APPEARANCES

 

by Brian Stableford

 

 

1.

 

Because Angie and her mother were making the car journey on their own Angie was allowed to sit in the front seat. It made little difference to the experience, because Angie spent the entire time solving the mazes in the new puzzle book her mother had bought her for the journey.

 

“You might save a few for later, precious,” her mother said. “We’ll be at the cottage on our own for nearly a week—Cathy and your father won’t be coming down until Friday.”

 

“I’m just doing the mazes now,” Angie said. “I’ll save the others for later. Anyway, I’ll be helping you, so I won’t get bored. If I do, I can go exploring.”

 

“I’m not sure about that,” her mother said. “We’ll have to find out how safe it is before you go wandering off on your own. You can play in the garden, though—the front garden, that is. We won’t be able to sort out the back one for quite a while.”

 

The cottage in the South Downs that Mr. and Mrs. Martindale had bought the previous year was called Orchard Cottage, because there had once been an orchard behind the property. Unfortunately, all the apple trees had died a long time ago, and the former orchard was now a jungle of hawthorn trees and brambles, topped off by a layer of bindweed.

 

“I’ll be okay,” Angie assured her mother, as she began to trace a path through yet another maze with the point of her pencil. “I’ve got my library books and my drawing pad, and now the electricity’s on the TV will be working.”

 

“You’ll be able to get out and about more when Cathy comes down,” her mother said, although she wasn’t able to make it sound convincing. Cathy wasn’t keen on “getting out and about”. Cathy disapproved of what she called “the whole cottage thing”—that was why she’d insisted on staying in Kingston with her father, who could only get time off work to come down for the Easter weekend itself.

 

Angie didn’t bother to point out that Cathy wouldn’t be much use in assisting her to explore the neighborhood of the cottage. It would only have drawn the conversation out, and she needed to concentrate on the track she was following with her pencil.

 

Her mother took the hint and concentrated on the road ahead of her. The A29 was a straight road, built on the course of one of the ancient Roman roads, but Mrs. Martindale was very scrupulous about not letting her attention wander. She was always reminding her daughters that driving required the utmost concentration, even though Cathy wouldn’t be legally able to drive for another three years, and Angie for nearly three years longer than that.

 

When they arrived at Orchard Cottage Angie had to get out and open the gate so that her mother could back the car into the narrow drive, all the way up to the front door. Then they had to unload the bags from the boot, and transfer them into the house two at a time. They’d brought a lot of luggage, because the kitchen had to be properly equipped, now that it was properly fitted, and the new beds had to be made up.

 

Once the bags were safely inside Angie went back into the garden to admire the new roof. The slates were exactly the same shade of grey as the broken ones they had replaced, but they seemed much brighter, almost as if they’d been polished.

 

The front garden was still in a mess. The builders had piled up all their materials here while they were fixing the roof and doing the other repairs inside the house. They’d cleared up after them, but it would be some time before the crushed grass and trampled flowers would recover. As a play area, it wasn’t very inviting—although it still had a clear advantage over the thicket at the back of the house, which offered no scope at all.

 

Angie went back inside, where her mother was busy putting things away.

 

“There you are, treasure,” Mrs. Martindale said, “Could you take some of this stuff up to the bedrooms, please?”

 

“Sure,” Angie said. “Which is which?”

 

“Those are for your room, those are for Cathy’s. Cathy’s bedding could have waited until Friday, but I couldn’t trust your father to remember it in addition to his own stuff. That’s the trouble with engineers—too intent on the task in hand to remember anything else.”

 

“Cathy could have reminded him,” Angie pointed out. Angie was still a little jealous because Cathy had got her own way, and would have the house all to herself while her father was at work. Angie couldn’t see why a fourteen-year-old had any greater need to be able to see her friends than an eleven-year-old. The argument that Cathy was better able to look after herself than Angie was silly, given that Cathy was so proud of her inability to boil an egg.

 

“Cathy would have reminded him of all the wrong things,” her mother replied, proving Angie’s point. Her parents were always commenting on the fact that while Angie obviously “took after” her father, Cathy didn’t seem to resemble either of her parents, being far less tidy-minded.

 

Angie distributed the two sets of bedding between Cathy’s room and her own. Cathy’s room was at the front of the house, next to what her father called the “master bedroom”, while Angie’s was at the back, next to the bathroom. Cathy’s room was larger, but Angie preferred her own because it had a lattice window.

 

The window was one of the few “original features” the cottage had left, apart from the grey stone walls and the big fireplace downstairs. The window had a frame of seasoned wood that seemed as hard as stone, and instead of a single pane it had a lead lattice supporting more than forty smaller pieces of glass. The pieces were diamond-shaped, except for the triangular ones at the edges.

 

The glass in all the downstairs windows had had to be replaced, but most of the glass in Angie’s window had survived the centuries of neglect that had left almost everything else in the building irreparably damaged. One central cluster of five diamonds had had to be replaced, but the others had only needed the thick layers of grime to be wiped away. The five new diamonds didn’t distort the light as much as the older ones, but that only added to the window’s individuality.

 

Angie’s father had tried to explain to her why the older glass was slightly distorted. Because he was an engineer, he was very fond of explanations.

 

“What you have to understand, treasure,” he’d said, the first time he’d shown her the as-yet-repaired window, the previous October, “is that making liquid glass set in flat sheets wasn’t always as easy as it is nowadays. When your window was first put together some glass-makers were still using a method that involved swirling the hot liquid glass around to make it spread out. The parts near the centre of the swirl were thicker, and they retained the traces of circular waves. Those were the bits they used to make the cheapest windows. People didn’t worry much about views in those days—they just wanted to let in enough light for a room to serve its purpose. Luckily, you’ve got enough new sections to let you appreciate the view—which will be well worth looking at, once we’ve sorted out the back garden.”

 

Angie remembered that she had looked out through the gap left by the missing diamonds at the overgrown orchard and said: “That won’t be easy.” She’d only said it because she knew exactly what her father’s reply would be.

 

“Of course it won’t,” he’d said, “but you have to remember the engineer’s motto.” Then they had joined their voices together to say: “The difficult we do at once; the impossible sometimes takes a little longer.”

 

When Angie had made up her bed and put her puzzle book down on the bedside table she went to the window in order to look out through the new diamonds.

 

The plot of land behind the cottage extended for about forty meters to the rear wall of the property. The field beyond belonged to a farmer, who sometimes grazed cattle there, although it had been left to lie fallow this year. The estate agent had explained, when the family had first come to view the property, that the orchard wasn’t an “original feature”. The house’s name had been changed by a former owner, some time in the 1930s, when the doomed apple trees had first been planted.

 

“Before the orchard there was probably some kind of vegetable garden,” the estate agent had said, during that first visit, “but you’ll be able to clear the hawthorns and the brambles and put in a proper garden. The cottage deserves that, don’t you think?”

 

The estate agent had spent almost as much time talking about what the cottage deserved as he had about its potential. According to him, it deserved new and careful owners, who would make it into the kind of cottage it really ought to have been, but had never succeeded in becoming.

 

Looking at the overgrown orchard now, from her high vantage-point, Angie wasn’t at all sure what it deserved to be, or what it was trying to be. The dense sheet of bindweed overlaying the various dead and stunted trees and the coiled-up brambles certainly seemed to be a commanding presence, which would resist any attempt to destroy it.

 

In the 1930s, Angie supposed—a historical era so distant that her grandparents had been children younger than her—someone must have thought that the cottage deserved an orchard, but the land behind it obviously hadn’t wanted to be one. She could hardly see the lumps in the thicket where the dead crowns of the old apple trees must be.

 

After looking through the new glass for half a minute, Angie moved her head sideways to look through the older glass. The greens became slightly darker, and the leaves of the bindweed seemed to become even greedier as they flooded over the underlying branches. The gentle movements stirred by the breeze gave the former orchard the appearance of a green sea billowing up in response to some mysterious force emanating from below.

 

“Perhaps the cottage didn’t deserve an orchard because it had been naughty,” Angie murmured. “Or maybe it thought that getting an orchard wasn’t really a reward.” She knew that coming here with her mother to spend the entire fortnight of the school holiday didn’t really qualify as a reward, although her parents had been careful to talk about it as if it were, but she hadn’t been naughty. Cathy was the one who had started a big row in order to avoid coming here, and had got her own way in the end—which she clearly didn’t deserve.

 

“I don’t want to go to your stupid cottage!” Cathy had yelled. “I didn’t want you to buy a stupid cottage in the first place. Don’t you realize that it’s people like us, buying second homes, who are ruining the countryside for the people who were born there and the people who work there, pricing them out of the market?”

 

Her father had, of course, taken the trouble to explain to Angie, once Cathy had stormed out, why that argument was untrue, or at least irrelevant.

 

“We’re not taking a home away from anyone else, Angie,” he told her. “No one’s lived in Orchard Cottage for almost fifty years. It’s not that the local people couldn’t afford to buy it—they just couldn’t afford to fix it up. What we’re doing is rescuing a property that would otherwise have to lie derelict until it was too badly ruined ever to be saved. We’re doing a good thing. You’ll like it, when it’s finished. It’ll be so beautiful. The perfect place to get away.”

 

The problem with that perfection, Angie knew, was that Cathy didn’t want to get away at all. Everything in life she needed and wanted, at present, was in Kingston, or a short train ride away in London. It was different for her parents, who both had jobs and were always competing with one another to establish who had had the most stressful day. For them, the office and the sites where her father worked, and the primary school where her mother taught, were things that really did need to be escaped occasionally. For them, the opportunity to construct a refuge in the South Downs was a dream come true.

 

But what about me? Angie wondered, as she stared down at the thorny jungle that would surely require the use of some kind of heavy machinery before it stood any chance of becoming a “proper garden”. Do I need to get away or not?

 

She had felt a need to get away a year before, when she had still been at the primary school at which her mother was a teacher. She had made that escape, though, when she’d moved up to the secondary school. Being in a school where she had a sister in year nine wasn’t at all the same thing as being in a school where she had a mother who taught year three. It might even be reckoned an advantage to have an older sister around if Cathy wasn’t quite so determine to ignore her during school hours.

 

Angie wondered whether she still needed to get away, or whether she too would now be better off in Kingston, hanging out with friends—or, at least, making some friends...or trying to.

 

Angie turned away from the window, still uncertain. She honestly didn’t know whether she wanted to be at the cottage or not. Time would tell, she supposed. She didn’t know, as yet, whether she could be comfortable in the cottage—whether it was the kind of place where she wouldn’t feel the pressure of needing something to do, in order not to feel awkward and out of place.

 

She tried to put on a smile before she went back downstairs, though. She knew that she ought to pretend to be glad to be here, for her mother’s sake. Her mother wanted her to be glad to be here, to count the time they spent here as a reward and not a punishment, and she had to keep up that appearance. She didn’t want her mother to be disappointed—not, at least, in her.

 

* * * *

 

2.

 

Angie’s mother was still in the kitchen, looking round proudly at all the utensils for which she had found proper and permanent places. She was nursing a freshly-made cup of tea. “Do you want a drink, darling?” she asked. “It’ll have to be tea, I’m afraid, until I can get some juice from the village shop.”

 

“I’ll just get a drink of water,” Angie said, hunting for a glass. “When are we going to start stripping?” The first job on their list was to scrape the remains of the ancient wallpaper off the walls in all the rooms, so that when her father drove down on Friday with a cargo of plaster and paint-cans he could start straight away on doing the repair work that had to be done before they could start “brightening the place up with a lick of paint”.

 

Angie knew that the painting would make a big difference to the way the interior of the cottage looked. The wallpaper patterned with apple-blossom must have seemed cheerful enough when it was put up in the 1930s, to reflect the cottage’s new name, but the building work that had been done in recent months had added massively to the ravages of ordinary dirt. The walls were now so filthy that the apple-blossom inside had been obliterated almost as successfully as the apple-blossom outside.

 

“We’ve got to finish stocking the fridge today,” her mother said. “It’s Sunday tomorrow, and shops still shut on Sundays in these parts. You’ll have to come to the village with me and help me carry things back. There won’t be time to do much today. The best plan is to settle in and make an early start on the walls tomorrow morning.”

 

“Fine,” Angie said.

 

“We’ll walk to the village instead of taking the car,” her mother went on. “It’ll give us a chance to look around, and it’ll do us good to use our legs for once. We can get a taste of what life used to be like in the olden days, when your granny was your age.”

 

“And all the glass was swirled around, so the world was always slightly blurred when you looked out through your windows,” Angie added—although she knew perfectly well, thanks to her father’s careful explanation, that glass of that sort dated from a much earlier era.

 

Her mother removed her spectacles and squinted at them. “I really should have booked an optician’s appointment over Easter,” she said. “It’ll probably have to wait till summer now.”

 

“So much to do,” Angie observed, trying in vain to imitate her father’s voice. “So little time.”

 

The village of Little Wychwood was about half a mile away on the map, but the map didn’t take account of the ups and downs. In spite of their name, and in spite of the fact that the appearance was plainly paradoxical, the South Downs seemed to Angie to have far more ups than downs. The ones between Orchard Cottage and Little Wychwood seemed much steeper on foot than they had in a car.

 

On the return journey, of course, the ups became downs and the downs became ups, but the ups still seemed more numerous and more awkward, even though it didn’t make sense. The fact that Angie had to carry a bag full of shopping didn’t help.

 

They had looked around the village for more than an hour, but there was so little to see that they hadn’t really needed that long. The heart of the village was a pub called The Elms, whose most notable feature seemed to Angie to be the incongruous reach of its car park. The shop was much tinier than their local supermarket in Kingston. There was a church too, and a graveyard, but the church was no longer in use and the graveyard was overgrown by long grass.

 

“Is it called Little Wychwood because people used to hunt witches around here?” Angie asked, once they were safely out of earshot of any villagers who might take offence.

 

“I don’t think so,” her mother replied. “I think it’s something to do with a kind of tree called a wych-elm. If the name of the pub signifies anything at all, there must have been a grove of them hereabouts, in the days before we were invaded by Dutch elm disease.”

 

“Just like the cottage, then,” Angie remarked. “One’s called after apple trees that died, the other after elm trees that died.”

 

“Don’t be so morbid,” her mother advised. “Look—here’s Mrs. Lamb on her way to the village.”

 

Mrs. Lamb was their only close neighbor; they had met her for the first time back in October. She lived in a house set back from the road between the cottage and Little Wychwood, hidden behind a tall hedge. Its gate bore the name Well House, although Angie suspected that any well that might once have been in its grounds had run dry long before the 1930s.

 

Mrs. Lamb was older than either of Angie’s grandmothers and she kept a black cat, but she didn’t look like the kind of witch after which Little Wychwood hadn’t been named. In fact, her blue-rimmed spectacles and her tied-back hair made her look like a retired primary school teacher, which was what she was. According to Angie’s mother, however, she and Mrs. Lamb had nothing in common, because Mrs. Lamb had done her teaching in a very different era, in a very different school.

 

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Lamb,” Angie’s mother said, cheerfully.

 

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Martindale,” Mrs. Lamb replied. “Hello, Angela.”

 

“Hello, Mrs. Lamb,” Angie replied, dutifully.

 

“We’re down for the whole school holiday,” Angie’s mother explained. “There’s just the decorating to do now—and the back garden, of course.”

 

“Clearing that dead orchard will be back-breaking work,” Mrs. Lamb observed. “You’ll need more people in to do that, I suppose.”

 

“Rob’s going to hire a chainsaw and a heavy strimmer, to see how difficult it is,” Angie’s mother said. “Not this time, though— it’ll have to wait until summer. With luck, we’ll get most of the painting done over Easter, and the rest on the odd weekend in May and June. It’ll be so nice to get it all finished—it was a big job. I don’t think Rob realized how much we were taking on.”

 

“You’ll want to be careful with that old orchard,” Mrs. Lamb said, looking at Angie rather than her mother.

 

“We will,” Angie’s mother assured her. “If Rob has to use heavy duty weed-killer he’ll wear a mask. We’ll be sure to warn you when we burn the rubbish—but it won’t be this trip.”

 

“Lots of nasty things under that bindweed,” Mrs. Lamb continued, still looking down at Angie from behind her blue-rimmed spectacles. “Two weeks is a long time for little folk with nothing much to do, but you don’t want to go rooting around in there. Townsfolk are always allergic—not used to country plants, see.”

 

“There can’t be much pollen about yet,” Angie’s mother said. “The bindweed’s beginning to flower, but the jungle seems to be mostly hawthorn, brambles and dead apple trees. Angie doesn’t suffer from allergies, though—Cathy’s the one who gets hay fever.”

 

“I’ll be helping with the stripping,” Angie put in, because she didn’t want Mrs. Lamb to think that she’d be idling around for two whole weeks.

 

“Must get on,” Mrs. Lamb said, continuing on her way towards the village.

 

“Have a nice day,” Angie’s mother said, to the older woman’s retreating back.

 

“Aren’t country people supposed to be friendly?” Angie asked, when Mrs. Lamb was safely out of range.

 

“She is friendly,” her mother insisted. “Just not very talkative. Comes of living alone, I suppose. I couldn’t. Not without a car, at any rate.”

 

“What nasty things might there be under the bindweed? Why was she looking at me when she said it?”

 

“Thorns, I suppose,” her mother told her. “She’s right, though—you don’t want to go burrowing around in there.”

 

“Poisonous thorns?” Angie asked.

 

“No, of course not—but scratches can start allergic reactions, even in people who don’t get hay fever. When your father’s cleared it we can make a nice big lawn, with flower beds. Until then, best let it alone.”

 

The natural result of this advice was that Angie immediately began to take a greater interest in the dead orchard than she had before. While her mother put the shopping away, Angie ran around to the back of the cottage, along the paved path that ran beside it to the left.

 

From ground level the tangle of vegetation didn’t look like a carpet or a sea, although it wasn’t tall enough to be a forest. It was more like a huge square hedge, like a country house maze without any internal pathways. Because of her fondness for puzzle-book mazes, her lather had sought out some real ones for her to get lost in—and she had got lost at first, because being inside a maze was quite different from looking down at a drawing. Her father had explained the trick of finding one’s way out, though. “Like any other problem, it’s just a matter of method,” he’d told her. “Remember the motto.”

 

It looked as if Mrs. Lamb’s advice to stay out of the thicket would be very easy to follow, because there seemed to be no way in. There was no gap at all between the vegetation and the garden wall, whose uppermost stones were so irregular that trying to walk along the top of it would be highly dangerous. A path of sorts had been cleared between the brambles and the wall of the house, so that the builders could fix their scaffolding and go in and out of the back door, but all they’d done was to stamp everything down with heavy boots, and now they’d gone the brambles had begun to rear up again much more forcefully than the feebler plants in the front garden. The greenery facing Angie, extending between the garden wall and the house, was like a solid wall itself.

 

Angie went around the other side of the house. The wall of the house was much closer to the wall of the property on that side and the unpaved path was much narrower; the mass of green blocking its far end seemed even denser, in spite of the builders’ attempts to clear a way for themselves. It was so difficult to see anything within the thicket that Angie settled for leaning over and putting her ear close to the green surface, hoping that she might hear something interesting within. She didn’t know what sort of animals might be using it as a refuge, but she felt sure that there must be some—mice, at least. If there were, they were being just as quiet as she was trying to be.

 

“Daddy had better hire a bulldozer instead of a strimmer,” she said, with a sigh. She straightened up, intending to turn away—but as she did, a movement caught her eye. It was in the higher branches, where the nearest apple tree must have been planted, but it wasn’t a bird moving inside the thicket. The movement seemed to be on the surface created by the bindweed, as if something invisible were moving over it, leaving brief footprints behind.

 

“Trick of the wind,” she said.

 

“What’s that, treasure?” her mother asked, from the corner at the front of the house. “What are you doing down there?”

 

“Nothing,” Angie replied, to both questions.

 

“I wondered where you’d got to,” her mother said, as Angie joined her and they went inside. “Your case is still on your bed— you haven’t unpacked yet. We’re here for a fortnight, remember. This isn’t just an overnight slay, like the other times. It’ll be the first taste we’ve had of living here. I do hope you like it.” Angie guessed that her mother must be thinking anxiously about Cathy’s reaction to the possibility of spending an entire fortnight in the cottage.

 

They went into the kitchen, where her mother immediately set about making preparations for dinner. “Cathy will like it too, when it’s all done,” Angie said, supportively. “When we’ve got a lawn and flower-beds. She’ll be able to bring her friends down to visit.”

 

“Not if we’re not here, she won’t,” her mother was quick to say. “Special friends, maybe—one at a time. This place is for your father, really—so he can get away at weekends and have a rest. I do wish Cathy wouldn’t be so difficult.”

 

“She’s a teenager,” Angie said, echoing her father’s all-purpose explanation for Cathy’s difficulties. Angie would be a teenager herself in not much more than a year’s time, and she couldn’t help wondering whether she, too, might turn out to be difficult.

 

Angie’s mother was busy chopping carrots and made no response to the ritual remark. Mrs. Martindale didn’t cook much during the week but she always made an extra effort at weekends. She believed in making sure that her children ate lots of healthy food, even if she had to cram it into them in two days rather than spreading it out over seven.

 

“I’ll go unpack, then,” Angie said.

 

She went back up to her room, but instead of making a start on moving her clothes from the small suitcase to the chest of drawers she went to the window and looked out over the bindweed-tiled roof of the dead orchard. The green surface was still moving, and it was easy to imagine that the movements were slow waves and ripples on the surface of a heavy sea—or that invisible creatures really were moving over it, pushing it down where their big feet landed for a moment before moving on.

 

Angie tried to make a mental map of the positions of the wave-crests, expecting to find that they would be arranged in a series of neat rows, because that seemed the obvious pattern in which to plant apple trees in an orchard. She couldn’t make out any neat rows, though, whether running from the house to the back wall of the garden or across the garden from side wall to side wall. Indeed, when she tried to find some sense in the arrangement of the dead tree-tops, it was more reminiscent of a spiral than a grid.

 

“Perhaps that’s how they planted orchards back in the 1930s,” Angie murmured. “Perhaps they always have. Or maybe the hawthorn trees have grown so big by now that they’re taller than the dead apple-trees. The spiral’s just an illusion—like the idea that something invisible might be moving over the bindweed.”

 

She moved sideways to look through pieces of the old glass instead of the clearer ones. The impression of a spiral seemed to become even stronger, as did the suggestion that something was moving over—or perhaps under—the surface of the wind-stirred bindweed.

 

After she had put her clothes away Angie went back downstairs. “Has anyone in the village said anything about the cottage being haunted?” She asked her mother.

 

“No, precious,” her mother replied. “Why? Were you talking to a ghost just now? You talk to yourself so often at home that I didn’t think anything of it.”

 

“No,” Angie said. “I was just watching the invisible monsters scuttling and slithering about on the bushes in the back garden.”

 

“You’ll need to be careful, watching invisible monsters,” her mother said, without a trace of anxiety in her voice. “Sometimes, if you look hard enough, you begin to see them. That’s when you need to start worrying.”

 

Angie was glad that her mother trusted her enough to know that any talk of ghosts and invisible monsters was just a joke. Like her father, her mother often told her that she was an engineer’s daughter through and through.

 

“It’s okay,” Angie assured her mother. “If they put on enough weight to be seen, they’ll fall right through into the heart of the maze—and then the poisonous thorns will tear them to pieces, or make them sneeze themselves to death.”

 

“That’s why there are so few invisible monsters about nowadays, treasure,” her mother said. “It’s the allergies that get them, every time.”

 

* * * *

 

3.

 

Although the next day was Sunday, Angie and her mother were up early, eager to make a start on stripping the walls. They were each armed with a scraper and a bucket of soapy water.

 

By the time they’d been working for an hour in the lounge-dining room—where there were already big gaps in the paper left by the builders when they’d knocked down the partition wall—Angie had begun to wonder how she’d ever got the idea that stripping wallpaper might be fun. It was much harder work than she had expected, because the wallpaper was much more resistant to being stripped than she’d imagined. Whenever she seemed to have a nice fat strip that got broader as she pulled it would suddenly decide to narrow itself down. Whenever a piece seemed to be coming away cleanly it would suddenly stick hard and leave a stubborn patch behind.

 

Angie was interested to discover that there were three layers of paper, which had been laid one atop another. The apple-blossom paper had been put on top of an elaborately-textured paper whose colors ranged from beige to chestnut brown. Beneath that was something thicker and more fibrous, whose colors included royal blue and silver.

 

There was a certain pleasure in taking an edge turned up by the scraper between her fingernails and pulling steadily, hoping that a huge strip might come away. More often than not she’d be left with a piece in her fingertips that was only a little larger than the edge she’d turned up, but on the rare occasions when things worked out the strip would curl up in her hand, as if it were finally able to revert to the shape it wanted to be after a hundred years of being forced to lie flat.

 

Wherever the plaster underneath the paper was uneven, little islands of paper were left behind, clinging hard—and when the plaster wasn’t uneven to start with, it often became uneven as it cracked and crumbled under the pressure of the scrapers.

 

“Don’t worry about the plaster coming away, precious,” her mother told her, as a whole section melted into dust and miniature rubble. “Daddy will skim the whole surface before he paints it.”

 

“Do we have to do one room at a time?” Angie asked. “1 think I’d rather make a start in my bedroom.”

 

“It’s all got to come off eventually, I suppose. You can make a start upstairs if you like. It won’t be any easier, though, even if there aren’t so many layers.”

 

As predicted, the wallpaper in Angie’s bedroom proved just as hard to remove from the wall as the paper downstairs—although there were, indeed, fewer layers and the outer layer of paper wasn’t as dirty. Here, a relatively plain paper patterned in pink and blue had been laid over something very similar to the bottom layer in the downstairs room. On the other hand, because the bedroom was so much smaller than the lounge-dining room, the job seemed far less daunting. The ceiling was lower too, although Angie still had to stand on a chair to reach the higher parts of the wall.

 

Once she’d figured out that the paper became much easier to strip away after it had been soaked for some time, Angie doused the entire wall around the window while she was still working on the narrow strip between that wall and the doorway. By the time she’d cleared the strip, the paper around the window was ready to come off a little more easily.

 

The plaster underneath the wallpaper was more grey than white, and sometimes stained with yellow and brown. It had occasional pencil marks on it, which the first of the two paper-hangers— presumably working long before the 1930s—must have used in calculating how much paper he would use and how it would need to be cut.

 

In mid-afternoon, when she returned to work after spending a leisurely break reading on her bed, Angie peeled back an unusually satisfying strip to find more markings on the plaster, in black ink rather than pencil. They seemed to have been made by a fine brush rather than a pen.

 

At first, Angie thought that the first drawing she uncovered must be a doodle of some kind—the kind of thing her father drew absent-mindedly on the message-pad beside the phone, consisting of a series of interlocking shapes or an expanding spiral. It looked like something that the wallpaper-hanger might have done in an idle moment, while taking a short break and staring out of the window.

 

Because bits of plaster tended to come away with the wallpaper, or crumble under the scraper, some of the lines had been lost or blurred. Even so, it soon became obvious that the drawing was more extensive and more elaborate than Angie had initially imagined. It was a spiral of sorts, but instead of approximating closely to a series of circles, the line wandered eccentrically, so that each successive cyclic sweep of the brush became more peculiar in shape.

 

Then she discovered the second drawing, which seemed to be a slight variation on the same theme. Again, instead of trying as hard as possible to make each loop of the spiral follow a near-circular path, the line began to wander as soon as it moved away from the central dot, and its wandering became more adventurous with each loop. Seen in isolation, this drawing too might have been mistaken for a mere doodle, but seeing the two of them together gave the impression that they were two attempts to produce a particular design: sketches aiming for a particular result.

 

Because the divergences from circularity became more exaggerated the further each line extended from the centre, each whole pattern ended up looking more like an amoeba than a coiled watch-spring. Both patterns reminded Angie quite forcefully of the puzzle-book mazes she liked so much—except, of course, that a spiral had no side-turnings. If the space enclosed by the looping line were regarded as a path, it was impossible to get lost, because all the pencil tracing the way out had to do was keep going, around and around and around, untroubled by all the kinks in the route.

 

Scraping away with increasing urgency, Angie soon uncovered parts of a third design, and then the edges of a fourth and a fifth. She immediately moved over to the other side of the window and began scraping there. It didn’t take long to determine that there were two more spirals there, making seven in all, but the artist seemed to have been less comfortable working on that side.

 

Angie knew that it would take time to uncover all seven sketches completely—especially if she did it carefully enough to minimize the damage to the plaster—but she was in no doubt that each of the seven was subtly different in shape from all the others.

 

Angie looked back at the first spiral she had found—the only one she had so far uncovered in its entirety. The line had been broken in numerous places where plaster had flaked away, but it was easy enough to complete the spiral in her mind if she looked at it intently enough. She found, however, that when she did stare hard enough to reconstruct the pattern in her mind it seemed to acquire a kind of flowing movement, as if it were continually attempting to change its own shape. It was an interesting optical illusion—and it helped her to guess what it was that she was looking at.

 

She ran downstairs then, shouting; “Mum! Come and see what I’ve found.”

 

Her mother put down her own scraper, without bothering to pretend that she was annoyed by the interruption, and followed Angie up to the bedroom.

 

“It’s just graffiti, treasure,” she said, having glanced at the near-complete sketch and the other six fragments. “People have always scrawled on walls. You see it all over the place in Rome, from the finest palaces to the ancient sewers and catacombs—you get it in all the cathedrals of Europe. The temptation to scrawl must be even stronger when people are about to hang wallpaper and cover the plaster over.”

 

“No, you don’t understand,” Angie told her. “Look out of the window.”

 

Her mother looked out of the window. “What am I looking for, treasure?” she asked, after a few seconds.

 

“The old orchard,” Angie said impatiently. “The apple trees weren’t planted in rows. They were planted in some kind of wonky spiral pattern—a spiral that gets less and less circular as it expands.”

 

“I can’t see anything,” her mother told her, after a few more seconds. “I can’t tell whether the bumps in the bindweed are apple trees or hawthorn, or something else entirely—there’s no pattern at all, so far as I can see. Anyway, there are seven drawings and there’s only one garden.”

 

“That’s just it,” Angie said. “Somebody was trying to draw the pattern, but they needed seven goes—maybe more, if there are others I haven’t uncovered yet.”

 

“I don’t think so, precious,” her mother said, sympathetically. “The bottom layer of paper here is the same type as the bottom layer downstairs. It’s Victorian, I think—the downstairs rooms were decorated again before the apple-blossom was pasted over it by the man who planted the orchard. The trees weren’t there when that wall was last bare.”

 

Angie hadn’t thought of that. She frowned.

 

“Keep up the good work,” her mother said, as she made her way back to the door. “I’ll do a little bit more, then we’ll leave it for today. We can go for a walk before dinner, if you like.”

 

It wasn’t until her mother was downstairs again, scraping away, that Angie wondered whether there might have been some kind of spiral formation in the garden before it was replanted as a orchard, and whether the layout of the trees, like the sketches, might have been an attempt to reproduce it.

 

They did go for a walk, heading away from the village along the road that ran past the front gate, but they didn’t go far. They were both too tired. Somewhat to Angie’s disappointment—although it was only to be expected, given that they were moving away from Well House—they didn’t meet Mrs. Lamb.

 

Later, as they ate dinner, Angie said: “How long has Mrs. Lamb lived in the cottage down the road?”

 

“I don’t know, treasure,” her mother replied. “Since she retired, I suppose—maybe since the 1980s. Why?”

 

“I just wondered whether she knew what the back garden was like before it was turned into an orchard.”

 

“Whether it had trees planted in a spiral pattern, you mean? It’s not likely—but I think she retired here because she knew the area. If she didn’t spend her childhood hereabouts, you might find someone in the village who did, but I doubt that you’ll find anyone alive now who can remember anything earlier than the 1930s.”

 

“What about the local library?” Angie asked.

 

“What passes for a local library in these parts is a van that comes around once a fortnight,” her mother observed. “There must be parish records somewhere, I suppose, but wherever they are, they’ll only be lists of births, marriages, and deaths—nothing about gardens. Does it matter?”

 

“I suppose not,” Angie said. “If there aren’t any more sketches on the other side of the window, whoever drew them was probably left-handed.”

 

“That’s a clever deduction,” her mother said. “Your father will be proud of you. You’ll be able to show him the designs when he comes up on Friday—by then you’ll have the whole room scraped clean.”

 

“I’ll finish tomorrow,” Angie predicted, confidently.

 

“Maybe you can. The big room downstairs will take a little longer, though. Do you think you can bear to help me out with it when you’ve finished your room, or would you rather do Cathy’s room?”

 

“I’ll do Cathy’s,” Angie said.

 

“So you can be on your own?”

 

Angie hadn’t realized soon enough that the question was a kind of trap. “I’ll help you with the living room if you want me to,” she was quick to say—although she realized immediately afterwards was that what her mother really wanted was for her to want to. “That might be better,” she added—too late.

 

“No, you’re right,” her mother said. “We’ll probably drive one another crazy if we’re under one another’s feet the whole time. Best to work on two fronts anyway—we’ll see quite enough of one another when we’re not actually scraping, I dare say.”

 

On the following day they continued to work in separate rooms, but on the Tuesday Angie made a point of helping her mother in the lounge-dining room before starting work on Cathy’s bedroom. When they had finished downstairs, her mother made a start on the master bedroom, for the sake of “a change of scenery”.

 

Because Angie was able to finish Cathy’s room on Wednesday, she and her mother were able to spend Thursday morning working together to finish off the larger bedroom. By that time, however, Angie was only working in sporadic spells, most of which lasted little more than half an hour. She spent the rest of the time on other pursuits. She finished off the puzzle-book, although the other puzzles weren’t nearly as fascinating as the mazes. “That’s an engineer’s mind,” her father had told her, proudly. “The words and the numbers are just things you need—all the beauty is in the spatial constructs.”

 

“Did you ever get a chance to ask Mrs. Lamb about the back garden?” her mother asked, as they walked past the gate of Well House on Thursday afternoon. They were on the way to the village for the third time to stock up on groceries. They had to lay in supplies for the new arrivals expected on the following day, because it would be Good Friday.

 

“Yes, I bumped into her yesterday,” Angie said, innocently. Although she still wasn’t supposed to leave the garden, she had spent more than an hour hanging about in the lane outside Well House before Mrs. Lamb had put in an appearance outdoors, creating the opportunity for her to shout a greeting and strike up a conversation.

 

“What did she say?”

 

“She did grow up not far from here, but she never saw Orchard Cottage in the days before it was Orchard Cottage. She’s heard talk, though.”

 

“And what does the talk say?”

 

“Not very much. Before there was an orchard the people in the cottage used to grow vegetables there, and herbs.”

 

“Nothing planted in spirals, then? No fancy rockeries, or anything of that sort?”

 

“No,” Angie admitted. “Nothing of that sort.”

 

“No ghosts, either? No resident witches?”

 

“No witches,” Angie confirmed. “As for ghosts, she said that everywhere’s haunted, The dead can’t do us any harm if we pay them no attention, she said—her exact words. She didn’t laugh at me, though, the way some people might. When she warned me off last Saturday, she meant it. She does seem to have the idea that there’s something, nasty under the bindweed, even though she can’t say what it is.”

 

“Just thorns and dirt, precious,” her mother assured her. “Even if it doesn’t make you sneeze or bring you out in a rash, it’ll make you absolutely filthy. Better stay out of it, even if it’s not haunted. You’ve been copying those sketches, I see. Daddy will be pleased. He’s very fond of diagrams.”

 

Angie had left her drawing-pad shut, so her mother couldn’t have seen her sketches by accident, but she didn’t protest that her mother had been snooping because she knew that Mrs. Martindale would retaliate by asking her exactly where she’d “bumped into” Mrs. Lamb.

 

“They’ll be painted over soon,” Angie explained. “I wanted to keep a record. The copies aren’t very good, though. The spirals loop around anti-clockwise, and it’s easier to draw anti-clockwise spirals left-handed than right-handed, especially if you’re naturally left-handed. I’m right-handed. Maybe I was wrong about him being left-handed, and that’s why he never got the design exactly right.”

 

“How do you know he didn’t?” Her mother asked. “Come to that, how do you know he wasn’t a she?”

 

“I suppose I don’t,” Angie conceded, although she was certain in her own mind on the first point, at least.

 

“Maybe the sketches on the walls really are preliminary sketches,” her mother suggested. “Maybe he went on to do a painting, once he’d had enough practice. Maybe he got it right when he used charcoal on the canvas. That kind of painting would have seemed a bit weird back in the nineteenth century, though, when they hadn’t any idea what modern art would be like.”

 

“I don’t think he ever did a painting,” Angie said, “or even a drawing on paper.” She was quick to add, before the question was put to her: “Not that I can know that for sure, of course.”

 

“It seems a bit disappointing to me,” her mother said. “It would have been so much more interesting to uncover a long-lost mural of the battle of Trafalgar, or an inscription saying Queen Victoria slept here.”

 

“That would have been in Cathy’s room,” Angie said. “From there you can see the road. Queen Victoria wouldn’t have wanted a room overlooking a vegetable garden, would she?”

 

“Queens are funny like that,” her mother agreed. “Are you looking forward to seeing Daddy and Cathy, after being cooped up in the cottage for a whole week with your mum?”

 

“It’ll be nice to see them,” Angie admitted, carefully. “But it’s been an interesting week—and I expect you’ll be looking forward to seeing Daddy too, even if he does have a teenager in tow.”

 

“It won’t be as quiet, that’s for sure.” her mother said, glancing disapprovingly into the almost-empty car park of The Elms as they passed by. “Cathy ought to be grateful that you’ve done her room, but she won’t let on—and I dare say she’ll find plenty of things to complain about. If she becomes unbearable, I suppose I can always give her a pair of scissors and tell her to make a start on the orchard.”

 

“She’ll claim that she can’t do it because of her hay fever,” Angie pointed out. “You might be able to change her mind by offering her the use of the chainsaw—except that the only thing worse than a bad-tempered teenager is a bad-tempered teenager with a chainsaw.”

 

“Tell that one to your father,” her mother said. “But wait until Cathy’s well out of earshot before you do.”

 

* * * *

 

4.

 

Angie’s father and sister didn’t arrive at Orchard Cottage until mid-afternoon on Good Friday, but the fact that they were due to arrive combined with the fact that it was an official holiday to provide a good excuse for not working too hard in the morning. Although the wallpaper was almost all stripped, there was still a lot of cleaning to do, but Angie’s mother decided that it could wait a little longer.

 

After five days, Angie felt that she had done enough soaking and scraping to last her a lifetime, although she was looking forward to helping out with the painting, which would be more creative.

 

She wasn’t entirely happy about the prospect of her unexpected discovery being plastered and painted over, but she knew that it had to be done. There was no way that the walls of her bedroom could be left bare and crumbling. It was partly for that reason that she had what effort she could to preserve the mysterious finding by trying to copy the designs on to sheets of paper in her drawing pad. She decided to use the Friday morning to make one last attempt to get the drawings exactly right.

 

Because her mother was idling too, she came up to Angie’s room to see what her precious daughter was doing. Knowing that her mother had already seen the drawings, Angie didn’t try to hide them.

 

“We used to have tracing paper when I was a girl,” her mother said, when she saw what Angie had done. “I don’t suppose there’s much demand for it, now that we’ve got photocopiers and scanners.”

 

Angie had already tried to trace the drawings using ordinary printer paper, but had proved too difficult. She didn’t bother to mention it.

 

Her mother joined her at the window and imitated her, first looking out through the diamond-shaped miniature panes, then looking carefully at all seven of the fully-exposed sketches on the wall.

 

“I still can’t see anything out there that looks remotely like these drawings, treasure,” she said. “The lumps under the bindweed seem quite random to me.”

 

“Perhaps it’s just my imagination,” Angie said, anticipating the suggestion.

 

“Perhaps it is, treasure. But that’s good. Imagination is a precious gift, especially when you’re eleven. When you’re younger, you haven’t really got enough ideas and images in store to make the most of it, and when you’re older....”

 

“You turn into a teenager,” Angie said.

 

“That as well,” her mother agreed. “What I was going to say is that when you’re older—and it lasts much longer than being a teenager—your horizons get narrower. You concentrate on the ordinary things. You start not being able to see the forest for the trees—or the pattern of the orchard for the bindweed that’s overgrown it. It’s too easy to see appearances, and to hard to see things as they really are.”

 

Angie reached the end of a spiral and stopped drawing. “Are you all right, mum?” she asked.

 

“Fine,” her mother assured her. “Engineers don’t have a monopoly on little flights of philosophical fancy, you know— schoolteachers can do it too.” She turned round then and left the room.

 

Angie carried on drawing, moving her pencil as carefully as she would have done if she’d been solving a maze. She eventually managed to produce copies of all seven diagrams that seemed almost correct—except, of course, that none of the seven was really correct, as a representation of whatever lay beneath the thicket that now occupied the area behind the house. Given that the original artist seemed to have had so much trouble getting the effect that he—or she—wanted, Angie thought that her efforts were just as good as his.

 

It was easier to compare the view from her window to her own drawings than it was the compare it to the sketches on the wall because she could place the sheets of paper flat on the older diamonds, one by one, while peering through the newer ones directly alongside. It was very difficult to figure out exactly where the discrepancy was between the drawings and the actual spiral, though. The weather was still breezy, and the bindweed overlaying the bushes and brambles was moving about restlessly. The illusory movement in the spiral drawings might have helped, if it had only matched the stirrings of the wind, but it didn’t; indeed, it seemed perversely contrary, always working in opposition.

 

It was even easier now to imagine that there were invisible creatures wandering over the surface of the overgrown orchard, or moving about beneath the bindweed, but they no longer seemed as monstrous as they had when Angie had first imagined them. It was easy enough to picture them as ordinary animals of an ordinary size— sheep, perhaps, or dogs—or even as people, more likely children than adults. It was easy enough, too, to imagine small people wandering in the gaps between the lines of her spirals, as if they were lost in a maze. Even though they couldn’t really be lost, Angie realized, they might still feel lost. If they didn’t know that the path would eventually lead them out, if only they stuck to it stubbornly, they could easily become convinced that they were wandering hopelessly around in wonky circles.

 

When her father and Cathy finally arrived Angie tried to put the puzzle out of her mind for a while, but she couldn’t help dragging her father upstairs at the first possible opportunity to show him what she’d uncovered.

 

“That’s interesting,” he said obligingly. “I wonder when that first layer of wallpaper was stuck on. Before nineteen hundred, probably—more than a century ago.”

 

“The person who drew them must have been looking out of the window,” Angie said. “What do you suppose he could have been looking at?”

 

“Staring into infinity, constructing mandalas,” her father replied. “He must have been left-handed, you know.”

 

“I figured that out,” Angie was quick to say. “The left-handed bit I mean. What’s a mandala?”

 

“Just a design—anything like a maze or spiral, however simple. There’s a famous psychoanalyst called Jung, who thought that they were reflections of something fundamental in the unconscious mind—maybe ways of symbolizing space, or time; I’m not sure.”

 

“I thought it might be something in the garden,” Angie said.

 

Her father obligingly looked down. “I can’t imagine what it could have been,” he said. “Certainly can’t tell now, with all that convolvulus getting in the way.”

 

Angie knew that convolvulus was just a fancy term for bindweed. She gave up on her father at that point, but she made another bid for support when she finally persuaded Cathy to come in and take a look.

 

“I’ve seen better tags on railway bridges and tube trains,” was Cathy’s judgment of the drawings on the wall.

 

“Look out of the window,” Angie said. “Try to match the lines to the pattern of the treetops.”

 

“There aren’t any treetops,” Cathy objected. “There’s just that green stuff with the white flowers, drowning everything.”

 

“You can still see vague shapes underneath it,” Angie persisted.

 

“I guess,” Cathy said. “You could imagine it as a miniature model of the downs, if you tried hard—except that the real hills don’t sway like that.”

 

“That’s just the invisible monsters walking about on it,” Angie said, with a sigh of disappointment.

 

“Right,” Cathy said. “So that’s, what the wind is: invisible monsters wandering back and forth. Good job I found out before I sit my GCSEs.”

 

“Actually, they’re not that monstrous,” Angie said, resentfully. “They’re just ghosts, really. Animals, mostly, except for the boy. You can hear him at night, you know, crying—and sometimes you can hear his footsteps running over the roof. He’s looking for something, but I don’t know what. Maybe you’ll remind him of his mother and he’ll come to sit on your bed.”

 

“You think you can scare me with silly ghost stories?” Cathy said, incredulously. “Listen, kid—I know all about ghosts. Dad says they can’t exist, because if they did there’d be at least six ghosts hanging around for every living person, most of them left over from prehistoric times—but what he doesn’t take into account is that only a few unlucky spirits get trapped here on Earth, while the rest make it through to the afterlife. If there’s a little boy ghost hanging around here, he’s far more likely to be interested in you than me. Misery loves company, they say.”

 

“Maybe he’s not that little,” Angie countered. “Maybe he’s more of a teenager, still yearning for his first kiss after a hundred years of loneliness. He’ll be in your room tonight, there’s no doubt about it—watching you.”

 

Cathy decided to laugh instead of getting angry; she was right about Angie’s inability to scare her by making things up. “In that case,” she said, “it’s up to me to help him out, isn’t it? You’re a weird kid, Ange—but I have to admit that you’re pretty good with a scraper. I’m glad I don’t have to do my room. Do you think Mum will be crazy enough to trust you with a paintbrush next week?”

 

“Only in your room,” Angie replied. “Don’t worry—I’ll be sure to cover up all the magic mandalas on the walls.”

 

“There aren’t any whatsits on my walls,” Cathy said, walking straight into the trap that Angie had set.

 

“There could be, now that I’ve practiced drawing them,” Angie said. “But you’ll never know, once the walls are painted over, what anyone might have drawn or written there—or what they might be for.”

 

“Sticks and stones might break my bones,” Cathy retorted, serenely, as she went back to her own room, “but the ghosts of little boys and invisible magical graffiti will never hurt me.”

 

The topic came up again at dinner, this time raised by Angie’s mother—who was trying to help rather than to add to the rain of mockery.

 

“Angie asked Mrs. Lamb what was out back before the orchard was planted,” Mrs. Martindale told her husband. “Apparently it was a vegetable garden and a herb garden. Is there any possibility, do you think, that there are still herb seeds lying dormant beneath all that rubbish? I quite like the idea of having a herb garden.”

 

“I don’t think so,” Angie’s father replied. “It wouldn’t matter if there were. I’ll have to use weed-killer to kill off the roots of the hawthorns and the brambles once the actual growth’s cleared away. We’ll never get a lawn otherwise. What sort of herb garden was it, Angie?”

 

“Is there more than one sort?” Angie asked.

 

“There used to be. Your mother is thinking about herbs used in cooking—thyme, fennel, rosemary and the like. There was a time, though, when people grew herbs for medicinal purposes.”

 

“Witches, you mean?” Cathy put in. “Must have been a lot of them around here, since the village is named after them.”

 

“It’s not,” Angie said, quick to score a point. “It’s named after wych-elms.”

 

“Oh yeah?” said Cathy. “So what are wych-elms named after, then?”

 

“It’s possible that people who had herb gardens might have been more likely to be accused of witchcraft than people who didn’t,” their father said, cutting off the argument, “but that would have been back in the seventeenth century. If there was a medicinal herb garden behind the cottage in the 1920s, before the house became Orchard Cottage, its owner would have been perfectly respectable. Anyway, the Romans used to think that hawthorn was a charm against sorcery, so any witchcraft in our garden must have been obliterated long ago, along with the apple-trees.”

 

“That’s a pity,” Cathy said. “It might have explained Angie’s ghost.”

 

“What ghost?” Mrs. Martindale asked, while her husband frowned.

 

“Nothing,” Angie was quick to say. “I just made it up to tease Cathy. She started it.”

 

“I did not!” Cathy retorted, evidently feeling unjustly accused. “She started it, with her silly graffiti. She says there’s a little boy haunting the place. I just thought that if there’s a witch’s garden buried underneath all those brambles, it might be the ghost of some child sacrifice whose innocent blood had been used to fertilize the ground where the plants used to make love potions once grew.”

 

“Where do you get such nasty ideas?” her mother complained.

 

“She’s a teenager,” her father said, dismissively.

 

“I never said any of that,” Angie added. “The witches and the human sacrifice were all Cathy’s idea.”

 

“Unlike the invisible monsters and the magic graffiti,” Cathy pointed out.

 

“That was just a joke,” Mrs. Martindale said.

 

“Well, it’s probably best to get these things into the open and out of the way as soon as possible,” Mr. Martindale said, deliberately making light of it all. “We’ve bought an old ruined house built in the seventeenth century, which has been left to lie derelict for more than fifty years—exactly the sort of place that generates talk of hauntings. If you can cook up a good enough story between the two of you, my darlings, maybe we can get the place on TV, in one of those shows where people walk around in the dark, lit by infra-red, with glowing eyes, squawking in terror every time the director drops a paper-clip. I suppose I’d better take some photographs of those drawings on Angie’s wall. That’s the sort of thing the TV people like—the camera can zoom in on them over and over again, while they spin around suggestively. The entire audience will be hypnotized into seeing ghosts.”

 

“I never thought of that,” Angie said, suddenly feeling stupid.

 

“Getting the house on TV?” her father said.

 

“No—taking photographs. I wasted all that time trying to copy them by hand.”

 

“That’s because you don’t have a mobile phone yet,” Cathy put in, to emphasize the fact that she did have one. “If you’d borrowed Mum’s, you could have sent us pictures when you first found them.”

 

“The time wasn’t wasted, love,” her father said. “Drawing’s good for hand and eye co-ordination, and very useful to an engineer. You should draw more.”

 

“Have you got your digital camera with you?” Angie asked. “Can you take the photos anyway?”

 

“I brought it down to take family photographs,” her father said. “And the house too, of course. I’ll certainly make a record of your discovery—and anything else we might unearth.”

 

“You don’t really want the girls to go on one of those TV shows, do you, Rob?” Mrs. Martindale asked.

 

“Of course not. Our girls are far too sensible to believe in ghosts, and far too honest to pretend. I was joking.”

 

“Pity,” Cathy said. “The story was getting better every time we told it.”

 

“That’s how these silly things develop,” her father said. “Every teller adds an extra twist. The sooner we get the walls painted and the back garden sorted, the sooner we’ll be able to see the cottage for what it really is, and what it deserves to be: our home-away-from-home, a place to rest and recuperate from the stress of city life.”

 

“A place to get bored to death instead of scared to death,” Cathy added. “Personally, I’d rather be on TV, faking ghosts.”

 

* * * *

 

5.

 

On Saturday Angie’s father drove the family to a large supermarket just outside Chichester. They stocked up enough food to see them all through the holiday weekend and make sure that Angie and her mother didn’t starve in the remainder of the week, when they’d be abandoned again. Mr. and Mrs. Martindale also bought lots of other oddments for the house, and items that would help with the cleaning and decorating.

 

After lunch, there was supposed to be an all-out assault on the last of the wallpaper stripping, but among all the things they had bought no one had remembered to include a fourth scraper. Angie argued that she’d already done her share and more during the week, and that Cathy had a lot of catching up to do, so she was let off. Her delight in the unusual experience of watching Cathy work soon faded away, and she began to feel slightly uncomfortable being the only idle person is a busy house, so she went out into the front garden.

 

Mrs. Lamb, who must have been taking a walk, had just paused in the road to inspect the house. “Hello Angela,” she said. “How’s the decorating coming along?”

 

“Daddy’s going to start the plastering tomorrow,” Angie told her. “He’ll try to get it done before he goes back to Kingston, so that Mummy and I can start painting on Tuesday.”

 

“It’s strange to see the place looking lived-in,” Mrs. Lamb observed. “I’ve got used to seeing it as a ruin.”

 

“I found some drawings behind the wallpaper in my bedroom,” Angie told her. “Spirals, but bent out of shape. They’re beside the window—as if someone were trying to draw something that was in the garden before it was an orchard.”

 

“Is that why you asked me if I knew what was there before the orchard?” Mrs. Lamb asked.

 

“Yes,” Angie admitted. “You’d already said there was something nasty in there—I thought you might know something.”

 

“No,” Mrs. Lamb said, thoughtfully. “Nothing specific, at any rate. I mentioned it in the village, though. Some of the regulars in The Elms said they remembered talk of a ghost—a little boy—but they’re the type who’d make up that sort of thing just to get a rise out of you.”

 

“Cathy and I made up a ghost of our own,” Angie told her. “He’s a boy, too. I think he might be trapped in the old orchard because he can’t find his way out of the spiral, even though it’s not a real maze. All he has to do is keep on going, but he doesn’t know that, because he just seems to be going round and round and getting nowhere.”

 

Mrs. Lamb looked at her sharply, then. The story had awakened her interest, as it had been intended to do, but this didn’t seem to be the right kind of interest.

 

“You shouldn’t joke about things like that,” Mrs. Lamb said. “You shouldn’t make up stories, any more than those old fools in The Elms. Sometimes, spirits do become trapped between this world and the next, and it’s very frightening for them.”

 

Angie could see by the pained expression on Mrs. Lamb’s face that she had accidentally touched a nerve. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Our story doesn’t make sense, anyway—if the boy who made the drawings had been the one who got trapped in the maze, he’d know that it was just a spiral, not a real maze.”

 

“Never you mind about ghosts,” the old lady said. “It’s not them you need to look out for.” Angie could tell that as soon as the final sentence was out of her mouth, the old lady wished she hadn’t said it.

 

“What do we need to look out for?” Angie asked, immediately.

 

“Townsfolk on motorbikes,” Mrs. Lamb replied, sharply— although Angie was quite certain that it wasn’t what she’d previously had in mind.

 

“No, really,” Angie said.

 

“Seeing things that aren’t there,” the old lady retorted, just as sharply—except that this time she did seem to mean it.

 

Some day, Angie thought—perhaps a long time ago now—Mrs. Lamb must have seen something that wasn’t there. “What kind of herb garden was behind the house before the orchard?” she was quick to ask, to keep the conversation going. “Was it for cooking, or medicines—or magic?”

 

“What an imagination you’ve got,” Mrs. Lamb observed, grimly. “For cooking, I expect.” The old lady’s manner suggested that there was still something that she was deliberately not saying.

 

“It wouldn’t matter anyway,” Angie said, stubbornly plugging on. “Dad says that hawthorn wards off sorcery, so any magic there ever was in the orchard is dead now, just like the apple trees.”

 

Mrs. Lamb tried to smile, and almost managed it. “I expect that’s right,” she said. “But you’d best remember what I said. Don’t go looking for things you don’t want to see.”

 

“Maybe I do want to see them,” Angie said, teasingly.

 

“If we only had to see what we wanted to see,” Mrs. Lamb retorted, “the world would be a nicer place. What I should have said was that you shouldn’t look too hard in places where there might be things you definitely wouldn’t want to see. Curiosity killed the cat, remember.”

 

Having said that, Mrs. Lamb turned on her heel and marched off in the direction of Well House. She didn’t give Angie the opportunity to mention that cats were also supposed to have nine lives, and could probably afford a certain amount of curiosity. There was nothing to be done then but to go round to the back of the house and stare hard at the overgrown orchard, to see what might be seen.

 

In order to get a better view, Angie climbed up on to the side wall of the property. She wasn’t sure that she could keep her balance if she stood up on it, so she contented herself with sitting down. That left her at just the right height to look out over the waves of greenery from the same sort of viewpoint she’d have had if she’d been on a harbor at high tide, looking out over the waves of a wind-tossed sea.

 

This view was quite different from the one from the bedroom window. There was no point in trying to find patterns in the waves of the sort for which the boy who’d made the drawings must have been searching. Here, the bumps in the green carpet where the crowd of the trees pushed up against the bindweed stood out purely by virtue of their height, not their distance from one another. Nor were the movements of their leaves blurred by distance; from here, it was obvious that the wind was stirring the foliage, and that each individual bump was quivering. It was equally obvious that the regions in between weren’t being depressed by the passage of invisible bodies. It was easy to see the hawthorn branches and brambles that protruded through the bindweed in hundreds of different places, so it was obvious that the greenery wasn’t a single oceanic mass at all, but a confusion of different things.

 

Angie looked hard. The bumps on the apparent surface were squat and rounded, impossible to imagine as people or animals, but it was possible to imagine creatures hiding behind them or moving beneath them—except that they only seemed to move when she wasn’t looking directly at them. Angie knew that it was an illusion. She knew that the movements glimpsed from the corners of her eyes were just branches of different kinds shifted in different ways by the wind. The reason she could imagine animate creatures making those movements was that the information transmitted to her brain by her eye was incomplete, allowing her brain to make things up. She was an engineer’s daughter, after all. Her father was always enthusiastic to explain those sorts of things.

 

That wasn’t the point, though. She wanted to know what kind of creatures she wasn’t really seeing. She wanted to know what it was that Mrs. Lamb had avoided saying. So she tried very hard to see exactly what wasn’t there. She tried to work out exactly what her brain might want to invent, if it were given a license to do so.

 

Then she guessed, and giggled.

 

“There are fairies at the bottom of the garden,” she quoted. That was what Mrs. Lamb had been too embarrassed to mention. It wasn’t ghosts that lurked in impenetrable thickets, in the old lady’s mind, but mischievous fairy folk.

 

Angie was eleven years old, and she knew better than to think of fairies as tiny people with butterfly wings. It wasn’t the kind of fairies that featured in children’s fairy tales and their illustrations that Mrs. Lamb had been thinking about. She had been imagining tricky things that moved in the borderlands of existence as well as the borderlands of sight: things that teased belief as well as sight.

 

“Well, if that’s all they are,” Angie said, “there really isn’t any need to be afraid, is there?”

 

“What’s that, treasure?” her mother’s voice put in. Her mother had opened the back door of the cottage, perhaps to look for Angie and perhaps to let in some fresh air.

 

“Nothing,” Angie said. “I’m just going upstairs to my room.”

 

That was, indeed, what she had decided to do. She wanted to take another look at the dead orchard from her bedroom window, to see if she could make any more sense out of the designs drawn beside it, now that she had made her new guess as to what it all might mean.

 

She ran up the stairs, and went into her grey-walled room, which now seemed to be waiting to be rescued from its own unfinished state. It deserved to be made into a thoroughly human habitation again, by the careful repair of its crumbling plaster and the application of two layers of cheerfully-colored paint, and it expected to be given what it deserved.

 

“All in good time,” Angie told the walls.

 

She took her drawings from the drawer of her bedside table and took them to the window. She looked out intently, staring as hard as she could, and then looked at one of the drawings. She repeated the procedure with another, and then another.

 

The artist never got it quite right, she reminded herself. Not while he was drawing on the wall, any rate. None of these is exactly accurate—hut there’s a wonky spiral in there somewhere, if only I can figure out how to see it and draw. It’s difficult because it’s a fairy thing—a tricky thing. Maybe it is a kind of trap. Maybe there is someone in there, after all, who can’t go on to wherever he’s supposed to go, because he’s trapped in the fairy ring. Even though he knows that, in theory, all he has to do to get out is to keep on going, he can’t actually do it because the fairies keep tricking him, the way fairies do.

 

It occurred to her, after she’d finished formulating the thought, that she now had it firmly fixed in her mind that the unknown artist was a boy. What Cathy had said about him being a human sacrifice whose blood had been used to fertilize a witch’s garden was nonsense, because there was no witches’ garden, but he had been trapped there nevertheless. The orchard hadn’t failed because the apple trees had been planted in poisoned ground; it had failed because it had been planted on a fairy ring—which was actually a fairy spiral.

 

That was nonsense too, of course—but it was a different kind of nonsense. It couldn’t make the kind of sense that an engineer’s thinking could recognize, but it might make a kind of sense that the artist standing by the window, looking out through the old lattice with its ill-matched fragments of distorted glass, had recognized quite naturally. Even her father had conceded that what he called mandalas might reflect something basic in the unconscious mind— something that hovered on the brink of perception and believability, teasingly.

 

Angie put the completed drawings back in the drawer and took out her pad and a soft pencil. She took them back to the window, and looked out. At first she looked through the cluster of new diamonds, but then she moved her head sideways, to look out through the older glass, which blurred the image of the green waves just a little bit more.

 

She began to sketch, trying to find the right eccentric spiral, the right mandala. She wanted to see the trap as it really was. She wasn’t in the least afraid, because she thought that if she could only succeed in making an accurate map, she would know exactly how to get out of the trap should she ever find herself in it.

 

Her first attempt was a dismal failure, worse than the examples scribbled in the yielding plaster. Her second was no better—but she could feel that the practice was doing her good. She was getting a feel for the work now. She was beginning to see what was really there, and beginning to guide her hand in such a way as to reproduce what she saw on paper.

 

She carried on drawing, relentlessly.

 

* * * *

 

6.

 

When Angie’s mother finally called her down to dinner, she took her best effort yet downstairs to show her parents.

 

“It’s not quite right,” she told them, “but it’s very nearly right. I don’t think the light’s quite right at this time of day. I’ll try again later, when the sun’s gone down.”

 

Her mother looked at the drawing, and then passed it on to Mr. Martindale. Angie could see that they were gathering themselves to be complimentary, although they wouldn’t really mean it. They couldn’t see what it was that she had almost drawn. To them, it was just a glorified doodle.

 

“It’s a load of crap,” was Cathy’s verdict. “If you’re going to be an artist, you might as well try to be a real artist first, before you settle for passing off scribbles as abstracts.”

 

“Not these days,” her father observed. “These days, you might as well skip the drawing entirely and go straight to pickled sharks, unmade beds and video loops.”

 

“You were wrong about the ghost, by the way,” Angie said to Cathy. “He wasn’t killed. He just got lost. He knows that he’s in a spiral rather than a maze, but he still can’t get out because he doesn’t have an accurate map. It’s not just a matter of going on walking, you see—you have to be able to see through the tricks.”

 

“What are you talking about?” Cathy demanded.

 

“I’m not at all sure that he’s a ghost at all,” Angie said, blithely. “At any rate, he’s not the sort of ghost they hunt for in those TV shows. The TV people are looking for the wrong things, so they never get to see anything clearly.”

 

“You’re off your head,” Cathy said dismissively.

 

“Don’t be nasty,” her father instructed. “What should they be looking for, precious? What are you talking about?”

 

Angie hesitated, knowing that it wouldn’t be a good idea to try talking to her father about fairies.

 

“I don’t think they’ve got a name,” she said. “In fact, I think that’s what they are: the kind of thing you can’t put a name to. Mrs. Lamb wouldn’t, when I talked to her this afternoon. She believes in spirits that get trapped here, and she believes in something else, but she couldn’t say exactly what it was, because it doesn’t have a name. Something you can’t see unless you look really hard, and might wish you hadn’t seen if you did.”

 

“Stark raving bonkers,” Cathy observed.

 

“No,” said Mr. Martindale, making an obvious effort. “I think I understand what Angie’s getting at. From what your mother tells me, Mrs. Lamb’s a country person, born and bred. She hasn’t always lived and worked in the same place, but she’s always lived in the same area. She taught village children in a village school. She’s never lived in a town, let alone a city. She’s an intelligent and sensible woman, no doubt, but she’s never entirely got away from the folklore she grew up with. She doesn’t believe it, exactly, but she doesn’t reject it either. People of that sort don’t put names to such things, because that would compel them to think about them more clearly, and come to a firmer decision about whether to take them seriously or not. But we’re not like that, are we? So what are we talking about, Angie? Fairies?”

 

Angie was surprised to hear her father make that guess, even though she knew how smart he was.

 

“You might call them that, I suppose,” she said, serenely. “Not the silly kind, though. Not the kind those two little girls cut out of soap ads so that they could fake photographs.”

 

“What little girls?” her mother asked.

 

“She means the girls who faked the Cottingley photographs that fooled Conan Doyle,” her father supplied, helpfully. “Are we talking about sinister fairies, love—sly things that steal the milk and knock things over in the kitchen while everyone’s asleep?”

 

“No,” said Angie, defensively.

 

“No?” her father echoed. Then, like the intelligent man he was, he looked at her drawing again, and studied it more carefully. “Ah!” he said. “I’m getting it now—the right folklore, that is. Tales of traps where people are becalmed in time—tales of wanderers who stray over some invisible barrier, into a world where time stands still, then return home to find that years have passed, or centuries.”

 

“Kids’ stuff,” Cathy said, scornfully.

 

“Not at all,” Mr. Martindale replied. “It’s a kind of story found all over the British isles, and very old. There was a time, you see, when fairyland and the land of the dead were the same thing. That’s why time doesn’t move in fairyland: because the dead are outside time, and unaffected by it. In that way of thinking, fairyland’s inhabitants are ghosts, of a sort—and Angie might be right when she says that it isn’t appropriate to name them, to see and know them for what they really are. Ignorance, you see, is what sometimes allows the living who stray into fairyland by mistake—especially children—to get back again unscathed. If they ever realize where they are, they get stuck, perhaps because they die themselves but perhaps because they just get stuck.”

 

“What’s the drawing got to do with it?” Angie’s mother asked.

 

“It’s a mandala,” Mr. Martindale said. “A map of time and life as a kind of maze—a maze that you can’t really get lost in, as you proceed from birth to death, by way of the eternal sequence of days and years, but in which you always seem to be lost, because you never know where you’re headed, and always seem to be going around in circles.”

 

“I don’t get it,” Mrs. Martindale said, flatly.

 

Angie was still looking at her father, and he was looking at her. “The thing you have to remember,” her father said softly, “is that you can always get out, even if you think you’re stuck. You understand that, don’t you, treasure?”

 

Angie knew that her father wasn’t talking about what was in the back garden, or about ghosts, or about fairyland. He meant that it was okay for her to let her imagination run wild occasionally, as long as she knew the way back and didn’t ever accept that she was stuck.

 

“Sure,” she said. “I know what I’m doing.”

 

She honestly thought that she did. As soon as she’d finished dinner, without even glancing in the direction of the TV set, she went back upstairs to see if the grey twilight would allow her to see what she hadn’t quite been able to grasp in the sunlight.

 

She drew one pattern, and then another—and then, finally, she got it right. She managed to capture the exact pattern of the fairy ring.

 

She didn’t take it downstairs to show her parents and sister. She knew that it would just be one more meaningless doodle to her mother and Cathy, and one more arbitrary mandala to her father. None of them would be able to see it properly, and recognize it for what it was.

 

Among the various things her father had bought in the supermarket to help with the decorating was some masking tape, which he was going to put around the edges of the windows while he painted the frames, so he wouldn’t get paint on the glass Angie went down to the kitchen and used the kitchen scissors to cut a few inches off the roll.

 

She took the piece of masking tape back to her bedroom, and stuck her drawing on to the wall beside the window, on top of two of the sketches that had been made directly on the wall. Then she spent a few minutes looking back and forth from the drawing to the window, checking that it really was right.

 

After that, she went downstairs and watched TV with Cathy. She didn’t mention ghosts or fairies between then and bedtime, and was quite happy to listen while Cathy talked about her friends, and all the things they planned to do once she was back in Kingston, having returned to civilization from the desolate of wilderness of Sussex.

 

Angie and Cathy stayed up late, because it was Saturday, and because the work that had to be done the following day was not work with which they could be expected or asked to help. Scraping wallpaper was something the entire family could do, but plastering wasn’t. Plastering was specialist work—the difficult sort that an engineer had to do on his own.

 

“Mind you don’t have bad dreams,” Cathy said, when they finally went up to their rooms, probably hoping that that was exactly what Angie would have.

 

“I’ll be fine,” Angie assured her.

 

She was confident that she would be fine. Indeed, she was so confident that she would be fine that she wasn’t in the least afraid when she woke up with a start to see that the starlight streaming through her window was falling at an angle upon the face of a boy who was studying her drawing raptly.

 

After a minute or so, he turned to face her. “You’ve got it right,” he said. “I never could.” He pointed at Angie’s drawing using his left forefinger.

 

Although he wasn’t very tall and was wearing knee-length trousers, Angie judged that the boy was at least as old as Cathy—plus an extra hundred years or so that didn’t show.

 

The most peculiar thing about the boy was that his clothes seemed brand new, as if he’d only just put them on for the first time. His trousers and socks were clean, without a thread out of place. His white shirt looked freshly-washed, and the black waistcoat he wore over it was equally unstained. His face had been scrubbed and his hair newly-combed.

 

All of that seemed much stranger than the fact that there was something slightly odd about the way he spoke, or seemed to speak. It was almost as if Angie weren’t hearing his actual voice, but some kind of substitute, like the voice-overs they sometimes used on the TV news to translate what foreign speakers were saying into English.

 

“You’re not a ghost, are you?” Angie said.

 

“No,” he replied.

 

“But you don’t belong here.”

 

“Oh yes I do,” the boy said, with a sigh. “That’s the trouble.”

 

“I mean that you don’t belong in this time.”

 

“Why not?” he said, innocently. “What time is it?”

 

“Two thousand and six,” she said. “What year was it when you got lost?”

 

“I don’t know,” he said. “But it was Whitsun—I remember that.”

 

“Might you be able to find your way out,” Angie asked, “now that you have the right map? You can borrow it if you like.”

 

“Is that why you drew it?” the boy asked. “I thought you were trying to find a way in. I tried to warn you twice, when you were looking at the bushes, but you couldn’t see me then.”

 

“Could you see me?” Angie asked, interestedly.

 

“I can see everything, after a fashion,” the boy told her. “Not well enough, though. I’ve never been able to see well enough.” He didn’t sound happy about it. Angie figured that he had been born into an era when there were no regular eye tests, and maybe no opticians at all, but she suspected that he wasn’t just talking about being short-sighted.

 

“What’s your name?” Angie asked.

 

“Jesse.”

 

“Mine’s Angela—Angie for short.”

 

“I know. I can hear too. I can see time go by and I can hear time go by; I just can’t seem to get into it any more. I’m not sure that I’m in it even now. I think you might be out of it.”

 

Angie had put her wristwatch on the bedside table, as she always did. The hands glowed in the dark, so she was able to see what time it was, but she couldn’t tell whether they were still moving or not. She assumed that they were, but she couldn’t be sure. The boy could watch time going by, even though he couldn’t get into it, so time might still be going by...except that the significant thing wasn’t that Jesse could see her, but that she could see him.

 

“Am I like you now?” she asked.

 

“I don’t know,” he said. “You’re not the first I’ve talked to. Other people have tried to see me, and looked hard enough to do it, just about—but it never lasts. Time carries them away. They didn’t have this, though.” He pointed to the drawing. “It’s not seeing me you have to worry about, in any case—it’s seeing them.”

 

“Who’s them?”

 

“I don’t know,” he said, again. “They can talk, I think, but they don’t—not to me. Not any more. They don’t explain things.”

 

Angie reminded herself that she was an engineer’s daughter, who didn’t have to be afraid of anything, but she wasn’t entirely convinced. “They don’t tear you apart and gobble up the pieces, though,” she observed. “They don’t use your blood to fertilize their garden.”

 

“No,” Jesse admitted. “They don’t do things like that. At least, I’ve never seen them do things like that—but I can’t really see them at all. Not well enough. That’s always been the problem. I can see through, but I can’t quite see what’s on the other side.”

 

“So what’s so terrible about them?”

 

“Nothing, except that once you’ve seen them—even if you can’t see them well enough—they can take you out of time, the way they took me.”

 

“And what’s so terrible about that?” Angie wanted to know.

 

“Nothing,” he said, again. “There’s no hunger, no thirst, no pain, no loneliness, no boredom. It’s just that I can’t go anywhere— except here and there. I can’t go home.”

 

Again, he used his left hand as a pointer, stabbing his forefinger at the floor of the bedroom when he said “here” and at the window when he said “there”. When he said “home” the palm of his hand opened up, and he made a gesture of helplessness. Angie knew that Orchard Cottage must have been his home once, long before it became Orchard Cottage—but he had been watching time go by for long enough to know that it wasn’t his home any longer. For a while, it had been a ruin, but now it was going to be something else: a weekend cottage; a place to get away.

 

Angie still didn’t know whether she wanted to get away from her life in Kingston, but she knew that she had to find out what was in the mandala. She didn’t imagine for a moment that it would be something she wanted to see, but she felt that she had to look anyway, as hard as she could.

 

* * * *

 

7.

 

Angie got out of bed, feeling more than a little self-conscious about her night-dress. Before going to join Jesse at the window she pulled on her jeans and put on a sweater of her own. She put her trainers on too, although she didn’t bother with socks.

 

She went to the window and looked out. There was nothing visible through the new glass but the same old lumpy green carpet. The old glass, on the other hand, displayed something quite different. The distorted diamonds filtered out the bindweed, the hawthorn, the dead apple trees and much more, leaving the mandala beneath exposed.

 

Angie had imagined the spiral as a kind of hedge, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t made out of vegetation at all, or of anything solid. The sight of it was slightly suggestive of the kind of glass that made up the older parts of the lattice window, but Angie knew that it wasn’t actually glass. Whatever was making up the mandala was only imitating substance. It was one of those things that was invisible unless you tried really hard to see it—and which only a very few people could see even then. There was a sense, Angie knew, in which the fairy ring wasn’t really there—but she could see it now, and because she could see it, she could look past everything else.

 

Should I have wanted to see it, though? she asked herself, in a moment of self-doubt. Would I have been better off following Mrs. Lamb’s advice, and looking the other way?

 

“You can’t really be trapped in it,” Angie told Jesse. “You’re outside it now.”

 

“No I’m not,” he told her. “Or if I am, this spot right here is the only other place I can be. This is where I first saw it, and once I’d seen it, I was inside it. You’re probably inside it too, now that you’ve seen it. I’m not sure, though—I’m never sure of anything. Can you turn around and go back to bed?”

 

Angie turned around without any difficulty—but when she tried to take a step back into the room, she couldn’t. Her legs wouldn’t obey the instruction. She could watch time going by around her, but she wasn’t in it any more.

 

Her parents, she realized, would think that she had disappeared—vanished into thin air. Except, of course, that her father wouldn’t believe that anyone could vanish into air, however thin it might be. Her father would take note of the fact that her jeans, sweater and trainers were missing, and would assume that she’d put them on in order to leave the room, and maybe go outside. He’d think that she’d run away, or that she’d been kidnapped.

 

Angie didn’t want him to think either of those things.

 

“I can get back,” she told Jesse, hoping that it was true. “It’s just a matter of figuring out how. What’s at the other end of the maze?”

 

“I don’t know,” Jesse said. “I can never get there. It doesn’t matter how long I keep going, I never get there. I think that’s because I’m not really going anywhere at all. I seem to be moving, but I’m really still here.”

 

Angie looked at the diagram she had drawn with such painstaking care. If you imagined the space contained within the spiral line as a space in which someone could move, she thought, then the someone could start from where the line ended and move around and around and around, until they eventually came to....what? The little covert where the line first curled away from the initial dot: a small enclosed space from which there was no escape but to go back.

 

The only way out of the maze, if one cared to think of it as a kind of maze, was also the way in. From where she and Jesse were standing, it appeared that the only way they could go was in. Perhaps, she thought, that was the way they had to go if they were ever going to get out.

 

“Right,” she said. “I need to see what it looks like from the inside. How do we get from here to there, since we can’t go down the stairs?”

 

“That’s easy,” Jesse said. “You just do this.”

 

What Jesse did was to go through the window. It wasn’t obvious how he managed it, because it wasn’t a very large window, even if you ignored the leaden latticework, and the sill was chest-high. Even so, he went out that way, without climbing or jumping.

 

Perhaps I won’t be able to do that, Angie thought, almost hoping that she might find that she couldn’t. She paused to pluck her drawing from the wall, figuring that if she could go out that way she would surely need a map to get back.

 

When she tried to do what Jesse had done, she found that she could—and that it was, as Jesse had said, ridiculously easy. It was the only step she could actually take, now that she was no longer able to turn back.

 

Once through the glass, she was inside the maze; it was as simple as that. And once she was inside the maze, she realized why the exact shape mattered so much. If the walls had been opaque, like the walls of her room, the way they curved and wound around wouldn’t have been important, because they’d just have been boundaries containing the path within. Because they were transparent, though, the curvature had dramatic effects. The walls distorted the light they let through, like the walls of a bottle or the glass in her mother’s spectacles, creating all manner of strange images.

 

The walls of the maze weren’t glass, though. They weren’t even solid. They weren’t just something that happened to get in the way of the light that was shining through them, she realized. They were, in some strange sense, a product of the light. They were there in order to transmit it, and they were shaped in order to transmit it in the way that it had to be transmitted—the way it wanted and needed to be transmitted.

 

Angie guessed immediately where that light came from. It came from—or, rather, through—the point from which the spiral started. Perhaps, within or behind that point, it was only the merest spark, but as it moved through the walls, reflected and refracted this way and that, it was multiplied and amplified. Invisible as it was to eyes that hadn’t yet caught a glimpse of it, that light was glorious and dazzling, and alive.

 

Angie saw immediately what Jesse meant by them, and understood why they were so mysterious. There were no clear shapes visible through the walls of the maze—it wasn’t in the least like looking into an aquarium—but it was extremely easy to catch glimpses of things that might have been trying to become shapes, if only they could be captured and clarified.

 

“It’s quite safe,” Jesse said, reaching out to take her left hand in his. “They won’t hurt you. It’s best not to try look directly at them though. It can’t be done. Every time you think you’ve got a clear sight of one, it vanishes. Then you get a sort of feeling—nothing painful, or even very unpleasant, but odd...as if you’d lost something.”

 

“You have lost something,” Angie pointed out. “You’ve lost your mother, your father, your brothers and sisters and the time where you belong. Unless....”

 

“Unless what?” the boy asked.

 

“Unless there’s a way back then as well as a way back now, if only you can master the trick of it. That’s not in the fairy tales, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. Maybe you have to step through the walls instead of letting the spiral pattern guide you.”

 

“You can’t step through the walls,” Jesse told her. “It’s like when you tried to go back to your bed. You just can’t go that way. You can only go further and further in—and even then, you never arrive anywhere.”

 

“I don’t believe that,” Angie said. “Just because you always seem to end up where you started, it doesn’t mean that you haven’t been anywhere. If there’s an answer, it has to lie at the heart of the maze. It always does. Let’s go.”

 

Without letting go of his hand, she pulled him along. She didn’t have to look at the map, because there was only one way she could go while she consented to be guided by the walls. It was, as Jesse had said, exactly like standing at the window; no other step was possible. Her right hand was clinging hard to the map, though, because she thought the time might come when she did need it. She still intended to get out if she could. She didn’t want to become trapped the way Jesse had.

 

While they walked, knowing that they were going round and round and round, though not in a perfect circle, Angie looked into the walls, searching for them.

 

As Jesse had said, anything she glimpsed had a tendency to vanish as soon as she tried to look directly at it, and when it did she felt a curious sense of regret. At least, there was a sense of regret there, although she wasn’t completely convinced that she was the one who was feeling it.

 

“How long had you lived in the cottage when you began to see the maze?” she asked him.

 

“Not long,” he told her. “Less than a year. It belongs to Lord Halcombe. My father is one of his stewards. We had a smaller house before, on the home estate.”

 

“It belongs to my father now,” Angie told him. “I never even heard of Lord Halcombe. You’re talking about a long time ago, maybe when Queen Victoria was on the throne.”

 

“Is she not?” Jesse asked, in surprise. Although he could see and hear time go by, he obviously couldn’t keep up with the news.

 

The light was getting brighter all the time. It was brighter than daylight now. The walls of the maze seemed to be made out of liquid light—but it wasn’t like the dazzle of a light-bulb or the even blue of a cloudless sky. All the colors of the spectrum were in there, but they weren’t arranged in a neat order running from red to violet, with all the others taking strict turns. Even in the maze, the colors might not be free to wander as they wished, but they seemed quite chaotic from where Angie was.

 

As the light grew brighter they became less numerous—but they also became more complicated. In the outer parts of the spiral the glimpses had been mere patches, like fragments of shadow. In the inner regions they were composed of brighter colors, which seemed much closer to patterns or shapes. They still vanished when she looked at them directly, but Angie thought that she was getting nearer all the time to a moment of capture, when the thing she had glimpsed would remain a thing, and increase its thinginess dramatically, while she looked at it squarely.

 

That possibility seemed strangely exciting. There was, at least, an excitement of sorts in the air, although she couldn’t be absolutely certain that it was she who was feeling it.

 

“You see,” Jesse said to her. “We’re getting nowhere.”

 

“That’s not true,” Angie told him. “We’re getting closer and closer to the heart of the maze—to the spiral’s point of origin. Can’t you see that?”

 

“No,” he said.

 

She stopped, and let go of his hand. She showed him her drawing, and pointed to the exact spot on the map that described their location.

 

“Can you see it now?” she asked.

 

“No,” he said. “I can’t see. That’s the trouble. I can only see so much. I’m useless.” There was a note of plaintive desperation in his voice—except, Angie remembered, that it wasn’t really his voice. They were his words—at least, they conserved the meaning of his words—but it wasn’t his voice. His own voice was lost in the past.

 

Can he hear my voice? Angie wondered. Or can he only hear them, repeating what I’m saying. If that was true, she thought, then perhaps what she was seeing wasn’t the real him, and what he was seeing wasn’t the real her. The fact that they could see one another was just another trick of the maze. Ordinarily, that would have made no sense at all, but they were in the maze now, and seeing wasn’t the same here as it was in the world of engineers and schoolteachers, brambles and dead apple trees.

 

“It’s not far now,” she said. “The heart of the maze is just around the corner. It’s a long and winding corner, but we really are almost there.”

 

She took his left hand in hers again, and led him on: around and around and around, but not in perfect circles. She didn’t get dizzy, in spite of the peculiar effects of the dazzling light.

 

Within the walls that they couldn’t touch, the light and its color danced with excitement. Angie knew exactly where she was, without having to glance at the map again. The map was only a drawing; the maze was in her mind. She wasn’t just walking it but thinking it and living it. She really was going somewhere, even if the somewhere was inside herself as much as it was in the dead orchard.

 

In no time at all, they arrived.

 

“If you stand just here” Angie told her companion, “You’ll be at the dead centre, the point of origin.”

 

“I can’t,” Jesse said. “I’ve tried, but I can’t. I saw the maze, but I can’t see them. I’ve tried. I’m useless. I saw you, though. I could see you. I could do that.”

 

Angie looked around before taking the final step. The walls were very close here, wrapped around the two of them so tightly that there was hardly room to move. There was only one of them that was not-quite-visible now, hovering at the spiral’s point of origin. It was a riot of color that was just one small step short of acquiring an actual appearance. There were many others strung out in the maze, but they were only reflections of reflections. Here at the centre there was just one.

 

Perhaps things of a similar kind had been taken in the past for the fairy king or queen, but Angie knew that names like that, and titles too, were just a part of the attempt to give the thing a definite shape, and a real presence.

 

The air was alive with anticipation.

 

“Don’t do it,” Jesse said, suddenly. His voice became distorted as he spoke, as if the air were reluctant to transmit what he said.

 

“Why not?” Angie asked.

 

“Because it’s bad,” he croaked, having to make a visible effort to speak. “It’s....” He could say no more.

 

“If I don’t,” Angie reminded him, “I’ll probably be stuck here, just like you. To get back, I’ll have to be able to find the way. I’ll have to be able to see. Anyway, I want to see.”

 

Having said that, there was no point in further delay. She let go of Jesse’s hand and took the extra step—the one that Jesse had never been able to take. She stepped into the point that was the heart of the maze, and became the heart of the maze.

 

Then she tried, as hard as she could, to see what there was to see.

 

This time, the image didn’t vanish. She was finally able to look directly at the creature made of light, and it immediately began to take on a definite shape. It began to appear.

 

Angie realized then that it was using her to discover how to appear and what to be. It wasn’t reading her mind, but it was using her imagination. That was why it tried to capture people. That was why it had captured Jesse. Jesse had not been able to see well enough, but Angie could.

 

Angela understood, too, that Jesse had been right to say that it was bad. It wasn’t bad because it had any innate desire to hurt her, or anyone else; it was too strange a thing to have any such motive. It wasn’t evil, in any ordinary sense of the world. It was only bad because its existence—the existence she was granting it by trying to see it—would be the beginning of a contest for existence: a battle to determine what could and would be real from this moment on, in which there would be losers. If they became real, then their reality might prove more powerful than the one from which Angie had come.

 

There was no going back, though. Now that Angie had found that she really could see there was no way to deny what she saw. She couldn’t turn away.

 

She had never been so excited before in all her life, although it wasn’t really her excitement at all.

 

* * * *

 

8.

 

The monster—because it was a monster of sorts; there was no doubt at all about that—seemed to have considerable difficulty figuring out exactly what it ought to be.

 

Because it was so brightly colored, Angie’s first inclination was to see it as some kind of bird: a peacock, maybe, or a parrot, or a bird of paradise. At second glance, though, it seemed too shiny to be a bird, no matter how glossy a bird’s feathers could be, and Angie wondered whether it might actually be a snake with highly-polished scales. That seemed more appropriate, given that it was, after all, a monster. It might be an intricately-patterned python, although it was probably more likely to be something poisonous, like an adder or a hooded cobra.

 

When she looked more intently, however, Angie saw that it wasn’t really a bird or a snake. Nor was it any weird combination of the two. It wasn’t a dragon, or anything mythical at all. It wasn’t anything that retained the least taint of unreality. It wasn’t content to be anything out of a story, even though Angie’s imagination had been formed and educated by stories to a greater extent than anything real.

 

The monster was striving, in spite of all its vivid qualities born of light, for a kind of appearance that was both ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. It was striving for an appearance that no one would ever suspect, even for a moment, to be monstrous, even though everyone would be forced to recognize that it was exceptional and magnificent.

 

It was, Angie realized, striving for beauty. It wanted to be seen as something marvelous, but also something irresistibly attractive. For a moment or two, Angie was almost on the point of seeing it as a child: a child more like herself than Jesse, but better-looking, more charming, not quite so odd. The moment didn’t last, though. If the thing were to appear human, Angie knew, then it had to appear as an adult: a young adult, to be sure—not someone as old as her mother, let alone Mrs. Lamb—but an adult nevertheless.

 

Perhaps, if Jesse had been able to see all that they wanted him to be able to see, the creature at the heart of the maze would have been a strong man, a regal Hercules—but it was Angie Martindale who had turned out to possess the gift in its fullest measure, and what she saw was born of a twenty-first-century imagination, whose educative stories had been taken as much from films and TV shows as from books and oral tales. Angie’s imagination was highly visual, and its visual images had been tailored to a high level of distinction.

 

What Angie saw, when she finally managed to make out the form within the light, was not a fairy queen but a beauty queen, or an actress equipped with a designer dress for a red-carpet walk at an award ceremony. There was a moment then when the whole business seemed perfectly ridiculous, and rather comical, but that didn’t last. As soon as the monster fixed Angie with her piercing blue eyes, Angie knew that the manifestation was no laughing matter.

 

“Oh yes,” the creature said. “That’s neat, and stylish. Have you any idea how precious you are, my child? Have you any idea what a treasure you are?”

 

“Mum and Dad are always mentioning it,” Angie replied, “but I never really believe them. It’s just a habit they have.”

 

“Believe it, my precious angel,” the monster said. “There was a time, I think, when sight such as yours wasn’t quite as rare—but time passes in the world of human beings, and there never was a time when sight was as sharp. You should be grateful that you’ve had the opportunity to use your gift—and will have the opportunity now to use it to the full. Gifts that people don’t realize they have, whose use they don’t practice, can so easily vanish...but once you take possession of a gift, and practice it....”

 

The monster was complete now. Angie decided to think of her as “the Diva” now that she existed, because everything that existed needed a name, and it might be undiplomatic, as well as unfair, to keep on thinking of her as “the monster”.

 

“There is a way out, isn’t there?” Angie said. “Now that I’ve got to the centre, I can find a way out, can’t I?”

 

“What does that matter?” the Diva said, “That’s not what you wanted. You wanted a way in, and you’ve found it. You’ve found your destiny. You’ve found the one place in the whole of your dismal and confused world in which you’re absolutely perfect and absolutely precious. There’s so much to see, Angela—so much to see.”

 

Angie knew what the Diva meant. They were very numerous— or could be, with the aid of the spiral maze, which multiplied them by reflection. They wanted her to see them all. They wanted to appear. They wanted to be. And she could do it. She could make them all real. She could make a whole new reality, and she could be at the heart of it.

 

She knew that Jesse had been right, though. That would be bad—not because they were evil, intent on doing harm for the sake of doing harm, but simply because their existence would eclipse all the things that already existed. There was a sense, Angie knew, in which the universe wasn’t big enough for them as well as us—and us, in this instance didn’t mean just human beings, or even everything living, but everything material.

 

Angie shut her eyes, but that didn’t work. She knew, even before she opened them, that the Diva would still be there, smiling.

 

“I’ve changed my mind,” Angie whispered.

 

“Now why would you want to do that?” the Diva asked. “Even if you could. That’s not what you really want at all, is it?”

 

Angie realized that the Diva wasn’t just making conversation. Here in the maze, her feelings weren’t entirely her own any more, any more than her sight and her voice were her own. She could feel their excitement, their pleasure, their anticipation. If she wasn’t careful, that would soon be all she’d be able to feel—but she could resist it. She could resist the Diva’s power of suggestion. She could resist the Diva and the way the walls of the maze forced her into its centre in spite of the fact that they weren’t solid. She could still set things right, if only she could figure out how. She ought to be able to do that. She was the daughter of an engineer. The difficult she had done at once; now it was time to attempt the impossible.

 

“I’m glad I came here,” Angie told the Diva. “I had to find out what this was all about. Now I know—not everything, of course, but I do understand know why curiosity kills cats, and why it’s sometimes not a good idea to want to see everything. I’m sorry.”

 

“What are you sorry about?” the Diva asked.

 

“About having to send you back again. About having to deny you what you want. It’s a pity—you’re very beautiful. I didn’t know I had that much imagination. I’ll never be able to draw anything like you.”

 

“You can’t unsee me, Angela,” the Lady said. “You couldn’t send me back even if you wanted to. And you can’t get out. That drawing can’t help you—it’s not really a map.”

 

For a moment or two, Angie thought that what the Diva was saying might actually be true: that the drawing couldn’t help her, because it wasn’t really a map; that she wouldn’t be able to get out, even though there was a way to do it; that she couldn’t send the Diva back into the light, because she couldn’t unsee what she had now consented to see.

 

Then she realized that the Diva was trying to trick her: to deflect her attention away from the solution to the mystery. Of course she couldn’t unsee, because there was no such thing—but that wasn’t what she had to do at all. The gift she had was the gift of sight, and what she had to do was see...and that was why the drawing was not only useful, in spite of the fact that it wasn’t a map, but quite invaluable.

 

She realized, now, what the drawing really was, and why it had been so important that she get it right. She realized why Jesse had been trapped, because he’d never been able to get it right, even though he could see well enough to know why the maze was there.

 

She knew that she had time in hand, now. Maybe not much— because the impossible was only supposed to take a little longer— but enough to look around. So she looked around, not at the walls but through them. She looked past them into the vast wilderness of time.

 

She felt a momentary pang of disappointment because she could only see the past, not the as-yet-unmade future, and felt slightly frustrated because so much of the past was darkness, and life so very sparse, but she caught glimpses of the big bang and supernovas, dinosaurs and mammoths, Babylon and Rome, the rediscovery of America and the French Revolution. She had no chance to capture any details, but she did get a sense of the whole.

 

“Right,” she said. “I know where I am, now, and I know where you are. I’m not trapped in the maze—the maze is trapped in me. When I finally drew it right, I captured it.”

 

“Don’t be silly, Angela,” the Diva said. “The maze existed long before you were born, and it’ll be here long after you’re dead. It’s much bigger than you are.”

 

“The bigger things are,” Angie observed, “The easier they are to see. The trick is not to focus too intently on the things that catch you up and try to take over your life. The trick is to see the bigger picture.”

 

“You could do so much,” the Diva said. “With us to help you, you can see anything you want to see, do anything you want to do. You wouldn‘t he trapped!”

 

“It’s nothing personal,” Angie told the Diva. “You are what you are, and you can’t help it. If you were a snake, you couldn’t help being poisonous. But there’s only one way out of here. If I don’t use it, I’ll be going round in wonky circles forever.”

 

The Diva might have leapt upon her then like some savage beast. The monster might have torn her into little pieces and flooded the maze with her blood. But that wasn’t the kind of monster the Diva was—and Angie felt that she was entitled to take a little of the credit for that herself.

 

“You’re mad,” the Diva said. “You’d be throwing away everything. Believe me, child, we can give you more than you could ever dream of having. You’re too young to know, as yet, what a meager thing human life is—but you’ve seen the maze, and you’ve seen me. You can imagine, I know, what we might make of you.”

 

“Yes,” Angie said. “But that’s not what I am.”

 

She lifted the sheet of paper on which she’d drawn the maze to eye-level and ripped it in two. Then she tore the two pieces into four and the four to eight, and crumpled the fragments in her hand. Then she dropped them, knowing exactly what it was that she was throwing away.

 

It was a symbolic gesture. The maze wasn’t contained in the pieces of paper—but the drawing was the means by which she’d seen it for what it was and brought it into, her mind.

 

She looked around at the walls full of light, and looked through them. She used her gift for seeing what was really there. She had enough presence of mind to shout: “Crouch down!” to Jesse before she put her hands up to protect her face and crouched down herself—but she peeped through her fingers, so that she could see what happened to the Diva.

 

The light stayed bright for a few seconds longer, but it couldn’t compete with the darkness. Because it was Easter, the moon was a long way from full, but it wouldn’t have mattered, because the bindweed would have screened out its light just as it screened out the fainter light of the stars.

 

The walls of the maze had no substance, and they couldn’t sustain themselves against the brutal reality of the brambles and the hawthorn, or even the dead apple trees. Angie had to make an initial effort to see through the glamorous illusion of the maze, but as soon as she had caught the merest glimpse of a thorny branch there was no stopping the violent solidity of the overgrown orchard. Its force was overwhelming.

 

The Diva spread her arms wide, and screamed at the top of her voice, using the sound in a determined attempt to assert her reality. She was real, thanks to Angie; she had found the form that she wanted and needed, thanks to Angie—but the very fact of becoming real rendered her vulnerable. The thorns slashed at her solid arms, her solid throat and her solid eyes. The delicate designer dress was cut to chiffon ribbons, and rivers of red began to stain its tatters.

 

The Diva was standing exactly where a hawthorn tree needed and deserved to be, and the hawthorn reclaimed its space with savage efficiency. It wasn’t content to flay her from without; its twisted trunk invaded her body, churning through her like a corkscrew.

 

Fortunately—for Angie as well as the monster itself—the Diva’s agony didn’t last long. No blood rained down on to the ground, either to fertilize it or poison it. The substance granted by Angie’s sight was exploded by her determination to see through it, and it vanished into the thinnest air imaginable.

 

The decision was not without penalty, of course. The thorns had not been able to hurt Angie while she was in the maze—or, to be strictly accurate, while the maze was in her—but now that she was back in the overgrown orchard there was nothing to restrain them.

 

Jesse was in exactly the same predicament, although he did no more than gasp when he suddenly found himself oppressed from every side, as well as from above and below, by thrusting branches and brambles. He was solid enough to turn them aside, though, and they had been too long beneath the bindweed to have much strength left in them.

 

Angie felt herself poked and prodded, but she too was able to turn the branches aside.

 

The difficult part, she knew, would begin when she and Jesse had to move—to fight their way out from the heart of the thicket to its edge. She didn’t doubt that they could do it, though.

 

Nor did Jesse. “Follow me,” he said. “Stay close. I’ll clear a path for us.”

 

Angie was grateful, then, that the boy was bigger than she was, and a good deal more muscular. His gift of sight might be incomplete, but he was tough and he was brave. He used his arms and his legs with grim determination, smashing a way through the brittle boughs. He must have been terribly scratched by the hawthorn and the brambles alike, but he never flinched. He would have won free within a minute if Angie hadn’t grabbed him around the waist and said: “Wait!”

 

He stopped immediately. “What is it?” he asked.

 

“Just a moment,” she said. “I’ve still got the shape of the maze in my head. I’ve got to get it exactly right.”

 

“What do you mean?” he asked.

 

“It’s still here,” she said. “The maze, I mean. We can’t see it any longer, but it’s still here. What was the garden like when you first saw it? Were there herbs and vegetables?”

 

“No,” Jesse told her. “There were bushes—myrtles, I think.”

 

“That’s what we need to find, then,” Angie told him. “You need to find the bushes you remember—and you can, I think, if only I can get the maze just right.”

 

“I can’t see...,” he began—but then Angie figured out exactly where they were in the maze, and she shoved him sideways, to the left. She guessed that he hadn’t finished the sentence because he’d suddenly found that he could see, and that the hawthorn had abruptly let him alone, consigning him to the gentler care of another kind of growth entirely—which might or might not have been myrtle.

 

“You can go through the walls,” she told him. “You just have to master the trick of it.”

 

The night was too dark to allow her to see much of the nineteenth-century house, and what she could see looked very similar in outline to the twenty-first century cottage, but Angie could sense several differences during the glimpse that she obtained. There was a momentary odor that was pleasantly sharp and strangely sweet, which she didn’t recognize but which seemed strangely appealing. She wasn’t tempted, even though she knew that the reverse step she would have to take when she let go of Jesse’s waist would take her back to odors of a very different kind: dank and dusty odors, mingled with the stench of rotting wood.

 

When she did let him go, he was able to stand up and step clear. The moonlight caught him then, and she saw that his new clothes were utterly ruined. They were badly torn and hideously dirty—as if he’d just fought his way through a filthy thicket.

 

Jesse looked down at himself and said: “My father will kill me.”

 

“That depends how long you’ve been gone,” Angie said. “You haven’t been away a hundred years and more, but I’m pretty sure it’s not Whitsun here any longer. It might be as late as Midsummer. I think I can hit my own Easter dead on, though—it’s a much closer target.”

 

“You could stay here,” he pointed out. He seemed to be speaking with his own voice now.

 

“I could go to any time at all,” she said, “except the future. But there’s only one that’s mine. You might do better, I suppose, to come with me—to a world with supermarkets, antibiotics and opticians—but you’d be a stranger. Your father might not approve of the state of your clothes, but he’ll know that you’re back where you belong.”

 

“Good luck. Miss,” Jesse said, politely, “and thank you.”

 

“You’re welcome,” Angie said. “Any time.”

 

She stepped back, then, into the ruined orchard, but she didn’t linger long before hauling herself out of her own exit, thrusting the thorns aside as bravely as Jesse had.

 

Unfortunately, the exit didn’t take her back to her bedroom; it deposited her in the narrow alley between the thicket and the back of the house, which the builders had cleared in order to erect their scaffolding. She’d made the effort to see the world as it was, and she was subject to its limitations again. The back door was only a few yards away, but it was locked.

 

Angie made her way around the house without any difficulty, but the front door was locked too. She considered ringing the doorbell, but decided against it. Luckily, even though the builders had cleaned up after them, there was plenty of fine rubble lying around. Angie picked up a handful, and began throwing little pieces at Cathy’s window.

 

It took more than ten minutes, but Cathy eventually came to the window and looked out.

 

“Come down and let me in,” Angie said, in a stage-whisper. “Don’t wake Mum and Dad.”

 

Cathy was reliable in situations like that. She came downstairs and opened the door. She looked Angie up and down, and said: “You’re absolutely filthy. Is that blood?”

 

Angie looked down at herself. The sweater had given some protection to her upper body, but not as much as her jeans had given to her legs. Her hands and forearms were badly scratched, and her bare ankles too. There wasn’t very much blood, but some of the scratches had swollen up and were beginning to itch.

 

It’s the allergies that get you, Angie thought. Aloud, she said: “I’ll clean myself up. Don’t tell on me.”

 

“Tell what?” Cathy said. “What on earth are you doing outside? And why didn’t you leave the door on the latch so you could get back in?”

 

“I went out through my window,” Angie told her.

 

“That’s impossible,” Cathy retorted.

 

“I’m an engineer’s daughter,” Angie reminded her, as she pushed past her sister and made for the stairs, feeling suddenly very tired. “The impossible sometimes takes more than a little longer, but if you don’t give it a try, you never make progress.”

 

* * * *

 

9.

 

Angie managed to get in and out of the bathroom without being seen or heard, and clean up her scratches as best she could. She slept late the next morning, and put on a long-sleeved blouse instead of a T-shirt when she got up. It couldn’t hide the backs of her hands and her wrists, but the injuries didn’t look bad enough to attract too much attention. She crept downstairs discreetly, to make sure that no one was waiting for her, expecting explanations.

 

In the lounge-dining room, Mr. Martindale was already mixing pink plaster, ready to begin his bold attempt to make the walls smooth and fit for painting. He was wearing his light brown overalls, and seemed to be in a very cheerful mood. The furniture had all been covered in protective sheets, including the TV.

 

“Morning, treasure,” Mr. Martindale said, when Angie looked in.

 

Cathy had obviously done as she’d been asked, and had kept her mouth shut.

 

Her mother was in the kitchen. “How did you get those scratches, precious?” she asked Angie, when Angie reached up to the cupboard to get a cereal bowl.

 

“Playing in the garden,” Angie said, vaguely.

 

“We told you to be careful,” her mother reminded her, but said no more.

 

When she’d finished breakfast Angie went back up to her room, armed with a washing up sponge. She carefully scoured away the four diagrams drawn beside the window. Then she tore up all her failed attempts to draw the maze and took them downstairs to put them in the kitchen bin. She didn’t want to have anything around that might prompt her to see the maze again. If ever she needed to go back in the maze, she would be able to reconstruct it, but for the time being, it seemed best to let the weeds keep possession of the back garden, at least until her father got busy with his chainsaw and heavy-duty strimmer.

 

She went outside later, and made her way round to the back of the house to look at the overgrown orchard, but she wasn’t looking for the maze.

 

The path that Jesse had cleared for them as they had made their reckless journey from the heart of the maze was still clearly visible, although it was by no means straight. Indeed, it wound around the trunks of the hawthorn trees in such in a tortuous manner that Angie could only marvel at the fact that Jesse had picked it out unaided. Even though his sight hadn’t been quite as keen as hers, he had obviously stared at the maze long enough to get a feel for its contours. The light-starved branches beneath the bindweed canopy had become so brittle that he had broken hundreds.

 

She could even make out the exact point at which his path had diverged from hers. His now ended suddenly, in what seemed to be a blind alley, but hers extended all the way to the outside. Angie made no attempt to go into the thicket.

 

Cathy came up behind her, curiously.

 

“Is that where you went last night?” the teenager asked.

 

“Not exactly,” Angie replied, vaguely.

 

“You couldn’t have climbed out of your window,” Cathy insisted. “You made that up, because you were embarrassed because you’d let the front door close and lock itself behind you, so you couldn’t get back in.”

 

“Something like that,” Angie said. Vagueness seemed to be working for her.

 

“So what were you looking for? I can’t remember exactly where we were up to when we were making things up, but it was something to do with fairies and fairyland being the land of the dead. You thought there was an entrance to fairyland in there, I suppose—but you figured that you had to get to it at the right time, the stroke of midnight, or whatever.”

 

“Pretty much,” Angie agreed.

 

“You’re mad,” Cathy said. “What did you expect to happen?”

 

“Oh, I thought I might meet a beauty queen and save the universe—you know the sort of thing.”

 

“I suppose I do,” Cathy said, although she really didn’t. “You might need tetanus shots, you know. Who knows what might have got under your skin? Weren’t you afraid of rats? I mean, take a good look in there—it’s filthy.”

 

Angie knew that Cathy was just trying to scare her with talk of tetanus and rats, and she wasn’t in the least intimidated. “I’m okay,” she said.

 

“No you’re not. You’re off your head. You’re not thinking of going in there again, are you? You’re eleven years old—you should have got it into your head by now that there are no secret entrances to fairyland.”

 

Angie knew that there was no more point in trying to tell Cathy what had happened than there was in trying to explain it to her mother and father. The spirals she’d drawn had meant nothing to any of them, and never would. They’d never be able to catch the slightest glimpse of the maze, even when the hawthorn, the brambles and the dead apple trees had all been cleared away, to be replaced by a lawn and flower beds. She’d be able to see it, though, if she ever wanted or needed to. She’d always be able to see it, even if she refrained from drawing it again.

 

“I think we ought to have a single tree in the middle of the lawn,” Angie said. “Maybe we should keep one of the hawthorns, but clear everything else away so that it has a chance to grow properly. Or maybe we should plant one of our own: an oak, say. I know exactly where it ought to go.”

 

“That won’t get you into fairyland either,” Cathy said.

 

“You really should stop going on about fairyland,” Angie advised her. “You’re fourteen, and that’s a bit old for that sort of thing. Stick to ghosts and witches.”

 

“I would have stuck to ghosts and witches, given the chance. You and Dad were the ones who insisted on complicating it. If we’d just focused, we might have got the house on TV. It’s not too late to invent a really good haunting, left over from the days when this was a witch’s cottage and local farm-boys disappeared mysteriously every time there was a full moon.”

 

“They’d check,” Angie said. “TV shows have researchers. They’d find out that this wasn’t a witch’s cottage. It was where the landowner lodged the family of one of his stewards, who had the job of managing this bit of his estate. And nobody disappeared mysteriously—not for very long, at any rate. From Whitsun to Midsummer Day, at the very most.”

 

“You don’t know that,” Cathy said. “Whatever the researchers found, there’d be all sorts of gaps in it. You can never prove that things didn’t happen. People can make up what they like, and there’s never any way to prove that it wasn’t true. Once the past’s dead and gone, anything might have happened. All that remains are relics, like those scratches on your arms.”

 

Angie thought it was time to change the subject. “Are you looking forward to going back to Kingston?” she said. “Is it as much fun as you thought it would be, with Dad at work all day and Mum and me down here?”

 

“Absolutely,” Cathy said. “Can’t wait. I’m going to avoid this place as much as I can, no matter how pretty it looks when Dad’s finished painting it. I’m not going to need a country retreat until I’m ninety—not if I can help it. Give it a year or two, and you won’t want to come down here either. You’ll have far better things to do.”

 

“Maybe,” Angie said. “Mum and Dad will like it, though.”

 

“Will they, though? They go on and on about needing a change of scene, but it’s probably the sort of thing that’s nicer to think about than actually to do. I think Dad will get bored once it’s all fixed up and there’s no more engineering to do—no more building-plans and timetables. Once he’s finished the garden and it’s all complete, I bet he’ll give it a year or so, and then put it back on the market. We’ll sell it to someone who really is ready to retire and put down roots— and then Dad will probably want to buy another ruin somewhere. If we don’t make it on to one of those haunting shows, I suppose we can probably get on TV anyway, on one of those house-rebuilding shows. At least they go out on the main channels instead of digital backwaters.”

 

Angie hadn’t thought about the possibility that her father might find that he didn’t need to get away as much as he thought he did. She didn’t know how she felt about the notion that Orchard Cottage might be sold on once it the house and grounds were fixed up. She decided after a few seconds thought, however, that her business here was probably finished. She wouldn’t be going back to the heart of the maze again, whether there was a protective tree there or not. She didn’t need a place to get away.

 

“There must be spirals everywhere,” she murmured. “In Kingston, in the middle of London. It’s just a matter of learning to see them.”

 

Cathy had already lost interest. “I’m going back indoors,” she declared. “The TV’s covered up, but I’ve got my laptop and my phone. I’ve got better things to do than grub around in bushes.”

 

Angie followed her sister to the back door, and went with her into the kitchen. “I’ll need some curtains for my room,” she said to her mother.

 

“Of course you will, precious,” her mother said. “We all will. But we need to get the plastering and the painting done first. Your father’s never going to finish all the plastering this weekend, you know. There’s just too much. I’ll be able to start the painting on Tuesday, but we’re going to have to do the job in stages. It’ll be nice when it’s finished, though.”

 

Angie went into the lounge-dining room then to watch her father at work. She stood quietly to one side, not wanting to disturb him. For ten or fifteen minutes he got on with the job, almost as if he didn’t know that she was there, but eventually he looked round at her. “I’m sorry you can’t help, treasure,” he said, “but even if you had the knack, you’re not tall enough.” He turned back to his work immediately, but it wasn’t necessary for them to maintain eye contact to continue the conversation now that it had started.

 

“That’s okay,” Angie said. “Do you suppose, now that I’m nearly twelve, that you and Mummy could stop calling me precious and treasure?”

 

“If that’s what you want, tr...I mean, Angel. Is Angel still all right?”

 

“I suppose so. I thought we might keep a tree in the middle of the back garden. Just one, somewhere near the middle. I’ll be able to pick the exact spot, once most of it’s been cleared.”

 

“That might be nice,” her father agreed. “It’s good to plant something that might live for centuries, growing all the while. An oak, maybe? This is England, after all. You know how to pick the spot, do you? Does it have anything to do with those drawings you found? Is it the mysterious centre from which all the spirals spread out, perhaps?”

 

“I scrubbed out the drawings on the wall,” Angie told him, evasively.

 

“I thought you wanted me to take photographs—I hadn’t got round to it yet.”

 

“It’s okay,” Angie said. “It would be a good idea to plant the tree, even if you decide to sell the cottage once you’ve finished fixing it up.”

 

“You’ve been talking to Cathy,” her father observed. “She’s got her own ideas about the way things ought to go. Can’t blame her— she’s a teenager. I might forget, once now and again, you now, and call you treasure by mistake.”

 

“The world’s not as safe and simple as we think, Daddy,” Angie said, thinking that she ought to make some attempt to tell him, and to warn him. There are more ways to get lost than you might imagine, and there are things that try to get in where they aren’t wanted.”

 

“You’re nearly twelve years old, all right,” her father observed. “You’re right, I’m afraid—and the awareness will never go away. We just have to learn to live with it, and do the best we can. Plaster over the cracks, make things as smooth as possible—and then paint over the plaster, to produce exactly the appearance that you want, exactly the appearance that you need. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that fixing things up and decorating are a waste of time. You’re an engineer’s daughter, remember. You know the motto.”

 

“Sure,” Angie said. “It’s true. The impossible did take a little bit longer—but it was worth the trouble.”

 

It was strange, she thought, as she went back into the kitchen, how two people could talk to one another so easily, and so comfortably, without either of them really knowing what the other was talking about. It was strange, too, how little that mattered, if the people could find the right things to say, even without knowing.

 

She told her mother what she’d said to her father about not calling her precious and treasure any more.

 

“Well, I’ll do my best,” her mother said, “but I’m making no promises. Will you be calling me Mother from now on, instead of Mummy?”

 

“Probably,” Angie said.

 

“Well,” Her mother said, with a sigh, “I suppose you’ll be a teenager soon, and you’ll have to keep up appearances, just like Cathy. You’ll always be precious, though, even if we’re not allowed to say so.”

 

“I know that,” Angie said. “I won’t ever forget it.”