The Dark Is Rising (20 page)

“Oh, wow,” said Max with cheerful rudeness. “You rotten old snob, hark at you.”

“Come on, that's not what I meant.” His father threw a wet muffler at him. “Inverted snobbery, more like. I simply don't see any good reason for our trooping off to partake of the bounty of the Lady of the Manor. We're perfectly all right here.”

“Quite right,” Mrs Stanton said briskly. “Now out of the kitchen, all of you. I want to make some bread.”

The only hope, Will decided, was the Walker himself.

He slipped away and went upstairs to the tiny spare room where the Walker lay in bed. “I want to talk to you.”

The old man turned his head on the pillow. “All right,” he said. He seemed muted and unhappy. Suddenly Will felt sorry for him.

“Are you better?” he said. “I mean, are you actually ill now, or do you just feel weak?”

“I am not ill,” the Walker said listlessly. “No more than usual.”

“Can you walk?”

“You want to throw me out in the snow, is that it?”

“Of course not,” Will said. “Mum would never let you go off in this weather, and nor would I, not that I've got much say in it. I'm the very youngest in this family, you know that.”

“You are an Old One,” the Walker said, looking at him with dislike.

“Well, that's different.”

“It's not different at all. Just means there's no point talking about yourself to me as if you were just a little kid in a family. I know better.”

Will said, “You were guardian of one of the Great Signs — I don't see why you should seem to hate us.”

“I did what I was made to do,” the old man said. “You took me . . . you picked me out . . .” His brows creased, as though he were trying to remember something from a long time ago; then he grew vague again. “I was made to.”

“Well, look, I don't want to make you do anything, but there's one thing we all have to do. The snow's getting so bad that everyone in the village is going to live at the Manor, like a kind of hostel, because it'll be safer and warmer.” He felt as he talked that the Walker might know what he was going to say already, but it was impossible to get inside the old man's mind; whenever he tried, he found himself floundering, as if he had broken into the stuffing of a cushion.

“The doctor will be there too,” he said. “So if you were to let everyone feel you needed to be somewhere with a doctor, we could all go to the Manor.”

“You mean you aren't going otherwise?” The Walker squinted suspiciously at him.

“My father won't let us. But we have to, it's safer —”

“I won't go either,” the Walker said. He turned his head away. “Go away. Leave me be.”

Will said softly, warningly, in the Old Speech, “The Dark will come for you.”

There was a pause. Then very slowly the Walker turned his shaggy grey head back again, and Will flinched in horror as he saw the face. For just a moment, its history was naked upon it. There were bottomless depths of pain and terror in the eyes, the lines of black experience were carved clear and terrible; this man had known somewhere such a fearful dread and anguish that nothing could really ever touch him again. His eyes were wide for the first time, stretched open, with his knowledge of horror looking out.

The Walker said emptily, “
The Dark has already come for me
.”

Will took a deep breath. “But now the circle of the Light comes,” he said. He pulled off the belt with the Signs and held it before the Walker. The old man flinched away, screwing up his face, whimpering like a frightened animal; Will felt sickened, but there was no help
for it. He brought the Signs closer and closer to the twisted old face, until, like a piece of breaking wire, the Walker's self-control snapped. He shrieked and began to babble and thrash about, screaming for help. Will ran outside and called for his father, and half the family came running.

“I think he's having some sort of fit. Awful. Shouldn't we get him to Dr Armstrong at the Manor, Dad?”

Mr Stanton said doubtfully, “We could get the doctor to come here, perhaps.”

“But he might very well be better off there,” said Mrs Stanton, staring at the Walker in concern. “The old man, I mean. With the doctor able to watch him — and more comfort and food. Really, this is alarming, Roger. I don't know what to do for him here.”

Will's father gave in. They left the Walker still tossing and raving, with Max near by in case of accidents, and went to turn the big family toboggan into a mobile stretcher. Only one thing nagged in Will's mind. It had to be his imagining, but in the moment when the Walker had cracked at the sight of the Great Signs, and become a mad old man once more, he had thought he saw a flash of triumph in the flickering eyes.

*  *  *

The sky hung grey and heavy, waiting to snow, as they left for the Manor with the Walker. Mr Stanton took the twins with him, and Will. His wife watched them go with unfamiliar nervousness. “I hope it really is over. D'you really think Will should go?”

“Comes in handy to have someone light sometimes, in this snow,” said his father, over Will's splutter. “He'll be all right.”

“You aren't going to stay there, are you?”

“Of course not. The only point of the exercise is to deliver the old man to the doctor. Come on, Alice, this isn't like you. There's no danger, you know.”

“I suppose not,” Mrs Stanton said.

They set off, heaving the toboggan, with the Walker strapped to it so trussed in blankets that he was invisible, a thick human sausage. Will left last; Gwen handed him the torches and a flask. “I must say I'm not sorry to see your discovery go,” she said. “He frightens me. More like an animal than an old man.”

It seemed a long while before they reached the Manor gates. The
drive had been cleared, and trodden down by many feet, and two bright pressure-lamps hung by the great door, lighting the front of the house. Snow was falling again, and the wind beginning to blow chill round their faces. Before Robin's outstretched hand reached the doorbell, Merriman was opening the door. He looked first for Will, though no one else noticed the urgent flicker of his eyes. “Welcome,” he said.

“Evening,” Roger Stanton said. “Shan't stay. We're fine at the house. But there's an old chap here who's ill, and he needs a doctor. All things considered, it seemed better to bring him here, rather than have Dr Armstrong going to and fro. So we hopped out before the storm broke.”

“It is rising already,” Merriman said, gazing out. Then he stooped and helped the twins carry the Walker's motionless swaddled form into the house. At the threshold the bundle of blankets jerked convulsively, and the Walker could be heard muffled through his covers shouting, “No! No! No!”

“The doctor, please,” said Merriman to a woman standing near by, and she scurried away. The great empty hall where they had sung their carols was filled with people now, warm and bustling, unrecognisable.

Dr Armstrong appeared, nodding briskly all round; he was a small bustling man with a monkish fringe of grey hair circling his bald head. The Stantons, like all Huntercombe, knew him well; he had cured every ailment in the family for more years than Will had been alive. He peered at the Walker, now twisting and moaning in protest. “What's this, eh?”

“Shock, perhaps?” said Merriman.

“He really behaves very oddly,” Mr Stanton said. “He was found unconscious in the snow some days ago, and we thought he was recovering, but now —”

The big front door slammed itself shut in the rising wind, and the Walker screamed. “Hum,” said the doctor, and beckoned two large young helpers to carry him off to some inner room. “Leave him to me,” he said cheerfully. “So far, we've got one broken leg and two sprained ankles. He'll provide variety.”

He trotted off after his patient. Will's father turned to peer out of a darkening window. “My wife will start worrying,” he said. “We must go.”

Merriman said gently, “If you go now, I think you will leave but not arrive. Probably in a little while —”

“The Dark is rising, you see,” Will said.

His father looked at him with a half-smile. “You're very poetic all of a sudden. All right, we'll wait just a bit. I could do with a breather, to tell the truth. Better say hallo to Miss Greythorne in the meantime. Where is she, Lyon?”

Merriman, the deferential butler, led the way into the crowd. It was the oddest gathering Will had ever seen. Suddenly half the village was living in close intimacy, a tiny colony of beds and suitcases and blankets. People hailed them from small nests scattered all round the huge room: a bed or a mattress tucked into a corner or fenced in by a chair or two. Miss Bell waved gaily from a sofa. It was like an untidy hotel with everyone camping in the foyer. Miss Greythorne was sitting stiff and upright in her wheelchair beside the fire, reading
The Phoenix and the Carpet
to a speechless group of village children. Like everyone else in the room, she looked uncommonly bright and cheerful.

“Funny,” Will said, as they picked their way through. “Things are absolutely awful, and yet people look much happier than usual. Look at them all. Bubbling.”

“They are English,” Merriman said.

“Quite right,” said Will's father. “Splendid in adversity, tedious when safe. Never content, in fact. We're an odd lot. You're not English, are you?” he said suddenly to Merriman, and Will was astonished to hear a slightly hostile note in his voice.

“A mongrel,” Merriman said blandly. “It's a long story.” His deep-set eyes glittered down at Mr Stanton, and then Miss Greythorne caught sight of them all.

“Ah, there you are! Evenin', Mr Stanton, boys, how are you? What d'you think of this, eh? Isn't it a lark?” As she put down the book, the circle of children parted to admit the newcomers, and the twins and their father were absorbed into talk.

Merriman said softly to Will, in the Old Speech, “Look into the fire, for the length of time that it takes you to trace the shape of each of the Great Signs with your right hand. Look into the fire. Make it your friend. Do not move your eyes for all that time.”

Wondering, Will moved forward as if to warm himself, and did as
he was told. Staring at the leaping flames of the enormous log fire in the hearth, he ran his fingers gently over the Sign of Iron, the Sign of Bronze, the Sign of Wood, the Sign of Stone. He spoke to the fire, not as he had done long ago, when challenged to put it out, but as an Old One, out of Gramarye. He spoke to it of the red fire in the king's hall, of the blue fire dancing over the marshes, of the yellow fire lighted on the beacon hills for Beltane and Hallowe'en; of wild-fire and need-fire and the cold fire of the sea; of the sun and of the stars. The flames leaped. His fingers reached the end of their journey round the last Sign. He looked up. He looked, and he saw . . .

. . . he saw, not the genial muddle of collected villagers in a tall, panelled modern room, lit by electric standard lamps, but the great candle-shadowed stone hall, with its tapestry hangings and high vaulted roof, that he had seen once before, a world ago. He looked up from the log fire that was the same fire, but blazing now in a different hearth, and he saw as before, out of the past, the two heavy carved chairs, one on either side of the fireplace. In the chair on the right sat Merriman, cloaked, and in the chair on the left sat a figure whom he had last seen, not a day before, lying on a bier as if dead. He bent quickly and knelt at the old lady's feet. “Madam,” he said.

She touched his hair gently. “Will.”

“I am sorry for breaking the circle, that first time,” he said. “Are you — well — now?”

“Everything is well,” she said in her soft clear voice. “And will be, if we can win the last battle for the Signs.”

“What must I do?”

“Break the power of the cold. Stop the snow and cold and frost. Release this country from the hold of the Dark. All with the next of the circle, the Sign of Fire.”

Will looked at her helplessly. “But I haven't got it. I don't know how.”

“One sign of fire you have with you already. The other waits. In its winning, you will break the cold. But before that, our own circle of flame must be completed, that is an echo of the Sign, and to do that you must take power away from the Dark.” She pointed to the
great wrought-iron ring of candle-sockets on the table, the circle quartered by a cross. As she raised her arm, the light glinted on the rose ring on her hand. The outer ring of candles was complete, twelve white columns burning exactly as they had when Will was last in the hall. But the cross-arms still stood empty-socketed; nine holes gaped.

Will stared at them unhappily. This part of his quest left him in despair. Nine great enchanted candles, to come out of nowhere. Power to be seized from the Dark. A Sign that he had already, without knowing it. Another that he must find without knowing where or how.

“Have courage,” the old lady said. Her voice was faint and tired; when Will looked at her, he saw that she herself seemed faint in outline, as if she were no more than a shadow. He reached out his hand in concern, but she drew back her arm. “Not yet. . . . There is another kind of work to be done yet, too. . . . You see how the candles burn, Will.” Her voice dwindled, then rallied. “They will show you.”