Advent by James Treadwell

listening. He couldn’t hear anything moving outside, but there was so much darkness around the house; he hadn’t seen a single other light from its porch. Let the boy go in. Who else could Miss Grey have been speaking to? What was she doing out there? Pursuing him? How could someone else possibly have heard her?
      The door had sliding bolts at the top and bottom. He pushed them across. In another room a tinny clock struck six. It made him check his own watch: still not working.
      He dropped his bag on the stone floor and emptied his pockets on top of it: ticket, keys, wallet, phone. He dropped the watch too.
      Further in the house, behind the wall where the round glass picture thing hung, he saw the bottom of a narrow staircase, carpeted in threadbare green. Opposite the foot of the stairs a heavy curtain hung across a doorway. The room he was in bent round the stairwell. It felt ridiculous to tiptoe, but he did anyway, passing in front of the glass circle; he now saw that its mosaic pieces portrayed a woman’s face (high cheekbones and dreamy eyes) seen head-on, with wild hair flowing out behind, in a lurid array of colours. The Mother, maybe? The table beneath with the tealights did look a bit like a makeshift shrine. He looked around the corner. At the far end of the dining room an open doorway led to a kitchen. Branches of something that bore red-orange berries and slender, feathery leaves had been tacked up in bunches over the door.
      There were a couple of dirty plates and saucepans by the sink, but no other sign of Auntie Gwen. Nor was she in any of the upstairs rooms, though an oddly intimate smell lingered in what was obviously her bedroom, in a way that made Gav a bit uncomfortable, as if he’d burst in on her in her pyjamas. The ceiling there sloped down almost to the floor, and an indecipherable jumble of stuff had been pushed into both corners. The only light in the room was a small lamp with a heavy red shade. He felt sure she wouldn’t have left the light on if she’d gone far. There was a bathroom next door, the inhospitably chilly, unmodern kind, and at the end of the upstairs hallway another bedroom, which also had bunches of the orange-berried branches tied over the lintel. Pinned to the door itself was something he thought must be mistletoe. It looked like the stuff on Christmas-card pictures, though he’d never actually seen it before. The bedroom beyond was unlit, neat, odourless and anonymously orderly.
      His room. She must have made an effort to leave a space cleared of her personality, somewhere his parents would approve of their only child occupying for a week.
      Going back down, he hesitated before pushing through the drape at the bottom of the stairs. It turned out he needn’t have.
      He couldn’t suppress a smile as he surveyed the benign chaos of his aunt’s living room. Here was the real Auntie Gwen, the exact visual equivalent of what he remembered her conversation being like: a picture of enthusiastic untidy muddle. Over it all hung the scent of something woody and spicy, conjuring up her presence immediately, almost as if she were sitting in one of the chairs across by the fire. The same aroma used to arrive with her whenever she visited. Dad liked to make a show of sniffing the air when he got home from work and (as long as Mum was in earshot) mutter, ‘Ah yes, that new fragrance, Imbecility by Dior,’ or, ‘Mmm, eau de mented .’ She’d once shown Gavin how you dripped the drops of oil onto the little clay dish and then set it over the pot where the candle burned. She did it reverently, like she did most things, especially things involving candles. He looked around and spotted the pot on a huge heavy desk, surrounded by papers and scattered books. There were piles of books on the carpeted floor, books stuffed into odd pieces of dark and bulky furniture that were never intended to be shelves, books dropped in the corners of the chairs and resting, open, over the