Greenwitch (15 page)

Jane took her cocoa and sat beside the window again, warming her fingers on the hot smooth sides of the mug; the room was cold. She looked out of the window, but the reflection of the bedside lamp was in her way. Impulsively she reached out and switched it off, then sat waiting until her eyes grew accustomed to the dim-lit dark.

When at last she could see again, she did not believe what she saw.

From the cottage, high up there on the hillside above the sea, she had a clear view of all the harbour and much of the village. Here and there were pools of yellow light from the lamp-posts: two on the quayside, three across the harbour, up on the road past the Grey House; others, more distant, at points within the
village. But the pools of light were small. All else was darkness. And in the darkness, wherever she looked, Jane could see things moving. At first she could tell herself that she was imagining it, for whenever she saw movement from the corner of an eye and shifted her gaze to stare, it was gone. She could never see it clearly, in direct view. But this did not last for long.

It was changed by a single figure of a man. He came up out of the water at the edge of the harbour, climbing a flight of stairs with a strange gliding motion.

He was dripping wet; his clothes clung to him, his long hair was plastered flat and dark round his face, and as he walked a trail of water dripped all round him and was left like a path. He walked slowly up towards the main street of Trewissick, looking neither to left nor right. When he came to the corner of the little canning factory, whose new extension jutted from the old brick buildings set higgledy-piggledy along the quay, the man in the wet clothes did not slow his pace, nor turn aside. He simply walked through the wall as if it had not been there, emerging in a second or two on the other side. Then he disappeared into the darkness of the main street.

Jane stared into the blackness. She said softly, desperately, “It's not true. It's not true.”

The night was very still. Jane clutched her mug like a talisman of reality; then suddenly jumped so hard that she spilt half the cocoa on the window-sill. She had caught a movement right below her, at the cottage door. Hardly daring to look, she willed her eyes to move downwards, and saw two figures leaving the door. Merriman was unmistakable; though he was hooded and muffled in a long cloak, light from a street-lamp showed Jane the high brow and fierce beak-like nose. But it was a moment before she realised that the second figure, cloaked and hooded in the same way, was Will Stanton. She knew him only
by a trick of his walk, which until then she would not have thought she could recognise.

They walked out unhurried into the middle of the quay. Jane felt a frenzied urge to throw open the window and shriek a warning, to bring them back from unknown perils, but she had known her strange great-uncle too long for that. He had never been like other men; he had always had unpredictable powers, seemed somehow larger than anyone they had ever known. He might even be causing these things.

“He is of the Light,” said Jane aloud to herself, gravely, hearing the true impossible seriousness of the words for the first time.

Then she said thoughtfully, amending it a little, “They are of the Light.” She looked at the smaller hooded figure, discovering in her mind a curious reluctance to believe that there was anything supernatural about Will. His cheerful round face, with the blue-grey eyes and straight mouse-brown hair, had seemed a subtly comforting image from the beginning of this adventure. There would be nothing very comforting about Will if he were like Merriman Lyon.

And then she forgot Merriman, Will and everything around her, for she caught sight of the lights.

They were the lights of a ship, out at sea: bright lights like stars, moving a little as with the waves. They swayed and bobbed out there in the darkness, but they were far too close in. Though they were clearly the lights of a ship of some size, they were close to the rocks of Kemare Head; dreadfully, dangerously close. She heard voices, crying faintly; one of them seemed to call: “Jack Harry's lights!” And forcing her gaze away from the sea she saw that the harbour was suddenly filled with people: fishermen, women, boys, running and waving and pointing out at the sea. They crowded past and around the still figures of Merriman and Will as if neither of them was there.

Then there seemed to Jane to be a strange blurring of the scene, a moment's vagueness; when her eyes cleared, everything was as it had been the moment before, and though she thought that the crowd of villagers seemed somehow different, in clothes and appearance, she could not be certain. Before she could think further, horror seemed to take hold of the crowd. An eerie flickering light grew over the harbour. And suddenly boats set about with great flaming torches were pouring in past the harbour wall, strange broad boats full of oarsmen, some bare-headed with flowing red hair, some wearing stubby helmets crested with a golden boar and jutting down into a fierce iron nose-guard over the face. The boats reached shallow water; the oarsmen leapt from their oars, seized swords and blazing torches and tumbled out, crowding, splashing, rushing ashore with blood-curdling yells that Jane could hear with dreadful clarity even through the closed window. The villagers scattered, screaming, fleeing in all directions; some few fought the invaders off with sticks and knives. But the red-headed men were intent on one thing only; they hewed and hacked with their swords, slicing at any they could catch with more fearsome brutality than Jane had ever believed possible in human beings. Blood ran bright over the quayside, and streamed down into the sea, clouding out dark and murky in the waves.

Jane stumbled to her feet, feeling sick, and turned away.

When she forced herself back to the window, shivering, the screams and yells had died almost to nothing. The last fugitives and howling invaders were racing out along the furthest roads, and an ominous red glow was rising all over the village, all over the sky. Trewissick was burning. Flames licked round the houses on the hill across the harbour, and glared bright red in the windows; in a great whoosh of fire the warehouse at the far side of the harbour burst into flames. Brick and stone seemed incomprehensibly to burn as fiercely as if they were wood.
Fumbling desperately with the catch, Jane flung open the window, and met a great crackling and roaring from the fire and the great billowing clouds of bright-lit smoke. The reflection of the flames danced on the water of the harbour. In her agitation it did not occur to Jane to notice that she did not smell burning, and felt no heat.

Down on the quayside, as if they saw nothing that had happened from the beginning, Will and Merriman stood cloaked and still.

“Gumerry!” Jane shrieked. She could think of nothing but that the fire might reach the cottages. “Gumerry!”

Then the noise outside in the sky was suddenly gone, altogether gone, and she heard her own voice, and found that what she had felt as a high tremendous scream was no more than a whisper. And as she sat watching, disbelieving, the flames died and disappeared, and the red glow in the sky faded away. There was no more blood, nor any trace of it, and everything in the harbour of Trewissick was as if the red-headed, ravening men from the sea had never come.

Somewhere, a dog howled into the night.

Cold, frightened, Jane clutched her dressing-gown tighter around her. She longed to fetch Simon, yet she could not take her eyes from the window. Still unmoving, the dark cloaked figures of Will and Merriman stood over the edge of the sea. They made no sign of having noticed anything that had happened.

There was a glimmering, glittering sheen on the water of the harbour, and Jane saw that over her head the moon had floated free of clouds. A different light brightened the world, cold but gentler: all was black and white and grey. And into it, out of the air, came a voice. It was not a man's voice, but thin and unearthly, chanting one sentence three times on one high heart-catching note.

The hour is come, but not the man.
The hour is come, but not the man.
The hour is come, but not the man.

Jane peered all round the harbour, but could see no-one:

only the two unmoving figures below.

Again the dog howled somewhere unseen. Again she felt a strange buzzing, humming sound in the air, and then she began to hear other voices crying far off in the village.

“The
Lottery!
The
Lottery!”
she thought they cried. Then a man's voice, clearer, “The
Lottery
is taken!”

“Roger Toms! Roger Toms!”

“Hide them!”

“Bring them to the caves!”

“The Revenuers are coming!”

A woman sobbed: “Roger Toms, Roger Toms. . . .”

The harbour filled with people, milling about, anxiously staring out to sea, scurrying to and fro. This time Jane thought she could see faces in the crowd that were like the faces of Trewissick that she knew: Penhallows, Palks, Hoovers, Tregarrens, Thomases, all anxious, all perplexed, casting fearful glances both to land and sea. They seemed to have no real contact with one another; they were like sleep-walkers, sleep-runners, folk desperately turning about in a bad dream. And a great shriek went up from the whole crowd as the last spectre came rushing at them from the sea.

It was not horrible, yet it was more heart-stopping than any. It was a ship: a black ship, single-masted, square-rigged, with a dinghy behind. Silent and unnerving it came gliding into the harbour from the sea, scarcely touching the water, skimming the surface of the waves. It carried no crew. Not a single form moved anywhere on its black decks. And when it reached the land, it did not stop, but went on, sailing silently over harbour and rooftops and hill, away out of Trewissick, to the moors.

And as if the phantom ship had swept away with it all sign of life, the crowd vanished too.

Jane found she was clutching the edge of the window-sill so hard that her fingers hurt. She thought miserably:
this is why he wanted us to sleep. Safe and empty with a blanket over our minds, that's where he wanted us. And instead lam in the middle of more nightmares than I ever imagined could come in one night, and the worst nightmare of all is that I am awake.
. . .

Nervously she peeped round the curtain again. Merriman and Will strode to the centre of the quay. A third figure, cloaked and hooded, joined them from the other side of the harbour. Standing very tall, facing the village and the hills, Merriman raised both arms in the air. And although nothing could be seen, it was as though a great wave of rage came roaring at them, rearing over them, out of the dark haunted village of Trewissick.

Jane could stand no more of it. With an unhappy little moan she dived across the room and into her bed. Tight over her head she pulled the covers, and lay there stuffy and shivering. She was not afraid for her own safety; Merriman had promised her that the cottage was protected, and she believed him. Nor was she afraid for those figures down in the harbour; if they had survived so strange a succession of monstrosities, they could survive anything. In any case nothing could harm Merriman. It was another fear that possessed Jane: a dreadful horror of the unknown, of whatever force was sweeping through land and sea, out there. She wanted only to cower into her own corner, animal-like, away from it, safe.

So this she did, and found, oddly, that because the fear was so large and formless, it proved more ready to go away.

Gradually Jane stopped shivering; grew warm. Her taut limbs relaxed; she began to breathe slowly and deeply. And then she slept.

 

 

DOWN IN THE HARBOUR WITH WILL AND CAPTAIN TOMS AT
either side, shadowy hooded figures, Merriman raised both arms higher in a gesture that was half-appeal, half-command, and he called into the darkness over Trewissick in his deep resonant voice the words of the spell of Mana and the spell of Reck and the spell of Lir.

From all around, rage beat at them like waves, a great gale of unseen force.

“No!” cried the great voice of the Greenwitch, thick with fury. “No! Leave me alone!”