Emerald Greene and the Witch Stones Page 21

  Emerald Greene straightened up, not looking her in the eye.

  ‘I’ve... brought my own snacks,’ Jess added hopefully, holding up a packet of dry roasted peanuts and a small bottle of Sprite. ‘Salt, protein and glucose? For the... other side...’ She let her voice tail off, words falling dead into the clearing like the crackling leaves around her feet. She swallowed hard, her throat suddenly tight and dry.

  ‘Jessica,’ said Emerald Greene, biting her lip and swivelling on one foot, ‘please understand. I am not of this time, or of this place. My work is done here.’

  ‘Done?’ Jess felt her heart gripped by a strange, unexpected coldness. ‘What do you mean, done?’

  ‘I do not belong here,’ said Emerald, with an apologetic shrug of her shoulders.

  ‘But you can stay... Surely you can stay?’

  ‘It is already decided. This morning, I programmed the Barrier to a delayed setting.’ Emerald paused. ‘In fifteen minutes, the link will automatically disconnect. This gateway will be gone forever, and I shall go with it.’

  Jess opened her mouth and no sound came out.

  She remembered how, years ago, Gabi had sat her down and told her - because she was old enough now to understand - what had actually happened to her mother and father. She had listened to the story, her mind reeling as detail after detail became clear, as image after image took shape in her mind. The story took on the pictures and the sounds it was to have for the next decade, for the rest of her life to come. Echoing down the years. And when Gabi had finished, Jess felt physically shattered, her every limb aching, as if the energy had been drained from her body in preparation for a new phase of her life.

  She felt like that now. Her legs were giving way beneath her, the forest was blurring. All the new certainties in her life had suddenly been pulled away and replaced with a great, yawning chasm.

  Eventually, Jess murmured, ‘You brought me up here just to say goodbye.’

  ‘Yes. I am afraid so.’

  ‘You can’t be going,’ she whispered, her voice fracturing. ‘You can’t! I’m only just starting to understand the things you tell me!’

  ‘I am sorry,’ said Emerald. ‘It is... better this way.’

  ‘How?’ Jessica demanded angrily. ‘How is it better?’

  ‘It was never intended that I should stay here. My presence in your school is already provoking... difficult questions. It is difficult to maintain a low profile while doing the research I need - ’

  ‘But you said you were... displaced? I thought that meant you’d washed up here and you were... well, stuck here?’

  ‘I am Displaced, that is true. I cannot return down the path I came from. The Barrier has some flexibility, though. Anoushka has been experimenting. And I need to explore its capacity myself.’ Emerald tilted her head on one side, in what Jess now saw as her oh-so-annoying way of looking mildly curious. ‘My apologies. I thought you realised. I did not know you would be so upset.’

  This couldn’t be happening, Jess thought angrily. It just wasn’t true. ‘Damn it, Emerald, you’re my friend!’ She lowered her voice to a cracked whisper. ‘You can’t go.’

  ‘I am... sorry?’

  Jess bit her lip. She couldn’t look at Emerald. She felt the hot, angry lump in her throat and knew that she was probably going to cry at any minute. ‘I’ll miss you,’ Jess said.

  Emerald Greene appeared to think for a moment, and then she smiled, as if she had realised something. ‘I shall also miss you,’ she said, nodding, and her voice carried an unexpected note of sadness.

  Jess shook her head in incomprehension, flapped her arms as if unsure what to do with them. ‘So... did you ever finish reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica?’ she asked, her voice cracking.

  ‘Yes!’ said Emerald brightly. ‘The final volume was especially interesting. Did you know that Zürich was the fifth member state to join the Swiss Confederation in 1351, but was expelled in 1440?’ Emerald sighed. ‘But X was a little thin. I got through that in about half an hour.’

  Jess smiled sadly. ‘You see, this is the kind of thing you say... It’s just you. And I’m going to miss it. This can’t be, Em... I thought we were going to be friends forever.’

  Emerald Greene looked at her, smiled ruefully. ‘Jessica,’ she whispered. ‘Nothing lasts forever.’

  They hugged, briefly, under the grey autumn skies. Jess could not help herself now, and she felt the warm, dissolving sensation in her eyes and nose and mouth.

  ‘Please don’t go, Emerald,’ she heard herself saying. ‘Please don’t go!’

  ‘I must,’ said Emerald sadly, drawing back from her. ‘Do not try to follow me.’

  Then Emerald Greene turned, hiding her face, and walked away, across the leafy clearing towards the barrier, her slim shape blending into the forest so that she seemed almost like a ghost.

  At the barrier, Emerald turned, lifted her hand.

  Jess’s eyes were awash, stinging. She could only raise her own hand in farewell as the cold, dark feeling of loss swept through her body.

  There was a breeze, and a rustling of the leaves. When Jess blinked and looked again, her friend was gone, carried like distant birdsong on the wind, with no trace of her in the clearing to show that she had ever existed. And then it was over, and Jess had to turn away as the world dissolved in a hot stream of tears.

  ‘Goodbye, Emerald,’ she said softly.

  She waited a full minute in the stillness of the clearing before she turned to go.

  She was halfway down the hill to the bus-stop when she put her hand into her pocket, and encountered the cold, hard feeling of an object that should not have been there.

  And when she drew her hand out of her pocket, she found it was grasping a silver omega-chain pendant, sparkling with the green of a single, inlaid emerald.

  13

  Echoes

  ‘Meresbury!’ said the authoritative voice of Mr Quentin Lancelot Courtney, commander of the Special Measures Division.

  In a secret bunker somewhere beneath Charing Cross Station in central London, a group of about a hundred government officials sat in the dim orange light of a lecture hall, watching the screen in front of them. It showed the cobbled streets and gabled houses of a picturesque English city basking in the afternoon sunlight.

  Mr Courtney strolled into the light of the picture and his dark suit was wrapped in the image for a second or two as he passed from one side to the other.

  ‘Meresbury. A place to keep an eye on, ladies and gentlemen.’

  Mr Courtney was holding a hand-held switch, and he punctuated his talk by clicking the button. He gave a brief history of the City of Meresbury, remarking on its medieval status as a confluence of trade routes and its tenacious survival during the Black Death. He outlined its key role in the English Civil War, its Victorian prosperity, and the recent battle to preserve its character in the heart of the country. Paintings, old maps and even a page of the Domesday Book were flashed up on the screen to illustrate his points. Having survived both World Wars and the modern town planners, he enthused, Meresbury was now an oasis of beauty in an England full of multiplying road-schemes and housing estates.

  And then - just as the audience was beginning to grow slightly restless from the history lesson - Mr Courtney hit them with the ghost photograph.

  It showed the precincts of Meresbury Cathedral at sunset. Long, black shadows lay on the paved Cathedral Close.

  ‘Observe, ’ he declaimed, ‘this amateur photograph, taken at approximately 19:15 hours in the city centre. A warm autumn evening, the streets still full of people heading to pubs, restaurants and the theatre.’

  He pressed the button again and the slide was replaced with a tighter close-up of the same image. The picture zoomed in on a blue car parked in front of the Cathedral doors.

 
‘Luckily,’ said Mr Courtney, ‘we have been able to enhance and magnify the picture with the aid of the latest imaging software.’

  He clicked the button again, and the frame had closed in on something else which could now be seen clearly hovering behind the car.

  There were murmurs, now, from the seated company, and Mr Courtney allowed himself a brief smirk of triumph.

  ‘We have, of course, had this photograph verified by independent expert sources,’ Mr Courtney went on. ‘All of them attest that it is genuine, and has not been tampered with in any way, shape or form.’

  He gazed proudly at the picture. The shape hovering behind the car, and which was causing such interested murmurs among his audience, was ragged-edged and slightly blurred. It was, though, unmistakably that of a pretty, wide-eyed girl with light-brown hair, wearing a plain white dress and clutching a posy of flowers. Her clothes and hairstyle were Victorian in appearance and she was, at a guess, about fourteen or fifteen years old. She appeared to be staring directly out of the picture with a troubled gaze.

  ‘A haunting?’ said Mr Courtney carefully. ‘An image resonance? Psychic disturbance? Call it what you will, but Meresbury is rich in them. In fact, it seems to have more incidents per square mile than previous English record-holders like the city of York, for example.’ He smiled out at his audience. ‘Interpret them how you will. The evidence is clearly there.’

  The murmuring began again in the audience, and one or two people cleared their throats, perhaps in disapproval. Mr Courtney held up a hand for silence.

  ‘Why, you may wonder,’ he went on, ‘should I be bothered about this one particular shot, taken one day in Meresbury, when I could furnish you with a dozen other, probably more impressive pictures of ghosts? I shall tell you why.’ Mr Courtney paused for dramatic effect, swivelling on the spot as he surveyed his orange-lit audience. ‘The reason, ladies and gentlemen, is that I have seen this young woman before.’

  He clicked again. The screen now showed a group of present-day children gossiping at their school gates at the end of the afternoon.

  Mr Courtney took an electronic pen from his lapel and used it to draw a white circle of light on the screen around the face of one of the pupils - a slim, pretty girl of around thirteen, with brownish hair and bright eyes.

  It was her. A little younger, but unmistakably the same. She was the spectral girl from the previous slide.

  There were subdued mutterings in the audience, which rapidly rose in volume to become an excited, inquisitive babble. Once again, Mr Courtney had to quell them with a raised hand.

  ‘This picture,’ he said, ‘was taken during a recent incident which I and my colleague Mr Odell dealt with. A psychic disturbance, focused partially around a Meresbury secondary school.’

  He pressed the button again and the slide was replaced by a close-up of the girl. Obviously unaware that she was being photographed, she was smiling. Her hair was blowing a little in the breeze and her eyes were narrowing slightly against the sunlight as she chatted with her friends.

  ‘The girl exists - today, in this century,’ said Mr Courtney quietly. ‘And I have, as yet, no explanation for this particular confluence. I can only conclude that it is the resonance of a catastrophic event which has yet to occur.’ He turned back towards the screen. ‘This is why we will be keeping a close eye - a very close eye - on Miss Jessica Mathieson.’

  On the screen, Jessica’s face stared out into the lecture theatre, caught forever in that moment, blue eyes looking out with the carefree gaze of a girl who had no idea that she was being watched.

  Watched for the past, and watched for the future.

  Jessica’s Diary

  Christmas Day

  Haven’t written in this for a while. Thought I’d better update things.

  Didn’t really feel very Christmassy today. We went to church with our faces tingling and our breath cutting jets through the air, and I sat and listened to the words - shepherds abiding in the fields and angels from on high and people walking in darkness and seeing a great light, and all that - and I thought it all rang hollow. It’s a good story, but it’s just a story.

  Some of it might be true, I don’t know. If I can believe in witches and demons and sorceresses, then surely I could believe in angels and the Christchild? All part of the same thing. All a big, ongoing story that never ends, I told myself.

  But then, as someone said once, nothing lasts forever.

  Aunt Gabi is saying how next year is going to be good for us. She’ll have finished her course and she’ll get a proper job, and I’ll have decided on my options and I’ll be well on the way to GCSEs.

  I suppose she’s right. I need to get back to the real world.

  Richie and I are still mates, but we don’t really talk as much as we did. He seems a bit embarrassed to be seen around me and the other girls. I’m not sure why.

  One thing worries me a bit - my hand has been hurting again, just a little. My palm tingles and I keep having to rub it. It’s as if I’ve been handling a frozen leg of lamb, or crunching snow into a ball with my bare hands. It doesn’t always feel like that, but sometimes it just bites, as if trying to remind me of something - and then goes away. It’s like it’s trying to speak to me.

  Meresbury seems to have got back to normal. The stones are still roped off and nobody can go near them. As for the school, they claimed it had been a gas leak, and everybody swallowed the story. I can’t believe how gullible people can be.

  Oh, there was a wild fuss about old Ulverston returning, obviously. He appeared on County TV again and explained it all away by saying he’d been in a private hospital in France recovering from his injuries and didn’t want anyone to know.

  Apart from that, you’d think people walked around with their eyes shut, given how little the media have made of things. It’s almost as if someone had silenced the TV and the papers. What’s that Government thing - a D-notice? They can put one on almost any news item to suppress it.

  The Special Measures guys packed up and left as soon as it was all over. I know that much. I saw them rolling up the cable outside the school and packing their equipment into plain white vans. Mr Courtney and Mr Odell were watching from a distance, but they didn’t acknowledge me.

  I’m sure I saw one of their cars pass along at the end of our street one morning, just before the end of term, but the windows were tinted and I couldn’t see who was in it. They moved off pretty sharply when they saw me coming, anyway.

  If I close my eyes, I can see her now. So clearly.

  It’s sunset in the forest. The sun is low behind the trees, swollen and orange and spreading its thick light as it sinks behind the hills. She’s standing at the Chronostatic Barrier and she’s looking back towards me. She seems troubled, as if there’s something she has forgotten to say.

  She turns, slightly, raises a hand. And then, a second later, she slips silently through, and there is one less shadow in the forest.

  It is colder, now.

  The sun has set, and I am alone.

  While I’ve been writing, it’s been getting darker outside and a few flakes of snow have been falling. They’re gathering pace, now, flurries settling and coating the grass and the roofs.

  People have retreated inside their houses and they’ve drawn the curtains. I can see Christmas lights twinkling in people’s windows, and in the distance I can just make out the floodlit Cathedral, tall and proud beneath the snow.

  Somewhere, there is no snow. Somewhere, just out of reach, there is a place called Rubicon House, a place where it is always summer and hot coffee is on the table.

  And inside, there is a strange girl called Emerald Greene, a girl who sees the holes in reality and mends them, a girl who knows far more than she ever lets on - a girl who trusted me to be her friend.

  The weather reports have been say
ing we’re in for a hard winter.

  Is this where it begins?