The incident was soon forgotten, by all except Graham. He still had the candle to remind him. And when, some time later, he examined it more closely, he found it was by no means an ordinary candle. It had upon it three eyes, each with a beam shining from it. It was an odd design, and had been carved in the wax and the grooves filled with what looked like gold. Graham buried the candle in amongst his sweaters and left it there.
But that was not the end. Far from it. That January was a windy one, and the branches of the apple tree creaked and the telephone wires whistled, and sometimes, far-off, there would seem to drift across the playing field the distant, eerie sound of the horsemen's horns. It was a month of sudden snow and sudden sun, which broke through the dark, massed clouds a pale lemon, melting the icicles on the gutter only for them to form again in frost-silent night.
One morning, two or three weeks later, Graham was breaking the ice from the birdbath in the garden. His mother was talking to the next-door neighbour over the hedge, and what he heard made a shudder run down his back.
"Well," said the lady next door, "I can't say I've seen anything. I don't know where he gets his stories from."
"He's getting on a bit," Graham's mother put it.
"Yes, well he's lost it. I mean, horses. Dear, oh dear, it's a bit much isn't it? Horses. We'd have seen them, backing on to the field. We'd have seen them horses."
"You'd think so. Still, it's very strange. Graham?" his mother called across to him.
"Yes Mum?"
"You haven't seen anybody riding round the field have you?"
"Anybody in particular?"
"He didn't say," said the lady next door. "That's just it. I mean, who's going to ride round there? They'd ask permission wouldn't they?"
"No – I haven't seen anybody," Graham said, almost truthfully. He had put down the horsemen he had seen to a trick played by the snow. Now he was less certain.
"Still, it's very strange," said Mrs. Bedford.
"Yes, oh yes, it's strange all right. I mean, it's not like he'd seen the horses. Just the hoof-prints in the frost, like, on the grass. Well, that's what he said. Been riding round and round he said. It's his turf he's bothered about, with the new term starting next week. He's proud of his turf. Doesn't want it messed up by horses. And in the night. Now who'd ride round the field in the middle of the night, he said? Vandals, I said. Must be vandals.
Graham stood and listened to the next-door neighbour chatter on for a few more minutes, but it was clear that she was as much in the dark about who the horsemen were as the grounds man. But Graham knew, and his heart beat faster when he thought about it. The horsemen he thought he had seen galloping away into the snow had been real. Who they were and what they had been doing there, he could only blindly guess at. What was more important was the fact that they had returned, who could say how often, to gallop around in seemingly meaningless circles in the field at the bottom of their garden. Why do that, he wondered, unless they were searching for someone, or something? The man in the brambles had plainly been in mortal terror of them, to judge by the expression on his face when the horn had first sounded. Were they in pursuit of him? Or perhaps they sought what he carried.
Graham slipped up to his room, opened his drawer and rummaged through his sweaters with his heart beating like a hammer in his chest. The candle was still there. He took it out, suddenly fiercely possessive, and studied it again. From that moment on, he never let it more than a few yards from him. He felt like the wizened little man had entrusted the candle's safety to him, and it was his duty to keep it from the horsemen's grasp.
At night he hid the candle under his pillow, and the first thing he did in the morning was to make sure it was still there. He carried it around with him all day, looked at the shining eyes on it and pondered for hour upon hour what they could mean.
Then, overnight, he had a dream. He was on the field, and the snow was falling heavily, and he could hear the pounding of the horsemen's hooves in the murk. They rode round and round, though he couldn't see them, and he knew they were closing in. Suddenly the whole world lurched. He felt himself dragged up and over the field, over the city. He could see the houses and the docks, the dirty river creeping to the sea, far, far below him. The factories belched smoke into the heavy sky and the millions of city people went their many ways. All this he took in, as a hawk might, leaning on the wind. Then he felt a great fear rush into him, flooding his mind, numbing his limbs. A wall of impenetrable darkness unfolded before him and plucked him from the light.
He reeled and swam in black air, suffocating. Abruptly the darkness died, and he emerged from his dream sweating and kicking on his bed. He lay still for a moment, trying to piece together the visions. But he could only part-remember what he had seen within the wall of darkness. There was glass, shattering, slowly. There was a cold wind biting at him, a sound like wings. There was a distant rumbling, and, in the darkness, a blacker black that was like a pit in the earth. That was all, except for a single word muttered like a growing thunder in the blackness: Desolation.