Fourth Horseman (9 page)

‘There’s an idea,’ said Javed. ‘Maybe there’s a special place there.’

‘A portal,’ said Alex. ‘A time portal.’

‘Maybe they don’t have anything to do with the squirrels,’ said Javed. ‘Maybe they just slipped through a time portal because it’s there.’

And it might have always been there,’ said Alex excitedly. ‘Since ancient times. That’s why someone built that dirty big wall around the place.’

‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘The only thing wrong with that is the way they were looking at Dad. They weren’t interested in me at all. They were definitely there on account of him.’

‘But they didn’t say anything?’

‘No. But I did.’ I had a sudden vision of Dad, his shirt front crumpled and lopsided, gazing like a zombie at the riders, and me, my voice high-pitched and whiny, waving my mobile and threatening the apparitions with the police. All the tension of the day found release through that absurd image, and I began to laugh hysterically. It was a long time before I could pull myself together enough to tell them what was so funny. Then I remembered the violent wind that had ripped the leaves off the trees, and I told them about that as well.

‘You know what we should do?’ said Javed.

‘What?’

‘We should just go there. Tomorrow. Search the place and see what we can find.’

‘Good thinking,’ said Alex. ‘Then if there’s any kind of wiring we’ll find it.’

‘If it hasn’t already been taken away,’ I said.

‘There’s bound to be some kind of evidence, though, if we look carefully enough,’ said Javed. ‘Broken twigs, bits of wire left around.’

‘And we can check out the wall,’ said Alex. ‘See if there’s any way a horse could get in there.’

I wasn’t so keen. The memory and the fear were still too fresh. ‘You weren’t there,’ I said. ‘You’ve no idea how scary it was.’

‘You can be a victim in life or you can be a warrior,’ said Javed.

Alex was a bit more sympathetic. ‘We’ll get Dad to come if you like,’ he said.

My spirits shrivelled. ‘Actually,’ I said pathetically, ‘Dad’s a bit weird about it all.’

‘Weird?’ said Alex. ‘What way weird?’

It felt almost impossible to explain, without making me look like an idiot. ‘He doesn’t want to admit he saw them.’ But as I said it, I realized the importance of going. If we found evidence, which I was sure we would, then we could confront him with it. All three of us. Make him talk.

I decided to be a warrior. My spirit was returning. ‘Better without him,’ I said.

I
DID MANAGE TO
go to sleep once or twice that night, but never for long. The two riders were in every part of my mind. If I dropped off I woke almost immediately, the horsemen vivid behind my eyes. Once the white rider was bowling at me with a huge, fiery ball, and the red one was keeping wicket behind me, standing right up to the stumps, breathing down my neck. The ball was going to be a bouncer, I knew. It was aimed right at my elbow. Another time the two of them were walking across the sky and I was in a hot-air balloon with Dad. I was trying to blow us away from them, but he was blowing smoke in the other direction, back towards them. He was winning. Every time I woke I would try to push the horsemen out of my mind; to vanish them the way they had vanished themselves. I couldn’t, though. They haunted me tirelessly from one edge of the night to the other.

And pretty much every time I woke up I heard Dad’s radio, tuned to the BBC World Service, talking to him in his room. He had a sleep setting on it, which meant that it turned itself off automatically after half an hour. The fact that it was on all night meant that he was turning it on again; probably tossing and turning like me. The cheerful face meant nothing then. He was as alarmed by what had happened today as I was. I just wished that he would admit it.

At about three a.m. I heard him turn off his radio, then get up and pad along the corridor to the bathroom and back. Soon afterwards the radio came on again. I turned over and tried to sleep. It was no use. Then I remembered something Mum had once told me: that if you’re angry with someone and it’s interfering with your peace of mind, the best thing to do is write them a letter. You don’t have to send it. In fact in most cases it’s better if you don’t. But writing it down can help you set your mind at rest. I thought about it for a while and eventually, driven demented by the persistent images, I got out of bed and found a notebook and pen.

Getting it down on paper definitely helped. I made two columns on a clean page, and as I wrote I remembered some things I hadn’t thought of before.

WHITE

Appeared first alone.

Wears a crown made of silver.

Wears white clothes and a long flowing cape.

Carries a bow and has arrows.

Horse is well fed and strong. Has a very smart saddle and no bridle.

Horse is very calm. The reins are loose.

Rider has an arrogant expression.

RED

Appeared later with the white rider. Has not appeared alone.

Has a beard.

Wears shabby clothes. Rusty red colour. Bloodstained?

Carries crude sword with blood dripping from it.

Horse is thin and wiry. Has no saddle and the bridle is made of rope.

Horse is restless and excitable. One of the reins is broken.

Rider looks humiliated and angry.

It didn’t look much when I’d finished and I wished I could remember more. I read it over a couple of times to see whether anything leaped out at me, but that was about all I could remember. It hadn’t helped much. I went back to bed but I still couldn’t sleep. I missed Mum dreadfully and wished I could talk to her. And suddenly I remembered that I could.

Dad had put the old computer back in his study, and Alex and I used it for our email. I booted it up. I checked my email then set about composing a message to Mum. I wrote several versions, a few serious ones about what I had seen and the effect it had had on Dad, and then a light-hearted one with the story of the horseman added as a kind of afterthought. But when I read them through they all sounded as if I was going off the rails. I had no doubts at all about what I had seen, but when I saw it in writing it looked crazy. It was making things worse, not better. I deleted the emails and decided to leave it until Mum next came home.

As I was getting up to go back to bed I noticed an unusual book beside the keyboard, half hidden by a couple of printouts. It had a white leather cover that I didn’t remember seeing in the house before. Dad was an atheist, and Mum called herself an agnostic, so I couldn’t imagine why either of them would have had a copy of the Holy Bible.

Back in bed, still sleepless, I went over what I’d seen, over and over and over. I thought about what I had agreed to do with the boys in the morning but I couldn’t remember how I had felt when I decided to be a warrior. I could only remember the fear.

By six a.m. I was so exhausted that I couldn’t think straight. I knew that if I didn’t get up and occupy myself I was going to go nuts. As I went along to the bathroom I could hear Dad snoring, finally asleep. I envied him, but the fact that he was sleeping sowed the seed of an idea in my head. I was going to have to go through with it; this search I had committed myself to. And if I had to do it, I wanted to get it over with as soon as I could. Why not now?

I didn’t fancy my chances with the boys, though. When I went into Alex’s room the two of them were in deep sleep. Alex was on the top bunk. I tried him first.

‘Alex!’

‘Huh.’

‘Wake up. I want to go to the lab. I want to search for the riders.’

‘’Kay,’ he said, and turned over to face the wall.

I had better luck with Javed. He opened his eyes as soon as I shook him.

‘What time is it?’ he said.

‘About six. Will you come with me to the lab? To check out the wall and stuff?’

‘Why so early?’

‘I can’t sleep,’ I said.

Javed sat up and scratched his close-cut hair. It sounded like someone using a scrubbing brush. He looked dazed but he was definitely awake.

‘I’m going to put the kettle on,’ I said. ‘Can you get Alex up?’

Javed yawned extravagantly and swung his legs over the edge of the bunk. ‘I’ll try.’

Half an hour later we were on our bikes and pedalling towards an adventure that I was still in two minds about. It had been Alex’s idea to bring Randall with us, and I found his presence reassuring, even though he was a soft-natured creature and would be absolutely useless if we found ourselves in trouble. Mum had trained him to go with her on the bike and he was a hundred per cent road-wise. He ran along beside the back wheel of the last bike and squashed himself in to the verge whenever a car came along. There were very few out at that time on a Sunday, though, and we flew along the quiet roads to the lab.

We parked our bikes in the Dutch barn and walked round to the place where Dad and I had been standing when we saw the riders. There were a few green leaves scattered around, but not as many as I had remembered blowing off the trees the previous day. I hung back behind the boys, surprised by how fearful I still was. I pointed into the trees.

‘About there,’ I said. ‘Under that big beech.’

‘Can you see them now?’ asked Alex.

‘Duuhh!’ I said. ‘If I could see them you could see them as well! These are horses we’re talking about. As in horse-sized horses!’

‘All right,’ said Alex. ‘Just testing.’

‘I don’t need to be tested, OK?’ I was a bit annoyed by what I thought he was suggesting. ‘I’m not doolally yet. I saw what I saw!’

We stayed where we were, waiting for that bit of bad air to clear. Randall was sitting at the edge of the trees, wondering whether we were ever going to make up our minds and do something.

‘Seek, Randall!’ I said.

He bounded up and hared around the place, nose to the ground. After a few moments of that he looked towards me quizzically. I knew what he was saying. ‘Seek what?’

The ground beneath the trees was green with wild garlic and bluebell leaves.

‘There’s bound to be some sign of them in there,’ said Javed, moving forward hesitantly. ‘They’ll have trampled all the plants and stuff.’

Alex and I followed. I was surprised to find that the light under the trees was stronger than it looked from outside. We searched the whole area, treading carefully so that we wouldn’t confuse ourselves with our own footprints. Randall sniffed out a trail and tore off along it, his nose to the ground. We watched, hopeful for a moment, but whatever he was trailing appeared to have spent the previous night rambling around aimlessly and circling trees. Before long Randall got disheartened and gave up. So did we. There was no sign of anything: not one broken leaf, not one hoofprint in the powdery brown leaf mould. We craned our necks to see up into the trees all around. Javed gave Alex a leg-up into the beech and he climbed right to the top.

There was nothing unusual there now and no sign that there ever had been.

I was relieved and disappointed at the same time. ‘They were definitely there,’ I said. ‘I swear it.’

‘We believe you,’ said Javed.

‘Do you?’

‘I do, anyway,’ he said. Alex said nothing. I knew he needed evidence.

We went back to the gates and began walking round inside the boundary wall. Within minutes we were lost, isolated from the world by the wall on one side and the thick woodland on the other. We weren’t actually lost; we could always find our way back the way we had come, but we had no sense of where we were in relation to the road, the fields, the buildings. Woods can do that to you. You can walk for five minutes into them and spend an hour trying to find your way out.

The enclosure had a longer boundary than any of us had expected. There were times when we frightened ourselves, convinced that we had entered some kind of dark other world populated by wild riders and who knew what else. Snakes and lions at the very least. Once a passing aeroplane reassured us, and another time Alex helped me to look over the wall, and I could see, among other things, the familiar shape of Worcester Cathedral. And eventually, inevitably, we did get to the end, or rather the beginning; back to the gates again. The wall was completely intact the whole way round. It was never less than two and a half metres high and there were places where the land dipped down and the wall was even higher. There was no way a horse could get in there. Not without a crane or a helicopter.

We walked back to the bikes.

‘They were definitely there,’ I said hopelessly.

‘No one said they weren’t,’ said Alex. We were all a bit tired and despondent, and I could see why he would be annoyed, after getting out of bed for nothing.

‘I know what you’re thinking, though.’

‘No you don’t,’ said Javed. ‘No one knows what anyone else is thinking.’

I stopped at the edge of the yard and looked into the trees one last time. The day was warming up and the flies were coming out to saunter around in the sunbeams again.

‘You know what was the weirdest thing about it?’ I said.

‘What?’ said Alex, less than enthusiastically.

‘The reason they were so frightening,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t because they were going to hurt us. I don’t think either of us thought that. The scary thing was the hold they had over Dad. He seemed to be completely in their power.’

‘But what would they want with Dad?’ said Alex.

‘I don’t know.’

‘They didn’t say anything, though?’ said Javed.

I shook my head. ‘No, they didn’t.’ I was struggling now, trying to put something into words that I hadn’t really thought through yet. But as I said it I knew it was true, and that it was a breakthrough of some kind. ‘The message wasn’t something they said to us. The message was them being there. They were the message.’

I
T WAS TEN O’CLOCK
by the time we got home. Dad had been out to the all-night garage and the kitchen was full of carrier bags, all half-unpacked. There was a fabulous smell of frying, and Alex and I homed in on the cooker. Dad had two pans on the go, one full of bacon and the other of sausages. Two boxes of eggs stood on the counter-top, their lids open.