of it.
He'd already taken his jacket off and hung it on the back of a chair. Now he kicked off his trousers. He was keenly aware of how unsexy men were considered to look in socks, so he peeled them off. He pulled his T-shirt over his head. Leaning back, propped up on one elbow, he tried to assume the posture of a man of the world, whatever that was. He raised one eyebrow, thought of Roger Moore, and lowered it again.
If he was too awkward or over-keen, might Ash realise he was a virgin, and change her mind?
Perhaps he shouldn't have taken his clothes off. What if she wanted to seduce him, undress him? Panicked by the idea, he leapt off the bed and started to get dressed as fast as possible. When Ash opened the door of the bedroom, he had one leg in his trousers, a sock in each hand, and was attempting to squeeze his head through the arm of his T-shirt.
"Take those clothes off, John."
He pulled his head back out of the T-shirt, his hair sticking out in every direction.
John straightened up, dropping the socks and hitting the lantern above with the back of his head. It swung wildly, giving the unlikely scene an unreal quality.
Ash was naked. She was naked, and she was walking towards him. She was naked, and she was walking towards him, and she was pulling his trousers off, then his underpants. She was naked, and she was walking towards him, and she was in front of him, and she was pulling his trousers and his underpants down, and she was taking his hand and, while she leaned up to kiss him, she was putting it between her legs, and he knew then it was going to happen, and every part of his brain not involved with receiving, or giving, pleasure, shut down.
"Is this your first time?" Grammatically, that was a question, but the way she said it left John in no doubt that she knew the answer. She was breathing heavily, looking at him with such anticipation he couldn't believe she was looking at the same face he saw in the mirror every morning - bland, uninteresting, average. Then her long fingers found his penis, she pushed him back onto the bed, and he stopped thinking.
Twenty-One
Evie,
If you have read this far, if you have sung a word of power, then you may be more frightened than excited now. You'd need to be unintelligent not to be frightened, and you struck me as a bright girl, even when you were tiny.
Your world, the world you lived in before you read this, is gone. Forever. There can be no bringing it back, but you must continue to live in it. The rules and expectations of society no longer apply to you, but it is essential that you behave as if they do.
We are no better than anyone else. That's an easy thing to say. You might even think you mean it when you say it. But, and you must never forget this, Evie, it's true. We are more powerful, but we are no better.
Soon, I will be dead. One day—a very long time in the future, I hope—you will die, too. But the power carried by our ancestors and descendants will continue. Have you ever waded into a shallow stream and made a dam with the stones you found there? You can change the course of the water for a while. But once you have gone, someone else can move stones and alter the course you constructed. Even if no one ever came, the force of the water would eventually dislodge your stones, and find its own course again. Magic is a stream, Evie. We do not know where it comes from, we only know where to find it. We can move some stones around, that's all. The stream continues long after we are back in the soil.
Evie, there will always be a temptation for women born into the Three to confuse the use of power with power itself. Once, hundreds of years ago, this led to open hostility in the Blurred Lands. The peace between Earth and the other realms hung in the balance. After a bloody and costly campaign, a rogue Adept was killed. That line of the Three was exiled, and the Wardens found another line to take their place. All power can be dangerous, but magic is the most insidious and dangerous of all. Never forget it. Look to your family, Evie. Remember who you are, think on your mortality, and use your power wisely.
Forgive the dire warnings, but I need to teach you something you mustn't try before you are ready. Promise me. If you are reading this before you reach maturity, before you... oh dammit, I'm going to have to stop being so old-fashioned. If you are reading this before you've started your periods, then you must promise me you will not try what I am about to describe. Our control over magic is linked to the cycle of life and death that takes place in our own bodies eve
ry month. What I have taught you so far can be learned by any female with a gift for magic and the right training. But what you will learn now is only possible for Adepts, or those training to be Adepts.
I'm deadly serious about this, Evie. What I'm about to tell you opens the door to the seven realms. You must not open this door until you are ready. Promise? Good. Then I will tell you how to access the Between.
Twenty-Two
The green-filtered sunlight was already streaming through the window when John woke up. He was still dressed. And he wasn't on the sofa. He sat up on the iron bed. The walls were magnolia, the floorboards covered in sheets. The bare lightbulb hung above him.
He stumbled to the bathroom and washed, splashing cold water on his face.
Downstairs, he made tea and toast. The loaf of bread, which he knew he'd used the day before to make a sandwich, was unopened. The butter was untouched as was the marmalade. In the fridge, the milk was full, and the packet of cheese had all eight slices again.
He checked his phone. The battery was dead, despite being plugged in. He switched the plug off and on a few times. Nothing.
John took his tea outside, leaving the back door open while he stood on the wet grass in bare feet, watching the heat of the morning sun lift the dew.
He scratched his crotch. John had already given his genitals a good check upstairs. His whole body, in fact. He was still fifty-one, not twenty, and it was clear he hadn't indulged in a night of vigorous sexual intercourse. Nights like that left physical evidence, but he wasn't sore, and his balls didn't feel as if someone had used them for a table-tennis match.
It had just been a dream. A memory. Except it hadn't been that at all.
He heard distant birdsong. There was no sound of traffic from the nearby road and, despite a clear sky, there was no evidence of any planes, no contrails interrupting the solid blueness. John was certain that, if he were to open the back gate and walk, he would end up back where he started again. There was a low buzz of dread at the top of his spine where instincts evolved over millennia were telling him he was not just alone, he was more alone than any human ever.
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