Doctor Illuminatus (11 page)

“Yes,” Pip agreed, then she paused. “How? We’ve never contacted him. He’s always got in touch with us.”

“Knock on the paneling,” Tim suggested, and he knelt by his sister’s bed, tapping very gently on the wood. He hoped it might echo, that somehow the tunnel was there after all, not just the lath-and-plaster wall. His knock, however, was not met with any resonance. He tried again. In vain.

“Maybe we could go out to the coach house,” Pip suggested, regretting it the moment the words were out of her mouth. The last thing she wanted to do was leave the security of the house.

“No point,” said Tim, without admitting how he knew. “If he isn’t here, he isn’t going to be there. Maybe,” he added, “the light’s his.”

They heard a soft footstep outside Pip’s door. A cat’s paw would not have made such a faint sound. A floor-board creaked.

“Tim ... ,” Pip whispered. She reached for Tim’s hand and gripped it so tightly his fingers hurt.

There was another step. Someone was making their way along the corridor on tiptoe. Or something.

“What do we do?” Pip mumbled, her mouth going dry.

Tim shrugged and looked around the room. Against the wall was Pip’s tennis racket. He removed his hand from hers and, picking it up, positioned himself beside the door. It was not, he admitted to himself, much of a weapon. His bat would have been more effective but that was in the wardrobe in his room.

The steps halted outside the door. There was a snuffling sound, as if a dog were running its nose along the bottom of the door. A scratching at the door was followed by the handle beginning to turn. Pip hid behind her bed. She wanted to scream but, instead, pressed her hands over her ears as if not hearing what was outside would somehow cause it not to exist.

Raising the racket over his head, Tim held his breath. The door opened. Four fingers covered in fur, like those of a bizarre ape, the nails small, the skin wrinkled and black with the ends blunt and grimy, appeared round the edge. Tim wondered if he should smash the racket down now or wait a moment until he saw the creature’s head.

“Pip,” came a barely audible but gruff voice. “Tim.” As he looked, Tim saw the fingers beginning to lose their hair, the black skin turning ashen.

“Pip, Tim. Are you there?” The voice was marginally less gruff. “It is I.”

Tim lowered the racket. Sebastian entered the room. His hands, and everything else about him, were quite normal.

“Your hands . . . .” Tim began, then he realized. “Were you shape-shifting?”

Sebastian smiled and said, “I am sorry, Tim. What you saw was what you did not want to see.”

“Like, what?” Tim exclaimed.

“To put it another way,” Sebastian added, “what you saw was what you were afraid to see. I regret that I may have influenced your imagination through the door.”

“You mean, hypnotized us?” Tim suggested. Sebastian answered, “In a manner of speaking,” and nodded in the direction of the window. “You too have espied the light, have you not?”

“Yes,” Tim replied.

Going to the other side of Pip’s bed, where she was still hunched up, her hands to her ears and her eyes screwed shut, Tim touched her on the shoulder. She jumped as if someone had just shocked her.

“It’s okay. It’s Sebastian.”

Pip got up, feeling a little sheepish.

“Be not ashamed,” Sebastian said. “Fear comes to us all and we each deal with it in our own way.” He parted the curtains and glanced out. “The light remains and I must go forth to discover its cause.”

“We’ll come too,” Pip announced, hoping to regain some of her self-esteem and vowing never again to hide in the face of whatever might come.

Five minutes later, the house alarm system deactivated, they crept out of the kitchen door and, heading across to the coach house, paused before setting off across the field.

“Stay close,” Sebastian ordered unnecessarily. “If we are as one, de Loudéac will think twice before acting upon us.”

As they stepped around the corner of the coach house, the wind struck them hard, momentarily stealing their breath away. The rain pelted their faces. Despite wearing fleeces with the necks buttoned tight, the rain seeped inside quickly, running down their backs and chilling them. The tossing grass thrashed their legs. In less than thirty meters, their jeans were soaked through, their feet sodden in their sneakers.

Halfway to the knoll, the field became waterlogged. Although the river had not burst its banks, the water table had risen, turning the field into a temporary grassy swamp. Their progress was heavy going; the only light they had to guide themselves by was that in the copse and the faint glow reflecting off the clouds from Brampton, a few miles away.

At the strand of barbed wire, Sebastian stopped and said, “Whatever you see, or hear, remember it is but an image in your head. No harm can befall you for you will be within the protection of the Garden of Eden.” With that, he held up the wire and stepped beneath it.

Pip followed, Tim taking up the rear. Very cautiously, they moved in single file through the trees. The wind blew hard in the boughs above them, tossing branches about and shedding small twigs that fell upon them as they advanced through the covert. Reaching the clearing, the pathways that Pip had cleared and trimmed stood out before them. In the very center, hanging from a Y-shaped staff stuck in the earth, was an ancient cast-iron lantern. The flame within it glowed a delicate green, flickering as the wind licked at the lamp’s chimney.

“Why it is green, not orange?” Pip whispered.

“De Loudéac has added powdered antimony to the oil,” Sebastian explained, keeping his voice low.

“What is antimony?” Tim asked softly.

“It is a metal, ruled by fire, which an alchemist called Basil Valentine discovered would act against men of holy inclination. Hence its name, for antimony derives from the Latin, meaning
against a monk
. Mixing it with the lamp oil makes for a devilish light.”

With that, Sebastian stepped into the clearing, raising his arms as a priest might before an altar.

“In nomine patris omnipotentis, domine sancta, eterne deus, tu fecisti coelum et terram,”
he intoned, walking towards the lamp,
“discedo, defluo, abeo...”

For a moment, nothing happened; then, from the far side of the clearing, there rose a black shadow darker than the night. It swept towards Sebastian, swirling above him like a miniature tornado. The smell of burning hair filled the wind. Pip felt it snatching at her throat. Tim, at her side, coughed loudly.

Sebastian did not move. He stood quite still with his arms raised. The narrow base of the black tornado sought him out, pulling at his clothes, which whipped about him.

“We’ve got to do something!” Pip exclaimed, choking on the stench.

Sebastian was being lifted from the ground, his feet a good few centimeters above the grass. He was beginning to spin with the force of the whirlwind.

Side by side, Pip and Tim ran forward, yelling at the tops of their voices. The tornado seemed to waver. The wide top of its funnel bent towards them as a face might upon suddenly seeing them. For a few seconds, it moved in their direction, carrying Sebastian with it. A meter from them, it halted and, with a piercing whistle, it rose rapidly into the air, dissipating as it hit the blast of the storm blowing over the treetops.

“I am indebted to you,” Sebastian said, dizzy from being spun round and trying to stand upright. “De Loudéac would not have won this petty joust, but that was not his intention. You might say he was flexing his muscles as best he could, to deter me from my mission.”

“He might have killed you,” Pip said, putting her hand on Sebastian’s shoulder to steady him.

“No,” Sebastian replied. “He could lift me no higher.”

“I thought he couldn’t come into this wood,” Tim stated.

“He may enter,” Sebastian replied, “as he did when Pip was tending the plants, yet he may do little harm here. His powers are much reduced within the precinct of the wood.”

“What was he doing here?” Pip pondered aloud. Sebastian pointed to the figwort growing close by and said, “Look, you can see where I picked a flower head when we were in this place together. And here, where I took a leaf of valerian. See how this other leaf has been torn? De Loudéac was in this place, seeking to copy my
sauvegarde
.”

“What does he want to do that for?” Tim asked. “If he could copy it,” Sebastian said, “he could the better counteract my magic and attack me.” At that point, he laughed. “Yet he is confused. He came here to study which plants I had used but you, Pip, have been here since with your pruning implements. Now, he cannot tell which plants I cut and which you.”

He walked across to the lantern, opening it. The wind extinguished the flame immediately. No sooner was it out than both the lantern and the staff melted into thin air.

“We must be gone,” Sebastian announced, “and you must return home, for the dampness will give you the ague unless you warm yourselves.”

“You’ll catch cold as well,” Pip said, but Sebastian seemed not to hear her and started striding out of the wood.

Pip and Tim followed him across the field. At the coach house, Sebastian waved to them and entered the building as they returned to the main house. They let themselves in and, resetting the alarm, silently went up to their rooms.

When Tim reached his bedroom, he found his Delta Airlines flight to Rome within ten minutes of landing but three hundred miles off course. He hit the Esc key and, undressing, started to towel himself dry.

Why play at being an airline pilot, he thought, when he was living in a real-life equivalent of
Tomb Raider
?

Five

The Shout

T
he storm had gone by dawn, leaving the countryside bathed in brilliant summer sunlight. Mrs. Ledger announced at breakfast that she was going to spend the morning investigating Brampton and, as she put it, get her bearings on the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker.

“Have a good time,” Tim said, tipping his cereal bowl to get the last of the milk and muesli onto his spoon.

“I’m sure we will,” his mother responded.

It was a moment before Tim caught the significance of the reply.

“We?”

“Yes, ‘we,’ ” said his mother. “You and Pip are coming too. We have to register with the doctor and the dentist.”

And so, just after nine o’clock, they left Rawne Barton in Mrs. Ledger’s car for the nearby town.

“How do you like living here?” their mother asked as she negotiated the narrow country lanes, having to pull in to let first a tractor, then a milk-collecting truck squeeze past.

“It’s cool,” said Tim, noncommittally.

Both he and Pip knew that when their mother started asking questions like that out of the blue, she was not just making conversation, but was on a mission of discovery.

“The house is wonderful,” Pip added.

“Yes, isn’t it?” Mrs. Ledger replied. “Just think of all that has gone on in our own home, right back down through history.”

And you don’t know the half of it, thought Tim. “And the countryside is beautiful,” Pip remarked. “It certainly is. When I was a little girl, you used to still see fields of wildflowers, but then they died out. Farming methods changed. Nowadays, you only see wildflowers in National Trust places and SSSIs. But our back field, behind the coach house — that’s a wonder to behold.”

“What’s an SSSI?” Tim asked, hoping to take some control of this seemingly innocuous conversation.

“A site of special scientific interest,” his mother told him. “A government classification for land that cannot be disturbed — dug up, plowed, built upon, sprayed with chemicals.”

Halting at a T-junction, Mrs. Ledger waited for a delivery van to pass. The signpost indicated Brampton to the left and Stockwold to the right. She turned left.

“Your friend Sebastian seems a pleasant boy,” she remarked as the car accelerated.

So, Tim thought, that was where this camouflaged interrogation was heading.

“Yes,” Pip said, exchanging a glance with her brother. “He’s really nice. Can we have him to stay over one night?”

Sharp move, Tim considered. His sister was no fool. Get their mother on the back foot . . .

“Of course,” Mrs. Ledger said. “Do you ...?” “He is going to go to Bourne End Comprehensive too,” Pip went on, justifying the lie: after all, if Sebastian were to attend any school, that would probably be the one — and he had once gone to a local school. “He’ll be in the same year as us but I don’t know what class.”

“I think he’s good at science,” Tim chipped in, “so he might be in a top set.”

“I hope you two will be as well,” their mother retorted. “Is he ...?”

“And he’s very good at history,” Pip continued. “He knows all about the history of our house, when it was built and everything.”

“I’m going fishing again this afternoon,” Tim announced, changing the subject to get it away from Sebastian before his mother could respond. “There’s a really neat stretch where the trees overhang the water.”

They reached the outskirts of Brampton. The sides of the road were so jammed with parked cars, passing traffic was at a crawl. There was a line ten cars long to get into the town parking lot.

“It’s very busy!” Mrs. Ledger exclaimed, with more than a hint of concern in her words. “I thought this would be a sleepy little place.”

Tim winked at Pip. She grinned back. Their mother, who always got flustered when driving in traffic, would not be of a mind now to delve further into the mystery of Sebastian.

As they turned into the high street, the reason for the traffic was explained. It was market day. The street was lined with stalls on the pavements selling anything from cheap clothing to fresh fish, fruit and vegetables, from locally made farmhouse cheeses and second-hand books to a wide variety of bread baked with organic flour. What was throughout the rest of the week a quiet little country town was now a bustling hive of activity: farmers meeting to discuss agricultural matters, housewives chattering as they shopped, stallholders calling out their wares, the occasional tourist wandering about photographing what was to them an old English scene, unchanged for eons.