Hexwood. Diana Wynne Jones

words in a strange language.

      It had seen her. It was too much. It spoke. Ann ran. She scrambled into a turn and ran, and her hurtling trainers slipped beneath her. She was down on the moss of the path, hardly aware of the sharp stone that met her knee, up again in the same breath, and running as fast as her legs could take her, away down the path. A corpse that walked, looked, spoke. A vampire in a lead chest – a radioactive vampire! She knew it was coming after her. Fool to keep to the path! She veered up the bank and ran on, crunching and galloping on squashy lichen, leaping among brambles, tearing through strident green thickets, with dead branches cracking and exploding under her feet. Her breath screamed. Her chest ached. She was ill. Fool. She was making so much noise. It could follow her just by listening.

      “What shall I do – what shall I do?” she whimpered as she ran.

      Her legs were giving way. After all that time in bed she was almost as weak as the vampire-thing. Her left knee hurt like crazy. She glanced down as she crashed through some flat brown briars to see bright red blood streaming down her shin and into her sock. There was blood in the brambles she stood in. It could track her by smell too.

      “What shall I do?”

      The sensible thing was to climb a tree.

      “Oh, I couldn’t!” Ann gasped.

      The creature croaked again, somewhere quite near.

      Ann found strength she did not know she had. It sent her to the nearest climbable tree and swarming up it like a mad girl. Bark bit the insides of her legs. Her fingers scraped and clawed, breaking most of the fingernails she had been so proud of. She heard her nice anorak tear. But still she climbed, until she was able to thrust her head through a bush of smaller branches and scramble astride a strong bough, safe and high, with her back against the trunk and her hair raked into hanks across her face.

      If it comes up, I can kick it down! she thought, and leant back with her eyes shut.

      It was croaking somewhere below, even nearer, to her right.

      Ann’s eyes sprang open. She stared down in weak horror at the path and the chest embedded in the bank beyond it. The lid had shut again. But the creature was still outside it, standing in the path almost below her, staring down at the scarlet splatter of blood Ann’s knee had made when she fell on the stone. She had run in a circle like a panicked animal.

      Don’t look up! Don’t look up! she prayed, and kept very still.

      It did not look up. It was busy examining its taloned hands, then putting those hands up to feel the frayed bush of its hair and beard. Ann got the feeling it was very, very puzzled. She watched it take hold of the shreds of cloth wrapped round its skinny hips and pull off a piece to look at. It shook its head. Then, in a mad, precise way, it laid the strip of rag across its left shoulder and croaked out some more words. This time, the sound was less of a croak and more like a voice.

      Then – despite all the rest, Ann still had trouble believing her eyes – the creature grew itself clothes. The lower rags went expanding downwards in two khaki waterfalls of thick cloth, to make narrow leggings and then brown supple-looking boots. At the same time the strip of rag on the corpse’s shoulder was chasing downwards too, tumbling and spreading into a calf-length robe-thing, wide and pleated, the colour of camelhair. Ann’s lips parted almost in an exclamation as she saw the colour. She watched, then, almost as if she expected it, the long hair and beard turn the same camelhair colour and shrink away. The beard shrank right away into the man’s chin, leaving his face more skull-shaped than ever, but the hair halted just below his ears. He completed himself by strapping a broad belt round his waist – it had a knife and a pouch attached to it – and slinging a sort of rolled blanket across his left shoulder, where he carefully fastened it with straps. After that, he gave a mutter of satisfaction and went to the edge of the path, where he drew the knife and cut himself a stout stick from the tree nearest the leaden chest.

      Even before he moved, Ann was nearly sure who he was. The long strolling strides with which he walked across the path made her quite certain. He was the tallest of the three men who had come in that car, the one who had made the gate open, the one in the odd camelhair coat. He was still wearing that coat, after a fashion, she thought, except he had made it into a robe.

      He came back to the path, carrying the stick. It was no longer a stick, but a staff, old and polished and carved with curious signs. He looked up at Ann and croaked out a remark at her.

      She recoiled against the tree trunk. Oh my God! He knew I was there all along! And now she was the indecent one. Comes of climbing trees in a tight skirt. The skirt was rolled up round her waist. He must be looking straight up at her pants. And her long, helpless legs dangling down on either side of the branch.

      The strange man below coughed, displeased with his voice, still staring up at Ann. His eyes were light, inside deep hollows. His eyebrows met over his nose, in one eyebrow shaped like a hawk flying. He was a weird-looking man, even if you met him in the ordinary way, walking down the street. You’d think, Ann thought, you’d run into the Grim Reaper.

      “I’m sorry,” she said, high-voiced with fear. “I – I can’t understand a word you’re saying – and I don’t want to.”

      He looked startled. He thought. Gave another cough. “I apologise,” he said. “I was using the wrong language. What I said was, I’ve no intention of hurting you. Won’t you come down?”

      They all say that! Mum’s warning voice said in Ann’s head. “No, I won’t,” Ann said. “And if you try to climb up I shall kick you.” And she wondered frantically, How do I get out of this? I can’t sit up here all day!

      “Well, do you mind if I ask you a few questions?” asked the man. As Ann drew breath to say that she did mind, very much, he added quickly, “I’ve never been so puzzled in my life. What is this place?”

      Now he was getting used to talking, he had quite a pleasant deep voice, with a slight foreign accent. Swedish? Ann wondered. And he did have every reason to be puzzled. There seemed no harm in telling him what little she knew. “What do you want to ask?” she said cautiously.

      He cleared his throat again. “Can you tell me where we are? Where this is?” He gestured round at the green distances of the wood.

      “Well,” Ann said, “it ought to be the wood just beside Hexwood Farm, but it – seems to have gone bigger.” As he seemed quite bewildered by this, she added, “But it’s no use asking me why it’s bigger. I can’t understand it either.”

      The man clicked his tongue and stared up at her impatiently. “I know about that. I could feel I was working with a field just now. Something near by is creating a whole set of paratypical extensions—”

      “You what?” said Ann.

      “You’d probably call it,” he said thoughtfully, “casting a spell.”

      “I would not!” Ann said indignantly. She might look absurd and indecent sitting dangling in this tree, but that didn’t mean she was a moron! “I’m far too old to think anything so silly.”

      “Apologies,” he said. “Then perhaps the best way to explain it is as quite a large hemisphere of a certain kind of force that has power to change reality. Does that help you?”

      “Sort of” Ann admitted.

      “Good,” he said. “Now please explain where and what is Hexwood Farm.”

      “It’s the old farm on our housing estate,” Ann said. He looked bewildered again. The one eyebrow gathered in over his nose, and he leant on his staff to stare about him. Ann thought he seemed wobbly and ill. Not surprising. “It’s not a farm any more, just a house,” she explained. “About forty miles from London.” He shook his head helplessly. “In England, Europe, Earth, the solar system, the universe. You must know!” Ann said irritably. “You came here in a car this morning. I saw you – going