Table of Contents

- ONE

- TWO

- THREE

A Writer's Life

Eric Brown

infinity plus

A Writer’s Life

Mid-list writer Daniel Ellis becomes obsessed with the life and work of novelist Vaughan Edwards, who disappeared in mysterious circumstances in 1996. Edwards' novels, freighted with foreboding tragedy and a lyrical sense of loss, echo something in Ellis's own life. His investigations lead Ellis ever deeper into the enigma that lies at the heart of Vaughan Edwards' country house, Edgecoombe Hall, and the horror that dwells there.

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© Eric Brown 2001, 2010

Cover © Julian Flynn 2010

ISBN: 9781458163615

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The moral right of Eric Brown to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

A Writer's Life was first published by PS Publishing in 2001. My thanks to Peter Crowther.

Electronic version by Baen Books

Also by Eric Brown

Novels

Guardians of the Phoenix

Cosmopath

Xenopath

Necropath

Kéthani

Helix

New York Dreams

New York Blues

New York Nights

Penumbra

Engineman

Meridian Days

Novellas

Gilbert and Edgar on Mars

Starship Fall

Revenge

Starship Summer

The Extraordinary Voyage of Jules Verne

Approaching Omega

A Writer's Life

Collections

Threshold Shift

The Fall of Tartarus

Deep Future

Parallax View (with Keith Brooke)

Blue Shifting

The Time-Lapsed Man

As Editor

The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (with Mike Ashley)

ONE

Edwards, Vaughan, (1930-1996?). English novelist, author of twelve novels and two collections of stories. His first novel, Winter at the Castle, (1951), received considerable critical acclaim but, like much of his subsequent output, little widespread popularity. Edwards was very much a writer's writer, eschewing the trappings of sensationalism in his fiction and concentrating instead on his own peculiar and unique vision. In book after book, this singular novelist wrote of a rural England haunted by ghosts of the past—both the spirits of humans and the more metaphorical apparitions of times long gone. The novel considered his finest, The Miracle at Hazelmere, (1968), tells, in his customary highly wrought prose, the story of William Grantham, an estranged and embittered artist, and his (perhaps imaginary—it is never revealed) affair with the phantom of a sixteen year-old girl from the Elizabethan period. This novel, in common with the rest of his oeuvre, contains much striking imagery, pathos and a yearning for a long gone era of bucolic certainty. Artists and loners burdened with tragic pasts appear again and again in his writing, and there is speculation that the novels and stories drew much from the author's own life, though, as Edwards was an intensely private person, this has never been confirmed. Critics generally agree that his final novels, the Secrets of Reality series, marked the artistic low-point of his career. Though beautifully written, and containing much of ideative interest, the novels, beginning with Those Amongst Us, (1990), continuing with A Several Fear, (1993), and The Secret of Rising Dene, (1996), show an obsessive preoccupation with the arcane, and found only a narrow readership. The series, a projected quartet, was unfinished at the time of the author's mysterious disappearance in the winter of 1996.

From the Encyclopaedia of Twentieth Century British Novelists, Macmillan, third edition, 1998.

~

The above entry was the first mention I had ever heard of the writer Vaughan Edwards. I was surprised that I had never happened upon his work, as I have a pretty comprehensive knowledge of British writers of the last century and especially those publishing after the Second World War. The discovery filled me with a wonderful sense of serendipitous anticipation: there was something about the entry that told me I would take to the novels of Vaughan Edwards. The fact that he was relatively unknown now, and little regarded during his lifetime, gave me the sense that I would be performing a service to the memory of the man who had devoted his life, as the entry stated, to 'his own peculiar and unique vision'. Perhaps what gave me a certain empathy with the novelist was that I too was an unsuccessful writer, the author of half a dozen forgotten novels, as well as over fifty short stories buried away in long-defunct small-press magazines and obscure anthologies.

I showed the entry to Mina. For some reason—perhaps subsequent events have branded the very start of the episode on my consciousness—I recall the night well. It had been a grey, misty day in early November; a gale had blown up after dinner, and now a rainstorm lashed the windows of the cottage, instilling in me the romantic notion that we were aboard a storm-tossed galleon upon the high seas.

Mina was reading in her armchair before the blazing fire. Her favourites were the classic Victorians, the Brontës, Eliot and the rest. Now she lay the well-read paperback edition of Wuthering Heights upon her lap and blinked up at me, perhaps surprised at the summons back to the present day.

I set the thick tome on the arm of the chair and tapped the page with my forefinger. "Why on earth haven't I come across him before?"

She pushed her reading glasses up her nose, pulled a frown, and read the entry. A minute later she looked up, a characteristic, sarcastic humour lighting her eyes. "Perhaps because he's probably even more obscure and terrible than all those others you go on about."

I leaned over and kissed her forehead. She laughed. The masochist in me found delight in setting myself up as the butt of her disdain.

I relieved her of the volume, sat before the fire and reread the entry.

Why was it that even then I knew, with a stubborn, innate certainty, that I would take to the works of this forgotten writer? There was enough in the entry to convince me that I had stumbled across a fellow romantic, someone obscurely haunted by an inexplicable sense of the tragedy that lies just beneath the veneer of the everyday—or perhaps I was flattering myself with knowledge gained of hindsight.

Mina stretched and yawned. "I'm going to bed. I'm on an early tomorrow. Come up if you want."

Even then, a year into our relationship, I was insecure enough to ascribe to her most innocent statements an ulterior intent. I remained before the fire, staring at the page, the words a blur, and tried to decide if she meant that she wished to sleep alone tonight.

At last, chastising myself for being so paranoid, I joined her in bed. Rain doused the skylight and wind rattled the eaves. I eased myself against her back, my right arm encircling her warm body, and closed my eyes.

~

Though the novels of Daniel Ellis are founded on a solid bedrock of integrity and honesty, yet they display the flaws of an excessive emotionalism which some might find over-powering.

From Simon Levi's review of the novel Fair Winds by Daniel Ellis.

~

But for Mina, I would never have come upon Vaughan Edwards' novel A Bitter Recollection. During the month following my discovery of his entry in the encyclopaedia, I wrote to a dozen second-hand bookshops enquiring if they possessed copies of any of his works.

Of the three replies I received, two had never heard of him, and a third informed me that in thirty years of bookdealing he had come across only a handful of Edwards' titles. I made enquiries on the Internet, but to no avail.

I forgot about Vaughan Edwards and busied myself with work. I was writing the novelisation of a children's TV serial at the time, working three hours in the mornings and taking the afternoons off to potter about the garden, read, or, if Mina was not working, drive into the Dales.

It was an uncharacteristically bright, but bitterly cold, day in mid-December when I suggested a trip to York for lunch and a scout around the bookshops.

As I drove, encountering little traffic on the mid-week roads, Mina gave me a running commentary on her week at work.

I listened with feigned attention. The sound of her voice hypnotised me. She had a marked Yorkshire accent that I have always found attractive, and an inability to pronounce the letter r. The word 'horrible', which she used a lot, came out sounding like 'howwible'. Perhaps it was the contradiction of the conjunction between the childishness of some of her phrases, and her stern and unrelenting practicality and pragmatism, which I found so endearing.

She was a State Registered Nurse and worked on the maternity ward of the general hospital in the nearby town of Skipton. In the early days of our relationship I was conscious, perhaps to the point of feeling guilty, of how little I worked in relation to her. I could get away with three or four hours a day at the computer, five days a week, and live in reasonable comfort from my output of one novel and a few stories and articles every year. By contrast Mina worked long, gruelling shifts, looked after her two girls for three and a half days a week, and kept up with the daily household chores. When I met her she was renting a two-bedroom terrace house, which ate up most of her wage, and yet I never heard her complain. She had just walked out on a disastrous marriage that had lasted a little over eight years, and she was too thankful for her new-found freedom to worry about things like poverty and overwork.

Her practical attitude to life amazed me—me, who found it hard to manage my bank balance, who found the mundane chores of daily life too much of a distraction...

She once accused me of having it too easy, of never having to face real hardship, and I had to agree that she was right.

There were times, though, when her pragmatism did her a disservice. She often failed to appreciate the truly wondrous in life: she fought shy of my romanticism as if it were a disease. She could be cutting about my flights of fancy, my wild speculations about life on other worlds, the possibilities of the future. On these occasions she would stare at me, a frown twisting her features, and then give her head that quick irritable, bird-like shake. "But what does all that matter!" she would say—as if all that did matter was a strict and limiting adherence to the banality of the everyday. She had gone through a lot: she was content with her present, when compared to her past. She feared, I thought, the uncertainty of the future.

We never argued about our differences, though. I loved her too much to risk creating a rift.

"Daniel," she said, her sudden sharp tone causing me to flinch. "You're miles away. You haven't been listening to a word... I might as well be talking to myself!"

"I was thinking about a dream I had last night."

Why did I say this? I knew that she hated hearing about my dreams. She didn't dream herself, or if she did then she failed to recall them. It was as if the evidence of my over-active sleeping imagination was something that she could not understand, or therefore control.

I had dreamed of meeting a fellow writer in an ancient library filled with mouldering tomes. I had gestured around us, implying without words the insignificance of our efforts to add our slight fictions to the vast collection.

The writer had smiled, his face thin, hair gun-metal grey—a weathered and experienced face. He replied that the very act of imagining, of creating worlds that had never existed, was the true measure of our humanity.

The dream had ended there, faded from my memory even though I retained the subtle, nagging impression that our conversation had continued. Even stranger was the fact that, when I awoke, I was filled with the notion that my partner in the library had been Vaughan Edwards.

More than anything I wanted to recount my dream to Mina, but I was too wary of her scepticism. I wanted to tell her that to create worlds that had never existed was the true measure of our humanity.

~

I frequently feel the need to lie about my profession. When people ask what I do, I want to answer anything but that I am a freelance writer. I am sick and tired of repeating the same old clichés in response to the same old questions. When I told Mina this, she was horrified, appalled that I should lie about what I do. Perhaps it's because Mina is so sparing with the details of her personal life that she feels the few she does divulge must be truthful, and cannot imagine anyone else thinking otherwise.

From the personal journals of Daniel Ellis.

~

We parked on the outskirts and walked across the Museum Street bridge and into the city centre. Even on a freezing winter Thursday the narrow streets were packed with tourists, those latter-day disciples of commerce: mainly diminutive, flat-footed Japanese with their incorrigible smiles and impeccable manners. We took in one bookshop before lunch, an expensive antiquarian dealer situated along Petergate. Mina lost herself in the classics section, while I scanned the packed shelves for those forgotten fabulists of the forties, fifties and sixties, De Polnay and Wellard, Standish and Robin Maugham, minor writers who, despite infelicities, spoke to something in my soul. They were absent from the shelves of this exclusive establishment—their third-rate novels neither sufficiently ancient, nor collectable enough, to warrant stocking.

Mina bought a volume of Jane Austen's letters, I an early edition of Poe. We emerged into the ice-cold air and hurried to our favourite tea-room.

Was it a failing in me that I preferred to have Mina to myself—the jealous lover, hoarding his treasure? I could never truly appreciate her when in the company of others. I was always conscious of wanting her attention, of wanting to give her my full attention, without being observed.

One to one we would chat about nothing in particular, the people we knew in town, friends, incidents that had made the news. That day she asked me how the book was going, and I tried to keep the weariness from my tone as I recounted the novelisation's hackneyed storyline.

Early in our relationship I had told her that my writing was just another job, something I did to keep the wolf from the door. I had been writing for almost twenty-five years, and though the act of creating still struck me as edifying and worthwhile, it no longer possessed the thrill I recalled from the first five years. She had said that I must be proud of what I did, and I replied that pride was the last thing I felt.

She had looked at me with that cool, assessing gaze of hers, and said, "Well, I'm proud of you."

Now I ate my salad sandwich and fielded her questions about my next serious novel.

How could I tell her that, for the time being, I had shelved plans for the next book, the yearly novel that would appear under my own name? The last one had sold poorly; my editor had refused to offer an advance for another. My agent had found some hackwork to tide me over, and I had put off thinking about the next Daniel Ellis novel.

I changed the subject, asked her about her sister, Liz, and for the next fifteen minutes lost myself in contemplation of her face: square, large-eyed, attractive in that worn, mid-thirties way that signals experience with fine lines about the eyes. The face of the woman I loved.

We left the tea-room and ambled through the cobbled streets towards the Minster. She took my arm, smiling at the Christmas window displays on either hand.

Then she stopped and tugged at me. "Daniel, look. I don't recall..."

It was a second-hand bookshop crammed into the interstice between a gift shop and an establishment selling a thousand types of tea. The lighted window displayed a promising selection of old first editions. Mina was already dragging me inside.

The interior of the premises opened up like an optical illusion, belying the parsimonious dimensions of its frontage. It diminished in perspective like a tunnel, and narrow wooden stairs gave access to further floors.

Mina was soon chatting to the proprietor, an owl-faced, bespectacled man in his seventies. "We moved in just last week," he was saying. "Had a place beyond the Minster—too quiet. You're looking for the Victorians? You'll find them in the first room on the second floor."

I followed her up the precipitous staircase, itself made even narrower by shelves of books on everything from angling to bee-keeping, gardening to rambling.

Mina laughed to herself on entering the well-stocked room and turned to me with the conspiratorial grin of the fellow bibliophile. While she lost herself in awed contemplation of the treasures in stock, I saw a sign above a door leading to a second room: Twentieth Century Fiction.

I stepped through, as excited as a boy given the run of a toyshop on Christmas Eve.

The room was packed from floor to ceiling with several thousand volumes. At a glance I knew that many dated from the thirties and forties: the tell-tale blanched pink spines of Hutchinson editions, the pen and ink illustrated dust-jackets so popular at the time. The room had about it an air of neglect, the junk room where musty volumes were put out to pasture before the ultimate indignity of the council skip.

I found a Robert Nathan for one pound, a Wellard I did not posses for £1.50. I remembered Vaughan Edwards, and moved with anticipation to the E section. There were plenty of Es, but no Edwards.

I moved on, disappointed, but still excited by the possibility of more treasures to be found. I was scanning the shelves for Rupert Croft-Cooke when Mina called out from the next room, "Daniel. Here."

She had a stack of thick volumes piled beside her on the bare floorboards, and was holding out a book to me. "Look."

I expected some title she had been looking out for, but the book was certainly not Victorian. It had the modern, maroon boards of something published in the fifties.

"Isn't he the writer you mentioned the other week?"

I read the spine. A Bitter Recollection—Vaughan Edwards.

I opened the book, taking in the publishing details, the full-masted galleon symbol of the publisher, Longmans, Green and Company. It was his fourth novel, published in 1958.

I read the opening paragraph, and something clicked. I knew I had stumbled across a like soul.

An overnight frost had sealed the ploughed fields like so much stiffened corduroy, and in the distance, mist shrouded and remote, stood the village of Low Dearing. William Barnes, stepping from the second-class carriage onto the empty platform, knew at once that this was the place.

"Where did you find it?" I asked, hoping that there might be others by the author.

She laughed. "Where do you think? Where it belongs, on the 50p shelf."

She indicated a free-standing bookcase crammed with a miscellaneous selection of oddments, warped hardbacks, torn paperbacks, pamphlets and knitting patterns. There were no other books by Vaughan Edwards.

I lay my books upon her pile on the floor and took Mina in my arms. She stiffened, looking around to ensure we were quite alone: for whatever reasons, she found it difficult to show affection when we might be observed.

We made our way carefully down the stairs and paid for our purchases. I indicated the Edwards and asked the proprietor if he had any others by the same author.

He took the book and squinted at the spine. "Sorry, but if you'd like to leave your name and address..."

I did so, knowing that it would come to nothing.

We left the shop and walked back to the car, hand in hand. We drove back through the rapidly falling winter twilight, the traffic sparse on the already frost-scintillating B-roads. The gritters would be out tonight, and the thought of the cold spell gripping the land filled me with gratitude that soon I would be home, before the fire, with my purchases.

For no apparent reason, Mina lay a hand on my leg as I drove, and closed her eyes.

I appreciated her spontaneous displays of affection all the more because they were so rare and arbitrary. Sometimes the touch of her hand in mine, when she had taken it without being prompted, was like a jolt of electricity.

The moon was full, shedding a magnesium light across the fields around the cottage. As I was about to turn into the drive, the thrilling, bush-tailed shape of a fox slid across the metalled road before the car, stopped briefly to stare into the headlights, then flowed off again and disappeared into the hedge.

~

Through focusing minutely on the inner lives of his characters, Vaughan Edwards manages to create stories of profound honesty and humanity...

From D.L. Shackleton's review of The Tall Ghost and other stories by Vaughan Edwards.

~

I began A Bitter Recollection that night after dinner, and finished it in the early hours, emerging from the novel with surprise that so many hours had passed. It was the first time in years that I had finished a novel in one sitting, and I closed the book with a kind of breathless exultation. It was not the finest book I had ever read—the prose was too fastidious in places, and the plotting left much to be desired—but it was one of the most emotionally honest pieces of fiction I had ever come across. It swept me up and carried me along with its tortured portrayal of the central character, William Barnes, and his quest to find his missing lover. There was a magical quality to the book, an elegiac yearning for halcyon days, a time when things were better—and at the same time the novel was informed with the tragic awareness that all such desire is illusory. Barnes never found his lover—I suspected that he was an unreliable narrator, and that Isabella never really existed, was merely an extended metaphor for that harrowing sense of loss we all carry with us without really knowing why.

I was moved to tears by the novel, and wanted more.

I wrote to a dozen second-hand bookshops up and down the country, and logged onto the Websites of book-finders on the Internet, requesting the eleven novels I had yet to read, and his two collections.

Mina read the book, at my request. I was eager for her opinion, would even watch her while she read the novel, trying to gauge how she was enjoying it. She finished the book in three days, shrugged when I asked her what she thought of it, and said, "It lacked something."

I stared at her. "Is that all? What do you mean? What did it lack?"

She frowned, pulled me onto the sofa and stroked my hair, her eyes a million miles away. "I don't know... I mean, it had no story. Nothing happened. It lacked drama."

"The drama was internalised in Barnes," I began.

"Perhaps that was the problem. I couldn't identify with him. I couldn't even feel sympathy for him and his search for Isabella."

"I don't think Isabella existed," I said.

She blinked at me. "She didn't?"

"She might have been a metaphor for loss."

Mina shook her head, exasperated. "No wonder I couldn't engage with the thing," she said. "If Isabella didn't exist, then it was even emptier than I first thought. It was about nothing..."

"Nothing but loss," I said.

She smiled at me. "You liked it, didn't you?"

"I loved it."

She shook her head, as if in wonder. "Sometimes, Daniel, I want to see inside your head, try to understand what you're thinking, but sometimes that frightens me."

~

Today I met a wonderful woman, Mina Pratt. "I wasn't born a Pratt," she told me, "I just married one." She is 36, divorced, has two children. We met in the Fleece and talked for an hour about nothing but the novels we were reading. I was instantly attracted to her. She's practical, down-to-earth, level-headed—all the things I'm not. I told her I was a writer, and cursed myself in case she thought I was trying to impress her.

From the personal journals of Daniel Ellis.

~

Christmas came and went.

It was Mina's turn to have the girls for that year's festivities. Her parents came over from Leeds and the house was full, for the first time in ages, with goodwill and glad tidings. I disliked Christmas—the occasion struck me as tawdry and cheap, an excuse to party when no excuse was really needed, a time of sanctimonious bonhomie towards our fellow man, and the rest of the year be damned. I withheld my humbug from Mina. She loved Christmas day, the glitz and the cosiness, the present giving... It was a paradox, I know. She, the hard-hearted pragmatist, and me the romantic. I could take the romantic ideal of Yule, but not the actuality, while Mina enjoyed the occasion quite simply for what it was, a chance for the family to get together, enjoy good food and a classic film on TV.

The period following Christmas, and the even sadder occasion of New Year, strikes me as the nadir of the year. Spring is a distant promise, winter a grey, bitter cold reality: if the calendar were to be rendered as an abstract visualisation, then January and February would be coloured black.

The new year was brightened, on the second Saturday of January, by the unexpected arrival of a brown cardboard package. Mina was on an early shift, and the girls—Sam and Tessa, eight and six respectively—were filling in a colouring book at the kitchen table. I tended to keep in the background on the days when Mina had the girls; even after a year, and even though it was my house, I felt as though I were trespassing on emotional territory not rightfully mine. On the rare occasions when I was alone with the girls, I would give them pens and paper, or put a video on TV, and leave them to their own devices.

I carried the package to my study at the top of the house, attempting to divine from the postmark some idea of its content. The package came from York.

Intrigued, still not guessing, I ripped it open.

Books, and books, moreover, by Vaughan Edwards: his first and third novels, Winter at the Castle and A Brighter Light. They were in good condition, complete with pristine dust jackets. They looked as though they had never been read, though the passage of years had discoloured the pages to a sepia hue, and foxed the end-papers. A bargain at five pounds each, including postage and packing.

The back flap of the jackets each gave the same brief, potted biography: Vaughan Edwards was born in Dorset in 1930. After National Service in the RAF, he taught for five years at a public school in Gloucestershire. He is now a full-time writer and lives in the North Yorkshire village of Highdale.

These terse contractions of an individual's life filled me with sadness, especially those from years ago. I always read them in the knowledge that the life described was now no more, or was at least much altered in circumstance. I thought of Vaughan Edwards in the RAF, then teaching, and then living the writer's life in Highdale... before the tragedy of his disappearance.

Highdale was a small village situated thirty miles from Skipton on the North Yorkshire moors. It occurred to me that Edwards might still have been living there at the time of his disappearance, six years ago.

I rationed myself, over the course of the following bitter cold days, to just three hours a night with the novels of Vaughan Edwards. While Mina curled in her chair and reread the Brontës, I lay on the sofa and slowly immersed myself in the singular world of the vanished novelist. I began with his first novel, Winter at the Castle, a strange story of a group of lonely and embittered individuals who find themselves invited for a month to the remote Northumbrian castle of a reclusive landowner. That the recluse never appears to the guests, nor in the novel, came as no surprise. There was no explanation as to why they might have been invited to the castle. There was little action, but much introspection, as the characters met, interacted, and discussed their respective lives—and then left to resume their places in a century that hardly suited them... I refrained from asking Mina what she might make of this one.

His third novel, A Brighter Light, was a monologue from the viewpoint of a young girl imprisoned in an oak tree, her recollections of her early life, and how her essence had become one with the oak. She befriended, through a form of telepathy, a young novelist who moved into the cottage where the tree grew. The book ends ambiguously; there is a hint that the man joins the girl's spirit in the tree, and also that the monologue might have been a fictional work by the young writer.

Unpromising subject matter, I had to admit that. In the hands of a lesser writer, the novels would just not work. But something in Vaughan Edward's mature handling of his characters' emotions, their honestly wrought inner lives, lifted the books from the level of turgid emotionalism and invested them with art.

I finished A Brighter Light and laid it aside, my heart hammering.

Mina smiled across at me. "Good?"

"Amazing."

"I'll believe you," she laughed.

Like all great art, which I believed these books to be, they had the effect of making me look anew at my life and the world around me; it was as if I saw Mina for the first time, was able now, with perceptions honed by Edwards' insight, to discern her essence, the bright light that burned at the core of her being. I felt then an overwhelming surge of love for this woman, and at the same time I was cut through with sadness like a physical pain.

Early in our relationship, she had told me that she did not love me, and that, "I can't bring myself to feel love for anyone, other than the girls."

I accepted this, rationalised that perhaps in time she might come to appreciate me, might even one day bring herself to love me.

I had asked her if she was unable to feel love because she had invested so much in her husband, only for that investment to turn sour. Perhaps she was afraid, I suggested, to risk giving love again, for fear of being hurt a second time. She denied this, said that she could not explain her inability to love me. I told myself that she was either deluding herself, or lying. Perhaps she was lying to save my feelings; perhaps she was capable of love, but I was not the right person. In the early days I was torn by the pain of what I saw as rejection... and yet she remained with me, gave a passable impression of, if not love, then a deep affection, and I refrained from quizzing her as to the state of her heart, and learned to live from day to day.

"Mina," I said now. "I love you."

She sighed and closed her eyes, and then snapped them open and stared at me. "Daniel, I wish you wouldn't..." Her plea was heartfelt.

"Sorry. Had to tell you. Sorry if that disturbs you. You know, most women like to be told that they're loved."

"Well, I'm not most women-"

"I'm not going to leave you, Mina. You can tell me that you love me, and I won't walk out, hurt you again-"

"Oh, Christ!" She sat up and stared across at me. "Why do you have to analyse? Why now? Everything's been fine, hasn't it? I'm here, with you. What more do you want?"

What more did I want?

Perhaps it was possessive of me to demand her love when I had everything else she could give me? Perhaps she was simply being honest when she admitted that she could not extend to me something that she claimed she no longer believed in. Perhaps I was an insecure, thoughtless bastard for demanding that she should open her heart.

"I'm sorry. I just wanted you to know."

She sat and stared at me, as if at a wounded animal. In a small voice she said, "I know, Daniel. I know."

~

Mina's professed inability to feel love for me can only be a reaction to what she went through with her husband. She denies this—but is this denial her way of not admitting me past her defences, of not allowing me a glimpse of her true feelings and emotions?

From the personal journals of Daniel Ellis.

~

The following week I received an e-mail from a second-hand bookshop in Oxford, informing me that they had located three novels by Vaughan Edwards. I sent a cheque and the books arrived a few days later.

One of the novels was his very last, The Secret of Rising Dene, published shortly after his disappearance. The biographical details made no reference to the fact that he had vanished, but did give the interesting information that, in '96, he was still living in the North Yorkshire village of Highdale.

That weekend I suggested a drive up into the Dales. I told Mina that I wanted to visit Highdale, where Edwards had lived. After the spat the previous week, things had been fine between us. She made no mention of my interrogative faux pas, and I did my best not to rile her with further questions.

"Highdale? Don't we go through Settle to get there? There's that wonderful Thai place on the way."

"Okay, we'll call in on the way back. How's that?"

She laughed at me. "I hope you don't expect Highdale to be a shrine to your literary hero," she said. "He wasn't quite in the same league as the Brontës-"

"Then let's hope that Highdale isn't as trashily commercialised as Haworth, okay?"

Deuce.

She elbowed me in the ribs.

TWO

We set off after lunch on an unusually bright February afternoon, dazzling sunlight giving the false promise of the Spring to come—which would soon no doubt be dashed by the next bout of bitter cold and rain.

The approach road to the village of Highdale wound through ancient woodland on the side of a steep hill. When we reached the crest I pulled off the road and braked the car.

I laughed in delight. The sunlight picked out the village with great golden searchlights falling through low banks of cumulus. Highdale was a collection of tiny stone-built cottages and farmhouses set amid hunched pastures; I made out a church, a public house, and what might have been a village hall, all laid out below us like some sanguine architect's scale model of a rural idyll.

We drove down the incline and into the village and parked on the cobbled market square before the White Lion.

The pub was empty, save for a barman chatting to someone who might have been a local farmer. They both looked up when we pushed through the door, as if unaccustomed to customers at this time of day.

I ordered a dry cider for Mina and a fresh orange juice for myself. While the barman poured the drinks and chatted to Mina, I looked around the snug. It was fitted out much like any typical village pub: a variety of moorland scenes by local artists, a selection of horse brasses, a battalion of Toby jugs hanging in ranks from the low, blackened beams.

Then I noticed the bookshelf, or rather the books that were upon it. One volume in particular stood out—I recognised the Val Biro pen and ink sketch on the spine of the dust jacket. It showed the attenuated figure of a man doffing his Trilby. It was the cover of Vaughan Edwards' third novel, A Brighter Light.

The barman said something.

"Excuse me?" I said, my attention on the books.

"I think he wants paying," Mina said. "Don't worry, I'll get these."

She paid the barman and carried the drinks over to the table beneath the bookshelf. I was peering at the racked spines, head tilted.

"Good God," I said. "They're all Edwards."

"Not all of them." Mina tapped the spines of four books, older volumes than the Edwards. They were by a writer I had never come across before, E.V. Cunningham-Price. They looked Victorian, and caught her interest. She pulled them from the shelf, sat down and began reading.

I sorted through the Edwards. There were ten novels, eight of which I had never read, and a volume of short stories. I pulled them down and stacked them on the table, reading through the description of each book on the front inside flap.

I looked back at the shelf. I thought it odd that there should be no other books beside the Edwards and the four Cunningham-Price volumes.

The barman was watching me. I hefted one of the books. "They're not for sale, by any chance...?"

He was a big man in his sixties, with the type of stolid, typically northern face upon which scowls seem natural, like fissures in sedimentary rock.

"Well, by rights they're not for sale, like. They're for the enjoyment of the customers, if you know what I mean. Tell you what, though—take a couple with you, if you promise to bring them back."

"I'll do that. That's kind-"

"You're not locals, then?"

Mina looked up. "Almost. Skipton."

"Local enough," the barman said. "Hope you enjoy 'em."

"I'm sure I will." I paused, regarding the books and wondering which two volumes to take with me. Mina looked up from her book. "I wouldn't mind taking this one, Daniel."

I selected the volume of stories, The Tall Ghost and other stories, and returned the others to the shelf.

I finished my drink and moved to the bar for a refill. I indicated the books. "He was a local, wasn't he? Did he ever drop by?"

"Mr Vaughan?" the barman asked. "Every Monday evening, regular as clockwork. Sat on the stool over there." He indicated a high stool placed by the corner of the bar and the wall. "Drank three Irish whiskeys from nine until ten, then left on the dot of the hour. Very rarely missed a Monday for over twenty years."

"You knew him well?"

"Mr Vaughan?" He grunted a humourless laugh. "No one knew Mr Vaughan. Kept himself to himself, if you know what I mean. Spoke to no one, and no one spoke to him. Reckon that's how he preferred it. Lived here nigh on forty years, and never said boo to a goose."

"Strange," I said, sipping my juice.

"Well," the publican said, "he was a writer chappie, you know?" He tapped his head. "Lived up here most of the time."

Over at her table, Mina was smiling to herself.

"He had a place in the village?" I asked.

"Not far off. He owned the big house up the hill on your left as you come in, set back in the woods. Edgecoombe Hall."

The very title fired my imagination. It seemed somehow fitting, the very place where Vaughan Edwards would have lived his sequestered, writer's life.

I decided I'd like to take a look at the place. "Who owns it now?"

"Edgecoombe Hall?" He shook his head. "No one. It's been standing empty ever since Mr Vaughan went and disappeared."

I nodded, digesting this. If it were a big house, with a fair bit of land, and perhaps dilapidated, then I imagined that no local would care to touch the place, and Highdale was just too far off the beaten track to make commuting to Leeds or Bradford an option for a prospective city buyer.

"Why's that?" I asked.

The publican shrugged. "Well, it's not exactly brand spanking new," he said. "A bit tumbledown, if you know what I mean. And the ghost doesn't help."

At this, Mina looked up from her book. "The ghost?" She had scepticism daubed across her face in primary colours. She gave me a look that said, if you believe that, Daniel...

"Only reporting what I was told, love. Don't believe in 'em meself. Old wives' tales."

Despite myself, I was intrigued. "The ghost of Vaughan Edwards, right?"

He shook his head. Behind me, I heard Mina sigh with mock despair. "That's where you're wrong, sir. The Hall was haunted—if you believe in that kind of thing—long before Mr Vaughan bought the place. Stories go way back, right to the turn of the century—and I mean the century before last. 1900s. Ghost of a young girl haunts the place every full moon, so they say. Many a local claims to have clapped eyes on it."

I drank my orange juice and considered Vaughan Edwards. The scant biographical information I had come across had never mentioned whether or not he had ever married.

I asked the publican.

"Married? Mr Vaughan?" He chuckled. "Never saw him with a woman—nor anyone else, for that matter. Bit of a recluse."

"So he lived alone in the Hall?"

The publican laughed. "Alone, if you don't count the ghost."

I noticed that Mina had finished her drink and was gesturing to go. I signalled one minute and turned to my informant. "You don't happen to know anything about how he disappeared?"

Mina sighed.

The publican said, "Strange do, all things considered. His car was found in the woods, not a hundred yards up from the Hall, on the track leading to the escarpment above the river. A local youth found it and notified the police. They investigated, found he wasn't at the Hall, then traced his footprints on the path leading to the drop." He shrugged. "Strange things was, his footprints stopped before they reached the edge." He paused, considering. "'Course, he could always have stepped off the path and walked to the edge through the bracken."

"You think that's what he did? Threw himself off the escarpment into the river?"

"Me?" He gave my question due consideration. "I don't rightly know, sir. He didn't seem the kind to do a thing like that, but then who can tell? You see, his body was never found, which struck me as strange. The river's fast flowing, but there's a mill dam about two miles south of here. The body would've fetched up there, all things considered."

"So if he didn't kill himself," I asked, "then what happened?"

"Aha," the publican said, "now that's the sixty-four thousand dollar question, isn't it?"

He paused, watching me. "Funny thing, though," he went on.

"Yes?"

"About a week before he disappeared, he brought in this carrier bag full of books. A dozen or so of his own and four or five others by the Cunningham chappie. He just dropped the bag on the counter and said that the far shelf needed filling, and that was it. Not another word."

I nodded. "Strange."

We were interrupted by the arrival of another customer. "Usual, Bill?" the publican called, and moved down the bar to pull a pint of Tetley's.

Mina took the opportunity to hurry me from the place. I picked up the Edwards collection, thanked the landlord and followed Mina outside.

As we drove up the hill and out of the village, she said, "You really believed all that rubbish, didn't you?"

I glanced at her. "What rubbish?"

"All that about the ghost."

"I don't believe it—but then again I don't necessarily disbelieve."

She said, "I don't know..." under her breath.

"What's wrong with keeping your options open, Mina? 'There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio...' Look at it this way, how many things were dismissed as impossible a hundred years ago, which have come to be accepted now?"

"Ghosts aren't one of them," she said.

I sighed. I often found her world-view severely limiting, and it irritated me when she took to mocking my open-mindedness.

I wondered if she had always been a sceptic, or if having to concentrate wholly on the practicalities of day to day survival during the traumatic separation from her husband had fostered in her such a narrow perspective. She would give credence to nothing that she could not see before her, that she could not grasp.

I drove slowly up the hillside, looking through the trees for sign of Edgecoombe Hall.

"Couldn't you see that he was leading you on, Daniel?" she continued.

"The publican?"

"He was spinning a yarn. I wonder how many times he's told the same story to visitors?"

I shook my head. "I don't think so. He said himself that he didn't believe in ghosts."

"And that story of Edwards' disappearance-"

I turned to her, wide-eyed. "Don't tell me, Mina—you refuse to believe in that, too?"

She struck my arm with playful truculence. "He was going on as if he might have survived—I don't know, staged his own disappearance. The chances are he left his car and went for a walk, went too near the edge and fell into the river."

"So why was his body never discovered?"

She shrugged. "Search me. Maybe it got snagged on the river-bottom."

"Surely it would've been discovered by now."

"So what do you think happened then?"

I smiled to myself. She loved certainty. I shook my head. "I just don't know," I said, knowing it would exasperate her. "Ah... Look."

I braked and pulled into the side of the road. Through the winter-denuded sycamore and elm, set perhaps half a mile from the road, I made out the gaunt towers of a Victorian building.

"Edgecoombe Hall, I presume. Mind if we take a look?"

She surprised me. She was staring at the severe outline of the Hall, something speculative in her gaze. "Why not?" she said at last.

I drove on a little further, looking for the opening to the driveway in the overgrown hedge of ivy and bramble.

"There," she called, pointing to a gap in the hedge. Once, many years ago, two tall stone pillars, topped with orbs, had marked the entrance to the grounds; now the pillars were cloaked with ivy. Wrought iron gates hung open and awry, their hinges having rusted long ago.

I turned the car into the pot-holed driveway and proceeded at walking pace through the gloomy tunnel between overgrown rhododendron and elderberry bushes.

Edgecoombe Hall hove into sight, more stark and intimidating at close quarters than when seen from the road. It was a foursquare pile with mock-Gothic towers at each corner, its façade having long ago given up the ghost against the creeping tide of ivy. Only the double doorway and a couple of upstairs windows were free of the verdant mass.

It struck me as the appropriate domicile of a lonely and reclusive writer. I almost expected to see a massive, haunted oak tree in the middle of the lawn, or the ghostly face of a young girl peering timidly out through an upper window.

I stopped the car before the plinth of steps rising to the entrance. Mina lay a hand on my arm and pointed.

A small truck, laden with timber, was parked around the far corner of the Hall. "Perhaps someone has bought it after all," she said. She peered at the façade and pulled a face. "Certainly needs work."

We climbed out. The sun was setting through the trees to the west, slanting an intense orange light across the lawn and illuminating the ivied frontage of the building. I moved away from the car, stood and took in the atmosphere of the place.

Far from intimidating, the Hall seemed to me a place of melancholy. Perhaps it was merely that it was in a state of such disrepair, had seen far, far better days. But I imagined the Hall as it might have been, shorn of ivy and pristine, and it came to me still that it would have been a dour and eldritch place.

A steady tattoo of hammer blows sounded from within the Hall, and it cheered me that someone was at least making a start at renovation.

"Daniel," Mina said. "Look."

She was pointing at the ground, the gravelled drive that swept around the front of the building. I joined her.

A series of fissures radiated from the Hall, wide where they issued from the wall and narrowing as they crossed the drive. I noticed great cracks in the grey brickwork beneath the ivy.

"Looks like it's been hit by an earthquake," she said.

I approached the façade, where I guessed a window might be positioned behind the ivy, and pulled away the clinging growth. I came to a mullioned pane and peered within. A bright spear of sunlight fell over my shoulder and illuminated the room. To my surprise it was furnished: bookshelves lined the walls, and elephantine armchairs and sofas were positioned before the hearth.

"See anything?"

I held a swatch of vine aside as she peered in. She shivered theatrically. "Creepy."

I was about to suggest that we enter the Hall and find the wielder of the hammer, but Mina had other ideas. She took my arm. "You've seen enough, Daniel. I'm hungry. A Thai banquet awaits us."

The thought of food appealed to me, too. I wanted to stay a little longer, but I also wanted to investigate the track which Vaughan Edwards had taken prior to his disappearance.

"Okay, but there's something I must check, first."

Mina rolled her eyes. I took her arm and we returned to the car. "What?" she asked.

I reversed, then drove down the drive and onto the road. I turned right, continuing up the hill, and kept a lookout for a track leading into the woods.

I found it, and turned. Twilight enclosed us. "Daniel," Mina warned me.

"This, if I'm not mistaken, is where Vaughan Edwards left his car on the day he disappeared."

Ahead of us the track terminated in a clearing made magical by the dying light of the sun. When I cut the engine and opened the door, a deathly hush pervaded the clearing and I received the distinct impression that place regarded our arrival as an intrusion.

I climbed out and stood beside the car. In the gathering dusk I made out a worn path leading through the trees. I gestured for Mina to join me. She sat in the passenger seat, frowning her displeasure, waited a beat and then flounced out with ill grace.

"All I can think about is green Thai curry and you want to drag me through the mud on a wild goose chase." As is often the case with Mina, the tone of her voice was betrayed by the humorous light of tolerance in her eyes.

She took my hand and we hurried side by side along the footpath.

Perhaps it was the writer in me, the pathological creator of tales, but I was storing away this setting, and the feelings I was experiencing, for use in some future work of fiction. I was filled with the sense that time had dissolved, that all events maintained simultaneously, and that any second I might behold the figure of Vaughan Edwards striding towards his destiny through the undergrowth before us.

The path took a sharp turn to the left, and the trees thinned out: an aqueous, twilight lacunae glimmered before us.

"Stop!" Mina screamed, clutching my arm.

I halted, stock still. At my feet the earth crumbled away, and only then did I make out the sudden drop.

Mina hauled me back and we stood, our arms about each other like frightened children, and stared in wonder and fright at the suddenly revealed precipice.

Emboldened by survival, I took a step forward and made out, a hundred feet below, the muscled torrent of a river in full spate.

I rejoined Mina. She was staring at me.

"Perhaps that's what happened to your writer," she whispered, staring down.

"And his body?"

She shrugged, then gave a little shiver. "I don't know." She paused, as if considering. "Let's go, Daniel. I don't like it here."

"I thought you didn't believe in ghosts," I said.

She snorted. "I believe in the power of auto-suggestion," she replied.

We retraced our way back along the path to the clearing. I was heartened to see the car—as if some primitive part of me had feared that it might have vanished in our absence, stranding us in the haunted wood. I kept my musings to myself as I backed from the clearing and once again resumed the road, heading for Settle.

Over piled plates of green curry and five mushroom satay, we chatted. Mina was animated and affectionate, as if she wished to put from her mind all thought of Vaughan Edwards and Edgecoombe Hall, and concentrate instead on the simple commerce of intimacy. She laughed a lot, reached across the table to touch my hand—an uncommon gesture—and got a little tipsy on Singha beer.

I'd often lose myself in the miracle of her physicality, staring into her wide eyes, or at her exquisite hands. Mina had the finest hands I had ever seen; small, ineffably graceful, with a lithe, articulated elegance and long, oval nails. And these were hands that made a dozen beds a day, that mopped up after incontinent patients, washed and cooked and cared for two children and myself...

Ten months ago her hours at the hospital had been cut and the rent of her terrace house increased, and for two weeks she had fretted without telling me of her concern. When at last I asked her what was wrong, and she told me, I rashly escalated the terms of our relationship by suggesting that she move in with me. Until then she had always stipulated that I stay over at her place only twice a week, that she was not committed to me—and I had feared that my offer might frighten her away.

To my joy she had agreed, and moved in, and I had adapted myself to part-time family life, careful not to impose myself on Mina in any way, to maintain a distance with the girls, not wanting to be seen to be usurping her maternal authority. For months I had walked on egg-shells.

I had never asked her if, even without the financial necessity, she would have eventually moved in with me. She hated my analysis of our relationship, the stripping to basics of her motivations. From time to time it came to me that she was with me not through bonds of strong affection, but merely because I was, to put it crudely, a meal ticket.

On these occasions I told myself that I should be thankful that I had found someone whom I could love, and left it at that.

We finished the meal and drove home through a frosty, star-filled night. It was as if we had agreed tacitly not to mention Edwards and the Hall. Mina lay a hand on my leg and talked of work, but I was conscious of the weight of the book in my jacket pocket, waiting to be read, at once inviting and, for some reason I could not quite fathom, not a little threatening.

~

"Vaughan Edwards manages to capture the tragic truth of the human condition in his timeless works of fiction..."

Graham Greene, cover quote for A Summer's Promise.

~

One month passed.

For some reason, I could not bring myself to read the Vaughan Edwards collection of stories I had borrowed from the White Lion. The book remained on my desk, unopened. From time to time I would pick it up, admire the Val Biro cover of a village scene with a Maypole as the centre-piece, and read the description of the stories on the inside flap, and the scant biographical paragraph on the back. But I felt a strange reluctance to begin the book.

I wondered if, subconsciously, I identified Vaughan Edwards and his books with Mina's uneasiness at Edgecoombe Hall that day. That weak core of my being, insecure in our relationship, was eager to appease Mina in whichever way possible—even if that meant not reading The Tall Ghost and other stories.

How Mina would have laughed at my tortured self-analysis!

However, as the weeks since Edgecoombe Hall elapsed, our relationship seemed to take on a new dimension, become deeper and more fulfilling. Mina did not go so far as to profess her undying love for me, but she did become more affectionate. Our love-making—never breathlessly passionate—increased in regularity and scope: it seemed that suddenly we each learned more of the other's desires, and adapted accordingly. As ever, these things went unspoken between us. Mina was a great believer that things should happen of their own accord, intuitively, an attitude which I—forever needing to question and analyse—found maddening. I bit my tongue, however. The last thing I wanted was to anger her by asking how she thought our relationship might be progressing.

A month after Edgecoombe Hall, it came to me that my reluctance to read the collection was nothing more than groundless insecurity. I looked back at my self-censorship and something in me, forever critical of my behaviour, mocked such feeble-mindedness.

I began the book when Mina was working a night-shift. While a wind keened around the cottage, rattling the windows in their frames, I lay on the sofa and immersed myself in Vaughan Edwards' singular visions.

The stories, written in the late forties and fifties and first published in magazines as diverse as Lilliput and the American Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, were, if anything, even stranger than his novels. They comprised routine ghost stories, eerie fantasy tales set in the far future and the distant past, and two tales quite unclassifiable. These stories I found the most compelling. They told of visitors to Earth—though from where they came was never disclosed—their relations with lonely human beings, their perceptions of each other, and their attempts at conveying a sense of their separate realities. The impossibility of ever wholly comprehending an alien's viewpoint made for frustrating, if occasionally intriguing, reading. I finished the book in the early hours of the morning, convinced that I had been granted a privileged glimpse into the brilliant, if tortured, psyche of a fellow human being.

That morning we remained in bed until eleven, made love, and then lay in each others arms. The harsh summons of the telephone propelled Mina to her feet. I watched her stalk around the bed and retrieve her dressing-gown from the back of the door. Short and heavy-breasted, she reminded me of the Earth-goddess figurines of the Palaeolithic period, full-bodied idols of fertility.

While she spoke on the phone—it was her sister, arranging a drink for that night—I stared at the ceiling and wondered whether to tell her that I was planning another trip to Highdale. I would return the two books we had borrowed, and ask if I could take the remaining Edwards if I left a monetary deposit.

Mina came back, shed her dressing-gown and slipped into bed beside me, gloriously naked. She slung a leg over my hip and told me that she was seeing Liz that night at the Fleece.

She met her sister perhaps once a week for a customary four halves of cider, and each time she left the house I could not help but experience an involuntary and wholly unwarranted pang of jealousy. Mina lived up to the archetype of a nurse in her extrovert ability to engage socially with all and everybody; men found her not only physically attractive, but open and approachable. She was popular, and outgoing, and the immature child in me, like a boy who demands his mother's total attention, bridled at the fact of her sociability.

Of course, I hated myself for this... And, of course, I had never mentioned it to Mina.

She had once, months ago, told me that she could never feel jealous. When I expressed disbelief, she quoted an instance. When she was leaving her husband he, in a bid to make her jealous and win her back, made it obvious that he was seeing another woman. She said she had felt nothing, other than relief that it made her decision to leave him all the more clear cut.

I refrained from pointing out to her that of course she would not feel jealous of someone who, by that point, she had come to hate.

Now I held her to me and let slip, quite casually, that the following day I intended to drive up to Highdale.

She pulled away to get a better look at me. "You're not going to look around that house again, are you?"

I shook my head. "I want to collect the remaining Edwards books I haven't read."

"You can only take two at a time, remember?"

I laughed. "It isn't a lending library. I'll leave him a deposit and take the lot."

She regarded me. "You really like his stuff, don't you?"

"It's magical."

"I don't like it, Daniel. There's something... I don't know, not exactly creepy..." She stopped and stared at the ceiling. "There's some quality about his books that frightens me. Perhaps it's just that I like certainty. I like to know that everything has its place. With his stories, his reality is off-centre, skewed." She shivered. "Enough of Vaughan Edwards. Aren't you getting up today?"

"Not working," I yawned.

"No?" She looked at me, concerned. "You haven't worked for weeks."

Getting on for two months, to be precise. The creative urge had left me, and I had no pressing financial need to

commit another novelisation. A week earlier my agent had phoned, asking how the latest novel was shaping up. He said that, despite the fact that my publisher might be wary of looking at the next one, he was sure he could interest a senior editor at HarperCollins.

I had lied—the fantasy springing easily to my lips—that it was going okay, was still in the early stages; that, as he knew, I didn't like to talk about work in progress. I had replaced the receiver with a nagging sense of shame at the lie.

"When there's no bread on the table, Mina, then we'll worry, okay?"

She looked at me. "I'll make breakfast, Daniel."

As I lay in bed and listened to the blissful sound of domesticity going on in the kitchen, the sizzling of eggs, the perking of the coffee, I wondered about the next book, and my lack of desire to start it. Never before had I been pole-axed by such apathy, even in my twenties when I had written novel after bad novel with no hope of finding a publisher.

I told myself that the muse would return, one day, and went downstairs to join Mina for breakfast.

~

"I don't give a damn about things like facts in my novels. My books aren't about the factual, physical world. They're about what's in here. Critics may call my work old-fashioned and over-emotional, but I contend that our emotions are the only true barometer of our humanity."

Vaughan Edwards, in a rare radio interview, BBC Third Programme, April 1959.

~

That afternoon, when I emerged from my study after doodling for a futile hour over the rewrite of a short story, Mina was kneeling on the rug before the fire, rump in the air. She had three books open on the floor, and was looking from one to the other, lost in concentration.

The girls were home from school, watching a noisy video on the TV in the kitchen.

Mina saw me and blinked, her face quite blank.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

I saw that the books she was studying were the E.V. Cunningham-Price and two of Vaughan Edwards' novels.

I moved to the kitchen and closed the door, diminishing the cartoon din.

"Daniel... This is strange."

"What's strange?" Oddly enough, and for no apparent reason, I was aware of my increased pulse.

She stabbed at a book with a graceful forefinger. I sat on the sofa, watching her.

"This. I was reading the Cunningham-Price. There's a chapter set in North Yorkshire, about an artist who lives alone in a big house. It's haunted, and the artist has an affair with the ghost of a young girl..."

My stomach turned.

Mina went on, "I remember you telling me about the Edwards' book, The Miracle at Hazelmere. It sounded pretty much the same, so I checked. And look."

She passed me the Cunningham-Price and Miracle. Disbelieving, and feeling a little strange, I read passages from both books that she had marked with yellow Post-it notes. For the next hour I went through the books, while Mina prepared the girls for ballet lessons. She looked in on me before setting off. "What do you think?"

I looked up, nodded. "Remarkable. He must have used the Cunningham book as a template..."

"You mean he plagiarised," she said. "I'll be back in an hour."

I nodded again, absently. "I'll have dinner ready."

"That'd be great." She hurried from the room. The video noise ceased, and suddenly the cottage was deathly quiet.

I read through the Cunningham-Price book, discovering many thematic similarities between it and other of Edwards' novels. My first fear, that Edwards had merely lifted great chunks of Cunningham-Price and claimed them as his own, was not borne out. Although, as Mina had rightly pointed out, Edwards had used an episode in the Cunningham-Price and expanded it, delving into the themes and ideas that Cunningham-Price had left unexplored, I was loathe to accuse the modern novelist of plagiarising the Victorian. Rather, it was as if he had read the Cunningham-Price, found himself fascinated with the Victorian's ideas and concepts, and fleshed them out in his own fiction: Edwards' work, far from plagiarism, struck me as a tribute—acknowledged when he used certain of the older writer's characters and situations. A simple plagiarist without talent would simply have copied, not used Cunningham-Price as a starting point from which to explore his own ideas.

I recalled my promise to prepare dinner, and moved to the kitchen.

Later that night, with the girls in bed, I served dinner and opened a bottle of wine, and we discussed Mina's literary discovery.

"Think it'll earn me a footnote in some encyclopaedia?" she asked.

"More like a whole damn entry."

She sipped her wine. "But why would he do it, Daniel? Why would a writer simply steal another writer's work?"

I pointed my fork at her. "I don't think he did," I said. I explained my theory that Edwards had used Cunningham-Price as a starting point, and as a matter of course had acknowledged the Victorian writer by echoing some of his events and characters.

Mina stared at me. "Echoing?" she laughed. "That's the strangest euphemism for plagiarism I've ever heard."

"Mina, Edwards is no plagiarist. He's too talented for that."

"You just don't want to admit that your literary hero is a word-burglar, Daniel!"

I smiled at her turn of phrase. "There's one way to find out for sure. Tomorrow I'll go up to Highdale and fetch the rest of the books, the Edwards and the Cunningham-Prices, okay? If Edwards used any more of Cunningham-Price's books on which to base his own... then okay, I might admit you have something."

"It's a deal."

"But I'll bet you a pound that my man will be vindicated."

Her eyes flashed. "I don't gamble, Daniel. Remember?"

I nodded, chastised. Her ex-husband had been an inveterate gambler. "Okay, sorry. But if Edwards used any more of Cunningham's ideas and characters, I'll buy you a Thai meal, okay?"

She nodded and shook my hand with pantomime seriousness. "Deal," she said.

~

My dear Vaughan, I exhort you, as a friend as well as your agent, to consider again your preoccupation with the occult. We're living in an increasingly rationalistic age. Readers don't go for this kind of thing any more. Charlesworth at Hutchinson is having second thoughts about commissioning the next book...

A letter from Desmond Maitland to Vaughan Edwards, July 1980.

~

The following afternoon I dropped Mina at the hospital and took the road due north to Highdale.

It had rained continuously all day, a monsoon downpour that reduced visibility to less than ten metres. In consequence I drove slowly, and the journey seemed to take an age. I usually listen to Radio 4 when driving, but that afternoon my thoughts were too full of Vaughan Edwards to concentrate on the play.

It was almost four o'clock when I pulled onto the cobbled square outside the White Lion. Evidently it had been market day; a few sodden traders were dismantling their stalls with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. I jumped from the car and ran across the cobbles to the public house, avoiding puddles but not the torrent that lashed down from a leaden sky.

A few more drinkers than last time were propped against the bar, and the publican greeted me with, "Not fit for a dog out there. Orange juice?"

Surprised that he remembered me, I nodded. I pulled the books from the inside pocket of my jacket. "And I've returned these."

He smiled as he fixed my drink. "Hope you enjoyed them."

I paid for the juice and carried it to the table beneath the bookshelf. Three volumes by E.V. Cunningham-Price, and nine by Edwards, still occupied the shelf. I pulled down the Cunningham-Prices and settled myself at the table. As with most Victorian novels, the date of publication was not given, though they had the look of books published in the last decade of the Nineteenth century. I began speed-reading my way through, first, Green Pastures, and then The Halfway House.

Again and again I recognised turns of phrase, and sometimes entire descriptions, from those works of Edwards that I'd read. The plot of Green Pastures was pretty much recapitulated in Edwards' 1958 novel A Bitter Recollection. The Halfway House featured a character I recognised from one of his short stories.

And yet... I found it difficult to agree with Mina that Vaughan Edwards was a plagiarist. Certainly he had lifted from Cunningham-Price's work characters, descriptions, and certain lines—but from these he had fashioned his own unique novels, using, as it were, the original novels as a spring-board for his own imagination. If anything, he could be said to have been collaborating with the earlier writer—even though it was a collaboration that had gone uncredited.

Then again, perhaps my love of his work would not allow me to accede to the charge that he was a plagiarist: in a court of law, the similarities between the two novelists' works would be sufficient evidence to have him declared guilty as charged.

I suppose the question now was, why had Vaughan Edwards used the works of E.V. Cunningham-Price as the starting point for so many of his own fictions? As a writer, and a voracious reader, I well understood that there were certain authors whose work was so overwhelmingly powerful, and which spoke to one's heart—irrespective of literary merit—that it was often difficult not to be influenced. But in my experience these influences were strongest when the writer was young and had yet to develop his or her own voice: with time one's vision matured, one's voice became wholly one's own... And yet Vaughan Edwards had clearly been influenced by Cunningham's work when working on his very last novel, The Secret of Rising Dene, published in 1996.

The affair had about it, in common with the man's life and disappearance, an air of insoluble mystery.

I turned my attention to the novels by Edwards, leafing through the volumes with that comfortable sense of anticipation that one inevitably acquires when handling unread books by favourite writers—and what if others might accuse him of plagiarism! I would argue with Mina that in Edwards' case the borrowings had been wholly justifiable, as they had helped to produce lasting works of literature.

The publican left the bar and made a tour of the snug, collecting empties. I took the opportunity to broach the subject of borrowing the books wholesale.

I held up a twenty pound note. "And I'll leave this until I return them," I offered.

He frowned at the note, and laughed. "You look like a gentleman and a scholar," he said, not without humour. "And you brought the others back. Take 'em. I'll trust you."

He moved away, balancing half a dozen pint glasses along the length of his right arm.

I waited until the rain had let up slightly, then thanked the publican and hurried out to the car. I stowed the books on the passenger seat and started the engine, wondering what Mina might have to say when I arrived home with enough reading material for the next few weeks.

I drove from the square and up the hill, my progress impeded by a small truck which laboured up the incline. It was not until it approached the crest of the rise, and turned right through the ivied gateposts of Edgecoombe Hall, that I recognised the vehicle as the one parked by the Hall on my first visit.

On impulse I braked, then sat and watched as the truck disappeared into the gloom of the driveway.

It came to me that I could always pose as someone interested in purchasing the tumbledown Hall, perhaps even ask the workman's permission to look around inside...

I turned down the drive and approached the Hall. The truck, parked around the corner as before, was emblazoned with the legend: Roy Giles, Builder. I saw a man, perhaps in his fifties, in baggy jeans and a red checked shirt, climb from the cab carrying a toolbox, and enter the building through a side door.

I braked and walked from the car, nervous now that the time had come to act the part of a prospective house buyer.

I rounded the corner and was approaching the side entrance when the man, presumably Giles, emerged.

"Can I help you?" Though his look was suspicious, his tone was friendly enough.

I gestured at the house. "I was talking to the landlord of the White Lion," I said. "I hope to buy a place in the area. I don't suppose you know if it's for sale?"

"Matter of fact, I do." He smiled. "Chances are that it might be—but I won't know for sure for a year or so."

He laughed at my puzzlement.

"Do you own the place?" I asked.

He scratched his head. "Look, it's not as straight forward as all that." He hesitated, considering. "Why don't you come in and I'll explain."

Bemused, I followed him through what I assumed was the tradesman's entrance into an old scullery. It had been stripped bare and repainted; plumbing fixtures and fittings lay around the floor, evidence of recent work.

He gestured to the only seat in the room, a wooden sawing horse, and I sat down.

He brewed a pot of scalding black tea on a Calor gas stove and handed me a chipped mug. I sipped experimentally: it tasted far better than it appeared.

He leaned against the wall beside a window darkened by ivy, gripping his mug in both hands. "It's a long story, but I'll make it short," Giles said. "I worked for the owner of the Hall for almost twelve years, you see. Odd job man, gardener, things like that. Then six years ago my employer vanished-" he clicked his thumb and forefinger. "Snap. Just like that." He shrugged. "A few months later I was contacted by his solicitor. Imagine my surprise when I found out that the owner had made a will, leaving the Hall and all its contents to me. Thing was, no one was sure that Mr Edwards—the owner—was dead. Until his remains were discovered, or seven years had elapsed, then the Hall was technically still his property. Well, his remains have never been found, and he's been missing six years now. So... until next year, I don't rightly know if I'm the owner or not. I come in from time to time, do the odd bit of work here and there to keep the place from falling down."

He looked at me. "Not that I hope they find his remains, understand? I'd be delighted if he walked back in here tomorrow."

"Did you know him well?"

He frowned into his mug. "Can't say that, but I respected him. He was a gentleman. He gave me work when I needed it and paid good money. He was a writer..." He shook his head and gave a wry smile. "I tried one of his books once, but it wasn't my cup of tea."

I nodded. "It must have been quite a shock when he went missing?"

"To tell the truth, it wasn't. It wasn't so cut and dried. He'd been away from the Hall for a day or two when someone discovered his car in the woods, and footprints leading towards the river. The days passed, and I expected him to turn up at any time. I never really thought that he'd thrown himself over the scarp, and anyway no body was ever found, like I said. There was even a sighting of someone fitting Mr Edwards' description getting off a train at York." He shrugged. "It's a mystery what happened to him. I still sometimes think he'll walk in out of the blue."

He laughed. "So that's your answer. Come back in a year and I might be able to tell you one way or the other."

I nodded, sipping my tea. "It's not in the best of repair," I began.

"I'll give you that," he said. He hesitated, then went on: "I'll show you around the place, if you like."

He led the way from the scullery and down a long corridor, tripping light switches as he went. He flung open consecutive doors and stood aside to let me peer within, maintaining a running commentary as we went. "Lumber room, still full of trunks and travelling cases." And, "Morning room, or that's what Mr Edwards called it, anyway."

We came to a spacious hallway, illuminated by the light from a dusty chandelier, and crossed the chessboard tiles to a room he announced as, "The study. This is where Mr Edwards wrote all his books."

He flung open the door and switched on the light. I stepped inside, aware of my heartbeat. I was on the threshold of the room where Vaughan Edwards had created—with a little help from E.V. Cunningham-Price—his remarkable novels.

But for the film of dust that coated every horizontal surface, the room gave the appearance of still being in use. A typewriter sat on a desk by the ivy-choked window, and a shelves of books lined the walls. A row of files—manuscripts, I guessed—occupied a bookshelf beside the desk. It was a pretty typical writer's study—the only thing missing being the writer himself.

My guide noticed me staring at the far wall, where a great crack in the brickwork, running from floor to ceiling, had been inexpertly plastered. I recalled the damage to the façade which I had noticed with Mina on our first visit, and the fissures in the grounds of the Hall.

"That's not the only one," he said. "I'll show you."

He led me from the study and into the east wing of the house. There, in an empty room, he indicated yet another fissure that had been rendered over with discoloured plaster.

He opened a back door, which gave onto a spacious kitchen garden. He stepped out into the twilight and pointed to the rear wall of the building.

Along the length of the Hall, a series of great timber buttresses supported the bulging wall. The building seemed to bow outwards with the marked curvature of a galleon's hull; but for the sturdy props, the impression was that the Hall would have split open like an over-ripe fruit.

An ancient conservatory, with several panes of glass cracked or missing entirely, occupied the far end of the east wing.

"No doubt you'll have second thoughts about the place, now," he said.

"Well, it does seem a bit tumbledown," I ventured.

"Oh, it's surprisingly sturdy. These repairs were made a hundred years ago, and the place hasn't fallen down yet."

The rain had abated, and in the light of the moon that appeared suddenly through the cloudrace I made out a series of crazed cracks in the garden—fissures that had been filled in over the years, but which still showed as slightly lower impressions radiating from the Hall itself.

"Mineshafts?" I asked at last. "An underground stream?"

He looked at me and shook his head. "An explosion."

I stared at him. "Explosion?"

"Well, that's what the locals said, those who were around at the time, and the story's passed into village folk lore."

I turned and stared at the bulk of the house. Edgecoombe Hall was a dark shape against the moon-silvered clouds.

"What happened?" I asked.

"It's all a bit of a mystery. One night in December—this was in 1899—a massive explosion was heard in the village. It came from up the hill—from Edgecoombe Hall. When a posse of locals arrived here, they saw a faint blue light hovering over the roof. The walls of the Hall were split open, and the ground all about was cracked." He shrugged. "The local bobby was called out and took a statement from the owner. That was the last of the affair, and there was no satisfactory explanation about what had happened."

"Was the owner some kind of scientist? An experiment backfired?"

He laughed. "He wasn't no scientist. He was a gentleman landowner who wrote the odd novel."

Quite involuntarily, the hair on the nape of my neck prickled, and a shiver ran down my spine. "A writer?" I said.

"Gentleman by the name of Cunningham-Price," my informant went on. "Seems the Hall is popular with men of letters."

"Cunningham-Price...?"

I was not aware that I had uttered the name, and he stared at me. "You've heard of him?"

"As a matter of fact I've read one of his books," I managed. "Quite a coincidence."

My mind was racing. The coincidence that was uppermost in my thoughts, of course, was that Vaughan Edwards should have lived in the very same Hall, albeit many years later, as his literary hero. Then again, if he was so taken by Cunningham-Price's novels, what would be more natural than that he should seek out and purchase Edgecoombe Hall?

"Cunningham-Price was a bit of a recluse," he was saying. "Lived here alone, never married. Of course, after the explosion there was all manner of wild speculation and rumour. Locals swore he was deep into witchcraft, that the explosion was his attempt to summon the devil!"

"Has no one ever tried to work out scientifically what happened?" I asked.

"Not to my knowledge. That is, there's never been scientists in to investigate. Cunningham-Price hired some workmen to shore up the building—apparently he had them brick up the cellars." He paused, looking at me. "For what it's worth, I have a theory."

I smiled. "You do?"

"The area's riddled with underground streams and natural springs. It's a known fact that running water can accumulate static electricity. Perhaps a charge of electricity filled the cellar, reacted with something stored down there, and blew up."

"And the blue glow that hung over the Hall?"

He shrugged. "A result of the discharge—if a blue glow was present at all. We've only the word of the locals for that."

He gestured inside, and we entered the Hall and made our way back to the scullery.

"What happened to Cunningham-Price?" I asked.

"He left the area around 1910. There was talk that he died in the First World War. The Hall was unoccupied for years, until Vaughan Edwards bought it in the mid-fifties. Two writers, one after the other-" he laughed "-don't suppose you're another pen-pusher?"

"Computers," I lied, my thoughts miles away.

He was writing his name and telephone number on a scrap of old wallpaper. He handed in to me. "Like I said, I'll know how things stand in a year or so, if you'd like to get in touch."

I hesitated before taking my leave. "The landlord said the place is haunted," I began.

He pulled his chin, nodding to himself. "He's not wrong, either. Ghost of a young girl haunts the place—or should I say haunted?"

"But not any more?"

He shook his head. "It left six years ago, around the time Mr Vaughan disappeared."

I stared at Giles, wondering what Mina might have said to this. "You believe in such things?"

He nodded, his expression stern, as if put out at my scepticism. "You see, I saw the ghost—just the once. It was following Mr Vaughan up the main staircase, a blonde-haired girl as plain as daylight. And I'd often hear her laughter around the place. But, like I said, never since Mr Vaughan vanished..."

~

I know there is more to this reality than we perceive with our strictly limited senses; we are like new-born babies who have yet to acquire polychromatic vision, and see the world only in black and white. Beyond our conditioned purview of the world are wonders of which we cannot even dream...

From the novel Seasons of Wonder by Vaughan Edwards.

~

The return journey seemed to pass in no time at all, my thoughts full of the Hall's strange history, the two reclusive writers separated by years and yet so obviously connected by a similarity of the soul.

It was almost eight by the time I arrived home. Mina was not due back until ten, so I fixed myself a quick meal and settled beside the fire with the books I had brought from the White Lion.

I scanned the first of the Cunningham-Prices, The White Lodge, a story of a country house and its inhabitants over the course of thirty years. It had the unmistakable feel of something that Vaughan Edwards might have written, a haunting, elegiac quality, a sympathy for the characters, that was familiar from the modern writer's work... I had another seven of Edwards' books yet to read—it was quite possible that among the books I had taken from Highdale there would be one that borrowed, as I thought of it, from The White Lodge.

I was still reading when Mina arrived home. She made herself a cup of tea and collapsed with a sigh on the sofa next to me. She frowned at the pile of novels on the coffee table. "So the day was a success?"

"And that's not all," I said. I told her about my visit to the Hall and the conversation with Giles.

"Strange, or what?" I said.

She cupped her mug in both hands and sipped, eyeing me over the horizon of the rim. I could almost hear her mind working, practical as ever. "What's so strange about it?"

I enumerated the strange points on my fingers. "Cunningham-Price, a reclusive writer. The mysterious explosion. Cunningham-Price's unconfirmed death in the Great

War. The ghost-"

Mina snorted at this. "You've only the word of some cowboy builder about that!"

I shrugged. "Nevertheless." I held up my fingers. "Vaughan Edwards, reclusive writer. He buys the place where his literary mentor lived and wrote. He uses the Victorian writer's novels as a starting point of his own-"

"So you admit he was a plagiarist?"

"Not in so many words."

"But you're still going to buy me that Thai meal?"

"Very well. Will you stop interrupting?" I pulled back my thumb. "Then Vaughan Edwards goes and disappears in mysterious circumstances."

Mina sighed. "Sometimes I wonder about you, Daniel. What's so strange? So Cunningham was a reclusive writer—so were you before you met me!"

"That's not fair."

"The explosion—your builder chap explained that. And then Cunningham died in the war, along with millions of others. Vaughan Edwards comes along, buys the house of his hero, copies his novels, goes out for a walk one day and falls down the hillside, his body buried in undergrowth or snagged at the bottom of the river." She smiled at me. "And the ghost—show me an old English building that isn't rumoured to be haunted. Why look for bizarre explanations, Daniel, when the obvious answer is so straightforward?"

I shrugged. "Sometimes the bizarre is more appealing than the everyday."

"But wholly impossible," she said. She ruffled my hair. "Come on, let's go to bed."

I followed her upstairs, trying to refute her cold water douche of rationalism—convinced, of course, that there was much more to the affair than met the eye.

~

It is all very well to drag the occult into his novels, but what this writer signally fails to realise is that the modern reader demands that the novelist provides also an interesting story...

From Gerald Percival's review of The White Lodge by E.V. Cunningham-Price.

~

I read the Cunningham-Price books and the remaining Edwards novels over the course of the next fortnight. It came as no surprise to find that the Edwards borrowed heavily from the Cunningham-Prices. Minor characters in the Victorian novels cropped up in the modern novels as fully-fleshed protagonists. Themes hinted at in the early books were developed by Edwards and given full flight. Settings recurred, scenes, and even lines of dialogue.

I thought long and hard about what Edwards had done—a gifted novelist in his own right, he had no literary need to go about plundering someone else's work to use as the grist for his own books and stories. Except, of course, he obviously felt some kind of debt to the earlier writer—a duty to complete in his modern novels what the Victorian had left unsaid.

Weeks passed. I considered making my discovery public in the form of an article, but if I approached a newspaper with my findings they would only request a sensationalist story of literary plagiarism spanning the years. I mulled over the idea of writing an essay for a small-press literary magazine, citing the examples of Edwards' borrowings and attempting to make a positive case for what he had done. At length I set the idea aside; it seemed to me that I had insufficient facts, that something was missing, information that might allow me to understand fully Edwards' objectives and motivations.

Life resumed its normal course, and I received the subtle impression that Mina was gratified that I had stepped down my search for the facts behind the story.

Not a day passed when I did not give thanks for having met her; I was beset less and less by the gnawing fear of her leaving me, a fear that in the early days of our relationship had often soured my peace of mind. We entered a period of mutual affection which I had never before known with anyone else, and I wanted to do nothing to undermine our happiness. I did not so much as mention Edwards, or Edgecoombe Hall. When I suggested that we dine at the Thai restaurant in Settle, I did so without reference to her having won our wager over Edwards' so-called plagiarism.

I received a commission to novelise a computer game, which I did over the next week or so and submitted under a pseudonym. Still I felt disinclined to embark upon an original novel, despite a phone call from my agent asking how it was coming along. I knew from experience that the creative drought would end in time, of its own mysterious accord, and in the meantime I would get by on hackwork. At the back of my mind, however, was the thought that apathy and laziness might win out, that I might never again want to write seriously enough to begin a project that meant something to me, a project I would have to invest with integrity and effort. The spectre of filling the years with hackwork in order to scrape a living hung over my waking days.

I forgot about Vaughan Edwards and the mystery of Edgecoombe Hall for long periods. On occasion, seeing the books that I would some day have to return to the White Lion, I did dwell on the events at Highdale and the strange case of his plagiarism—but I knew that the passage of years had all but quashed any chance of ever discovering the truth.

That might have been the case, but for the arrival through the post, a week later, of two novels which the editor of a small literary magazine wanted me to review.

~

I have never demanded from Mina the affection she obviously finds so hard to give to me. More than anything I want to ask her to show some sign that she... not that she loves me... but that she cares. But I'm terrified of asking that for fear of frightening her away.

From the personal journals of Daniel Ellis.

~

I was still in bed at nine-fifteen the following morning when Mina returned from taking the girls to school. She shouted up that she was preparing breakfast—and that the postman had just delivered a parcel of what looked suspiciously like books. The promise of breakfast might not have propelled me downstairs, but the arrival of post was assured to get me up.

Over fried eggs on Marmite toast, I opened the package and read the enclosed letter.

"Anything interesting?" Mina asked.

I indicated the two hardback books on the table, and lifted the note. "The editor of The Coastal Quarterly wants me to review these. He read my piece on the last Boyd in the Yorkshire Post. Says he was impressed."

"Great," Mina said, "but does he pay?"

"Trust your grubby little mind to think of nothing but filthy lucre. As a matter of fact," I went on, "he does."

That stirred her interest. "More Thai banquets?" she said.

"Hardly. He's offering me a tenner per book."

"That's not much."

"About what a small literary magazine can stretch to. I get thirty from the Post. The London periodicals usually pay fifty or so, but not some small-press imprint based in Whitby."

I picked up the books. They were handsome first editions by a writer I'd never heard of, Ed Cunningham.

In retrospect, I was surprised the alarm bells didn't start ringing—but at the time I was oblivious to the tenuous connection.

Mina glanced across at me. "You will review them, won't you?"

"Of course. I've got to keep you in Thai food, haven't I?"

Mina began work at ten, and after driving her to the hospital I brewed myself a coffee, lay on the sofa before the fire, and began reading Sundered Worlds by Ed Cunningham.

How to describe the shock of recognition, and the subsequent turmoil of emotions, that passed through my head as I read?

My pulse throbbed at my temple. My mouth ran suddenly dry and I felt light-headed.

Ed Cunningham...

I read on, my hands trembling.

Sundered Worlds was about a soldier invalided out of the army at the end of the First World War, and his fight to regain his physical and mental well-being at a sanatorium high in the Yorkshire Dales. There he met and fell in love with a young girl who, by the end of the novel, is revealed as the spirit of a girl murdered by Roundhead soldiers in the Civil War nearly three hundred years ago.

Lines and turns of phrase echoed those in the works of E.V. Cunningham-Price and Vaughan Edwards.

A minor character in Sundered Worlds was none other than the central character in Cunningham-Price's The White Lodge.

Description of the Yorkshire landscape eerily mirrored those of the earlier writers.

I finished the first book in three hours, and began the second, Winter Harvest.

Again and again: repeated lines, familiar characters, themes in common with the earlier books...

I read about the author on the back flap. There was no photograph, and the merest biographical information. Ed Cunningham was in his thirties and lived in the North Yorkshire town of Whitby. Winter Harvest was his second book. His first, Sundered Worlds, was now out in paperback.

I lay the books aside and stared into space, my mind dizzy with the impossible.

~

God knows, there are times when my existence, what is happening to me, is more than I can humanly bear... and I desire nothing more than the balm of oblivion!

From the personal journals of E.V. Cunningham-Price.

~

"Daniel, are you okay?" She stood in the doorway of the front room, staring at me.

It was eight o'clock. The house was silent, and in darkness. The girls were with Mina's ex-husband across town. I had no idea how long had passed since I had stopped reading.

She switched on the light and approached cautiously, as if at any second I might jump from the sofa and attack her.

"Daniel?"

I stared at her, shaking my head. I pointed to the books. "They're the same," I said. "I should have known. Ed Cunningham."

Mina sat beside me on the sofa and picked up the books.

"They contain lines and characters and descriptions from the other books," I said.

She looked at me. I could see the practical cogs of her mind spinning a reply. "So some hack discovered the plagiarism before you and he's doing his own take on it. It's all a big con."

"How did they know?"

She sighed. "How did who know?"

"Whoever sent the books. How did they know that I knew about Edwards and Cunningham?"

She reached out and ruffled my hair. "Haven't you ever heard of coincidence, Daniel?"

"Massive bloody coincidence," I said.

She pulled the editor's letter from one of the books, read it and then regarded me. "Daniel, this was written two days ago."

The course of her logic defeated me. I blinked. "So?"

"So... two days ago was April fool's day."

I shook my head, impressed, despite myself, by her dogged pragmatism. "Fact remains, how the bloody hell did they know?" I paused. "And it can't be a coincidence if it's an April fool's joke, can it?"

Touché. I saw her flinch.

A long silence came between us. Mina perched on the edge of the cushion, legs together, the letter open on her lap, her eyes downcast.

At last she said, "I'm sure there's some perfectly logical explanation, Daniel."

I wanted to hug her, to cherish her unfailing existential belief that was so much a part of her; at the same time I wanted to lash out at her in blind fury, angered by her inability to look beyond the mundane for fear of seeing something that might fill her with terror.

For a while, back in the darkness of the afternoon, my mind had glimpsed something that it had had no right to glimpse, and I was filled with a trembling fear of a myriad terrible possibilities.

"Daniel, I'm going to ring him."

"Who?"

"Who do you think?" she said, lifting the letter. "The editor of the magazine."

"Is there a number?"

She scanned the letter-heading. "Damn. No, but there's an address. I'll ring directory enquiries."

She hurried into the hall. I heard the low, reassuring sound of her voice as she spoke into the receiver.

She returned a minute later. "Strange. The magazine doesn't have a number."

She sat down beside me. I took the letter, read the address. "What's happening, Mina?"

She shook her head, brow drawn in furious thought. "It's a practical joke, Daniel. Or it's a coincidence. It's one or the other. It can't be anything else."

"Can't it?"

She snorted. "What else can it be?"

I was silent for a long time. At last I said, "Perhaps, just perhaps, E.V. Cunningham, Vaughan Edwards and Ed Cunningham are one and the same person."

She tsk'd in scornful disbelief.

"Think about it! There's no record of Cunningham-Price's death, Vaughan Edwards vanished, and now these turn up—books that bear a remarkable resemblance to the earlier novels-"

"Daniel," Mina pointed out with the sweet patience of a saint, "if he were still alive he'd be... good God, I don't know... ancient."

"At least a hundred and thirty, give or take," I said.

"Somehow, I don't think so."

I reread the address on the letter-heading.

"What?" Mina said, watching me.

"I'm going over there," I said. "I'll drop you off at the hospital tomorrow. Then I'll go over to Whitby, try to find out what's going on. According to the blurb, Ed Cunningham lives in Whitby-" I stopped.

"Daniel?"

"Perhaps this is his way of contacting me," I said.

Mina stared at me for a long time, and I relented.

"Or then again," I said, "perhaps it is one big practical joke."

I slept badly that night, and again and again reached out to touch Mina's reassuring warmth.

~

All we have, when all is said and done, for good or bad, is the constancy of our humanity.

From the novel Summer in Ithaca by Daniel Ellis.

~

The following day at ten I dropped Mina off at the hospital.

She had been quiet for the duration of the drive, but before she climbed from the car she gave me an unaccustomed peck on the cheek and said, "I hope you find the joker, Daniel. Take care, okay?"

I nodded and drove away.

Bright sunlight alternated with silvery showers as I took the long, high road over the North Yorkshire moors towards Whitby. I considered the events of the past few months, the strange occurrences at the Hall, the odd plagiarism that now connected three writers spanning as many centuries. I told myself that I had always kept an open mind as regards phenomenon considered... let's say... bizarre, but now I felt that I was fast approaching someone who might be able to answer some of my many questions, and quite frankly I was more than a little apprehensive.

The sky over the North sea was as leaden as the ocean itself as I came to the crest of the road and looked down on the bay and the tumbling town of Whitby. The sun was concealed behind a bank of cloud the colour of old bruises; the scene was drear and inhospitable, and I could well imagine why Bram Stoker had chosen as Dracula's point of arrival in England this grey and unprepossessing fishing port.

The address given on the note-paper was in the village of Throxton, a few miles north of Whitby on the coast road. I drove slowly, anxious now that the time had come to approach the man who had sent me the Cunningham books for review. He had signed himself as Gerald Melthem, the literary editor of The Coastal Quarterly.

What if Mina was right, and the whole affair was no more than a massive and unlikely coincidence? How might I explain myself to the editor then?

I decided to broach that eventuality if and when it occurred.

But if it were not a coincidence, then what might it be?

Throxton was a hamlet consisting of a dozen large houses strung out along the clifftop beside the coast road. I came upon Hapsley House quite by accident. I slowed and braked before the first big house in the village, intending to ask directions, and was surprised to read on a cross-section of tree-trunk, affixed to the gate, the title: Hapsley House.

The rain had abated, and the sun was out again. A mist hung over the road, and when I stepped from the car, my heart beating like a trip-hammer, I found that the afternoon was unseasonably mild.

I opened the gate and approached the front porch, only to be informed by a hand-written sign that visitors should call at the side entrance.

I walked around the tall, grey-stone building, past rhododendron bushes spangled with rain, and found the side door.

Before I rang, I heard the sound of a child's laughter emanating from the rear garden, and when I looked I saw, obscured by a stand of apple trees, the distant sight of a tall man in a white shirt, pushing a radiantly blonde girl in a swing. She was perhaps fifteen or sixteen, and her uninhibited laughter, as it carried over the garden on the sea wind, brought suddenly to mind the long gone summers of my youth.

I remembered myself, and rang the bell.

Almost immediately the door was opened by a grey-haired woman dressed in the old-fashioned garb of a housekeeper or maid. She looked at me severely, as if unaccustomed to receiving callers.

"Can I help you?"

"I've come to see Mr Melthem."

She appeared unmoved, so I continued, "If you could tell him that Daniel Ellis wishes to see him."

She said, "Are you a writer?" as if admission to this might prove the open sesame.

I nodded. "Mr Melthem sent me some books to review."

"In that case do come in, Mr Ellis. Please, follow me."

She closed the door behind me and led the way up a narrow flight of stairs to a long room overlooking the sea. The lounge was stuffed with too much old-fashioned furniture, cabinets full of china, and an abundance of chintz.

"One moment while I inform Mr Melthem..." She left the room, and I moved to the window and stared out.

The tall man—I would guess that he was in his sixties—was leaning against the iron frame of the swing and talking to the girl. Even at this distance I was overcome with her Alice-like beauty; something in her laughing manner filled me with delight.

The housekeeper came into view in the garden beneath me and called to the man. He turned and looked up at the window where I stood, and involuntarily I took a backwards step so as to be out of sight.

When next I looked, the man was striding up the garden path towards the house, but of the young girl there was no sign.

A minute later I heard footsteps on the stairs, and the door opened suddenly.

He stood at the far end of the room for a second, lost in the shadows, as if assessing me. Then he strode forwards, his hand outstretched.

Closer to, I could see that he was much older than I had first assumed. Though he held himself stiffly upright with an almost military correctitude, the skin of his face and hands had the tissue-thin, translucent quality of great age.

I reached out to take his hand, my own trembling. I recalled the dream I had had, several months ago, of meeting a writer in an ancient library—and how I had been convinced, upon awakening, that the writer had been Vaughan Edwards.

The man before me bore an uncanny resemblance to the hazy figure in my dream...

"Mr Ellis," he said warmly. "Please, take a seat." He indicated a wicker chair beside the window and took one positioned opposite, a wicker table between us.

The housekeeper appeared at the door, and Melthem asked me, "A drink? Tea, coffee?"

"Tea, black," I said.

The old man said, "I have enjoyed your novels, Mr Ellis. They embody a spirit, let's say an attitude of mind, not often found in these modern times."

I shrugged, at a loss. I always find flattery, on the infrequent occasion it was directed my way, more difficult to handle than criticism.

"That's kind of you. I try to write what I find most important to me."

He sighed. "Don't we all, Mr Ellis?" he said.

"You write yourself?" I asked, idiotically.

His reply was interrupted by the arrival of the housekeeper with our tea. Melthem poured the Earl Grey into two improbably delicate china cups.

I took mine on a saucer, the china chattering a quick signal of my nervousness.

Only then did I notice, on the table between us, a slim book. It was the collection of Vaughan Edwards' short stories— Improbable Visions—that I had yet to read.

I wondered if Mina would call this a coincidence, too?

My vision misted and my head reeled. I thought, for a second, that I was about to collapse. The feeling passed. I sipped my tea.

"I take it you received the Cunninghams?" he enquired.

I nodded. "Yesterday. I've read them already. I was... impressed. They show a mature handling of character and situation-" I was aware that I was gabbling, running off at the mouth. "A maturity surprising for a novelist's first books..."

"Quite. Exactly my feelings, too. I thought you might appreciate them. Isn't it wonderful to happen upon like souls in the appreciation of the noble art?"

I smiled and gulped my tea.

He noticed my glance towards the Vaughan Edwards' collection. "A gift," he said, and an icy hand played a rapid arpeggio down my spine. "I thought you might appreciate the volume."

I thanked him with a whispered, "... most kind." And took refuge behind my cup.

How had he known I would come here, I wanted to shout: for that matter, how did he know that this of all Vaughan Edwards' books was the one I had yet to read?

I felt as though I were participating in a dream over which I had no control, and from which I might at any second awake in fright.

"I was at Edgecoombe Hall just the other day," Melthem was saying.

I nodded, at a loss quite how to respond. I sat rooted to my seat, my posture rigid, staring at him as he said, "Would you care to meet me tomorrow at the Hall, between eleven and noon?"

I found myself assenting with a gesture.

"Splendid. There is so much to explain, and it would help if we were in the Hall where it all originally happened, don't you think?"

"Cunningham-Price, Edwards...?" It was barely a whisper, a feeble attempt to articulate the many questions crowding my mind.

"Tomorrow, Mr Ellis."

He reached out a papery hand, and when I looked into his sapphire-blue eyes it came to me that I was in the presence of someone who had experienced more than it was humanly possible to experience, and still survive.

The feeling was gone almost as soon as it arrived. I found myself shaking his hand. I rose from the chair and gestured farewell.

"Oh, Mr Ellis..." He called out as I made for the door. He held the volume of short stories towards me. I murmured an apology and took the book.

As I reached the door, he said, "Tomorrow, between eleven and noon, Mr Ellis. I'll see you at Edgecoombe Hall."

In a daze I hurried down the stairs and let myself out through the side door. The fresh air seemed to waken me, as if from the dream I had been so convinced I had fallen into. I made my way to the car, regretting now that I had not remained to question him—but at the same time not wishing in the slightest to return.

I made three-point turn and accelerated up the road towards Whitby. As I came to the rise above the hamlet, I glanced back at the imposing grey pile of Hapsley House. I slowed the car and stopped, turning in my seat and staring.

Melthem had returned to the garden overlooking the sea, and once again he was pushing the laughing, golden-haired girl on the swing.

Sweating, I turned my back on Hapsley house and drove away.

~

Do I love him? What is love? Do I trust him? If trust is giving your fate to another, and knowing that you will not be harmed, then I trust him. But do I love him? After The Bastard, how can I bring myself to love anyone? So why, then, do I trust him?

From the diary of Mina Pratt.

~

I arrived home at six. Mina was still at work. I was relieved to have the house to myself. I would have found it hard to find rational answers to her questions; indeed, I found it hard myself to answer the many questions posed by the events of that afternoon.

I built the fire, taking my time with wadded newspapers, sticks of wood, coal and fire-lighters. I have always found the act of making a fire comforting, therapeutic. With the fire blazing, I sat on the sofa and considered eating—but I had no appetite.

I fetched Improbable Visions from my jacket where it hung in the hall, and returned to the front room. I resumed the sofa and began reading: the act seemed appropriate.

Mina returned at eight. The sound of the front door opening brought me back to reality. I was aware of my heartbeat, and the fact that I was not looking forward to facing her.

She appeared in the doorway and paused, gripping a bulky carrier bag of groceries. She stared at me. "What happened, Daniel?"

I could not bring myself to reply. She disappeared into the kitchen, and I heard the sound of her unpacking the shopping and storing it away in cupboards. It struck me as the typical, practical thing that Mina would do at a time like this.

She emerged five minutes later, again halting in the doorway as if wary of approaching me. "Are you going to tell me what happened?"

I found my voice at last. "I met him," I said.

She nodded. "The editor?"

I could not bring myself to look at her. Instead I regarded the leaping flames. I licked my lips.

"Edwards," I said. "Or Cunningham-Price, or whatever he calls himself."

The flames danced. Mina said nothing. The silence stretched painfully. I tore my eyes away from the fire and looked at her.

She was staring at me, and slowly shaking her head. She said, "He told you he was Edwards?"

"No, not in so many words-"

"Then just what did he say?" I could hear the exasperation in her tone.

"It was strange, Mina. The meeting seemed unreal, like a dream. I wanted to ask so much, but I found myself unable to form the questions. He told me very little."

"Then how on earth did you know he was Edwards?" she almost cried.

I shook my head. "A feeling, an intuition. He was so old. At first I thought he was about sixty, seventy. Then... I don't know. When he spoke, when I looked into his eyes, I realised he was ancient."

Mina moved to the armchair before the fire. She pulled her feet onto the cushion and hugged her shins, staring at the flames.

She glanced at me. "Did you ask him why he sent the books?"

I shook my head. "I think he wanted to communicate with me... tell someone about himself, after all those years."

"But you said he told you next to nothing!"

My mouth ran dry. I considered my words. "I think he wants to explain, tell someone who might be sympathetic. He said he liked my books, sympathised with their sentiments-"

"Wants to explain?" she asked, a note of what might have been apprehension in her voice. "You're meeting him again?"

I nodded. "He wants to meet me at Edgecoombe Hall tomorrow. He said that there's much to explain."

"And you're going?"

I let the silence stretch, become almost unbearably tense, before it snapped and she asked, "Well?"

I looked up at her, held her gaze. "I've got to go, Mina. I want to find out."

She gave a quick, bitter, shake of her head and stared at the flames.

"Mina, something strange and wonderful happened at the Hall all those years ago... All my life I've been hoping that there was more to... to this... than what is apparent. We're so programmed by our limited perceptions and this reality's conditioning. There's more to existence than what is apparent to the senses. There has to be. If this is all there is, then I'd despair..."

She turned her head and stared at me, and I was shocked to see something almost like hatred in her eyes. "You're a fool, Daniel. You're a bloody fool! Can't you be satisfied with what there is? Why all this searching?"

"I don't know."

"Isn't what you've got enough?" She said this with her eyes down-cast, unable to look at me.

I almost replied, then, cheaply, that if she would give me all her love, then that might be enough—but I held my tongue. "It isn't about what I've got," I said. "It's about what's possible."

"Listen to me, the editor is a con man—he's planning something."

"He knew I was coming," I interrupted, indicating the collection. "He had this for me, the only Vaughan Edwards I haven't read. He knew that."

"Impossible!"

"Another coincidence?" I sneered.

A silence developed, and the fire hissed and cracked. At last Mina said, "Are you going?" in a small voice.

"What do you think? I've got to go. I must find out what's happening."

Suddenly, surprising me, Mina stood and moved to the door. "I'm meeting Liz at nine," she said. "We're going for a drink. You can fix your own dinner, can't you?"

The mention of such banalities angered me, but she had hurried from the doorway and was climbing the stairs before I could reply.

I sat in silence, staring at the glowing coals.

She came down thirty minutes later, dressed in her short black coat, the collar turned up around her windswept-effect hair. She looked wonderful, and a part of me wanted to take her in my arms and apologise and tell her that I would not be going to Highdale in the morning.

I remained seated.

"Daniel," she said, and I could tell that she had been giving the words great thought, "I won't be back tonight. I'm staying over at Liz's."

I nodded. "Have a good time."

She did not move from the door. "So you're going up there, then?"

"That's what I said, isn't it?"

"I wish you wouldn't, Daniel," she said, and made to leave.

I stopped her with, "What do you fear, Mina?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Do you care about what might happen to me, or fear I might discover something that might shatter your safe, limited little world view?"

She stared at me, slowly shaking her head. "I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about-"

"It's the latter, isn't it? You don't want your safe, cosy existence shattered by the knowledge that there's more to life than merely this..." I gestured about me... "this physical existence. I've never met anyone as closed-minded as you."

She could only stare at me, tears filming her eyes. "That's not fair. I do care..."

I could not help myself. "You've got a damned strange way of showing it, then. I know you've told me, again and again, that you don't love me... but what about affection?"

"Daniel..."

"Is it simply that you don't trust me, after all the love and affection I've shown you? Is that it? You know, never once in the year we've been together have you shown any spontaneous sign of intimacy. It's always me who has to make the first move. Do you know how galling that is? Do you ever stop to wonder what it's like to love someone, and not to have the slightest clue as to what the hell they feel about you in return?"

She was crying now, leaning against the door-frame and sobbing.

I twisted the knife. "I sometimes wonder why the hell you bother staying with me!"

Shocked and angered, she looked up and stared at me, and I knew I had gone too far then, and would regret it. "If that's how you feel..." she wept.

She hurried into the hall.

"What?" I called after her.

I heard the front door open. Then, suddenly, she was back, framed in the doorway, staring at me. "You bastard," she said. "Don't expect me to be here when you get back."

And, before I could reply, she was gone.

THREE

As a child I read a lot, lost myself in adventures and quests along with characters more real than anyone I had ever met in real life. Books were my refuge, a bolt-hole to other, better worlds than this one, an escape.

Perhaps they served much the same function now, though on a more sophisticated level: now I might lose myself in a book to escape the exigencies of this life, but at the same time fiction was a way of understanding others, of realising that one's own psychological viewpoint was not the only one. By engaging with the diversity and variation of thought and character to be found in literature, I was making my own life richer and more rewarding.

Vaughan Edwards' books had fulfilled both the above criteria; they had offered me a brief escape from this reality, and a means of understanding another person's unique world view. For me, the bizarre, other-worldly tales they told functioned as a grand metaphor for something very strange.

And I wanted to experience that strange reality for myself.

I awoke late the following morning in a bed cold without Mina. I forced myself to drink a cup of coffee, and at ten set off for Highdale.

As I drove, I considered Mina's declaration that she would not be at home when I returned. I decided that later, when I had met Vaughan Edwards—or whoever he might be—I would seek out Mina, and apologise. I could always tell her that I had acceded to her wishes, and not gone to the Hall.

But lies breed a subsequent duplicity, the need to follow up the original untruth with a series of others. I had never lied to Mina, and I did not want to begin now: what I was doing meant something to me—even though I was filled with apprehension at the same time—and I knew that it would devolve to me, upon my return, to attempt to explain this to Mina, somehow make her understand. If she were to share my life, then she must also share my mind. Relationships are founded on mutual understanding, and how could our partnership work if she failed to comprehend what the mystery of Vaughan Edwards and Edgecoombe Hall meant to me?

I arrived at Highdale just as cloud cover occluded the sun and a squall of heavy rain began. I drove past the Hall and into the village, glad of the excuse to delay the inevitable encounter: I had brought back the books I had borrowed from the White Lion on my last visit.

It was just after eleven when I pushed into the snug and returned the novels to their shelf. I was tempted to delay the rendezvous still further by ordering a drink, but resisted the urge. The sooner I learned the truth of Edgecoombe Hall, I reasoned, the sooner I could return to Mina.

I left the pub and drove slowly up the hill. The rain was torrential now, making ineffectual the laboured swipes of the windscreen-wipers. I slowed to a walking pace, hunching over the wheel so as to make out the road ahead.

I came to the ivied gateposts and turned, feeling as I did so the oppressive weight of something very much like fear settle over me. It was not, I told myself, too late to turn back. I could retreat now and be back home inside the hour, and I would be able to tell Mina that I had not set eyes on Edgecoombe Hall that day.

Even as I considered this option, I knew that I would not take it. I had set out with the express intention of meeting with Vaughan Edwards, if such was who he was, and I could not at this late stage deny myself the opportunity of discovering the truth.

By the time I emerged from the tunnel of shrubbery, the rain had abated, and the sun appeared from behind the clouds. Edgecoombe Hall stood before me, presenting an even more inimical façade for being so theatrically bathed in sudden sunlight.

I braked the car and remained inside for long minutes, aware that I was gripping the steering wheel as the survivor of a shipwreck might cling to flotsam. My pulse hammered at my temple, and sweat soaked my shirt.

I climbed from the car and approached the Hall, unsure now the time had come whether to knock on the main door or try the side entrance.

There was no sign of another vehicle: perhaps, I told myself, he had not yet arrived.

As I stood, momentarily paralysed by indecision, I heard a familiar sound from within the building.

The high joyous trill of a young girl's uninhibited laughter issued from the dour precincts of the Hall, a sound as golden as the sunlight without.

I attempted to peer through those windows not obscured by ivy, but what little I could make out of the interior was lost in shadow.

Then the great timber front door opened, and instantly the girl's laughter ceased.

He stood upon the top step, smiling down at me—and again I received the impression of great age and amiability.

"Mr Ellis, Daniel—splendid that you could make it."

His face was thin, his hair gun-metal grey, and though there was about him a suggestion of infirmity—in the slight stoop of his frame, as opposed to his ramrod posture of yesterday—yet he seemed to glow with a lustrous vitality.

I found myself saying, quite unrehearsed, "Who are you?"

He smiled, not at all put out by the question. "Daniel, I think you know that by now, don't you?" It was almost a laugh.

I cleared my throat, began, "You... are you-?" I halted, unable, for some reason, to bring myself to say the name.

He came to my assistance. "I am Edward Vaughan Cunningham-Price, to give me my somewhat long-winded title."

I opened my mouth to speak, but remained inarticulate.

He smiled. "Would you care to come inside?"

I stood rooted to the spot, quite unable to move.

At last I said, "What happened in '96, and before that, in the Great War?"

He considered my question. "In '96 it was necessary for me to move on, and likewise before that in 1916-"

"How," I said, hearing my words as if from a great distance, "... how old are you?"

He nodded, as if this were a perfectly reasonable question. "I am one hundred and seventy-eight, Daniel."

He peered into the sky; a cloud scudded across the sun, suddenly darkening the Hall. "I think rain is on the way. You'll catch your death if you remain out there. Do come in."

He stood back and gestured with an outstretched hand for me to enter. He was the epitome of genial hospitality, and for some reason it came to me that, despite everything, I could trust him.

I mounted the steps one by one. At the top I paused, facing him. "How is that possible?" I murmured.

He laid a hand on my arm. "Daniel, that is what I came here to explain. Please, this way..."

He turned and walked into the Hall. I followed him across the chessboard tiles, down a long corridor towards the back of the house. From time to time he made comments over his shoulder about the weather, and asked me if the drive up had been pleasant, as if such mundane smalltalk might put me at ease.

A part of me expected to see the laughing girl dancing in delight somewhere in the Hall. And yet, at the very same time, some intuitive part of my consciousness knew that she would not appear.

We passed though a double glass door, and for a second I thought that we were stepping outside: then I found myself in a vast conservatory, quite denuded of vegetation.

I looked around, bemused. I had expected to be shown something—I have no idea what—but the great glassed-in area was empty.

Cunningham-Price moved to the centre of the floor and stooped, lifting the ring of a trap-door to reveal a flight of steps descending into darkness. He took three steps down, then turned and smiled at me to follow.

"Where... where are we going?"

"The cellar, Daniel."

I recalled what the builder, Giles, had told me weeks ago. "The cellar? He—you... you had the cellar bricked up after the explosion."

"All but this entrance," he explained.

"What happened?" I asked. "The explosion—what was it?"

He paused, regarding me. "I was writing in my study at the time. It was late, midnight if I recall. The explosion shook the very foundations of the Hall. I made my way into the cellar, through the entrance in the scullery. I..." He paused, his vision misting over as he recalled the events of over one century ago. "I beheld a remarkable sight, Daniel."

I heard myself whisper, "What?"

"It was the arrival here of something unique in the history of humankind," he said, and continued down the steps.

My heart hammering, God help me, I followed.

We came to the foot of the steps. A naked bulb gave a feeble light, illuminating a short corridor, at the end of which was a door. Cunningham-Price paused before it, took a key from his pocket and turned it in the lock.

He looked at me over his shoulder. "I would advise you to shield your eyes," he counselled.

Puzzled, and not a little apprehensive, I did so, peering out beneath my hand as he turned the handle and eased open the door.

An effulgent glow, like the most concentrated lapis lazuli, sprang through the widening gap and dazzled me. I think I cried out in sudden shock and made to cover my eyes more securely. When I peered again, Cunningham-Price was a pitch black silhouette against the pulsing illumination as he stepped into the chamber.

Trembling with fright, I followed. As I crossed the threshold I heard, for the first time, a constant dull hum, as of some kind of dynamo, so low as to be almost subliminal.

I stepped inside and, as my vision grew accustomed to the glare, removed my hand from my eyes and peered across the chamber.

How to describe what I saw, then?

It seemed to me that, embedded in the far wall, was a great orb of dazzling blue-white light—like a swollen will-o'-the-wisp. It was as bright as the sun seen with the naked eye, and seemed to be spinning, constantly throwing off crazed filaments of crackling electricity; these filaments enwebbed the chamber, flowing around the walls and totally encapsulating us as we stood there in mute awe. Only then, belatedly, did I realise that the chamber was not a cellar room as such, but more like a cave, a great cavern excavated perhaps by the force of the explosion all those years ago.

"What..." I managed at last, "what is it?"

In lieu of a reply, he said, "When I heard the explosion I came down here forthwith—don't ask me how I knew its location. It was as if I were drawn here. I made my way cautiously down the stairs, afraid but at the same time unable to resist the impulse to investigate. Then suddenly I came upon this light occupying the space where my wine cellar had once been..."

He stopped there, a sad light in his eyes, as if the thought of what had happened then was too much. "I... I have no idea how long I was down here. It seemed like hours, but later it came to me that only a matter of minutes had elapsed."

He paused again, and I waited. I stared into the pulsating will-'o-the-wisp like someone hypnotised, then tore my gaze away and looked at him.

"And then?" I prompted.

"And then," he went on, "they communicated with me."

I stared at him, at once wanting to disbelieve his bizarre story and yet, because of the very evidence of my eyes, unable to do so.

"They?" I echoed.

"Or perhaps I should say 'she'," he said. "At least, that was the form they took to approach me. You see," he went on, "I was writing a novel at the time, about a soldier's love for a young girl... And they reached into my mind, and took this image of the child, and used it." He paused there, on the verge of tears, his face drawn as he recalled the events of more than a century ago.

Seconds elapsed. A dizzy nausea gripped me. My conscious mind was exhorting me to run, to get out and never return, and yet at the same time another part of me, that part forever fascinated with the lure of the arcane, wanted nothing more than to hear the conclusion to his story.

He faced the light, tears now streaming down his cheeks. "She came to me from the light, a fair innocent child emanating such an aura of purity that I was overcome. She explained that she was from elsewhere, that her kind had opened a channel from her realm to this world, and that they wished to study us..."

I said, "Aliens? Beings from another dimension?"

He shook his head. "Neither description quite fits the reality," he said. "She tried to make clear to me the nature of their realm, but my human mind, conditioned only to accept this world, could not begin to comprehend the place from whence she came. It was not from outer space, or from another dimension, or an alternate world—it was from a place that existed beyond matter as we understand it. Her universe was one of energy without physical form, and she herself consisted of pure energy. She, or it, or whatever, was bemused by the discovery of this world, and wanted to understand."

He wept. "The girl... It was as if she had the power to demand from me all the love, all the compassionate desire, I had ever felt for anyone. I stood before this ethereal creature and I was besotted. I could but accede to her desire..."

Something surged within me, a sudden, terrifying panic.

"What?" I began. "What did she want?"

He forced his gaze away from the effulgence as if with great effort, and faced me, sobbing uncontrollably now and shaking his head.

As I stared at him, something in his lean, aquiline face altered. The lineaments of age seemed to dissolve, become suffused with a golden glow. I stepped backwards in alarm as the form of a young girl—the very girl I had beheld in the garden at Throxton—took shape within the old man and then stepped out, smiling at me.

Something hit me then, the full force of this creature's irresistible allure, and I cried out in rapture.

Behind her, Cunningham-Price, divested of energy, slumped suddenly, and in that second he seemed to age a hundred years.

I backed away, came up against the cavern wall.

The girl regarded me, smiling with angelic sweetness. It was hard to believe that she was a mere manifestation of pure energy, a being from another dimension; she seemed to possess, in her radiant form, the essence of all womanly pulchritude and sensuality.

"I wanted to dwell within the being of Cunningham-Price," she said. "He was a writer, and I was intrigued by his visions; more, by his heightened emotions. I had never before experienced such feelings, such emotion. I wanted to inhabit him."

"You wanted to take him over!" the rational side of my mind protested.

"I would grant him powers of which he had never dreamed," the girl continued. "I would bestow upon him increased longevity, allow him to live beyond the paltry duration you poor beings are allotted. I would give him perfect health, and new abilities. He would have intuition as none of you might know, and foresight, and the ability to shape circumstances to his will..."

A sudden, dreadful realisation came to me. "The books," I began. "He knew I was coming!"

She smiled, and the quick knowing look that crossed her face filled me with sudden panic. "All along..." I cried. "If he could shape circumstances..." My mind reeled, and I felt utterly powerless before this lambent being.

"Why?" I managed. "What do you want?"

"Cunningham-Price is old," she said. "There is only so much that even I might do to sustain and prolong the life of the flesh. He is unable to host me any longer. I require someone with his sensibilities, with his innate understanding of what it is to be human, someone in contact with their emotions. We read your books, Daniel. We knew you were the one."

She stepped forward. Behind her, Cunningham-Price fell to the floor like a dead weight.

I cried out in an anguish of dilemma. I was overcome with a tidal wave of desire, the need to lavish upon this creature all the love I had within me, even though I knew that she was manipulating this desire. I wanted to love the girl as I loved Mina—but, even as I realised this, I knew too that the girl would be unable to reciprocate: what did this creature of energy know of the very attribute unique to the human race? She would inhabit me and use me, and I would live an extended life in thrall to this supernal creature, forever in love, while she would study me like some laboratory specimen, without the need or desire to love me in return.

I cried out. I wanted to take the easy option and step towards her, allow her to inhabit my being. I would be free then of the tangled web of emotions that make human relationships so terribly difficult. I would be her slave, and a part of me desired the ease of worshipping at the altar of her beauty.

And yet... and yet, what made human relations so joyous, so fulfilling, was that the effort of loving was often rewarded, that effort expelled was sometimes repaid, or at least we live in hope that our need to be needed might find in someone, somewhere, a like need...

I dived away from her outstretched hands. I fell to the floor and scrambled in the direction of the door. I heard her coaxing, mocking laughter trilling behind me, but I dared not bring myself to look back in case I weakened and allowed her entry.

On all fours I lunged at the door, hauling myself upright, flinging it open and running. I stumbled again and again, crying out as I imagined, at any second, to feel the warmth of her energy flow into me. Again and again I picked myself up, flung myself up the flight of stairs, my arms and legs bruised and painful, my heart labouring fit to burst. I came to the conservatory, and only when I saw the full moon silvering the panes of glass did I wonder how long I had been in the cellar. It had seemed like minutes, but evidently hours had elapsed. Without a backward glance ran through the darkened Hall in the

direction of the entrance.

I hauled open the front door and bolted into the night. My car, a welcome symbol of banal modernity, stood where I had left it before the house. I dived into the driver's seat and started the engine—miraculously it fired first time—then steered in a crazy, careering u-turn and accelerated away from the Hall.

I did not look back—a fear like I had never known before would not allow me to turn my head to check if I was being pursued, even though every fibre of my being wanted to do so.

I sped from the Hall, down the hill away from the woodland. I wondered at the creature's range, its ability to chase me until I was caught. I told myself that, the greater distance I was able to put between myself and Edgecoombe Hall, the safer I would be. It had not, after all, possessed me when it had had the chance back in the cavern. Perhaps my headlong flight had saved my soul...

Still I accelerated, taking corners at breakneck sped, with no care at all for my safety, pursued as I imagined myself to be by a far, far greater danger.

I failed to see the oncoming vehicle until it was too late. Its glaring headlights appeared around the corner as if from nowhere, and instinctively I hauled on the wheel. My car careered from the road, bucked over a banking and rolled down what seemed like a never-ending incline. By the time it reached the bottom and halted, on its side, broken glass tinkling around me in a strangely beautiful glissando, my consciousness was rapidly ebbing away.

Seconds later I passed into oblivion.

~

There are times when I give thanks for what has happened to me, knowing that I am unique among all men; there are other times, however, when I feel the curse of this possession. To give love that cannot be returned, and to be denied the opportunity to exhibit love for any other...

From the personal journals of Vaughan Edwards.

~

I came awake to find myself slung on my side, cradled by the seat-belt. My body was frozen, and an intense pain gripped my head and legs. I waited, trapped, for the girl to find me, to take me over. I cried aloud in anguish at my inability to flee. I thought of Mina, and wanted nothing more than to apologise.

I passed out.

And awoke... to find myself in bed, and warm, the pain no more than a distant memory. I recall crying out in fear, and a soothing hand upon my forehead, before falling unconscious yet again.

The next time I came awake, I had a raging thirst. I tried to find the words to communicate my desire for water, but the effort was beyond me. I tried again, what seemed like hours later, and was rewarded. A disembodied hand—I could not move my head to see who it belonged to—lifted a beaker of water to my lips, and I drank.

Between moments of fleeting consciousness, I dreamed. I was in the cellar, and the girl-creature was reaching out, and I felt again the desire to give this being all the love that I possessed, and then it came to me with even more intense terror that that love could never be returned.

I awoke once in darkness, the hospital quiet around me, and the more I thought about the events at the Hall, the more I came to doubt the truth of what had happened.

Then I recalled, crying quietly to myself, what Mina had told me the last time I had seen her: that she would not be there for me when I returned from Edgecoombe Hall.

When I awoke again, it was morning. Intense sunlight cascaded through a window. A vase of brilliant daffodils seemed the most miraculous sight I had ever witnessed.

I felt a hand take mine, and squeeze.

With incredible effort, I moved my head, and the reward was worth the pain.

Mina sat beside the bed, smiling at me through her tears.

"You fractured your skull," she reported in a small voice, "broke both your legs. You were in a coma for a week. They thought-" she stopped herself, dried her eyes with a Kleenex. "They thought you might not survive."

I gripped her fingers. "I'm sorry," I said.

"Daniel," she whispered, after a long silence, "what happened?"

I shook my head. "I don't know," I said. "I really don't know..."

A nightmare, I thought...

She smiled at me, and I slipped into unconsciousness.

She was by my side when I awoke again, maybe hours later. She was staring at a newspaper, her expression shocked.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Daniel, look..."

She held up the Yorkshire Post. The front-page headline declared: MISSING NOVELIST DISCOVERED DEAD.

"Vaughan Edwards," she reported. "He was found yesterday in the cellar of the Hall. He'd died of a heart attack. They give his age here as seventy-two." She lowered the paper and smiled at me, shaking her head. "All those crazy ideas of yours..."

I smiled at her. "I was a fool," I said.

I watched her, and wondered what had really happened at the Hall; had it all, actually, been nothing more than a figment of my over-wrought desperation—a cathartic episode created by my desire to find love in this loveless world?

Quite suddenly, as I stared at Mina, an idea occurred to me. I smiled at the thought.

She looked up. "What is it?"

I said, "I want to write a new novel, Mina."

Her face clouded. "About what happened?"

I stared at her beautiful left hand, resting upon her knee. "No," I said. "It will be about you... If you'll let me, that is."

She had always been reluctant to have me write about her, as if by doing so I might claim possession of the part of her that she had been so careful to withhold.

Now she smiled. "I think perhaps I might," she said.

~

This novel is dedicated with love to Mina, for showing me that the true measure of love is one's actions, not words.

Dedication in Daniel Ellis's novel A Woman of Quality.

About the Author

Eric Brown has won the British Science Fiction Award twice for his short fiction and has published forty books and over a hundred stories. His latest books include the novel Guardians of the Phoenix and the children's book A Monster Ate My Marmite. His work has been translated into sixteen languages and he writes a monthly science fiction review column for The Guardian. He lives near Cambridge, England, with his wife and daughter. His website can be found at: www.ericbrownsf.co.uk.

About the Cover Artist

Born in 1964, Julian Flynn was brought up in England and in the Languedoc region of France. He started photographing inspired by the work of such photographers as Sally Mann, Eugene Atget and Bill Brandt. He works in black and white and utilises a variety of formats. He has produced exhibitions and bodies of work exploring the self-portrait, portraits and urban landscapes. He currently lives in France and is exploring the theme of 'the Road'. His website is at: www.julianflynn.co.uk.