Spring

  She took half a step towards him. ‘What is it?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing, just thinking,’ he answered, joining her.

  She turned as he did, the pair of them at one together, and he put a hand briefly on her shoulder.

  As they walked back into the garden Mrs Foale called to them from the doorway, ‘Jack, there’s something I want to talk to you about – along with Clare.’

  Jack whispered, ‘She’s beaten me to it!’

  ‘Well, obviously they don’t want me there!’ Katherine whispered on return, but without rancour. ‘Tell me about it later. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ agreed Jack.

  32

  REVELATION

  Later, with the light fading and Katherine upstairs revising, Jack and Margaret Foale went and sat by Clare’s bed in the conservatory.

  Jack had no idea what to expect but he felt subdued and nervous.

  ‘It’s about Arthur isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Margaret, ‘and also yourself. And Katherine too. But let’s start with Arthur. Do you remember him?’

  Jack shook his head. Except for a shadowy male figure on one of their visits, he had little recollection of him at all.

  Margaret produced a photograph. ‘This was taken when he was a guest lecturer at Imperial College in London, just before he disappeared. I want you to have a good idea what he now looks like.’

  The photograph was in digital colour and quite clear.

  It was of a big man, black-bearded, wild-haired, with a ruddy, weather-beaten English country face and sharp twinkling eyes. He was wearing a check shirt and grey trousers that were somewhat too short for him and standing by a pull-down blackboard, with an old-fashioned piece of chalk in his hand. A dark misshapen jacket hung over a chair to one side, a laptop sat on the table in front of him, and there was part of a projected image on the screen just behind his head. The lecture room looked archaic, with a great window to his right, the cords to open and shut it dangling down the wall.

  ‘So, that’s Arthur,’ continued Margaret. ‘He once told me most emphatically that if ever he went off on one of his field trips and didn’t reappear within two weeks, we were to ask you to come here at once. That’s why Katherine called you, because I asked her to, but she doesn’t know the full reason why.’

  Jack nodded.

  ‘She was scared after he disappeared. But . . .’

  He got up and paced about.

  ‘I’m not comfortable talking about this without Katherine here. You shouldn’t keep all this from her.’

  ‘But she’s just a . . .’ began Clare.

  Jack raised his eyebrows and looked quizzically at Margaret Foale.

  ‘Just a girl?’ he said ironically.

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Jack.

  They both looked sheepish, even defensive.

  Margaret Foale got up and said, ‘He’s quite right, Clare. I’ll go and get her.’

  It seemed that everything at Woolstone was shifting and changing before their eyes. The perceptions of all of them, both of themselves and of the world outside, were altering, fracturing, regrouping into something new, separate and together, like the world seen in the reflective chimes whose continual music was the only thing that kept things together, lightly, beautifully, made by the lightest of breezes, powerful as the greatest hurricane.

  When Katherine finally joined them they all talked that evening in a way they had not before, sharing the doubts and discoveries of their separate journeys to the same time and place. Journeys of loss and grief, of love and realization, of the past into the present and on, moment by moment, into the future. Fragments of memory turned into a thousand different stories of which they were made but which, as they talked, they unmade and remade.

  Mrs Foale had been going to tell Jack alone that evening all that she knew about Arthur’s disappearance. She finally did so with them all present a few days later.

  The way it was done was unexpected. She handed Jack a computer disk.

  ‘Arthur said to give this to you, Jack, only after you’d got used to things here, and to us too, and when we felt the time was right. Well the time’s right and I’m going to do what he probably wouldn’t have done seeing as he was over-protective of you, Katherine. I’m going to give it to both of you to watch. All right?’

  ‘Very all right,’ said Katherine.

  Arthur had written the words For Jack on the disk in black felt-tip. She had added ‘and Katherine’ in blue.

  ‘The time’s right to share this now,’ said Clare matter-of-factly. ‘I’m dying and we all know it. You’ve got the right to have some questions answered before I go, Jack.’

  ‘About the accident?’

  Clare nodded. ‘Yes, that . . . and what happened before that, which Margaret knows about. About your past, in other words.’

  Katherine looked at Jack and said, ‘Yes, he needs to know about that.’

  ‘Well, we don’t know much,’ said Margaret, ‘but certainly more than has been said. Arthur put what he knows and believes on that disk, in case he didn’t come back. Where from will become clear when you watch it. He said it’s both an explanation and a warning, and that it would be better if you watched it with us present, so we could answer any questions. That now includes you, Katherine.’

  Jack took the disk and inserted it in the DVD player.

  ‘Okay, shall we watch it?’

  Margaret reached over and touched Jack’s arm.

  ‘Arthur could be a bit insensitive sometimes, thinking other people had his intelligence and his thick skin. What you’re going to see and hear, if it’s what I think it is, might be a bit of a shock. That’s why we’re here.’

  ‘To pick up the pieces?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I think I’ll sit next to Katherine then,’ he said softly.

  They exchanged another glance. There was friendship there, and trust. There was nervousness too.

  She reached a hand to his arm, unconsciously copying the way Clare made contact at important moments.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s go for it,’ said Jack, turning off the light in the conservatory so they could see the screen better.

  The film was amateurishly made by Arthur himself. It started with a shaky webcam recording of him talking straight to camera.

  ‘Jack, we know only that you came from Germany, probably from the Harz Mountains, and that was when you were about six. Margaret will explain the background to that. Anyway, you came to England only a few weeks before the accident in which you got so badly injured. Now this is going to be hard to take but, astonishing as it may seem to most people, to you it might not come as a total surprise. Most people who never knew their earliest years actually retain what are called vestigial memories of them buried deep in their unconscious, which then begin to surface in their teens. I wouldn’t mind betting that something like that has been happening with you, too.

  ‘So let’s get to the point. I believe you’re very special because you’re a genetic crossover between two worlds, one of which is our own, the human world, with which we are comfortable and which we see as the solid and material reality of our lives, and the other . . . well, that’s the one I need to explain. The other, which I call the Hyddenworld, we humans do not see at all. This is for many reasons, but most of all because we do not believe it to be there. We have been taught, for two thousand years at least, that it is not there, and people, indeed whole communities, have been slaughtered for suggesting that it is. We have lost the ability to see it just as someone who loses their sight for many years may not see in the same way as sighted people can until they have learned how to. So far as the Hyddenworld is concerned, humans have become unsighted to its presence among us and, as important, what that means to our understanding of the world.

  ‘The good news is that in many of us the belief survives that this Hyddenworld – the world of little people – does
actually exist. It has its own reality. It is just as real as our own. Indeed you will find hardly a society or a culture throughout the world that does not have so much traditional and cultural reference to the little people that, were it anything else but them, this evidence would be regarded as sufficient proof of their existence by most rational thinkers.

  ‘But there is also evidence of a more specific kind, which very few know about and which has been kept well away from the public domain. Such evidence is in the form of some film and early security-camera footage taken before the inhabitants of this otherworld came to realize the threat cameras posed to them, and took evasive action. I began collecting such material many years ago . . .’

  The film switched suddenly from webcam to the grainy black-and-white footage familiar from old film stock. Arthur’s voice then continued as a background commentary.

  ‘This exterior footage comes from a film made in 1948 at Elstree Studios in Surrey. Keep a close watch on the top left-hand corner.’

  It showed a woodland scene near a river, as two actors in Forties dress appeared in the foreground. Then someone else, seemingly dressed in a period costume of some kind, appeared suddenly on the far side of the river.

  ‘Watch out for the scale of things when he passes that bicycle leaning against the tree . . .’

  Jack leaned forward, watching now with growing fascination. The figure in the film could suddenly be seen to be standing little higher than the cycle wheel, no bigger than a child.

  The footage changed again, and Arthur’s voice-over continued.

  ‘Berlin, 1945 and some footage on a news camera accidentally switched on at dusk. Watch carefully! We’ve got the familiar war-damaged city-scape, but this time including two figures, strangely dressed as if they were peasants from a medieval village . . .’

  These figures appeared and disappeared several times, as if they were searching for something among the rubble. An adjacent doorway indicated the scale, and again, they were no bigger than young children.

  ‘One last clip, from 1991, taken by an early security camera at night in a shopping mall in Manchester.’

  Again, an ordinary urban scene, and again diminutive little people, caught on camera. After that the film reverted to Foale talking directly to camera.

  ‘I could show more examples, but let’s leave it at that for now. Here’s the interesting thing. In the three years from 1993, all such images disappear from the record, first in Germany and then gradually across the world. They suddenly stop. We think that’s because these people learned ways to avoid ever being caught on camera. You might think that these clips could have been faked, but I’ve had them very carefully examined and there’s absolutely no evidence of that.

  ‘Now, it’s true that we don’t generally believe in beings such as the little people, and will prefer any explanation but the true one, but that’s good, in a way, because it makes my investigative work a lot simpler.

  ‘Meanwhile, the Hyddenworld and its people certainly know we exist. They have to, because they live among us constantly in real time, in real space, being born, living, dying, subtly interacting with us. They see us as clumsy giants, doltish and highly destructive of ourselves and the environment, yet they also piggy-back on our technology, though to what extent I’m not yet sure. What I do know for sure is that one of them telephoned me ten years ago from a public telephone in Germany just before your own mysterious arrival.

  ‘Why contact me? you may ask. That’s probably because I am the only human being who actually believes in them, not excepting my wife, who remains sceptical still. And why now particularly? Because a crisis looms. This brings me back to you, Jack.

  ‘I said earlier that you’re a genetic crossover. By that I mean that though we humans and hydden come from a common ancestry, separating off in the primeval past, what hydden call a “giant-born” retains certain qualities of both races, and yet crucially something unique to himself. More of that in a moment, but let me stress that such crossovers are not unique among the hydden, but they do seem to occur extremely rarely.

  ‘Because their recessive genes mean that they can grow to human size, giants are seen as objects of dread and superstition amongst their own kind. And though they usually turn out exceptionally able and physically strong, the hydden fear them so much that they almost invariably kill them in childhood. Because of the timing of that mysterious phone call and your sudden arrival, it is my firm belief that you are one of these prodigies, and that you were sent into the human world to save you from destruction by your own kind.’

  The film came to an abrupt stop.

  Jack looked totally stunned.

  After a while, he finally broke the silence.

  ‘These trips of Arthur’s, are they to do with the Hyddenworld?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Margaret after a pause, ‘that’s exactly what they are to do with, but can you see why it would be impossible to tell anyone? If it’s true it’s something beyond extraordinary. If it’s not it means that Arthur is mad. Either way it’s fraught with danger.’

  ‘And he thinks that I come from that world?’

  ‘He does and so do I. Let me tell you a bit more about what we think it means to be what the hydden call “giant-born” . . .’

  She began telling him what she knew, what Arthur and she had worked out, and about the legendary giants-born, most particularly Beornamund of Brum.

  Old stories, new times.

  Jack listened but asked hardly any more questions. At some point during that long evening, which went into the night, Katherine found courage to reach over and put her hand on his. Just a touch for reassurance and empathy. She couldn’t begin to imagine what it all meant to him but she guessed it ran deep.

  In the absence of questions from him and his silence as he tried to come to terms with an entirely new perception of himself and his world, she asked questions for him.

  ‘But . . . but . . . but . . .’

  So many ifs and buts, and more questions remaining than answers given.

  Finally they had all had enough for the time being and went off to their rooms.

  ‘Thanks, Katherine,’ he said outside her door. ‘I’m glad you were there.’

  She hugged him.

  ‘Always,’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Katherine said, ‘I think that Arthur was primarily trying to tell you something, without actually spelling it out. He must have guessed that Mrs Foale would see the film, too, and he didn’t want to worry her unduly.’

  He went to his room.

  Arthur had been right in what he said: none of this was exactly a surprise. Jack had sensed something like this was coming. It shook him, even shocked him, but it also brought a sense of relief. For the first time in his life, he felt he was beginning to get a sense of who he really was.

  Later that night he suddenly woke up feeling certain that Katherine was right. Arthur had been trying to warn him about something – but what?

  Jack got up and opened the window, staring through the darkness towards the trees.

  He stood there a long time, but somehow couldn’t work it out.

  Eventually he went back to bed, and slept fitfully, until he reawakened feeling much more worried than before.

  Dawn was breaking and the sky was red.

  ‘Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning,’ he murmured aloud.

  But that was merely a caution about the weather. What was nagging at him was something that hinted at dangers far greater than the weather.

  Then he got it.

  The warning’s not just about me, it’s about Katherine too. They might try and get at me through her. He didn’t want her or the others to know that because it would ‘alarm them unduly’ as Katherine herself puts it.

  Then he got something else.

  He’s telling me the Hyddenworld is my world and I’ve got to protect Katherine from it.

  The sky over White Horse Hill changed to the colour of warning
red as rain clouds loomed and then, the wind shifting, retreated.

  ‘For the time being,’ murmured Jack, his eyes purposeful, his movements assured. ‘All I can do is watch and wait.’

  He got up, washed and dressed and went out into the garden before breakfast, prowling about as if in search of the enemy. He didn’t see one but he didn’t doubt any more that one was there and it was dark and shadowed and some day, probably sooner than later, it was going to emerge out of his dreams and nightmares and show its face.

  33

  RIDGEWAY

  Their daily walks became longer, faster and more vigorous, as if providing an antidote to the shocks of Arthur’s DVD. They tried not to think what it might mean for the future and put all their thoughts and actions into the present.

  They began at last to explore the chalk escarpment immediately to the north of Woolstone, and then the chalk Downs beyond. Their mysterious dry valleys and rolling slopes, littered with ancient monuments, including the White Horse itself, were as changeable in appearance as the weather which swept continually across it.

  The ridge enticed both Jack and Katherine and they explored every aspect of it from the huge hill fort nearby, and even down to the solitary hawthorn that added drama to the smooth sward of grass below it.

  But they did not walk those few extra yards up to the Horse itself. It didn’t feel as if it was time.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Katherine, her fair hair wild in the strong wind that was always blowing up the scarp face.

  ‘No,’ murmured Jack in agreement, hands stuck into his anorak pockets, feet solid on the grass, mouth firm over jutting jaw, eyes narrowed against the wind.

  Instead they would turn back from that final exploration, and head over the crest of the scarp to the ancient Ridgeway that ran west-to-east in its lee, echoing the run of the Thames flowing to the north.