surprised how optimistic the other two seemed, despite everything, although he knew his view had been coloured by his vision of his own death in the Watchtower. Laura had been entrusted with the stone, although they had never discussed it; it just seemed natural as she had been the one to find it. As their conversation turned to the possible locations of the other talismans, she pulled the stone out from the small rucksack where she had decided to keep it.
'It's a weird thing,' she said. 'I still can't get over the feel of it. It's kind of creepy.'
'What do you mean?'
'You'll know if you touch it. Here, cop a feel.'
She handed it over to Church for the first time. But as his fingers brushed it, an ear-splitting shriek burst from the stone and he dropped it like a hot coal. 'What the hell was that?' he asked in shock.
They all looked at it for a moment before Laura picked it up. 'Care to try that again?' Laura held it out to him again.
Church hesitated, then gingerly brushed his fingers over the stone's surface. The shriek erupted immediately.
'Jesus, why don't you set off a flare so everyone knows where we are!' Ruth protested.
'What does it mean?' Church said curiously. 'You try it,' he said to Ruth.
She took it from Laura, passed it from hand to hand, then gave it back. 'Looks like it doesn't like men,' Laura said to Church. 'Or maybe you've just got clammy palms.'
Church felt suddenly cold. 'The woman in the Watchtower said it had the power to recognise the true king of the land.'
Laura burst out laughing. 'King Church the First! That's a good one!'
Church shook his head. 'Don't be ridiculous.'
'You can't get away from the fact it only reacts to you,' Ruth said.
'I don't want to think about that. With this kind of stuff we can spend forever guessing. Who knows what any of it means?'
Laura was still laughing coarsely. 'The king! With his royal carriage, the Nissan Bluebird!'
Her mockery was so sharp they couldn't help joining in the laughter. It eased some of the tension which had been collecting around them.
They spent the next couple of hours drinking beer, talking quietly and feeding the fire from the rapidly diminishing woodpile; a cold wind threatened a storm. The conversation never strayed far from their mission, as they called it (ironically at first, but with increasing seriousness); even Laura's attempts to keep the chat superficial failed.
Shortly after 9 p.m., Ruth felt a change come over her. It started as a simple shiver that reached from deep within her, followed by a prickling of the skin that suggested the onset of some virus; a moment or two later she heard, or thought she did, her name whispered somewhere among the trees. Church and Laura continued to talk in hushed voices, oblivious to whatever had alerted her. Yet despite their situation, she didn't feel frightened. The pull was too strong to resist; she told the others she was going to stretch her legs and slipped off into the trees.
As she walked, she realised she couldn't turn back, even though some distant part of her was warning of the dangers of straying too far from the fire; obliquely, she recognised something was in her head, dragging her on and calming her at the same time.
She had wandered barely a few yards when she regretted it. The light from the fire faded quickly, as if it were being leached by the dark which quickly enfolded her. The noises seemed unnatural and disturbing; the creak of the branches above her head too loud, out of time with the gusts of the wind, as if they had a life of their own, the arms of living tree-gods reaching down to her; crunches in the undergrowth, near then far, which could have been small animals but sounded like footsteps circling her; whispers scarcely reaching her ears, dispossessed words fading out before she could make sense of them. Within moments she felt Church, Laura and all of civilisation were lost to her; she was in a dark, elemental world that considered her an interloper.
The flap of large wings made her jump and a second later an owl swooped close to her head, its face ghostly white against the dark. The owl shrieked once, sounding more human than bird, and a second later the trees were alive with light. Tiny white flames flickered as if myriad candles had been placed among the branches and for an instant Ruth had a breathtaking vision, as if the stars had been brought down to earth.
A figure stood next to an ancient, twisted hawthorn bush, its shape distorting amongst the shadows. As Ruth drew closer, she saw it was the young girl she had seen in the park in Salisbury-although she knew in her heart it was neither young nor girl-a cloak of what appeared to be thousands of interlocking leaves billowing in the wind around her.
Ruth felt drawn to the apparition as if she were in some hypnotic state, yet at the same time she was consumed by fear and awe: the figure was so alien. She knew, on some level she couldn't understand, that the girl had some specific interest in her; she could feel the subtle strands of manipulation in her head, the sense that the girl was trying to communicate something important.
'He is missing. The night to my day, the winter to my summer.' The words came out without her mouth moving; it was the same thing she had said in the park in Salisbury.
Who is missing? Ruth thought. And what has it got to do with me?
As if in answer, the quality of the light changed and Ruth could see something large crashing and stumbling among the undergrowth behind the girl. It was a vision, not reality, primal and terrifying. Ruth caught a glimpse of powerful muscles, and a shape slightly larger than a man, but with antlers curving wickedly from his head. Beyond him the small grove of trees went on forever.
Whatever moved through the trees made snorting noises and began to circle closer, but still beyond the circle of light thrown by the flames in the branches, so it was impossible to see it fully. As the vision disappeared, the girl's flowing dress seemed to fade beneath her cloak, leaving her naked. Her skin was almost translucent, milky like the moon, her breasts small, her belly rounded, hips shapely. Ruth felt an incipient sexuality in the air, as if it were electricity and the girl a generator.
'Find him and then you must join us. Become our daughter. Our champion.'
Ruth stared into her mesmerising eyes, trying to comprehend. The girl reached out to Ruth, but the thought of touching those alien hands filled her with such dread, the spell was broken. She started to back away.
The owl that had startled her earlier suddenly swept down into the space between them and stared at Ruth with eyes that were unnervingly intelligent; it made her shudder.
'A companion,' the girl continued, 'a familiar, to guide you through the dark. When you see him, remember me.'
She began to say something else, but Ruth couldn't bear to stay any longer. And then she was running wildly through the trees, terrified by the knowledge that she had been recognised by something unknowable, and filled with the awful belief that she would never be allowed to return to the life she once knew.
'Are you making any sense of this?' Laura lounged back against the twisted trunk of an old ash tree, supping on the last of the beers. In her eyes, Church saw a sharp wit, incisive, and dark things moved beneath it.
'I try not to make sense of anything any more. If you thought about all the things happening to us in any kind of rational way, you'd go mad. The only way is to just deal with it as it happens.'
She shrugged, looked away into the dark. Since Ruth had gone for her walk, she seemed to have sloughed off some of the superficiality and mocking humour; for the first time Church felt a glimmer of the real Laura. 'Sort of screws up the belief system, doesn't it?'
'Belief,' Church said with surprise. 'What do you mean?'
'You know, God and all that. Not much in the Bible about this.'
'You believe the Bible then?' Church asked cautiously.
'I've got no time for any religious dickheads,' she said brutally. In that simple sentence, Church sensed dark currents running, but she made it clear it was something she wasn't going to discuss further.
'When you get into the historical truth of that whole Bible thing, it's hard to keep any faith,' he said.
'What do you mean?'
'Well, you know, how the Bible was put together by a council of the religious establishment from all the various texts lying around. Some got put in, some got left out-the Apocrypha-so it presented a simple, uncomplicated teaching guide for the masses, and a unifying cosmology. Politics. So even if the Bible is God's word, it was edited by men. How reliable does that make it?'
