The Changes Trilogy

by Peter Dickinson

  “We’ll let it soak while we get him down to the barn,” whispered Jonathan. “I’ll come back with a lantern to light it. People will run out if they see the flames now.”

  “Why do you want to burn the stocks?” said Margaret as she picked up her corner of the hurdle.

  “Burn the saw marks. Then people might think he got away by witchcraft.”

  They didn’t talk again as they carried the witch through the alley, along the stretch of road at the bottom, down through the farm gate and yard and along the steep path behind the pigsties to the big barn where the wicked machines stood in their rusting rows. Jonathan seemed to know his way about and led them unstumbling through the blackness to a place where there was a little hut inside the barn. He pushed a door open, and another forgotten smell lifted out into the night, more oily than petroly this time.

  “I think he’ll be safe here,” he said. “There’s a big engine without wheels in the middle; I don’t know what it was for but it drove a big fan and pushed air into those towers outside. Marge, you’ll have to climb up the ivy to my room and get some coverings to keep him warm. Straw, Tim. Straw. Straw. Good boy.”

  Tim bubbled his understanding and slouched out. Jonathan was shuffling around in the blackness, making a sweeping noise. Margaret waited, jobless, to help shift the witch. Then the faint square of lighter blackness in the doorway was blocked and she could smell fresh straw—Tim must have robbed the stack by the pigsties.

  “I’ve cleared a place here,” said Jonathan. “Hurry, Marge—we can move him.”

  The ivy was harder to climb than Jonathan had implied, but she managed it on the third go. She whisked the blankets off his bed, threw them out of the window, and went slowly down the stairs. Aunt Anne was still sitting in tragic stillness by the ovens, but this time she looked up when Margaret came in.

  “Pete should be back in ten minutes,” she said. “He’s talking to Mr. Gordon. You must be hungry after all that riding—there’s mutton and bread in the larder if you want something to keep you going.”

  “Oh, yes, please,” said Margaret. “I’ve just remembered I didn’t check whether the ponies had enough water. I won’t be out long.”

  She found what she wanted in the larder: two fresh rolls, apples, slices of mutton, and one of the little bottles of cordial which Aunt Anne had brewed last March. She took the bottle from the back of the shelf and hoped it wouldn’t be missed. As she was going out through the porch she had another thought and picked up one of the half-dozen lanterns which were always there. Aunt Anne didn’t even move her eyes when she crossed the kitchen and lit the wick with a spill from the fire. Jonathan met her just outside the porch.

  “Bit of luck,” he whispered. “I thought I’d have to sneak in to light mine. Put it down—I’ve got a bit of dry straw. Shield the light as you go down the path, Marge.”

  He knelt in the moonlight and flipped the little doors open; deft and sure he lit his straw and moved the quick flame into the other lantern in time to light the wick before the straw was all burned. Margaret carried her lantern around the corner of the house where the pile of bedding lay, picked the blankets up and hid its light among them.

  The witch was moaning on his straw. His face in the yellow lantern light was an ugly mess of raw flesh, his lips fat with bruising, his eyes too puffy to open. Margaret tucked her blankets around him, put the food where he could reach it, opened the bottle and tried to push its neck between his lips. With a jerky movement the man’s hand came up and grabbed at the bottle, tilting it up until the yellow stuff was pouring out of the corners of the hurt mouth. He swallowed four times and then let his hand fall so that Margaret had to snatch at the bottle to prevent it from spilling all over him.

  “Thanks,” he whispered.

  She started to sponge the cordial from his jaw with a corner of her skirt, but stopped in a welter of panic—someone was moving out in the barn. She knelt, quite still, then realized that the lantern was more betraying than any movement—rats scuttle, but they don’t send out a steady gold glow. As she was moving to blow it out she heard the man in the barn make a different noise, a faint bubbling, Tim.

  The big zany shambled through the door, carrying more straw and an indescribable mixture of old rags. He walked toward the wounded witch as if he was going to dump his load on him, then stopped. He stared at the blankets, then at the lantern, then at Margaret. Then he cooed and added a quiet little cluck of satisfaction before he took his bundle over to another corner of the hut and began to spread it about. Margaret realized that he’d brought his own bedding to keep the wounded witch warm, and now he intended to spend the night there to look after him. She decided to leave the lantern; Lucy was such a lazy slut that she’d never notice there was one missing when she cleaned and filled them in the morning.

  As she stood up she looked for the first time at the other thing in the hut, the hulking old engine, bolted down into the concrete floor, streaked orange and black with dribbles of rust and the ooze of oil. She fitted her lantern into a nook where a lot of pipes masked it from three sides, in case there were cracks in the outside wall where the light could shine through and betray them. Then she left.

  Uncle Peter was in his chair, and Aunt Anne and Lucy were putting supper out on the table, home bread and boiled mutton and turnips. The steamy richness filled the kitchen.

  “Where you been, Marge?” he said.

  “I’d forgotten to see if there was enough water for the ponies.”

  “Good lass, but I can’t have you traipsing about the farm at all hours of darkness. You must learn to do things while it’s still daylight. But never mind this time. Where’s that son of mine, though?”

  Feet clattered on the stairs and Jonathan rushed into the room, flushed and bright-eyed.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said, “but I was looking out of my window and a great big fire started up suddenly in the lane. It doesn’t look like an ordinary fire. One minute there wasn’t anything, then it was like sunrise. What do you think’s happening?”

  Uncle Peter jumped to his feet, picked his cloak off the settle and his cudgel from behind the door, and strode growling out. Aunt Anne stood with the ladle in one hand, the other clutching the back of a chair, her face as gray as porridge. Then she sighed, shrugged, and began to spoon meat and gravy and turnips into bowls. Lucy took the big cleaving knife and hacked off clumsy chunks of bread, which she handed around. Aunt Anne mumbled a quick grace and they sat down.

  At once Jonathan was talking about a bird he’d seen that afternoon, which he thought might be a harrier. He held a piece of mutton on the point of his knife and waved it over the table to show how the bird had spiraled up out of the valley; then he popped the meat into his neat little mouth (which looked too small to take it) and settled down to chewing. Nobody else said anything. Margaret knew that she ought to be hungry after all that misery and riding and excitement, but the excitement was still buzzing in her, making her blood run too fast through her veins to allow it to settle down to anything so stolid and everyday as eating and digesting. She dipped a morsel of bread into gravy and watched the brown juice soak up through its cells; she ate that slowly, and then picked up the smallest piece of meat on her plate with the point of her knife and managed to swallow that too. Lucy had gobbled, and was already giving herself a second helping. Aunt Anne ate almost nothing.

  After twenty minutes Uncle Peter flung through the door, his cheeks crimson above his beard. He tossed his cudgel into the corner.

  “Gone!” he cried.

  “Gone?” said Aunt Anne, shrilly.

  “Gone to his master the Devil!” shouted Uncle Peter. “I tell you, the stones were burning!”

  “What does that mean?” said Jonathan in an interested voice.

  “They were burning,” said Uncle Peter solemnly. “Not much, by the time I came there, but I could see where they’d been blackened with big flames. And they weren’t honest Christian flames, neither—the whole lane reeked o
f the Devil—the stink of wickedness—you know it when you smell it. And the little flames that were left, they were yellow but blue at the edges, not like mortal fire.”

  “Were the stocks all burned too?” said Margaret. Uncle Peter was too excited to notice how strained her voice came out, but Jonathan glanced sharply toward her.

  “Burntest of all,” said Uncle Peter. “Roaring and stinking still.”

  “Oh dear,” said Aunt Anne. “I don’t know what to think. We’ve kept your supper warm for you, Pete.”

  “We’ll know tomorrow,” said Uncle Peter, “when I’ve done milking Maisie. I reckon the witch has gone home to his master, and she’ll be carrying a full bag.”

  He sat down and plunged into the business of eating, tearing off great hunks of bread and sloshing them around his platter before stuffing them into the red hole in the middle of his ginger beard, where the yellow teeth chomped and the throat golloped the lumps down. Margaret, who did not like to watch this process, looked away and her eye fell on Lucy. Lucy was a house servant, so she did not speak unless she was spoken to, though she sat at the same table with them all. (Where else was there for her to sit, if she wasn’t to share a shed with her poor mad brother?) Now her black eyes sparkled above her plump red cheeks as she drank the excitement, looking from face to face; but the moment she saw Margaret watching her she dropped her glance demurely to the table. She was a funny secret person, Margaret thought, just as much a foreigner as the witch, really. Four years back she’d led Tim into the village—she’d been twelve then, she said, and Tim must have been about fifteen, but nobody knew for certain—and asked for shelter. They’d stayed ever since, but Margaret knew her no better than the day she came.

  The moment Uncle Peter had speared his last chunk of mutton and thrust it into his mouth, Lucy was on her feet to take his plate and bring him the big round of cheese. He was swilling at his mug of rough cider when the door was racked with knocking. Aunt Anne started nervously to her feet and Uncle Peter shouted, “Come in!” It was Mr. Gordon, the sexton, his broad hat pulled down to hide most of his knobbly face, his shoulders hunched with rheumatism, but his blackthorn stick held forward in triumph like an emperor’s staff.

  “The Devil has taken his own!” he cried.

  “Off to bed with you, children,” said Aunt Anne, with a sudden echo of the brisk command she used to own before she became so silent. “I’ll clear, thank you, Lucy.”

  Lucy curtsied and said good night in her soft voice and slipped up the stairs. Margaret kissed her aunt on the cheek, bobbed to her uncle and went too. Jonathan came last, and above the noise of his shoes on the bare stairs Margaret could hear Mr. Gordon and Uncle Peter settling down to excited talk over the meaning of the magical fire. As she undressed she saw how extraordinary it was that they shouldn’t even think of petrol—they’d been grown men before the Changes. Then she remembered that she’d only found the picture of the seaside in a dark cranny at the back of her mind—a place which she knew she was supposed to keep shut, without ever having been told so. And Jonathan was a funny boy, treating the adventure so calmly, knowing just what to do all the time, thinking things out all the time behind his ugly little cat-face. He must have remembered about petrol and machines long ago, if he’d been exploring in the barn enough to know his way through it in the pitch dark.

  She herself remembered about central heating as she rushed the last piece of undressing, wriggled into her flannel nightdress and jumped into bed. Once the house had been warm enough for her to open her presents on Christmas morning, wearing only her pajamas. Why …

  She sat bolt upright in bed, knowing that if she asked that sort of question aloud Uncle Peter and Mr. Gordon and the others would be stoning her for a witch. She shivered, but not with cold this time, and blew out her candle. At once the horrible business of the morning floated up through her mind—the jostling onlookers, and the cheering, and the straining shoulders of the men as they poised their stones for throwing. She tried to shut it out, twice two is four and four is eight and eight is sixteen and sixteen is thirty-two and thirty-two is sixty-four and sixty-four is, is a hundred and twenty-eight and … but each time she got stuck the pictures came flooding back. She heard Mr. Gordon cackle exultantly from the door as he left, and Uncle Peter’s booming good-nights. Still she lay, afraid to shut her eyes, staring through the diamond-paned window to where Orion was just lifting over the crest of Cranham woods.

  Something scratched at the door.

  “Who is it?” she croaked.

  “Me,” whispered Jonathan through the slight creak of the opening door. “I must oil that. Come and listen. Quietly.”

  She put on her cloak and tiptoed onto the landing. Flickering light came up the stairs as the fire spurted. Jonathan caught her by her elbow in the darkness.

  “Stop there,” he whispered. “The floor squeaks further on. You can hear from here.”

  Aunt Anne and Uncle Peter were still in the kitchen, arguing. Uncle Peter’s voice was nimbly with cider and not always clear, but Aunt Anne’s had a hysterical edge which carried every syllable up to the listeners.

  “I tell you I can’t stand it any longer,” she was saying. “Everything that’s happened is wicked, wicked! What harm had that poor man done us this morning, harm that you can prove, prove like you know that if you drop a stone it will fall? And forcing the children up there to see him die. I kept Jo back, and I’d do so again, but Marge is like a walking ghost. Oh, Pete, you must see, it can’t be right to do that to children!”

  “Rumble mumble Maisie nigh filled a bucket tonight when she was dry mumble rumble answer me that woman!”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, you know as well as I do that you’ve only just moved the cows down to the meadow pasture. They always make more milk the first couple of days there.”

  “Rumble bang shout off you go before I take my cudgel to you!”

  A gulping noise. Aunt Anne was really crying now.

  “Wouldn’t she help?” whispered Margaret.

  “She’s too near breaking as it is,” whispered Jonathan. “But Lucy will be useful.”

  “Lucy! But she’s …”

  “You’ve never even thought about her, Marge. Just look what she’s managed for Tim. And anyway, Tim’s deep in it, so she’ll have to help. Thank you for asking about the stocks. Bed now.”

  This time Margaret found she could shut her eyes and there was a different picture in her mind: she’d reined Scrub up for a breather on the very top of the Beacon and looked northwest toward Wales. The limestone hill plunged at her feet toward the Vale; there lay the diminishing copses and farms, and beyond them the gray smudge which was the dead city of Gloucester, and beyond that, green so distant that it was almost the color of smoke—but through those far fields snaked the gleaming windings of the Severn toward, in the distant west (often you couldn’t be sure whether what you were seeing was cloud or land or water, but today you could) the Bristol Channel. The sea.

  Chapter 2

  DOG PACK

  The frosts came, and shriveled the last runner beans. Even at midday the air had a tang to it which meant that soon there would be real winter. Any wind made whirlpools of fallen leaves in odd corners.

  It was three days before the witch spoke. To either of the children, that is—maybe he talked to Tim, but if so Tim couldn’t tell them. And it was dangerous to go down much to the old tractor barn where the wicked machines stood.

  “If you’ve got to go,” said Jonathan, “look as if you’re making for Tim’s shed. Carry something he might need-food or an old rag. Then sneak round the back of the barn. And once you’re past Tim’s shed walk on a fresh bit of grass each time, or you’ll make a path and someone will spot it. You do realize we’re stuck with a dangerous job, Marge?”

  “Stuck?”

  “Well, wouldn’t you rather you’d never heard him? Rather someone else had? Then we could have rubbed along as we were.”

  Margaret didn’t know what she�
�d rather, so she hadn’t said anything. Next time she went to the barn she carried a knuckle of mutton with a bit of meat still on it, and actually walked into Tim’s shed as if she was going to leave it for him. She looked around at the stinking heaps of straw, with the late-autumn flies hazing about in the dimness, and wondered how she’d never thought about the way Tim lived, any more than she thought about the cows who came squelching through the miry gates to milking. She’d thought far more about Scrub than Tim.

  Ashamed, she looked around the dank lean-to to find something she could do now, at once, to make the zany more comfortable. There was nothing, but in her search she saw a triangular hole in the corrugated iron which formed the back of the shed. And on the other side of the hole was the wheel of a wicked machine, a … a … a tractor. Of course, this shed was propped against the back of the barn, and if the hole were larger she could slip through to where the witch lay, and there’d be no danger of leaving a track through the rank grasses below the barn.

  She tugged at the ragged edge of metal, and the whole sheet gave and fell out on top of her. It left a hole just like a door. Inside were the derelict machines and the little brick hut in the corner. And inside that were the rusting engine, Tim, and the witch. He looked a little better, but not enough; it was difficult to tell because of the deceiving yellow light from the lantern and because his face was still livid and puffy with bruising. Tim squatted in his corner of the shed, watching her as suspiciously as a bitch watches you when you come to inspect her puppies. Margaret took the bone to him, then knelt beside the witch. She’d brought a corner of fresh bread spread with cream cheese; she broke bits off and popped them into the smashed mouth whenever it opened—it was like feeding a nestling sparrow, except that nestlings are greedy. It took him a long time to chew each piece, and longer still to swallow.