Awakening

by William Horwood

  ‘Promise you will not leave me in this goodwife’s hands when she comes,’ he implored. ‘Look! I am well after all! She will be the death of me.’

  They no sooner promised than there was a sudden and peremptory knock at the front door, the kind of solid, heavy knock-knock-knock that people who expect to be admitted at once generally make.

  Brief opened the door.

  Stort took one look at the female standing there with a formidably large leather bag at her feet and an impatient look in her eye. He fled into his parlour and locked the door.

  ‘You are?’ she asked Master Brief.

  ‘Me?’ said Brief, taken aback.

  ‘Yes, sir. You, sir. Who are you?’

  ‘Well, I’m Master Brief and this is Mister Pike . . . we . . .’

  ‘Where is my patient?’

  ‘In the parlour,’ said the mild Barklice, ‘behind that door!’

  She glared at the door, tried the handle, shook it and said, ‘The key if you please. It is very bad practice to lock patients in.’

  Pike smiled grimly.

  ‘It’s we who are locked out,’ he said.

  Goodwife Cluckett’s eyes bulged and her cheeks flushed dangerously as she muttered, ‘Absolutely unacceptable!’

  She rat-tat-tatted on the door and said, ‘Open this door this instant, sir.’

  There was a sliding of bolts and Stort opened the door and eyed her.

  She eyed him.

  Then she turned to the other three and said, ‘Please leave at once, I can handle this gentleman quite without your further assistance.’

  ‘But . . .’ began Stort, whose day had been a very hard one and now looked like it was going to get harder. ‘Cannot my friends stay? In fact they promised they would. They must! I cannot be left alone with . . . with . . . with a female.’

  ‘They cannot stay and you cannot go,’ she said, ‘and that’s an end to it.’

  She sniffed and then sniffed again and as good as stuck her nose into his chest and sniffed a third time.

  ‘You are whiffy, sir, and whiffy will not do for someone in my care. To your bedroom at once and remove your clothes that they be fumigated and your person washed.’

  ‘Me washed?’

  He looked with ghastly appeal over her shoulder towards his friends.

  ‘They are leaving, are they not?’ she said, turning on them, her eyes narrowing.

  Barklice backed away towards the door.

  ‘You cannot,’ said Stort, ‘you promised . . .’

  But as she eyed them beadily, one by one they began to leave.

  ‘Please,’ bleated Stort after them, ‘do not desert me, dear friends, do not leave me in her hands!’

  But they had fled.

  The goodwife closed the front door, locked it, removed the key and added it to several already attached to the vast metal ring that hung from the girdle round her waist. Then, for good measure, she shot the bolts at the top and bottom of the door.

  Stort stood in his own corridor looking at her with all the desperation of one who knows that all possibility of escape is gone and he must submit to his punishment.

  She advanced upon him, her keys clinking, her shiny forehead dazzling, her bosom like the prow of a warship about to engage the enemy.

  ‘Well, Mister Stort,’ she said, ‘and what exactly is it that you’re waiting for? We have work to do! Disrobe at once!’

  8

  CRY FOR HELP

  ‘We should take her to the doctor,’ said Margaret for the hundredth time. ‘There’s obviously something wrong. Please, Katherine, it’ll be for the best . . .’

  It was five days since Judith’s birth and a chaos of emotion, disorder and now disharmony had descended on Woolstone House. They would all have coped better with the crisis had they had more experience of babies.

  They had none.

  The Foales were childless and both came from families which had few children or lived so far away that contact was rare. Nor had their professional lives as university academics prepared them for the day-by-day realities of infants, least of all a unique one.

  Katherine had no experience either. She was an only child and had never done the round of babysitting that her peer group had as a way of earning money. Her role had been helping her bedridden mother. As for Jack, he had lived only briefly in a children’s home before making the car journey with Katherine and her parents which had ended in tragedy for them and third-degree burns for him. From then on all he had known was hospitals and young people’s institutions. Babies were not part of that scene.

  Only experience might have prepared them for the fact that a newborn infant can easily reduce a house and the adults living in it to disorder and constant stress.

  The slightest cry seems a signal of danger.

  A failure to feed, a sign of illness.

  A moment’s choking, a cause of worry and guilt.

  A sleepless night . . .

  Then there’s the fatigue that sets in with the constant worry and lack of sleep.

  Soon normality is fractured and relationships grow fraught as tempers rise and rationality flees.

  This was what five days of Judith’s terrible crying had done to the residents of Woolstone House.

  ‘At the very least he’ll give you reassurance, Katherine,’ said Margaret, who had been worn to a frazzle dancing attendance on mother and child.

  ‘I suppose . . .’ said Katherine, who was hollow-eyed, ‘that it does make sense, doesn’t it, Jack?’

  It was a plea as well as a statement. She was so tired, she just wanted someone to tell her she wasn’t doing everything wrong.

  ‘I must say, Jack,’ added Arthur, ‘there does come a point where the sensible thing is to admit that one needs help and maybe that point has been reached . . . and anyway, we do have a legal obligation to register a child’s birth, even if she’s . . . well . . . whatever she may be. Even then.’

  Judith cried loudly, a thin scream, and Jack winced at the sound of it. He too was desperate.

  He heard what they said but something told him no.

  ‘Give her to me,’ he said, taking her gently, ‘I’ll take her round the garden and we’ll think about it together. Give you a break, Katherine.’

  ‘I don’t want a break, Jack, I want Judith to be happy.’

  He stood with her by the kitchen door and stared back at them, all tired, all worried, all desperate for a solution to something none of them could understand. He had never thought about babies before, apart from the romantic idea he had after Katherine conceived. So far as he had thought about it at all, babies woke up, they fed, they needed cleaning and washing, they slept and then they woke up again.

  It did not seem so simple any more and he knew Katherine was desperately worried.

  He looked at them and breathed deeply as he felt Judith’s hot mouth at his neck and then, despite everything, he felt gratitude. They were his family, his only family. The Foales had accepted him into their home and now Judith as well, and they were trying, as he was, to find a way through the confusion and doubt that had descended on them all.

  ‘Maybe you’re all right . . . I don’t know . . .’

  Then: ‘Come on, Judith, let’s go for a walk . . .’

  ‘Don’t be too long, she’ll need a feed.’

  ‘Okay . . .’ he called back.

  That was one thing that seemed all right, her feeding.

  ‘Come on, my love . . .’

  He chose to go round the house first because when he did, climbing up and down the stairs, backing into rooms to open doors when she was in his arms, moving to windows, his feet sounding on the wooden floorboards, it seemed to quieten her a little.

  The house in which Katherine had been raised was large and rambling. The Foales had lived there for fifty years and were now in their seventies. Arthur was a former professor of Astral Archaeology at Cambridge University, Margaret a specialist in Anglo-Saxon literature. They were childless.

 
Their home dated back to Elizabethan times and had been added to over the centuries in a piecemeal way, with innumerable rooms, three different staircases to the first floor and enormous attics. The areas on which Margaret imposed herself – the study she shared with Arthur, the conservatory and the kitchen – were tidy. So too was Katherine’s bedroom, which she now shared with Judith and Jack. It overlooked the garden with a view towards White Horse Hill.

  Since their return with Judith it had become a tip by Margaret’s standards: hard to clean, impossible to keep the nappies and all the other things in order. They might have used one of the many spare rooms as a nursery, but Katherine wanted Judith with her through the night.

  Disordered their lives might temporarily have become, but there was nothing untidy about the minds of Arthur, Margaret and Katherine. They were all mentally sharp, Jack knew that. If they had a fault it was that they were too intellectual, lacking the instinctive feelings Jack displayed, though free of the impulsiveness and stubbornness that sometimes got him into trouble.

  In fact Katherine might easily have been mistaken for their real grandchild. She was taller than they were, but most of her generation were taller than their parents and grandparents. Her mother had been tall and dark before the tragic accident that brought them all together. It happened after Katherine’s father, a doctor, had offered to give Jack, then six years old, a lift from the North to London. The weather was atrocious, roads were blocked, there was a diversion, and her father not only lost his way in the dark but lost control of the car as well.

  It crashed and burned.

  Katherine’s father died rescuing her mother, who was so badly injured that she later became bedridden. Katherine herself, strapped to a back seat in the flames, was rescued by Jack, whose unusual strength and courage brought her out unharmed, but he suffered terrible burns to his back and neck which required years of painful treatment. Ten years later they got together again, fell in love and found a way into the Hyddenworld. They came to Brum, made friends with Bedwyn Stort, and only Katherine’s pregnancy and her desire to come home made them return to the human world.

  Jack stood at an upstairs window, staring out over the garden towards the two conifers that marked the entrance to the henge.

  ‘Come on,’ he said again, ‘let’s go and see where you were born.’ He knew that if she wasn’t crying as loudly as normal it was probably because she was exhausted and needed sleep. That didn’t mean she slept, but perhaps being rocked in his arms as he walked would do the trick.

  He passed Katherine on the stairs.

  ‘I thought you were outside . . .’

  ‘Just going . . .’

  ‘Jack, I do think seeing a doctor would be best.’

  ‘I know you do and you’re probably right. Give me ten minutes; let me breathe some outside air. I just feel . . .’

  ‘Take as long as you like. She looks like she might even sleep.’

  He went on down, she up.

  ‘Jack,’ she called down.

  ‘Mmm,’ he said softly, looking up towards her.

  ‘I love you both,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry that—’

  ‘There’s nothing to say sorry about, not now, not ever,’ he said. ‘We made her together, we’re going to fight for her together. Now, you have a rest, her miserable ladyship and I will perambulate the garden . . .’

  He was trying to make the best of it but it wasn’t easy. Outside, her cries persisted, but in the Summer breeze were less claustrophobic, more tolerable.

  Like the house, the garden was big and rambling, the rough lawn he was walking across one of many once formal now dilapidated features. The garden had been made in the late nineteenth century, maintained until after the First World War when gardeners became hard to find, and after that it had been one long, slow decline and more than a match for Arthur. The old rockeries, the terraces and stairs with cracked urns and occasional sculptures, and a formal rose garden behind which a rhododendron shrubbery extended, all spoke of a time when Margaret’s family had money and status. All gone. It was a battle to pay the maintenance bills.

  Until Jack came there had not been a young, strong pair of male hands working in the garden for years. He had grown to love it; Katherine already did.

  Before that Arthur made the henge, explored the world beyond the human one, believing that if only its secret could be found there was a way that a henge – any henge – could be used to access a world other than their own. He had found it, and later so had Katherine and Jack – the one abducted into it, the other her rescuer. One way and another Jack and Katherine had fallen in love in the garden and during their summery walks up on the Berkshire Downs, along the Ridgeway and by the White Horse.

  As he wandered across the lawn and Judith cried and cried he felt her distress as his own.

  He stopped near the henge, with the shrubbery to his right, and whispered, ‘If only you could say what’s wrong, Daddy could try to help. What is it? Mmm? Find a way to tell me.’

  Jack was as tired as everyone else, though he wasn’t going to admit that. But out there in the garden, where no one could see, with Judith inconsolable, he could admit it to the trees and the grass and the skies.

  He began to weep. He wept for Judith and for them all. He wept because he didn’t know what to do. He wept because it felt like nothing was right, everything was wrong, and there was no help he could give.

  Then, as suddenly as she always started, she stopped.

  Just like that.

  She even raised her head a little, which in a five-day-old was difficult if not impossible. Maybe, too, she looked off to their right.

  Jack looked the same way, and for the first time in a long while, he heard the chimes. They were pieces of glass, or what looked like glass, on threads, tied to the bushes of the shrubbery, which caught the wind and tinkled away, night and day, soft and loud, falling completely silent only on the day that Katherine’s mother Clare had died.

  Clare had put some of the chimes there when she could still get out, so Margaret said. She believed they gave them protection against . . . them, whoever they were. Malign little people, spirits and mischievous sprites.

  Margaret half believed it too, or felt it was unlucky not to. She said that the chimes were already there when she was a child. Examining them, Jack concluded that a few were very old, the glass stained with rain and residue from plants. He also noticed something else. They never looked exactly the same, as if they came and went, the old as well as the new. Arthur doubted that, but being superstitious never went near them, though he liked the sound.

  Now, it seemed, the chimes had made Judith stop crying.

  He carried her to them, stood in the breeze that held their sound, closed his eyes, felt her body and its life.

  ‘A baby’s not weak,’ he murmured, ‘but strong, and you’re stronger than all of them. Now, tell me . . . what’s wrong?’

  She let out a cry again, a scream, most terrible, which carried on the breeze, along with the sound of the chimes, up and away into the henge, spiralling off into the sky. It was a cry for help.

  Standing there, arms about her, Jack suddenly felt her pain, really felt it.

  ‘No!’ he said. ‘No!’

  An image of when he was nine had come to him.

  In bed, a skin graft to his back just completed, the pain unbearable and doctors and nurses and people standing around looking down at him. Not one of them touching him or holding him. Just adult eyes staring as he heard someone say, ‘Of course, he’ll need another . . .’

  ‘No!’ he had screamed. ‘No!’

  That was the beginning of his battle with medical authority and the welfare services, and he had always wished he had someone to fight his corner for him. He never did.

  But Judith did.

  ‘You’ve got me, and Mummy and Arthur and Margaret . . .’

  He held her tight and wept again until he felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Katherine.

  ‘I’m not going
to let them do to her what they did to me,’ he said.

  ‘Sssh,’ she replied, ‘ssh, my love . . .’

  ‘My instinct says the best thing is for us to keep her warm and dry and fed. Does she look unhealthy?’

  ‘Arthur says she’s growing already and he’s taken to measuring her.’

  Jack laughed.

  ‘It’s the scientist in him. He needs something to do.’

  ‘Your instincts are usually right, Jack. So let’s leave things as they are and hope Margaret stops worrying so much.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘The law,’ said Katherine. ‘She’s worried that one of her village friends will find out about Judith and start asking questions. Let’s give it a few more days at least . . .’

  She took Judith from him and put her to the breast.

  ‘Ow! She bites. In fact . . .’

  She pulled Judith gently from her nipple and felt her gums.

  ‘She’s got a tooth!’

  ‘Impossible,’ said Jack.

  ‘Really. Look!’

  Her nipple was bleeding.

  ‘She’s a vampire,’ said Jack.

  Gingerly Katherine put her back to the nipple.

  ‘Ow!!’

  She pulled her away again, whispered an affectionate ‘No!’ in her ear and then put her back.

  Judith did not bite a third time.

  ‘If she’s a vampire she’s learning fast not to be,’ she said.

  They went back to the house, their moment of sharing feeling like respite.

  It was, but it didn’t last long.

  Half an hour later Judith began screaming again.

  9

  AWAKENING

  Four hundred miles to the east, across the North Sea, far beneath the surface of the Earth, a mortal form lay cocooned in a nineteenth-century dentist’s chair of rusting iron and mildewed leather.

  Around him in the terrible dark were the chair’s accoutrements: flexible tubes, drills on leads, an extending spittoon, a cast-iron footrest, a treadle to turn the wires that turn the wheels that turn the drills, and counterweights.