The Dark Is Rising (14 page)

“I suppose that might be possible,” said James, polite but disbelieving. “Of course, there's no way at all for anyone to tell, yet.”

Will said belligerently, “But he —” and caught Merriman's dark eye and stopped. “Mmmm, aaah,” he said, and James looked at him with astonishment.

Miss Greythorne called across the room to Merriman, “Paul would like to see the old recorders and flutes. Take him in, would you?”

Merriman inclined his head in a small bow. He said casually to Will and James, “Care to come too?”

“No, thank you,” said James promptly. His eyes were on the far door, through which the housekeeper was advancing with another tray. “I smell Miss Hampton's mince pies.”

Will said, understanding, “I'd quite like to see.”

He moved with Merriman towards Miss Greythorne's chair, where Paul and Robin stood stiff and rather awkward, one at each side, like guardsmen. “Off with you,” said Miss Greythorne briskly. “Are you going too, Will? Of course, you're another musical one, I was forgetting. Quite a good little collection of instruments and stuff in there. Surprised you haven't seen them before.”

Lulled by the words, Will said thoughtlessly, “In the library?”

Miss Greythorne's sharp eyes glittered at him. “The library?” she said. “You must be mixing us up with someone else, Will. There's no library here. Once there was a small one, with some most valuable books, I believe, but it burned down, almost a century ago. This part of the house was struck by lightning. Did a lot of damage, they say.”

“Oh, dear,” said Will in some confusion.

“Well, this is no talk for Christmas,” Miss Greythorne said, and waved them off. Glancing back at her, as she turned to Robin with a bright social smile, Will found himself wondering whether the two Miss Greythornes were not one after all.

Merriman led him, with Paul, to a side door, and they walked through a strange musty-smelling little passage into a high bright room that Will did not at once recognise. It was only when he caught sight of the fireplace that he realised where he was. There was the wide hearth, and the broad mantel with its square panels and carved Tudor rose-emblems. But round the rest of the room the panelling was gone; the walls were instead painted flat white, and brightened here and there by some large improbable-looking seascapes done in lurid blues and greens. In the place where Will had once gone into the little library, there was no longer any door.

Merriman was unlocking a tall, glass-fronted cabinet that stood against a side wall.

“Miss Greythorne's father was a very musical gentleman,” he said in his butler voice. “And artistic too. He painted all those pictures on the walls over there. In the West Indies, I believe. These, though” — he lifted out a small beautiful instrument like a recorder, black inlaid with silver — “he didn't actually play, they say. He just liked to look at them.”

Paul was absorbed at once, peering at, into, through the old flutes and recorders as Merriman handed them out of the cupboard.
They were both most solemn in their handling; they would put each one carefully back before taking the next out. Will turned to study the panels round the fireplace; then jumped suddenly, as he heard Merriman silently calling to him. At the same time he could hear Merriman's voice aloud speaking to Paul; it was an eerie combination.

“Quickly, now!” said the voice in his mind. “You know where to look. Quick, while you have the chance. It is time to take the Sign!”

“But —” said Will's mind.

“Go on!” Merriman silently roared.

Will glanced back quickly over his shoulder. The door through which they had come was still half open, but his ears would surely warn him of anyone coming up the passage between this room and the next. He moved soft-footed to the fireplace, reached up, and put his hands on the panelling. Shutting his eyes for an instant, he appealed to all his new gifts, and the old world from which they came. Which square panel had it been? Which carved rose? He was confused by the loss of the panelled wall all around; the mantel seemed smaller than before. Was the sign lost, bricked up somewhere behind that flat white wall? He pressed every rose that he could see, round the top left-hand corner of the fireplace, but none moved even a fraction of an inch. Then at the last moment he noticed, at the very point of the corner, a rose part-buried in plaster, jutting out of the wall that clearly had been repaired as well as altered in the last hundred years — ten minutes, he thought wildly — since he had last seen it.

Hastily Will reached up high and pressed his thumb as hard as he could against the centre of the carved flower, as if it were a bell-push. And as he heard the soft click, he was staring into a black square hole in the wall, exactly on the level of his eyes. He reached in and touched the circle of the Sign of Wood, and as he sighed in relief, his fingers closing round the smooth wood, he heard Paul begin to play one of the old flutes.

It was very tentative playing: a slow arpeggio first, then a hesitant run; and then, very softly and gently, Paul began playing the melody “Greensleeves.” And Will stood transfixed, not only by the lovely lilt of the old tune but by the sound of the instrument itself. For though the melody was different, this was his music, his enchantment, the same eerie, faraway tone that he heard always, and then always
lost, at those moments in his life that mattered most. What was the nature of this flute that his brother was playing? Was it part of the Old Ones, belonging to their magic, or simply something very like, made by men? He drew his hand back from the gap in the wall, which closed instantly before he could press the rose again, and he was sliding the Sign of Wood into his pocket as he turned, lost in listening.

And then he froze.

Paul stood playing, across the room, beside the cabinet. Merriman had his back turned and his hands on the glass doors. But now the room held two other figures as well. In the doorway through which they had come stood Maggie Barnes, staring not at Will but at Paul, with a look of dreadful malevolence. And close beside Will, very close, in the spot where the door to the old library had once been, towered the Black Rider. He was within arm's length of Will, though he did not move, but stood transfixed, as if the music had arrested him in mid-stride. His eyes were closed, his lips silently moving; his hands were stretched out pointing ominously towards Paul, as the sweet, unearthly music went on.

Will did one thing well, from the instinct of his new learning. Instantly he flung up a wall of resistance round Merriman and Paul and himself, so that the two of the Dark swayed backward from the force of it. But at the same time he shrieked, “
Merriman!
” And as the music broke off, and both Paul and Merriman swung round in swift horror, he knew what he had done wrong. He had not called as the Old Ones should call one another, through the mind. He had made the very bad mistake of shouting aloud.

The Rider and Maggie Barnes vanished, instantly. Paul was striding across the room in concern. “What on earth's up, Will? Did you hurt yourself?”

Merriman said swiftly, smoothly, from behind him, “He stumbled, I think,” and Will had the wit to crease his face with pain, bend slowly over as if in anguish, and clutch hard at one arm.

There was the sound of running feet, and Robin burst into the room from the passage, with Barbara close behind. “What's the matter? We heard the most awful yell —”

He looked at Will and slowed to a halt, puzzled. “You all right, Will?”

“Uh,” said Will. “I — uh — I just banged my funny-bone. Sorry. It hurt.”

“Sounded as if someone was murdering you,” Barbara said reproachfully.

Shamelessly Will took refuge in rudeness, his fingers curling in his pocket to make sure the third Sign was safe. “Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you,” he said petulantly, “but really I'm all right. I just banged myself and yelled, that's all. Sorry if you were frightened. I don't see what all the fuss is about.”

Robin glared at him. “Catch me running anywhere to rescue you, next time,” he said witheringly.

“Talk about the boy crying Wolf,” Barbara said.

“I think,” Merriman said gently, closing the cupboard and turning the key, “that we should all go and give Miss Greythorne one more carol.” And quite forgetting that he was no more than the butler, they all filed dutifully out of the room in his wake. Will called after him, in proper silence this time: “But I must speak to you! The Rider was here! And the girl!”

Merriman said into his mind, “I know. Later. They have ways of hearing this kind of talk, remember.” And he moved on, leaving Will twitching with exasperation and alarm.

In the doorway, Paul paused, took Will firmly by the shoulder and turned him to look in his face. “Are you really all right?”

“Honest. Sorry about the noise. That flute sounded super.”

“Fantastic thing.” Paul let him go, turning to gaze longingly at the cupboard. “Really. I've never heard anything like it. And of course never played one. You've no idea, Will, I can't
describe
— it's tremendously old, and yet the condition it's in, it might be almost new. And the tone of it —” There was an ache in his voice and his face that something in Will responded to with a deep, ancient sympathy. An Old One, he suddenly knew, was doomed always to feel this same formless, nameless longing for something out of reach, as an endless part of life.

“I'd give anything,” Paul said, “to have a flute like that one day.”

“Almost anything,” Will said gently. Paul stared at him in astonishment, and the Old One in Will suddenly realised belatedly that this was not perhaps the response of a small boy; so he grinned,
stuck out his tongue impishly at Paul, and skipped through the passage, back to the normal relationships of the normal world.

They sang “The First Nowell” as their last carol; they made their farewells; they were out again in the snow and the crisp air, with Merriman's impassive polite smile disappearing behind the Manor doors. Will stood on the broad stone steps and gazed up at the stars. The clouds had cleared at last, and now the stars blazed like pinpricks of white fire in the black hollow of the night sky, in all the strange patterns that had been a complicated mystery to him all his life, but were endlessly significant now. “See how bright the Pleiades are tonight,” he said softly, and Mary stared at him in amazement and said, “The
what
?”

So Will brought his attention down out of the fiery black heavens, and in their own small, yellow, torchlit world the Stanton carollers trooped home. He walked among them speechless, as if in a dream. They thought him tired, but he was floating in wonder. He had three of the Signs of Power now. He had, too, the knowledge to use the Gift of Gramarye: a long lifetime of discovery and wisdom, given to him in a moment of suspended time. He was not the same Will Stanton that he had been a very few days before. Now and forever, he knew, he inhabited a different time-scale from that of everyone he had ever known or loved. . . . But he managed to turn his thoughts away from all these things, even from the two invading, threatening figures of the Dark. For this was Christmas, which had always been a time of magic, to him and to all the world. This was a brightness, a shining festival, and while its enchantment was on the world the charmed circle of his family and home would be protected against any invasion from outside.

Indoors, the tree glowed and glittered, and the music of Christmas was in the air, and spicy smells came from the kitchen, and in the broad hearth of the living room the great twisted Yule root flickered and flamed as it gently burned down. Will lay on his back on the hearth-rug staring into the smoke wreathing up the chimney, and was suddenly very sleepy indeed. James and Mary too were trying not to yawn, and even Robin looked heavy-lidded.

“Too much punch,” said James, as his tall brother stretched gaping in an armchair.

“Get lost,” said Robin amiably.

“Who'd like a mince pie?” said Mrs Stanton, coming in with a vast tray of cocoa mugs.

“James has had six already,” said Mary in prim disapproval. “At the Manor.”

“Now it's eight,” said James, a mince pie in each hand. “Yah.”

“You'll get fat,” Robin said.

“Better than being fat already,” James said, through a mouthful, and stared pointedly at Mary, whose plump form had recently become her most gloomy preoccupation. Mary's mouth drooped, then tightened, and she advanced on him, making a snarling sound.

“Ho-ho-ho,” said Will sepulchrally from the floor. “Good little children never fight at Christmas.” And since Mary was irresistibly close to him, he grabbed her by the ankle. She collapsed on top of him, howling cheerfully.

“Mind the fire,” said Mrs Stanton, from years of habit.

“Ow,” said Will, as his sister thumped him in the stomach, and he rolled away out of reach. Mary stopped, and sat gazing at him curiously. “Why on earth have you got so many buckles on your belt?” she demanded.

Will tugged his sweater hastily down over his belt, but it was too late; everyone had seen. Mary reached forward and yanked the sweater up again. “What funny things. What are they?”

“Just decoration,” Will said gruffly. “I made them in metalwork at school.”