“But that makes no—”
He pushed himself upright, his hand rasping as it pulled free of the rail. Ice particles glistered on the fingers of his glove. “We’re almost at the village,” he said. “Perhaps there’ll be answers there. Come on.”
But when we came down from the lane, the village had changed, too. Never exactly well-lit, the cottages around the green were now entirely dark. Their shapes merged in the half-light and could scarcely be seen. The green itself was filled with shifting coils of mist. Above us, the church tower blended with the pewter-black sky.
“Why are all the lights off here, too?” I said.
“Not just off,” Lockwood whispered. He pointed. “Look by the church. The ghost-light’s gone.”
It was true. True, and it made no sense. On the little mound beside the church, there was an empty space. The rusty, disused ghost-lamp wasn’t just gone—there was no trace of it ever having been there at all.
I didn’t say anything. Nothing made any sense, not since we’d come out of the institute. A creeping, pervading wrongness hung over everything; in the cold, the silence, the soft, pale light, and the terrible, sapping solitude of it all. But it numbed you, too; it was hard to think.
“Where is everybody?” I murmured. “Someone should be around, surely.”
“It’s after dark—they’re all at home. And George and the others will be safe inside the inn.” Lockwood’s voice didn’t carry any conviction. “We know half the village is deserted, anyway. We shouldn’t expect to see anyone.”
“So we go to the inn?”
“We go to the inn.”
But the inn, when we reached it, was as dark as all the rest. Its sign was blistered with frost. The door swung open to the touch, and a faint stale smell came from the black interior. Neither of us wanted to go inside.
We walked back out onto the green and stood there, wondering what to do. When I looked down, I saw that where my boots protruded beyond frozen drapes of the spirit-cape, the leather and steel caps were white with ice. Our capes were almost solid; they creaked whenever we moved. Then I noticed something else. A thin gray plume of smoke was rising from Lockwood’s cape, drifting away into the dark air. The surface flickered, as if with heatless flames.
“Lockwood, your cape—”
“I know. Yours is doing it, too.”
“It’s like…like when we saw the Shadow. You remember how it left a trail of…”
“We need to think about this.” Lockwood’s face was drawn, but his eyes blazed defiantly. “What have we done that might have made things different? There’s only one thing. Up at the institute, what did we do?”
“We went into the circle.”
“Yes, and…”
“And we came out again.” I looked at him, suddenly aware. “We left the circle on the other side….We followed the iron chain and left on the other side.”
“You’re right. Maybe that’s important. I don’t know why it should be, but if it is…”
“All this…” I said.
“All this isn’t what it looks like.” Lockwood stared at me. “What if we haven’t actually come out, Lucy? What if we’re somehow still inside?”
How dark the green was, how thick the rising mists, how unyielding the silence.
“We have to get back to the circle,” Lockwood said.
“No, look,” I said, my voice rising in my relief. “We’re talking nonsense. There they are.”
I pointed across the green. On the far side, within the mist, three figures were limping slowly up the road toward us.
Lockwood frowned. “You think that’s them?”
“Who else would it be?”
He squinted out from under his steaming hood. “It’s not them….No, look—they’re adults. They’re all too tall. Plus, I thought those cottages were abandoned. Didn’t Skinner say—?”
“Well, anyway, maybe they can tell us what’s going on,” I said. “And look, here’s somebody else coming.”
It was a little girl, stepping out of a garden in front of a house. She opened the gate and shut it carefully behind her, before starting toward us. She had a pretty blue dress on.
“I don’t recognize her,” I said. “Do you?”
“No, Lucy…” Lockwood was turning on his heels, looking all around. The mists were pretty thick over by the duck pond, but we could just see someone walking along the opposite bank, between the barren willows—a lady with long pale hair. “Nor her…” Lockwood said, “Nor any of them. But we’ve heard about them all.”
There were other movements in the mist, people coming out of their houses, latches lifting, gates being softly unlocked.
“Lucy,” Lockwood said, “we really need to go.”
“But look, that little girl—”
“Danny Skinner told us about her, Luce. Remember? Hetty Flinders, with her nice blue frock.”
Hetty Flinders? Yes….
She’d died.
With steady, unhurried steps, the girl in the blue dress and the other inhabitants of the dark village made their way toward us. You could see the details of their clothes—some modern, others less so. Their faces were as gray as the frosted ground.
For a few dreadful seconds it was as if some power pinned us where we stood; our blood was water, our limbs cold stones. But we had the warmth of the spirit-capes around us; and, deep inside, our willpower still burned strong. As one, we shrugged the death-clasp off. As one, we began to run.
We pressed close together, hoods low over our faces against the cold. We cut across the green, boots thrumming on the hollow, frozen earth. Smoke poured from our icy capes, extending behind us like a comet’s tail.
The green was not a big space, but it seemed to expand as we went across it. It took a long time to get near the church. We passed beneath the tower at last. Looking up, I saw the shape of a person standing there; I felt him lock his gaze with mine.
We ran down the lane past the churchyard. From the other side of the hedged embankment came noises—the grinding of stone, the whisper of rustling cloth. Shapes appeared at the hedge. They began pushing their way through, framed against the sky.
Out of the village, up the cold road. It was hard to move fast; whether it was the chill, or something else, my limbs felt like lead. It was like walking through mud, like going the wrong way up an escalator. Lockwood, usually so fleet of foot, was having the same problem. Our breaths came in gasps. Over our shoulders, we could see the people of the graveyard and the people of the village congregating in the road, pooling toward us, following our trail.
We fled over the footbridge, over the dried-up stream, into the woods. We took the shortest way. At the turning to the quarry, a man stood waiting for us at the cairn. His face was the one we’d seen in the photograph atop the neat pile of stones; his features too were blurred as if by rain. He walked into the center of the lane and reached out for us. Lockwood and I veered away, off the road, up into the forest. The ground was thick with dead black brambles that burst into dust as we ran through them. The branches of the trees were sharp and snaring, snagging at our faces, catching on our clothes. We ran through light and dark, dodging, jumping, fighting against the cold, thick air.
I could see other people in the trees now, moving slowly, yet somehow effortlessly keeping pace. They were homing in on us from either side. Lockwood, just ahead of me, took a flare from his belt. He threw it at the nearest figure; it struck a tree root, bounced, broke open. The breaking made no noise; and nothing came out—no burst of light, no dazzling white fire. I’d instinctively squeezed my eyes tight shut; now I opened them, one after the other, to see our pursuers clambering over the roots, working their way implacably through brambles, still silent, patient, utterly unmoved.