Читать книгу The Book of Magic: Part 2 - Группа авторов - Страница 10

Sometimes, in the church, I see a fireball eye looking at me from the shadows. It is as tiny as a button, a glowing ember beneath a pew, or lodged like a little joke in the face of one of the scowling Jacobean angels that feature on the end of every row. An angel, made demon. I think it’s a joke, anyway. The eye never seems to appear near the altar: perhaps the power of Christ, greatest magician to walk this Earth, puts it off, or maybe it is simply shy. It is possible, indeed sometimes necessary, to imagine an angry god, but an enraged cherub is just funny. I suspect, you see, that the owner of the eye is in possession of a sense of humor.

I’ve never mentioned it to anyone, not even to my daughter or granddaughters, who have, God knows, enough secrets of their own. Women’s stuff, to which as a man I’m not supposed to be privy and I probably couldn’t see it even if I was supposed to. Presumably more proper these days to refer to it as “women’s mysteries,” but I just think of it as stuff—and before anyone starts complaining, I think of my own practice in the same way. Just stuff: the matter of Britain, the components of the World beyond the world.

Getting back to the eye, it’s unthinkable to speak to the vicar about it: the old boy (he’s younger than me, by the way) would probably have a heart attack. Or exorcise me. Good Lord, Professor Fallow! What a very extraordinary thing to say. Are you feeling quite yourself? No, let’s not tell the vicar. It has always struck me as curious that this little old English church, which has such an odd history, is invariably put into the ecclesiastic hands of the most prosaic clerics, all scones and conservatism and tea. I wonder, though, if the church actually does know what it’s doing and the incumbents are the ballast, the counterweights to the wild swing and sway of the building’s own magic.

It’s definitely not much to do with religion. Hard to say how I know: I do believe in the great Powers, you see, but I’m not entirely sure that all of them are the ones we’re supposed to be worshipping on a Sunday morning. This eye, whatever it belongs to, seems too free range, although I never see it outside the church. Trapped? Possibly. But occasionally it winks at me, and that seems a bit too frivolous an act for something desperate to be free.

And this is the story of that eye.

On one particular Sunday, I had attended church as usual. I’m not an especially religious man, but it’s the done thing in a small community, particularly if one is elderly. I’m not the local squire, but I suppose I’m the next best thing: my family has been here for a long time, in an old house. And I have two professions. One is respectable, if rather unusual: I’m an astronomer. I used to teach, at one of the Southwest universities not far from here and then at Oxford, but I’ve been retired for some years and now live permanently with my daughter and her children. My wife is dead. If you could see me now, you would see an entirely familiar sort of person: British, though not English, wearing an ancient tweed jacket and—outside church—a disreputable array of hats. I carry a walking stick, and I wish a good morning to the people I meet. It’s like a kind of protective coloration: I blend well into my native habitat, like a duck-billed platypus.

The other profession? I’m a magician. You’ll find out more about that in due course.

So, church. On that chilly January Sunday, with a bitter easterly whistling around the gargoyles and occasional thin rain, I did not see the eye. Its lack didn’t really worry me one way or another; it was not a permanent phenomenon. I listened assiduously to the sermon, which was about aid to those less fortunate than oneself—a thoroughly Christian message, hard to disagree with—and sang some hymns. Then I buttoned up my coat, located my gloves—trying to start the new year off by not losing a pair a month like some daft old bugger—and went out into the winter.

Our house, which is called Moonecote, is not far from the church. I never bother to drive. I took the south path through the churchyard, what I thought of as the “river path,” although the little Moone brook which runs alongside the bounds of the church is hardly a river. This is an old place and the graves are old, too, leaning to one side like drunks at a bar and so eroded and lichen coated that the names are scarcely visible anymore. There was a handful of daffodils on one of them now, already frost blighted, but the only other flowers in sight were a tiny bunch of snowdrops, coming up along the wall. No, there was another—I blinked.

It wasn’t a flower, there against the wall of the churchyard. It was a flame.

I gave a quick glance over my shoulder. The rest of the meager congregation was either halfway to their cars or still in conversation with the vicar, who had his back turned to me. Just as well. I sidled up to the flame, which flickered with a deep red glow, most unwintry, and pretended to be fumbling with my hat. In an undertone, I said, “Who are you?”

There was no reply. I should probably explain at this point that this sort of thing isn’t precisely unknown to me, quite apart from the presence of the eyeball in the church. The churchyard, as one might expect, is full of spirits. Most are the residue of the departed, as though a little door has been left open. And usually they’re quite happy to chat, although one has to bear in mind that you’re not always accessing the full force of the soul, which is happily elsewhere—who wants to hang around a damp English churchyard for eternity, after all? Some of them take the form of light: clusters of blue flashes, or a pale, steady glow. But I’ve seen flames before, and once a drop of water, hanging suspended in the air in a tiny lustrous globe. The elements, you see. I’m sure some of them just sink back invisibly into the earth.

This little flame was dancing. No voice answered, but it leaped up onto the wall and flickered, taking sustenance from nothing.

“Who are you?” I said again.

Help him.

Spirits speak like a breath on the wind. You have to learn how to listen.

“How can I help? Who is ‘he’?”

You have to wake him.

“But who is he?”

When we ask, you must wake him.

Then it flickered and died, retreating into the wall. There was a faint glow for a second, like a patch of sunset, and it was gone.

I plodded home, somewhat amphibiously. The brook, swollen with recent rain, was high, brimming over the water meadows, but the path was safe enough. Fire and water, I thought. Water and fire. By the time I reached the house, the sky was stormy, with a single bar of light falling in the direction of the Severn estuary. The house itself, with its long drive, was quiet; it seemed to have retreated in on itself, huddling like an animal made of red Tudor brick. The kitchen garden was tidy and bare; the orchard empty of the crop of white apple sacks that had marked it throughout the autumn. There was a drift of smoke from the chimneys, but apart from that and the bar of light, the day was sodden, the color of lead. No more fire.

Alys, tall and rangy in jeans, was preparing Sunday lunch.

“Hello, dad! How was the service?”

“Went on a bit.” I could have told her about the flickering light in the churchyard, but something held me back. Pretend we’re a normal family, even if we know different.

“Oh, dear. I thought you were later than usual. Hope the church wasn’t too cold.” She bent over the Aga, fiddling with something on the stovetop.

“How was your morning? Can I do anything?”

“Quiet. And no, I don’t think you can. Beatrice has pinched the Telegraph crossword, by the way.”

I laughed. “It’s too easy for me on a Sunday.”

“Tell her that. She’ll be annoyed.”

Leaving her in the kitchen, I hung up my coat, changed my shoes, and wandered off in the direction of my study. As I climbed the stairs I could hear, muted, the voices of my granddaughters from the sitting room, then laughter. The study is at the end of a long upstairs passage, at a sort of T-junction that branches corridors in both directions, the floor uneven from several hundred years of use and subsidence. I prefer to be higher up—perhaps it’s my profession, but I like to be able to see clearly, over the land and the sky.

But as I approached the study door, someone walked rapidly and smoothly across the opening, heading down the corridor and out of sight. I caught a glimpse of a woman in a dark green dress, very long and full-skirted like an Elizabethan gown. She had a little ruff, too, which sparkled like her hair, and she was carrying a long frond of some kind of plant.

For a moment, I thought she was one of the girls, dressed up, but she was too tall—at least six foot, my own height. Heels?

“Who’s that?” I called, but there was no reply. I trotted to the end of the corridor and looked down it. No one was there.

Well, this house is full of ghosts. We do see them, you know. Not just in the mind’s eye, a fancy of the imagination, but really and truly present, just as you yourself might stand before me. I hadn’t seen this one before, but that didn’t mean that no one else had. We’ve all got our own special spirits, the ones only particular people see, and then there are the communal ones. The child by the window, for instance: we’ve all seen him in his Kate Greenaway velvet suit, his sorrowful face, like something out of a particularly emetic Victorian painting. No idea who he is. Alys and I see a doddery gardener in eighteenth-century clothes, and I think Bea might have done as well. Stella and Serena, the middle girls, talk about a pair of ghostly gazehounds, but they’re going through an animal-mad phase, so perhaps they’re tuned in to spectral beasts. Luna’s a bit too little to say for sure: hard to know if she’s seeing people or imagining them.

So a lady on the landing didn’t bother me a great deal. I mentioned her at lunch.

“No, not a clue who she might be,” Alys said, passing roast potatoes. “Elizabethan? Well, the house is old enough.”

“She sounds pretty,” said Serena, who was into fashion. “What was the gown made of? Silk, or velvet?”

“I don’t know. I only got a glimpse.”

“I hope she comes back. She sounds rather nice.”

“Granddad?” This was Stella. “Never mind the lady. Can we see the comet yet?”

Stella had asked this once a day since late November, rather as another child might ask for Christmas. “I’ve told you, Stella. It’s nearly here. Another couple of days and it should be visible.” I said it kindly; I could understand her excitement. The name of the comet was Akiyama-Maki, and it was discovered in 1964 by a pair of Japanese astronomers. It is a Great Comet, a popular name for a very bright visitor to the skies, and it is thought to be one of the Kreutz sungrazers, the remnants of a big comet that broke up in the 1100s. Astronomy was still my job, and I’d been looking forward to this winter visitor for some months—there was something about a comet, a kind of celestial magic all of its own, which had fascinated me ever since I was a boy. So I could see why Stella kept asking, even though the comet wasn’t the first thing on my mind. Other visitations were taking precedence.

“So, we’ll see it soon?” Stella pestered.

“Yes. Not long now.”

After dinner we sank into a Sabbath somnolence with the Sunday papers and early nights all around; the girls were back to school the following morning. I wanted to listen to a radio play, which ended about ten; switching it off along with the light, I fell asleep quickly. When I awoke, I was disoriented. It was very dark. I’d left the curtains open, but there was nothing visible beyond the window: no stars, no moon, not even the lights of the farms scattered across the valley. It was that which alerted me to the fact that something was awry with the world. There is always a light somewhere, a small orange token of human life.

I clambered out of bed and went to the window, stood staring out. The darkness was all encompassing. We’re not that close to any big cities, but there’s a faint glow where Bristol lies to the north; that wasn’t visible, either. I thought it might be fog—we’re prone to mist in these parts, especially in winter—so I pushed the window up to see. A thin, curling tendril of darkness made its way into the room, as if questing. I shut the window damn quick after that. And then I heard it again.

Help him.

After a while, in magic, the messages start to stack up; you’d have to be really clueless to ignore them. The flame, the woman, the dark.

“All right,” I said aloud. “All right.”

It’s hard to feel heroic in a dressing gown and slippers, but the voice was whispering, insistent. I went through the door, and the house had changed. Instead of the carpeted, picture-lined corridor, there was a passage of stone, a rough, porous substance like pumice. I touched it and snatched my hand away; it burned with cold. I took a few experimental steps. My feet, in their old man’s slippers, did not freeze, but the air around me felt constricted, as if there wasn’t enough of it. At the end of the passage, encased in rock, stood my study door. I reached it and pushed it open.

Things happen that should make you die. There was a veil of white fire. I fell back, shielding my eyes. The fire flared and vanished. The door reached onto open space. Seizing the doorframe, I tottered on the edge of a black void, standing now on curving ice. It was moving, almost too fast for me to take it in. Stars whisked by, and I looked up to see a streaming cloud, the colors of an unnatural fire.

Help him!

A tiny voice, imperious, compelling.

“What the hell are you?”

He is dreaming! Wake him!

The colors were coalescing. As I stared, a figure started to form, made out of cascading light. I started shaking. I knew that I was in the presence of death, not the normal end to my life, which, at seventy, could not be that far away, but something which strove to wipe me out, as one might remove a speck of dust from a sheet of glass. It reached out a hand, long finger and thumb ready to pinch, and I felt it touch the edge of my soul, which shriveled.

Then fear overcame me and I slammed the door shut, knees trembling. It took all my strength, as though a vacuum were sucking the door open.

“Granddad? Are you all right?” Serena was standing on the landing. The pictures were back on the cream-papered walls; everything was still and normal and midnighty. In her white nightgown, with her blond hair, Serena looked like a small, pale ghost.

“Yes. Thought I heard something. In the study. Nothing there.” My sentences stuttered out as if I were a puppet.

“Oh, okay.” Serena looked reassured. “Maybe the window catch is loose. It’s really windy out there now. You didn’t shut one of the cats in, did you?”

“I—yes, possibly. Anyway, everything’s all right.” Paternalism was coming to the fore now. Mustn’t worry the girls. “You hop back into bed—you’ll get cold.”

She nodded and vanished into her own room. I staggered back to mine and collapsed on the bed to stare into space—except it wasn’t space, just air and the ceiling. I’d seen space, many times, and it didn’t look like this. What an odd expression that was … But I’d witnessed it from observatories, traveling the world, when I was attached to universities: mountaintop places in the quiet nights, star-staring. I’d never seen it up close and personal, and I didn’t think I wanted to do that again.

Because I thought I knew where I’d just been. I knew what comets looked like.

I didn’t think I’d end up talking to one, though. But had I been? Or was that pale figure something else? If it was on the comet, how could its messenger appear in an English churchyard? Talking to me made a little more sense, magician/astronomer as I was. Yet I had no idea what I was supposed to do about it. What about the woman on the landing? Was she connected? Visitations often come in clusters. I mulled all this over until a chilly dawn began to creep around the curtains, and then I went down to the kitchen and made some tea. I took it back to the study, and I don’t mind confessing that I had a bad moment when I opened the door. But there the room was, the usual bookcases and muddle. No black depths of space, no icy void. I released a breath and stepped through the door. I wanted to look up Akiyama-Maki.

Google gave me the basics, which I already knew. What was niggling at the back of my mind was when the comet had appeared before. We knew it had been named in 1964, but a lot of these comets turned out to be “the great comet of 1569” or somesuch, and given the woman’s apparently Elizabethan costume, I wanted to see just what had been visible in the heavens during the old queen’s reign. Not exactly a precise science; I’d only caught a glimpse of her, after all. I leafed through one of the older books on celestial phenomena and found seven comets during the period of 1558 to 1603. Most of these were known. It should be possible to work Akiyama-Maki’s path backward, so I did some calculations, and it had appeared within that window: in 1571.

I closed the book and looked up. The woman was standing in the doorway. She regarded me gravely. Her lips moved, but I couldn’t hear her voice. Her skin was very pale, and there were lights moving within it; it was then that I knew she wasn’t human, not a ghost. But what was she? A spirit, surely. She looked as though she was standing in a breeze, tendrils of black hair drifting out from her elaborate coiffure, and the dark green skirts of her gown rippled, the heavy silk like water. Emeralds glinted around her throat, above the spikes of her ruff. She held out her hand to me, offering a sprig of sage. Its spicy, late-summer scent filled the room. A moment later, she winked out, as if she had never been. I was left sitting over the book, my mouth open.

I spent that afternoon looking through my library, searching for a sign of her. I failed to find it. We’d lived here a long time, the Fallows, and this is our story: the men in our family don’t do so well. The house had been built by a woman: Lady Elinor Dark, who was widowed and married a Fallow. The names in the family tree interweave through one another: Dark, Fallow, Fortune, Lovelace. The women run the house—formidable chatelaines with hoops of keys, dreamy poetesses, stout orchard wives. The men die young, or simply fade. I am an exception. I’ve never been sure what I’ve done to deserve this honor. My granddaughters all have different fathers: no shame in that, post 1960s. None of them have stuck around.

Moonecote is not a mansion. It was conceived as a farmer’s house, and over the years it grew, but not very much. Elinor’s portrait hangs on the stairs; she has an oval Elizabethan face, like an egg. I’m sure she wasn’t that bland. She does not wear emeralds, nor does she dress in green. She bore little resemblance to the black-haired woman who had just visited me. So who was the latter, then? What could her connection to the comet be? It made me nervous of going onto the landing, but I did. No one was there.

And nothing happened that night. At one point I woke, nerves jangling, but the bedroom was quiet and undisturbed. Now, however, the silence was anticipatory; it felt as though something huge was waiting to happen. I even went to the window again and looked out, but everything was normal. The fields lay under a crisp frost, moonlight-touched. Orion marched away to the west with his blue dog at his heels. It was all winter-clear. I wrapped myself in my dressing gown and went with some trepidation up to the attic, where I keep the telescopes.

The moon was gibbous, and there was a single bright star beneath it, guiding it to moonset like a tug with a ship into the harbor of the dawn. The star was Spica: the only really vivid body in the constellation of Virgo. A binary star, comprised of a blue giant and a Beta Cephei variable, if you want to get technical. If you prefer to be historical, an early temple of Hathor was aligned to Spica, and Copernicus did many observations of its passage. Now, not far before sunrise, it burned in the cold sky. I watched it and its fellows. Jupiter was visible now, the red spot a dusky rose. Akiyama-Maki would first appear above Arcturus and travel northward, heading up the handle of the Plough. I looked, but it was not yet visible.

He is coming! said a voice inside my head. I started and looked around, half expecting to see woman or flame, but there was nothing.

… Fermi Asian Network (FAN) was established in 2010 to promote collaborations among the high-energy astrophysicists in Asia with particular focus on using the data obtained by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope for observational and theoretical investigations. Over the last few years, we have published a series of papers related to gamma-ray astronomy …

It was two days after my night in the attic, and I was on the train, heading north. I looked up from the abstract I was reading, watched the gray fields flash by. We rarely get snow in the Southwest, but the Midlands were another matter.

“Jane’s in Wolverhampton,” Stella had said that morning, privy to the mysterious revelations of Facebook. “That’s near Birmingham, isn’t it? And she says there’s snow. Do you want me to look at the trains for you?”

There were no cancellations. I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or not. The conference was only for a day: a series of not uninteresting papers. Now that I no longer taught, there wasn’t a great deal of call to attend, but I thought I ought to take an interest, keep my hand in, all that kind of thing. Unfortunately, the invite had arrived in July, on a sweltering day when any thought of bad weather was very far from the mind. Winter, my late wife said once, is like childbirth: you never remember it properly once it’s over and done with. She was right. Now that the conference date was actually here, I was faced with the usual problems of the wrong kind of snow on the line, the numerous excuses that the national rail network seem to conjure up to explain its inexplicable delays.

However, Alys got me to the local station for seven-thirty; the conference didn’t start until ten. I would have to change at Bristol, but then it was a fast service straight through. Bristol was the usual scramble—wrong time of day, full of commuters—but Alys had booked me a seat, and I sank into it gratefully. We stopped once at Parkway, then belted through Gloucestershire, the hills vanishing into cold, low cloud. Everyone had long since settled down by then, and all the seats were taken, but a few stragglers were going up and down to the buffet car in search of more coffee, so when a woman brushed past me, I didn’t register it until she was past me. Then the green of her gown caught my eye. I looked up. She glanced over her shoulder; an emerald in her hair flashed in the overhead glow and she gave me a small, enigmatic smile in which I thought I read something of triumph. Then she was gone.

Green for “go.”

Inside my head, my inner voice said: It’s not the house, you bloody fool. It’s you.

After that, I got really jumpy. No one else seemed to have noticed her, although admittedly they were all absorbed in laptops and the newspapers, but women in Elizabethan gowns are not common on trains. I got the feeling that I was the only one who could see her, but it made me nervous all the same; what if she popped up during the conference? Thank God I wasn’t giving a talk. It had, of course, occurred to me that I was simply becoming senile, but these visions seemed too specific, too precise. As I’ve said, I was pretty much used to the house being haunted—but then the flame in the graveyard had, as far as I knew, appeared to me alone. And now so had she.

I reached the conference center in something of a state. Pretend to be a normal person, I kept telling myself. Inevitably, I ran into some people I knew in the lobby and was immediately hauled into one of those slightly-oneupmanship-dominated conversations that academics often engage in. But the first talk was due to start soon. Together, still chatting, we filed into the lecture theater, and confronted with a deeply earnest paper on the nature of gravitational microlensing, I managed to push the woman to the back of my mind.

For reasons that I hope are obvious, I’d always kept my magical interests separate from my worldly job. It’s not a good idea, if you’re a university professor, to start babbling on about astrology—one of the dirtiest words in professional astronomy. But it hasn’t always been the case: look at Newton, returning to alchemy at the end because he didn’t think this physics stuff was ever really going to hack it. You can’t get away with that now, but as the talk—which was frankly rather tedious—dragged on, my mind started to wander back to the Renaissance, to magic. To planetary spirits, which each planet possesses, along with its own sigil, its own quality. Jupiter confers wealth; Venus is the bringer of love. Now, in an age that demotes planets annually (poor old Pluto), it’s perhaps hard to enter a mind-set in which celestial matters have an eternal quality.

All of this was lurking at the back of my mind throughout the series of seminars—some interesting, some turgid. During the latter, I found myself doodling in my notebook like some lackluster undergraduate; it had always been a bad habit. I drew a woman’s face, a series of traced lines, not very good, and a sprig of sage. As I drew, I could almost smell it and I glanced up fearfully, expecting to see her there, but the room was full of my mercifully dull colleagues with no Elizabethan ladies in sight. I stopped doodling after that, afraid I might conjure her up. But there was something brewing in my unconscious; I could feel it, nudging me like the memory of a dream, and it stayed with me all through the buffet lunch.

During the afternoon break, I managed to collar one of my more comet-informed colleagues by the tea urn and I asked him, in what I hoped was a lightsome tone, about Akiyama-Maki.

“Oh, yes, wonderful. Marvelous to have such a visitor. Should be visible from tonight, you realize? Just a smudge, at first.” Dr. Roberts was enthusiastic. “Really will come awfully close, though—at least half a million miles.”

I smiled at this routine joke, but Roberts wasn’t really kidding. For a foreign body traveling the solar system, this isn’t far off a near miss. It sounds like a long way off, but it isn’t in astronomical terms.

“Conspiracy theorists are having a ball, of course. I’ve had at least five emails a day asking if it’s the end of the world.”

“How exceedingly tedious.”

At this point we were interrupted by a young man summoning us back to the lecture theater, so our conversation came to a close. That morning’s encounter with the woman had put me on edge so much that, making the excuse of worries about the weather, I bailed out of the communal Indian meal organized by one of my former colleagues and picked up sandwiches at the station before catching an earlier train home.

Not that it made any difference. We were held up before Bristol, with a fault on the line. I was grateful that I’d brought a book. I texted Alys with some difficulty—you’d think a scientist would adjust more readily to modern technology—and told her I’d call from the station. When we finally got into Temple Meads, the train out was delayed. I could have gone for a curry after all, I thought gloomily; I’d arrived after the original later train was due in. By now, close to ten p.m., the platform and the surrounding fields were heavy with frost. My breath steamed out before me in clouds, and even in woolen gloves my hands felt immediately pinched. I rang Alys, fumbling the phone, and told her that I’d meet her on the road. The station is too small for a waiting room, and I didn’t fancy sitting for twenty minutes in the open bus-stop affair on the platform. So I set off at a brisk, but careful, pace down the lane that leads to the station. The moon hung high, outlined by cold: a ring of ice crystals sparkled around it, and its light caught the frozen hawthorn. My footsteps rang out on the hard ground. I came to the summit of a small rise, which carried the lane down to the main road. Here, a gate revealed a long rolling vista of fields.

I paused for a moment, knowing that Alys was still some way off, and looked over this pale, unfamiliar landscape, then upward, seeking the comet, but before I could orientate myself beneath the stars something shimmered in the distance. Someone was coming over the brow of the field. Hard to see—they were wearing white, not some farmer encased in an ancient Barbour—and who, I realized with sudden shock, would be in white in the middle of a field in the middle of winter?

I knew who it was: not the death that comes to us all at our end, whose hand is not always unkind, but the other death, the one who snuffs out life as though it has never been, who steals the candle of the soul. The figure passed down the field, heading for the gate. He wore a headdress in the form of a star, like a child’s drawing of Jack Frost, and long robes that sparkled like the crystals around the moon. He was more solid than the form I’d seen in my earlier vision. He was moving swiftly, gliding over the ground. I had an impression of black, inhuman eyes; a long lantern jaw. I was, almost literally, frozen to the spot. As he neared the gate he looked up and reached out a finger like a claw. Then he blinked out, like the woman had done. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to see him, but he was gone in an instant, and I was alone with the hawthorns and the moon. Distant on the road I heard the throb of the Land Rover’s engine, and a moment later saw Alys turn down the lane.

Gradually, I started to warm up. I felt that I’d been touched by a cold that was much greater than that of a frosty January night. Alys kept glancing at me in concern, and eventually she said, “Dad, are you all right?”

“Just tired.”

“You can have a rest tomorrow,” she remarked, encouragingly. Normally, I bridle at being treated like a poor old thing, but tonight I found I didn’t mind so much. When we finally got home, driving slowly over the frozen roads, and the bedroom door closed behind me, I thought: Enough.

Despite the tiring previous day, I woke early next morning. It was about six-thirty, and not yet light. When I drew the curtains, I saw frost flowers decorating the pane for the first time in years. We have double glazing, and anyway it’s rarely cold enough in this mild part of the country. I was reminded of childhood, when there was a magic in such things. There still is. I traced an icy star with my finger. When I took it away, the skin was faintly silvered.

In magic, there are really only two choices. You can act or not act. You have to be clear about your decision, though, and your reasons, and you have to be prepared to take the consequences. Be careful what you wish for, and all that: the monkey’s eldritch paw. Now, I thought I was clear; I knew what I wanted. Knowledge. And irritatingly, I thought I already had it: that subconscious push beneath the surface of my mind was still present, and still insistent. But I wanted more of an answer.

But first I needed tea. I went to the door of the bedroom, took hold of the handle, and the subconscious push broke through the surface of my mind in a shower of crystal drops.

Sage juice with trefoil, periwinkle, wormwood, and mandrake placed will increase gold, accumulate riches, bring victory in lawsuits, and free men from evil and anguish—

It was my own inner voice, not some external agency, and I knew where it came from. Cornelius Agrippa: theologian, physician, soldier, occult writer, much more besides. Many of the correspondences in magic come from Agrippa’s obsession with noting what goes with what, macrocosm and microcosm. In the Book of Hermes, he speaks of the fixed stars—known as the Behenian stars—and their influences and attributes. Each star is associated with corresponding plants and gemstones, and the idea is that you make talismans that accord with these correspondences: a metal ring inscribed with the sigil of the star, and containing the planet and stone. When I was a young man, and becoming interested in magic, I had made such a talisman, but for Mercury, not a star. I thought I knew where it was: in an old box, containing a number of semiprecious stones of the tumbled kind that you can buy in any New Age shop. They’d been around for a long time, however, ever since I was a boy, and I didn’t know where they had originally come from. Now, I thought I knew exactly which stones were in that box: the ones that corresponded to the Behenian stars.

I spent much of the day searching for the box; I had to go up to the attic in the end. But I did find it. I opened it to the faint glow of fifteen semiprecious stones and the old tarnished circle of my Mercurial talisman.

Arcturus. Aldebaran. The Pleiades, and more. Fifteen stars or star groups that, in this northern hemisphere, circle continually above our heads, that never set. The woman carrying the sage, in her green gown and her grassy emeralds, would be Spica, chief star of Virgo, which I’d watched traverse the sky the other night.

I felt as though she’d personally introduced herself. But why Spica? She might be prominent in the sky at present, but so, by definition, were the other Behenian stars.

“Why are you here?” I asked aloud. A visiting cat, the tabby, gave me a startled look and scooted from the room. “Spica. Why you?”

But there was no reply. No woman in green appeared; the house was quiet. After some further searching, I located the copy of Agrippa and pored over it; I was thinking of the Jack Frost figure in the fields.

So who is “he”?

Fennel juice and frankincense, placed beneath a crystal. That sounded suitably cold, but it corresponded to the Pleiades, and I could not see even one of those sisters manifesting as a male, though it’s hard to tell with spirits.

Black hellebore with diamond, for Algol.

An eclipsing binary, in the constellation of Perseus and known as the Demon Star; its name is Arabic, like so many star names. It means “the ghoul.” This didn’t seem quite right to me, placed upon that white striding figure of the night before. So who was he? I couldn’t find him among the Behenian stars; he was anomalous. What about the pale form I’d seen? And the little flickering flame of the churchyard hadn’t appeared, either.

Back to church with you, Fallow, I thought.

It was still very cold. The snowdrops seemed to have shrunk, and no flame was visible as I made my way through the churchyard and pushed open the oak door. Inside, empty of congregation, the church contained the echoes of hymns and prayer, whispers from innumerable Sundays. Without the large, old-fashioned stove going, the place was also cold, but not dark. Wan winter light cast dim shadows over the floor. I sat down in a front pew and waited for the eye to appear. I had a feeling it knew more than it was letting on.

I sat there for perhaps half an hour, reading and rereading the inscriptions that appear along the upper walls of the church: strawberry pink on white plaster. We can thank the Arts and Crafts movement for this: two classical gentlemen holding scrolls. Is it nothing to you, all ye that shall pass by? reads one, in unnecessarily admonishing fashion in my opinion. Who is passing, and why? Well, I thought self-righteously, I’m not passing by. I’m trying to help. I kept glancing around the church, looking for the eye, but it was evidently being coy. I sat there, getting colder and colder, and eventually the light began to die outside to the blue of a winter twilight. And I saw it looking at me.

It was high in the rafters, set in an angel’s face. One of the angel’s eyes was a stone oval, a bland blank in its neo-Classical face, but the other was scarlet, hot and glowing. I stood up.

“I’m trying to help,” I said aloud, hoping none of the church ladies had crept in behind me to adjust the floral arrangements. “Tell me what to do.”

You are a pilot, the voice said. The eye rolled.

“I’m an astronomer. I’ve never flown a plane.”

You are the witness.

“I’m not sure I understand.”

The angel gave a sigh, a breath that steamed out from its stone lips.

Too cold. Find me in the fire.

There was a sudden muted roar as the furnace stove started up, making me jump. The church became a fraction warmer. I thought of flames, dancing on a wall. Cautiously, I opened the stove door.

Inside was a ball of fire. Something was twisting and moving within; it looked at me.

“Ah,” I said. “Now I know what you are.”

I am salamander, it said proudly.

In its native element, I could see its long lizard shape, the curling tail. It wasn’t like the reptile known as “salamander,” but more heraldic, elegant. With some difficulty I squatted down on my heels so that I could see it more clearly.

You have seen him.

“Who? Do you mean the person in the fields, the other night?”

Yes, that is the one. He is waking, as he draws near the sun, but not quickly enough. I am a messenger of the sun. You are in danger. You have to bring him safely through.

“How am I to do that?”

You must go to him, when it is time. You must give him your hand.

I shivered, thinking of the cold, and at that moment a blast of chilly air ran down the back of my neck, accompanied by the creak of the church door. The salamander whisked into the heart of the furnace, and I slammed the plate shut, straightening up. The churchwarden, an elderly man, blinked at me mildly.

“Professor Fallow? I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there.”

“Just came in for a bit of peace and quiet. Your stove seems to be lit.”

“Oh, is it? Doubtless one of the other wardens put it on. The church gets so damp, you know. And we have to try to keep this plasterwork intact.”

“Well, I’m grateful for the warmth.” I hoped he wouldn’t ask too many questions of his colleagues. “But I’d better be going.”

We exchanged pleasantries, and I went back to the house. Nothing flickered in the churchyard. Dusk cast a cold blue pall over the hills.

Later that evening, Alys said to me, “It’s wassail on Saturday. Had you remembered?”

I stared at her. “No. I’d forgotten it was our turn. But of course, you’re right. How many people this year?”

“I don’t know. I sent out invitations. Maybe fifty? You don’t have to do anything. I’ll sort out the food. Sausage rolls and baked spuds.”

Wassail. Nothing to do with astronomy. Lots to do with orchards and apples. It’s a celebration of the apple harvest and no, I don’t know why it’s done in the middle of January rather than the autumn, except that apple harvests can go on for rather a long time, and it’s not until after Christmas that the redwings and fieldfares fly in and devour the remaining windfalls. It’s one of those customs that goes up and down in popularity. Right now, it was undergoing something of a vogue, and a lot of the local farms were making a tidy sum by charging a few quid entry. It’s appealing because it involves alcohol and guns: you drink hot mulled cider, sing a couple of wassail carols, and a man fires a shotgun into a tree to scare away any evil spirits and ensure a good harvest for the following autumn. It’s all about the earth, and perhaps that was what I needed, with a head in the heavens, beset by the persons of stars.

The next day was even colder. I rose before dawn and locked myself in the study, shifting the table closer to the window and rolling up the faded Persian rug. Beneath, the circle was traced on the floorboards, with a conjuration triangle outlined in red beyond it. If you are summoning a spirit, you don’t necessarily want it in the circle with you. In fact, usually not. I performed the lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram, moving smoothly around the circle and invoking the protection of the archangelic powers at each quarter, each watchtower. This is standard ceremonial magic, dating from the late nineteenth century and the turgid practices of the Golden Dawn, but its roots are older. And, more important, it works.

Whether it would work now remained to be seen; I sought to summon a star. I finished up the ritual and turned my attention to the conjuration triangle. A handful of frankincense, myrrh, and sage went into the little brazier inside the circle; it hit the hot charcoal and hissed up.

I held out my hands. “Lady Spica! I invite you …”

At first I didn’t think anything was happening, and I wasn’t surprised; I didn’t even know if you could summon a star like a normal spirit. But gradually the smoke began to congeal. The air cleared. Spica stood before me, but not in the conjuration triangle. She glanced at it and smiled an ambiguous smile. She stepped over the edge of the circle, lifting the hem of her gown, and I took a step back. She was loose in the room and unbound; I’d seen no evidence that she meant me harm, but I was still taking a chance.

Her lips moved in silence. “I can’t hear you,” I said. Spica smiled again, held out a hand. Then she turned her hand over and up, palm outward.

Stop. Wait.

It took me a moment. She held a finger to her lips and pointed to the clock.

“Seven in the morning? No. You’ll tell me when?”

A nod. She spoke once more, earnestly and long, but her words weren’t audible to me. Her tendrils of hair drifted out in a rising wind, and she was gone again.

I don’t like the feeling that I’m not in control. But in magic, it happens all the time. You’re only a piece of something, a tiny cog. You may never know the full story, and the powers who engineer such things operate on a need-to-know basis. Sometimes not even that. If fifty years of this have taught me anything, they’ve taught me patience.

Which is its own reward, so they say.

After the ritual, I cooled my heels for a couple of days. I saw nothing strange; nothing strange spoke to me. I looked for the comet, but to my frustration the temperature rose, with cloudy night skies. Stella was furious. However, Saturday, the night of the wassail, dawned cold and the frost remained in the lee of the hedges and in the pockets of the fields all day, until the sun went down in a fiery blaze. Alys and the girls had cooked all day, and I did the washing up and made some bread; by the time we’d finished, cars were starting to pull into the yard as the first of our guests arrived.

Cider and mead first, then wassail. You make toast and place it in the tree—it’s for the spirits, the good ones. I gather Serena rather fancied the shotgun, but it was left firmly in the hands of a neighboring farmer who could be relied upon to aim in the right direction and not take out one of the guests or a cow. We trooped out into the gathering twilight, clutching mugs and glasses, boots crunching on the icy grass. Carols were sung; the shotgun was fired. I looked up, but it was not dark enough yet to see the comet.

As the gunshot echoes were reverberating through the orchard to the sound of cheers, I turned to see Spica standing behind me, her finger to her lips. The cheers slowed and died, as though someone had pressed a mute button. I looked over my shoulder. My family, our friends, were still there, still moving and clapping, but in slow motion, and they were shadowy, like ghosts. Only the trees of the orchard were solid, and they looked taller, harder, older: stiff as stone. Spica said, “Come.”

Her voice was musical and low, and I realized how inhuman she was. Her eyes were whiteless, a burning green. She held out a sharp-nailed hand, bonier than before, the fingers longer.

We were entering her world now, I thought. I stepped forward and took her cold hand. Turning, she led me through the stately trees and out into the fields. The frost sparkled into snow, thick drifts of it against the ancient hedge patterns, but I was warm in the aura of Spica the star.

“My sisters are waiting. He needs to wake,” she said. Her voice was musical but cold: the sort of voice you might expect from a star.

“ ‘He’ is the—the person I saw? The comet?”

“Ah, you saw him?” She seemed anxious. “So his shadow is here already? Then there is great danger.”

I wanted to ask, What sort of danger? but pride stopped me. “His shadow?”

“Yes. We will see him soon.” She lifted the hem of her gown to step over a tuft of reeds. The ground here was marshy, patterned with thin ice. “Do not worry. We are almost at the causeway.”

I did not know what she meant by this; there was nothing akin to a causeway in my version of the world. But then, we weren’t in my world now … And as we traversed the field, I saw a glimmer of stone through a gap in the hedge: a long road, heading into the distance, rimmed with silver fire and leading to a tower. It resembled a Norman keep: round and squat as an owl in the landscape.

“Is this where your sisters—live?”

“It is what we create when we need to.” She set foot on the causeway, pulled me along. Our footsteps rang out like hammer beats. The causeway wasn’t stone, as I’d thought, but metal, like solid moonlight. As we drew closer, I saw that the tower was made of the same substance.

“You work with light?” I asked.

“We are stars.” She smelled of sage and snow.

The portcullis was up; the tower shivered faintly. We went through into a central courtyard and here, indeed, were the sisters of Spica: the spirits of the Behenian stars. They stood in a half circle, the Pleiades clustered together in a whispering huddle, silver-dressed; Aldebaran holding a thistle, her hair blood-dropped with rubies; Capella laughing, sapphire bedecked against azure silk. Like their spokessister Spica, all were attenuated, passing for human, something else beneath the masks of women. For the first time in years I was too shy to speak. Schoolboyish, I stood before the weight of their gaze.

One of the Behenian stars stepped forward. This one was gold and blue, holding a sprig of juniper. Frantically remembering Agrippa’s correspondences, I placed her as Sirius. Her star hung overhead, following on the Hunter’s heels. The stars of her sisters wheeled about her, but there was a newcomer in the sky, hanging over the bleak edge of the distant hills, which were higher than they should have been.

The comet was coming. Akiyama-Maki blazed over Arcturus and the star herself was coming forward, her red-and-green gown flecked with jasper beads. The comet was a bright silvery-gold, like a bead in the sky. It would be visible in the Earthly heavens now.

We have to bring him in.

“By ‘he,’ you mean the comet?”

We have to see him safely through.

“If we don’t—what will happen?”

“He is close,” Spica said. “But he has not yet woken.”

It was at this point that my colleague Dr. Roberts’s voice suddenly flashed into my mind, saying, Really very close. “His path should take him past the Earth, though,” I said. He has not yet woken: that was literally true. As the comet, that dirty snowball hurtling through space, came closer to the sun, the warmth of the sun would begin to release its gases, causing the tail to appear.

“He’s been traveling for a long time,” Spica said. “He sleeps and he dreams.”

“What dreams does a comet have?”

“Protection. The cold of deep space, of death. His cold self dreams but does not wake.”

“And when he dreams, he’s dangerous? Because he’s—what?” I didn’t see comets as innately malevolent. “Trying to protect himself in sleep?”

“Yes. And if he does not wake quickly enough, he might leave his path, come too close to the world. He needs a pilot,” the star said. “You will be his pilot.”

“I’ve never—” I stopped. Because I’d been there already, onto the snowball surface of Akiyama-Maki. I’d set foot, in some manner, comet-side.

“Will I—die? If I go there?” I hadn’t before. Best to check, though.

“You should not die. And you will have help,” Algol said. She held out her arm, in its sleeve of cloth-of-gold, and the salamander slid out onto her palm, curling its tail like a cat.

I will come with you, the salamander, messenger of the sun, said.

“Why can’t you come?” I said to Algol.

She looked rueful. “There is no love lost between stars and comets. They come to us like moths to flames, and we wink them out.”

I paused, then I said, “Very well. I’ll go.” The salamander dropped to the floor and rustled over to me; I bent and picked it up. It sat in my palm, curiously heavy.

The Behenian stars all stepped back. Algol raised her hand, and there was white fire between us, a wall like the one I’d seen in the study.

It will not burn you, the salamander said. But it took a moment to nerve myself to step through it, all the same.

The comet’s aura was all around us, a blue-green burn like the Northern Lights. I tried to take a breath. I failed, but I did not choke; it seemed I did not need to breathe. I wasn’t sure whether I’d stepped out of my body, leaving it behind in the castle, for surely I could not be really here; this was some astral level.

Holding the salamander, I walked across the surface of the comet. It was like the frost of the orchard. I heard my footsteps crunch, but this too was illusion; there is no sound in space. Its surface was pockmarked with holes, too small to be termed craters. I had a momentary, and probably foolish, worry about twisting my ankle.

“We have to find him,” I said to the salamander. It radiated heat, without burning. In this bright, cold-colored landscape it was a single spot of fire. “Do you know where he might be?”

I do not.

Akiyama-Maki actually looks a lot like a potato, and it is known to rotate, but the astral surface on which we stood was quite still. As my eyes adjusted to the flickering, streaming light, I realized that the comet’s male form was standing some distance away, with his back to me. A cloak of light streamed out behind him, mimicking a comet’s tail. I walked across the surface toward him. He did not turn his head. When I was closer, I started wondering how to proceed. An “Excuse me?” Perhaps a delicate cough? What I actually said was, “Are you awake?”

No reply. Maybe if I tapped him on the shoulder?

Breathe, the salamander said. Breathe.

I faced the comet. His eyes were open, but blank and dark. I forced myself to stay put. Seen so close, he looked even less human than the Behenian stars.

“Wake,” I said. “You need to wake up!” I took a breath, breathed out, and so did the salamander, in a cloud of cold-morning steam.

Wake! the salamander chimed.

“You need to wake up.”

The comet blinked. His eyes flashed with a brief silver light. I could feel the warmth of the sun on the back of my neck. His long-nailed hand flashed up.

“No!” I cried. “Don’t kill!”

He blinked again, but he lowered his hand. “Who am I?” the comet said, wonderingly.

“You are a comet. You are close to a world—to my world. Wake up!”

I glanced up and saw the moon. It hung in the astral heavens, a glowing silver ball, and not far away the Earth itself was turning, all green and blue and white. I could see the dim lights at their cores, the signs of their aliveness, for this was not the true solar system in the physical world, but the world beyond.

“Listen to me,” I said. “You are a sungrazer. In the real world, not this world of your dream, you will pass this red world above us—there is a faint chance that it will draw you in, but very faint. You will pass the Earth, and if you choose, you can meet your own end there. But it will be the end of that world.”

“I do not wish to kill a world,” the comet said, with a trace of alarm.

“Then wake up! Your dreaming self is dangerous—it brings the cold of deep space with it, and we can’t withstand that. And you might become confused and leave your path. Listen—can’t you hear the sun calling to you?”

He blinked again. His pale skin was flushing with gold.

Wake up, the salamander said encouragingly.

“Wake. And we’ll all live.”

And the comet’s eyes were bright as fire. He raised his hand again, in a gesture, and the salamander and I found ourselves standing in space as the growing tail of the comet whisked by. Then there was the sparkle of stars, Akiyama-Maki was waking up and streaking sunward, between Earth and the moon, and we were slowly falling.

It was with regret as an astronomer that the astral solar system faded around me and the castle of the Behenian stars took its place. The stars themselves were waiting for us, still in their semicircle. Spica seized my arm.

“You are safe. The comet?”

“He’s awake.”

The salamander flicked away. As one, the Behenian stars bowed and faded, returning, I presumed, to their places in the constellations. But Spica remained. She walked back with me, over the causeway, and across the fields. As we drew closer to the house, I could see a bonfire in the orchard, surrounded by moving figures. The bare branches of the trees reached for the moon. The air smelled of woodsmoke and frost. Overhead, in the clear heavens, a silver smudge was visible over Arcturus, blazing over the apple trees. Faintly, I could hear Stella’s familiar voice.

“Look! It’s the comet! Look, mum!”

“And you,” I asked the star, “your sisters? Will we see you again?”

“Oh,” she said. “We are always here.” She pointed upward, and I followed her hand to where the fixed stars span on their never-ending wheel in the shining winter sky.