The Greenstone Grail: The Sangreal Trilogy One

For the first time, Annie found herself trying to go back – and back – into her memory, into the past, into the unopened rooms of her subconscious. She thought she must have been afraid to remember, to even make the attempt, but now it was necessary, it was urgent. She pictured the pallor of that hospital room, Daniel lying there, the bruising on his face dark, dark against the whiteness of his skin, white bandages, white pillow … Daniel slipping away from her … and the sudden opening of his eyes, and the love in them that stabbed her, even now, making a wound that would always be fresh, always raw, as long as her heart beat. She clung to that moment, and shrank from it, because beside it all the other moments of her life were as shadows and half-lights; but this time she knew she must go beyond it, opening up the pain, reaching into death itself. Her fingers slid from the keyboard; her face emptied. There were impressions – colours – a spinning sensation – falling into softness, warmth, touch. There was a love enfolding her, mind and body, filling every pore, eclipsing both heart and thought, absorbing her into its passion and its potency. Daniel’s love – it must be Daniel – but Daniel had given much, and taken little, and this was a love which took everything, all that she was, and all that she had, and gave only on its own terms, in its own way. A great gift, a gift that was worth the price, though she paid with her life and her soul …

There was a violent jolt, and her head was in her hands, and the world slid back into place. She looked up, and saw the bookshop, and her current screensaver, fish swimming through a coral grove, and the spiralling dust-motes caught in a ray of sunshine from a small side window. Gradually her pulse steadied, but she didn’t move. After an hour or more, she got up and went to make tea.

When the tea was ready she returned to the table, sat down, sipped, pressed a few keys on the computer, tapped out an e-mail to other dealers about a rare first edition she was trying to obtain for a client. But her thought was elsewhere. She had listened to Bartlemy’s theory, but hadn’t really digested the implications. Something – someone – had taken her, in the instant of Daniel’s death, and made her pregnant. She had been invaded and violated, when she was open and vulnerable, when she had offered her whole being, to Daniel, for Daniel – but it was not Daniel who had accepted. Some alien power had seized her and used her, drawing a veil in her mind to blind her, leaving her with … Nathan. She loved Nathan as much as she had loved Daniel, though differently, but in that moment it didn’t matter. A slow-burning anger mounted in her, like no anger she had ever known, a white fire with which she could have torn down the walls between worlds, and stormed across the multiverse to find her ravisher. He had imprinted her with his spirit, but she would tear him out, and take back the life he had riven from her, and the love he had poisoned, and the soul he had left broken or benumbed. Her heart raged until the tea grew cold, and the fire died within her, and the tears came and came and would not stop.

Hazel Bagot found her there, when she came round to borrow a book for school. ‘What’s wrong?’ she said, horrified. ‘Annie, Annie, what’s wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ Annie sobbed, struggling for self-control, and Hazel put her arms round her, awkwardly, embarrassed to find an adult weeping with such abandon, though she had seen her mother cry, often and often. Her bracelet caught in Annie’s hair, pulling it sharply, so she started with the pain, and Hazel sprang back, stammering an apology, and ran out into the street. And there was Michael, walking towards her, and she dragged him inside, though he offered little resistance, and left him to do what he could in the way of comfort, while she headed home to brood on the mystery of it, with Annie’s hair snagged on her bracelet.

In the shop, Annie laid her head against Michael’s shoulder, and wept herself to a standstill.

‘What is it?’ he said. ‘Can I help?’

‘No. Thanks. It’s just … something a long time ago, something I never understood … never realized till now.’

‘Can you tell me?’

‘No. Sorry. It’s too …’

‘Too private?’ he suggested.

‘Too difficult.’ She looked up at him, red-eyed, rubbing her nose with the back of her hand, like a child. ‘Excuse me. I need a tissue. Possibly several.’

‘I’ll get them.’ He got up. ‘Where –’

‘Loo paper. In the bathroom. Upstairs on your left. But you shouldn’t …’

He ran upstairs, returning presently with a skein of toilet paper.

‘Thank you,’ Annie said again, feeling helpless and rather foolish. She blew her nose vigorously, wondering what she could say, unwilling to lie when he was being so kind.

But Michael asked no more questions. ‘If there’s anything I can do …?’

‘No, really. I’ll be fine now. I’d just like to be alone.’

‘Sure?’ She nodded. He stood looking down at her, and for once the crooked smile wasn’t in evidence. ‘Okay. But I meant what I said. If there’s anything I can do, ever, you have only to ask. It sounds melodramatic to say you’re alone in the world – I know that’s not exactly the case – but you don’t have a husband or family, at any rate, not round here. I want you to know you can call on me, any time.’

He does like me, Annie thought, and the knowledge warmed her, and unsettled her, more than she would have expected, ruffling what little serenity she had left.

She thought of asking him: How would Rianna feel about that? But of course she didn’t.

Not long after his birthday Nathan went walking in the woods near Thornyhill. He had left Hoover behind, ostensibly because he wanted to watch for birds and squirrels, but really because he needed some time to himself, to think things over. Hazel had told him about finding his mother in tears, and he had asked Annie what had upset her, but all she would say was that it didn’t matter now. ‘I was crying over spilt milk, and everyone knows that’s a waste of energy. What’s done is done. It’s nothing you need worry about.’ He didn’t want to press her, but instinct told him there was something very wrong, something important, one of many nebulous troubles that threatened to disturb the pattern of his life. The vision of the cup – dreams of another world – the illegal immigrant – Effie Carlow – Michael Addison – the star. He sat down on a log some way from any path, his gaze resting absently on the fluttering of leaf-shadows across the woodland floor, primrose clumps around a tree-bole, a mist of bluebells stretching away into a green distance. There was no traffic noise from the road, only the song of unseen birds. It was a beautiful scene, restful to the soul, but he was thirteen and his soul was restless. There were so many things he wanted to know …

The face was watching him from the crook between branch and tree-trunk: he must have been staring at it for some time without seeing it, the way you stare at a puzzle picture until the instant when the hidden image becomes clear. He thought at first that it was an animal, maybe a pine marten – he had always wanted to see a pine marten – but the face, though pointed, was hairless, bark-coloured and thrush-speckled, watching him sideways from a dark slanting eye. He became aware of spindle limbs clinging to the tree-trunk, leafy rags of clothing. Even so, it was several minutes before he said, very softly: ‘Woody?’

The woodwose shrank away, retreating into the shelter of the tree.

‘Please don’t go! It’s me, Nathan. Woody, please …’

‘Nathan?’ It was the slightest of whispers, emanating from behind the oak.

‘Yes, it is. Really …’

‘Nathan … was little. No bigger than me.’

‘I grew up,’ Nathan said. ‘I couldn’t help that. It’s what people do. I’m a teenager now.’

‘You went away.’ The woodwose was still invisible, only a voice among the leaves.

‘I know. I’m sorry. They told me you were imaginary, and I suppose … I got to believing them.’

‘They?’ The tip of a long nose reappeared, followed by the gleam of an eye, the twitch of an ear.

‘People. My mother. Some of my friends. It wasn’t their fault: they didn’t know you. It was my fault.’

‘You’ve grown too big,’ Woody said doubtfully. ‘Too big to talk to.’

‘I’m the same,’ Nathan insisted. ‘Look at me, Woody.’

The woodwose studied him, first from one eye, then the other. ‘You are Nathan,’ he said at last, ‘but you are not the same. You are … more. Perhaps too much …’

‘It feels that way sometimes,’ Nathan said. ‘But you can still talk to me. Honestly you can. Please come out, Woody. Please.’

Slowly, tentatively, the woodwose emerged into full view, staying close to the tree, no longer relaxed as he had been with his child playmate but a nervous, distrustful creature, easily startled, poised not to flee but to fade, back into the concealment of the wood. ‘Do you,’ he murmured, ‘do you have any – Smarties? You brought some once, I remember, in a tube with a lid on. They were small, and many-coloured – all different colours – and they tasted very good.’

‘I’ll bring some next time,’ Nathan promised. ‘I’ll come again soon. What … what have you been doing, all these years?’

But he knew the answer. ‘Being here,’ said the woodwose. ‘Waiting.’

‘For me?’

‘I – yes. You are all I have. You told me so. My parents, my friend.’ And, after a pause: ‘What is imaginary?’

‘It means, I invented you. You came from my mind. Where did you come from, Woody?’

‘From your mind,’ said the woodwose. ‘I think.’

Nathan remembered the man he had pulled from the seas of another cosmos, onto the beach at Pevensey Bay. He had no memory of it, but perhaps he had found Woody, too, in a dream, in the woods of some alternative world. It was an uncomfortable idea, though he hadn’t yet had time to work out why. The two of them sat for a while, almost the way they used to, watching a beetle creeping through the leaf-mould, and sunspots dancing on a tree-trunk, and a tiny bird with a piping call which Nathan would never have seen without his friend to guide him. ‘Would you look out for anything-different?’ Nathan asked at last. ‘There are things happening now, strange things. I can’t explain properly because I don’t understand, but I think you should be wary. If you see-oh, I don’t know – anything unusual, weird …’

‘Weird?’ Woody looked bewildered. There were few words in his vocabulary.

‘Odd. Peculiar. Wrong.’ Nathan paused for a minute, struck by a sudden thought. ‘How do you speak my language, Woody? It isn’t natural to you, is it?’

‘I must have learned from you,’ said the woodwose. ‘I’ve never spoken to anybody else.’

Nathan didn’t say any more. He bade his friend goodbye, and set off back towards Bartlemy’s house. An awful fear was growing in him, that he had brought Woody here, had dreamed him into this world and then abandoned him, and now the woodwose had no other friend, no other place, no other tongue. It was a frightening responsibility, but the wider implications were worse. He had no control over his dreams. (What had Effie Carlow said? Dream carefully.) Perhaps, if he really had this power, this ability, he might find himself bringing other people here, other creatures, unhappy exiles who could never go home, unless he found a way to dream them back again. The idea was so terrifying it made his mind spin. He forced himself to think rationally, to analyse what it was in his dreaming that had transported the man in the water from world to world – if that was indeed what had happened. There had been the urge to help, to save him – a huge impulse of will. After all, he had only brought back one person – not any of the xaurians or their riders, or the man in the white mask. And maybe some similar impulse had drawn Woody to Thornyhill to be his companion. A selfish impulse, a child’s impulse: the desire for a secret friend. ‘And I couldn’t send him back,’ he reflected, remorsefully, ‘even if I had the power. I don’t remember where he came from.’ He resolved that he would dream carefully from now on, he would suppress all such urges, he wouldn’t – he mustn’t – allow his feelings to dictate his actions.

He wanted to tell Bartlemy – he wanted to tell someone – but he feared to be treated as an over-imaginative child, diminished by adult scepticism. Somehow, because she was so old, so eccentric, Effie Carlow had been different: he could have endured her scorn, if she had scorned him. But Bartlemy was the person he respected most in the world, knowledgeable and wise, and in his inmost heart Nathan shrank from the very notion of his disbelief.