The White Wolf's Son (3 page)

As usual, I took the cell phone. I had instructions to phone her if I needed her or got into any sort of trouble. “Mr. H can
be down there in a minute or two,” she assured
me as she saw me off. “It doesn’t matter how silly or trivial a feeling you get; just phone up. He’ll know what to do. And
if there’s nowt to do, so much the better. He needs to be kept busy.”

Mr. Hawthornthwaite, an amiable man with a shock of snow-white hair and with startling blue eyes in ruddy features, was up
in the Tower mending a pipe and could be heard cursing mildly from time to time as metal clanged against metal.

I put one of Mum’s old Indian bags over my shoulder. Its tassels hung down almost to the ground, but it was the best thing
I had to carry my bits and pieces in, including the phone. On the way to the river I spent some while playing around in a
ruined building we called the Castle. It was actually part of an old quarry, with a loading platform and rail tracks still
running into it where the First World War graphite trucks used to unload, transferring the stuff to the steam train which
ran along a narrow-gauge line to Ingleton Station. The remains of the graphite mill was on the other side of the village.
It had blown up in 1917. Some thought it was the work of German saboteurs, but my dad said it was probably due to someone’s
neglect.

Rural Yorkshire has dozens of similar abandoned workings and buildings. There was still an active gravel quarry up the road
from us. Occasionally we could hear them dynamiting. Their explosives were why we were never allowed to go into any local
caves. A man and his two children had been trapped in White Scar Cave some years ago, hiding from a bull, and only luck had
saved them. The quarrymen were not the only ones to use explosives. Even today you would hear a thump and the house would
shake, usually because the least responsible
cavers, the hooligans of the caving world, were dynamiting new routes into the systems below!

I had quite a decent game running in the Castle, but by about three o’clock in the afternoon I had begun to wonder about going
back for tea or continuing down to the river. Then I heard a sharp crack from the direction of the woods above and assumed
that the quarry was blasting, though I hadn’t noticed the usual warning siren. When there were no further explosions, I swung
my feet from the platform and continued on down the grassy bank from the dirt path to the river. Taking off my shoes on the
bank, I waded into the clear water and was soon absorbed in seeking out whatever swam over the pebbles.

I was hoping to find freshwater crayfish, those tiny, almost transparent relatives of the lobster, but the sun on the water
was too bright, and all I found were a few minnows. My cell phone was in a little holder swung across my body, and I thought
I heard it start to ring. False alarm. I was on the point of giving up on the fishing trip when suddenly the phone began to
make a very peculiar noise, almost as if it was warning me that my battery was low. Although I had recharged it while I was
having lunch, I pulled it out and flipped it open, wondering if Mrs. Hawthornthwaite was trying to get in touch with me. She
sometimes rang at teatime if there was something special, like toasted scones or crumpets, which were best eaten hot.

The phone was completely dead. I pressed the recognition button without success. There were no text messages. So I put the
thing away again, thinking, a passing fluke of the hills, and returned my attention to the river until a noise from above
me told me that someone was on the path. I got up in a hurry. This was all a bit spooky.
There he was, a monster of a man, swinging out of the woods: a tall, bulky figure wrapped in a big leather overcoat, his head
shaded by a wide-brimmed felt hat, his eyes hidden by reflecting sunglasses, with a scarf drawn up to his nose, as if it were
winter and he were feeling the cold. Perhaps he was worried about inhaling dust from the quarry’s latest blast.

I must admit I felt a little more vulnerable than usual as the burly man stopped on the path high above me and lifted a gloved
hand in greeting. His accent was thick, deep and vaguely familiar.

“Good afternoon, young lady.”

He was probably trying to sound friendly, but I gave him a cold nod in response. I hated people calling me “young lady.” It
seemed condescending. Perhaps a little ostentatiously I sat down and began buckling the straps of my shoes.

But the man did not walk on. “You live around here, do you?” he asked. There was an edge, an undertone to his voice, that
I really didn’t like.

Again I nodded. I couldn’t see anything of his face at all and began to wonder if he was deliberately hiding it. He reminded
me of the pictures of the Invisible Man I had seen in the Alan Moore comics my brother collected. He hardly seemed any better
tempered than that character. Was that why I was so wary of him?

“Am I on the right path for the village of Ingleton?” he asked.

“You’re on the back road,” I told him. “Keep going and it’ll take you to the middle of the square across from the butcher’s.
The newsagent will be down on the main road to your right.”

He thanked me and began to move on. Then he hesitated.
He turned, fingering the lower part of his face, still covered by the scarf. “Has anyone else come this way recently?”

I shook my head.

“I’m looking for a rather thin, pale gentleman. A foreigner. Likes to wear black. He would have arrived a day or so ago. Mr.
Klosterheim? Might he be staying in these parts?”

“You could ask at the newsagent for the Bridge Hotel,” I told him. “They’ll put you right for where the Bridge is, on the
other side of the viaduct.” There were also a couple of guesthouses closer, but I didn’t feel like offering him too much information.
His had been a very odd question for anyone to ask in Ingleton. I wondered where he could have come from. He wore high, thick,
flat-soled boots of battered leather, reaching to his knee. His trousers were tucked into the boots. He had no haversack,
and he didn’t look like any kind of hiker I’d ever seen. The clothes were old-fashioned without being identifiable with any
historical period. Instinctively I was glad of the distance between us, and intended to keep it. Slowly I finished fastening
my shoes.

He grunted, thought over what I’d said, then began moving. He was soon gone, clumping along the track like a campaigning soldier.
The track was used by everyone local and curved downwards into the village. It was the shortest way and roughly paralleled
the main paved road which passed our house above. For us it could often seem just as quick to go down that back road than
to take the car and try to find a parking space in the village.

The encounter had unsettled me. I was getting flashes of those old, bad dreams. Nothing specific. Not even a tangible image.
It was also possible I had eaten something
which disagreed with me. Standing on the riverbank, I tried my phone again. It still wasn’t working, although now I got a
buzzing, like the sound of distant bees. I decided it was time to go home.

I wasn’t used to feeling the shivers on the sunlit commons of Ingleton during a golden summer afternoon.

I scrambled up the grassy bank, reached the path, then ran up through the green hillocks over the common, past Beesley’s,
until I got to the back gate of our house. Mrs. Hawthornthwaite was hanging white linens up to dry on a line stretched beside
part of our vegetable garden. She insisted it was the best place for laundry, since the linens especially were refreshed by
the growing carrots and brussels sprouts. As a girl she had read the tip in
Woman’s Weekly,
and always applied it. Her whites glittered, reflecting the bright sunshine. Starched or unstarched, they blossomed in the
breeze like the sails of fairy ships.

The main walled garden was to the front of the house, still landscaped much as it had been in the seventeenth century, with
junipers, cedars and poplars surrounding what was mostly smooth lawn arranged in terraces. The lawn was not good for much
except looking at, since there was such a slope on it. When we wanted to play cricket or some other game, we had a flattened
area out of sight behind the row of poplars and willows on the far side of the tiny stream which dropped underground long
before it reached the main river. You could just see down to the back road from there.

I was half-tempted to check if the stranger was still on the path, but he would probably have reached the village by now.
Something about him continued to bother me. His heavy, menacing masculinity had made its way into my head.

“You feeling hungry, dear?” Mrs. Hawthornthwaite was surprised to see me back. She looked at her watch as if wondering why
I would be home so early on such a beautiful sunny day.

“A bit,” I said. “Is Mum home yet?’ I knew the answer.

“Not yet, dear. They were going to wait for the fresh fish to be landed in Morecombe, remember? They might have gone to the
pictures, but there wasn’t much on in Lancaster.” She frowned. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, thanks,” I said. “It’s just that I saw a man on the back road. He scared me a bit.”

She grew alert. “He didn’t—”

“He didn’t do anything except ask me the way to Ingleton and if I knew some foreign visitor,” I told her. “Then he went on
to Ingleton. I suggested he ask about his friend at the Bridge. It’s okay. I just thought I’d come home. For some reason my
phone’s not working.”

She accepted this. Mrs. Hawthornthwaite had a way of trusting our instincts, just as we trusted hers.

I went into the big, warm living room which looked out towards Morecombe. It got the western sun from two sets of windows.
Through them you could see the roofs of the village below. I took the binoculars from the shelf and focused them on the little
bit of the back road that was visible. All I saw was the vicar’s wife, coasting her bike down the track. As usual, Mrs. Handforth
had her big orange cat, Jerico, in the front basket. They both seemed to be enjoying the ride. Nobody else was about. I went
up to my own room, planning to plug the phone in and recharge it, but when I got it out it was working perfectly. I wondered
if the weather had something to do with the problem. Sunspots? I had only the vaguest idea of what sunspots were.

A bit later I had some bread and jam and a glass of milk in the kitchen. Now I was really bored. Mrs. Hawthornthwaite suggested
I find a book and go outside again. I didn’t have a better idea. I took one of my mum’s favorite E. Nesbit books,
The House of Arden,
and went downstairs, out of the front door, through the yard, and crossed the paved road to Storrs Common.

“Watch out for that chap!” she called as I left.

Immediately opposite the house was a leveled spot, originally designed to provide parking space for visitors who planned to
climb the mountain. Now, as I said, they had to park in the village. From that flat area the hill continued to rise up towards
the distant peak of Ingle-borough. We always said living at Tower House developed strong calf muscles if nothing else. You
were either straining to go up or bracing to go down. Whenever we found ourselves on flat ground we walked so rapidly nobody
else could keep up with us.

On the peak of the mountain were the remains of a Celtic hill fort. The story of the fort was that the last of the Iceni had
gone there to make their stand against the Roman invaders. Armed to the teeth behind a heavy wall, they prepared for the attack.
But the Romans had taken one look at them and decided to go round on their way to Lancaster and Carlisle. The Celts were nonplussed.
After about fifty years of living in the wind and cold of the peak, the remains of the Iceni eventually came straggling down
and got jobs on the docks at Lancaster.

I had soon found one of my favorite spots in the common, a dip in the grass where it was impossible to be seen. Here, if it
was windy, you could swiftly find yourself in a complete cone of silence. The common was full of such holes, where the ground
had fallen in over the
cave systems which riddled the entire area. Here and there were deeper, larger holes, where the rock was exposed and which
seemed like the entrances of caves but never really led anywhere.

Once below the level of the ground in the inverted cones, you couldn’t hear a thing. There was no better sense of isolation,
and yet anyone who knew you could easily find you
and
you could be back at home within a few minutes.

With a sense of pleasurable anticipation, I opened the covers of
The House of Arden,
a companion to another favorite,
Harding’s Luck.
It was all about time paradoxes and people meeting themselves. My earlier exertions must have tired me more than I thought,
because I fell asleep in the middle of the first chapter. The next thing I remember is rolling over on my back and blinking
up into the late-afternoon sun. As I yawned I saw some large, round object drifting across the sky, a thin plume of smoke
coming from it, a bit like the vapor trail of a plane.

Waking up rapidly, I recognized the aircraft as a hot-air balloon. A local group of enthusiasts took visitors up over the
Dales during the summer, but they rarely came down this low. Nor, I realized, as the shadow of the basket fell across my hiding
place, were they usually so big or so colorful. Next thing the balloon filled up my entire field of vision, and I could smell
the smoke. The silk of the canopy blazed in the sun. Glittering scarlets, greens and golds dazzled me. From the rigging flew
the cross of St. Andrew, the blue and white Scottish flag. I saw tongues of fire from the brazier in the basket and two very
pale faces staring down at me. Then something whooshed past, and I heard a thump, a yell. As I scrambled
up and out onto the common, there came the roaring sound of a powerful engine in high gear.

On turning, the first object I saw was the big antique convertible. Not the Lexus containing my parents, as I had half hoped,
but a great, dark green monster with massive mudguards and a huge radiator decorated with an ornamental “B,” a single blue-clad
occupant, swinging off the road and onto the flat parking space. The driver’s dark goggles gave him the appearance of a huge,
mad lemur.