Over the following months, I watched my father apprehensively, mindful that his health might deteriorate. But he remained stable, and as winter became spring, and spring turned to summer I allowed myself to forget momentarily that he was ill.
On the dawn of my fifteenth birthday, the box began to tick. I lay in bed, awoken by the sound, listening to its beat urging me to get up, get up. I wondered if it had in fact begun its ticking exactly on the stroke of midnight. Childhood stories always speak of midnight as a liminal time, when the earth is balanced between the ghost world and ours, shimmering in unreality.
I looked at the clock. It was three in the morning—long past the witching hour. Nothing magical ever really happens at midnight, I thought. It’s all a story to sate little children’s appetites: princesses don’t turn back into raggedy maids and witches’ cats don’t start to talk. The fairy tales have got it all wrong.
I got up sleepily and brought the box into bed with me, covering it with my quilt so that its tick was more like the heartbeat of a mouse, fluttering next to my skin.
I dreamed I was inside the box, inside the museum of Dad’s mind. I was padding barefoot along the velveteen rugs, admiring the richness of the paintings all around me. The rooms each smelled different, cinnamon in one, cotton candy in another.
I came to a room where a summer breeze blew lightly, fragranced with the smell of meadow grass. A door ahead of me began to slowly close, and I glimpsed a familiar, dirt-encrusted foot retreating. At the same time, the smell of parma violets drifted across to me and I ran toward the door, but it closed just as I reached it.
“Stacey!” I called, pulling at the handle, but the door was jammed shut. I turned to leave, but the way I had come was blocked. Desperately I pulled again at the door, but it was disappearing behind twisting vines. The floor was pockmarked with rubble like an abandoned castle. The vines were growing quickly now, snaking round my wrists. I wrenched free and ran onward. Every time I turned a corner I was met with a dead end. These weren’t rooms, I realized, but a crumbling, disintegrating maze. I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out the bell, shaking it wildly, desperate for someone to hear its ring amid all this destruction.
I woke up. The bell was by my ear on the pillow, the echo of its peal still hanging in the air. I slept fitfully till morning.
I awoke to pale early morning sunlight filtering into the room, and thought of Dad sleeping on the floor below, probably oblivious to the fact it was my birthday. I thought of Bea, and the letters she used to send me. It was nearly a year since she had died: nearly a year since Dad told me he was ill.
So much time had passed, and yet I felt just the same, suspended in limbo, going through the same routines, living the same day over and over again.
My mother had come to visit this time last year. I remembered saying goodbye to her in the hallway, clinging on to her, trying to anchor her to Braër when all she wanted to do was escape. I pictured her waking up this morning, wherever she was. I doubted she remembered it was my birthday either, and with Beatrice gone, there would be no one to send a card or present.
It was too early to get up, but I felt wide-awake. I sat up and found the carved box on the floor by my bed, the tip of a bright pink feather poking out of a new opening in its base. I reached over and pulled it out. It was sparse and bedraggled, as if it had been left out in the rain a long time ago. I touched it to my cheek, and a shimmer of glitter cascaded through my mind: a majestic horse flaring its nostrils and tossing its head, pink feathers nodding on its brow.
Could this be the same feather from the circus all those years ago? I remembered how envious Stacey was that I had gone. How she had grabbed the feather from me and tucked it jauntily behind her ear to make me laugh.
A feeling of loneliness overwhelmed me. Oh, Stacey, I thought, where are you? I went to the window and looked out, hoping I might spot her marching across the fields. I inhaled deeply, trying to re-create the smell of parma violets from my dream, remembering the way her mouth sucked lazily on the candies, rolling them around with her tongue as she grinned at me.
From my window I could see a group of treasure hunters’ tents on the common land. Their number had grown in size this summer. I don’t know if it was because all of the books were out now, and they thought they had a complete set of clues with which to crack the code, or if the public had got wind that Dad was ill, and wanted to snatch a glimpse of him to see just how bad he was. Whatever it was, the police sometimes moved them on, but they always trickled back, new tents popping up here and there. A handmade banner had been stuck into the grass. It billowed in the breeze, proclaiming proudly, Kemp Treasure Forever, in tie-dyed patches of red and gold. As I watched, a man crawled out of his tent and stood and urinated up against our hedge, the stream arcing high and falling against one of Dad’s mobiles that stood, neglected and beginning to rust. I stared angrily as the plume of liquid forced the mobile into movement.
I felt a sense of restlessness as I looked out of the window. What was Dad hiding in his books? I had better access than anyone to all of the clues: I spent my days in the treasure hunt house, I cuddled up at night to the treasure hunt cat. Cracking the code should be easy, so why couldn’t I work it out?
I got up and padded downstairs to make myself a cup of tea, the feather tucked into my hair for safekeeping. There was a pile of letters on the doormat left over from yesterday. I bent to pick them up, still half-asleep, hoping someone had sent me a birthday card amid all the fan mail. But there was no card: everything was addressed to Dad. I blinked in the early morning light, my eyes still gummed with sleep. In the middle of all the letters was a paper flyer with a picture of a circus on the front. I rubbed my eyes. Was this the same circus we had visited years ago? The same circus that Dad painted in his book? My stomach flipped in excitement. I scanned the list of places where the circus would be performing. The nearest was a village a few miles away, a place called Terringstead. I closed my eyes and remembered standing on a hill, the smell of animal sweat and cotton candy all around me. My hand went to the feather in my hair.
Perhaps I was so deeply entwined with Braër and all that it represented that I couldn’t see through it to the truth. Maybe what I needed was some distance: to get away from all I knew so that I could scrape together some semblance of scale.
It wasn’t running away, I told myself as I ran back upstairs to get my rucksack, my cup of tea forgotten. It was just space, so I could see the wood instead of the trees. A fact-finding mission, I thought as I ran through the details in my head, collecting together a bus timetable and an ordnance survey map.
With a flash of inspiration, I tiptoed downstairs to Dad’s study. The key hadn’t hung next to the door for years, but I tried the handle anyway, knowing how forgetful he had become.
The door clicked open, and I slipped inside, remembering vividly the day I saw him counting the money on his desk. I had checked on it often since then, carefully watching where Dad kept the key to the desk drawer, and unlocking it now and again to make sure it was still there. He rarely ate into it, occasionally nipping into his study and coming back with ten pounds for me to take to the village shop to buy essentials. Once, he had come home from an auction with a clanking suit of armor, and when I checked the drawer later, some of the fifty-pound notes had disappeared.
Now as I slipped into his study, I stopped.
Dangling from a rope in the middle of the room was one of Dad’s wooden mannequins—the little models he used to help him draw people. It was hanging from the ceiling, revolving slowly in the air, its head drooping.
Feeling slightly sick, I took a step forward, and my feet crunched on the carpet. I looked down. The whole study was strewn with sawdust. For a moment I thought it was an elaborate anti-burglar system, but then the woody smell drifted up to me, and I was transported back to our day at the circus.
I approached the model, sawdust clinging to my feet, and let out a breath of relief. The rope was not around its neck, as I had feared, but around its chest. It was dressed as a trapeze artist, wrapped in ribbons of silk, its arms and legs stretched gracefully outward. I tiptoed around it, still feeling nauseous, and hurried to the desk, fumbling the drawer open, wanting to be away from the strange, silent scene.
I skimmed the surface of the money, peeling off layers of notes and tucking them into my pockets. I put a few into my rucksack too, and then I left the study with a quick glance back at the room.
Out in the garden, I slipped deep into the beech tree and tucked the money away. I backed out and blinked in the early morning haze. The garden was alive with birdsong, louder than I had ever heard it before. I propped my rucksack on the beech and rummaged around for the bus timetable. The first bus was at seven o’clock—two hours’ time.
Stacey would have loved an adventure like this, I thought. She would have relished traveling across the country, experiencing new places and meeting new people. I looked across the garden, staring far out at the horizon, past marsh and reed. My mind made the decision for me: before I knew it, I had jumped down from the tree and begun walking toward the gate. Perhaps today I would find her.
I set a course across the fields: we had always spent our time outside, on the outskirts of the village, exploring and playing, so it made sense to start my search there.
It had occurred to me to try to find Stacey’s house, to hammer on the door until she let me in, but she had rarely talked of home in the years I had known her, and all I knew was that she lived in one of the council houses on the other side of the village with her mum. When I was younger, I had set out on more than one occasion to surprise her at home. It was a very long, straight road, a line of regimented red brick houses on one side, a crescent of small bungalows on the other. There had often been a skinny dog chained up in the front garden of one of the first houses, and I could never quite muster up the courage to walk past it. I always consoled myself, as I walked home, that Stacey spent as little time as possible at her house, and she was probably not there, anyway.
The farmer had cut the corn early this year, and the stubble lay in regimented rows across the field. I scooped up a handful of soil and sniffed it. It was sweet and rich in my nose like the crumbs of the birthday cake I would not have this year. Beneath my step, the warm crust of earth crumbled, and I recalled Stacey and myself walking this route before, our feet turning to leather from going without shoes all summer long.
Was she barefoot this year, like in my dream? She might even have crossed this field recently, leaving soft footprints in the soil for me to follow. I bent and removed my own shoes.
Halfway across the field I stopped: far away, where the sky met the fields, a black cat trotted. I tried to focus on it as it merged with the shimmering horizon, to decide if it was domestic or wild, but it evaporated before my eyes. I began to walk again, heading for the circle of trees and the little lake within.
At the ring of poplars I turned one last time and surveyed the field. Clouds had appeared in the east now, moving fast as if a storm was pursuing them. Huge swathes of land were covered in shadow interspersed with light. I turned and passed into the cool of the trees, pausing for a moment, reminded of another glade, another magic circle, trying to remember where I had seen it. A place where woodland animals came, where the drip, drip of water never ceased. As I pushed through the last of the undergrowth, I half expected to see a deer standing at the water’s edge, drinking, but there was nothing there but me.
It had been two years since I was last here. The ground was clotted with marsh marigolds, dipping their tiny golden heads into the lake. A dog rose wound its way through the trees, swaying in the ripening breeze. My head was aching now. I sat down in the shade of the poplars and dipped my toes into the cool water.
A twig snapped somewhere within the bushes.
“Stacey?” I said, peering through the branches, trying to spot movement. Something plopped quietly into the pool. I shifted back to look, but the lake was completely still, no rings rippling its surface.
“Stacey, stop it,” I said, angry now, my head pounding. “I’m sorry if I upset you, I really am. I miss you. Things aren’t as fun without you.”
I stopped and waited. The ring of trees was silent. The lake was still.
“I came to tell you that I’m going to find the circus in Dad’s books,” I called over the water, feeling mildly stupid. “I want to see if they can tell me anything. I just... I just need to get away. Will you come with me?”
I could hear the echo of my words drifting away from me, and then there was nothing but the sigh of air over water. It had been pointless to search for her. She was still angry with me. I stood up and turned to go, tripping over something in my haste. An old glass bottle lay half-submerged in the long grass. I kicked at it. Dried petals had pasted themselves to the inside of the glass, the remains of the summer potion from two years ago. Bending down, I pulled at the long white grass roots that had wrapped themselves around it and levered it up.
With all my strength, I hurled it into the center of the lake, hoping she was watching. I paused to listen to its satisfying splash, watching as it bobbed for a moment or two and then sank without a trace.