‘I doubt it,’ said Zoe. She sat on the edge of the bed and stroked his hair. ‘Well. We’re here for you now.’
‘Never mind that. I had something important to say to you but it’s gone clean out of my head. What use is that?’
They waited in silence as he tried to remember.
Then Jake sat down in the plastic chair and said, ‘Did you tune in to hospital radio last night?’
‘What?’
‘They had a request for you. Frank Sinatra. Played it for you specially.’
Peter looked at Zoe and laughed, though the laugh pained him. ‘He’s barking mad, isn’t he? What on earth is he talking about? I don’t know how you ever came to marry him.’
‘It’s a mystery, Dad,’ she said.
‘Oh, that was it: I remembered what I wanted to say. Hang on to him, for his sake. Death us do part and all that. Hang on to him. You’ve been the making of that boy. You really have.’
‘Oh?’
‘That was it. And to ask you for one thing. One little hug. From you. One little hug.’
‘I can do that, Peter.’
Zoe inched up the bed as far as she was able and put her arms around him and laid her face against the rough stubble of his cheek. Jake watched from the plastic chair. The hug lasted for ten or twelve seconds, during which Peter flicked a finger at Zoe’s hair.
‘That’s enough,’ he said.
‘Do I get a hug?’ Jake asked.
‘Unmanly.’
‘Okay.’
Peter didn’t have a lot of chat left in him. Zoe and Jake both exhausted themselves trying to initiate conversations, dredging up bits of news in which he might be interested. But the time-slip seemed to have released him from its claws, and for that Jake felt grateful. He didn’t want to have to go outside to put a bullet through Charlie a second time.
Peter fell asleep after a while, and they left. The hospital would inform them if there was any change in his condition. Zoe drove on the way home.
‘Did you smell it?’ Jake asked her as she drove.
‘Smell what?’
‘Maybe nothing.’
They got home and before Jake put the key in the door he heard the phone ringing. It was the hospital calling to say that Peter had slipped away in the last hour.
14
Jake was at the window of their hotel room.
‘What are you looking at?’ Zoe wanted to know.
‘Nothing.’
She stepped forwards to see for herself, but he turned quickly and blocked her advance towards the window. She giggled, and tried to slip by him. He blocked her again.
‘What are you doing?’
He said nothing. Just held her so that she couldn’t get to the window. She tried to push his arms away from her, but he bear-hugged her, steering her towards the bed, finally toppling her backwards onto it.
‘Get off me, Jake! I want to see.’
She pushed him away and struggled to her feet, rushing to the window. She looked out across the snow. The sky presaged more in heavy grey clouds. The road curved away into the distance, flanked on either side by trees like frozen sentries in a forgotten war. There was nothing she hadn’t seen before.
Jake came up behind her, peering over her shoulder. He reached an arm around her belly, stroking her.
‘What was it?’ she demanded to know.
‘Nothing.’
‘You lie.’
‘Yes.’
‘So tell me.’
‘No.’
Something made her shiver. She turned suddenly and grabbed his jaw with her hand, squeezing. ‘Are you protecting me? I don’t want to be protected. Whatever there is to be known about this place, I want you to tell me.’
He took her hand away from his mouth. ‘It was a horse.’
‘A horse?’
‘Yes, a horse. And a sledge. It was waiting there. Now it’s gone.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I’ve seen it there before. It frightened me.’
‘What do you mean? You’ve seen it before?’
‘Yes. A few times.’
‘I saw it too.’
‘What? You saw it? You saw the horse and you didn’t tell me?’
‘Yes. A huge black horse with a red plume, pulling an enormous sledge.’
‘How could you not tell me? Zoe, what were you thinking?’
‘Can you hear yourself? A moment ago you wouldn’t even let me look out of the window.’
He shook his head and sank onto a chair. ‘All right. Let’s make a promise. Let’s not try to protect each other. In this place. I mean it.’
Jake was astonished to learn that Zoe had stolen out into the night, and had stood next to the steaming horse; that she had stroked its flanks and had even tried to get onto the sledge. She told him that the horse and sledge were huge, but that when she’d tried to climb onto the sledge it had swollen massively without warning; or perhaps she had suddenly shrunk, like Alice.
They decided to go out and look at the place where the horse had stood.
There were tracks in the snow, left by the runners on the sledge and the horse’s hooves. There was also some dung.
‘Well, that shows it was real,’ Jake said, ‘but just look at this stuff.’
He picked up some of the dung in his ski glove and offered it for her to see.
‘Nice. Thanks.’
‘Look at it.’
It was the shape and texture of ordinary horse dung. But it rippled with iridescent light. It sparkled. It shimmered blue, green, red and violet; swirling with its own light.
‘Are we dreaming?’ Zoe said. ‘Is it a trick of the light?’
‘It’s not.’
But even as Jake held it in his glove, the sparkling dung faded, crumbled, turned to sand, disappeared. The rest of the dung on the snow vanished too, and so did the hoof-prints and the tramline impressions left behind by the sledge’s runners.
‘And I was just about to suggest we follow the tracks,’ Jake said.
‘Jake, we haven’t tried for a while.’
‘Tried what?’
‘Just to walk out.’
‘No.’
‘Why haven’t we?’
‘Because we’re in a place where a horse shits rainbows.’
‘Right.’
They went back to the hotel. Neither the lighting nor the heating had returned and the temperature was dropping rapidly now. It was astonishing how quickly a hotel of that size could discharge its heat. Jake remembered he had found an axe embedded in a log at the house they’d raided. He said he was going out to chop kindling. He said that if they needed to, they would sleep in front of the fire.
While he was out Zoe swept and prepared the fireplace for his return. In a nook in the stone surround she found a set of playing cards. She took them out. They were some kind of Tarot cards. Zoe had seen packs of such cards before and this was some continental version with the Major Arcana titles in French. Most of the major cards were the same as the standard Tarot deck, La Lune, Le Soleil and such, but some were different. There was a card called La Montagne, the mountain, and another depicting a compass, perhaps instead of the conventional Wheel of Fortune. Another card was Le Chien and she didn’t remember a dog card from the Tarot. She found another card that made her catch her breath.
It was a depiction of two large black birds, each perched on one of the posts either side of a gate. It brought to mind the two large crows she had encountered on the morning when she had returned to the stranded police car. She shivered.
She began slowly sorting through the cards, looking for the Death card. Her hand slowed as she turned each card, knowing that it was in there somewhere. Then she decided that whatever it looked like, she didn’t want to see it. She gathered up the cards and returned them to the nook in the fireplace where she’d found them.