I hurried up the slope of Pudding Pye Hill, seeing everything anew, and yet remembering the first time I had taken this path. The sunshine lent the grass an almost unnatural brilliancy and the sky above me was the most vivid and peerless blue. Buttercups shone like glass amidst the viridian, and I saw that something had changed after all: the dandelions were reduced to stalks, denuded of their seeds. There were no more clocks. The hours, minutes and seconds had all blown away.
I turned to see Halfoak, still somnolent, still peaceful, a thousand miles or more from the possibility of wickedness or tribulation. There, all went on as they always had—all, save perhaps for one.
I did not wish to dwell upon it. I remembered the way I had once climbed this hill, unused, then, to the endless glare of summer, and I had sat upon the barrow. There, sleep had overtaken me, rising out of the earth until I had been enveloped by it. She had warned me, had she not, that it was dangerous to sleep in such a place; that the fairies would come and steal my soul away. Perhaps even then, they already had.
I stumbled onward, not towards the crown of the hill but towards the little oaken grove. All was more vivid to my eye than it had ever been: enchanter’s nightshade nodded in the sunshine; self-heal pushed its purple flowers up from the verdure whilst henbane bent beneath my feet. I knew all their names at last; they had been revealed to me. And then, with a start, I saw them.
It was so brief it might never have happened. I saw eyes, eyes peeping at me from behind a blade of grass, and then gone. Something fluttered at the edge of my vision and I whirled to see wings of the most brilliant blue, there in a moment and then vanished. As I stared, a little face emerged from the bell of a foxglove. It was sly and grinning, the eyes shaped like a cat’s and as black as sloes, and I realised that I could no longer hear their music; that in its place there was only the faintest tinkling of laughter.
When I tried to look at them directly, they hid from me. I smiled at them but they would not greet me—that, perhaps, was as it should be. And yet I felt them watching, their eyes upon me, all around and everywhere. As I went on they were lost to sight, but I knew that they were there still, all of them, so bright and so beautiful; I saw their glowing colours; I glimpsed their tiny wings; and my smile broadened as I went, feeling all of their splendour, their presence, the magic that had been hidden and was revealed to me at last. And I saw that everything was more wonderful with them in the world. I did not sing the words that were in my heart, but the whole of my being expanded at the idea of them so that I felt it must burst for the joy and the madness of it.
The grass was soft under my feet. Thorn bushes did not scratch or hinder my way. It was not long before I was standing once again before the fairy ring, marked out so plainly in the grass. I did not enter it, not now; there was no need.
I stood beneath the first trees—they had not ceased their whispering; perhaps they never did. Perhaps now they would whisper to me. And it occurred to me then that they might all be waiting for me within the hill: my true wife, my true child. They would become the music I could almost hear, swelling and rising with the flowing of my blood and the beating of my heart, so filled with joy and sorrow and yearning. I would take them in my arms; they would cleave to me, and their smiles would have love in them; there would be nothing between us, no broken trust, no blackened promises, nothing to mar our perfect happiness. My heart, of a sudden, felt light, as if I were nothing but a dandelion seed, ready to blow away on the air.
There was but one thing remaining to be done. I forced myself to walk to the little grave. It was just as I had described it, in another world entirely. The sward was cut and stacked, the topmost layers yellowing in the sun. The earth, which had been so dark beneath its covering, had dried to a dull, lifeless grey. I had, as I had thought, covered it once more; the sad contents were gratefully hidden. At its head, still in its place in the ground, was the iron blade, keeping the door open.
I stood there for a time, looking down at the grave with its nameless occupant, returned to the hollow hill by the people of Halfoak. I did not know how long I lingered, but the air grew cooler and the breeze gained in strength, wrapping itself about me, and after a time its caress became interspersed with stronger gusts that presaged rain. The shadows lengthened, those of branches and twigs stretching inwards like fingers towards the cleft that lay on the other side of the grove. They pointed the way.
The light grew lurid with the hues of sunset, but still I did not turn. Instead I bent, seizing the knife by its leather handle, and without touching the iron, I pulled it from the earth. There was no reluctance; it slid out easily, the blade clean. The metal did not look as if it could burn my skin; it was cold and indifferent.
I walked towards the door in the hill, taking the knife with me. How long I had pondered the secrets of what might lie within, and still I had no inkling of what they may be; I knew only that its mysteries, held so close, were now upon me; and that soon I should know them all. I knew also that I would never tell. There were things of this world—and not of this world—that each man must discover for himself.
I did not look back. From somewhere behind me came the first distant intimations of thunder. It was the end of summer; the end of all things. It appeared, at last, that we were going to have a storm.