by Harper Fox
A grand theory. In practice it meant an unimaginable parting from his husband and his child. He took a couple of long strides after Tamsyn, as if that would somehow help. Quarter past twelve now, and he had to stay in the minute if he could, and use the next forty-five to good purpose. This was a perfect town for wandering, most of the streets pedestrianised or too narrow for traffic, every alleyway opening up into strange vistas: the vast turf bowl of the plain-an-gwarry with its earthwork amphitheatre seats and echoes of medieval mystery plays hanging in the warm air; sudden views all the way out to the cliffs and the sea beyond. Narrow lanes with roses spilling into them over thick, shoulder-height drystone walls. Tamsyn darted into one of these as if she’d known the place all her life, and Lee, who never let her get out of sight if he could help it, arrived on her heels at the foot of a single, huge standing stone. “Wow,” he observed. “Good discovery, kiddo.”
She turned to beam at him. “Willy Stone, Lee.”
He clamped a hand to his mouth, turning his reaction to a cough. She could be like a little cat at times, and you couldn’t always laugh at her. Besides, she was probably right: Willy from Wylloe was an easy linguistic step. More likely it was the other way round, and this stone with its undeniable angle and shape had passed into early Christianity as a local saint. “Is that its name? How did you know?”
She pointed pityingly to the large brown tourist-board sign aimed squarely at the stone. He had to be careful not to miss the obvious in the swirl and rush of life’s mysteries. “All right, clever-boots. How did you know it was here?”
Her expression changed. He knew the look. Since her earliest babyhood, whenever words failed, all she’d had to do was meet his eyes. He’d experience a kind of ripple in the air between them, and whatever she needed him to know would simply manifest, clear and three-dimensional, in his own mind. What was she telling him now? That this giant standing stone was a node on the network, the ley-map of Kernow, birthright knowledge to the pellar kind?
God, why couldn’t he hear her?
He went to scoop her up. He sat her on the sunwarmed wall which enclosed the great menhir and kept off the cows grazing on the common land beyond. “Chocolate?” he offered, breaking the bar in two, and waiting for her usual broadcast of pleasure, not so much at the treat as their shared enjoyment. But all he saw was her smile.
Still, their silence was companionable. He let it extend while she got half the chocolate into her mouth and the rest onto her face, and then he broke out another tissue from the satchel and gently cleaned her up. “You and I are different, Tamsie,” he said carefully after a while, keeping his tone casual. “You know that, don’t you? Different from your friends at school, and even from Dada, although he can do a little bit of it too. I don’t mean moving things without touching them. I mean...”
“Looking inside people’s heads.”
“Yes, that’s right.” She was reaching for him again, as she had in the car. Again he leaned down for her, and stood in puzzled stillness while she once again turned his face a little way left, then right, then up and down. “I’m not very good at it, though. And I think you’re very good. What are you doing, sweetheart?”
“Can’t look today.”
“Look where?”
“Inside you.”
Oh, God. He hadn’t meant to shut her out. Hadn’t thought about it at all, not consciously: had been too frantically busy playing for time with Gid. If he’d raised his shields for his husband, though, how much further would he go to protect his child? “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Is that why you brought me here? Did you think you’d get a... a better signal near the stone?”
“Mm-hm. Moving head around, too.” She let go of him, released a curiously adult little sigh. “Have to talk to you properly today.”
“You’re doing very well. Proper sentences and everything, more or less.”
“Very dickifult.”
Restraining laughter was a lot easier with an aching load of tears in his throat. “Difficult, honey. And I’m sure you also know by now that almost everybody else in the world has to do it that way all the time. That’s why lots of them are sad and angry. They feel so alone.”
She nodded. “Alone, all alone. Ganny said daisies used to be called day’s-eyes.”
Revelation hit Lee like a nova, a day’s-eye sunburst. He hoisted Tamsyn off the wall and into his arms. “So you put a string of them around my head, to see if that would help you get a better look?”
A faint sob shook her at last. “Yes. Didn’t work.”
“Oh, my girl. You listen, all right?” He gave her a gentle jounce, cupped one hand around the back of her curly head and rocked her. “Soon—very, very soon—this will be over, and I promise I’ll never keep you out again. I didn’t mean to do it this time, and I can’t make you understand why it happened, or why it’s... for the best. Meanwhile we’ll just have to talk to each other, like all those poor lonely-heads. Can we do that?”
She snuffled against his neck. “Can.”
“Good girl. Proper sentences and everything, even if it is difficult. Tamsie—when you say Ganny, who do you mean?”
He could sense her giving the question thought. The answer wasn’t an easy one. On any day but today, he’d have seen the possibilities running through her mind, the faces and the connections. Maybe Ma Frayne had told her about the day’s-eyes. But she’d kept her baby habit of calling her grandmother Ganmar, and a sad day it would be for that old lady when she stopped. He waited, knowing that truth was a mobile, ambiguous concept for most children, let alone a telepath with phenomenal psychokinetic abilities.
She stiffened in his arms. “Alice Rawle!”
He almost dropped her in shock. “Tamsie, no. There once was an old lady called Granny Ragwen, and you called her Ganny. You were very little, though, and—”
“No, no, no, no, no, no!” She began to fight him in frustration. “No, not Ganny now. Alice!”
“Tell me. Just tell me with words.”
Poor kid. He set her down, and she sucked in a huge breath, clutching him by the collar of his shirt and his silver chain. “Alice Rawle,” she said, with perfect clarity, “is in the church. The stone gave me the signal. Alice Rawle!”
She can’t be. She’s locked up. It’ll be years and years before you need ever worry about her again—never, maybe, if she ends up in Broadmoor where she belongs. None of these reassurances would come out of Lee’s throat. If Tamsyn said she was here, so she was. “All right,” he croaked. “Why?”
“Because she’s like me.”
“She is nothing like you, Tamsyn.”
“She is. She is. And they hurt her and made her do things, things in a big empty place with soldiers. And you and Dada found her and they locked her up again. But she got out. She got out, and now she wants to pull everything down. She wants to turn the world back to the bad time. Lee, run! Run!”
In a way he was so proud of her. She’d never in her life strung so many cogent sentences together. She wriggled out of his grasp and fled back the way they’d come. Soon he caught up with her. He seized the flying tails of her little embroidered denim coat. Did she want to get back to the church? He hoisted her into his arms and she pointed that way mutely, eyes wild, so he settled her as best he could and ran on.
Only when they passed his parked car and she grabbed for the door handle and broke into wild shrieks of fear did he get it. He swung round so as not to hurt her. She was tearing at the locked door, and not for her own sake. She’d renewed her grip on his shirt collar. With her free hand she pointed again, first at him and then through the window of the car. Get in, get in, the gesture obvious even though words had failed. And when she’d said run, she’d meant run away.
Too late for Lee. The raven-voiced bell was ringing one o’clock, but he barely noticed. Gideon’s police truck was parked by the kerb at the end of two short streaks of rubber, her lights still ablaze, her nose half an inch shy of the lychgate.
Whatev
er had brought Gid to St Wylloe’s church in that kind of whirlwind, Lee wasn’t about to add their kid to the mix. He let go of Tamsyn for long enough to hit the unlock button on his key fob: hauled open the door and bundled her inside.
Her fists hit the window as he locked her in. Her face had creased into a wildcat’s mask. He kissed his fingertips and pressed them to the glass in a hopeless apology: waited long enough to check that the car was in the shade, that she had her satchel with her, her water and her snacks. Then he turned and ran for the gate so hard that his feet churned up the gravel and he almost fell. “Gideon! Gid!”
Chapter Ten
What Goes In Wonderland
Gideon rounded the northwest corner of St Wylloe’s church and ran smack into his brother, running the other way. The impact was considerable. “Christ almighty,” Gideon said, scrambling out of the red currant bush in which he’d crash-landed, distractedly noticing its rich catlike stink. Zeke, with small, eloquent gestures, indicated the church, his dog collar, the holy ground surrounding them, and Gideon rolled his eyes. “I’m sorry. But this time it’s not so much a swear as an appeal to the local deity.”
“What for?”
“Information, mostly, but you’ll do. Did you call the police?”
“No, the vicar did. Apparently there’s someone in the tower, throwing down stones from the turret. I came out to have a look.”
Gideon took a few steps back and looked up at the squat, somehow dizzying tower. He blinked sun-dazzle from his eyes. “Is that what you’re doing out here, running widdershins around the church?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Widdershins, like Old German widar and sens in French. Against the direction of the sun, and things in nature generally. That’s why it’s meant to be bad luck.” Gideon shook himself: Rufus must be haunting him today. “What are you doing in St Wylloe? Parish business?”
“Yes, I suppose so. The strange thing is, I can’t in the least remember what it’s meant to be.”
Brushing pollen off his stab vest, Gideon turned to look at him. The sun was beating down. He stepped into the shade, drawing Zeke with him. “Do I need to get you a hat? Because that... tiny bald patch of yours is going pink.”
“I do not have a bald patch, Gideon. Besides, if I do, it’ll be yours in ten years’ time. What are you doing here, on a callout any of the local police could have handled?”
That was a good question. Gid had happened to be in the squad room at Tollgate Road when someone from dispatch had mentioned an incident at St Wylloe’s church. He’d jumped up, knocking over his cup of coffee. Had he offered to handle it, let alone taken time to get the call assigned to him? He played back his last thirty seconds at Tollgate. The duty sergeant hadn’t been at her desk. He’d just run. “Lee’s working here,” he said, as if that was a good enough reason. “Tamsie’s with him too.”
Good enough for Zeke, who nodded. “Have you seen them?”
“No. That’s Jory Stark’s yard over there, and it looks like the back door’s locked. Lee might have taken her into the church. She’s pretty keen on churches, for a table-turning demon spawn.”
Zeke let the old gibe slip by him. He was shadowed with confusion. “They’re not inside.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’ve been in myself, and...”
“All right. What’s inside that church, that you don’t want me to go running in half-cocked and cause trouble?”
“Elowen.”
The breath caught in Gideon’s throat. Something about his inability to find his husband and his child, something about his sister-in-law’s name—the combination of these things filled him with prickling dread, a need to lash out he could never indulge because he’d bring the house down, shatter Zeke’s heaven and cause it to crash in blue-gold broken chunks around their ears. “What the fuck, Zeke?”
“I don’t know,” Zeke told him seriously, for once oblivious to his choice of words. “I’ll tell you what happened, though it makes no sense to me. I did think I had business here, so I set off from Dark about an hour ago. I’d got about halfway when I saw Mrs Coulter in a layby.”
“Mrs Coulter?”
“Yes, your child’s exceptionally strange companion. She was holding... Well, I must have been mistaken, but it looked as if she was holding some kind of brush or broomstick and shaking it as if it was broken. When she saw me approaching, she threw it into the bushes and stuck out her thumb instead.”
“She was... hitchhiking?”
“Yes. With Elowen.”
The moon was almost full again. This time around, Gideon hadn’t experienced the strange energetic surges and hungers that had plagued him before, but still he’d been sleeping badly. Maybe he’d nodded off in the squad room and was drooling onto his undone paperwork. “Elowen and Mrs Coulter were hitchhiking together on the road to St Wylloe?”
“That’s right. So I picked them both up and brought them, and before you start jumping up and down, Gideon, Elowen is very upset. She doesn’t seem to have much more idea of what she’s doing here than... than I do myself, and she knows that any unscheduled meeting with you is going to make you hostile. It’s time you forgave her.”
“What?” Gideon pushed his cap back, distractedly aware of his own thick, close-cut hair, like a beast’s pelt, so different from Zeke’s fine strands that he had to be wrong about the bald patch. “I forgave her years ago.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, come inside. The vicar’s in there, going spare about vandals and thugs in his church.”
“I can’t see anyone. And I really have to find Lee and...” Something caught Gideon’s eye, high up in the turret. Surely nothing more than the sweep of a swallows wing, or perhaps one of the falcons employed by the council to keep pigeon numbers down. Following the movement changed his perspective, and he stepped back out into the sun, keeping a steadying fingertip touch on the granite wall. “Zeke. One of the ears has gone—the one to the southwest.”
He didn’t need to clarify. He’d called them ears all his life, the pinnacles which adorned the four corners of the towers of the ancient Celtic churches. They’d merged in his childhood with the idea of Batman, an alert, protective signal. Zeke, almost twelve by the time his baby brother had begun to talk, had made a couple of efforts to teach him the proper word, then, in an unusual surrender, had given up and adopted the childish term too. In one coordinated, silent motion, Gideon and Zeke rounded the southwestern corner of the tower.
The pinnacle had crashed down into the tall grass. It was much larger than it had looked in situ, set against the endless Cornish sky. Almost the height of a man, and it had broken neatly into three parts, the lichen-crusted ball from the top lying among the buttercups like a skull. Gideon realised that, ever since he’d heard the words disruption and falling stones back at Tollgate Road, he’d expected to find his husband and child connected with them somehow: at best, Tamsyn on a levitation spree, and at worst...
He shivered back into reality. What would Lee have been doing out here, in just the wrong place at the wrong time with his kid? If, out of the two remaining pieces, one looked like the body of a child and the other of a curled-up man trying to shield her, that was only his own pattern-making primate brain going about its work. Pareidolia, that was called. Gid had read about it in one of the science magazines Lee kept buying him, mostly for the pleasure, Gideon thought, of watching him fall asleep whilst manfully trying to plough his way through the articles. That kindly hand, lifting the magazine off his face... “They’re probably in the village somewhere. Tamsie and Lee, I mean. She often takes him for a walk at lunchtime. Come on.”
The great wooden door on the south side was propped open. Gideon heard the vicar before he saw him. Thin and small, cut from a different cloth than Zeke, he was trotting about anxiously between the archway that led to the tower and the row of chairs by the font, where two women were sitting bolt upright, wat
ching him. “About time!” he exclaimed, setting eyes on Gideon. “I called the police nearly an hour ago. There’s somebody in the tower.”
“All right, sir.” Gideon strode over to intercept him. “I’m here to help now. I saw that one of the ears... er, the pinnacles had come down outside. Was anybody hurt?”
“No. These women were in the churchyard at the time, but they came indoors for shelter, God be praised. There’s a... a hooligan up there, some young layabout from one of the towns. He threw the pinnacle down, or... or she did. I thought I saw a skirt. I thought I saw... What is it they call the headgear the Muslim women wear?”
“A hijab?” Gideon struggled to keep up. He hadn’t heard hooligan and layabout for years, though blaming outsiders for random troubles had recently enjoyed a revival on the peninsula. “You actually saw someone? A Muslim woman?”
“Yes. I don’t know. There’s nowhere to hide up there, but...”
Letting him go, Gideon leaned in through the archway and looked up. A narrow stone staircase followed the angles of the tower up to the wooden maintenance platform beneath the bell. There was almost no cover, though perhaps a skinny kid might be concealed in the shadows. “All right. I’ll go and have a look.”
“Hurry, please. And when you get hold of them, give them a good sharp shock. Discipline, that’s what’s lacking these days. Nobody knows their place anymore. Discipline!”
Pity passed through Gideon. What must it be like, clinging to this toe-hold outpost of Christianity where every change meant the uprooting of some long-held principle, every newcomer an enemy? “I’ll do my best. Meanwhile, this is my brother, Ezekiel Frayne. He’s minister of the Methodist chapel in Dark.”
