'Forget my own brother? I don't think so,' Hugh said, though mostly to himself. He returned the deadened mobile to his pocket as he crossed the road to Cybernet, the closest Internet connection. It was housed in the lobby of the old Empire cinema, the upper storey of which still exhibited sex films in a club. But the doors to Cybernet were locked.
He was registered to use the computers in the central library too. All the same, for a moment he felt robbed of the route he'd planned to follow. On the way into the town the shops grew larger and more expensive, as if striving to be worthy of the old pale stone they occupied. Three headscarved women, Muslims rather than just Yorkshire housewives, were sitting on the library steps to watch two men pore over a giant game of chess on the flagstones outside, to the accompaniment of calypsos performed on a steel drum near a pub. Beyond the doors at the top of the steps another flight divided at a landing to climb both ways to the reference library. Art was stuck to the wall above the stairs – two trails of outsize coloured arrows, one side identified as right, though the other was unnamed. It meant nothing to Hugh, and as he made for the lending room he wondered if it would to Rory. Once a librarian who'd slimmed her accent down had booked him in, he took his place halfway along a line of shallow computer booths. A faint metallic calypso greeted the appearance of the Internet, and he sent Metacrawler in search of Thurstaston.
Which of the references would help Ellen? Thurstaston Rugby Club seemed unlikely to inspire her, and the same went for a yacht club. Thurstaston Bird Hide suggested concealment and secrecy, which she might take further than he felt able to. Thurstaston Country Park, Thurstaston Tea Parties, Thurstaston Gardeners' Association . . . He was beginning to think he'd been too eager to give Ellen ideas until he found a reference to Thor's Stone. He called it up at once.
It described a block of red sandstone twenty-five feet high, twice as wide and almost three times as long, which stood in a stone amphitheatre on Thurstaston Common. Traditions suggested that it had given the area its name and that it was a Scandinavian altar on which animals – perhaps humans too – had been sacrificed. One Victorian commentator described it as 'red as blood'. Less than a hundred years ago children would decorate an adjacent fairy well with flowers, and even now local pagans celebrated the midsummer solstice and other occasions at the stone. Never mind rugby and cups of tea – there was magic in the landscape. Perhaps Ellen should use the common instead of the cliff top, though that was less than a mile from the stone. He returned to the list, on which the next item was Thurstaston Beach.
This brought him a gallery of black and white photographs. While some resembled his memories – yachts bowing to a wind, sandpipers stooping along the shoreline or flocking like a pennant of windblown smoke above the estuary, an elaborate sandcastle defying the waves – the shapes of the cliff were unfamiliar, and the clothes of such people as appeared in the photographs dated them to the early years of the last century. One image had strayed in by mistake or as a cameraman's joke: the stretch of cliff that Hugh and Rory and their cousins had climbed after the funeral. Hugh inched the photograph up the screen to reveal the legend. 'Site of Arthur Pendemon's House.' Photo by Stanley Neville, 1926.
Hugh stared at the picture of a convex stretch of cliff beneath a bloated cloud as dark as a winter midnight and tried to make sense of the caption. If the year referred to the date of the photograph, surely it was misattributed. This section of the cliff could hardly have survived unchanged for eighty years, especially when the other photographs showed such an altered landscape. How useful might Ellen find the notion, though? Perhaps there was more that she could use. He recalled the search engine and typed 'Arthur Pendemon' in the search box. At least, he thought he had until he read 'Stygie Orbswnim'.
He had to laugh, loud enough to earn him a frown from his turbaned neighbour on one side and a grunt from the white-robed greybeard on the other. While the grotesque words suggested a secret name or formula, he'd simply managed to miss every key, hitting adjacent ones instead. He erased the gibberish and set about taking his time until he saw that he'd typed 'Serjyt Owm'. Didn't he care about helping Ellen? He looked for the arrow like a nameless direction sign and held down the key until it swept the parodies of words away, then he ducked to the keyboard, peering about in search of the letters he needed. At last he glanced up for the thirteenth time to see the name in the search box. He clicked on the button to start the search, or rather he tried to. The cursor went nowhere near.
He skated the mouse around its mat to free it from the invisible obstruction and made another snatch at the button on the screen, but the arrow veered aside and did its best to vanish off the edge of the monitor. 'Wrong way,' Hugh muttered and watched the arrow sidle downwards as he tried to raise it. 'Wrong again,' he declared. 'All right, you little rodent, let's see you go left.' Was he losing his way among his words? 'I said left, right,' he exhorted through his teeth and assumed they were keeping his volume down even when he gritted 'Wrong' like a ventriloquist until the librarian with the lurking accent bustled over.
'Excuse me, what's the problem?' she murmured. 'You're disturbing people.'
'This is disturbing me,' Hugh complained as he saw his neighbours staring at him. 'It won't go where I want it to.'
The librarian leaned forwards while staying ostentatiously clear of him. 'You want to search for this, do you?'
For an absurd moment the question sounded like a warning. 'Of course I do.'
'Then there you are.'
She'd clicked on the search button before she finished speaking. 'Thanks,' Hugh said as she returned to the counter, having called up more than a dozen references to Arthur Pendemon. Hugh clicked on the first – at least he did his utmost to, but the mouse had still more ideas of its own.
'Wrong. Wrong. Wrong again, you little swine,' he tried to whisper, but his monologue grew louder and threatened to become less polite. Well before his neighbours started glaring at him he'd had enough. He could hardly ask the librarian to wield the mouse, and all the other terminals were in use, although was the computer the problem? He sent the chair stumbling backwards and blundered away from the source of his feverish embarrassment, looking, at nobody. Even the automatic doors that had admitted him no longer worked for him. He was making to haul them apart when he realised what the librarian had just called out to him. 'Isn't anything right round here?' he blurted as he dashed along the counter to the exit doors, which swung open at once.
He could easily have imagined that the word over the arrow above the stairs was a joke at his expense. The three women had vacated the steps outside the building, but the men were still at their chess. One used both hands to move the black knight backwards, a sidling retreat that bewildered Hugh. He needn't feel compelled to take so devious a route, but a flurry of metallic drumming wouldn't let him think. He felt as if his confusion were being observed, which made it worse. Straight ahead seemed to be the safest direction, though he hardly knew where he was going until a roof closed over him.
It belonged to the market, where he'd often been as a child. He remembered the smells of cloth and Asian spices, and the stalls piled with exotic vegetables and bright clothes, and the motto above one stall that announced WE CAN ALTER ANYTHING, but he seemed to have forgotten there was no direct route through. At each junction he had to dodge one way or the other to find the next aisle that led forwards. Soon he would be out and capable of seeing which way to proceed, but why couldn't he now? As he hesitated at yet another intersection boxed in by boxy stalls he realised where his haste was leading him. He was heading away from Cybernet, even if the place was open now. Worse, he was heading away from home.