'Poor souls,' Cat said, her eyes switching off into the distance of the haunted forest. The wolves sounded lost and forlorn. Damned.
'The Devil rides a horse in this place,' she said to Michael suddenly. 'Gathering souls. We must always flee the sound of hoofbeats when we are here.'
'He has Rose,' Michael said, the words like lead in his belly.
He had no idea where the knowledge had come from, but he knew it was true. Rose, or her ghost, was deep at the heart of this place.
Cat shivered, her gaiety gone for the moment. 'Come. I will take you out of here, back to your own place.'
They rose together, a sudden dread constricting them at the same time. The wood was black with shadow, pools of murk brimming under the overhanging branches. Something which was as dark as the shadow and yet apart from it moved between two trees. Upright, long-muzzled, sharpeared. It halted and stood still barely fifty yards away, watching them. Cat took Michael's hand, her eyes showing the whites like a horse smelling fire.
'Run!'
He remembered little later of their headlong flight through the wood, though he would bear the scars of the briars for weeks. He remembered her hand locked on to his, pulling him onward, her hair flying in his face, the white shift like a ghost in the crowded darkness. He felt as though it were all a dream. A fairy tale in which the princess was rescuing him rather than the other way around.
They laboured up wooded hills that he had never seen or climbed in his life before, plashed through streams which could not exist. They covered the better part of two miles in a wood he knew ended a hundred yards away. And always the shadow was behind them, swift and silent, now running on all fours, now upright. Behind it the wood was alive with the cries of the pack.
Time passed and died. He grew exhausted though Cat seemed built out of untiring sinew and bone. Or sugar and spice, perhaps. In the end she was half supporting his weight, and absurdly he noticed even then the springy suppleness of her body as it moved with his.
A last hill, she told him. Nearly there. And they found themselves above the trees, looking out on a starlit night at a blue, sleeping earth. It was the Bann valley where Michael lived. He knew its contours as well as the profile of his own face, from the long slope of the plateau in the east to the river and then the low hills leading to the Sperrin mountains in the far west.
Not a light was to be seen across the whole landscape. Not a house, not a village or town. The land was as dark and empty as an undiscovered wilderness.
That was what it was in this place, he realized. Wilderness. And sometimes his world and this one met.
As he watched, he saw a tiny bead of flame-like light strike up miles away in the hills leading to the mountains. A bonfire, perhaps, a big one to be seen over twenty, twenty-five miles.
Cat was tugging at him, her voice a low hiss of urgency, but he resisted her pull for a moment, staring out at his own country gone wild, drinking in the weirdness. It was his to travel, if he wanted to, and if he was fit for it.
The wolves were close, the shadow that led them a rippling black shape powering through the trees with two eyes burning yellow and its maw agape.
'Mother of God!'
Then Cat pulled him down what seemed to be a deep hole, a dark pit leading into light at its end. A tumble ... did he always have to fall through these things?—and he was lying on leaves with a tree root digging into his neck and the sound of the river peaceful and endless at his side.
He got his breath back. 'Cat?'
But she was gone. Back into Wonderland, perhaps.
Answers... well, he had a few of them now, but they only made him think of new questions.
BACK IN THE world he thought of as his own, where there were clocks and guns and flying machines, where wolves paced in zoos and girls wore shoes, the long days continued to go by, unaware of anything out of the ordinary. Each was as distinct as a portrait miniature, their procession merging into a larger canvas, a picture painted by memory. Midsummer was weeks gone and there was a barely perceptible shortening of the golden evenings as August drew on and Michael's holidays ran away from him like sand in an hour glass. Cat did not choose to reappear and though Michael prowled the wood like a savage he saw nothing unusual. Or almost nothing. He did come across tracks and managed to persuade Aunt Rachel to get out library books on nature, on woodland and forest wildlife, and an old one on prehistory: cave-men stories, as Rachel labelled them. But she and his grandmother were nonetheless impressed that he was reading books during the holidays.
The tracks were of the usual animals of northwestern European woodland, except that they were a thousand years out of date. According to the book's identifications, there were boar and wolf, beaver and great deer, wild oxen and bears in the woods. Bears! And yet they were silent and invisible, ghost animals, their only record the footprints in the soft clay of the wood floor.