Now it was Christmas and she was hoping that the excitements and joys of this time would help her to return to normality. She hoped for this and yet the strangest thing of all was that although the dreams made her muddled and uneasy she longed for the end of the day when she would once again inhabit their world and be with the little band of companions as they journeyed through the countryside.
She was just putting the finishing touches to her arrangement of the lights on the tree when her mother called through to her from the kitchen.
‘Beth, lay the table would you, dear? Your father will be home soon and the meal is almost ready. Get some sherry glasses out for us; you can have a little glass as well.’ There was a pause and Beth heard the clatter of pans in the kitchen. ‘Have you finished the tree? I suppose we’ll have to get your father to look at the lights again. They never work; it’s the same every year.’
Beth switched them on at the plug socket and nothing happened.
‘No, they haven’t come on, Mummy,’ she said, and stood back to admire her handiwork. ‘The tree looks nice though,’ she called.
She went over to the big oak dresser which stood against one wall of the room and pulled out the cutlery drawer so that she could lay the table. The mats she fetched from a ledge which ran along the bottom of the dresser and she then walked across to the middle of the room and began to lay four places on the large oval dining table which smelt of polish and shone in the flickering light of the candles which she had lit and placed in the centre. Upstairs she could hear sounds of movement as her elder brother who, at fifteen, was two years older than her, though he sometimes acted as if it were ten, got up from the desk where he had been reading a book and walked over to the door of his room.
‘What time is it, Beth?’ he shouted down.
‘Five o’clock,’ she told him. ‘Come and fix these lights before Father gets home.’
‘Fix them yourself.’
‘Pig!’
‘Children, don’t bicker tonight. I’ve got enough to cope with feeding James and getting the meal ready without you two going on at each other.’
Beth finished laying the table.
‘I’ll go upstairs and get changed now,’ she called through to the kitchen, ‘so that Daddy can take me to the dance as soon as we’ve had the meal.’
‘All right, dear. I’ve ironed your new dress; it’s over the back of the chair in your room. Don’t be too long; Daddy should be home any minute.’
The girl walked across to the open wooden staircase which ran up one side of the little room. She loved this room; this was the old room, the one that had always been here ever since she could remember, unlike the new room at the end which had been built as part of an extension to the house four years ago and which, although it had been designed to be in keeping with the rest, she had never taken to as being a part of it. It was too well-planned and neat. But the old one seemed to have grown out of the earth itself and she never felt shut in inside it because it gave her the feeling of being outside in the woods. When the winds blew and the rain poured down on winter evenings she felt as if she were underground, and the rough and gnarled black oak beams in the ceiling which glimmered in the firelight were the roots of a large tree. Even when her restless moods were on her she felt content here and would often sit alone, reading, when the others had gone through to the new room to watch television. The magic of the books she read seemed to be intensified by the room with its flickering shadows and atmosphere of secret history.
Beth had reached the stairs and was about to start climbing them when her eye was caught by a movement through the window in the wall behind the stairs. She stopped and bent her face to the glass to look outside. There, to her disbelief, was the face which had grown so familiar to her in her dreams, the face of the boy from the stream. She closed her eyes, counted to ten and opened them again to make sure it wasn’t a dream but the face was still there, looking at her, the smouldering eyes searching into her soul. Now the dream had become reality and she felt strangely calm for she had been with the boy so often in her dreams it was as if she had known him for a long time. This was a moment she had lived through on countless occasions in the twilit world she had been inhabiting, so she knew exactly what she would do.
Outside, Nab was a mass of doubts and uncertainty. He had been to the first window and when he had seen no one in that room he had moved cautiously along to this and had been standing watching Beth for quite some time while she set the table. At the sight of her again, he had been unable to do anything except stare, transfixed, as she moved around the room. She was of course older than that spring day when he had first seen her and she had begun to acquire a grace and delicacy in the way she moved which captivated him; the way her hair flowed around her face as she walked and the way she tucked the sides behind her ears so that it would not get in the way when she bent her head to put the cutlery on the table; the way she had folded her arms when she called upstairs and the way her lips had set when the voice came back down; and the way she had stood talking to her mother with both her hands tucked in the back pockets of her jeans. There were a hundred little mannerisms, indefinable and unconscious, all of which came together to weave a spell under which Nab became entranced so that when she looked through the window and he knew she had seen him he was unable to think what he should do. Then he remembered the ring and he fumbled under the layers of his garments until he found the second locket on the belt. With hands that were shaking in confusion he pushed the catch, the top sprang open and he placed his two first fingers inside to draw it out.
When she saw the boy delicately hold out the ring to her on a hand that was dark and seamed with use Beth knew without any doubts that she had to go with him. It shone with the colours of an autumn morning, just as she had seen it in the dreams. She looked up at the boy’s anxious face and their eyes met. She knew he was nervous and tense, as he had been when they first met. He stood there, ragged and wild, the breeze gently moving the layers of bark that hung around him and blowing his hair over his face so that only his eyes were uncovered. He was as a wild animal; the tension in his body filling him with the energy which is at the source of life itself, magnetic and powerful, his entire being tuned to the rhythms of the earth and the sky. At the same time his eyes, which burned so desperately into hers, were full of sadness and mistrust, of constant persecution, but deep within them was an anger, the perception of which frightened Beth, so resolute and enormous did it appear. ‘I would not like to be the cause of that anger,’ she thought to herself. ‘It would destroy the world.’ She did not know it and neither did Nab but what she was seeing was the fury of Ashgaroth.
Their eyes held each other for a long time and, because it was the only way they could communicate, worlds passed between them. Suddenly Beth became vaguely aware of her mother calling from the kitchen. It sounded far away as if it came through a room filled with cottonwool but Nab heard it and his face froze with tension.
He watched her, through the window, as she called something to her mother; then she turned back to him and placing her finger over her lips in the universal gesture of silence she pointed up the stairs and then down again, and then out to him.