Chloe bit her lip. Where was there to escape in all this? But she was determined to keep him unsure of her, so she folded her arms and glared at him. “So where’s this castle then?”
Under his mask, he had been smug. “Inside.”
The top of the white hill was flat; in its very center a spiral stairway had descended, an exact counterpart to the outside; this also widened as it went down. At first the walls were blocks of smoothed chalk; her fingers had caught their irregularities, the flattened ants and crushed grasses trapped between them. Then the spiraling corridor had begun to gleam; it had been like walking deep inside a vast seashell, like the one on her bedroom window at home, and the whiteness had become iridescent and the steps a long ramp of pearl and creamy shimmer, slippery underfoot.
Finally they had come to this room, seemingly the sole chamber, in the heart of the shell. Circular and windowless, its roof and walls and floor merged into one, vague reflections moving in it. And it wasn’t silent either, like the other caers had been; this one hummed, a low, constant hushing, as if around some bend the waves of the sea murmured on a distant beach.
Listening now, she said, “There’s no one else in here, is there?”
His head turned sharply. “Of course not. Why?”
“I can hear a voice.”
He sat up, both hands on the oyster rim.
She was sure now. Someone was speaking, very far off, very faint. Someone was talking in an endless one-sided conversation, his voice modulating up and down; she could make out questions and intonation, the drone of words, the hiss of esses. Almost she felt that the words were made up of letters that had melted, that were trickling and running down the shimmering chute of the ramp, arriving here hopelessly mixed and heaped, fused into fantastic sounds.
“It’s nothing.” The King looked around nervously. “Forget it.”
Words picked themselves up, put themselves together. She recognized them: theater, production … terrible nuisance really, Chloe … your mum…
Eyes wide, she stared at him. Then she said, “It’s my father!”
Vetch crouched at the water’s edge and dipped a hand in. Drawing up some of the green weed, he examined it curiously.
“Well?”
“The forest will be able to cross this. Roots will snake out under it, then undergrowth will rise and drown and rise again on the matted remains. But it will take time.” He stood, looking at the white spiral ramp of the hill.
“It’s Silbury, isn’t it?” Rob hugged himself. “This is the downs, lost under all this woodland. These are real places Chloe knows.”
“The Unworld is always a real place. And when Darkhenge was made, the downs were forested.” Preoccupied, Vetch rummaged through the crane-skin bag; he tipped a pile of rubbish out of it—nuts, berries, a candle, the ogham sticks, the tinderbox, a scatter of ribbons and knotted threads. Quickly he scooped them up and thrust them into his pockets; then, to Rob’s surprise, tossed the bag on the water.
“What are you doing?”
The poet folded his arms. “We could swim. ‘I have been both flesh and fish.’ But why get wet?” He glanced back, into the trees. “Besides, the goddess may be a wolf behind us, or a pike under the surface.” He knelt, and put his face close to the rippled water. Softly he said, “I can feel you, Clare. I can hear your heartbeat.”
Rob wasn’t listening. He was watching the bag as it opened, unfolded, grew to a small skin boat, its thread a trailing rope.
Vetch grabbed it and hauled it in; dragging a straight branch from the woodland, he broke the twigs off to make a pole. Then he climbed in, and held out one hand to Rob.
Rob looked up at the caer, then grasped the poet’s cool hand and stepped into the boat. It rocked, and he sat very quickly.
Vetch pushed off. Watching the misty surface warily, he poled them across the crystalline lake.
The King leaped out of the shell. He said nothing. Instead they both listened.
The voice came from unknowable distances. Chloe felt it echoing and whispering through the Spiral Castle as if the whole building was an enormous ear, twisted and fine boned, and she was trapped in a tiny space at its center. Her father’s voice was huge. The words seemed too big, as if she had shrunk, or the world she had left was gigantic now, and she could never grow to be a normal size there ever again.
“Make it stop,” she muttered.
The King scowled under his mask. “I can’t! I told you, the three have opened a hole, a place called Darkhenge.”
“What’s that got to do with my father?” She turned on him. “He sounds upset. He sounds … scared.”
He tapped the smooth shell, anxious. “Well, maybe he is. He must miss you.”
She stepped forward. “Let me see him.”
“I can’t.”
“You mean you won’t!”
“I can’t, Chloe! I don’t know how.”
She put her hands over her ears. “Then make it stop! I don’t want to hear him if I can’t answer!”
Vetch laughed his soft laugh. Kneeling at the entrance, he upended the crane-skin bag and seeds poured out of it: hazelnuts, acorns, conkers, berries, sloes. They cascaded down as if the bag was still huge; there were far more than it could possibly contain.
Crouched above him, Rob peered down the seashell spiral. “Now what?”
“We go down.”
The poet snapped the thread shut, slung the bag over his head and shoulder, and pushed it under his dark coat. He descended three steps, the seeds rolling and crushing under his feet. Looking up, his eyes were dark. “Be ready. They’ll be expecting us.”
The King said nothing, and when Chloe looked at him he was standing by the tilted lintel of the doorway, and out in the corridor something was rattling. It was slithering and tinkling down the long spiral ramp, and as she took her hands down from her ears and ran over to him it seemed to grow in size, thundering until she felt a vast boulder would roar into the chamber, an avalanche of rock that would bury them both.
“What is it?” she screamed.
He grabbed her arm and pulled her back. “They’re still following! They’ve crossed the water.”
With a final mighty rumble the object clattered into the room, rolled across the pearly floor and lay still, inches from Chloe’s feet.
She stared down at it. It wasn’t huge at all.
It was a tiny black seed.
O. ONN: GORSE
Dan’s just rung; he’s in his mother’s car out on the downs. No sign of Rob. John’s hoarse with talking, but now Katie’s here. She came running in out of the rain with that blue coat around her; it was just then that the monitors showed the blip.
A small round interruption in the brainwaves.
I went to the window. The trees outside were dripping on the sill, and I leaned my forehead against the cold glass.
Reflected behind me I saw Rosa in the corridor.
I don’t know what goes on inside people’s minds. I’ve always tried to know. But there are too many defenses, too many tangles.
Too many masks.
There shall be great darkness.
There shall be a shaking of the mountain.
The King was terrified. He clung to her arm. “Stop them. They’ll grow. The forest will grow,” he whispered. “Stop them, Chloe!”
How could she stop them?
Every seed was sprouting. And as she watched, an acorn split, sent a pale root splintering into the smooth shell, a shoot unkinking into the air. They grew rapidly, unbelievably. Saplings of every size and species shot up, snapping the chamber floor, cracking it into tilted slabs.