'Maybe you should stay with her?' Will said to Frannie. She put up no argument. By the expression on her face it was apparent the atmosphere of the place had unsettled her deeply. 'I promise I won't step inside without you.'
'You'd better not,' Frannie said.
'If she tries anything tricky, yell.'
'Oh you'll hear me, don't worry,' Frannie said. Will glanced back at Rosa. She'd given up her protests now, and was lying back against the rock, staring up at the sky. It seemed her eyes were mirrors at that moment, waves of sun and shadow moving over them. He looked away, distressed, and said to Frannie: 'Don't go near her.' Then he was off, towards the place between the rocks.
CHAPTER VII
He was happy not to be following in Rosa's footsteps, and happy to be alone. No, never alone. The fox was with him as he went, like a second self. It was more agile than he, and several times he felt its energies urging him to walk where his lumpen body didn't dare go. It was also more cautious. His eyes darted about looking for signs of threat; his nose was uncommonly sensitive to the scents in the wind. But there was no evidence of danger. Nor, though he was now fifteen yards from the rocks, was there any sign of a house, or the ruins of a house.
He glanced back towards Frannie and Rosa but the ground had dipped so steeply he could no longer see them. To his right, no more than a yard from his uncertain feet, the ground fell away into a cleft of black rock a little wider than a man's body. One slip, he knew, and he was gone. And wouldn't that be a pitiful end for a journey that had taken so many years and covered so many miles, from a hill and a runaway hare, from a flame and a handful of moths, from the wastes of Balthazar and a bloody bear, coming to take him in her arms? A few more yards, a few more seconds, and he'd be there at the doorstep, and that journey would be ended. There'd be understanding, there'd be revelation, there'd be an end to the ache in him.
Ahead of him was a patch of bright green turf, sparkling with moisture and starred with yellow vetch. Beyond it, a small rocky outcrop, which the birds apparently used to crack their catch upon, because it was littered with broken crab shells and spattered with white shit. Beyond that, the boulders between which Rosa had been staring so intently.
It wasn't a particularly tricky manoeuvre to get from where he stood to his destination; but he took his time, his body trembling with a mixture of fatigue and exhilaration. He crossed the patch of grass without incident, though it was as slick as ice beneath his boots, then he proceeded to clamber up the outcrop, the gully at his back. The first couple of handholds were simple enough, but the higher he climbed the more his body's betrayal escalated. His eyes began to flicker wildly, turning the rock in front of him to a blur. His hands and feet had become numb. There was a good deal more than exhaustion at work, he realized. His body was responding to an outside influence; some energy in the air or earth that was tempting his system to treason. The blurring of his sight was sickening; he felt nausea rising in him. To ward it off he closed his eyes, tight, trusting to what little feeling he had left in his hands to guide him up the rest of the way. It was a dangerous business given that the gully was right behind him to swallow him if he fell, but the risk paid off. Three more handholds and he was up onto the top of the rock, brushing shards of crab shells off his palms.
He opened his eyes. Their motion had quieted a little in the murk behind his lids, but as soon as the light hit them they began to spasm again. He reached out to grab hold of the boulders on either side of him, focusing as best he could on the patch of green that lay between them. Then, keeping his numbed hands pressed against the stones, he started to fumble his way into the windless passage.
It was not just his sight and sense of touch that had gone awry. His ears had joined the rebellion. The chorus of wheeling birds and the boom of surf had decayed into a general noise that sloshed around in his skull like mud. All he could hear with any clarity was his own raw breath, drawn and delivered. He would not be able to get much further in this state, he knew. Another three, four steps and his dead legs would fold up under him, or something in his head would snap. The House had put up its defences, and they were successfully repelling him. He forced his barely functioning limbs to take another step, clinging to the boulders as best he could to keep from trusting his full weight to his legs. How far was he from the grassy space that had once been his destination? He no longer knew. It was academic anyway. He would never make it. And yet, the idiot ghost of that ambition remained, haunting his failing sinews.
Maybe another step, another two steps, just to see if he could make it to the open space.
'Come on ...' he muttered to himself, the syllables as raw as his breath. 'Move...' His growls worked. His reluctant legs carried him another step, and another after that. Suddenly the wind was on his face again. He had reached the end of the passage, and was out into the open air.
Having no other choice, he let go of the boulders, and sank down to his knees. The ground was sodden beneath him; cold water spattered up against his groin and belly. He teetered for a few minutes and then pitched forward onto his hands. The scene was an incoherent blur before him: a haze of green for the earth, a haze of grey above it for the sky. He was about to close his eyes against the sight when he glimpsed in the middle of this muddied field of vision a sliver of clarity. It was thin, but sharp, as though his eyes, for all their cavorting, had here resolved their confusions. He could see every blade of grass in crystalline detail; and the sun-gilded fringes of the clouds, as they slid past the aperture.
It's open, he thought. The door's open, just a fraction, and I'm looking through it; peering into the House the Nilotic built. His legs would not carry him to the place, but he'd damn well get there on his hands and knees. As he started to crawl he remembered the solemn promise he'd made to Frannie, and felt a spasm of guilt that he was breaking it. But he wasn't so mortified that it slowed his crawl. He wanted to be there more than anything right now. More than promises, certainly. More than life probably, and sanity, too. Keeping his eye fixed on the sliver of the open door he crawled through the muck to the place where it stood, and forsaking all he hoped, believed and understood, entered the House of the World.
CHAPTER VIII
The last Frannie saw of Will he was attempting to scale the rocky outcrop at the head of the gully. Then her attention had been claimed by Rosa, who'd started to moan piteously, tearing at her bandages. When Frannie looked back in Will's direction, he'd gone. She assumed at first he'd scaled the rocks and was now through the passage and onto the slope beyond, but though she watched for him, she saw no sign. Slowly, a grim possibility took shape: that in the minute or so that she'd been trying to stop Rosa re-opening her wound, Will had lost his balance and toppled back into the gully. The longer she stared and failed to see him the more probable this came to seem. She hadn't heard him cry out, but with the birds so loud was that any great surprise? Fearing what she would see, she ventured from Rosa's side, and followed Will's route along the edge of the gully, yelling to him as she went.
'Where are you? For God's sake answer me! Will?'
There was no reply. Nor was there any sign of his having fallen. No blood on the rocks; no place where the grass had been uprooted. But these absences were little comforts. She knew perfectly well he could have slipped down into the gully without leaving a trace: a straight fall between the rocks, down into the impenetrable darkness.
She had almost reached the head of the gully by now, the spot where she'd last seen Will. Should she climb up and see if he was simply squatting on the far side of the rocks? Of course she should. But something drew her eyes back to the gully, and she stared into its abyss, afraid now to call his name; afraid he'd answer out of the darkness.