The Fugitives
At the dark end of a winter's afternoon early in 1991 a young woman climbed down from a truck on the road through Thornyhill woods.
"Are you sure?" said the driver. "I can take you on to Eade."
"I'm sure." He had placed a hand on her knee. That was enough. She had insisted on being set down.
"It's a lonely stretch of road," he said, hefting her bags out of the cab, too slowly for her taste. She reached up, tugging her suitcase from his grasp and stumbling under the sudden weight. The baby suspended in a sling about her neck woke at the jolt but didn't cry, only staring about him with wide-open eyes. They were very dark, the irises so large they seemed to have almost no whites, like the eyes of some small nocturnal animal. But the truck driver wasn't watching the child. He thought the woman looked very young to be a mother, little more than a girl, her round face unmade-up and somehow vulnerable, framed in a soft blur of hair, her coloring far paler than her baby. He wanted her to stay in his cab for all sorts of reasons, some kindly, some less so. "I thought you were going on to Crawley."
"I know where I'm going." Her determination belied her softness. She didn't know, but it didn't matter. She slammed the door, hooking the strap of her carryall over her shoulder and dragging the suitcase behind on inadequate wheels. After a few minutes, the truck drove off.
They were alone now. It was a relief the truck had gone, but one fear was swiftly replaced by others. She had been going to Crawley—she had a contact there, a babysitter, the friend of a friend, and the possibility of a job—but instead here she was, miles from anywhere, with little hope of another lift even if she had the courage to accept one. The baby was quiet—he cried so rarely it worried her—but she knew he would soon be hungry, and it was growing darker, and the road was lonely indeed. The suitcase trundled awkwardly at her heels, swaying from side to side, regularly banging against her leg, and the woods seemed to draw closer on either hand, squeezing the road into a narrow slot between thickets of shadow. She was a country girl with no real fear of the night, but she thought she heard a whisper of wind on the windless air, the crack of a twig somewhere nearby, strange stirrings and rustlings in the leafmold. Since the birth of her child she had been subject to nervous imaginings that she had not dared to confide in anyone, dreading to be called paranoid. There were footsteps pattering on empty streets, doors that shifted without a draft, soft murmurings just beyond the reach of hearing. And now the woods seemed to wake at her presence, so she thought the branches groped, and shreds of darkness slithered from tree to tree. They were there, always following, getting closer, never quite catching up . . .
When she saw the lights, she thought they, too, must be an illusion, and she was becoming genuinely unbalanced. Twin gleams of yellow, twinkling through the trees, the yellow of firelight, candlelight, electric light. As she drew nearer she feared they would vanish, but they grew clearer, until she could make out the source. Windows, windows in a house, and the yellow glow between half-drawn curtains. The house appeared to be set in a clearing among the trees: she could see gables pointing against the sky, and the dim suggestion of half-timbering crisscrossing the facade. It looked a friendly house, even in the dark; but she wasn't sure. "What do you think?" she whispered to the baby. "Shall we ask for help? Maybe they'll offer us tea . . ." Maybe it was a witch's cottage, made of gingerbread, and the door would be opened by a hook-nosed crone who would show them the shortest way to her oven.
Footsteps. Footsteps on the empty road. She looked around but could see nothing. Yet for a moment they were quiet and clear, soft-shod feet, or padded paws. And in the gloom there was a deeper dark, like a ripple running through the woods, and the sound of breathing, very close by, as if the wind itself had a throat and was panting on her neck . . . Her suitcase bounced and lurched as she tugged it up the path to the door. There was a knocker, and an old-fashioned bellpull that dangled. She tried both.
The door opened, and there was no hook-nosed crone but a large, comfortable-looking man with a looming stomach, shoulders to match, and very graceful hands. His hair was pale, his complexion a faded pink. His face wore an expression of vague benevolence, or maybe the benevolence was in the arrangement of his features, since his manner was initially hesitant, almost guarded. His eyes were periwinkle blue between fat eyelids.
"We're lost," the young woman began, uneasily, "and I wondered . . ."
He was looking beyond her, into the night, where the footsteps were, and the breathing of the wind. For a fleeting instant she imagined that he, too, heard or saw, though what he saw she didn't know; she didn't look around. Then his gaze came back to her, and he smiled. "Perhaps you'd like to come in. It's getting late, and I was just making tea. If you need to feed the little one . . ."
"Thank you so much!"
She stepped into the hallway, and the closing of the door shut out the dark and its phantoms. Long afterward, she knew she had trusted him without thinking, on instinct. Maybe it was because he was fat, and benevolent looking, and she was desperate and alone, or because the blue twinkle of his eyes had worked a charm on her, but in the end she realized it was because he had looked behind her, and seen something, seen them. He showed her into a room with oak beams, shabby capacious chairs, firelight. A large dog was sprawled on the hearth rug, a dog with shaggy fur and waggy tail, plainly a mongrel. It got up as they came in, stretching its forelegs, rump in the air, tail waving. "Why don't you leave the child by the fire?" the man said. "Hoover will look after him. I call him Hoover for obvious reasons: he cleans up the crumbs. My name is Bartlemy Goodman."
"Annie Ward." She lifted the baby out of the sling and set him down on the hearth rug, which was as shaggy as the dog and so similar they might have been related. "This is Nathan."
Baby and dog surveyed each other, wet black nose almost touching small brown one. Then suddenly Nathan laughed—something as rare as his tears—and she imagined they had formed a bond that transcended any differences of species or speech. "I'd like to heat his milk," she said. "Would—would you mind watching him for me?"
Copyright © 2004 by Amanda Hemingway
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A desperate mother spirits away her infant son, seemingly drawn (chased, perhaps?) to the small English village of Thornyhill. She ends up on the doorstep of old Bartlemy, a curious man who has lived on the forested land for as long as anyone can remember--and who comes to believe that the child is destined for great things.... While growing up under Bartlemy's protective eye, Nathan Ward senses something *else* watching him, a shift of shadows in the surrounding Darkwood. Then pieces of his dreams begin to come to life. A man he saved from the ocean washes ashore on the television news. A greenish stone cup set with jewels that has haunted his visions sounds eerily like one lost by the Thorn family centuries ago--a cup that has recently made its way back into the hands of the village's last living ancestor. Yet when Nathan learns the chalice may have come from another world, a land with bloodstained moons and a toxic sun, he knows he is destined to play a part in something beyond his most vivid imagination. But why is the cup here, and what could it possibly want with a teenage boy and a sleepy town of villagers full of tall tales? With the help of his best friend, Hazel, Nathan must figure out why he's been chosen--and for what purpose. Even if it means traveling deeper each night into dreams, into lands, into legends that both terrify and mesmerize him. The Greenthorn Grail is the first novel of a thrilling new trilogy, tracing a boy's journey--a quest rife with magic, wonder, and forces as dark as midnight.
