Comet Weather

by Liz Williams

  “But, Mum –”

  “Go!” Alys stood up. The hunter saw her at once. He made a sound like a crow, a harsh bark. Echoes came from across the beechwood. The hunter began to bound over the ground, the streamers from his hat ringed him with shadows. Luna wasn’t going to leave her mother. She stepped in front of Alys, shrieking abuse. Moth barked, sharp and high. The hunter was upon her, she saw his hand, long black claws shining as if oiled and when he opened his mouth his teeth were sharp needles and his breath was charnel-sweet. Luna flung her arm in front of her face as the dog raced forwards, growling. She could hear Alys shouting behind her but then the hunter was plucked up into the air and there was a blinding flash of whiteness. The beechwood lit up. Luna felt a strange cool heat on her face and when the dazzle faded and she could make it out, she saw a white horse, as perfect as a heraldic figure, stamping the ground in front of her. On its back, perched high and ridiculously like a bundle of rags, sat Ver March.

  Later, they walked the road together. Not the lych path, this time, but the Second Road, the star road. The white mare trotted along it, with Ver still on her back, Luna and Alys on either side, holding the horse’s long mane and Moth running heraldic beside. Bridesmaids flanking a bride, thought Luna, who didn’t normally have much time for weddings.

  “When you went off,” Ver said, from on high, “I thought: I don’t like this. I got a feeling, you see. Something, I said to myself, is coming down the pike. Remember I told you there was some funny stuff on the lych paths?”

  “Yes. You said there were some odd things on it and Sam mentioned it, too. He was speaking to Dark. A friend of my sister’s. He said it was ‘too risky’.”

  “Well, now you know why. So I thought I’d better go and enlist help, so to speak.”

  “She’s a beautiful horse,” said Alys.

  “Well, of course. And where do you think she comes from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think where we are.”

  “Oh!” Luna said. “Of course. The Vale of the White Horse.” She’d seen it many times, this one and its kindred. Cut into the chalk slopes of the Wiltshire downs.

  But the one near Wayland’s Smithy was the oldest, the most mysterious: some people said it was prehistoric. To Luna, who had often seen its curving lines over across the face of the hill, it looked more like a dragon, or even a cat. But the mare, shining with her own faint light like the dappled moonhorse which rocked all by itself in the bedroom at home, was definitely a horse.

  “Is that what you meant by White Horse Country?” she said to Alys.

  “Yes, sort of. But I didn’t mean Wiltshire. This is somewhere else. Like and yet not like.”

  “I owe her a favour now,” said Ver from high on the mare’s back. “And that’s a bit of a problem but I’ll sort it.” She reached down and tapped Alys on the shoulder.

  “Which way did you come up, then?”

  “I’ve been on the run. I started out on the Switch from Dartmoor, and from there I went up to Northumberland, and from there to Cumbria and then back down here.”

  “You didn’t get all the way up, then?”

  “No. I didn’t finish the Switch. In fact, I barely started it. I didn’t know what I was doing. Completely fucking clueless. I knew where the thing I was looking for was to be found, I found it, and I thought that would be it. Like Hell it was.”

  Ver gave a snort of laughter. “Easy to say in hindsight, though: I should have done this, that and the other. Not so simple at the time when you don’t know what you’re walking into. I’d say you’ve done all right.”

  “What was it you were looking for, Mum?” Luna asked. She fingered the thing in her pocket. It felt like stone, but too light: bone, perhaps?

  “I’m not going to talk about it until we’re in a safer place,” Alys said.

  “Best not to draw attention,” Ver agreed. “There’s all manner of snares and traps along the lych paths and this one’s not so perfect either, believe me.”

  Luna looked down. The white chalk beneath her feet was broken by ridges of earth, where tiny white flowers grew, but for a moment, the chalk was transparent as glass and the flowers were stars. An unimaginable darkness lay beneath. She blinked and was once more traversing the quiet Wiltshire ridgeway.

  “There are points along the way, Luna, where you can step onto these old tracks,” Alys said. “Wistman’s Wood is one of those, so is the land around Wayland’s Smithy.”

  “Stone circles?” Luna asked, thinking of Avebury and the great henge to the south of here.

  “Oddly enough, only sometimes. Some of those monuments were built to close a door, not to open one. But there’s so much I don’t know,” Alys sounded frustrated.

  “Lovey, you’ve come to it a bit late,” Ver said. “There’s a lot even I don’t know, coming from that background so to speak, and probably I never will.”

  “Well,” Alys said. “I’ve had some adventures, that’s for sure. But I won’t mind being within four walls for a bit.”

  “While we’re on the subject,” Ver said, “I won’t be coming all the way with you. The mare will go back under her own steam.”

  “Don’t you want to see Sam?” Luna asked, disappointed.

  “I do, but – don’t take this the wrong way – I can’t spend all night at this time of year looking after other people. I’ve got stuff to do. Don’t think I didn’t want to help you out – that was essential. But I’ll make sure you’re safe for the rest of the journey and once you’re back, Sam will know what to do once Alys tells him what she knows. Well, he should, anyway, more or less, even given that he’s a man. It’s always hard to know if they’ve got the right end of the stick, even the best of them.”

  The mare came to an ambling halt. Ver slid down with an ungainly thump.

  “Thank you, my lovely.” She patted the mare’s neck and the horse stood patiently. “Right, this is my stop, as it were. You’ll know where to get off, won’t you?”

  “Yes, I think so,” said Alys. “Nice to meet you, Mrs Fallow. I’m sure we’ll see one another again. Goodbye, doggy.” She bent to pat the lurcher’s head and Moth wagged his tail.

  She shook their hands and stepped from the chalk path. Luna had a glimpse of her fading figure, with the alder grove visible through it, and when she turned back to the path, the mare was no longer there.

  “Come on,” Alys said. “Let’s get home.”

  Bee

  Stella had fallen asleep at the kitchen table. Hardly surprising, thought Bee. It was long past anyone’s bedtime, although she wasn’t sure about Ward. He didn’t precisely appear bright eyed and bushy tailed but he, too, had had a long day. She stood up.

  “Right. Stella needs to go to bed. So do you, Luna. So do you.” She favoured her mother with a stern eye. She had not yet recovered from the shock of walking into the kitchen and finding Alys sitting at the kitchen table as though she’d never been away. Now she knew why cats were really pissed off when you’d come back from a trip. Bee had rehearsed Alys’ homecoming so many times, imagining her relief, her love, the embraces and are-you-all-rights and the where-have-you-beens and now that this had actually happened, she just wanted to turn her back on the bloody woman and ignore her for a day and a half.

  “I don’t feel particularly knackered, actually,” Alys said, irritating Bee further.

  “You might not.” Ward knuckled his eyes. “I suspect it’s an accurate description of the rest of us, however.”

  “My sleep patterns are all over the place,” Alys said. “I suppose it’s a bit like mega jetlag.”

  “I just feel really drained,” said Luna. She sat holding tightly to Sam’s hand. Bee did not yet know how he had reacted to his girlfriend’s rescue attempt, though they had been brought up to speed on recent events.

  “…then Sam’s gran left us and we just walked on, up hill and down dale like Pigling Bland until we came to a landmark I recognised.”

  “What was that, Mum?” Ser
ena asked. “For future reference.”

  “I could see the Hornmoon church steeple with its golden weathercock. In bright sunlight from the road, even though it was night. So we stepped off and there we were in the churchyard, and we just walked home as though we’d been down the pub for the evening. There was Sam, waiting, and clever Bella had made this rather wonderful cake and gone to bed, and so had Nell.”

  “Well,” Ward remarked. “All this is most curious, I must say. I’ve passed into a state beyond astonishment and now I’m going to follow Bella’s example and go to bed as well.” He looked at Serena. “And I’m past shame, too. Are you coming?”

  “What?” said Alys. “Are you two – What happened to Ben?”

  “Good question,” said Serena. She took Ward’s hand. “He buggered off with Dana Stare. We told you about her brother. I haven’t got to Dana yet and I think she can wait till morning, the cow.”

  “Well, it’s nice to see you back in this house,” Alys said graciously to Ward.

  “Thank you. You, too, to put it mildly.”

  “Mum, I don’t care if you’re tired or not. The rest of us are going to bed.” Once she had put aside her unreasonable annoyance, Bee was delighted to see Alys back safe and sound, but she’d had enough of her mother being mysterious about what she’d been doing. For Alys had by no means told them everything. And there was another, unfamiliar emotion lurking in the wings, too, which Bee was too tired to examine right now: doubt. When Alys had disappeared, Bee had been left with no option, or so she believed, other than to become Mooncote’s mistress. That had brought some interesting things in its wake, like Dark, who had not joined them in the kitchen but melted away into the orchard, as was his custom. She couldn’t yet face the thought that Dark might not return, now that Alys had, but there was this lesser worry, too. Bee was by no means sure that she wanted to hand the reins of the house back to her mother and she had a very harsh word with herself about selfishness: after all, they had wanted nothing more, or so they thought, than for Alys Fallow to come back.

  Well, now she had.

  “We’re going to bed, too,” Luna said. She patted Bee on the shoulder as she passed. “Goodnight, Mum.”

  Alys looked up and smiled. “Good night, my darling.”

  “Well,” said Bee, rather more sharply than she intended, “We could all sit here like the Waltons but I, too, am going to turn in.”

  “Yes. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Do not go wandering off.”

  Alys grinned like a small child, caught out. “No, miss. I wasn’t going to, actually. I was going to let everyone have a fair crack at the bathroom and then come up myself. I really could do with a proper wash.”

  Bee kissed her cheek. “Can’t say fairer than that.”

  Later, teeth cleaned and face scrubbed, she lay in the coolness of her bed watching the moon as it sailed through the clouds. She thought back over the long, strange day, her summer powers. If they were hers. Bee remembered lying here with Dark, watching Mars on its journey through the sky, chasing Sirius who chased the Hunter who chased the bull who chased the seven sisters like one of those Russian doll nursery rhymes, embedded. The old woman who swallowed the fly, indeed. She closed her eyes, shutting out the moon and the scudding clouds, and she did not think that she slept, but she must have done so for when she next opened them, surely only a moment later, Dark’s familiar presence was beside her. Bee gave him a big hug.

  “I’m so pleased you’re here! Why didn’t you stay when we got back? Mum’s come home! Luna brought her.”

  “I know.” Dark said into her ear, very quietly, “Mistress Fallow – are you sure that this woman really is your mother?”

  Stella

  Thank God for ibuprofen. And the entire modern age. Stella, showered and in a t-shirt and pyjama bottoms, stood by the window, looking out over the dark garden. She barely remembered going to bed, having apparently fallen asleep at the kitchen table and been sent upstairs by her sister. She had woken, fully clothed and uncomfortable but no longer so exhausted, and had decided that the day needed to be taken in hand. It was around seven, so Stella had occupied the bathroom before anyone else was up and was now about to get dressed. But she wanted a moment of quiet before heading down to the kitchen. She wanted to think.

  Her mother was back. Stella now felt even worse about that argument with Bee. She had known perfectly well the extent to which Bee had liaised with the police, with the organisation that had been the Susy Lamplugh trust, the informal enquiries. And know she knew that even if her sister had taken personal charge of a police investigation, they still wouldn’t have found Alys. Having experienced one of those patchwork layers of time and place for herself, the thought of her mother – resourceful but hardly young – having to face who knows what otherworldly shit made Stella feel physically ill. She told herself that Alys had survived, however, and they had succeeded – Luna, bless her, had succeeded – in bringing her home. It was time to get on with things and the family was still entangled: she somehow did not think Tam Stare was dead, Dana almost certainly wasn’t, and the Behenian stars were still in mysterious orbit around Mooncote. Stella remembered those comments about ‘the cold man’. Who was the cold man? Had the trees meant Tam? That was some sort of winter magic, surely. Or the comet? And who was the star they had rescued?

  Slowly, Stella dressed in a sweatshirt, jeans and one of Bee’s woolly jumpers. It must have reached her sister’s knees: it was long enough on Stella. But it was warm and comforting and she felt like being bundled up. Ibiza’s summery warmth was a distant memory; Mooncote was not terribly well heated.

  She went downstairs, trying to be quiet, but there was a line of light beneath the kitchen door. When Stella pushed it open, she found her mother sitting at the table.

  “Oh, Stella. You’re up early. Want some tea?”

  Alys wore a velvet blue kaftan as a dressing gown and sheepskin slippers; her normal winter attire for bedtime. Apart from her shaved head, which lent her a rather ascetic appearance, she looked exactly as she had at the time she had left. She was reading a letter.

  “Rather nice to get a letter, isn’t it? In this technology-obsessed day and age. Bee’s done her best to weed out all the junk mail. I must say, I didn’t realise I’d been gone for quite so long.”

  “Well, you had,” Stella said. She folded her arms. Alys sighed.

  “Have I really pissed you off?”

  “Pissed off doesn’t really begin to cover it, Mum. Terrified, grief-stricken, baffled…”

  “I promise you, Stella, I didn’t mean to be gone for so long. A week, not more. And it started out well enough, although as I said to Sam’s gran, I now see that I didn’t know what the hell I was getting into, not really. Then I got trapped.”

  “Look,” Stella said. She accepted a mug of tea and sat down. “The trouble is, this doesn’t start with you going off like that, right? Or even with your disappearing. This starts way before that. I can’t speak for anyone else in this family, but I didn’t know, prior to this week, that it was possible to travel through time, that another world – or parts of worlds – exists alongside our own in some kind of Celtic twilight style thing and that you can pop in and out of them as you please, or that there’s so much weird shit going on. I mean, I knew there was some weird shit. Like the ghosts and the stars. But not all this. So how did you know?”

  Alys sighed again. “I know. It’s a lot to take in. I grew up here, with Abraham and your grandmother, and stuff happened then. But it happened from time to time – a ghost on the landing, something slipping out of sight in the garden. That was it. I thought it was normal. My mother was proud of it. I can see her now – she was very tall and willowy, very elegant, a great gardener, and she loved to go and dead head the roses and potter about and I would watch her. She told me stories about the ghosts as she was gardening. It was a fairy-tale childhood and I suppose I wanted to give you girls all that as well, not that I could have stopped
it. Abraham wouldn’t have moved house. I suppose I could have done and I did travel a lot, but I always came back. Anyway, one day, when I was nineteen, I was home for the summer. It was really hot – 1976, everyone remembers it. None of you were born then, obviously, and I hadn’t even met –” here she paused and Stella almost heard the whisper of a name on her lips “– Bee’s father at that point. I was out on the lawn, the sun was setting, and the heat of the sun had brought up all these old patterns in the dry grass of the lawn. Parch marks, they’re called. They show things like old watercourses and where buildings once stood, and I was looking at this square on the grass where the soil had been a different colour. Suddenly there was a building there, a little hut-like thing, and I was in the middle of a maze. I wasn’t in my own time at all. It was like a dream. The sun was high and there was this powerful scent of box from the hedges of the maze. I went into the hut. And there were two girls there, winding silk onto spools.”

  “Did you recognise them?”

  “One was a pretty girl in a rose coloured dress and the other one was in mourning black, with violet ribbons in her black hair and a little pointed face. They both stared at me. There was a tiny bird in a cage and it fluttered up in fright when it saw me. I was going to say something but the girl in mourning opened her mouth and a shower of golden sparks came out. They whirled around my head – they were stinging, like tiny wasps, or needles – and I threw my arm up to protect my face and when I lowered it, there I was on the lawn again. So after that, I started looking into the history of the house. And into other things. I got to know a man in – well, never mind where, later on, after Bee was born, and he told me about the Gipsy Switch and how his family said that you could use it to travel, to other places. Not normal places. So I started to look into it.”

  “Did you ever see the two girls again?”

  “I used to see the one in the rose coloured dress quite a bit and I think Serena has seen her, too. She certainly used to when she was a little girl.”