The Silver Witch(18)

‘No, no, I don’t think it’s that. Let me see…’ He minutely alters some setting which Tilda cannot see. There is a pause, and then the hallway is once again filled with the steady rhythm of the grandfather clock. ‘There!’ The professor shuts the door to the workings and gives the thing an affectionate pat. ‘Lovely craftsmanship. Look at the inlay, can you see from there? Here, thin strips of a lighter-colored wood cut and set into the walnut casing. Beautifully done. You’d think it was painted, the joins are so flawless. If you run your fingers over it the surface is as smooth as marble. You try,’ he says, standing back.

Tilda finds she cannot step forward. The calm that she has acquired while with Professor Williams is leaving her, minute by minute. Her pulse begins to race as if she has just run up the hill to Ty Gwyn, for she knows beyond doubt that if she touches the clock it will stop again. And this time there will be a witness to the madness. The professor will see that it is she who is causing the clock to stutter and fail. Just as the lights failed at the cottage. Just as the computer failed.

Because of her.

And I won’t be able to pretend otherwise any longer. Not even to myself.

‘I’m sorry,’ she blurts out, ‘I really have to go.’ Hurrying to the doorway, she jams on her sneakers, hat and jacket as the professor chatters on about tea and clocks and the fog having lifted outside. She scarcely hears what he is saying as she mumbles a good-bye and hurries through the heavy oak front door, breaking into a run the second she turns in the direction of home.

* * *

Two days after meeting Professor Williams, Tilda steels herself to visit the busy side of the lake. Ordinarily, she would avoid the bustle of such a place, with its boats for hire, ice-cream van, café, sailing club, campsite, and so on, but the more she thinks about it, the more she knows she must go there. However much tea and a chat with the professor helped her to shrug off what she saw in the mist that morning, time on her own has forced her to think again. Try as she might to convince herself that what she saw was nothing more than a trick of the eerie light combined with low blood-sugar levels, she cannot shake off the feeling that there was more to it than that. On top of which, her own effect on the grandfather clock still disturbs her. She cannot see how, if, the two things are in any way connected, and yet there is a niggling sense that they must be. On her return to the cottage that same day the lights had fused again. Not when she first arrived home, but after she had been there an hour or so.

Something is going on. Either I’m losing my mind, or there is another explanation.

She is relieved not to be having to explain her actions to anyone. She is aware how unformed her ideas are. How unfounded her theories. She is acting only on a hunch, and has no real notion of where it will lead her. Or even what it is she is hoping to find. Last night she sat in front of the fire in the snug sitting room of Ty Gwyn, sipping a glass of daftly expensive wine from the local shop, with Thistle stretched out on the hearth rug, and tried to pull together what she knew. Or at least, what she thought she knew. Her flashbacks–or waking nightmares as she had come to think of them–of the moment of Mat’s death are not new. She has been having them for over a year now. But recently they do seem to be more vivid, more horribly, cruelly real in every heartbreaking detail. And then there are the electrics in the cottage. Bob found nothing wrong, yet the fuse box continues to trip out so frequently that Tilda has given up resetting the thing. She and the dog muddle along without electric light or the computer or any other plug-in appliances. The solid fuel range in the kitchen means she can continue to boil a kettle or cook the few food items she has left. And it heats the water to lukewarm, too. The open fire in the sitting room stops the house from becoming uncomfortably cold, even if upstairs is getting increasingly bleak as the temperature outside drops. Tilda is certain that it was her own proximity to the professor’s clock that caused it to stop, so she cannot pretend that the wiring at the cottage is faulty. It makes no real sense, but the fact is, she is the common factor in both cases.

Sitting next to Thistle, gazing into the flames, Tilda had tried to recall what she had seen—or thought she had seen—at the lake. Three people in a boat. Two men, one woman, rowing for the shore. Dressed outlandishly. Or rather, outdatedly.

By several hundred years.

And the farside of the lake utterly changed. No café, no boathouse, no sailing club. No buildings that made any sense. Just a collection of huts. As if everything had been washed away by the mist and replaced by another land entirely. The most obvious cause for what she had seen, Tilda had decided as she drained her wine, was that grief had finally unhinged her. She was losing her flimsy hold on her own sanity. It was not a conclusion that brought her any comfort. And the only way she could think of to disprove it, to come up with something, anything else, was to go to the north shore and reassure herself that everything was still there, still as it should be, in all its slightly tacky, hot dog and paddleboat normality. That her hallucination, if such it was, amounted to nothing more than the febrile workings of a troubled mind. Her grief counselor, all those months ago, had advised her to accept her flashbacks as a part of the grieving process. Was this latest vision simply more of the same?