AIDAN SPENT THE REST OF THE DAY EXPLORING THE house and its grounds. Andrew, leaning attentively over Stashe and the computer and trying to take in what she was telling him, watched Aidan pass and repass the study windows and was reminded of himself at Aidan’s age. Things at his grandfather’s house had seemed so magical in those days.
No. Correction. Things had been magical then. It was quite possible they still were. Watching Aidan scoot away across the tufty lawn, Andrew began, at last, to remember some of the very odd things that had happened while he stayed here as a boy. Hadn’t there been a werewolf that was nearly shot for chasing sheep? His grandfather had rescued it somehow. Andrew had told his mother about that when he came home, and she had told him angrily to forget all Jocelyn’s silly nonsense.
“Are you listening, Professor?” Stashe asked. She was using a special kind voice on Andrew and his ignorance.
Andrew jumped. “Yes, yes. It’s just that my research assistant used to handle all this for me. Double click on the right-hand button here, you said. And do, please, call me Andrew.”
“Or use this function key,” Stashe said, pointing to it. “Honestly, P—er—Andrew, until today I didn’t believe there were such things as absent-minded professors. I know better now.”
Aidan had been up to the attics, where there was no proper floor. He had stood on the joists and looked up at the cobwebby holes in the roof. It was queer that no rain had come in. Aidan took off his glasses and saw why. The apparent spiderwebs were really thin, old enchantments holding the roof together. Emboldened by what Andrew had done to Tarquin, Aidan tried to see the cobwebby spaces as proper roof tiles. And as he stared at the spaces, the attics slowly became dark, dark and musty, too dark to see much in.
Pleased with himself, Aidan felt his way from joist to joist—because it wouldn’t do to mend the roof and then put a foot through a bedroom ceiling—and went down to explore the grounds. They were wonderfully bushy and wild. But the amazing thing about them was that they felt utterly and securely safe, safe the way Gran’s rented house had been until she died. Aidan knew that no Stalkers could get near him here. He went everywhere.
There were Beings living in the safety of these grounds. Things that Aidan could feel but not see seemed to lurk at the corners of his eyes, in the orchard particularly, but also among the laurels by the gate. There was a sort of grotto near one of the back walls, where water trickled and ferns grew. Something definitely lived there, but even without his glasses, Aidan had no clue what kind of entity it was.
One of the times he crossed the lawns, he encountered Shaun. Shaun had a bag of cement in each hand. He looked lost. Aidan was astonished at how strong Shaun must be. He had tried to lift one of those stone-hard bags himself and hadn’t been able to budge it.
“Professor said to bury these,” Shaun said. “Would here do?”
They were right in the middle of the main lawn there. “No, I don’t think so,” Aidan said. “You’d better find somewhere with bare earth.”
“Ah.” Shaun nodded. “Easier to dig.”
He trudged off one way and Aidan went another.
After a while, Aidan worked round to Mr. Stock’s particular, privileged walled vegetable garden. It was so orderly and clean and square that it was more like a room that had lost its roof than a garden. Aidan could see Mr. Stock’s hatted head moving about inside the greenhouse in one corner. He veered off toward the opposite corner and tiptoed around a bed of broccoli that seemed to be trying to grow into oak trees, hoping not to be seen. He didn’t want to get Andrew punished again. But my goodness, things grew huge in this garden! There were strawberries the size of pears and a vegetable marrow, reposing in a rich, black bed of its own, that Aidan first thought of comparing to a small dinosaur; then he thought, No, what it is, is an ecological zeppelin. Beyond it, runner beans a foot long trailed from tall, tall pea-sticks.
Beyond these, Aidan came upon Shaun busily digging in another rich black bed, with the cement bags waiting on the path to be buried.
Oo-er! Aidan thought. Crisis! “Er—” he said. “Shaun—”
Shaun just grinned at him. “Good place,” he said, and went on digging.
Aidan could think of only one way of stopping Shaun. He ran to find Andrew. When he put his face round the study door, Stashe was alone in there. She gave Aidan one of her hundred-watt smiles. “What’s up?”
“I need Professor Hope,” Aidan said. “Urgently.”
“In the living room,” Stashe said. “I overloaded him and he went to play the piano.”
Aidan tore off there. But by the time he got to the living room, and Andrew had looked up from sorting music out of the piano stool, it was already too late. Mr. Stock’s voice crashed like thunder in the distance.
“My sparrowgrass! That hulking brainless looby of yours is DIGGING UP MY SPARROWGRASS BED!”
And the voice of Mrs. Stock shrieked back, sharp as daggers, “And what if he is? I don’t know what you grow it for! Not one stalk of asparagus have you brought into this kitchen ever!”
“It’s for the Fête, you stupid cow! GO AND TELL HIM TO STOP!”
“You tell him. It’s your asparagus!”
“Oh, dear!” Andrew said. “Is that what you were coming to tell me about?” Aidan nodded. He was thoroughly out of breath. “I think,” Andrew said, “the only thing to do is to keep our heads down. Why—?”
“You told Shaun to bury those bags of cement,” Aidan panted. “And then I told him not in the middle of the lawn.”
Andrew grinned. “Then it’s too late to do anything but make bets on what our punishment’s going to be.”
Aidan discovered that he really, really liked Andrew. Up to then, he had been too shy of him to know. He grinned back. “He’s got some broccoli like little oak trees.”
“No, rhubarb,” Andrew said. “I bet on rhubarb. He’s got some that’s taller than you are.” In fact, what they got was asparagus. Only minutes after Mrs. Stock had collected Shaun and stormed off in a dudgeon, the asparagus was sitting on the kitchen table in an enormous box half filled with earth.
“Double punishment,” Andrew said cheerfully. “Mrs. Stock didn’t even wait to make cauliflower cheese. Do you like asparagus?”
“I’ve never had any,” Aidan said. “How do you cook it?”
“You can steam, roast, or boil it,” Andrew said, picking about in the box. “My grandfather used to love it because you’re allowed to dip it in butter and eat it with your fingers. But I’m afraid that Mr. Stock has let this lot get too big and woody. Let’s just wash it and put it on the woodshed roof. Someone might like it.”
Yes, and I can’t wait to see who! Aidan thought.
Andrew took the usual kitchen chair out and stood on it, while Aidan passed him dripping green bundles of asparagus they had washed in the biggest iron pan in the kitchen.
They had hardly started when Stashe came hurrying around the corner, staggering a bit in her elegant shoes. “It’s all fixed, and I’m just off now,” she was saying, but she stopped and giggled when she saw what they were doing. “Oh, do you have a visitor too? Ours takes stuff off our outdoor table. But only meaty bits. Dad says it must be a fox. What do you think yours is?”
Andrew paused in laying asparagus carefully along the dips in the corrugated roof. “I’m not at all sure. Is the computer ready to use now?”
“Perfectly,” said Stashe. “And I’m hurrying off now so’s I can walk home and save Dad the drive. You wouldn’t believe the muddle he got in this lunchtime! He kept forgetting the car was adapted to drive with his hands.”
She beckoned imperiously. Andrew found himself bending double on the chair to bring his ear near her mouth. Bossyboots! he thought. But Stashe certainly had a way with her. He couldn’t help laughing.
“Thank you for what you did for Dad!” she whispered. “He was so depressed I was getting worried. How did you do it?”
“Um—his leg was almost still there,” Andrew said. “I just brought it back.”
“And will it last?” Stashe asked urgently. “I don’t think he could bear to lose it again.”
“I can always bring it back,” Andrew said, much more confidently than he felt. “Keep telling him that.”
“I will,” said Stashe. “Now I must fly. See you!”
She went rushing off at a smart stagger round the house. Andrew waved good-bye with the bunch of asparagus he was holding and almost fell off the chair. “A right fool I look!” he said to Aidan. “Next bunch, please.”
By the time they had finished, the woodshed appeared to be thatched in asparagus. Aidan could hardly wait to see what came and ate it. It was a good thing there was so much of it. He would have plenty of time to get downstairs with the torch as soon as he heard munching.
He went to bed early, saying he was tired again, which was far from true. Upstairs, he propped all his bedroom windows open as far as they would go, by wedging them with new packets of socks. He put on new pajamas, new fleece, and the new waterproof over those. Then he fetched the pillows from the bed to make the windowsill comfortable and settled down there with the torch to wait and listen. The woodshed was just round the corner from there. He ought to hear munching easily.
An hour later he was freezing, in spite of the new fleece, but nothing else had happened. Aidan had heard an owl hooting, cars on the road, and people laughing in the distance down by the pub. But those were all ordinary sounds. An hour later still, when it was quite dark, he began to wonder if the mysterious visitor might be magically silent. Aidan was going to sit here all night and not hear a thing.
The idea panicked him and he saw that the only way to be sure of seeing anything was to go outside and wait beside the woodshed. He sprang up, clutching the torch, and tiptoed across the creaky floor, up the bulge in the middle, and down to the bedroom door. He creaked the door open. Bother. Stupid. He should have oiled it. There was a can of WD-40 in the kitchen, but he had not thought to borrow it like the torch. He crept along the corridor and down the stairs. They creaked too. Was there any way to oil stairs? Probably not. Things creaked when they were old. It was a relief to get down to ground level, where the floors were stone. Aidan scudded across the flagstones and along to the kitchen.
Andrew, sitting reading in the comfortable chair in the living room, heard light footsteps fleeing down the passage, and looked up. Aidan? Up to what? Hungry again probably and going to find the biscuits they had bought this morning. Not to worry. Andrew looked back to his book and, as he did, he heard the faint, distant sound of the back door being carefully opened and shut. Then he knew just what Aidan was doing. He swore and flung down the book.
Aidan tiptoed through the dewy grass, gasping at how cold it was. He should have put shoes on. Rather late for that now. He came to the corner of the house and, very cautiously, put his shoulder against the stones of the wall and sidled round.
The visitor was already there. It was enormous. There was a fitful moon that was rushing through smokelike clouds, and Aidan could see the visitor against the sky, towering over the woodshed, stooping and strange. It reached out a piece of itself….
The Stalkers in London came instantly back to Aidan’s mind. For an hour-long minute, he was more terrified even than he had been then, paralyzed with horror, while the great shape unfolded upward and made mysterious movements. Then there was a crunch, followed by very large munching.
It’s a vegetarian, Aidan reminded himself. It’s eating the asparagus. He managed to take a deep breath. He lifted up the big torch, aimed it at the creature, and switched it on. It made a fan of dazzling white light.
The visitor gave a yelping grunt and tried to hide its eyes with the bunch of asparagus in its huge hand. It said, quite distinctly, “Don’t do that!”
Aidan automatically said, “Sorry,” and switched the torch off. Then of course he could see nothing. He opened and shut his eyes to clear the dazzle off and thought about what he had seen. For a moment, he thought he had been looking at Shaun. But Shaun at least four times the usual size, almost sixteen feet tall and wide with it. Shaun with wild hair tangling down onto his thick shoulders. But the grimy face up among the hair had not been padded with the fat of stupidity, the way Shaun’s was. No, it was not Shaun. It was something else.
“Let’s face it,” Aidan found himself saying aloud. “You’re a giant.”
“Not yet,” the visitor answered discontentedly. He ought to have had a deep, rumbling voice, but in fact, his voice was quite high, rather like Shaun’s. “I grow slow,” he said. “Who you? You got windows on your eyes, but you not the usual boy. That one had hair like straw.”
“I’m Aidan,” Aidan said. And he thought, He must mean Professor Hope when he was a boy! So Andrew did go and look! “And what’s your name?”
The visitor took a big bite of asparagus and answered as he munched.
“Pardon?” said Aidan. No one’s name could be crunch.
At that moment, Andrew said from the corner of the house, “Hallo, Groil.”
“H’llo, h’llo!” the visitor replied excitedly, waving two bunches of the asparagus against the faint light of the sky. He waved just the same way that Shaun did when he was excited. “Who you? Not the usual old man, are you?”
“No,” said Andrew. “I’m Andrew.”
“Andrew! You grew quick!” the giant exclaimed. He swung a fistful of asparagus toward Aidan. “Then he—?”
“Staying here,” said Andrew. “Like I used to do. I hope Aidan isn’t disturbing you at your supper. My grandfather used to get very cross with me—”
At this, Aidan looked nervously from Andrew to Groil, but Groil simply crammed both bunches of asparagus into his mouth, crunched mightily, swallowed with the sound of a drain being unblocked, and said, “Nah, nah.” In the gray, gusting light from the moon, he seemed to be smiling. After another drainlike swallow, he said, “Still wearing the jumper you gave me. See?” He plucked proudly at his chest.
Aidan was seeing quite well now. The thing Groil was plucking at might have been a jumper once, but now it was mostly holes, like a dark, irregular string vest, stretched very tightly across his great chest. Below that, he wore a loincloth that could once have been a bath towel.
“Aren’t you cold like that?” Aidan asked before he could stop himself.
“Sometimes,” Groil admitted. “In winter.” He picked up another fistful of asparagus and pointed it at Andrew. “He gave me clothes, see.” He stayed pointing the asparagus at Andrew. Aidan could see his big eyes shining rather sadly in his big face. “Then he grew. Everyone grows so quick except me. You look like the old magician now. Where is he?”
“He’s dead, I’m afraid,” Andrew said.
The eyes, dimly, blinked. Then they looked at Aidan for help. “What is dead?” Groil asked.
Aidan and Andrew both spoke at once. Andrew said, “Gone for good.” Aidan said, “Not here anymore,” and gulped back misery.
“Ah.” Groil munched asparagus for a while, thinking. “And then you ate him?” he suggested. “I ate a gone-for-good squirrel once. I didn’t like it much.”
“Well, no,” Andrew said. “Not quite. More like the squirrel before you ate it. He left me in charge here. Let’s change the subject. Do you like the asparagus we put out for you?”
“This?” Groil scrabbled up another bunch of asparagus from the roof and held it into the moonlight. “Very tasty. Crunchy. A little bitter. It tastes green. Sparrowgrass, is it?”
Aidan thought of Mr. Stock and tried not to laugh.
Groil grinned at him. Big flat teeth caught the moonlight. “I heard him shouting about it in the garden,” he said. “It’s a new word I know.”
So Groil must lurk about Melstone House somewhere, Aidan thought. “What do you do in the winter when it’s cold?” he asked.
“I curl down,” Groil said. “Under stuff. Earth keeps you quite warm.”
“Wouldn’t you like some more clothes?” Aidan asked.
Groil thought about it. “Something looser?” he said, plucking at the strands of wool across his chest.
“Then I’ll see if I can find you some,” Aidan said.
Andrew coughed. “Aidan, I think we should leave Groil to his supper now. My grandfather was always very strict about this. And you should be in bed. Don’t forget to bring the torch.”
“Oh.” Groil was not quite a vegetarian, Aidan realized. Someone who could think of eating dead grandfathers might not draw the line at living boys. “Oh, I—Good night, then, Groil. See you.”
“See you, Edwin,” Groil said happily. His teeth closed on more asparagus with a snap and a great crunch.
Aidan, as he bent and groped about for the torch that he had put down in the grass somewhere, wondered crossly why it was that nobody could get his name right. He muttered about it as he followed Andrew round the house and into the warmth beyond the French windows. “I don’t want to go back to bed yet,” he said once they were indoors. “I’m too excited. Do you mind if I stay in here and make Groil some clothes?”
Gran would have said no and sent Aidan off to bed at once. Andrew simply asked agreeably, “How do you propose to make clothes?”
“I’ll show you.” Aidan put the torch on the piano and pelted off upstairs to his room. He came back with his old clothes—clothes he had worn for the best part of last week—and spread them out on the worn, patterned carpet. He took his glasses off. “Like this,” he explained to Andrew, who was now sitting in the good chair with his book again. “If I take my glasses off, things go larger anyway. I think I can make them go really larger.”
Andrew answered, in his polite way, “It’s certainly worth a try. I remember, when I was your age, getting pretty distressed at how cold Groil must be. When I first met him, he had no clothes on at all.”
And how had he forgotten that, Andrew wondered. He had forgotten Groil completely. All he had remembered was that it was very unwise to try to see what, or who, ate the food on the woodshed roof. And he ought to have remembered. He had been in trouble with his grandfather about spying on Groil, and in trouble with Mrs. Stock over stealing the bath towel. Then, when he got home, he had been in trouble with his mother about the missing jumper. She had knitted it herself for Andrew to wear in Melstone. All that was enough to make a person remember, you would have thought. But he had forgotten because, when he was older, he knew that adults didn’t believe in naked giants at midnight.
Then there was the puzzling way that Groil looked so like Shaun. Andrew thought that he had probably given Shaun a job because Shaun looked familiar somehow. He had a dim feeling that his grandfather had talked about this kind of resemblance. It was another of the magical things Jocelyn had told him about. He suspected that, one way or another, his grandfather had prepared him quite thoroughly for this field-of-care thing. And Andrew had forgotten every bit of it.
“Did Groil remind you of anyone?” he asked Aidan.
“Yes,” said Aidan. “Shaun.”
Aidan was having trouble. The clothes were stretching, but very slowly and unevenly, and going spiderweb thin in places. Andrew took his glasses off and looked across at Aidan crouching on the carpet, staring, staring at a pair of jeans with one leg longer than the other. A couple of years ago he would have thought Aidan was mad.
“Try taking them back smaller, and then thinking of each thread as longer and thicker,” Andrew suggested. “Like looking at cloth under a microscope.”
“Oh, yes, but—Thanks,” Aidan said, flustered.
There was a pause, during which the sweatshirt grew at last and the jeans shrank.
“You know,” Aidan burst out in his frustration, “I do hate my name!”
“Why is that?” Andrew asked.
“No one gets it right!” said Aidan. “Not even Groil! And it’s an awful name anyway. Aidan’s a saint and Cain was the first-ever murderer. What a mixture!”
“Well, most people are that kind of mixture,” Andrew said.
“Yes, but they don’t have names that say so!” Aidan said disgustedly.
“True,” Andrew agreed. “But has it occurred to you that if those Stalkers of yours had called you by the right name, you might have gone out to them?”
“Oh!” Aidan was much struck by this. “Do you think I would have?”
“Yes. Names are powerful things,” Andrew told him. “It could even have saved your life that they got yours wrong. Besides, neither of your names means what you think it does. Here. Let me show you.”
Sick of brooding on things he could maddeningly not remember, Andrew sprang up and went to the bookshelves. Aidan distrustfully watched him seize two fat books and spread them open on the piano. Being a professor again, Aidan thought.
“Yes, here we are,” Andrew said. “Aidan is a diminutive—that means a smaller version or a pet name—of an Irish name that means ‘fire.’ You are ‘young fire.’ Think of yourself as crackling and throwing up long yellow flames. Sparks too. And Cain—” He turned to the other book. “It says here that Cain as a surname has nothing whatsoever to do with the first murderer in the Bible. It means either ‘war zone’ or ‘son of a warrior.’ You can think of yourself as ‘Young Fire, Son of a Soldier.’ Does that make you feel better?”
“Let me see,” Aidan said, jumping up. Andrew obligingly pushed the books toward him. Aidan bent over them and discovered that what Andrew said was quite true—except that Andrew had somehow made the meanings more colorful than the books did.
When he turned back to the garments on the floor, he found they were growing nicely all by themselves. They were now slightly larger than Groil-size and took up most of the carpet. No matter. Groil said he was still growing. “Stop!” Aidan told them, and they did. Aidan turned to Andrew, grinning with relief. “Quite a learning curve!” he said. “Spells and names.”
“The two things are often the same,” Andrew said. “But I do think that when people say ‘a learning curve,’ they make a mistake. Learning to me always seems to go in a straight, ignorant line and then, every so often, takes a jump straight upward. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Aidan considered this and nodded. You always learned things suddenly, mostly because people came and told you things. He was beginning to think that Andrew was impressively wise.
“Now go to bed,” Andrew said. “Or I’ll tell Groil you want him to eat you.”