The Changes Trilogy

by Peter Dickinson

  Lucy was asleep on a pile of straw in the corner, but twitched herself wide awake the moment they came in. Tim was already awake, bubbling quietly, watching them, sitting so close to the lantern that his shadow covered all the far wall. The witch—Otto—was awake too, his eyes quick amid the bruised face. His wounds looked even worse now that the blood and dirt had been washed away, because you could see how much he was really hurt.

  “Welcome to Cell One of the British Resistance Movement,” he said in his croaking voice. “I’m Otto.”

  “I’m Margaret.”

  “Pleased to meet you. I got a fever coming on, and we should get things kind of sorted before. I could have tried earlier, but I figured you were some kind of trap. But Jo tells me I owe you my life, young lady. Such as it is.”

  “It was Jonathan really,” said Margaret. “I wouldn’t have known what to do.”

  “Well, thanks all the same. You reckon they’ll stone me all over again if they find me?”

  “Yes,” said Jonathan.

  “And what’ll they do to you?” said Otto.

  Margaret and Jonathan glanced at each other, and then across at Lucy. She shook her head slightly, meaning that they mustn’t tell him, but his eyes were sharp and his mind quick with the coming fever. He understood their glances, plain as speaking.

  “Kill you too?” he whispered. “Kids? What kind of folk are they, for God’s sake?”

  “Not everywhere,” said Margaret quickly. “I mean I don’t think it’s the same all over England. I was wondering about that this morning. This village has gone specially sour, don’t you think, Jo?”

  “I don’t know. I hope so, for the other villages’ sake.”

  “They’re so bored,” said Margaret. “They haven’t anything to do except get drunk and be cruel.”

  “It’s more than that,” said Jonathan slowly. “They’ve done so many awful things that they’ve got to believe they were right. The more they hurt and kill, the more they’re proving to themselves they’ve been doing God’s will all along. What do you think, Lucy?”

  “That’s just about it,” said the soft voice from the corner.

  “And what started it all?” said Otto.

  “The Changes,” said Margaret and Jonathan together.

  “Huh?”

  “We aren’t allowed to talk about them,” said Margaret. “But everyone woke up feeling different. Everyone started hating machines. A lot of people went away, and the rest of us have gone back and back in time, until …”

  “But why?” said Otto.

  “I don’t think anybody knows,” said Jonathan.

  The girls shook their heads. Tim bubbled. The witch was silent for half a minute.

  “Let’s try a different tack,” he said. “You three don’t think machines are wicked. Nor my friend Tim, neither.”

  “Tim never did,” said Lucy.

  “I did until four days ago,” said Margaret. “But I hadn’t thought about them for ages. And I still don’t like them.”

  “I do,” said Jonathan. “It happened in that very hot week we had during haymaking; I was lugging water out to the ponies and I suddenly felt, Why can’t we use the standpipe tap again?”

  “Me too,” said Lucy, “only it was the stove. I was cleaning it, and I remembered electric cookers didn’t need cleaning—not every day, leastways.”

  “But everyone’s afraid to say,” said Jonathan.

  “It’s only worn off some people,” said Margaret. “All the men still seem to believe it.”

  “Course they do,” whispered Lucy fiercely. “It means everyone’s got to do just what they says.”

  “It might be something to do with children’s minds,” said Jonathan in a detached voice. “Not being so set in their ways of thinking.”

  “Let it go,” said the witch restlessly. “You’d best just cart me someplace else and leave me to fend for myself.”

  The three children were silent, staring at him.

  “We can’t,” said Jonathan at last.

  “Why not? You got me here.”

  “What about Tim?” said Jonathan.

  “I don’t think he’d let us,” said Margaret.

  “That he wouldn’t,” said Lucy.

  They all looked to where Tim, scrawny and powerful, crouched amid the tousled straw. There was another long silence.

  “Besides,” said Jonathan, almost in a whisper, “d’you think you’d ever sleep easy again afterward, Marge?”

  She shook her head. There was stretching silence again.

  “Where do you come from?” said Jonathan at last.

  “America. The States.”

  They looked at him blankly.

  “Davy Crockett,” he said. “Cowboys. Injuns. Batman.”

  Forgotten images stirred.

  “Why did you come?” said Margaret. “You must have known it was dangerous.”

  “They wanted to know what was happening in these parts,” said the witch. “I’m a spy. I had a little radio, and I was in the woods up yonder reporting back to my command ship when your folk burst in on me.”

  “Mr. Gordon smelled your wireless,” said Jonathan. “He’s like that with machines. You mean that this hasn’t happened to the whole world? Only England?”

  “England, Scotland, Wales,” said the witch. “Not Ireland. Well, then, if Tim won’t let you dump me somewhere, how are you going to keep me here?”

  “I bring food for Tim,” said Lucy. “I can bring enough for you, easy as easy. You won’t be eating much, from the look of you.”

  “I don’t like it,” he muttered, more to himself than to them.

  “We’ll work out a story,” said Margaret, “something they’ll want to believe and that fits in with what they know.”

  She told them about the cat and the rook.

  “And I do have a broken arm,” muttered the witch when she’d finished. He was looking much iller now.

  “Please, miss,” said Lucy, “he’s had enough of talking for now.”

  “All right,” said Margaret, “we’ll go.”

  She stood up, but Jonathan stayed where he was.

  “What’re we going to do if we think it’s becoming too risky to keep him here?” he said. “We must have a plan.”

  “Yes,” muttered the witch, “a plan. A man can plan. Can a man plan? Dan can plan, Anne. Nan can fan a pan, man. Dan … Dan …”

  “He doesn’t know what he’s saying,” said Lucy. “My dad went that way, sometimes, but it was drink did it to him. We shouldn’t have kept him talking so long. I’m worried for him, I am.”

  “We’ll have to think of something without him,” said Jonathan. “Are you going to stay here all night, Lucy?”

  “Aye,” she said.

  “But will you be all right?” said Margaret fussily. “It doesn’t look very comfortable.”

  Lucy looked at her slyly out of the corner of her eyes.

  “I’ve slept worse,” she said. “And it’s one less bed to make, isn’t it, miss?”

  Outside the night air was cold as frozen iron. The moon was up now, putting out half the stars and making the shadows of the orchard trees crisscross the path, so black and hard that you lifted your feet for fear of stumbling over them.

  “Jo,” said Margaret, “I …”

  He caught her elbow in an urgent grip; he seemed to know just where she was in spite of the dark. He put his mouth so close to her ear that she could feel the warm droplets condensing in her hair, like a cow’s breath.

  “Not out here,” he whispered. “Sounds are funny at night. Inside.”

  She went up the ivy first, letting him push her feet into toeholds to save the noise of scrabbling among the hard leaves. She was shivering as she crawled along the wall and in through the window; by the time she was sitting on the edge of his bed, cold was all she could think about. Jonathan came into the room as quietly as a hunting owl, shut the window, opened his big chest (no creak—he must have oiled the hinges) and brou
ght out a couple of thick furs. They wrapped the softness around themselves, hair side inside, and sat together on the rim of the mattress, as close as roosting hens, trying to feel warm by recalling what warmth had once been like.

  “What were you going to say, Marge?” he whispered.

  “I went right into Gloucester today. A pack of wild dogs chased me, but that wasn’t it. Jo, there are real boats in the town; there’s a sort of harbor in the middle of it, with a big canal full of water. If we could get him into one of those and make it go, we might be able to get him away.”

  “Sailing boats?”

  “No, tugs. They sit a funny way in the water as if they were made for pulling things. Do you remember, we used to have a jigsaw puzzle?”

  “I had a toy tug. I used to play with it in my bath, but the water always got into the batteries.”

  “Will these have batteries?”

  “Don’t be stupid. They’ll have proper engines, diesel I should think. If there’s a harbor, there should be big tanks with diesel oil in them; perhaps Otto will know how to make it go—he’s an engineer, he told us while we were washing him. Lucy’s marvelous: she doesn’t seem to mind anything.”

  “One of them’s sunk, Jo, but the other two look all right.”

  “It’s been five years, Marge. Engines get rusty, specially sitting down in the water like that. I don’t know if you could take a canal boat out to sea—you’d have to be very lucky with the weather.”

  “But it wasn’t that sort of canal, Jo. It was big—twenty yards across, and there were proper ships there, sea ships.”

  “Oh. Where did the canal lead, then? Out into the Severn?”

  “I don’t know, but not where I saw, about two miles out of Gloucester. Why do you think it’s still full of water? It’s much higher than the river.”

  “They probably built it so that streams keep it filled up. The river wiggles all over the place and goes up and down with the tide and it’s full of sandbanks too, I expect. It’d be useful to have a straight canal going out to sea, which you could rely on to have the same amount of water in it always. There’d have to be a lock at the ends, of course.”

  “What’s a lock?”

  “Two gates to keep the water from running away when a canal goes downhill or out to sea. You can make the water between them go up and down so that you can get a barge through.”

  “There were two gates—three gates—at one end, but I don’t see how they’d work.”

  “I’ve explained it badly. I’ll draw you a picture tomorrow. But even if the tugs don’t actually go they might be a good place to hide the witch in.”

  “Provided the dogs don’t swim out. They were horrible, Jo.”

  “Poor Marge. I’ll ask him what he thinks tomorrow. Bed now.”

  But next morning, while Margaret was ladling porridge into the bowls Lucy held for her, the girls’ eyes met. Lucy gave a tiny shake of the head, a tiny turndown of the corners of the mouth, before she moved away; so Margaret knew that the witch must be worse. It was a funny feeling, being part of a plot, sharing perilous secrets with somebody you never really thought of as a proper person, only a rather useless and lazy servant. But it was exciting too, especially being able to speak a language they both understood but which Uncle Peter and Aunt Anne didn’t even see or hear being spoken.

  After breakfast she helped Lucy clear and wash up and then make all the beds, a job she especially hated. Uncle Peter had hired a man to clear the undergrowth in Low Wood and tie all the salable sticks into bundles of bean poles and switches; this meant that he had to go and work alongside the man, partly from pride and partly to be certain he got every last groat of his money’s worth out of him. And that meant that poor Jo had to muck out the milking shed after the first milking and take the fourteen cows down to pasture, and then do all the farmyard jobs which Uncle Peter would usually have done. It was midmorning before any of them was free. They couldn’t all slink down to the barn, and Margaret was the least likely to be missed.

  The witch was very ill, she could see at once; flushed and tossing, his eyes shut and his breath very fast and shallow. The splint on his arm was still tight in its place, but she didn’t like to think about his ribs as he fidgeted his shoulders from side to side. Tim knelt at his good elbow, gazing into his face and bubbling very quietly; when the witch’s feverish thrashings threw the blankets aside Tim waited for the first faint beginning of a shiver and then drew them back over him as gently as snow falling on pasture. The moment the gray lips moved, Tim was holding a little beaker to them and carefully tipping a few drops into the dry cranny. There was nothing Margaret could do which Tim couldn’t do better, so she sat down with her back against the engine, taking care to arrange a piece of sack behind her so that the rusty iron shouldn’t leave its betraying orange streaks down her shoulders.

  The witch fidgeted and muttered. Tim babied him, eased water into the tense mouth, bubbled and cooed. When Margaret had been watching for nearly half an hour in the dim light and was just deciding to leave, the witch sighed suddenly and deeply and the tenseness went out of his body. His head lay back on the straw, with his mouth open in a sloping O, like a chicken with the gapes. But this time Tim didn’t pour any water into it; instead he watched for several minutes, at first with intense concern but gradually relaxing. At last he turned to Margaret, bubbled briefly and shambled out. She was in charge now.

  Nothing happened in the first twenty minutes of her watch. The witch slept unmoving. The harsh lines of action relaxed into weakness until she could see how young he really was. Twenty? Twenty-one? She wondered how many times this had all happened before—the soldier, hunted and wounded, hopeless, lying feverish on dirty straw in some secret place while the yellow lamp burned slowly away. Hundreds of times, after hundreds of battles. But this time …

  Then the lamp burned blue for a second, recovered, reeked with black fumes and went out.

  Margaret sat in the dark, not knowing what to do. She could go up to the house and refill the lamp, or just get a new one; but it would be a funny thing to be seen doing in midmorning. And it would mean leaving him alone. And if she stumbled and made a noise in the dark she might wake him and sleep was better than medicine, Aunt Anne always said. She stayed where she was; it was quiet and warm and dark, and after the panics of yesterday and the busyness of the night she was as tired as a babe at dusk.

  Voices woke her. Her legs were numb and creaking with the pain of long stillness, but she dursn’t move because one of the voices was Mr. Gordon’s.

  “I smell summat,” he grumbled.

  “Smell, Davey?” said Uncle Peter’s voice.

  “Arrgh, not smelling with my nose—in my heart I smell it. There’s wickedness about, Peter.”

  “Ah, ’tis nobbut those old engines in the big barn. There’s a whole herd of ’em in there, Davey, but they’re dead, dead.”

  “Mebbe you’re right,” said Mr. Gordon after a pause. “Mebbe you’re not. That zany of yourn, Peter, what do you reckon to him?”

  “Tim?” said Uncle Peter. Margaret could hear the lilt of surprise in his voice. “He’s not in his right wits, but he’s as strong as an ox.”

  “Mebbe, mebbe,” said Mr. Gordon. “He’ll bear watching, Peter. They’re proper cunning, witches are. I wouldn’t put it past ’em.”

  “Making out to be a zany, you mean,” said Uncle Peter, still surprised. “But Tim’s been with us these four years, and I’ve seen no sign of it. And why, Davey, I told you about the milk, didn’t I—how much Maisie gave after we stoned t’other witch up in the stocks? But if Tim was one …”

  “Your missus don’t reckon ’twas more than a change of pasture as made the cattle give so well,” said Mr. Gordon sharply.

  “Don’t you listen to what Anne says,” said Uncle Peter with a growl. Mr. Gordon began to cluck. Very slowly, with a rustling like a cow browsing through long grass, they moved away up the orchard. It was minutes before she dared to shift a leg and end
ure the agonies of pins and needles. Just as the witch was stirring again there came the sound of someone moving quietly through the main barn; the door of the hut rasped as the rusty hinges moved.

  “Why are you in the dark?” said Jonathan’s voice, very low.

  “The lamp went out,” whispered Margaret.

  “There’s another one,” he said. “You should have lit it from the old one before it went out. I’ll run up to the house and fetch a new light.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Be careful, Jo—Mr. Gordon’s been nosing round outside.”

  “Yes, I saw him. They’ve gone up to the pub, the Seven Stars. I won’t be long.”

  The witch looked no better when the light came, despite his little sleep. Margaret tried to dribble a sip of water between his parted lips as she’d seen Tim doing, but made a mess of the job and spilled half of it down the stubble on his chin. Then she told Jonathan what she’d heard.

  “We’ll shift Otto as soon as we can, down to those tugs of yours in Gloucester Docks,” said Jonathan. “No one goes there, and it’s halfway home for him. If only we can last out till the snow comes we can take him down on the logging sledge.”

  “That’ll be at least a month.”

  “I know. Will you tell Lucy or shall I? About Tim?”

  “Tim?”

  “What you told me Mr. Gordon said. They like the feel of killing now, that lot—smashing up rooks won’t keep them happy for long. They want a real person, human, but somebody who doesn’t matter to anyone.”

  “Except Lucy,” said Margaret.

  “They wouldn’t think she counted. And even if Otto wasn’t here, if he was really dead, they’d come and search and find Tim’s treasures and stone him for that.”

  “Jo, oughtn’t you to come and see the tugs?”

  “Father’ll want me on the farm too much.”

  “Couldn’t you sprain an arm or something—something that didn’t stop you riding?”

  “I suppose so. I ought to have a look at that canal too. I want to know how it gets out into the sea.”

  “Well, we’ve got a month,” said Margaret. “We’ll just have to be careful. I’ll go and tell Lucy. Do you think Tim understands about being secret?”