V
Living the hard and ordinary life we lived on Coney Mound, torn as I was between past and future wonders, my mother hardly needed to have asked me not to speak to anyone about our visit to Redhouse. Naturally, I was hungry to keep my own secret portion of this world, particularly if it lay beyond Bracebridge. So I bore my burden—along with the bright images of that day; Annalise, Mistress Summerton—in silence, although, as I wandered the town, my head was filled with questions which had previously never troubled me.
Down in Bracebridge market square, I found a patch of especially cracked and weathered old stone where the stocks had stood, and where, before that, and in the chaos of the First Age, changelings might once have been burnt before we learned how to tame and capture them. And rummaging through the town public library, sniffling over dank pages, I searched for G for Goldenwhite, U for Unholy, R for Rebellion, and C for changeling. But what was a changeling? All the talk of green vans and Northallerton and trolls and milk souring and babies being eaten seemed like nothing but gossip across the back fences of Coney Mound. But on a high shelf in the corner of the library so dim and dank and unvisited that the shadows seemed to give a resistance, I heaved down a tome embossed with a cross inside a letter C and flopped it open.
It could almost have been one of those books from Redhouse, but this one contained foggy photographs the colour of nicotine stains amid long columns of text. Flesh rippled and sluglike, or white and blooming. Faces cracked like peeling paint. Limbs strung with cascading cauls.
‘What are ye lookin’ at?’
It was Masterlibrarian Kitchum, a half-blind man of such dumb illiteracy that it was hard to imagine that his appointment hadn’t been some kind of joke. Cursing, he dragged the book from me and chased me into the rain.
But there was so much I still needed to know. So, within three shifts, and on a grey Nineshiftday of irredeemable ordinariness, I set out to make my way back to Redhouse. I left home at the usual time carrying my school satchel, then doubled down and back around the edges of lowtown, trod the cabbage leaves through the failing allotments, crossed Withybrook Road and followed the railway tracks around the side of Rainharrow to the point where that lonely branch line dipped across the moors. It was past midday when, plodding on beneath dulled loops of telegraph as the wind bit into me, I took the path through the greying heather beside the old quarry. The late autumn sun was already ominously low by the time I entered the wood leading down to the clearing where my mother and I had had our picnic. Despite the new bareness of the trees, the path grew darker as I descended it, drowning in riots of thorns and holly. Wading through the undergrowth, no longer sure if I was following any kind of path, I began to panic. I was running, breathless. Then, when I was sure I was utterly lost, the wood suddenly relented and I found that I was standing again at the edge of the moor. Darkness was flooding in and the greyish path threaded back towards the empty platform of Tatton Halt. I took it at a grateful run and trotted homewards along the track, pausing only to ease the pain in my sides. The telegraphs glowed faintly above me with distant messages, and, far beyond that, the stars began to glimmer in clusters and strings. One, beckoning towards Coney Mound, was red.
Tired and afraid and disappointed, I followed the dim strings of lowtown’s gaslights and the milky wyreglow of the quickening pools, and climbed the familiar streets past St Wilfred’s. The cobbles were wet, each glinting with a fleck of that red star. The houses were black. The air was silent. Then I heard something screaming, and my heart chilled. It sounded as if claws were being dragged across the surface of the night. Then the noise emerged from the alley opposite me and became a dark figure. Its eyes, like the cobbles, burned with twin flecks of red light, and the air seemed to grey and shimmer around it. The night shrank and pulsed. I was sure at that moment that the devil himself had decided to walk Coney Mound, or at the very least that Owd Jack, aged and pained beyond belief and yet still living, had come to reclaim me. SHOOM BOOM SHOOM BOOM. Stretching its rags, the thing shuffled towards me. And I ran. I was leaning against the gate of our back yard and catching my breath in ragged yelps before I realised that I’d only glimpsed the Potato Man. This was, after all, the time of year for him.
‘You’re late.’
My sister Beth barely glanced up at me as I slumped down before the kitchen range. She thumped a dried-up meal on the table as I worked off my boots. I studied the chipped plate. A slice of shrivelled bacon. Some fibrous lumps of sea-potato, that ever-ready standby of the poor. Not even a slice of bread.
‘Where’s Mother?’
‘She’s upstairs.’ Beth’s look stopped any further questions. And she wasn’t wearing the inky pinafore she usually wore when she’d been working at her school. Picking at my food, I tried to remember whether anything had been different about this morning other than my own preoccupation with my secret plans for the day.
‘Can I go up and see her?’
Beth bit her lip. Her wide, pink-cheeked face was framed by black, glossy, carelessly cut hair. ‘When you’ve finished eating.’
Father came in from work soon after and headed straight upstairs without bothering to wash. Hobnails thunked across the ceiling, followed by the rake of a chair, his voice raised in a question, what might or might not have been the murmur of Mother’s reply.
The fire in the range spat and crackled. The sounds from the other houses of pots banging, doors opening and closing, people talking, washed in through the thin walls. Redhouse seemed further away than ever. Father came down and shook his head at the withered food Beth offered. Hunched in his chair, he lit a cigarette and stared at it until a worm of ash dropped to the floor. It was silent above us now. The evening crawled by. I went into the scullery to wash my plate, then crept up the stairs on my blistered toes, trying hard as all the usual creaks popped and clattered not to make a sound. The landing swayed in the lanternlight that came from my mother’s room. Not wanting to go in now, just wanting to get to my bed in the attic and put this day behind me, I crept past the half-open door.
‘Robert?’
I hesitated. The floor creaked again.
‘That is you Robert. Come in …’
My mother looked ordinary enough, propped up by an extra pillow and wearing her better night-gown. Her eyes flickered to the shadows that bulked in the room’s corners, then back to me.
‘You look tired, Robert. That scratch on your cheek. And you smell different. Where have you been?’
I shrugged. ‘Just the usual …’
Her hands lay above the blankets, thin and delicate as a bird’s. The right one grasped the cloth, was slowly contracting and relaxing. SHOOM BOOM. The rhythmic motion stopped when she realised I was watching. A dull shudder passed through me.
‘Anyway, you’d better get to bed.’
She tilted her head slightly, offering her cheek. Her skin felt brittle and hot.
My mother’s new frailty became a kind of normality as Coney Mound settled into another winter. One by one, she gave up her various part-time jobs. Money became shorter and Beth, stuck with all the extra work that had fallen to her, failed her Guild of Assistant Teachers’ exam. After long hours of frigid rage, Father managed to complete the necessary forms to apply for the hardship funds set up by the Toolmakers’ Guild and a cheque was issued. Meagre though it was, it paid for occasional visits by that black frock-coated harbinger of death and uncertainty, a Master of the Physicians’ Guild. I watched the doctor rummaging in the glimmer of his bag, bottles clinking, his steel glasses and bald head shining with the glow of his useless potions, his meaningless spells, before he applied the drainings and poultices that always left my mother filler and more fretful.
Sometimes, though, she would still be up when I got home, sitting by the parlour fire with a blanket over her legs and another over her shoulders which now seemed to rise too narrowly and too high. Occasionally, she would even be on her feet and moving about, ignoring Beth’s protests as she tried to get on with some household task that she had convinced herself was being neglected. She was clumsy enough at the best of times but I remember one evening soon after the first snowfalls when I came in and found her standing at the kitchen table, trying to crack eggs into the bowl. A scatter of crushed shells lay around her and yokes and whites drooled from her fingers, glistening in the faint darkness that now always seemed to surround her as if she was receding into a dream. I stayed out late the following evening. That year, that winter, I stayed out late on many nights.