Season of Secrets

by Sally Nicholls

  The moon is out over the hills, pale and thin, with a huge, frosty ring. The sky is a deep, dark blue. I’m not frightened. There are shimmery beginnings of frost on the grass and a sort of witchy-magic in the air and sky, which fills me up with excitement. It’s the sort of night me and Mum like best.

  His house sits low and mysterious under the dusky sky. Like it’s hiding a secret. My heart starts beating faster. He couldn’t have come back, could he? Just in time for Christmas?

  No. He couldn’t.

  The barn is empty. The oak tree looms over the floor and out of the hole in the barn roof, branches reaching out for the open air. I go and touch it. It’s cold. The wood is dry and dark.

  Is it dead?

  I don’t know.

  I put my presents down and sit on a bag of concrete, I rest my head on my knees and wrap my arms around my legs.

  “I wish you’d come back,” I say. “From wherever you are.”

  Nothing happens.

  I scratch around in the earth with the sharp end of a bit of rock. I try and draw a full moon but it just looks like a circle. I make it a head and give it horns and round eyes.

  It looks stupid.

  I turn the horns into leaves, growing out of the head. I draw long twigs shooting out of where the person’s nose would be, if he had a nose.

  Above my head, the branches of the oak tree rustle.

  I draw a gravestone around the person. Underneath the grave, I draw a woman with long hair. I make the hair longer until she’s buried underneath it, like Sleeping Beauty.

  She looks like she’s been scribbled out. Or like she’s buried alive.

  “Can dead people come back and visit?” I say, out loud.

  The oak tree shivers. The branches move in complicated welcome, or warning.

  A hand reaches forward and covers mine.

  “Who’s dead?” he says.

  Two Kings

  Him!

  It is him. He’s half-sitting, propped up against the tree, grey shadows falling across his face.

  “You’ve come back!”

  I’m so pleased, I forget to be shy. I jump up and hug him, as well as I can with his back against the tree.

  “Where’ve you been?”

  He doesn’t answer. I pull away.

  And, for the first time, see him properly.

  He looks awful. His face is much thinner than I remember, with hollows where his cheeks ought to be and dark shadows under his eyes. It’s an awful greyish, white colour. It’s hard to tell, in the darkness, where he ends and the tree begins.

  He’s shivering.

  “Are you all right?” I say. And then, when he doesn’t answer, “What’s wrong with you?”

  He shudders. I touch his hand. It’s icy.

  He’s still dressed in nothing but his strange trousers. I take off my coat and drape it over his chest. He doesn’t move.

  “You can’t stay here,” I say. I may not know much, but I do know that. I put my arms around him and try and lift him. He gasps and cries out and I let go, helpless. “You have to come back with me. You have to.”

  “No,” he says. He puts his hand on my arm.

  “But. . .”

  There’s a noise in the doorway, behind me. I turn, too quick to be frightened, and draw in my breath.

  It’s the Holly King.

  He’s standing there in the doorway. He’s bigger than I remember – taller, and stronger too.

  Frost shimmers on the doorframe where his hand rests.

  I bite my lips. Did he follow me? Did I bring him here?

  Is this my fault again?

  I look sideways at my man, my Oak King. He moves his hand across to mine and squeezes it gently. He’s shaking with the cold, but he can still speak.

  “Not yet,” he says.

  The Holly King doesn’t answer. He turns his black eyes on to me. “You shouldn’t be here,” he says.

  “Leave her alone,” gasps my man. That’s what it is, a gasp. His hand is still shaking, over mine. “Go home,” he says.

  “No,” I whisper.

  It’s quiet in the barn, except for the rasp of his breathing.

  “Listen,” he says, and I bend forward, trying to catch his words. “You asked me once. . .” he says. “About bringing people back from the dead—” He shudders. I grip his hand. In the darkness of the barn, his words have a sinister edge, and suddenly I’m afraid. “For you—” he says, “I can—”

  “What do you mean?” I say. “What for me? What are you going to do?” Is he going to bring my mother back? How? As a zombie? A ghost? For real? Terror rises inside me sudden as water.

  “What are you going to do?”

  Behind me, the Holly King stirs, frost crackling on the doorway. My man stiffens. He squeezes my hand.

  “Go home,” he says.

  I squeeze his hand. I don’t know what to say. I love you? It sounds silly and overdramatic. Will you be all right? What would I do if he wasn’t? Call the police? And what does he mean by “not yet”? How much longer can he last?

  I lean forward and pick up my bit of sharpened rock that I was drawing with. The Oak King, the Green Man, lets go of my hand. The beast-man steps aside in the door, leaving me room to pass. I think my man looks up, but it’s so dark it’s hard to be sure. He’s in the shadowed side of the barn; a grey ink-shape merging into the trunk of the tree; in the darkness, you can’t be sure where one begins and the other ends.

  I walk very slowly past the Holly King. I’m shaking. Neither he nor my man moves. I’m holding the piece of rock cold against my palm. If I threw it straight into his eyes, could it blind him? Could it kill him?

  I’m close beside him in the doorway. His strong, animal smell is all around me. All I would have to do is pull back my arm and throw.

  I don’t throw. I keep walking out of the door and the moment’s passed. I stop and drop the rock in the mud, and suddenly I’m running, a small girl running beneath the great black arc of the sky, across the old familiar fields, to home.

  Loki

  Here’s a thing about gods. You might think all gods are nice – you know, maybe the god of wine gets drunk sometimes, or the god of maths is a bit boring, but they’re not really bad or anything. It’s just, you know, if you’re the god of maths, then you have to talk about long division all the time. But you need all the different gods, even gods of fractions, or rain, or underwear or whatever, because otherwise there’d be no one to ask for help when you got stuck in maths. Or ran out of underwear.

  Anyway. That’s what you might think, but it’s not true. Because there are some gods who are just evil. There’s Loki, for instance, who’s this Viking god who went around doing awful things for no reason at all, like killing other gods just for fun and then refusing to cry so they never got reborn. He was so evil that the other gods tied him up in a cave underground and stuck a poisonous snake over his head, so that now the snake drips poison on him all day and all night and his wife has to stand over him with a bowl, catching it. And when the bowl is full, she pours it away and then the poison from the snake drips on Loki and he shakes so much that the whole Earth shakes too, and that’s where earthquakes come from.

  Or so the Vikings thought.

  And that proves that not all gods are nice. Some gods will kill other gods and make sure they never get reborn. Just for fun.

  Sleeping and Waking

  All night I lie just between sleeping and waking. It’s the sort of night where you think you haven’t slept at all, but you must have done because where else has the night gone?

  The god of the hunt is banging on our door.

  “Not yet!” I shout. “Not yet!”

  But, “Now,” he says, and he bangs down the door and the wind comes whirling in and blows everything up – all the magazines swirling in the shop, all the tins tumbling down from the shelves – and I’m hiding in the doorway, and he’s standing there on his hooved feet, watching. And my mother’s there, rising up from the
grave, a skeleton most beloved in blue jeans and long pale strands of yellow hair.

  And I’m screaming and screaming, but then Grandpa’s there, so I must have been dreaming, and he’s saying, “Hush. You’re all right. I’ve got you.”

  And I feel his arms around me and I’m crying, and I say, “He’s coming! He’s coming!”

  But Grandpa holds me and he rocks me, very gentle, much more gentle than Grandma, and he says, “Shush, Shush,” and I wonder whether if I tell him about the Holly King, he’ll be able to save my man. And I wonder if I go out now, into the night, I can get to him before the Holly King does, and somehow save him. But the night is deep and dark, and the wind is whustling round the windowpanes, dying down to nothing and then whustling again, and Grandpa is rocking me, saying, “Shush, shush,” just like the man in the lane, and then antlers grow out of his head and leaves grow out of his ears and nose and he towers over me as tall as the oak tree in the barn, swaying in the breeze, and my eyes are closing and I’m falling asleep, before I can do anything at all.

  Fear

  I know I ought to go back to the barn, but I don’t.

  I go to the Seaman’s Mission Carol Service with Grandma instead, because we always go, and remember my great-grandfather, who was in the navy. I go and see my cousin Tom play an ugly sister in his school pantomime. I stay and help Grandpa hang up all the Christmas cards ready for Dad coming to stay.

  I know I ought to go back, but I don’t.

  The Year Is Dying in the Night

  It’s the last week of school, and we’re doing hardly any work. We sing Christmas carols instead (Hannah and Josh sing the rude versions) and practise for the Christmas play. We’re doing a modern version of the Nativity. At home, there were never enough parts to go around and we were all stuck being extra shepherds or angels, but here everyone except Mary and Joseph has two parts. I’m an angel with cardboard wings and a hotel keeper.

  “Yes,” I say. “You can sleep in my garage conversion.”

  I wish Grandpa had a garage conversion that my man could have. He’s a sort of god, like Jesus.

  Hannah and Josh are Mary and Joseph. Poor baby Jesus. Josh is a plumber instead of a carpenter, because carpenters aren’t modern enough.

  “You can’t be having a baby,” he says to Hannah. “We ent married yet!”

  “That’s all you know,” says Hannah. “It’s the Son of God, so there!”

  On the last day of term we cut up old Christmas cards to make calendars. I wonder who’ll get ours this year, Grandpa or Dad? I decide to give mine to whichever one Hannah doesn’t give hers to, but it’s sad. Our calendars are always stuck up next to each other on the fridge in our old kitchen. I look across at Hannah to see if she’s sad too, but she’s busy drawing horns and a tail on a Christmas card Joseph and doesn’t seem to mind.

  It’s very cold at lunch. There’s ice by the wall, where the shadows are. The boys start sliding on it and soon we all are, even Emily. Hannah and Josh try to push each other over. After I’ve nearly got knocked down twice, I go and slide on the frost, as far away from them as I can get.

  All of a sudden, I have this memory of the time when I was off school because I had to go to the dentist. Me and Mum were going back to the car when we saw this ice rink, an outdoor one in the middle of town.

  “Let’s go skating,” said Mum, and we went. And at first I just hung on to the edge and didn’t know what to do, but then Mum held my hand and pulled me and we went round and round and faster and faster until we were both hot and laughing and I’d forgotten to be scared.

  And after I’ve remembered that, I don’t want to slide any more. I go and crouch down in the cold by the school wall and watch the others.

  I wonder if my man is dead yet.

  Then Matthew drops icicles down the back of my coat.

  And I feel like I’m going to cry, which isn’t how you’re supposed to feel when it’s the last day of term and only four days until Christmas.

  The afternoon is better. We do our play and all the parents come and watch. Actually that’s only nine people and Grandpa and Grandma and Miss Shelley and Mrs Angus, but one of the nine is Dad, so I don’t mind. He comes in with Grandpa and Grandma and as soon as I see his lopsided face my whole body lets out the breath that I didn’t even realize it was holding and I get the same jolt of surprise that I always get when I see him – that he looks the same as always, that he hasn’t stepped further away from us in the time since I saw him last. And they all say they like the play and laugh in the right places and there is tea and coffee and squash and mince pies afterwards.

  The entertainment is supposed to be over with the play, but Miss Shelley starts talking to Dad about us. She tells Dad all about the Viking poems we wrote for our topic. So then Hannah has to get up and read one of hers out.

  “Vikings

  by Hannah Brooke

  Vikings,

  Had likings,

  For pikings,

  And hikings,

  To places,

  And races,

  And chases,

  Of a nun,

  Without a gun,

  For fun,

  They wrote sagas,

  And drank lagers,

  And said, ‘Yah! Grr!’s.

  Just like you.

  I would not be blue,

  If I were a Viking too.”

  Then Josh and Matthew do kick boxing. And Alexander plays The Snowman on the school piano. He doesn’t want to, but his mum makes him. And Emily does a ballet dance, because she goes to ballet classes.

  You’d think Sascha and Oliver would be too small to do anything, but they get up and sing baby songs with Mrs Angus, and Sascha tells this long, twisty story about a fairy that goes on for ever and ever. So that’s just me left.

  Mrs Angus says, “Why don’t you show your dad some of your pictures?” But pictures aren’t a talent show sort of thing. They’re a let’s-give-Molly-something-to-do-so-she-doesn’t-feel-left-out-thing and I don’t want to do it.

  I go and stand in front of everyone. I hold my hands behind my back and I turn out my feet like Emily did when she was dancing, and I say,

  “Ring Out, Wild Bells

  Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

  The flying cloud, the frosty light;

  The year is dying in the night:

  Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

  Ring out the old, ring in the new,

  Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

  The year is going, let him go:

  Ring out the false, ring in the true.

  Ring out the grief that saps the mind,

  For those that here we see no more,

  Ring out the feud of rich and poor,

  Ring in redress to all mankind.”

  Which is a poem by Lord Alfred Tennyson, which Mum taught me for Christmas last year. When I’m done nobody claps like they did the others. Everyone’s quiet for the longest time. I go back and sit by Dad and he puts his arm around me, so I must have done all right. And then Mrs Angus goes over to the piano and we all sing carols.

  We sing “I Saw Three Ships” and “Away in a Manger” and one about wassailing, which is an old word for carol-singing.

  Miss Shelley says, “Any requests?”

  And Emily says, “Oh, please, ‘The Holly and the Ivy’,” so we sing that one.

  Oh, the rising of the sun,

  And the running of the deer,

  The playing of the merry organ,

  Sweet singing in the choir.

  When we go outside it’s dark and all these tiny flakes of snow are falling out of the sky, like something in a picture book, and it’s so beautiful that it makes me want to cry. Everyone goes back to their cars, calling, “Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!”, and I hold on to Grandpa’s hand so he doesn’t slip on the ice, and I wish it could be Christmas for ever.

  Ice

  But when we get home, I remember the man in the barn, and once I’ve remembere
d, I can’t get him out of my head. I look out of the window at the snow falling and I think about how half of his roof has fallen in – the snow must be blowing through and right on to where he’s lying.

  You could freeze to death on a night like this. Even a god could.

  Dad’s downstairs in the kitchen with Grandma, drinking tea. I go up to the door and almost inside, but then I stop. I don’t think they’ll go out for a man they don’t believe in on a night like this.

  I go back up to the living room. Hannah’s watching Neighbours with her hand in a Christmas tin of Roses.

  “Hannah.”

  “What?” And when I don’t say anything, “What?”

  “My man. In the barn.”

  “Oh, gawd.” Hannah flings herself back on to the sofa and closes her eyes. “What about him?” she says, dramatically, head tossed back.

  “It’s snowing.”

  “Maybe the fairies can knit him a blanket.”

  I twist the hem of my jumper round and round.

  “Please, Hannah.”

  “Please what?”

  “Come with me. Make sure he’s all right.”

  “Molly.” Hannah puts on her grown-up voice. “Imaginary people don’t get cold, you know.”

  She turns back to the television.

  “He’s not imaginary!” She doesn’t move. “He could die.”

  She turns up the volume. I grab the remote control. She squeals.

  “Molly! Pack it in!”

  “You’re just scared,” I say. “You’re scared, because if you come you’ll see he’s real and then you’ll be wrong, and you don’t want to go out in the dark on your own, and you’re scared of seeing a dead body, which is what he will be, and—”