“And was it?”
Evelyn shook her head. “It wasn’t a garden. It was just this big overgrown field. Dead grass and stones. But it was rather beautiful in a bleak way. Ant laughed and started yelling ‘Heathcliff, Heathcliff!’ And it was warmer—the walls were high enough to keep out the wind, and there were some trees that had grown up on top of the walls as well. They weren’t in leaf yet, but they formed a bit of a windbreak.
“We ended up staying there all day. Completely lost track of the time. I thought only an hour had gone by, but Ant had a watch, at one point she said it was past three and I was shocked—I mean, really shocked. It was like we’d gone to sleep and woken up, only we weren’t asleep at all.”
“What were you doing?”
Evelyn shrugged. “Playing. The sort of let’s-pretend game we always did when we were younger and hadn’t done for a while. Moira had a boyfriend, Ant and I really wanted boyfriends—mostly that’s what we talked about whenever we got together. But for some reason, that day Ant said ‘Let’s do Sun Battles,’ and we all agreed. So that’s what we did. Now of course I can see why—I’ve seen it with my own kids when they were that age, you’re on the cusp of everything, and you just want to hold on to being young for as long as you can.
“I don’t remember much of what we did that day, except how strange it all felt. As though something was about to happen. I felt like that a lot, it was all tied in with being a teenager; but this was different. It was like being high, or tripping, only none of us had ever done any drugs at that stage. And we were stone-cold sober. Really all we did was wander around the moor and clamber up and down the walls and hedgerows and among the trees, pretending we were in Gearnzath. That was the world in The Sun Battles—like Narnia, only much scarier. We were mostly just wandering around and making things up, until Ant told us it was after three o’clock.
“I think it was her idea that we should do some kind of ritual. I know it wouldn’t have been Moira’s, and I don’t think it was mine. But I knew there was going to be a full moon that night—I’d heard my uncle mention it—and so we decided that we would each sacrifice a sacred thing, and then retrieved them all before moonrise. We turned our pockets inside-out looking for what we could use. I had a comb, so that was mine—just a red plastic thing, I think it cost ten pence. Ant had a locket on a chain from Woolworths, cheap but the locket part opened.
“And Moira had a pencil. It said RAVENWOOD on the side, so we called the field Ravenwood. We climbed up on the wall and stood facing the sun, and made up some sort of chant. I don’t remember what we said. Then we tossed our things onto the moor. None of us threw them far, and Ant barely tossed hers—she didn’t want to lose the locket. I didn’t care about the comb, but it was so light it just fell a few yards from where we stood. Same with the pencil. We all marked where they fell—I remember mine very clearly, it came down right on top of this big flat stone.
“Then we left. It was getting late, and cold, and we were all starving—we’d had nothing to eat since breakfast. We went back to the house and hung out in the barn for a while, and then we had dinner. We didn’t talk much. Moira hid her jacket so they couldn’t see she’d torn it, and I took my boots off so no one would see how I’d got them all mauled by the thorns. I remember my aunt wondering if we were up to something, and my uncle saying what the hell could we possibly be up to in Zennor? After dinner we sat in the living room and waited for the sun to go down, and when we saw the moon start to rise above the hills, we went back outside.
“It was bright enough that we could find our way without a torch—a flashlight. I think that must have been one of the rules, that we had to retrieve our things by moonlight. It was cold out, and none of us had dressed very warmly, so we ran. It didn’t take long. We climbed back over the wall and then down onto the field, at the exact spot where we’d thrown our things.
“They weren’t there. I knew exactly where the rock was where my comb had landed—the rock was there, but not the comb. Ant’s locket had landed only a few feet past it, and it wasn’t there either. And Moira’s pencil was gone, too.”
“The wind could have moved them,” said Jeffrey. “Or an animal.”
“Maybe the wind,” said Evelyn. “Though the whole reason we’d stayed there all day was that there was no wind—it was protected, and warm.”
“Maybe a bird took it? Don’t some birds like shiny things?”
“What would a bird do with a pencil? Or a plastic comb?”
Jeffrey made a face. “Probably you just didn’t see where they fell. You thought you did, in daylight, but everything looks different at night. Especially in moonlight.”
“I knew where they were.” Evelyn shook her head and reached for the bottle of Armagnac. “Especially my comb. I have that engineer’s eye, I can look at things and keep a very precise picture in my mind. The comb wasn’t where it should have been. And there was no reason for it to be gone, unless…”
“Unless some other kids had seen you and found everything after you left,” said Jeffrey.
“No.” Evelyn sipped her drink. “We started looking. The moon was coming up—it rose above the hill, and it was very bright. Because it was so cold there was hoarfrost on the grass, and ice in places where the rain had frozen. So all that reflected the moonlight. Everything glittered. It was beautiful, but it was no longer fun—it was scary. None of us was even talking; we just split up and crisscrossed the field, looking for our things.
“And then Moira said, ‘There’s someone there,’ and pointed. I thought it was someone on the track that led back to the farmhouse—it’s not a proper road, just a rutted path that runs alongside one edge of that old field system. I looked up and yes, there were three people there—three torches, anyway. Flashlights. You couldn’t see who was carrying them, but they were walking slowly along the path. I thought maybe it was my uncle and two of the men who worked with him, coming to tell us it was time to go home. They were walking from the wrong direction, across the moor, but I thought maybe they’d gone out to work on something. So I ran to the left edge of the field and climbed up on the wall.”
She stopped, glancing out the window at the black garden, and finally turned back. “I could see the three lights from there,” she said. “But the angle was all wrong. They weren’t on the road at all—they were in the next field, up above Ravenwood. And they weren’t flashlights. They were high up in the air, like this—”
She set down her glass and got to her feet, a bit unsteadily, extended both her arms and mimed holding something in her hands. “Like someone was carrying a pole eight or ten feet high, and there was a light on top of it. Not a flame. Like a ball of light…”
She cupped her hands around an invisible globe the size of a soccer ball. “Like that. White light, sort of foggy. The lights bobbed as they were walking.”
“Did you see who it was?”
“No. We couldn’t see anything. And, this is the part that I can’t explain—it just felt bad. Like, horrible. Terrifying.”