There was another interview two days later, this time from a man who wanted to talk to Will about some of the stories he'd told Faraday, especially the part about seeing Thomas, alive and dead. The interviewer's name was Parsons, but he invited Will to please call him Tim, which Will pointedly refused to do, and he kept circling around the business of how Jacob had touched him. Will was as plain as he could be: said that when they were climbing the hill and Jacob laid a hand on him, he felt strong. Later, he explained, in the copse, it had been him who'd done the touching.
'And that's when you felt as if you were in Jacob's skin, is that right?'
'I knew it wasn't real,' Will said. 'I was having this dream, only I wasn't asleep.'
'A vision ...' Parsons said, half to himself.
Will liked the sound of it. 'Yes,' he said, 'it was a vision.' Parsons jotted something down. 'You should go up there and look,' Will said to him.
'Do you think I might have a vision, too?'
'No,' Will said. 'But you'd find the birds, if they haven't been eaten by ... foxes or whatever...'
He caught a fearful look on the man's face. He wouldn't go up the hill to look for the birds, today or any time. For all his understanding looks and his gentle persuasions, he didn't want to see the truth, much less know it. And why? Because he was afraid. Faraday was the same; and the constable. All of them afraid.
The next day, the doctor pronounced that he was well enough to get up and move around the house. Seated in front of the television, he watched an update on the murders at Burnt Yarley, with the reporter standing in the street outside Donnelly's the Butchers. Sightseers had come from all over the country, apparently, despite the inclement weather, to see the site of the atrocities.
'This little hamlet,' the reporter said, 'has had more visitors in its icy streets the last four days than in half a century of summers.'
'And the sooner they go home again-'said Adele, emerging from the kitchen with a tray of vegetable soup and cheese and chutney sandwiches for Will '-the sooner we can all go back to normal.' She set the tray on Will's lap, warning him that the soup was very hot. 'It's so morbid,' she said, as the reporter interviewed one of the visitors. 'Coming to see a thing like this. Have people no decency?' With that, she retreated to her steak-and-kidney-pie making in the kitchen. Will kept watching, hoping there'd be some mention of him, but the live coverage from the village now ceased, and the newscaster returned to report on how the search for Jacob and Rosa had spread to Europe. There was evidence that two people fitting their description had been linked to crimes in Rotterdam and Milan within the last five years, the most recent report from northern France, where Rosa McGee had been involved in the deaths of three people, one of them an adolescent girl. Will knew it was shameful to feel the pleasure he did, hearing this catalogue of deeds. But he felt it nevertheless, and he'd learned from Jacob to speak his feelings truthfully, though in this case the only person he was telling was himself. And what was the truth? That even if Jacob and Rosa turned out to be the most bloodthirsty pair in history, he couldn't regret having crossed their paths. They were his connection to something bigger than the life he'd been leading, and he would hold onto their memory like a gift. Of all the people who talked to him during this period of recuperation, it was, surprisingly, his mother who knew most intimately the way he was thinking. He had no verbal proof of this; she kept her exchanges with him brief and functional. But the expression in her eyes, which had been until now a vague fatigue, was now sharpened into wariness. She no longer looked through him as she'd been wont to do. She scrutinized him (he several times caught her doing so when she thought he wasn't watching) with something strange in her eyes. He knew what it was. Faraday and Parsons were afraid of the mysteries he'd talked about. His mother was afraid of him. 'It's brought up all the bad memories, I'm afraid,' his father explained to him. 'We were doing so well and now this.' He had called Will into his study to have this little talk. It was, of course, a monologue. 'It's all perfectly irrational, of course, but your mother has this very Mediterranean streak in her.' He had not looked at Will more than once so far, but gazed out of the window at the sleet, lost in his own ruminations. Like Lord Fox, Will thought, and smiled to himself. 'But she feels as though somehow ... oh, I don't know ... somehow death's followed us here.' He had been twirling a pencil in his fingers, but now he tossed it down on his well-ordered desk. 'It's such nonsense,' he snorted, 'but she looks at you and- 'She blames me.'
'No, no,' said Hugo. 'Not blames. Connects. That's it, you see. She makes these ... connections.' He shook his head, mouth drawn down in disgruntlement. 'She'll snap out of it eventually,' he said. 'But until then we just have to live with it. God knows.' Finally, he swung his leather writing chair around and looked at Will between the piles of papers. 'In the meanwhile, please do your best not to get her stirred up.'
'I don't do
-anything. I know. And once this whole tragic nonsense is over and done with, she'll be on the mend again. But right now she's very sensitive.'
'I'll be careful.'
'Yes,' said Hugo. He returned his gaze to the gloom beyond the window. Assuming the conversation was over, Will rose. 'We should really talk more about what happened to you,' Hugo said, his distracted tone suggesting that he felt no urgency to do so. Will waited. 'When you're well,' Hugo said. 'We'll talk then.'
iii
The conversation never happened. Will's strength returned, the interviews ceased, the television crews moved on to some other corner of England, and the sightseers went soon after. By Christmas, Burnt Yarley belonged to itself again, and Will's brief moment of notoriety was over. At school, there was the inevitable gauntlet of jokes and petty cruelties to run, but he felt curiously inured against them. And once it was plain that the name-calling and the whispers were not discomfiting him, he was left alone.
There was only one real source of pain: that Frannie kept her distance from him. She spoke to him only once in that period before Christmas, and it was a short conversation.
'I've got a message for you,' she said. He asked from where, but she refused to name the source. When she told him the message, however, he didn't need the name. Nor, in fact, did he need the information. He'd already had a visit from Lord Fox. He knew he was part of the madness, for as long as he lived.
As for Sherwood, he didn't come back to school at all until the third week of January, and when he did he was in a much subdued state. It was as if something had broken in him; the part that had turned his lack of mental grasp into a strange kind of attribute. He was pale and listless. When Will tried to talk to him, he clammed up, or started to get teary. Will quickly learned his lesson, and left Sherwood to heal at his own speed. He was glad that the boy had Frannie to look after him. She protected Sherwood fiercely if anyone tried to pick on him. People soon got the message. They left brother and sister alone, just as they left Will. This slow aftermath was in its way as strange an experience as the events that had preceded it. Once all the hoopla died down (even the Yorkshire press had given up the story by early February, having nothing to report) life resumed its usual even pace, and it was as if nothing of any consequence had happened. Of course, there were occasional references made to it (mainly in the form of sick jokes passed around at school) and in a host of minor ways the village had changed (it no longer had a butcher, for one; and there were more people at church on Sundays), but the winter months, which were brutally cold that year, gave people time to either bury their sorrow or talk it through, all behind doors that were often blocked by drifts of snow. By the time the blizzards receded, folks had finished their grieving, and were ready for a fresh start.