There was no reply. I should probably explain at this point that this sort of thing isn’t precisely unknown to me, quite apart from the presence of the eyeball in the church. The churchyard, as one might expect, is full of spirits. Most are the residue of the departed, as though a little door has been left open. And usually they’re quite happy to chat, although one has to bear in mind that you’re not always accessing the full force of the soul, which is happily elsewhere—who wants to hang around a damp English churchyard for eternity, after all? Some of them take the form of light: clusters of blue flashes, or a pale, steady glow. But I’ve seen flames before, and once a drop of water, hanging suspended in the air in a tiny lustrous globe. The elements, you see. I’m sure some of them just sink back invisibly into the earth.
This little flame was dancing. No voice answered, but it leaped up onto the wall and flickered, taking sustenance from nothing.
“Who are you?” I said again.
Help him.
Spirits speak like a breath on the wind. You have to learn how to listen.
“How can I help? Who is ‘he’?”
You have to wake him.
“But who is he?”
When we ask, you must wake him.
Then it flickered and died, retreating into the wall. There was a faint glow for a second, like a patch of sunset, and it was gone.
I plodded home, somewhat amphibiously. The brook, swollen with recent rain, was high, brimming over the water meadows, but the path was safe enough. Fire and water, I thought. Water and fire. By the time I reached the house, the sky was stormy, with a single bar of light falling in the direction of the Severn estuary. The house itself, with its long drive, was quiet; it seemed to have retreated in on itself, huddling like an animal made of red Tudor brick. The kitchen garden was tidy and bare; the orchard empty of the crop of white apple sacks that had marked it throughout the autumn. There was a drift of smoke from the chimneys, but apart from that and the bar of light, the day was sodden, the color of lead. No more fire.
Alys, tall and rangy in jeans, was preparing Sunday lunch.
“Hello, dad! How was the service?”
“Went on a bit.” I could have told her about the flickering light in the churchyard, but something held me back. Pretend we’re a normal family, even if we know different.
“Oh, dear. I thought you were later than usual. Hope the church wasn’t too cold.” She bent over the Aga, fiddling with something on the stovetop.
“How was your morning? Can I do anything?”
“Quiet. And no, I don’t think you can. Beatrice has pinched the Telegraph crossword, by the way.”
I laughed. “It’s too easy for me on a Sunday.”
“Tell her that. She’ll be annoyed.”
Leaving her in the kitchen, I hung up my coat, changed my shoes, and wandered off in the direction of my study. As I climbed the stairs I could hear, muted, the voices of my granddaughters from the sitting room, then laughter. The study is at the end of a long upstairs passage, at a sort of T-junction that branches corridors in both directions, the floor uneven from several hundred years of use and subsidence. I prefer to be higher up—perhaps it’s my profession, but I like to be able to see clearly, over the land and the sky.
But as I approached the study door, someone walked rapidly and smoothly across the opening, heading down the corridor and out of sight. I caught a glimpse of a woman in a dark green dress, very long and full-skirted like an Elizabethan gown. She had a little ruff, too, which sparkled like her hair, and she was carrying a long frond of some kind of plant.
For a moment, I thought she was one of the girls, dressed up, but she was too tall—at least six foot, my own height. Heels?
“Who’s that?” I called, but there was no reply. I trotted to the end of the corridor and looked down it. No one was there.
Well, this house is full of ghosts. We do see them, you know. Not just in the mind’s eye, a fancy of the imagination, but really and truly present, just as you yourself might stand before me. I hadn’t seen this one before, but that didn’t mean that no one else had. We’ve all got our own special spirits, the ones only particular people see, and then there are the communal ones. The child by the window, for instance: we’ve all seen him in his Kate Greenaway velvet suit, his sorrowful face, like something out of a particularly emetic Victorian painting. No idea who he is. Alys and I see a doddery gardener in eighteenth-century clothes, and I think Bea might have done as well. Stella and Serena, the middle girls, talk about a pair of ghostly gazehounds, but they’re going through an animal-mad phase, so perhaps they’re tuned in to spectral beasts. Luna’s a bit too little to say for sure: hard to know if she’s seeing people or imagining them.
So a lady on the landing didn’t bother me a great deal. I mentioned her at lunch.
“No, not a clue who she might be,” Alys said, passing roast potatoes. “Elizabethan? Well, the house is old enough.”
“She sounds pretty,” said Serena, who was into fashion. “What was the gown made of? Silk, or velvet?”
“I don’t know. I only got a glimpse.”
“I hope she comes back. She sounds rather nice.”
“Granddad?” This was Stella. “Never mind the lady. Can we see the comet yet?”
Stella had asked this once a day since late November, rather as another child might ask for Christmas. “I’ve told you, Stella. It’s nearly here. Another couple of days and it should be visible.” I said it kindly; I could understand her excitement. The name of the comet was Akiyama-Maki, and it was discovered in 1964 by a pair of Japanese astronomers. It is a Great Comet, a popular name for a very bright visitor to the skies, and it is thought to be one of the Kreutz sungrazers, the remnants of a big comet that broke up in the 1100s. Astronomy was still my job, and I’d been looking forward to this winter visitor for some months—there was something about a comet, a kind of celestial magic all of its own, which had fascinated me ever since I was a boy. So I could see why Stella kept asking, even though the comet wasn’t the first thing on my mind. Other visitations were taking precedence.
“So, we’ll see it soon?” Stella pestered.
“Yes. Not long now.”
After dinner we sank into a Sabbath somnolence with the Sunday papers and early nights all around; the girls were back to school the following morning. I wanted to listen to a radio play, which ended about ten; switching it off along with the light, I fell asleep quickly. When I awoke, I was disoriented. It was very dark. I’d left the curtains open, but there was nothing visible beyond the window: no stars, no moon, not even the lights of the farms scattered across the valley. It was that which alerted me to the fact that something was awry with the world. There is always a light somewhere, a small orange token of human life.
I clambered out of bed and went to the window, stood staring out. The darkness was all encompassing. We’re not that close to any big cities, but there’s a faint glow where Bristol lies to the north; that wasn’t visible, either. I thought it might be fog—we’re prone to mist in these
