The Book of Magic: Part 2. Группа авторов

water meadows, but the path was safe enough. Fire and water, I thought. Water and fire. By the time I reached the house, the sky was stormy, with a single bar of light falling in the direction of the Severn estuary. The house itself, with its long drive, was quiet; it seemed to have retreated in on itself, huddling like an animal made of red Tudor brick. The kitchen garden was tidy and bare; the orchard empty of the crop of white apple sacks that had marked it throughout the autumn. There was a drift of smoke from the chimneys, but apart from that and the bar of light, the day was sodden, the color of lead. No more fire.

      Alys, tall and rangy in jeans, was preparing Sunday lunch.

      “Hello, dad! How was the service?”

      “Went on a bit.” I could have told her about the flickering light in the churchyard, but something held me back. Pretend we’re a normal family, even if we know different.

      “Oh, dear. I thought you were later than usual. Hope the church wasn’t too cold.” She bent over the Aga, fiddling with something on the stovetop.

      “How was your morning? Can I do anything?”

      “Quiet. And no, I don’t think you can. Beatrice has pinched the Telegraph crossword, by the way.”

      I laughed. “It’s too easy for me on a Sunday.”

      “Tell her that. She’ll be annoyed.”

      Leaving her in the kitchen, I hung up my coat, changed my shoes, and wandered off in the direction of my study. As I climbed the stairs I could hear, muted, the voices of my granddaughters from the sitting room, then laughter. The study is at the end of a long upstairs passage, at a sort of T-junction that branches corridors in both directions, the floor uneven from several hundred years of use and subsidence. I prefer to be higher up—perhaps it’s my profession, but I like to be able to see clearly, over the land and the sky.

      But as I approached the study door, someone walked rapidly and smoothly across the opening, heading down the corridor and out of sight. I caught a glimpse of a woman in a dark green dress, very long and full-skirted like an Elizabethan gown. She had a little ruff, too, which sparkled like her hair, and she was carrying a long frond of some kind of plant.

      For a moment, I thought she was one of the girls, dressed up, but she was too tall—at least six foot, my own height. Heels?

      “Who’s that?” I called, but there was no reply. I trotted to the end of the corridor and looked down it. No one was there.

      Well, this house is full of ghosts. We do see them, you know. Not just in the mind’s eye, a fancy of the imagination, but really and truly present, just as you yourself might stand before me. I hadn’t seen this one before, but that didn’t mean that no one else had. We’ve all got our own special spirits, the ones only particular people see, and then there are the communal ones. The child by the window, for instance: we’ve all seen him in his Kate Greenaway velvet suit, his sorrowful face, like something out of a particularly emetic Victorian painting. No idea who he is. Alys and I see a doddery gardener in eighteenth-century clothes, and I think Bea might have done as well. Stella and Serena, the middle girls, talk about a pair of ghostly gazehounds, but they’re going through an animal-mad phase, so perhaps they’re tuned in to spectral beasts. Luna’s a bit too little to say for sure: hard to know if she’s seeing people or imagining them.

      So a lady on the landing didn’t bother me a great deal. I mentioned her at lunch.

      “No, not a clue who she might be,” Alys said, passing roast potatoes. “Elizabethan? Well, the house is old enough.”

      “She sounds pretty,” said Serena, who was into fashion. “What was the gown made of? Silk, or velvet?”

      “I don’t know. I only got a glimpse.”

      “I hope she comes back. She sounds rather nice.”

      “Granddad?” This was Stella. “Never mind the lady. Can we see the comet yet?”

      Stella had asked this once a day since late November, rather as another child might ask for Christmas. “I’ve told you, Stella. It’s nearly here. Another couple of days and it should be visible.” I said it kindly; I could understand her excitement. The name of the comet was Akiyama-Maki, and it was discovered in 1964 by a pair of Japanese astronomers. It is a Great Comet, a popular name for a very bright visitor to the skies, and it is thought to be one of the Kreutz sungrazers, the remnants of a big comet that broke up in the 1100s. Astronomy was still my job, and I’d been looking forward to this winter visitor for some months—there was something about a comet, a kind of celestial magic all of its own, which had fascinated me ever since I was a boy. So I could see why Stella kept asking, even though the comet wasn’t the first thing on my mind. Other visitations were taking precedence.

      “So, we’ll see it soon?” Stella pestered.

      “Yes. Not long now.”

      After dinner we sank into a Sabbath somnolence with the Sunday papers and early nights all around; the girls were back to school the following morning. I wanted to listen to a radio play, which ended about ten; switching it off along with the light, I fell asleep quickly. When I awoke, I was disoriented. It was very dark. I’d left the curtains open, but there was nothing visible beyond the window: no stars, no moon, not even the lights of the farms scattered across the valley. It was that which alerted me to the fact that something was awry with the world. There is always a light somewhere, a small orange token of human life.

      I clambered out of bed and went to the window, stood staring out. The darkness was all encompassing. We’re not that close to any big cities, but there’s a faint glow where Bristol lies to the north; that wasn’t visible, either. I thought it might be fog—we’re prone to mist in these parts, especially in winter—so I pushed the window up to see. A thin, curling tendril of darkness made its way into the room, as if questing. I shut the window damn quick after that. And then I heard it again.

       Help him.

      After a while, in magic, the messages start to stack up; you’d have to be really clueless to ignore them. The flame, the woman, the dark.

      “All right,” I said aloud. “All right.”

      It’s hard to feel heroic in a dressing gown and slippers, but the voice was whispering, insistent. I went through the door, and the house had changed. Instead of the carpeted, picture-lined corridor, there was a passage of stone, a rough, porous substance like pumice. I touched it and snatched my hand away; it burned with cold. I took a few experimental steps. My feet, in their old man’s slippers, did not freeze, but the air around me felt constricted, as if there wasn’t enough of it. At the end of the passage, encased in rock, stood my study door. I reached it and pushed it open.

      Things happen that should make you die. There was a veil of white fire. I fell back, shielding my eyes. The fire flared and vanished. The door reached onto open space. Seizing the doorframe, I tottered on the edge of a black void, standing now on curving ice. It was moving, almost too fast for me to take it in. Stars whisked by, and I looked up to see a streaming cloud, the colors of an unnatural fire.

       Help him!

      A tiny voice, imperious, compelling.

      “What the hell are you?”

       He is dreaming! Wake him!

      The colors were coalescing. As I stared, a figure started to form, made out of cascading light. I started shaking. I knew that I was in the presence of death, not the normal end to my life, which, at seventy, could not be that far away, but something which strove to wipe me out, as one might remove a speck of dust from a sheet of glass. It reached out a hand, long finger and thumb ready to pinch, and I felt it touch the edge of my soul, which shriveled.

      Then fear overcame me and I slammed the door shut, knees trembling. It took all my strength, as though a vacuum were sucking the door open.

      “Granddad? Are you all right?” Serena was standing on the landing. The pictures were back on the cream-papered walls;