I scrambled up the willow that had got Crayfish on to the roof earlier in the day and crawled around the edge, as the boy must have done, for fear of falling through the insubstantial plaster in the middle. Then I paused, looking around me and hesitating while I thought about what I intended to do. The sky overhead was brilliant with stars, although luckily the moon had not risen yet. When I looked over my shoulder I could see the faint, flickering light of the brazier at the top of the parish temple, but it was too far away to shed any light on me. There was no sound except the wind stirring the willow by the house and the trees and rushes that lined the parish’s plots out on the lake.
What I intended to do here was to find Kindly’s featherwork for him, because it was the only thing I could think of that might lead me to where my son was. I was convinced that the place to look for it was the room Idle had shared with Marigold. There was something concealed in that room, I was certain of that: why else would Butterfly have been so desperate to keep me out of it?
As I shifted my weight and prepared to drop into the courtyard as quietly as I could, sudden dread made my stomach cramp painfully. What I was about to do, trespassing in a house at night, was a serious crime, but it was not that which frightenedme. I had committed capital crimes before and got away with it, one way or another. What terrified me was the conviction that whatever Idle had died for, it had something to do with what I had come here to find, and whoever had killed him would not hesitate to kill again.
I took a deep breath and jumped.
As soon as my feet were on the ground I darted into the shadows. From there, after a quick look around me to ensure I was alone, I crept towards the forbidden doorway I had to hold my breath as I lifted a corner of the cloth that covered it, in case I missed any sound that might betray the presence of someone in the room: a cough or a footstep, a grunt or a snore or the faint rustle of someone turning over under a blanket. Butterfly had told me that this had been Idle’s and Marigold’s room, and I assumed from this that it was unoccupied, but if Skinny and his wife had moved into it since the afternoon then I intended to be out of the front doorway before they could stir.
Hearing nothing, I slipped into the room and let the cloth fall back behind me.
Now there was no light whatever. I would have to do all my searching by touch. I cursed under my breath. The last thing I needed to be doing now was blundering about in a strange room with my hands groping the air in front of me in the hope that one of them would connect with something important, but I had no choice.
I took a single step forward, and a moment later was in agony, with my tongue clamped between my teeth to stop me screaming and my legs buckling with pain and shock.
I had stubbed my toe.
Tears sprang to my eyes as I tried to work out what I had walked into. Whimpering, I dropped to one knee, curling the leg with the injured foot protectively under me as I felt for thething. It was a piece of rock, rough hewn and jagged, or so I thought until I managed to turn it over and discovered that parts of it had been polished smooth. As I ran my fingers over its curves and ridges I realised that it was a carving, although there was no way of telling by touch what it was meant to be.
‘I wonder how this got broken?’ I mused. ‘Maybe some other clumsy moron bumped into it before me.’
I got up, grimacing as my sore toe touched the floor. Edging around the place where I had left the stone, I found another piece, as rough as the first, when my heel brushed against it.
Butterfly had not lied when she said the place was a mess. Working my way along the room towards the back of the house, I soon found a pile of rubbish. Somebody appeared to have made a loose heap of all Idle’s possessions and just left it in the middle of the floor. Fishing around in it with my hands, I found stale tortilla crusts, broken pottery, cloth, thread, something sharp that I thought must be an obsidian razor and feathers. There was a surprising number of feathers.
The pile spilled across the whole width of the room, so that I had to clamber over it to find out what lay beyond it. I started nervously as something fell off the top of it, and rolled across the floor with a loud clatter. I froze for a moment but heard no other sound.
The room turned out to be smaller than it had looked from the outside because I found the rear wall of the house immediately beyond the heap.
I ran my hands over it briefly. There seemed to be no shelves or niches, just plain plaster. The surface had a rough feel as though it had been hastily finished. There was a draught around my feet, which made me think mice from the fields behind the house must have eaten their way through the adobe from the outside.
An unpleasant smell filled this part of the room. It wasvaguely familiar, but for the moment I could not recall where I had come across it before. It was not difficult to guess where it emanated from, however: somewhere in the mass of garbage behind me. I sighed, realizing that I had no choice but to rake over the heap. I had already decided why it had been left there. It was the obvious place in which to have concealed the costume.
I clambered back over it, meaning to search it from the other side where there was more room to work.
I was stooping over the pile with my back to the doorway when I heard something behind me. It sounded like a light, stealthy footstep.
I tried to stand up but I was an instant too late.
Something crashed into the back of my head, and before I even hit the floor I was plunged into a darkness even murkier than the room around me.
4
A snake danced in front of me. It was not the venomous kind. When it raised its broad, flat head and opened its mouth to send its tongue darting silently towards my face, I saw no fangs. It was the sort that killed its victim slowly, squeezing until he could not draw breath, until ribs cracked and organs split and burst. With every movement I made, I knew its grip would tighten further. I kept as still as I could, taking short, shallow breaths until the strain on my lungs and the sensation in my head, a feeling that it was whirling and rocking even while the rest of me was pinned to the ground, became too much and I gasped and coughed.
The snake did not react. Its eyes watched mine. As I gazed into them I realized that they looked wrong: their pupils were not thin elliptical slits but perfectly round black beads and their irises were a warm brown that I knew from somewhere.
I kept my eyes on the snake’s because I could not look at the flickering light that illuminated them. It seemed to swing back and forth like a censer in the hands of a priest, looming towards me until it threatened to fill my head up and then shrinking to a shimmering point the size of a star.
I could hear a voice. It seemed to come from far away and I was not sure whether it was uttering words or inarticulate cries. The sound was so faint that when it stopped I could notdecide whether I had really heard it, but when it resumed, the snake seemed to respond to it.
‘Can you hear us?’
I blinked. My eyes were shimmering, misty. It was becoming harder to focus on the creature’s face, on those unsettling eyes, the scales that glistened where they caught the light, the lipless smirk on its mouth. I shut my eyes but somehow the snake was still there, its head now moving from side to side in a slow, sinuous dance. I felt its coils moving over my body, and terror convulsed me, making my hands clench and snatching my head up off the floor, but the choking, suffocating pressure did not come. I lay still again, wondering at the sensuous caress of the snake’s skin against mine, its tongue flickering over my throat and chest.
It reared up then, as if to strike.