Ryan reddened, but at the same time a warm feeling of relief was soaking through his chest like blotting paper. He didn’t mind Will talking to him as if he was an adult who should have known better, despite the fact that he was a year younger than Chelle. Will believed him, and Ryan felt bad for ever having thought of him as floppy.
Will’s presence was far more quickly explained. He’d telephoned Chelle’s house to let her know that Silverwing had accepted his article and had reached her panicky parents, who told him that she had disappeared from the local library. Remembering the ‘tea party’ invitation, he had decided to attend after all, so that he could warn Chelle that her parents had missed her.
‘The Harley got me to the edge of Whelmford before the water got too deep, and by then I was really worried, so I waded the rest of the way.’
‘But your Harley!’ Ryan stared at him. ‘Where is it? Is it OK?’
‘Nah, doubt it,’ Will said shortly. ‘Water in the engine.’ He gave Ryan a sideways glance. ‘Funny thing is, I’m kind of relieved. It was like I’d expected something to end when I got the Harley, and it didn’t. I was just there with the bike looking at me and I knew I couldn’t live up to it. Now it’s gone I don’t have to feel that way.’
Will shrugged, looked around at his bedraggled companions and then smiled reluctantly. ‘Anyway, life’s all about priorities, isn’t it? Let’s pick up the pace.’
The water had got into the joints and seams of the world and washed away the glue. Lives and little universes broke their banks, mingling and bubbling over and flowing out to join the river. Plastic tricycles with peeling sticker eyes, photograph albums, biros, washing-up brushes, hair slides, uprooted tomato plants. Comics spun giddily, socks sulked against window sills.
Maybe this is the way the world ends, thought Ryan, not with a bang, but with a splash. For a moment he imagined all the people of the world being washed out of their cars and office windows, and swept downstream clinging to shivered timbers, into a great pool where they would be judged.
Then, instead, he thought of the Well Spirit’s watery domain claiming village after village. Toilets erupting, cisterns ripping from their frames, road surfaces breaking apart like dunked digestives, flash floods chasing cars down lanes . . . and at every turn a sigh as a vindictive wish was granted. Destroy my school, my office, the football pitch, the house of the boy that hit me. Destroy Crook’s Baddock so they can’t make us come here again on coach trips . . . these would be easy wishes to grant now the floods were rising again. It was no wonder that the waters were growing ever higher and stronger. But what had Josh done to waken the stunned Well Spirit and give her back her powers?
The houses abandoned them, and now they were flanked by hedges where crisp packets and pizza boxes twitched with the wind like the wings of strange birds. The water was so high that they had to flatten themselves against their rafts to pass under footbridges.
Their strange little convoy was just navigating carefully around a great tangle of cables and leaves when voices became audible over the rain. They kicked desperately to escape the current and succeeded in swimming out on to what Ryan suspected was usually a village green.
A row of chipped stone cottages was drinking in the brown flood through every window. Occasional car roofs peeked disconsolately above the surface, and an empty coach stood up to its windows in water. In the middle of the green stood a war memorial, a glistening concrete spire around which metal men in rounded trench helmets waved standards and supported each other. Standing upon two metal shoulders was a single, utterly drenched figure that clung to the spire in an attitude that seemed desperate until she turned and they saw the megaphone in her hand.
‘. . . and for the last time, make sure that your electricity, gas and water are turned off at the mains. Turning it off at the switch or tap is not enough. Now has everybody finally understood that or is it just too complicated for some of you?’
It was Donna Leas. Donna with one shoe, and her skirt clinging to her legs, and her make-up long since washed away. Ryan became aware that there were people peering from top windows and listening attentively to the rasp of the megaphone.
‘You!’ She pointed down at the new convoy and addressed Will. ‘Where’ve you come from? Whelmford? Have they evacuated? You’re sure you’re the last out of there? Yes, yes, I can see she’s in shock. OK, all of you report in at the Rectory. Over there. We’ve got all the camp stoves and Calor-gas fires in their attic room, and a supply of clean water, hot drinks and dry blankets. I’ve got the rector taking names so nobody gets left behind, and his wife’s on first-aid duty. Hurry up, get those children out of the . . . oh God, it’s the Twilight Zone twins . . .’ Donna’s eye had at last fallen on Ryan and Chelle.
‘Will,’ shouted Ryan, his voice sounding mousy after Donna’s electronic bellow, ‘can you please get Carrie to the Rectory? We’ll be right there, we just have to ask Donna something first . . .’
Only the sight of the rain splashing on Carrie’s unresponsive cheeks persuaded Will to go on ahead.
‘Be quick, right?’ he said. Chelle gave him a reassuring smile.
‘Donna crouched and scowled down at the two children in her narrow-eyed witchy way. Rain runnelled off the corners of her bob as if she was an oddly designed gargoyle.
‘Donna . . . where’s Josh?’
Donna’s gaze immediately became unfocused, hostile. ‘What did you expect me to do?’ She grasped a fistful of her own hair. ‘I don’t know where he is, all right?’
Ryan’s mouth was open to ask what had happened, but the moment was washed away by the torrent of Chelle’s voice.
‘Donna, it’s all right, because we know you took him to Magwhite, we saw you, and then he did something, didn’t he, but it’s not your fault . . .’
‘I don’t know!’ Donna shouted with the savageness of sheer wretchedness. Her resemblance to a grown woman was dissolving in the rain. ‘It wasn’t flooding as badly then, but the traffic got bogged down. And we were stuck there, and he just kept on threatening . . . so I finally told him that I didn’t care, and he should get the hell out of my car!’ The last words were almost screamed. ‘I don’t care if he tells Jeremiah everything, I don’t care, and that goes for the pair of you too . . . you little . . . you creepy, freaky little . . . I don’t want any part of it any more . . .’
‘We’re not going to make you; it isn’t like that with us. Josh has just gone a bit funny with all his powers, but we’re going to make him better only he won’t be able to do the things with bulbs for you any more, and Donna . . .’ Chelle seemed to draw herself up and took on a more serious and grown-up tone. ‘You can really do a lot better than Mr Punzell, you know.’
In dismay, Ryan saw Donna crumple, almost sliding off the soldiers’ shoulders. Chelle seemed to have picked the worst possible thing to say. For a long moment Donna watched intrepid drops clambering down the ladders in her tights.
‘I know,’ she snapped suddenly. She straightened again, muttering something that sounded like ‘voodoo’ in disgust. Perhaps Chelle had said exactly the right thing.
‘Donna,’ Ryan asked carefully, not wanting to cramp Chelle’s style, ‘did Josh say anything about what he was going to do at Magwhite?’
‘He was in a nasty mood most of the journey, and then he started sniggering and saying, “I’ve got her over a barrel,” and at first I thought he meant me. Then he started muttering, “She has to grant a big wish quickly for power, I can ask whatever I like.”’
Ryan was taken aback to find that Josh had worked out so much about the source of the Well Spirit’s power. But perhaps she had found a way to tell him what she needed, through something like the Ouija bucket.
‘Then he asked how I fancied him as an archangel with lightning coming out of his eyes,’ Donna went on. ‘And when we argued, he told me that after tonight he wouldn’t need me or anybody else, and he jumped out and ran off into the rain.’ Donna looked defensive. ‘Look – I did go ba
ck to find him when I heard the storm warnings on the radio, but my car got flooded out and then there was all this to take care of . . .’ She gestured towards the row of rain-lashed cottages.
Part of ‘all this’ chose that very moment to make itself noisily apparent. Donna leaned out from her pedestal to listen as someone called something from an upstairs window.
‘OK, listen, everybody!’ she bellowed through the megaphone. ‘We’ve just had contact on the radio and there’ll be a helicopter to start winching people out in about half an hour.’ She lowered her megaphone to glare at Ryan and Chelle again. ‘Both of you, to the Rectory. Right now!’ Obediently they started to swim in the direction of her pointing finger.
Donna had clearly thought she was wishing for true love. In fact she had wanted . . . what? Wanted miserable, the Well Spirit had said once. Perhaps Donna, who seemed to hate everybody, really only hated herself. She could never let herself be popular or loved because she was unable to believe that she could be or deserved to be. She had to test it all the time to reassure herself, the way she had tested her power at the primary school until everybody hated her. Well, thought Ryan, if she wanted to be miserable, then that explains why she chose Mr Punzell. In fact, it looked as if what Donna had really needed all the time to bring her into her own wasn’t wishes granted, but a full-blown disaster.
‘I wish we could go to the Rectory,’ Chelle whispered under her breath.
‘So do I,’ Ryan murmured. ‘Hot chocolate . . .’
‘And big fluffy vicar towels,’ said Chelle with feeling. ‘Only . . . we’ve got to find Josh, haven’t we? And besides . . . I don’t think they’d let us go to the Rectory, would they?’
Ryan cast a glance at the seven little wakes behind them, arranged in a goose-convoy ‘V’. The trolleys were still almost entirely submerged, but they had risen just enough that their weed-trailed orange handles grazed the surface.
‘No,’ said Ryan quietly, ‘I don’t think they would. I think she’s sent for us.’
28
Mother Leathertongue
‘All right. We’ll come.’
The trolley formation broke apart, and the two largest approached and submerged, coming up under Ryan and Chelle so that they were encaged but lifted out of the flood. They released their rafts and let them tumble away. Ryan’s sleeves and trouser legs were waterfalls. The trolleys began to move forward in a lumpish, lolloping motion, like coin-powered toddler horses.
Out across the fields which were now a lake broken only by an occasional solitary tree. Past a flotsam signpost that told them that Whelmford was below them and Crook’s Baddock was in the sky. The trolleys all caught their wheels in a tall hedge lurking just below the surface and shook the children sick as they tugged themselves free.
To Ryan’s quiet terror, they were carried beneath a stalking parade of pylons. But somehow the sheer helplessness of his situation numbed his fear. If he was meant to be killed by a great electric arc, there was nothing he could do about it. But no, it seemed that this was not their immediate destiny.
A wide raft of greenery skimmed towards them over the flood. They reached its edge and found themselves gliding single file into waterlogged woodlands, the ripples of their passing licking at the trunks of the trees. The birds had abandoned them, and instead the boughs were full of trolleys, some antlered with broken branches, some swaying excitably on their perches. The briars bowed under blackberries the size of footballs.
‘Where are we?’ Chelle hissed as the pace of their convoy slowed.
‘Magwhite,’ Ryan whispered, watching the liquid moss seething on the tree bark. ‘Dream Magwhite. The real Magwhite.’
The waters grew shallower, and the trolley steeds lurched and tangled in brambles. A minute later the ground pushed up through the water, and the little swivel wheels were scooping up great curls of mud and leaf mulch.
‘Whoa! Um . . . thank you, we’ll walk from here.’ Their mounts halted, and Ryan and Chelle scrambled out, Chelle pausing to pat hesitantly at hers and stroke its sodden mane of long grasses. As they climbed the slope that led to the well Ryan could feel his heart banging so hard that it made his vision jump.
Ahead of them, blotted posters in plastic envelopes flitted shyly from tree to tree, then fluttered down to perch on the Well Spirit’s throne of roots and litter. The scene seemed deserted at first, but as they drew close Ryan noticed that there was a figure seated on the grille of the well itself, head bowed.
‘Is that . . . ?’ began Chelle.
The figure wore a long mustard-coloured coat and black patent shoes. Its thin grey hair did not waft, but straggled over its scalp so that every bulge of the skull was visible. The apparition looked up sharply at Chelle’s whispered question, and showed them the narrow, sallow features of Miss Gossamer.
For a moment something melted in Ryan’s brain, and Miss Gossamer and the Well Spirit danced out of the dark corners of his imagination to become one nightmare shape, but then he recovered his senses.
‘Miss Gossamer . . . what are you doing here?’ Did she even see where she was, or hear the cricketing of the Coke cans that twisted their metal in warning? Did she think she was sitting on a muddy slope between an ordinary car park and canal? Or had she lost her grip on the ordinary a long time before?
‘He’s never coming back.’ Her voice was a creak. ‘It’s too late. He can’t come back.’ She started to laugh in a way that reminded Ryan of the broken sounds on Carrie’s answering machine. He suddenly realized that in her hand she was holding a Swiss Army knife with the screwdriver fitting extended. It looked a lot like Josh’s knife.
‘Josh . . .’ Ryan choked on the word.
‘I followed them in my car,’ continued Miss Gossamer, ‘and when he got out, so did I. He ran off ahead, but I knew where he was going. I came here and there he was, kneeling by the well, talking to it, loosening the screws. He kept calling it ‘My Lady’. He said that since the only way she could get her power back immediately was to grant a big wish quickly, he’d give her one that was easy to grant. I heard him do it. I heard him pledge himself to the demon of the well in exchange for becoming her ‘Chosen One’. He said he wanted every power she could give him. And then he climbed down the well, and I knew I had to be fast . . .’
‘Oh no,’ breathed Chelle. ‘Oh nonononono . . .’ Her eyes were fixed on the grille that capped the well and the brown waters licking against it.
‘He never heard me put the grille back, the rain was too loud. When the waters started rising, then I heard him trying to climb out. But I sat on the grille to keep it down, and spread out my coat so it would be too dark for him to find handholds, and he never made it to the top . . .’
Ryan’s imagination was assaulted by the thought of beating against a grille while air tried to burst from his lungs and escaped from his nose.
‘Miss Gossamer, Miss Gossamer, you can’t do this, you’ve got to let us take up the grille and see if he’s all right.’ Chelle’s voice had become almost strident with desperation.
‘It’s too late, he’s not coming back.’
Ryan had never realized that triumph could sound so much like despair.
‘He’s down forever in the cold, dark water, where they sent my beautiful girl.’
‘But Josh didn’t kill your little girl!’ Even the rain hushed for an instant after Ryan’s words. ‘It was somebody else a long time ago, and they’re dead. They all went mad and died and their spirits are still trapped and probably will be forever. I mean, how much revenge is enough? Josh didn’t kill your baby, and he’s not a demon, and he’s not a witchy man, and he’s not got the answer to everything, he’s just Josh . . . and he’s a kid, OK? There’s a kid down there, and maybe he’s still alive but drowning . . .’ Maybe we could jump on her and wrestle her off the grille, try to get past the screwdriver she’s holding towards us . . . ‘I mean . . . you already know what his parents would feel . . .’
Miss Gossamer suddenly screamed and sta
rted tearing the buttons from her coat, the locket from her throat, and rings from her ears.
‘Don’t pretend that you know! You don’t know! Nobody pitied my little girl as she sank into the mud without a christening. Do you want to grant a wish? Here!’ She dashed the earrings and buttons down upon the grille, so that they bounced and vanished between the spokes. ‘Do you know what I wished? I wished him to the hell where they sent my little girl. He’s there with her now, forever . . .’
‘Are you sure that’s what you wished?’ Ryan asked gently.
Twenty yards away, the wind stirred the leaves into a spiral, into a column, into the likeness of a figure. It was a little shorter than Ryan, with a bird’s egg freckled pallor, rosehip-coloured hair and grass-green satin shoes. A sunbeam smile, a turned-up nose, a dress chequered in shades of dusk and daylight. Miss Gossamer gave a croak and ran to gather the girl-shape in her arms. It collapsed in her embrace, subsiding into a scatter of leavings and litter. Further up the path, the haunting little figure formed and beckoned once more, and again Miss Gossamer scrambled towards her, only to see her tumble to nothing again.
Whatever she claimed, in her unknown heart Miss Gossamer had wished for the return of her child. Not the real baby, but her ‘beautiful girl’, the daughter-granddaughter that had haunted her imagination. The little girl had never been real, and there was nothing to hold her in one piece each time Miss Gossamer got close to her, so the old woman zigzagged wailing through the wood after the elusive phantom until both were lost to sight.
‘Quick!’ Ryan scuffled in the mulch for the knife Miss Gossamer had dropped and Chelle cleared the leaves away from the grille’s screws.
‘He’s been down there for ages, Ryan, he’s been there since before the rain started so that means he’s dead, doesn’t it, doesn’t it! Unless there was another way out of there, like an underground sewer . . .’