Dying Fall

counsel.
    Cathbad makes a methodical tour of Pendragon’sbedroom, a long, low room with a double bed under the vaulted eaves. Pendragon would have had trouble standing up in here, thinks Cathbad. The bed is neatly made with a patchwork quilt, the bedside table empty apart from a teacup containing mouldy leaves and a book of old ballads. Cathbad opens the oak chest at the foot of the bed. It is full of bed linen, carefully folded with lavender. The wardrobe, jammed under one of the beams, contains a collection of robes as well as some more utilitarian garments, mostly jeans and work shirts. There is nothing else in the room, no bookcase, no photographs, nothing of a personal nature at all. Cathbad glances up at the wooden crucifix on the wall and offers up a quick prayer to Saint Anthony, patron saint of finding things. Help me find Pendragon before it’s too late.
    The other two rooms are full of personal stuff. Tea chests full of books, an old bicycle, sundry items of broken furniture, a huge Victorian bird cage, several gloomy old paintings, even a chipped cistern and sink. Pendragon obviously just shuts the door on these rooms and lives in minimalist splendour in the master bedroom. Cathbad is about to go back downstairs when something flashes across his brain, like a subliminal advertising message. There was another door. It was in Pendragon’s bedroom, just by the wardrobe. A low door, half hidden by a curtain. Cathbad turns back, trying to find a calming mantra to slow his heart down.
    The door is locked but Cathbad, who has an excellent visual memory, remembers a bunch of keys hanging by the larder in the kitchen. He runs back downstairs, Thingclattering at his side. He spends a few frustrating minutes trying different keys but eventually one – an unobtrusive Yale – fits.
    He switches on the light and sees a tiny room, barely six feet wide, containing a desk, office chair and laptop. Cathbad pauses. Something shocking has just happened. What was it? He switched on the light … In a house lit by oil-fired lamps, he has switched on a light. And in front of him is a perfect slice of twenty-first-century life. Desk, laptop, mobile phone, even an iPod in its dock. Shelves hold lever-arch files and a wireless modem twinkles with green lights. It is as if he has gone forward in time, stepped into the wardrobe and discovered a high-tech Narnia. But even as he sits at the desk, he knows that this hidden room can’t mean anything good. Pendragon must have his reasons for hiding his links with the outside world but Cathbad can’t think of any that make him see his old friend in a warm and twinkly light.
    He opens the laptop. It asks him for a password and – exercising his psychic powers – he guesses ‘Thing’. The computer flashes into life. The first file he sees is titled White Hand. Cathbad’s heart sinks. He doesn’t want to find out any more. He is about to close the case when something catches his eye, a silver pimple at the side of the screen. A memory stick. He clicks onto the C drive and reads the words ‘Dan’s Computer’.
    *
    Ruth is on the beach when she gets Cathbad’s message. She felt that Kate deserved some time running aboutafter the library and the cafe. So after a healthy lunch of chips on the pier, they headed down to the sands. As soon as they got there it started to rain and even the donkeys had sought shelter. But Ruth and Kate play on, jumping over puddles and writing in the sand. Kate is wearing a raincoat but Ruth has forgotten to bring hers and soon her hair is hanging in wet ribbons and her feet are soaking in their thin shoes. She takes them off and runs barefoot, enjoying the feeling of the cool sand between her toes. ‘Me too,’ yells Kate, so Ruth takes her shoes off too and they both run, laughing, in and out of the freezing water. For those few moments, Ruth feels that she is completely happy.
    The tide comes in incredibly quickly, faster even than on the Saltmarsh. Now, it’s as if the sea is erasing all the frivolities of Blackpool life – the donkeys’ hoof-prints, the writing on the sand (Ruth has read at least two ‘Marry Me’s), the chip wrappers and the half-eaten ice creams. Ruth thinks of an Etchasketch that was given to Kate last Christmas. It was too old for her but Ruth spent many happy hours writing or drawing and then watching as the inexorable line moved across the screen, restoring everything to smooth blankness.
The moving finger writes