Witch’s Honour

The goblin pondered the question, evidently considering whether it was safe to answer. ‘Humans call me Skuldunder,’ he conceded eventually.

‘Well, Skuldunder,’ said Fern, ‘since you’re here, and it’s a special occasion, will you have some champagne?’

‘Is it good?’ The goblin scrambled down from the shelf and approached warily, radiating suspicion.

‘Have you never stolen any?’

There was a shrug, as if Skuldunder was reluctant to admit to any shortfall in his criminal activities.

Fern took another glass from the cupboard and half filled it. ‘Try it,’ she said.

The goblin sniffed, sipped, grimaced.

‘We will drink to your queen,’ Fern announced. ‘Queen Mabb!’

They drank, solemnly. When Fern judged their visitor was sufficiently at ease she left him with Gaynor and went to her room, returning presently with a small quilted bag, unzipped to show the contents. ‘These are gifts for your queen,’ she told Skuldunder, ‘as a gesture of friendship and respect. I have heard she is a great beauty.’ Fern uttered the unaccustomed lie without a wince, ‘so I have chosen presents to adorn her loveliness. These coloured powders can be daubed onto her eyelids; the gold liquid in this bottle, when applied to her fingernails, will set hard; in this tube is a special stick for tinting her lips. There is also a hand mirror and a brooch.’ She indicated a piece of costume jewellery in the shape of a butterfly, set with blue and green brilliants. ‘Tell her I honour her, but the Sleer Bronaw, the Spear of Grief, is something I and my people hold in trust. It is not mine to give up.’

Skuldunder nodded with an air of doubtful comprehension, accepting the quilted bag gingerly, as if it was a thing of great price. Then he drained his glass, choked, bowed clumsily to the two women, and made an awkward exit through a window which Fern had hastily opened. ‘I don’t think it will dematerialise,’ she said, referring to his burden. ‘I hope you can manage…’ But the goblin had already disappeared into the shadows of the street.

‘What was that all about?’ Gaynor demanded as Fern closed the window.

‘The Sleer Bronaw is the spear Bradachin brought with him from Scotland when he first came to Dale House,’ Fern explained. ‘It’s still there, as far as I know. I believe it has some mythic significance; Ragginbone thinks so, at any rate.’ Bradachin, the house-goblin who inhabited her family’s Yorkshire home, had migrated from a Scottish castle after the new owners converted it into a hotel. Ragginbone was an old friend, a tramp who might once have been a wizard and now led a footloose existence in search of troubles he could not prevent, accompanied by a faithful dog with the mien of a she-wolf. ‘It’s unusual for something like that to be left in the care of a goblin, but Bradachin knows what he’s doing. I think. You saw him use it once, remember?’

‘I remember.’ There was a short silence. Then Gaynor said: ‘Why would Mabb want it?’

‘I’m not sure. Ragginbone said someone had offered her a trade, but that was a long time ago. I suppose she must have latched onto the idea again; he says her mind leaps to and fro like a grasshopper on speed—or words to that effect. Anyhow, none of the werefolk are focused in Time the way humans are.’

‘It was an interesting start to the New Year,’ Gaynor volunteered. ‘A goblin-burglar.’ She gave a sudden little shiver of reaction, still unused to encounters with such beings.

‘Maybe,’ said Fern. ‘Maybe—it was a portent.’

When the bottle was empty, they went to bed, each to her own thoughts.

Gaynor lay awake a long time as two-year-old memories surfaced, memories of magic and danger—and of Will. Somehow, even in her darkest recollections, it was the image of Will which predominated. There were bats—she hated bats—flying out of a TV set, swarming around her, tangling in her hair, hooking onto her pyjamas. And Will, rushing to her rescue, holding her in his arms…She was waiting behind a locked door for the entrance of her gaoler, clutching a heavy china bowl with which she hoped to stun him, only it was Will—Will!—who had come in. Will who had escaped and come back to find her, Will beside her in the car when the engine wouldn’t start, and she switched on the light to see the morlochs crawling over the chassis, pressing their hungry mouths against the windscreen. Will whom she had kissed only once, and left, because he had too much charm and no hang-ups, and he could never want someone like her for more than a brief encounter, a short fling ending in long regret. ‘He’s your brother,’ she had said to Fern, as if that settled the matter, the implications unspoken. He’s your brother; if he breaks my heart it will damage our friendship, perhaps for good. But her heart, if not broken, was already bruised and tender, throbbing painfully at the mention of Will’s name, at the sound of his voice on a machine. Ulan Bator…what was he doing in Ulan Bator? She had been so busy trying to suppress her reaction, she had not even thought to ask. She knew he had turned from painting to photography and abandoned his thesis in mid-stream, ultimately taking up the video camera and joining with a kindred spirit to form their own production company. Whether they had any actual commissions or not was a moot point, but Fern had told her they were working on a series of films exploring little-known cultures, presumably in little-known parts of the world. Such as Ulan Bator, wherever that might be. (Mongolia?) And what the hell was a yurt? It sounded like a particularly vicious form of yoghurt, probably made from the fermented mare’s milk to which Will had alluded.

Gaynor drifted eventually into a dream of bats and goblins, where she and Will were trapped in a car sinking slowly into a bog of blackberry-flavoured yurt, but a morloch pulled Will out through the window, and she was left to drown on her own. Fortunately, by the next morning, she had forgotten all about it.

Fern stayed awake even longer, speculating about Mabb, and the goblin-burglar, and the spear whose story she had never heard, the ill-omened Spear of Grief. She remembered it as something very old, rust-spotted, the blade-edge pitted as if Time had bitten into it with visible teeth. It had no aura of potency or enchantment, no spell-runes engraved on shaft or head. It was just a hunk of metal, long neglected, with no more power than a garden rake. (Yet she had seen it kill, and swiftly.) She wondered whose tears had rusted the ancient blade, earning it its name. And inevitably, like Gaynor, she slipped from speculation into recollection, losing control of her thought and letting it stray where it would. She roamed through the rootscape of the Eternal Tree, in a world of interlacing tubers, secret mosses, skulking fungi, until she found a single black fruit on a low bough, ripening into a head which opened ice-blue eyes at her and said: ‘You.’ She remembered the smell of fire, and the dragon rising, and the one voice to which both she and the dragon had listened. The voice of the dragon-charmer. But the head was burned and the voice stilled, for ever and ever. And her thought shrank, reaching further back and further, seeking the pain that was older and deeper, spear-deep in her spirit, though the wound, if not healed, was all but forgotten. Now she probed even there, needing the pain, the loss, the guilt, fearing to find herself heart-whole again for all time. And so at last she came to a beach at sunset, and saw Rafarl Dévornine rising like a god from the golden waves.

But she had been so young then, only sixteen, in an age ten thousand years gone. And now I am different, she thought. In Atlantis, they thought I was a star fallen from the heavens. But now I am a witch—not some pagan crone from a dream of the past but a witch of today, a twenty-first century witch. My skills may be ancient but my spirit is as modern as a microchip. As modern as a hamburger. Would I love him, if I met him now? When Someday comes, if it comes, will I even know him, or he me? And the tears started, not from the return of pain but from its loss, so she thought the lack of pain hurt the more, and there was an ache inside her that was not her heart. Gaynor suffers, she sensed, for her Gift or their friendship showed her what the other sought to hide, but at least she suffers because she loves. I have lost all the love I ever had, and it will not come again, because you love like that just once, and then it’s gone for good. I must be a fickle creature, to love so deeply and forget so fast. And her tears dried, because she saw them as an indulgence, playing at grief, and she lay in the dark empty of all feeling, hollow and cold, until at last she slept.

And dreamed. She moved through the dream as if she were an onlooker behind her own eyes, with no control over her actions, traversing the city with the desperate certainty of someone who was utterly resolved on a dreadful errand. It was a winter evening, and the glare of the metropolis faded the stars. Many-windowed cliffs rose above her, glittering with lights; modern sculptures settled their steel coils on marble plinths; three-cornered courtyards flaunted fountains, polished plaques, automatic doors. Recent rain had left sprawling puddles at the roadside which gave back headlamp and streetlamp in glancing flashes. In places the city looked familiar, but at other times it seemed to change its nature, showing glimpses of an underlying world, alien and sinister. Sudden alleyways opened between buildings, thick with shadows that were darker and older than the nightfall. Flights of steps zig-zagged down into regions far below the Underground, where crowds of what might be people heaved like boiling soup. Faces passed by, picked out briefly in the lamplight, with inhuman features. It came to Fern that she was looking for something, something she did not want to find, driven by a compulsion that she could not control. She had always believed in the freedom to choose—between right and wrong, good and evil, the choices that shape the soul. But she knew now that she had already chosen, a choice that could not be unmade, and her feet were set on a deadly path.

Presently she came to the turning that she sought, a pedestrian walk that passed under an arch in a façade of opaque windows. When she emerged at the other end of the tunnel she was in an open square. It was large—far too large for the buildings that enclosed it on the outside, as if she had passed through a dimensional kink into some alternative space. Stone pavings stretched away on either hand; distant groups moved to and fro, busy as ants on their unknown affairs. In front of her, broad steps spread out like low waves on an endless beach, and above them rose the tower. She had been expecting it, she knew—she had been seeking it—but nonetheless the sight gave her a sick jolt in her stomach, a horror of what she was about to do, her fearful necessary errand. It was taller than the surrounding buildings, taller than the whole city, an angular edifice of blind glass and black steel climbing to an impossible height, terminating in a single spire which seemed to pierce the pallor of the clouds. Reflected lights gleamed like drowning stars in its crystal walls, but she could see nothing of what lay within. It was of the city and yet not of it, an architectural fungus: the urban maze nourished it even as a hapless tree nourishes a parasitic growth, which has outgrown and will ultimately devour its host. For this was the tower at the heart of all evil, the Dark Tower of legend, rebuilt in the modern world on foundations as old as pain. Fern looked up, and up, until her neck cricked, and dragged her gaze away, and slowly mounted the steps to the main entrance.

Guards stood on either side, scarlet-coated and braided across the shoulders. They might have been ordinary commissionaires were it not for the masks of dark metal covering their faces. Iron lids blinked once in the eye-slits as Fern passed between them. The double doors opened by invisible means and she entered a vast lobby a-gleam with black marble where a dim figure slid from behind the reception desk. A voice without tone or gender said: ‘He is waiting for you. Follow me.’ She followed.

Behind the reception area there was a cylindrical shaft, rising out of a deep well surrounded by subterranean levels, and ascending beyond the eye’s reach. Each storey was connected to the shaft by a narrow bridge, unprotected by rail or balustrade, open to the drop beneath. Transparent lifts travelled up and down, ovoid bubbles suspended around a central stem. Fern flinched inwardly from the bridge, but her legs carried her across uncaring. The lift door closed behind them and they began to rise, gently for the first few seconds and then with accelerating speed, until the passing storeys blurred and her stomach plunged and her brain felt squashed against her skull. When they stopped her guide stepped out, unaffected, unassisting. An automaton. For a moment she clutched the door-frame, pinching her nose and exhaling forcefully to pop her ears. She didn’t look down. She didn’t speculate how far it was to the bottom. Her legs were unsteady now and the bridge appeared much narrower, a slender gangplank over an abyss. Her guide had halted on the other side. She thought: It looks like a test, but it isn’t. It’s a lure, a taunt. A challenge.

But she could not turn back.

She crossed over, keeping her gaze ahead. They moved on. Now, they were on an escalator which crawled around the tower against the outer wall. At the top, another door slid back, admitting them to an office.

The office. The seat of darkness. Neither a sorcerer’s cell nor an unholy fane but an office suited to the most senior of executives. Spacious. Luxurious. Floor-to-ceiling windows, liquid sweeps of curtain, a carpet soft and deep as fur. In the middle of the room a desk of polished ebony, and on it a file covered in red, an old-fashioned quill pen and a dagger that might have been meant for a letter-opener but wasn’t. There was a name stamped on the file but she did not read it: she knew it was hers. Her guide had retreated; if there were other people in the room she did not see them. Only him. Beyond the huge windows there were no city lights: just the slow-moving stars and the double-pronged horn of the moon, very big and close now, floating between two tiers of cloud. A scarlet-shaded lamp cast a rusty glow across the desk-top.

He sat outside the fall of the lamplight. Neither moonbeam nor starfire reached his unseen features. She thought he wore a suit, but it did not matter. All she could see was the hint of a glimmer in narrowed eyes.

Perhaps he smiled.

‘I knew you would come to me,’ he said, ‘in the end.’

If she spoke—if she acknowledged him—she could not hear. The only voice she heard was his: a voice that was old, and cold, and infinitely familiar.

‘You resisted longer than I expected,’ he went on. ‘That is good. The strength of your resistance is the measure of my victory. But now the fight is over. Your Gift will be mine, uniting us, power with power, binding you to me. Serve me well, and I will set you among the highest in this world. Betray me, and retribution will come swiftly, but its duration will be eternal. Do you understand?’

But Fern was in the grip of other fears. She felt the anxiety within her, sharp as a blade.

‘The one you care for will be restored,’ he said. ‘But it must be through me. Only through me. No other has the power.’

She heard no sound yet she seemed to be pleading with him, torn between a loathing of such a bargain and the urgency of her need.

‘Can you doubt me?’ he demanded, and the savagery of aeons was in his voice. ‘Do you know who I am? Have you forgotten?’ He got to his feet, circling the desk in one smooth motion, seizing her arm. Struggle was futile: she was propelled towards the glass wall. His grasp was like a vice; her muscles turned to water at his touch. She sensed him behind her as a crowding darkness, too solid for shadow, a faceless potency. ‘Look down,’ he ordered. She saw a thin carpet of cloud, moon-silvered, and then it parted, and far below there were lights—the lights not of one city but of many, distant and dim as the Milky Way, a glistening scatterdust spreading away without boundary or horizon, until it was lost in infinity. ‘Behold! Here are all the nations of the world, all the men of wealth and influence, all the greed, ambition, desperation, all the evil deeds and good intentions—and in the end, it all comes to me. Everything comes to me. This tower is built on their dreams and paid for in their blood. Where they sow, I reap, and so it will always be, until the Pit that can never be filled overflows at the last.’ His tone softened, becoming a whisper that insinuated itself into the very root of her thought. ‘Without me, you will be nothing, mere flotsam swept away on the current of Time. With me—ah, with me, all this will be at your feet.’

Fern felt the sense of defeat lying heavy on her spirit. The vision was taken away; the clouds closed. She was led back to the desk. The red file was open now to reveal some sort of legal document with curling black calligraphy on cream-coloured paper. She did not read it. She knew what it said.

‘Hold out your arm.’

The knife nicked her vein, a tiny V-shaped cut from which the blood ran in a long scarlet trickle.

‘You will keep the scar forever,’ he said. ‘It is my mark. Sign.’

She dipped the quill in her own blood. The nib made a thin scratching noise as she began to write.

Behind her eyes, behind her mind, the other Fern—the Fern who was dreaming—screamed her horror and defiance in the prison of her own head. No! No…

She woke up.

The sweat was pouring off her, as if a moment earlier she had been raging with fever, but now she was cold. Unlike with Gaynor, there was no merciful oblivion. The dream was real and terrible—a witch’s dream, a seeing-beyond-the-world, a chink into the future. Azmordis. Her mouth shaped the name, though no sound came out, and the darkness swallowed it. Azmordis, the Oldest Spirit, her ancient enemy who lusted for her power, the Gift of her kind, and schemed for her destruction. Azmordis who was both god and demon, feeding off men’s worship—and their fears. But she had stood against him, and defeated him, and held to the truth she knew.

Until now.

She got up, shivering, and went into the kitchen, and made herself cocoa with a generous measure of whisky, and a hot water bottle. It seemed a long time till daylight.

II

At Wrokeby, the house-goblin was no longer playing poltergeist. He lurked in corners and crannies, in the folds of curtains, in the spaces under shadows. The newcomer did not appear to notice him but he sensed that sooner or later she would sweep through every nook and niche, scouring the house of unwanted inmates. He watched her when he dared, peering out of knotholes and plaster-cracks. He was a strange wizened creature, stick-thin and undersized even for a goblin, with skin the colour of ageing newspaper and a long pointed face like a hairless rat. His name when he had last heard it was Dibbuck, though he had forgotten why. The piebald cat which prowled the corridors could see him or scent him, and hunted him like the rodent he resembled, but so far he had been too quick for her. He had known the terrain for centuries; the cat was an invader, on unfamiliar ground. But the presence of Nehemet made him more nervous and furtive than ever. Yet still he crept and spied, half in fascination, half in terror, knowing in the murky recesses of his brain that the house in his care was being misused, its heritage defiled and its atmosphere contaminated for some purpose he could not guess.

The smaller sitting room now had black velvet curtains and no chairs, with signs and sigils painted on the bare floor where once there had been Persian rugs. A pale fire burned sometimes on a hearth long unused, but the goblin would not enter the room then, fearing the cold hiss of its unseen flames and the flickering glow that probed under the door. Instead, he ventured to the cellar, hiding in shadows as old as the house itself. The wine racks had been removed and shelves installed, stacked with bottles of unknown liquids and glass jars whose contents he did not want to examine too closely. One bottle stood on a table by itself, with a circle drawn around it and cabalistic words written in red along the perimeter. It had a crystal stopper sealed in wax, as if the contents were of great value, yet it appeared empty: he could see the wall through it. But there came an evening when he saw it had clouded over, filled with what looked like mist, and in the mist was a shape that writhed against the sides, struggling to get out. He skittered out of the room, and did not return for many days.

On the upper floors he found those Fitzherberts who had stayed this side of Death, their shrunken spirits rooted in age-old patterns of behaviour, clinging to passions and hatreds, the causes of which were long forgotten. They dwelt in the past seeing little of the real world, animate memories endowed with a glimmer of thought, an atom of being. Yet even they had felt an unfamiliar chill spreading through every artery of the house. ‘What is this?’ asked Sir William, in the church tower. ‘Who is she, to come here and disturb us—we who have been here so long? This is all that we have.’

‘I do not know,’ said the goblin, ‘but when she passes, I feel a draught blowing straight from eternity.’

The ghost faded from view and the goblin skulked the passageways, alone with his dread. At last he went back to the cellar, drawn, as are all werefolk, by the imminence of strong magic, mesmerised and repelled.

She wore a green dress which appeared to have no seams, adhering to her body like a living growth, whispering when she moved. There were threads of dull red in the material like the veins in a leaf. Her shadow leaped from wall to wall as she lit the candles, and her hair lifted although the air was stifling and still. The cat followed her, its skin puckered into gooseflesh, arching its back against her legs. There was a smell in the cellar that did not belong there, a smell of plants and earth and uncurling fronds: the goblin was an indoor creature so it took him a while to identify it, although his elongated nose quivered with more-than-human sensitivity. He avoided looking at the woman directly, lest she feel his gaze. Instead he watched her sidelong, catching the flicker of white fingers as she touched flasks and pots, checking their contents, unscrewing the occasional lid, sniffing, replacing. And all the while she talked to her feline companion in a ripple of soft words. ‘These herbs are running low…the slumbertop toadstools are too dry…these worm eggs will hatch if the air reaches them…’ At the end of one shelf he saw a jar he had not noticed before, containing a pair of eyeballs floating in some clear fluid. He could see the brown circle of iris and the black pupil, and broken fragments of blood vessel trailing around them. He knew they could not be alive but they hung against the glass, fixed on her, moving when she moved…

He drew back, covering his face, afraid even to brush her thought with his crooked stare. When he looked again, she was standing by a long table. It was entirely taken up by an irregular object some six feet in length, bundled in cloth. Very carefully she uncovered it, crooning as if to a child, and Dibbuck smelt the odour more strongly—the smell of a hungry forest, where the trees claw at one another in their fight to reach the sun. Her back was turned towards him, screening much of it from his view, but he could make out a few slender branches, a torn tap-root, the leaves that trembled at her caress. She moistened it with drops from various bottles, murmuring a sing-song chant which might have been part spell, part lullaby. It had no tune but its tunelessness invaded the goblin’s head, making him dizzy. When she had finished she covered the sapling again, taking care not to tear even the corner of a leaf.

He thought muzzily: ‘It is evil. It should be destroyed.’ But his small store of courage and resource was almost exhausted.

‘The workmen come tomorrow,’ she told the cat. ‘They will repair the conservatory, making it proof against weather and watching eyes. Then my Tree may grow in safety once more.’ The cat mewed, a thin, angry sound. The woman threw back her head as if harkening to some distant cry, and the candleflames streamed sideways, and a wind blew from another place, tasting of dankness and dew, and leaf-shadows scurried across the floor. Then she laughed, and all was quiet.

The goblin waited some time after she had quit the cellar before he dared to follow.

He knew now that he must leave Wrokeby—leave or be destroyed—yet still he hung on. This was his place, his care, the purpose of his meagre existence: a house-goblin stayed with the house, until it crumbled. The era of technology and change had driven some from their old haunts but such uprootings were rare, and few of goblinkind could survive the subsequent humiliation and exile. Only the strongest were able to move on, and Dibbuck was not strong. Yet deep in his scrawny body there was a fibre of toughness, a vestigial resolve. He did not think of seeking help: he knew of no help to seek. But he did not quite give up. He stole down his native galleries in the woman’s swath despite his fear of Nehemet, and eavesdropped on her communings with her pet, and listened to the muttering of spells and schemes he did not understand. Once, when she was absent for the day, he even sneaked into her bedroom, peering under the bed for discarded dreams, fingering the creams and lotions on the dressing-table. Their packaging was glossy and up-to-date but he could read a little and they seemed to have magical properties, erasing wrinkles and endowing the user with the radiance of permanent youth. He avoided the mirror lest it catch and hold his reflection but, glancing up, he saw her face there, moon-pale and glowing with an unearthly glamour. ‘It works,’ she said. ‘On me, everything works. I was old, ages old, but now I am young forever.’ He knew she spoke not to him but to herself, and the mirror was replaying the memory, responding to his curiosity. Panic overcame him, and he fled.

On the tower stair he found the head of Sir William. He tried to seize the hair but it had less substance than a cobweb. ‘Go now,’ said Dibbuck. ‘They say there is a Gate for mortals through which you leave this place. Find it, before it is too late.’

‘I rejected the Gate,’ said the head, haughtily. ‘I was not done with this world.’

‘Be done with it now,’ said the goblin. ‘Her power grows.’

‘I was the power here,’ said Sir William, ‘long ago…’

Dibbuck left him, despairing, running through the house uttering his warning unheeded, to the ghosts too venerable to be visible any more, the draughts that had once been passing feet, the water-sprites who gurgled through the antique plumbing, the imp who liked to extinguish the fire in the Aga. In the kitchen he saw the woman’s only servant, a hag with the whiteless eyes of the werekind. She lunged at him with a rolling-pin, moving with great swiftness for all her apparent age and rheumatics, but he dodged the blow, and faded into the wall, though he had to wait an hour and more before he could slip past her up the stairs. He made his way to the conservatory, a Victorian addition which had been severely damaged fifty years earlier in a storm. Now, three builders were there, working with unusual speed and very few cups of tea. The one in charge was a gypsy with a grey-streaked ponytail and a narrow, wary face. ‘We finish quickly and she’ll pay us well,’ he told the others. ‘But don’t skimp on anything. She’ll know.’

‘She’s a looker, ain’t she?’ said the youngest, a youth barely seventeen. ‘That figure, an’ that hair, an’all.’

‘Don’t even think of it,’ said the gypsy. ‘She can see you thinking.’ He stared at the spot where the goblin stood, so that for a minute Dibbuck thought he was observed, though the man made no sign. But later, when they were gone, the goblin found a biscuit left there, something no one had done for him through years beyond count. He ate it slowly, savouring the chocolate coating, feeling braver for the gift, the small gesture of friendship and respect, revitalised by the impact of sugar on his system. Perhaps it was that which gave him the nerve to investigate the attics.

He did not like the top of the house. His sense of time was vague, and he recalled only too clearly a wayward daughter of the family who had been locked up there, behind iron bars and padlocked doors, supposedly for the benefit of her soul. Amy Fitzherbert had had the misfortune to suffer from manic depression and what was probably Tourette syndrome in an age when a depression was a hole in the ground and sin had yet to evolve into syndrome. She had been fed through the bars like an animal, and like an animal she had reacted, ranting and screaming and bruising herself against the walls. Dibbuck had been too terrified to go near her. In death, her spirit had moved on, but the atmosphere there was still dark and disturbed from the Furies which had plagued her.

That evening he climbed the topmost stair and crept through the main attics, his ears strained for the slightest of sounds. There were no ghosts here, only a few spiders, some dead beetles, a scattering of mouse-droppings by the wainscot. But it seemed to Dibbuck that this was the quiet of waiting, a quiet that harkened to his listening, that saw his unseen presence. And in the dust there were footprints, well-defined and recent: the prints of a woman’s shoes. But the chocolate was strong in him and he went on, until he reached the door to Amy’s prison, and saw the striped shadow of the bars beyond, and heard what might have been a moan from within. Amy had moaned in her sleep, tormented by many-headed dreams, and he thought she was back there, that the woman had raised her spirit for some dreadful purpose, but still he took a step forward, the last step before the spell-barrier hit him. The force of it flung him several yards, punching him into the physical world and tumbling him over and over. After a long moment he picked himself up, twitching with shock. The half-open door was vibrating in the backlash of the spell, and behind it the shadow-bars stretched across the floor, but another darkness now loomed against them, growing nearer and larger, blotting them out. It had no recognisable shape, but it seemed to be huge and shaggy, and he thought it was thrusting itself against the bars like a caged beast. The plea that reached him was little more than a snarl, the voice of some creature close to the edge of madness.