Then Catrin blinked, as if trying to focus on something, the giggling slowly drying up.
And her lips went into a pout.
CATRIN (with a new authority): 'Come here. I'm cold.'
Her voice had changed again. It was affected, now, and petulant. And very English.
CATRIN: 'Come on! For Christ's sake, Guy!'
Guy froze. Larry looked up from his viewfinder, the camera still rolling.
CATRIN: 'We are utterly alone and likely to remain so for
two whole, wonderful days. How long have you got?
Inches and inches, if I'm any judge.'
A profound chill spread through Guy.
CATRIN: 'There's a bathroom directly facing you at the
end of the passage.'
Catrin smiled. Guy thought he was going to scream.
CATRIN: 'Don't be long, will you?'
Guy Morrison strode erratically into shot, dragging a wire, nearly bringing the light down.
'Fucking hell, Guy,' Larry Ember yelled.
Guy ignored him, shook his shoe out of the lamp wire, clutched at Graham Jarrett's cardigan. 'Wake her up. For Christ's sake, man, wake her up!'
CHAPTER X
It was cold in the wood.
Still, he waited.
The words in his pocket, scribbled in the pages of a pocket diary, kept appearing in his mind, as though the lines were rippling across a computer screen.
'Alle the nyte came strange noyses and lytes and the dogges
howled in the yarde and when he vysyted me in myne chamber he
apered lyke a clowde and a yellow cullor in the aire.'
By nine-thirty, the air was singing with tension, as if great pylons were carrying buzzing, sizzling power cables across the darkening sky.
Joe Powys was standing by the new stone in the clearing, around the centre of the wood, a hundred yards or so from Keeper's Cottage.
This stone, narrow, like a sharpened bone, would be on the line from the Tump, through the Court to the church.
At either end of the clearing, undergrowth had been hacked away to form the beginning of a track. Or to reinstate an old one. He knew all about this track now. This was the legendary secret passage between the Court and Crybbe church, along which Sir Michael Wort was said to have escaped.
Like most legends, it was a literal interpretation of something more complex.
Something suggested by the notes he'd found in Keeper's Cottage, which had turned out to be a primitive kind of schoolhouse.
Primitive in that there was no electricity, only candles, and it was not very clean. It smelled of candles and mould… and paint.
There was a mattress and a duvet. Andy (or someone) had slept here. Like a monk might sleep in a little whitewashed cell with no worldly possessions. Or a rich philanthropist might feed the need to live like a squatter for a while to restructure his consciousness.
Or a modern man might have a need, somehow, to shed centuries…
'… tolde me he would come at nyte in hys spyryte, by the olde roade.'
These were Andy's own notes, hand-written; Powys had discovered them in the only modern luxury item to be found in Keeper's Cottage – absurdly, a black leather Filofax.
The Filofax had been kept in what once might have been a bread-oven inside the stone open fireplace, which suggested this hovel was rather older than it appeared from the outside.
Upstairs, Powys had found a single room with a skylight, which appeared to be used as an artist's studio. There was a table with brushes and palettes on it and coloured inks and a large assortment of paints, oil and acrylic.
There was turpentine and linseed oil and other dilutants in tightly corked medicine bottles. He uncorked one and sniffed incautiously.
It was urine.
Another one looked like blood.
Eye of newt, he thought, toe of frog.
Christ.
This room, with its skylight, was the only well-lit area of the house; all the windows in the sides of the building were screened by dense conifers.
There was a work in progress on an easel – a canvas under-painted in black and yellow-ochre. Shapes of buildings and a figure.
He decided not to sniff the painting.
There were two chairs up here, just as there were two downstairs. Andy and a lover.
Or a pupil.
He didn't know quite why he thought that. Maybe it was because someone else had been doing what he himself was doing – copying out pages of material from the Filofax. In the bread-oven had been a small pile of loose-leaf pages with writing on them in a different hand – bold, big letters. A schoolboy hand. Or a schoolgirl. There was also a paperback book on Elizabethan magic, with pages marked. He'd read one – and immediately put the book into his pocket, to study later.
The Filofax had contained about thirty loose-leaf pages of closely written notes, together with hand-drawn plans and maps. Powys had sat down at the table with the artist's materials on it, a rough-hewn item of rustic garden furniture. He'd copied everything out as carefully as he could, including the maps and plans, some of which made sense, some of which didn't.
He could have stolen the Filofax; that would have been simpler.
But he suspected that what he held here was something like what the old magicians called a grimoire, a book of magical secrets, a Book of Shadows. It belonged only to one person. To anyone else – if you believed in all this, which he was rather afraid he did – it could be as insidiously dangerous as a radioactive isotope.
So what you did, you copied it out.
He stopped copying at one stage, his wrist aching, a distant siren sounding in his head like the beginning of a migraine.
What the hell am I doing?
I mean, am I out of my mind?
He'd crossed again into the Old Golden Land, where everything answered to its own peculiar and archaic logic.
So, by candlelight, he'd gone on copying material from the Filofax into the blank pages of a slim blue book of his own with photographs of stones and mounds in it and maps of Britain networked with irregular thin black lines. Indented gold letters on the cover spelled out. The Ley-Hunter's Diary 1993. They sent him one every year; he carried it around, the way you did, but this was the first time he'd ever actually written in one.
It took him a long time.
And if Andy had come back, caught him at it?
So what? The bastard had more explaining to do than he did.
He was scared, though. You couldn't not be, in this environment. Not if you were inclined to believe it worked.
As he wrote, he started to understand. Not all of it, but enough. Enough to convince him that the original source of some of these notes was probably Dr John Dee, astrologer to Elizabeth I. That Dee, who lived along the valley, who was not psychic but studied people who were, had been the recipient of the visit from the man who came "at nyte in hys spyryte'.
And that the visitor was Michael Wort. High Sheriff of Radnorshire.
And you can prove that?
Of course not. What does that matter? I believe it.
But you're not rational, Powys. You're a certifiable crank.
He'd put the Filofax back into the bread-oven, wishing there was somewhere to wash his hands, and climbed out through the window again, walking away into the dusk, the wood gloomy, treacherous place now, spiked with fallen branches bramble tentacles.
The night coming on, and he didn't feel so certain of ability to deal with this, this…
diabolical sorcerie.