Every Never After

  What on earth is he doing here?

  “Surprise!” Al said with a chuckle. “Maggie swiped him from the Ordnance Survey to develop a virtual dig-site learning-tool app for the museum in conjunction with our blog. It was Milo’s idea, but we thought you’d probably be okay with it.”

  Clare, hearing herself make a giddy, astonished noise that in no way resembled actual speech, turned to see Al regarding her with a sly grin on her face. Clare turned back to look at Milo, who hadn’t seen them yet. And dang, it probably should have been illegal, the way those jeans fit him …

  “Dude.” Al elbowed Clare in the side. “You’re starting to drool a bit.”

  “I am not!” She wiped the corner of one sleeve over her mouth just to make sure. “Gawd. The way you talk you’d think I had some sort of excess saliva issue.”

  Al just grinned and said, “I think you left your dribble bib in the van.”

  Clare rolled her eyes. At least, she tried to. But her gaze just sort of drifted back to Milo. “You knew about this and didn’t tell me?”

  “Yup. Hence—surprise!”

  “Traitor …”

  Al laughed and shook her head, waving Clare away in Milo’s direction. “Go on! He’s not going to stand there posing winsomely for you all day, y’know.”

  “I’m a mess. I’m blotchy.”

  “You look fine. You’re pleasantly pink.”

  “Sweaty.”

  “Glowing. Now go.” Al gave her a push. “I’m gonna go check out that tower thingy. You go check out the view of Milo.”

  “You mean with Milo.”

  “Sure. That too,” Al said and turned on her heel.

  Clare watched for a moment as her best friend wandered off toward the stone spire that stood at the centre of Glastonbury Tor’s summit. She wondered if it was her imagination, or if Al actually looked a little … lonely. But then Milo called her name and Clare turned to see him waving. There was a big, beautiful smile on his face, and the blazing blueness of his gaze gave the colour of the sky a run for its money. Suddenly, as if released from a spell, Clare was running. And then kissing.

  In just that moment, everything was exactly as it should be.

  The world revolved around Glastonbury Tor and time stood perfectly still.

  3

  Allie circumnavigated the old stone tower a total of three times before actually stepping inside one of its four arches. The structure was the signature defining element of the hill’s profile. You could see it from miles away—a single stone finger pointing skyward like an accusation. It was, according to everything she’d read, the last remaining ruins of a church dedicated to St. Michael that had stood there until the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539, during the reign of Henry the Eighth.

  Once inside, it was a little like standing at the bottom of a well. The top of the tower ruin was open to the sky. Allie glanced up and was startled to see a pair of eyes staring down at her. A raven— the biggest one she’d ever seen—was perched on one of the stone corners. It gazed down at her with its unblinking, obsidian gaze. Allie stared back, the brilliant blue of the sky a stark backdrop that reflected off the bird’s oily black feathers almost as if the creature was outlined in an electric-blue glow. It was a cool, if eerie, optical illusion.

  Allie stood looking up at the bird for a long time, thinking that that was how she had appeared to Clare in the past. Every time she’d shimmered, Clare said it was a raven with Al’s voice that had brought her spiralling back home. Of course, there was nothing mystical about the bird on top of the ruined tower. After all, Britain was lousy with ravens. It probably would have been odd not to have seen at least one of the things hanging around Glastonbury.

  As if sensing her dismissive thoughts, the bird opened its big black beak and cawed at her. The harsh, dissonant sound reverberated off the stone walls, echoing weirdly. Allie put out a hand to steady herself against the tower wall, suddenly dizzy. But the bird just flapped noisily away, and when nothing particularly supernatural happened after a few long moments, Allie breathed a slightly embarrassed sigh of relief.

  You just gave yourself a head rush from staring up for so long, doofus.

  Outside the tower, Clare and Milo must have finally come up for air. Clare was calling her name and, as Allie stepped back into the sunshine, she was reassured to see that there were other tourists—not monks or pilgrims or Druids—wandering around the Tor. In the far distance, there were cars—not horses or chariots— travelling past on the roads below. Allie couldn’t help feeling just the tiniest bit ridiculous.

  For one thing, she wasn’t the one the weird stuff happened to. For another thing, no weird stuff was going to happen. Allie’s fundamentally analytical mind gave her a bit of a swift kick and urged her to move on.

  LATER THAT EVENING, after the girls had settled into the Avalon Mists Bed and Breakfast rooms where they’d been billeted and Milo had checked in at the local inn where the museum had booked him a room, they all met up to have dinner with Maggie before she headed back to the city.

  As the waitress wandered back to the kitchen to place their food orders, Maggie sighed deeply and leaned on her hand, staring out the window in the direction of the Tor—even though it was hidden from sight by tall hedgerows and the quaint old buildings of the town.

  Clare and Milo and Al exchanged glances.

  “Mags,” Clare said finally, “what’s wrong?”

  “Hm?”

  “You’re fidgeting and sighing and you keep looking out the window. You look as if you’re expecting someone to come walking up the road.” Clare knew what her aunt must be thinking. “You’re not, are you?” she asked gently.

  “Oh … no.” Maggie laughed wanly and waved a hand through the air. “No. And anyway, I paid my respects today at the Tor and there were no surprises. Still. I suppose this place just … makes me a bit melancholy.”

  Back in the eighties, when Maggie had been a student in university, a boy had disappeared from Glastonbury Tor. Literally. And Maggie had been there when he had.

  “I know he’s not really here anymore. Just my memories of him, few as they may be. I hardly even knew the lad. But we lost him and I can’t help wondering what I could have done differently.”

  “Maggie … what …” Clare hesitated. “What really happened back then? That night with Stu and Dr. Jenkins and the others? When the Free Peoples of Prydain—or whatever you guys called yourselves—did that ritual on the Tor?”

  Maggie sighed again, took a sip from her half-pint of cider, and told them the story. It was a story about how, as a young graduate student at Cambridge, she’d gone on an ill-advised expedition with her then crush, a self-styled neo-Druid high-priest charlatan named Stuart Morholt. “New Age” was all the rage back in 1986, and there was a handful of them at the university: bored intellectuals who’d decided to band together and form their own, distinctly eighties idea of an Order of Druids. Most of which involved lighting candles, drinking lots of wine late at night out in the quad, and casting quasi-spells designed mainly to increase grades or popularity.

  Then someone (Maggie seemed to recall that it was Morholt, although she wasn’t entirely certain) had suggested they stop playing around and actually do a road trip to an actual mystical site. Stonehenge had been tossed around as a potential destination, but access to the ancient stone circle had been limited since the year before, when police had clashed with a caravan of hippie types and head-busting mayhem had ensued. Besides, someone pointed out, it was highly unlikely that real Druids had ever had anything to do with Stonehenge. So Glastonbury Tor was decided on.

  “The idea—if you can call something so vague, ill thought out, and airy-fairy an idea—had been to cast some kind of mystical New Age spell that would show us all the way to Avalon.” Maggie’s upper lip twisted in a sneer of disgust. “Maybe commune with some earth spirits or dance in the moonlight with leprechauns or some such ludicrous thing. What a load of bloody rubbish.”

  Whateve
r its initial aims, the outcome had been something unexpected. And horrible, in that they’d lost one of their number in the process. A young man named Mark O’Donnell who’d just … disappeared. Vanished. Never to be seen again.

  “I’ll never forgive myself. I should have told someone. But quite honestly, I don’t know what I would have said.” Maggie shook her head, remembering. “I don’t know how it happened. I mean, Ceciley took credit for it but I can’t say that I believe her. And Stuart is … well, Stuart. I can’t think he’d have had the wherewithal to actually track down a real spell. But he must have.” Maggie shook her head. “Even to this day, it’s all a bit fuzzy in my memory. With Morholt guiding us, we walked the ancient path around and around the hill. I swear he did it wrong—we kept getting turned around, as if it really were a maze—but then somehow we were at the summit of the hill. And then … and then the world seemed to come apart all around us. It was real magic. Really big trouble. Everything felt wrong all of a sudden. They sky looked shattered. And that’s all I remember. We all sort of passed out, I think. But when we awoke, one of us … Mark … he was gone.” Maggie blinked rapidly, her eyes glassy with unshed tears.

  “Gone, like … shimmer gone?” Clare asked, suddenly uneasy. Maggie sniffed and shook her head, reaching out to grip Clare’s hand. “Oh, duckling, no. I don’t mean to frighten you. I don’t know where he went. Or when, or how. But he’s not you and it wasn’t the same. There were no artifacts, nothing to trigger a shimmering. And you always came back. For all I know, it really was Ceciley’s spell that spooked him terribly and he did just run away—apparently he’d done that kind of thing before—when the rest of us were down for the count.”

  “What was he like?” Al asked quietly. “The guy who disappeared.”

  “Oh … he was very young.” Maggie pushed her glasses up on her nose and dabbed at the corner of one eye. “A boy, really. From Edinburgh. I can’t think he was more than fourteen or fifteen. He’d gotten into Cambridge on a special linguistics scholarship and had already advanced several grades past his age group.” She sighed. “Afterward, back at school, Stuart concocted a story about how the lad had cracked under the pressures of his studies and dropped out. Run away. No one really questioned it all that much, especially once the police confirmed that he’d been a runaway when he was younger. I can’t say I blame him. His parents were celebrated academics and, to be honest, I think they’d pushed him hard all his young life and were ashamed at the thought that a son of theirs hadn’t been able to handle the workload. The police put out missing persons reports, but after a while, what were they to do? He’d vanished into thin air. His family didn’t press the matter. Wrote him off as a black sheep, I suppose. And the rest of us went along with Stuart’s story because we were all too frightened and too bloody embarrassed to tell the truth.”

  “And because Morholt bullied you. I know what that’s like coming from him,” Clare said, glancing over at Al. “We both do.”

  “Such a shame. He really was a bright spark …” Maggie shook her head. “Despite what his parents wound up thinking of him.”

  Clare smiled and laughed a little. “Jeez, Al,” she said, trying to lighten the mood, “he sounds like your perfect male.”

  “Says the girl who’s dating my cousin,” Al snorted. “Whom we, in secret, have code-named ‘Brainzilla.’” She elbowed Milo, who elbowed her playfully back.

  “I think I’d prefer ‘Brain Kong,’” he mused. “Or ‘Creature from the Brain Lagoon.’”

  Maggie had gone silent during the brief bout of teen banter, her expression slack with memory, her eyes misted windows looking inward.

  “Perfesser?” Al prodded her gently.

  “Hm? Oh! Yes. Sorry.”

  “No, that’s okay,” Al said. “I was just wondering if that was the end of the story.”

  “Yeah … Sorry, Mags,” Clare said. “We got a little sidetracky there. You were telling us about this O’Donnell guy.”

  “Well, as I say,” Maggie continued, regaining something of her usual brisk demeanour, “he was young. Soft-spoken. Slight of build, with soft eyes. Soulful, really. And … he had rather large hair.”

  Clare and Al exchanged a look. Al said, “What?”

  Maggie wafted a hand above her own head. “Sort of poufy.”

  Clare clamped a hand over her mouth to keep from laughing out loud.

  “Now, now. It was the style at the time.”

  Milo snorted.

  “Well,” Maggie sighed. “Here. Let me show you.”

  She hauled up the battered old soft-sided leather satchel that she toted around, full of notebooks and texts and other assorted archaeologist paraphernalia. After searching deep in the bowels of a side pocket, Maggie finally drew forth a scuffed and yellowed Moleskine notebook. She slipped off the elastic band that held the little journal shut and lifted the back cover, taking out an old, bent-cornered photograph. It was a group shot—taken against the backdrop of Glastonbury Tor rising above the trees into a deep blue, twilight sky—and it featured a half-dozen people ranging in age from teens to late twenties.

  “Good god, Mags …” Clare gaped at the picture in disbelief. “You had a spiral perm!”

  “And you were hot!” Milo exclaimed, crowding over her shoulder for a look. “I mean—are hot.”

  Maggie’s eyebrow crept toward her hairline as she regarded him sideways.

  “Still hot.”

  Maggie rolled her eyes and reached across the table to snatch the picture back again, but Clare kept it out of her reach. “Look at the shoulder pads, Al! And is that … holy crap. It is!”

  Clare’s jaw fell open as she stared at the image of a young Stuart Morholt, who struck a pose in a flowy, open-necked pirate shirt and tight leather pants. His black hair was long and wavy, and his eyes were rimmed with kohl.

  “That is some seriously egregious guyliner.” Clare shook her head in disgust.

  Al remained silent, leaning in on Clare’s other side. Her gaze was fixed like a laser beam, not on Maggie’s questionable sartorial choices or Stuart Morholt’s outlandish getup, but on the face of a boy who stood at the end of the line. The boy who’d disappeared. Clare could hardly blame Al for staring—it was a pretty tragic story. She glanced back down at him herself. Mark O’Donnell grinned excitedly at the camera, but his eyes were shadowed by a fringe of—good lord, Maggie hadn’t exaggerated, it was poufy— mullet-style hair. It kind of reminded Clare of the coif she’d seen Bono sporting in really old U2 music videos. The boy in the picture also wore skinny hip-hugger tartan pants and—

  “Is that a leather tie?” Al asked, pointing at the narrow strip of neckwear.

  “Wait,” Milo interjected. “Is that Dr. Jenkins?”

  “Is she wearing a leopard-print corset?” Clare snorted. “Gawd!” Clare hadn’t managed to muster up much in the way of sympathy for the crazy curator. Not seeing as how Dr. Ceciley Jenkins had tried to kill Clare and her friends and Maggie only a few weeks earlier.

  “Jeez, Perfesser!” Al’s customary sardonic grin slid back into place and she shook her head. “You guys kinda look like a bunch of avatars from Guitar Hero!”

  “I’m not even going to pretend I know what you’re talking about.” Maggie sniffed and retrieved the photograph, sliding it back into the notebook and returning it to her satchel. Clare thought she might have been beaming just a bit from Milo’s “hot” comment. But after a moment she shook her head, the melancholy creeping back into her expression.

  “Poor lad … Morholt treated him like a lackey,” she said. “A pet. If he could have had the dear boy carry his books around campus, I think he would have. I wish I could have stopped him. I wish I’d tried. I wish …” She sighed again and took another sip of her cider. “Ah, well …”

  The crispness returned to her gaze as she glanced around the table at the trio of young people she was about to leave in the place where, all those years ago, she’d lost Mark O’Donnell to the mists of time.

/>   “Now. Enough. I know I don’t need to tell you this, but you three will be careful while you’re here. Do you understand me?” The air almost crackled with the electric force of her stare.

  “Maggie?” Clare reached over and laid a hand on her aunt’s arm. “Believe me. If there’s anyone who understands that … I think it’s us. We’re probably the only ‘trowel monkeys’ Dr. Ashbourne has ever had working for him who know just how careful you have to be when you start digging up the past. Trust me. Nothing is going to go wrong. Nothing.”

  4

  The landlady at the Avalon Mists Bed and Breakfast insisted on making the girls a cup of tea before they toddled off to bed. “Dream Tea” she called it: a blend of chamomile and mugwort infused with valerian root and patchouli and various other hippie-sounding herbs and spices, guaranteed to help facilitate vivid dream experiences, she assured them. So they could better tap into the mystical “Dream Walks” that proximity to Glastonbury Tor bestowed upon the “seekers and the pilgrims.” Clare thought it was probably a bunch of New Age hooey—and the tea smelled a bit like cat pee and tasted like watery grass clippings—but she didn’t want to offend their purple-haired, crystal-festooned hostess, and so she forced herself to choke back a few tiny sips.

  Al, being quicker on the uptake, begged off, claiming herbal allergies.

  As it was, Clare went to bed that night dreaming of Milo. So much for the purported astral potency of Dream Tea, she thought, smug in her REM sleep state. She dreamt of Milo pretty much nightly these days and didn’t exactly require boggy-tasting tisanes to help in that arena.

  Clare sighed and settled into her visions of a Thames-side, lateafternoon stroll, hand in hand with the boy genius at her side … the dream-rich colours of sunshine and blue skies echoing in Milo’s blond hair and sparkling gaze … a gentle breeze wafting the subtle, fresh scent of the soap he used … Clare losing herself in his eyes as Milo smiled down at her and leaned in for a kiss …

  Best. Dream. Ever.