Advent by James Treadwell Page A

back of the long sofa that stood between him and the fireplace. Among the books were so many loose sheets of paper that it looked as if a couple more volumes had been systematically shredded and scattered like seed. Perhaps she hoped they’d take root in the mess and grow into new books. There was, he noted with a sinking heart, no TV.
      A framed black-and-white photograph on the desk caught his eye, and after a moment’s hesitation – the room was so obviously a repository of everything Auntie Gwen was thinking and doing, and its messiness so perfectly matched her own cheerful incoherence, that walking through it felt like snooping into her head – he picked it up.
      It was a portrait, very faintly blurry, of an unconventionally beautiful woman with unblemished skin and a round mouth and hair that glistened. She was turning away from the camera, and her eyes were closed. It didn’t look like a family picture, but it was the only one in sight. He put it back where it had stood, at the edge of the desk, under the room’s single standing lamp.
      Most of the desk was covered by an unfolded map, a proper detailed one at a scale that showed every twist of every track and each border of every field. It was so heavily marked with lines and circles and tiny pencil scribblings that Gav could barely make out the features it charted, but in the top corner he recognised the name of the station where Hester had left her car. Near the middle of the sheet was an area where many of the straight pencil lines converged on a number of small circles, and although any names had been obliterated under Auntie Gwen’s graffiti, it was obvious that this was where he was. The pattern was like spokes on a wheel, leading into the centre: Pendurra. He examined the map for a while, trying to imagine the open sea out there in the night, the river with its narrow branchings fingering their way into valleys somewhere down beneath him.
      The book lying face down and open on one corner of the map had a picture of Stonehenge on its cover and was called Geomancy . Stacked nearby, interleaved with torn yellow Post-its shelving out of them like fungi on the trunks of old trees, were Mysteries of Stone Age Britain , The Ley-Hunter’s Field Guide , Antiques of— no, Antiquities of Devon and Cornwall , The Track of the Wild Hunt . . . Around and beneath the map, sheets of paper written over in Aunt Gwen’s cuneiform handwriting spread chaotically. A few appeared to be diagrams with labels; some looked like lists with multiple crossings-out and insertions; most were chunks of written notes he didn’t want to look at too closely. He had a strong feeling that visible energies would feature heavily in them.
      Each time he stopped to look at anything, the silence became oppressively thick. The thought of Miss Grey wandering in the night outside, watching the house, was like a pair of eyes on his back. He made sure all the curtains were drawn tight.
      The best way to keep busy while he waited, he decided, was to get himself something to eat. He went back to the kitchen and found a stocky fridge with a big blunt handle, which turned out to hold bowlfuls of what his father liked to call ‘chicken feed’: grainy, persistently brown salads. There was an open packet of biscuits on a counter by the sink, so he took a few of those instead and, spotting a carton of instant hot chocolate, lit a burner on the stove under a battered metal kettle. The clankings and clatterings in the kitchen dropped into the stillness of the house like pebbles in a pond, and were as quickly swallowed.
      What did she want from him?
      He meant to take his mug of hot chocolate back to the messy living room, sit down by the fire with any book he could find that didn’t look too forbiddingly weird, and get comfortable. As soon as he passed the front door on his way back, he knew it wouldn’t work.
      He leaned an ear to the door, held his breath and listened. The only sounds