‘Did you ever doubt me?’ Hal walked slowly down the short avenue; the crunching echo of his footsteps now sounded strange, distorted.
When he finally stood before the monument, none of the pictures he had seen in the books had prepared him for its scale: he was dwarfed by its size. The reversed image from Poussin’s painting was only one small, though central, part of the whole monument. It was framed by two giant stone columns topped by a megalithic block, with another ornamental block on top. On the large stone that straddled the columns, two faces had been carved, one smiling, one sad, like the Greek masks for tragedy and comedy. The size and shape of the framing monument reminded Hal of nothing less than one of Stonehenge’s trilithons.
Underpinning the whole monument was the mysterious inscription: O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V. with a ‘D’ and an ‘M’ carved partly beneath the line. Another clue left by the Society of Dilettanti, perhaps, its meaning now lost to time. Cautiously, Hal reached forward and scraped his fingers across the rough stone surface of the Poussin relief, picking out the legend ‘ Et in Arcadia Ego ’ carved on the tomb.
But as he removed his hand, a large blue spark jumped out from his fingertips and crackled into the monument. Hal jumped back in shock.
‘What was that?’ Samantha gasped.
Before Hal could answer, flickers of blue energy appeared on the relief, sizzling around the outline of the tomb before moving down the monument. Though the ground was thick with snow, Hal could see the sapphire electricity sparking beneath the surface as it surged away from the monument in straight lines.
‘What are you looking at?’
Hal turned to Samantha, who was staring at him, puzzled. ‘The electricity, or whatever it is.’ He pointed to the lines of force moving out across the gardens.
Samantha followed the line of his finger, but shook her head. ‘I can’t see anything.’
‘You can’t?’ Hal was baffled. The blue light now burned brightly through the snow, the lines reaching out across the landscape far into the distance, interconnecting — a network of fire. The brilliant blue energy was the same as that which formed the image locked into the Wish Stone. Hal could feel it resonating inside him, filling him with a tremendous exhilaration. He felt as if he could do anything, that he was linked to everything. Was this part of what it meant to be a Brother of Dragons? Was that why Samantha was blind to the power?
There was a sudden rush in his heart and the blue light exploded upwards from the ground, soaring into the sky to form a cathedral-like structure high over the Shepherds’ Monument. Hal was stunned by the wonder of what was happening around him.
He turned back to the Shepherds’ Monument and was shocked to see that it was transforming. The blue light had made the stone relief translucent and now the image had turned the right way around. As Hal watched, the stonework began to fold out like two shutters.
‘It’s like a window,’ Samantha said, entranced.
‘You can see that?’
‘Of course I can.’
Hal’s heart thumped even harder when he realised that what he was seeing through the gap where the relief had been was not the trees behind the monument, but another landscape entirely. Hal made out rolling grassland, and in the distance a thick forest before a row of breathtaking mountains. In that place, the sun was just rising, casting the land in a magical light, picking out the mist in the hollows, illuminating the dawn clouds. The ethereal quality was palpable and sparked in Hal a deep yearning.
‘Where is that?’ The awe in Samantha’s voice told Hal that she felt it, too.
‘Otherworld,’ he said softly. ‘T’ir n’a n’Og. The Land of Always Summer.’
Across the magical landscape, Hal could just make out tracings of the blue energy that was spreading out across the countryside behind him. It was in everything, linking this world and the Otherworld, and the instant that thought entered his head, more pieces of the mystery fell into place.
‘Arcadia is the Otherworld,’ he said. ‘Poussin is pointing us towards something in the Otherworld. The image here is reversed because T’ir n’a n’Og is the flipside of our world. It’s telling us to view it from the other side!’
A surge like a strong wind came through the window from Otherworld; it felt like a bubble expanding as it passed through Hal and continued outwards, and when he looked around he was shocked once again. The gardens had been transformed, the snow gone, the quality of light that of dawn on a summer’s day.
‘That’s why this place is so important!’ Hal said jubilantly. ‘For some reason, this is one of the special spots where our world and the Otherworld intersect. That’s what you could feel earlier… the echo of it. But feel it now!’
‘I can!’ Samantha exclaimed. ‘It’s so different… I feel as if I’m drunk!’
‘That’s just the start of the mystery, though,’ Hal said. ‘There’s more. We’ve just got to keep pushing.’
Suddenly there was movement in the bushes nearby. Hal whirled just in time to catch a glimpse of a small man with the legs of a goat. The figure was naked to the waist, and small horns protruded from his forehead. He winked at Hal as he danced off, clutching a set of pan pipes. More activity was apparent all around the garden, drawing Hal and Samantha away from the monument. None of it was threatening. A magical air hung over the whole landscape, and Hal found himself grinning for no apparent reason. Samantha caught his hand and they ran to investigate, laughing, as the jaunty music of the pan pipes floated across the balmy garden. Bats flitted in and out of the trees, joined here and there by what Hal at first took to be fireflies until he realised they were tiny people with gossamer wings, glowing with an inner light.
‘This must be what it’s like over there,’ Hal said ecstatically. Then another thought struck him: ‘We could use this place to cross over!’
They followed the path around in a state of wonder. Inside the Chinese House, coloured shadows moved across the walls. It looked to Hal like dragons winding sinuously across a landscape; there was fire and light and a tremendous sense of wellbeing.
At the ruined monument by the river, the statue of the druid was now gone, replaced by the faun, who perched on the highest point playing his pipes. Hal wondered if the druid was the faun, locked in stone, waiting to be released by the power from T’ir n’a n’Og. Nearby, the fountain that had earlier been dead and dismal in the snow was now gushing, but instead of water Blue Fire flowed from the swan’s mouth, joining the network of interconnecting lines that spread out over the landscape.
‘This is amazing!’ Samantha said in awe. ‘This is what it could be like always! Can you feel it, Hal? It’s like… healing. Like I’m getting a shot of something that’s making me fit enough to do anything.’
‘I like that,’ he replied. ‘ This is what it could always be like.’
They spent the next half-hour wandering the garden in a state of awe, engulfed by sights and sounds and sensations that were so powerful it felt like a drug trip. There was magic in everything. The little creatures, the nature sprites, the tree spirits were everywhere, as if every living thing and every object had a shadow life, hidden away until a switch was thrown that allowed the true self to come out into the open. The power was so evident, so great, that Hal was convinced the war could be won if only humanity could tap into what had been released into the garden.
That was part of the secret of the Shepherds’ Monument, he was sure, and it was linked in some way to the part yet undiscovered. It was a double mystery: the reversal of the Poussin painting on the relief was the clue. Two sides, both inextricably bound together. They had broken the symbolic code of one side, the mystery of the reversed painting, which was tied into the anagram of the legend — I Tego Arcana Dei — Begone! I conceal the secrets of God. Now they knew what the secret of God was: the Blue Fire, hidden in force in the Otherworld.
But the flipside of the mystery, the true side, still escaped him. Et in Arcadia Ego — And in Arcadia I Exist? If the ‘Ego’ wasn’t Death — and he was sure it wasn’t — then who was it?
Hal’s thoughts were disturbed by a sudden change in the ambience of the summery garden. A note of tension intruded on the calm, like jagged violins in a pastoral musical passage. Samantha felt it, too, for she looked around uncomfortably.
The music of the pan pipes faded, and when Hal glanced at the ruin he saw that the faun was gone and the little flying people were rapidly disappearing into the trees. A stillness descended.
‘I think we should get out of here right now,’ Hal said.
But as they hurried along the path, a shadowy figure emerged from the thick vegetation ahead of them. It was huge, its outline moving as if seen through a heat haze. As it stepped forward, Hal was appalled to see that it was made up of the writhing bodies of animals — badgers and foxes, rabbits and mice — all melded together to
