Chapter Twenty-Four

It was one of those still, crisply warm days that spring occasionally throws our way to reassure us that summer will, eventually, come and we shouldn’t give up and move to Rio or wherever. Stan and I had pottered up onto the hill, where I’d scanned the skies but seen nothing more than flocks of starlings wheeling over the field boundaries, the peat had smelled like coffee and the ground squidged under his hooves. The world was as empty as the sky, just a blanket of unfurling bracken and winter-grey heather and my heart flopped about in my chest like a deadweight.

Sod it. When I get back I’m going to ring all those people I knew through Tim, get myself some proper writing gigs. I’ve had enough of martyring myself to the cause of some stupid illusion. My grip on the reins must have tightened, because Stan peeled through the mud to a standstill and I had to nudge him forward quite hard, turning his head so that we went down the trackway to the village.

The river was running in full spate, I could see and hear it before I even came down onto the bridge. The flat area alongside the banks was waterlogged and the green where the children would be dancing around the maypole in a couple of weeks’ time, was under six inches of murk. I halted Stan on the bridge and looked down. Tree branches were sweeping underneath us like drowning arms, jamming briefly against the underside of the bridge before the force of the water ripped them clear and bore them downstream in a roar of meltwater. I shuddered.

‘Molly!’

I thought I’d imagined the call, that the water was making me hallucinate, but Stan’s head came up and, when I looked, I could see Phinn running towards us, taking no notice of the fact that he was splashing through liquid mud. He was wearing what I thought of as his ‘astrophysicist’ clothes, normal black jeans and his old jacket, not his TV stuff, so I knew he must have been back at Howe End.

‘Phinn? What are you doing here?’

He puffed up, stopping just before he got within eating distance of Stan, and eyed him warily. ‘I came … to see you. To tell you stuff. Things.’

I didn’t know whether those things were good or bad, but couldn’t stop myself from smiling at the sight of him. ‘You—’

‘This,’ he said. ‘It was this.’ He uncurled his fingers. ‘Look.’

I leaned forward in my stirrups to see. On the centre of his palm sat something square and white that looked like a sugar lump. Clearly Stan thought so too, because he leaped forward to intercept the snack, his hooves slithered on the wet road and his shoulder dropped as he tried to keep his feet underneath him. I grabbed for his mane, but the chopped nature of it meant there was nothing to get hold of. I lost my balance completely and fell, scraping myself on the bridge parapet before I plunged down into the racing water below.

* * *

Phinn and the horse stared at one another for a second. ‘Shit,’ was all Phinn could think of to say. ‘Shit!’ His mouth was too dry for anything else.

He leaned over the stone bridge, catching a glimpse of her hair, an arm – and then Molly was gone, swept along with the flotsam of a moorland winter, in the nightmare black water. In his hand the edges of the plastic brick cut into his palm and made his fingers ache. For a second he stood there in the middle of that bridge, balanced between one bank and another, one life and another.

‘Okay, okay.’ He whirled on the spot a couple of times. ‘Nobody about. Houses too far to go to. No phone signal.’ Another quick look down into the stained waters cascading beneath his feet. ‘Fuck.’

And then he looked at Stan. Stan looked back at him. There was an air of quiet panic about the horse, Phinn thought, although he couldn’t say how he knew, and Stan stepped towards him, reins flopping along one side of his neck.

‘Okay,’ Phinn said again, his heart loud in his ears even over the sound of the water. ‘Death Star time.’ And he grabbed the saddle, hauled himself on board and, using a combination of yanking and kicking, Phinn forced the horse into a shuffling run.

* * *

The breath clanged out of me, squeezed by the shock of the fall, and I sank. Currents and eddies pulled at my clothes, my boots came off and I felt my feet trail against rock, slam into boulders and then trawl briefly along a sandy bottom before I broke surface again. Couldn’t call out, the water was too cold to allow me to draw breath, too fast to fight, dragging me, forcing me scarily fast downstream.

I caught one quick glimpse of Phinn’s face, shocked white, before I was pulled back under the surface again, turned around and hustled past the bridge supports, the water in my ears and over my head banging and clattering and muffling until I didn’t know which way was up and took one brief lungful of what turned out to be liquid mud.

Couldn’t cough. Not enough air. The world stung and spun, my head surfaced again and I saw the blurry image of the village, vanishing, pulled away from me by the speed of the water. The weight of my clothes pulled me under but the force of the current kept shoving me to the surface again, I could hear my riding hat clonking and banging against objects in the water with me, but I was travelling so quickly that I couldn’t grab anything to help me to float. All I could manage to do was to flap my arms, almost insurmountably heavy in their sleeves, and breathe whenever my head broke water.

Couldn’t call. Now too cold even to move. My back slammed into something hard and I found myself wedged in a tree trunk that had itself jammed in the centre of the river, a whole heap of detritus caught where its dead branches dipped the waters. And there I hung, unable to fight the current to move towards the shore, no air to shout with; just another piece of flotsam waiting for a small alteration in the flow patterns to be knocked free and carried further on downstream to where the river widened and deepened and the farmers fetched the bodies of the cows out with hooks on poles every winter.

I’m going to die.

Mud filled my eyes. I couldn’t feel anything below my waist and what I could feel above it didn’t feel healthy. My lungs ached as though a huge fist had closed around them and there was an equally tight band around the top of my skull where my hat had gone sideways and wet hair flailed around my face.

So this was it. I was going to die, a stupid, careless death. Why had I got so close to the water, when I knew the river was dangerous? Why had I lost concentration, let Stan take me unawares? Stupid, stupid … but too late. I was going to drown, or die of exposure or hypothermia or some obscure river-borne disease and my body would be washed up on some strange riverbank, embedded in the mud with half my clothes missing, torn off by rocks. By the time Phinn had run to one of the houses, found someone to help, phoned the Emergency Services, it would all be over.

I’d resigned myself now. A curious warmth was beginning to slide over me, as though mild currents were travelling down the river, it made me feel sluggish and I was glad. Through numb lips I muttered ‘just let it be soon’.

And then there was a thundering noise above me where the banks of the river rose high and vole-pocked, a pounding sound that was familiar and yet strange, echoing down this stretch of river like a drummer accompanying the apocalypse. If I stretched my head back I could see the edge of the bank and a shape, stretched and strained through the mud in my eyes. A long shape, bunched and uneven in the middle, a shape that wheeled away almost as soon as I’d seen it, disappearing out of my vision. I closed my eyes. Hallucinations. A volley of water struck me in the chest and swept me from my perch to whirl me around once more rootless and then pitched me back into the tree’s embrace, this time pegged on a series of branches which impaled my shirt. So cold now that I’d stopped being cold.

And then another sound, this time coming closer. An evil, blowing sound, a bit like someone trying to start a recalcitrant chainsaw, a regular chuffing, deep and threatening. I opened my eyes again.

A dragon?

No, but something coming for me, nostrils first. A curled back lip over yellow teeth, coming closer, a wet-black neck suspending a Loch Ness head above the water in an attitude of strain. And behind it … no, on top of it …

‘Phinn?’

And then I saw what I was seeing. Stan swimming towards me through the sweeping waters, snorting and puffing to keep the river out of his nose. Phinn astride, one arm wrapped around Stan’s neck to keep him from being swept off, eyes wide, glasses gone.

‘Molly.’ His voice was quiet but carried to me over the noise of the rushing water and the horse’s constant snorting. ‘If you can hear me, lift your hand.’

Feebly I tried, but my limbs weren’t working well. One wrist broke the surface amid the twig and plastic nest that was accumulating around me. It was the best I could do.

Stan swung round to face upstream, coming at me now around the wedged tree, hooves thrashing at the water like a paddle steamer from hell. One leg clouted me from below and then Phinn was reaching down, disentangling me from the branches and hauling me across the broad back, looping his arms around my waist to keep me on board as Stan huffed and spun gently around to face the way he’d come, head extended above the water as far as it would go, all the veins on his neck standing out with the effort of swimming against the current.

‘Phinn.’ I could barely speak.

‘It’s okay, I’ve got you.’

With some signal to the horse that I couldn’t detect he steered us down to where he must have entered the water, a shallow stretch of bank where cattle came down to drink and the water level was parallel to the ground. With one mighty heave Stan dragged himself up out of the river, cantered three strides into the field and then floundered to a halt, sides dragging in and out, head down and gasping.

Phinn slithered to the ground and pulled me down along with him, wrapping his body around me until he could feel my heart beating.

‘Oh my God,’ he was saying. ‘Oh my God,’ over and over again with each breath, with each thud of my heart. ‘Oh my God.’

Beside us Stan shook himself like a dog, looked around for a second then began to graze.

‘Phinn, you …’ I started to cough and carried on, coughing until I retched up some black water, then felt better. My lungs still felt as if they were on fire and my ankles ached, but feeling was coming back to everywhere else in slow dribs and drabs. ‘You came for me.’

Phinn leaned forward, hands on thighs and started to laugh. One more round of ‘Oh my God,’ and then he couldn’t speak, just laughed and laughed so hard that I thought he’d fall over. Laughter that was the wrong side of fear. I reached out and touched his hand and he turned to look at me out of eyes that were full of tears.

‘Molly.’ And the laughing turned to crying and he was sobbing, holding on to me while his whole body shook. ‘Molly.’

And then I was crying too, with his arms tight around me and his chest hauling and dragging at the air and we wept ourselves to a standstill while my horse steamed himself quietly dry and ate thoughtful dandelions around us.

Eventually we moved, letting reluctant fingers disentangle. He tipped my chin to see my face. ‘We need to get back. You’ll need a doctor.’ He began reeling Stan in by his reins. ‘You can ride, I’ll walk. I think both of us might be a bit much for him at the moment.’

‘But you can’t. Ride. Couldn’t ride. You fell off. How did you …?’

Phinn paused, halfway to helping me to my feet. ‘Well, I decided that riding a horse shouldn’t be that difficult for someone who knows what the Large Hadron Collider is actually for, so I just put my mind to it. It might not have been pretty or accurate, but it got the job done.’

‘And you’re afraid of rivers.’

Gosh his eyes were dark. ‘No. I’m afraid of what rivers can do. I wasn’t going to lose you, Molly, not to the water. And then I couldn’t see you, you’d been carried too far away and …’ He stopped talking. Fumbled where his glasses ought to have been and then appeared to notice their loss with some surprise.

‘What? How did you find me? I was moving so fast.’

‘You’ll think I’m mad.’

‘Bit late to worry about that now.’

‘The lights. They were hanging in the sky above where you’d washed up. Just hanging there, Molly, like they were pointing right at you.’

‘That’s mad.’

He shook his head, wet ropes of hair coiling around his neck. ‘That’s what happened. Otherwise …’ He stopped again. Coughed. Ran the back of his hand over his eyes and then went on in a voice that choked. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t have had a clue. I’d have had to follow the river all the way and there are fences and gates and I wouldn’t have been able to … I wouldn’t have found you.’

As though overcome with fellow feeling, Stan nudged gently at his shoulder and then bit his jacket in an exploratory way.

I felt incredibly tired all of a sudden. ‘I want to go home.’

‘You’re in shock. Here.’ Phinn legged me up onto Stan, where I collapsed thankfully, resting my face on his mane as Phinn began to lead us back to the village. The river had taken me further than I’d thought, it had only seemed as though I’d been in the water for a matter of moments and yet we had to trudge for nearly half an hour to get back to the outskirts of the village. His jacket was lengthening with every stride, the leather stretching until he had to keep shoving it up his arms to keep his hands free to manage Stan, but he didn’t seem to notice.

‘Here.’ He helped me slide down onto my garden wall. ‘Sit there a second. Okay?’

I could only nod.

Caro and Link came dashing across the road, hand in hand but arms flailing. ‘Molly! Link said … he saw you fall!’

‘He saved me,’ I said quietly. ‘Saved my life.’

Phinn leaned against Stan, who carefully ate his lapel.

‘Which he are we talking about?’ Caro looked at the pair of them and I could see her chest rising and falling with the emotion that was coming out as anger. ‘Because I am going to slowly kill the other one.’

‘And I am going to kill the one that’s left, just in case.’ Link’s face was grey with shock.

‘Both of them.’ I now felt so tired that the wall under me was spongey. ‘Phinn and Stan. What a pair,’ and then I collapsed, falling slowly backwards over my own garden wall, unconscious before I even landed on the gnomes.