Hexwood

Now what’s this? she wondered. Has the field made the castle a ruin?

“Come on!” Hume screeched from inside the bushes. “I can’t get it open!”

“Coming!” Ann forced her way in among the thicket, ducking and pushing, until she arrived against the wall. Hume was impatiently jumping up and down in front of an old, old wooden door.

“Open it!” he commanded.

Ann put her hand on the old rusty knob, turned it, pulled, rattled, and was just deciding the door was locked when she discovered it opened inwards. She put her shoulder to the blistered panels and pushed. Hume hindered in a helping way. And the door groaned and scraped and finally came half open, which was enough to let them both slip through. Hume shot inside with a squeal of excitement. Ann stepped after more cautiously.

She stopped in astonishment. There was an ancient farmhouse beyond, standing in a walled garden of chest-high weeds. The house was derelict. Part of its roof had fallen in, and a dead tree had toppled across the empty rafters. The chimney at the end Ann could see was smothered in ivy, which had pulled a pipe away from the wall. When her eyes followed the pipe down, they found the waterbutt it had drained into broken and spread like a mad wooden flower. The place was full of damp, hot silence, with just a faint cheeping of birds.

Ann knew the shape of that roof and the shape the chimney should be inside the ivy. She had looked at both every day for most of her life – except that the roof was not broken and there were no trees near enough to fall on it. Now look here! she thought What’s Hexwood Farm doing here? It should be on the other side of the stream – river – whatever. And why is it all so ruined?

Hume meanwhile charged into the high weeds, shouting, “This is a real place!” Shortly, he was yelling at Ann to come and see what he had found. Ann shrugged. It had to be the paratypical field again. She went to see the rusty kettle Hume had found. It had a robins nest in it. After that, she went to see the old boot he had found, then the clump of blue irises, then the window that was low enough for Hume to look through, into the farmhouse. That find was more interesting. Ann lingered, staring through the cracked, dusty panes at the rotted remains of red and white check curtains, past a bottle of detergent swathed in cobwebs, to a stark old kitchen. There were empty shelves and a table with what looked like the mortal remains of a loaf on it – unless it was fungus.

Does it really look like this? she wondered. Or newer?

Hume was yelling again. “Come and see what I’ve found!”

Ann sighed. This time Hume was rooting in the tall tangle of green briars over by the main gate. When Ann made her way over, he was on tiptoe, hanging on to two green briar-whips that had thorns on them like tiger claws. “You’ll get scratched,” she said.

“There’s a window in here too!" Hume said, hauling on the briars excitedly.

Ann did not believe him. To prove he must be wrong, she wrapped her sweater over her fist and shoved a swathe of green thorny branches aside. Inside, to her great surprise, there was the rusty remains of a white car bonnet, and a tall windscreen dimly glinting beyond. Too tall for a car. A van of some kind. Wait a minute! She went further along the tangle and used both fists, wrapped in both sweater sleeves, to heave more green whips aside.

“What is it?” Hume wanted to know.

“Er – a kind of cart, I think,” Ann said as she heaved.

“Stupid. Carts don’t have windows,” Hume told her scornfully, and wandered off, disappointed in her.

Ann stared at the side of a once-white van. It was covered with running trickles of brown rust. Further, redder rust erupted through the paint like boils. But the blue logo was still there. A weighing scale with two round pans, one higher than the other.

It is a balance, she said to her four imaginary people.

There was no reply. After a moment when she felt hurt, angry and lost, Ann remembered that they had lost her this morning when she went into the wood. Ridiculous! she thought Behaving as if they were real! But I can tell them later when I come out So—

Using forearms and elbows as well as fists, she heaved away more briars until she could stamp them down underfoot. Words came into view, small and blue and tasteful. RAYNER HEXWOOD INTERNATIONAL and, in smaller letters, MAINTENANCE DIVISION (EUROPE).

“Well, that leaves me none the wiser!” Ann said. Yet, for some reason, the sight of that name made her feel cold. Cold, small and frightened. “Anyway, how did it get this way in just a fortnight?” she said.

“Ann! Ann!” Hume screamed from round the house somewhere.

Something was wrong! Ann jumped clear of the van and the briars and raced off in Hume’s direction. He was in the corner of the garden walls beyond the waterbutt, jumping up and down. So sure was Ann that something was wrong that she grabbed Hume’s shoulders and turned him this way and that, looking for blood, or a bruise, or maybe a snakebite. “Where do you hurt? What’s happened?”

Hume had worked himself into such a state of excitement that he could hardly speak. He pointed to the corner. “In there – look!” he gulped, with a mixture of joy and distress that altogether puzzled Ann.

There was a heap of rubbish in the corner. It had been there so long that elder trees had grown up through it, making yet another whippy thicket “Just rubbish,” Ann said soothingly.

“No – there!” said Hume. “At the bottom!”

Ann looked and saw a pair of metal feet sticking out from under the mound of mess. Her stomach jolted. A corpse now! “Someone’s thrown away an old suit of armour,” she said, trying to draw Hume gently away. Or suppose it was only the legs of a corpse. She felt sick.

Hume would not be budged. “They moved,” he insisted. “I saw.”

Surely not? This heap of rubbish could not have been disturbed for years, or the elder trees would not be growing there. Horror fizzed Ann’s face and hurt her back. Her eyes could not leave those two square-toed metal feet. And she saw one twitch. The left: one. “Oh dear,” she said.

“We’ve got to unbury him,” said Hume.

Ann’s instinct was to run for help, but she supposed the sensible thing was to find out the worst before she did. She and Hume climbed up among the elders and set to work prising and heaving at the earthy mess. They threw aside iron bars, bicycle wheels, sheet metal, logs that crumbled to wet white pulp in their fingers, and then dragged away the remains of a big mattress. Everything smelt. But the strong sappy odour of the elders seemed to Ann to smell worst of all. Like armpits, she thought. Or worse, a dead person. Hume irritated her by saying excitedly, over and over, “I know what it’s going to be!” as if they were unwrapping a present Ann would have snapped at him to shut up, except that she too, under the horror, had a feeling she knew what they would find.

Moving the mattress revealed metal legs attached to the feet, and beyond that, glimpses of the whole suit of armour. Ann felt better. She sprang with Hume up the mound again and dug frenziedly. An elder tree toppled. “Sorry!” Ann gasped at it. She knew you should be polite to elder trees. As it fell, the tree tore away a landslide of broken cups, tins and old paper, leaving a cave with a red-eyed suit of armour lying in it under what looked like a railway sleeper.

“Yam!” Hume yelled, sliding about in the rubbish above. “Yam, are you all right?”

“Thank you. I am functional still,” the suit of armour replied in a deep monotonous voice. “Stand clear and I will be able to free myself now.”

Ann retreated hastily. A robot! she thought. I don’t believe this! Except that I do, somehow. Hume leapt down beside her, shaking with excitement. They watched the robot brace its silver arms on the railway sleeper and push. The timber swung sideways and the whole rubbish heap changed shape. The robot sat up among the elder trees. Very slowly, creaking and jangling rather, it got its silver legs under itself and stood up, swaying.

“Thank you for releasing me,” it said. “I am only slightly damaged.”

“They threw you away!” Hume said indignantly. He rushed up to the robot and took hold of its silvery hand.

“They had no further use for me,” Yam intoned. “That was when they went away, in the year forty-two. I had completed the tasks they set me by then.” He took a few uncertain steps forward, creaking and whirring. “I am suffering from neglect and inaction.”

“Come with us,” Hume said. “Mordion can mend you.”

He set off, leading the glistening robot tenderly towards the door they had come in by. Ann followed, reluctant with disbelief. What year forty-two? she wondered. It can’t be this century, and I refuse to believe were a hundred years in the future. And Hume knows the robot! How?

Well, I know the date is 1993, she told herself, and she knew, of course, that there were no real robots then. It was hard to rid herself of the feeling that there must be someone human inside Yam’s unsteady silver shape. The paratypical field again, she thought. It was the only thing that would account for those elder trees growing above Yam and the way Hexwood Farm itself was so mysteriously in ruins.

With a sort of idea that she might catch the farmhouse turning back to its usual state, Ann looked over her shoulder at it. It happened to be the very moment when the decaying front door opened and a real man in armour came out, stretching and yawning like someone coming off duty. There was no doubt this one was human. Ann could see his bare hairy legs under the iron shinguards strapped to them. He wore a mail coat and a round iron helmet with a nosepiece down over his very human face. It made him look most unpleasant.

He turned and saw them.

“Run, Hume!” said Ann.

The armed man drew his sword and came leaping through the weeds towards them. “Outlaws!” he shouted. “Filthy peasants!”

Hume took one look and raced for the half-open door, dragging the lurching, swaying Yam behind him. Ann sprinted to catch up. As they reached the door in the wall, more men in armour came running out of the farmhouse. At least two of them had what seemed to be crossbows, and these two stood and aimed the things at Ann and Hume like wide heavy guns. Yam’s big silver hands came out, faster than Ann’s eyes could follow, closed on Hume’s arm and Ann’s, and more or less threw them one after the other round the door and into the snowball thicket. As Ann landed struggling among the bare twigs, she heard the two sharp clangs of the crossbow bolts hitting Yam. Then there was the sound of the door being dragged and slammed shut. Ann scrambled towards the open ground as hard as she could go.

“Are you all right, Hume?” she called as soon as she was there.

Hume came crawling out of the bushes at her feet, looking very frightened. Behind him there were shouts and wooden banging as the armed men tried to get the door open again. Yam was surging through the thicket towards them, swaying and whirring. Twigs slapped his metal skin like a hailstorm on a tin roof.

“You’re broken!” Hume cried out.

Ann could hear the door in the wall beginning to scrape open. She seized Hume’s wrist in one hand and Yam’s cold, faintly whirring hand in the other, and dragged both of them away. “Just run,” she told Hume.