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“I think I’ve got it,” Rob murmured, one Saturday evening in November as they sat on either side of the fire in the parlour. He had a notepad on his knee and was transcribing from what Matty thought of as the Himalayas book, with the coded text and sketch-maps. It had been raining all day and they’d been hauling muck from the heap behind the byre to put on the fields of oat stubble. It had been a relief to come in and have a bath before they’d eaten, and they were now relaxed and tired.
Matty paused in his own reading to look over at Rob. He was still working on the green book himself, on the pages of what he thought of as spells. Some of them were in reasonably plain if old-fashioned English, some were in languages he could make a decent stab at with a dictionary, and a few were in a completely incomprehensible scrolling script that he couldn’t place, even after two months of searching. “Got what?” he asked, intelligently, pulled from his fugue.
“The cypher. There’s a bit later on, toward the back, that’s a translation, I think. It looks like I might be able to make the rest out from there.”
Matty rose and went over to sit on the arm of Rob’s chair. He often sat like this, reading over Rob’s shoulder as they puzzled out some piece of nearly indecipherable script. They were moving forward slowly with understanding what the books said. There were many others—piles of them all around the floor. Matty had ploughed his way through Arthur’s well-thumbed edition of The Golden Bough and agreed with Rob that it was the biggest load of cobblers he’d ever come across, neither of them having much use for either magic or religion. There were history books, psychology books—Mr Freud was another load of perfect bollocks, Matty thought, despite Rob’s interest—and books on different languages and people and places. As they had sifted through them all during the dry autumn, it had become clear that the focus of the collection was the pair of antique, handwritten books they had initially identified. Arthur had gathered the rest of his library in his quest to understand those. Now Matty and Rob had taken on his mantle.
Matty often wondered how long Arthur had been investigating this. Was it something he’d come across during his time in London? He’d gone from Oxford to work at the Evening Trumpeter when he’d gone down in 1897. He had travelled abroad to cover the war in the Sudan. He’d been to Afghanistan to write about the Pathans for the same paper. “Perhaps he picked up the brown book in India,” he mused, out loud. “That would make sense, wouldn’t it? A lot of the notes are about that area.”
“Perhaps,” Rob agreed. “I’m not sure it matters, though. Look at this.” He pointed to an untidy page of writing on the flyleaf at the back of the book, scratched in pencil. It contrasted sharply with the reasonably neat pages of the rest of the notebook. He recognised the hand as the one filling the second half of the book. “Here, look, it’s a translation of the cypher.”
“I thought you said it was Trench Code,” Matty asked.
“Sort of. It’s a cypher, really. Trench Code is impossible to crack without a code book—you can guess, but really, unless you know what the words are supposed to stand for, you’re stuck. A cypher, though. You can crack a cypher, if you’re lucky. Even if you don’t have the key.” He drew his finger down the pencil-covered, discoloured page and Matty became a little distracted, following its path. “It’s not a direct key, this here. But I think that it’s a translation of an earlier bit of cypher. This one, here.” He flipped back to a page much earlier in the book, a left-hand page, facing the map of the cave system on the right.
“Here, look. This grid here has pencil marks overwritten. Very faint.” He pointed. “And I’ve just realised...the first few letters on this page...” he flipped back to the flyleaf at the back of the book, “correspond to them. Which gives us somewhere to start.” He grimaced up at Matty. “I’m kicking myself. I’ve been thrashing through it for weeks and not getting anywhere, and it was here all the time. It looks like someone tried to rub them out on the first page, once they’d written it out in longhand.”
Matty looked. “Yes, I can see the marks. So, what does it say?”
“Good question,” Rob grinned at him. “I thought it was a description of the cave system to start with, but it’s not. It’s not connected at all, I don’t think. Look, here.” He traced the pencilled script, faded with time and spelled out slowly...
“I am sure that it was a Hollow that killed my beloved Lucy. I saw its eyes in the firelight as it ran. These creatures that come through the gate in the border are evil in both their manner and in the way they inhabit the bodies of men, women, and even children and animals by the pernicious and twisted use of their shimmering magicks. Their draining of the energies of the body is bad enough. I sometimes wonder if they have their designs on me, although I am fighting it well enough if they have. The most brutal thing about them, however, is this hollowing out of a living body as a host and replacing the soul with a vile creature that wishes only to rapine and kill.”
“That sounds...pertinent,” Matty said.
“Yes. I thought so.” Rob grimaced. “This bit about the gate and a border. Do you think that’s what Lin meant when he was talking about the shimmer?” He tapped the place on the page with his finger. “It sounds similar.”
“It does. And the notes in the margins of this one—” Matty reached for the green book, “—where Arthur has scribbled things. It talks about a gate and draining people. And later on,” he leafed frantically to and fro, “it talks about a border, I’m sure of it.” He found the place he was looking for. “Here, look. Gather the kias from your surroundings. From your partner or partners. Draw it toward you. Pull it in. And then use it to link to the border and pull from that. You will start to see the light gather at the point on which you focus. That makes more sense if the border they’re talking about is that thing Lin was calling the shimmer. There were lots of shimmery lights back in the summer.” He pushed his hair back from his face. “I don’t know, Rob. None of it really makes sense unless you suddenly start believing in the supernatural.” He bit his lip.
“That’s the thing, isn’t it? I’ve seen a lot of crazy things in my time. And some damned peculiar ones at that. But this...” Rob left the sentence hanging. “This takes the biscuit.”
They had both together and singly gone back to the place behind the barn over the last couple of months, looking for any trace of what had happened and seeing if the gate or Lin would reappear. There had been nothing. Life had settled into a calm, peaceful routine that Matty relished.
Plus, the Treaty of Versailles had been registered with the League of Nations late in October. Matty had felt an enormous sense of relief that the peace was formal now, signed and sealed by the high-ups. Fritz having to pay for all the damage he had caused everyone by sucking them into four years of war seemed only fair. That had been one of the topics of conversation when they had gone down to the County Cinema in Taunton with Mrs Beelock and her daughter a week before to watch the Pathé newsreel of the two minutes silence at the new Cenotaph in London.
However, it was a stunned, waiting, recuperating kind of peace for them both, Matty thought. He was reeling still, from coming home and from Arthur’s death. Rob was gathering himself together almost visibly, losing that overlay of Sergeant Curland and returning full-time to Rob who the neighbours knew was a good man to ask for a hand with their hedges.
He could feel them growing again, on the cusp of moving forward. Rob spent his nights in Matty’s bed in the house instead of in the barn. Annie Beelock only came in mid-morning now, her health needing her to rest, and it was a luxurious thing, this waking in the arms of someone he loved. They had fallen into it with ease and familiarity, eating whatever Mrs Beelock cooked for dinner for all the farm men like they usually did, having bread and cheese and cake for tea once she’d gone, and washing up companionably together; and then settling in front of the fire with the books. They had fallen into a pattern that Matty imagined would be like being married. If men could marry the people they loved.
The war had shifted something inside them both. Coming so close to so much death meant that neither of them were inclined to waste more time. They saw what would make them happy and had grabbed it with both hands. That didn’t solve the problem of the books.
Although, it wasn’t really the books that were the issue. It was more that Matty was failing. Not as quickly as Arthur had, for whatever reason. He could feel it in his bones. It could have been no more than the normal slowing down of his body for the winter. But it wasn’t. A glorious, dry, clear, and cold October had morphed into a bitterly cold November. It made him think back to the last autumn of the war, with the angels’ wings of blue and gold arching with a kind of glorious, terrible disinterest over the ants of humanity crawling around in the mud.
He had the same feeling now. The bitter frosts, the clear blue skies of the onset of winter, made him feel like the world was waiting for something to happen. Watching him with a lack of interest that bordered on not noticing him at all. He was failing. He knew it and Rob knew it.
“What’s to be done, then?” Rob had asked one Sunday morning in early October as they were moving the churns of milk out to the block by the lane where the carter would pick them up to take to the station. “I don’t like the look of you, lad. And I don’t want you to go west like Arthur.” He obviously felt awkward bringing it up and had steeled himself to flank Matty with the question as they were working. Matty was getting tired more easily and he supposed that there was no hiding from Rob his diminished appetite and weight loss.
He launched the last of the churns up on to the platform and stepped back, taking his cap off, and wiping his brow with his sleeve. “I’m glad that’s done. I like giving Jimmy the Sunday off, but it all takes longer.”
“Jimmy’s wife’s got him painting the bedroom, he said. She took him out to buy the paint last weekend.” Rob allowed Matty to prevaricate, but as they turned back to walk up the drive, he had put his hand on Matty’s arm. “Matty. I’m serious.”
Matty shrugged his hand off gently. “I know you are. I don’t know. This was Arthur’s enterprise, not mine. I run a farm. He was the brains.”
Rob had looked at him long and hard. “Do you really think that?” he’d asked quietly. “Because you’re wrong. You might have chosen not to follow the same line as Arthur, but you and he have the same amount up here,” he tapped Matty’s head, “however you choose to use it. So, don’t give me any of that.” He had returned Matty’s solemn stare. “We’ll work it out. I promise you. I’ve waited more than a ten-year for you. I’m not losing you to this. Whatever it is.”
So, they kept on with the books.
Rob interrupted his brown study with an embarrassed cough. “About that,” he said, seriously.
“About what?” His serious tone drew Matty’s attention and he swivelled where he was still perched on the arm of the chair.
Rob pushed at him gently. “About the supernatural. Go and sit back over there.”
Matty arched his eyebrows enquiringly but did as he was told. Sometimes doing what Rob told him to do worked out extremely well. He didn’t really think this was going to be one of those occasions, but the thought did cross his mind.
Instead of moving toward him, or speaking, Rob sat still and looked at him for a moment. “Promise me,” he started to say, stretching a hand toward Matty. “Promise me, nothing will change between us?”
Matty looked at him, brow furrowed. “What do you mean? What might change?”
Rob bit his lip and kept his hand extended, but he turned it over, palm up. “You know I said I could feel the pull that the book talks about?” He gestured to the spell-book Matty was holding in his lap. “That one, with the marginalia? And that it felt like a backward blast from a shell, when Lin was there?”
Matty nodded, silent.
“Well, I thought I’d see if I could do anything.” Matty could see the hot tide of a blush rising in Rob’s neck and he wouldn’t meet Matty’s eye. “I always fancied being a magician, when I was a kid. Dad used to tell me I could be one when I grew up.” He smiled a tiny, secret smile. “I believed him, because you believe everything your father tells you as a kid, don’t you?”
Matty nodded again.
“So, I pulled the stuff I could feel, like the book said. Then I focused and pushed it out. And...watch. I can do this.”
He opened his palm, and in the centre, about an inch high and half an inch across, a small, translucent rose-coloured flame sprang to life.
Matty stared, blinking.
Rob closed his fingers in over his palm and the flame went out. Then he opened them again and after a second or two, the flame reappeared.
“So,” he said, finally meeting Matty’s eyes over his extended, flame-filled palm. “It looks like my Dad was telling the truth after all.”
