She stormed out of the sitting room and her bedroom door made the pictures jump on the walls as she slammed it shut.
“That went well, don’t you think?” said her dad.
“Oh, shut up!” snapped Ruth.
***
Ever since she’d been so understanding about his feelings for Tiger, things had been going better between David and Christine, partly because he now gave her the benefit of the doubt instead of leaping to the worst possible conclusion about her intentions all the time.
One evening a few days after the encounter with Morgan, David and Christine sat in the garden. Alastair was trying to light the barbecue while Christine and David enjoyed a cool drink in the shade. It was ridiculously hot for May.
They’d been talking amicably about school and what subjects David thought he might choose to study, when Christine asked, out of the blue, “How long has Claire looked after you now?”
“Four and a half years,” he said, though she must already know that. Why was she asking?
“She’s great, isn’t she? I know how fond you two are of each other.” David made a sort of grunt which was meant to signal agreement without condoning the use of a word as wet as fond. “I was just wondering,” she went on. “You’re thirteen, you hardly need anyone to look after you any more, so there’s not much for Claire to do …”
David put his glass down so hard that it toppled over on the paving, a trail of sticky coke spreading from it.
“No! How could you?” He was looking at her in horror. “I thought you were okay, I thought you understood and all this time you’ve been planning to get rid of Claire.” He pushed himself to his feet, scarlet with anger, afraid he would burst into tears.
“No, David, you’re wrong – I didn’t mean …”
But he wasn’t listening. He turned and half ran into the house.
Alerted by the noise, Alastair left the smoking barbecue and came over.
Christine gave a sigh, a rueful expression on her face. “Well, I messed that up completely.”
“It’s not your fault. He just leapt to conclusions. Maybe I should have told him; I just thought it might work better coming from you.”
“I didn’t even get that far and now he hates me again. Are we ever going to sort things out?”
“It’ll come right.” He gave her a kiss. “You’ll see.”
***
One by one, the Great Ones stepped through into the Underworld, donning their physical bodies as they did so.
The Queen of Darkness was clad in a gown the colour of old blood and a crown of jet and garnets. She had been hunting and carried a small, deeply curved black bow.
The Lightning King was in his usual robes of tattered black, a few forgotten tendrils of lightning slithering across it like tiny snakes.
Tethys the Water Witch wore a dress of shifting iridescent rainbow, like oil on water. A pool of water grew about her feet as she stood waiting with the others.
“Where are the wolves?” asked the King.
The two wolves which often accompanied Tethys were absent.
“With the Hunt,” she replied.
A few minutes passed before the Hunter appeared among them. Unconsciously, they all drew back a little from him.
It was difficult to say what he wore: rags and tatters of cloth and skin that clothed him without being garments. His bare torso and arms were flecked with blood, as were his owl-eyed face and the horns, much like those of a roe deer, that grew among his chestnut hair.
“Is the hunt over?” asked the Queen.
“Yes.” He smiled a terrible smile. “A good hunt. The wolves will feed well.” He slid a black knife back into its sheath at his side.
“We must decide what to do now,” said the Queen. “We were close for a moment when she killed the man Thomas. I thought the power might overwhelm her then. But it did not. Now she knows she possesses it and begins to understand what it can do. She will be on her guard and our task will be harder. Everything is at stake. Now that the Stardreamer has been called, there can be no going back.”
“She must be brought to the Heart of the Earth if we are to use her power to destroy it,” said the King.
“My son will bring her,” said the Hunter.
“Or if he fails,” mused the Queen, “perhaps we can use the children. It may prove to be very useful that she fell into their hands. Making them the instruments for the destruction of their world would be a fitting way to repay them for thwarting our plans before.”
“We must break into their world if we are to reach the Wildwood and the Heart of the Earth,” said a voice thin and chilly as a blade. When the Hunter spoke, everyone listened.
“We must be invited for that to happen,” said the Queen cautiously. “Those two know us for what we are. We cannot disguise ourselves from them.”
“We can influence others around them though: draw them to one of the places where the barriers have grown thin, trick them into saying the words … We grow stronger every day the Stardreamer is here,” mused the King.
“Most people are much easier to influence than those children,” said Tethys, smiling a scarlet smile. “We must watch for a little, decide who and where, then persuade them to the right place …”
***
They pretended to go to Badminton Club but went to the house instead. It was now four days since Erda had disappeared and Morgan had gone after her and there had been no sign of either. They didn’t hold out much hope that anyone would be there now and the house felt very empty when they opened the front door.
There was a postcard from Gordon though. Great weather and good golf courses but I’m playing rubbish! Getting brown (that’s a first!) Hope the plants are behaving! He hadn’t put any names on, just the house number, but they knew it was for them.
They decided to go to Badminton Club after all; they would only be ten minutes late and if they went there would be no chance of their parents discovering what they were doing.
As they turned back to the front door, David noticed something odd.
“Look, the door’s open.” It was the door of the big, silent grandfather clock he was referring to. It stood slightly ajar. “Was it like that when we came in?”
“I don’t think so,” said Kate. “I’m sure we’d have noticed. It’s always shut.” She tried to push it closed but it wouldn’t stay and something prevented it from closing far enough to turn the key. “There’s something jamming it,” she said.
“Let’s see,” said David, reaching inside. “There’s a bit of paper stuck in the hinge. Wait a minute.” He peered inside and wiggled at something. “There we go.” He pulled it out.
Kate shut the door and turned the key.
“Kate,” said David from behind her in a strange voice. “Look.”
She turned. He was holding a small, cream-coloured envelope. On it was written clearly in Mr Flowerdew’s writing: For Kate and David.
They stared at the envelope, then at each other.
“Well, open it,” said Kate after a moment.
David tore open the envelope and unfolded the single sheet of paper it contained and they pored over it together.
My dear Kate and David,
I hope you will never have to read this letter, but if you have found it, it is because you must know what it will tell you, to be able to deal with what is happening.
If you are reading this, it means the Stardreamer has been called down by the Guardians or the Lords. I have always counselled against such a thing: the risk is too great, but if this letter has come to you it must have happened.
The Guardians hope to lock the Stardreamer’s power into the place we call the Heart of the Earth. If we succeed the Lords will finally be defeated and the Worlds will be held safe in the Stardreamer’s dreaming.
The Lords hope to provoke the Stardreamer into detonating all that power outside the Heart of the Earth and destroying it. Then the Guardians will be defeated utterly, and both time and the Worlds tha
t make up this planet will be torn apart.
People will be searching for the Stardreamer and it is likely that one or more of them will pass through this house. Trust your instincts if you meet with any of them.
Unless it is locked within the Heart of the Earth the Lords of Chaos can feed off the Stardreamer’s power. They may even be able to take physical form in your world.
Now to the hardest part; you will find it hard to forgive me for not telling you before. You were able to help in the defeat of the Lords because you were descendants of the Smith. This you already know, but not quite why it was so. The Smith was what we call a Child of Light; one of his ancestors was a Guardian. His blood runs in your veins and so you are also Children of the Light.
That might please you, but not this; you are also Children of the Dark, for somewhere in your past one of the Lords of Chaos was your ancestor.
You are Children of Light and Darkness, poised between the two; that was why the Lords could appear in your dreams. Both sides will seek you out now and the Lords will be trying to find a way into your world.
The final conflict is upon us and you must choose what you will do and who you will help. The Lords will tell you that you would survive the destruction of time and the Worlds. That is true, because of the Darkness that is part of you.
I am truly sorry to weigh you down with this knowledge, but you cannot fight without it and soon you will need to.
Your friend,
John Flowerdew
The letter stunned them into silence for a long time. They read it over and over, sure at first that they must have misunderstood, but gradually finding themselves unable to disbelieve.
Children of Light and Darkness.
The Lords of Chaos had tried to destroy their world once and they had fought against them and helped defeat them, but they hadn’t known then that part of them was the same as the Lords.
“How could he not tell us?” Kate asked in a whisper. “How can we be like them?”
David’s hand trembled as he held the letter.
“What do we do? There’s no one to help us, Kate. We have to work it out for ourselves.”
INTO THE WOODS
Morgan hunted the Stardreamer across the Worlds. She is here somewhere. I feel her presence, he had said to Kate and David as he left them and it was as he had said it that he realised he had been aware of that presence when he took Thomas’s body back to the Wildwood to bury him and came back through Tisian’s Door. She had been with him all the time, unseen, and now her presence was like a background noise grown so familiar you didn’t notice it until it stopped. She was moving between worlds, slipping away from him again and again, and each time she moved out of the world he was in it seemed to lurch as though he had lost his sense of balance.
She watched him, getting as close as she could without him realising exactly where she was. She had listened to him talk to Tisian about her, trying to understand what was this thing – Stardreamer – that she was. The word made pictures in her head that she didn’t yet comprehend: a great void between the stars, a glittering cave, a little meadow of parched grass high on a hillside.
She knew she was dangerous.
***
The cuts on Morgan’s face and hands healed, though the hurt of Thomas’s death was as raw as ever. He pursued Erda with no idea of what he would do if he was faced with her. Try to kill her? Reason with her? Confess?
He knew that Thomas’s death had been an accident, but if he couldn’t blame her for it, he would have to take all the blame on himself. He was afraid of doing that.
Every few days he would pass through Tisian’s house and she would make him eat and sleep and talk to her. Otherwise, he seemed to have almost lost the use for speech. He saw no one he knew and avoided as much contact with people as was possible.
He felt as though he was the hunted, not the hunter.
***
They sat at the kitchen table in silence, Gordon’s postcard and the explosive letter laid in front of them.
“Final conflict?” said Kate in disgust. “I thought everything we went through last time was meant to keep time safe.”
“It was,” said David. “Read it again. This is something he thought would never happen, something he’d argued with the other Guardians about. If he’d really thought this was going to happen don’t you think he’d have told us himself about being Children of Light and Darkness, so he could have explained it properly and answered our questions? He never thought we’d need to read that letter. It was just …”
“Insurance?”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“And why do we have to get involved? Wasn’t last time enough? Why not Gordon – he lives in the house after all,” Kate went on angrily.
“Yes, but he’s not here just now, is he?” said David gently, “and it seems to be now that this is happening.”
Kate put her head in her hands.
“I want a normal life, with normal worries, not this again – and we don’t even have Mr Flowerdew this time.” David said nothing. “Why aren’t you angry? And why are you so quiet? Are you just going to accept it?”
David sighed. “What choice do we have, Kate? We’re trapped in this; it doesn’t matter if we think it’s fair or not.”
They sat, not speaking, for a few moments.
“Stardreamer … Heart of the Earth …” muttered David. “No clue what any of it means.”
“Maybe he left other letters – clues – somewhere,” said Kate excitedly, pushing her chair back and standing up.
They ran to the grandfather clock and unlocked it to look inside, feeling around the dark corners, checking underneath and behind it.
Nothing.
“What about the study?” Kate said.
They hurried up the two flights of stairs to Mr Flowerdew’s study and opened the door.
It had lain largely undisturbed since his death, aside from a little light dusting on Gordon’s part. The telescope and binoculars still stood waiting by the window, the notebooks and watercolours stacked ready on the shelves and the stuffed Tawny Owl keeping watch with cold yellow eyes.
Kate looked around at the organised clutter of belongings, wondering where to start.
“Desk drawers?” she suggested. David nodded and they began to carefully go through anything that might contain a clue about the information in the letter.
After almost an hour they had found nothing. Kate sat back on her heels, a smudge of dust on her nose and pushed her hair behind her ears, thinking.
“I’m an idiot,” she announced.
“I know,” said David, head in a cupboard, “but I haven’t told anyone else.”
“You are as well.” He pulled his head out of the cupboard and looked at her. “Erda. And Morgan. You don’t really believe it’s a coincidence that they turn up just before this letter shows itself?”
David hit his forehead with the heel of his hand.
“How could I not think of that?”
“Beats me,” said Kate absently, thinking again. “I know what I think. I think they’re both looking for this Stardreamer person … thing … and Erda found it and got hurt and lost her memory. Now Morgan’s looking for her to take her home and then he’ll go looking for the Stardreamer too.”
“Maybe …” David considered this. “Why didn’t he tell us though?”
“He’d only just met us, he doesn’t know anything about us. He probably thinks we’re just kids and we wouldn’t understand.”
They looked at each other. David shrugged.
“We have to help them.”
“I know,” said Kate with a sigh. “How can we help them though, if we don’t even know where they are?”
“Erda will come back here, surely?”
“Probably. Maybe. Oh, I don’t know. But what about Morgan? He talked about a Door in this house that led to somewhere else. Maybe we can find him.”
“We’ll have to find the Door first. Does he really mean a door?
Maybe it’ll look like something else. Or maybe it won’t open for us.”
“Well, there’s no harm in looking anyway. He came down from upstairs when we met him, but he was in one of the rooms on the first floor, not up here. Come on.”
They went in and out of the bedrooms and bathrooms, opening and closing the doors to the rooms and to the big cupboards and the wardrobes.
Nothing.
They sat side by side on the single bed in the smallest bedroom.
“Well, we tried. It looks as though we’ll have to wait for one of them to come back,” David sighed. He looked at his watch. It was nearly eleven. “I suppose I’d better go home and see what Christine’s decided to do now. Maybe she’s sold the house since I went out.”
They got up and opened the door. In front of them hung a piece of cloth with blocks of patchwork colour. They took a step back, staring at each other, wide-eyed, silent.
Kate swallowed. “It looks as though we’ve found it.”
They crept forward and stood perfectly still behind the cloth, listening intently, but there was no sound. They knelt and peered under the edge where it finished a few inches above the floor.
The room they were looking into was dim compared with the bedroom. They could see a beaten earth floor and an open fire with a black pot hanging over it. There was a smell of soup.
“D’you think that’s Morgan’s house?” whispered Kate.
“Maybe.”
They peeked round the edges of the patchwork and, seeing no one, stepped out into the other room. As their eyes adjusted to the change of light they saw colour everywhere: patchworks hung on the walls and spread over the bed in its alcove, the glowing fire with the soup bubbling over it, the stacked shelves with their carefully sorted flotsam. It reminded Kate immediately of Mr Flowerdew’s study.
The outside door scraped on a bump in the earth floor as someone pulled it open, making Kate and David jump. They drew closer together, unsure what to do or say. A tall woman was coming in, ducking under the lintel. She wore a dress patched with colour on colour, red and green and blue and brown. Her hair was grey-brown, twisted up on top of her head and seemingly held in place with a couple of twigs. There was a white clay pipe in her mouth.
Chaos Quest Page 7
