An Enemy at Green Knowe by L.M. Boston (illustrated by Peter Boston).

Title: An Enemy at Green Knowe.
Author: L.M. Boston (illustrated by Peter Boston).
Genre: Literature, fiction, children's lit, nature, fantasy, occult.
Country: England, U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1964.
Summary: If there is one thing Tolly and Ping love, it is listening to Mrs. Oldknow's stories about the many different inhabitants of Green Knowe throughout the centuries. One evening, the story is about an alchemist, Dr. Vogel, who had stayed at Green Knowe hundreds of years ago. The very next day Mrs. Oldknow receives a letter from a mysterious Melanie D. Powers who is intent on studying Dr. Vogel, or something much more sinister, and from then on Tolly and Ping find themselves guarding Green Knowe against incredibly powerful and frightening black magic.

My rating: 8.5/10
My review:




NOTE

"Crossing the River" is the real name of one of several traditional languages used by witches. I have seen the alphabet, but do not know what letters the signs represent. I have used it as it suited me for the purposes of this book and offer my apologies to any person reading it who is familiar with the language and knows the correct usage.
♥ Ping turned the pebbles over lovingly and handed his favourites to Mrs. Oldknow. "Stones ought to be magic," he said "they fit our hand too well. It feels as though they meant something important."

"They are the natural weapons," the old lady answered, teasing. "Wild man would be very good at throwing them at things. Natural tools, too—the first nutcrackers and all that. Perhaps it's just your primitive instincts coming out."

"It doesn't make me feel at all like a Wild Man. It makes me feel wise, as if I knew things. Only I don't know what it is I know."

"They were used in Magic, too," she said, relenting.

♥

This one was a polished flat pear shape in the blackest possible black. The hole was near the top, smooth and big enough for Ping's little finger. The lower part was figured with a white star and some intricate mathematical-looking curves, made of course not by man, but by the sky and the sea and the earth all working together.

"What a wonderful thing! Where did you find it, Ping?"

"In Fydlyn Bay. During the storm, when the tide was up, the waves were boiling with stones and throwing them about like spray, and afterwards the shore was quite a different shape. Instead of being all even, it was a great bank of rocks and stones at one side and a great hollow at the other.

"Fydlyn! I know it well. That is where the last of the Druids were driven into the sea by the Romans. The Chief Druid used to wear a Stone of Power round his neck. I can imagine the storm churning up the bottom of the bay, rolling great rocks up and down deep under the water, shifting the base of cliffs, splitting open cracks, and throwing up far on the shore things that had lain hidden foe two thousand years. This could be the Druid's stone."

♥

♥ "I'm glad this house is stone," said Tolly. "It smells of stone. When you come back to any house that you know, it has such a special smell. Do you think when they built this they put in some magic somewhere to make it last? Because it has lasted so much longer than houses do."

"I am sure they did—or something magic. It was a custom going right back to the first house ever made. Generally it was something under the threshold, or on the roof, or perhaps under the hearth—the three most important places."

"Have you looked?" Tolly was patting and stroking the walls as if they were alive.

"No," the old lady said. "I haven't disturbed anything. Whatever is there is working very well."

♥ In the camp he and Tolly had shared a tent, and alone in it at night, with the stars showing through the opening, they had told each other the almost unbelievable things that had happened to them separately at Green Knowe. At last they were there together. To both of them it was now home, and also the most wonderful place on earth. It was like nowhere else, because while most houses are built to shut out everything but the inmates, to close doors and draw curtains equally against the cold winds from the edge of space and the curiosity of the neighbours, to make a cosy den where everything is yours and under your own control, Green Knowe was full of mysteries. Certainly it was welcoming and comfortable and rejoicing and gay, but one had the feeling that behind the exciting colours and shapes of its ancient self there might be surprises from the unknown universe; that the house was on good terms with that too, and had no intention of shutting out the un-understandable. Of course, it was largely Time. Surely Now and Not-now is the most teasing of all mysteries, and if you let in nine-hundred-year dose of time, you let in almost everything.

Tolly looked at Ping, whose adventures here had been so different from his own.

"I wonder what it will be this time," he said. "Come on, let's go down and start."

♥ [Dr. Vogel]'s nose was prominent and pointed. It pointed almost as much as his long first finger, which—in spite of the courtly play of his hands unruffling his lace cuffs, touching his heart, trifling with his cravat, gesturing like a Frenchman—seemed constantly to be pointing at something admired, despised, coveted or commanded. It was all the more fascinating to watch the movements of that accusing and acquisitive finger, because his eyes were elsewhere. They had a slight outward cast and when they wandered it was not in the same direction as his finger.

The mixed feelings of shyness and excitement with which Roger had looked forward to this moment were suddenly simplified into dislike.

♥

He did such odd things that Roger felt he had to watch, to see how often they happened. When he came into the room, for instance, and Roger stood up to greet him, the Doctor held the door open and looked down before he closed it, as if a little person or an animal were following him in. And sometimes when he was deep in one of his books of diagrams and breathing heavily as if in excitement, he would twitch one shoulder and say, "Leave me alone." And sometimes that finger would point not at Roger, but at empty space, and be meaningfully wagged.

♥ "Alas!" groaned Dr. Vogel, pointing at the smouldering books and looking not less woeful because his exhausted eyes were straying separately. "What's thought cannot be unthought."

♥

♥ The entrance hall was delightfully enclosing and reassuring, full as always of flowers and birds' nests, the lights relayed from mirror to mirror all down its length, and all the scatter of happy living—secateurs, baskets, books, letters, and anything-to-hand lying on the tables. The coloured stairs led up invitingly, but to get to the attic you had to pass through the Knights' Hall, which, if it had been alone for some hours, had a habit of slipping back to its own century. However much you loved it, Tolly thought, it always needed a little resolution to break away into its privacy at night.

♥ "Is it for seeing the future?"

"It looks as though it should be. You could easily see strange things in a spherical mirror-room where even ordinary things look so queer. Something could be there for quite a long time before you noticed it. Besides, it's always easier to see visions in a glass than in reality. But I believe it was supposed to keep away demons. I don't know why. Perhaps because if anyone had an attendant demon and came anywhere near the witchball they would risk the demon being seen. You must admit it looks magic enough for anything."

"You would have to learn how to look into it," said Tolly sensibly. "It is difficult to recognizer things in it, especially upside down."

"A demon, if there was one," said Ping, "wouldn't like being reflected, even if no one saw. It might steal some of his power."

"I'm sure that's right, Ping," said the old lady. "Unlike ghosts who want to be seen and use looking-glasses to do it."

♥ "Green Knowe doesn't need guardians," said Tolly, showing in his face how proud he was of it. "It can't have any enemies."

"It has enemies and it needs guarding all the time," said the old lady. "In spite of all the Preservation Societies it wouldn't be there another five years if we stopped watching and guarding it. The very fact that it has lasted so long makes some people impatient. Time it went, they say, without further argument. The fact that it is different from anywhere else, with memories and standards of its own, makes quite a lot of people very angry indeed. Things have no right to be different. Everything should be alike. Over and above the rest, it seems to me to have something I can't put a name to, which always has enemies."

♥ "What lovely reds," said Tolly. "The frame, one lantern in the room and another in the looking-glass. Why do reflected things always look more mysterious?"

♥ "All I can think," said Ping at last, "is that this glass reflects the right place but at another time."

"It only reflects the ceiling half of the room where nothing goes on, so it could be ages before anyone notices," Tolly agreed.

"The question is, does it reflect the past or the future?"

"It will be the past, in this house."

"Lift it down, Tolly, and let's look at it properly."

They lifted it down and propped it on a chair seat, kneeling down to look in it. It showed their two interested faces cheek by cheek and their arms round each other's shoulders, and that filled up the whole surface.

"Well, that's now at any rate," said Tolly.

"How do you know? It may be the next time we look in it."



"Mirror, mirror on the wall
Who is the cleverest of us all?"
sang Tolly, teasingly pushing Ping over. Their mock fight ended with their tumbling one at each side of the mirror. From there, each boy saw in it a woman's face. It was colourless, and like a sculptured saint's head on a cathedral porch. But this face had an evil sneer, as shocking as if the expression of one of the gargoyles had strayed on to the face of the Madonna. It was there for so short a time they were left wondering if they had imagined it.

.."I don't think that was a ghost. I had a feeling it didn't mean to be seen. Suppose the glass shows the future, just suppose. What I think is, if that person is coming here, it would be better to take the glass up to our room, where nobody ever comes. It would be better if she didn't know we knew in advance. It's always better with dangerous people."

♥ "Let's go down and help Grand, and then we'll do the garden."

"Doing the garden" meant going all round, following every path, showing each other exactly where every single thing had happened, swarming over the fallen tree that had been Hanno's bridge across the moat, climbing all the trees, looking at Green Knowe from every possible vantage-point and loving it every minute. As Ping was forest-born he was able to compete on equal terms with Tolly, who knew all the trees and holds. If Tolly swung in the top fork of the giant beech tree from which he got the best view of Green Knowe as a Norman building, singing sea shanties at the top of his voice, Ping in a tall pear tree in the orchard from which he could see the circle of the moat and the course of the river, answered with strange and distant Chinese songs. In this duet all the birds joined with enthusiasm.

They were at home.

♥ Mrs. Oldknow had the art of making every meal an informal party. Perhaps it was because she was much alone, so that having the two boys really was a party for her, of which she enjoyed every minute every time, and that was infectious. In many houses meal-times are the wrangling point, where young and old gang up against each other, boys against girls, familiars against strangers, and every grievance is aired and even exercised. In Green Knowe it was not at all like that. Tolly might have teased Ping for being Chinese, Ping might have been jealous of Tolly for being the grandson of the house, both might have disbelieved and belittled each other's adventures. The two boys might have laughed at Mrs. Oldknow for her old lady's ways. She might have felt they made a lot of work and were a tiresome pair of young things. Instead, they were three quite different people who loved being together and used their imagination for laughing and devising pleasures. Each was ready to take up the others' ideas. But Mrs. Oldknow always seemed to enjoy most what could be understood without actually saying it.

♥ "I am very susceptible to old houses and don't want to lose a single thrill. Every old house is like a love-affair to me. And this one, I know, is going particularly to enmesh me. I shall never be the same again."

♥ "Isn't it all interesting! I expect you two know all sorts of special hiding-places? Boys are like water, they seep in everywhere. You probably know things your old lady never guesses? Even secrets from each other, perhaps. Or things you think you've kept from each other. But to get his own way everybody needs a moment of power."

♥ "What a lovely piece of oak! A family treasure, no doubt. Wood with a surface like that is tempting to the fingers. This carved African head, too. It looks as if it had been polished with caresses."

♥ ..her attention jumped to the picture—a view of Green Knowe in the eighteenth century embroidered with great patience and art in human hair. A sinister work.

♥ The house was full of odd things, as always happens when the men of the family have been travellers. Mrs. Oldknow's own collection had been chiefly of pictures, and birds' nests from the garden, but she was a great picker-up of objects that she felt "belonged" to the house or would add to it. She never bought anything simply because she personally liked it, but only if she felt she was bringing it to its real home. Consequently it was impossible to tell from looking at her possessions what she was like herself.

♥ Before long Miss Powers stopped in front of another picture, this time a Japanese print of a witch casting spells on the sea-shore—an exhilaratingly eerie work of imagination. "A most rare print," she murmured, "most rare and valuable. I wonder how you came by that."

Mrs. Oldknow laughed. "Someone was here the other day who said, 'What uncomfortable pictures you have.' But I don't want comfortable pictures. I prefer them to have a nip of otherness, like life. In a house like this there is room for questions as well as answers."

♥ "You have studied?"

"I wouldn't say so before you. I have no doctor's degree."

"So many occult references in the house. A ju-ju head, a picture in human hair, an incantation to raise the wind—and here, if I am not mistaken, another of hypnotic rituals in Bali? Downstairs I saw a dish portraying Dagon, the Great Fish God."

Mrs. Oldknow caught the boys' eyes and gave a delighted chuckle. "All just thrown in as extras," she said. "This house is not put out by a few things of that kind. It has something bigger of its own."

"Ah!" And Miss Powers backed away murmuring under her breath what sounded like a string of ancient names.

♥ Lines of sunshine fell into the room, the longest coming from the window up under the tent-shaped ceiling. This was so high that the furniture (of which there was little except comfortable seating) was dwarfed to seem a deposit on the floor. Nine-tenths of the room was empty space, and though Tolly had said earlier that nothing went on up there, it seemed now to be fully occupied with its own quietness, as if that were something active. Tolly thought the only comparable serenity he knew was that which hung over long empty beaches if you could be the first to get there at sunrise or sundown.

♥ "Funnily enough, not all previous periods of time strike one as old-fashioned. Some seem to come round again quite topically, like persecution, the fall of empires and the inrush of barbarism."

♥ Miss Powers continued looking round, and the boys stood side by side on the stairs leading to their attic. They watched her with the eyes of youth that see what they see and do not try to believe it is something different.

♥ The evening light was streaking low across the garden, laying out the shadows of the trees across the lawns. Every west-facing window was a little sun. Mrs. Oldknow made a tour of her long rose-beds on the watch for signs of mildew. She saw with the greatest pleasure how every bush held up its crop of buds ready to open in the last big flowering of the year. For many varieties the autumn flowering was the best, and for the old lady, who was quite aware that people do not live for ever, this festival was important. Her roses were her passion. They seemed to her the clearest sign of the essential nature of life. She looked at the sky, at the red sunset that was shepherds' delight, and promised herself joy.

♥ She could hear Tolly and Ping coming along the river path, and smiled at the sound of their voices, which had that comfortable interchange that only best friends have and which cannot be imitated.

They all went in together.

♥ The head of Ping's bed was against the wall beside the window. As he lay, he could see in the mirror the moon reflected in the river. The moon was bright and the unquiet disc in the water was tiring to watch. To look direclty at a bright object makes anyone sleepy. Ping dropped off and half woke again with the fascinating square of glass still in view. Now the moon was so high that the trees and shrubs at the end of the garden wore their shadows close round them. At one moment he thought he saw something moving there—something that drew out of the shadows, and went back into them. He propped himself on his elbow to get an easier view. There was nothing, and he lay down to go back into sleep. But whatever it was leapt out of the shadows and ran about the lawn. Sometimes it seemed on all fours and sometimes upright, and it had a whitish face. With much erratic coming and going, stooping and rising, it passed towards the house and out of the mirror. Ping leapt out of bed to wake Tolly. The glass showed nothing but the moonlit garden.

♥ "Oh, what a horrid feeling of loss it has left! I was thinking the most unlikely, hateful things."

"Did you really mean what you said?" asked Tolly, whose heart had still not found its normal beat.

"Of course she didn't," Ping comforted Tolly and the old lady simultaneously. "It was a demon speaking. Didn't you hear it laugh?"

"I don't care to be a vehicle for demons." She spoke sharply. "Surely one has some resistance. Come along, boys."

♥ "I shall have a nap, but I shall be quite safe this time."

"You don't want us for anything else now?"

"No, my dears. Go and sharpen your wits on whatever boys do. I shall need them later, I expect."

♥

They dusted themselves and took Tolly's find to the window. It was nastier in full daylight than he had realized, like an unclean piece of a mummy. The claws were still on the corners, making hooks to hang it up by. It was indeed a bat book. The skin had been cured and dried, the wings stretched to their full extent. The bat's furry back was the leather that joined them. Inside in dim and dirty but slightly phosphorescent white paint there was writing. A bat's wing makes a small sail-shaped page. The first was taken up with these words—

THE LANGUAGE
KNOWN TO US AS
CROSSING THE RIVER
The other side was filled with strange signs, over each of which someone had written in a browning black that looked liked blood much smaller letters now almost invisible.

"It's a witch's code!" said Tolly in triumph. "No, it's an alphabet. And it goes backward. Look, A is at the end."

♥ What Tolly had taken for the leg of a riding-boot turned out to be the back of a massive book bound in leather. It was difficult to recognize because it was swathed round and tied together, not with cobweb but with Traveller's Joy, and this had to be cut away strand by strand. The back was cracked, and had been much eaten by rats. One cover was detached, the corners rounded and ragged. However carefully the boys pulled, bits of pages and whole pages came adrift. The inside, as Tolly had guessed, had been used for a rats' nest. A semi-circle as big as half a saucer was missing from most of the pages. These were elaborately decorated in gold and colour and written by hand. Each page was in two columns, a different language in each. The capital letters were combined with pictures of beasts, and the general lettering most beautiful and clear, but for there being no break between one word and the next.

The book was so rotten, broken-backed and fly-away that the boys had the sense to close it and keep it together as much as they could. The title was "DECEM POTENTIAE MOSIS".

.."I want time of course to examine it, but you can see it is a translation into Latin from Hebrew. Written in Spain in the ninth century, I'm almost sure. The binding can't be original. That would probably have been of wood. It was a famous book, of which there was thought to be no surviving copy. This therefore must be unique and of the very greatest value."

"What sort of book is it?"

He laughed. "It's a book of magic, pre-dating the Key of Solomon. The Ten Powers of Moses—presumably what he practised on Pharaoh. We are seldom reminded that Moses was a great magician."

♥ Mr. Pope looked at it and whistled his astonishment at its existence and his sorrow at the worn corners. He opened the book, which he caressed as if soothing something alive, with such reverent and expert handling that the boys blushed for their best care, seen now to have been only moderated violence. His fingers seemed to have a special sense for the mastery of rotting parchment, and a foreknowledge of crumbling or cracking leather. When he saw the rat-eaten pages he swore, touching in imagination what was gone. At the end of the book were several pages that were stained but quite whole. He stopped to read these, forgetting his company altogether and his face grew brilliantly happy as if he were drinking champagne.

♥ At this time of year the bird population was at its greatest, for there were not only the regular winter and summer residents, but each pair had raised at least two broods during the summer, and the play and chatter of young birds was another of the special pleasures of Green Knowe. People tend to think of young birds as fledglings, foolish, open-mouthed and vulnerable. But there is a happy period when they have learnt to fly and have nothing to do but amuse themselves, which they do with the fantasy, the enjoyable waste of energy and bursts of high spirits, the chasing and shouting natural to any other young creature. Their love of life restored the old lady's confidence and good humour.

♥ "He doesn't talk to us as if we were kids. In fact I think he's really talking to himself."

"If everybody talked aloud to themselves," said Ping, "it would be very interesting."

♥ Nevertheless neither of them proposed anything that would take them out of doors into the moonlight, beautiful and fairy-like though it was. There might, in tropical forests, be satin-white moonflowers opening, but there might also be climbers with hanging tendrils like nooses that closed round you and squeezed you and sucked your blood. In fact there might be anything anywhere just as horrible as you could imagine it.

♥ Then she went back to a garden that was responding to the gentle but potent sun warmth. The roses opened willingly as the dew evaporated out of them. As soon as they opened, the scent spread around them so pervadingly that the flight of the birds fanned it to her.

She walked among them in very great contentment. If she herself was old, the sun was not, and the earth would do these wonders for him again and again.

♥ "They really are divine."

Not a bad word for them, she thought, smiling to herself. The word Rose has lost its old meaning. Now it only means something glossy, that you have, along with cars, washing machines and lovely plastic table-tops; it's only a status symbol. But the old-fashioned roses have always been a symbol for love, and like all ecstatic things they die and come again. And the flower is simply a cup for the scent and the scent is an offering. But these thoughts she kept to herself.

"You know, we all enjoy your roses," the amiable neighbour went on. "Yours is one of the few gardens that doesn't make people malicious."

♥ She had tied a washing line waist-high between two trees opposite the gate and on this she was pegging up dead birds by the tail. They hung head down with their wings fallen open, chaffie with his crest fallen down too, the known and loved song-birds, Mrs. Olknow's darlings, enough already to thin out much of the joy of the garden. Underneath the line a sleek and sinuous cat reached up, boxing the dangling corpses.

♥

He made his way to the tree from whose branches Hanno had once leapt down to rescue him. On the spot where his splendid friend had been shot, Ping dug a hole. In this he laid the long black hair, and with the scissors cut off some of his own that fell to mix with it, and tears fell too without his intention because he had loved Hanno more than he could understand. He brushed the earth over it, hung the prayer bell on the tree, and said his prayer in his boy lover's voice, "O Hanno, come just once again," then, leaving the prayer bell fluttering a tongue of paper that waved in the dark the one words HANNO, he went away,

To Ping, memories of that great man-animal always filled the garden, and now they were so vivid that he quite forgot the cats and was mooning around alone with his thoughts re-living that time, reluctant to go indoors. He was leaning over the wall looking at the river without seeing it. He did not know how long he had been standing there when there arose from the inner garden such a spitting and screeching of cats as never was heard at any witches' Sabbath. Dark forms fled past him through the hedge and over the wall. He could imagine he even saw the sparks flying from their fur.

Deep quiet followed. Not even that chuckling grunt that Ping would have so loved to hear. Only a few notes of midnight-and-all's-well from a blackbird.

Ping smiled, and went indoors, and could not stop smiling though very weary.

.."He came when I called him," he said proudly.

♥ Once in the early hours he got out of bed to look out. The ageing moon, lying on its back, was rising from a bank of cloud in the east, where was no promise of dawn. The garden had no scent but of darkness and sleep. Ping shivered. He looked in the mirror. In that square of glass the obscure quicksilver showed a sinister picture of the dead moon usurping the place of the sun. The darkness was full of the stirrings that come when power is challenged, as if the upshot could be uncertain. This was a time when any evil thing might gable on the order of the universe not being stable, and try to swing it to further private ends.

Ping's eyes were heavy but he peered into the baffling surface at a night view grown shapeless, without outline or perspective, seeing blurs and blobs of more or less darkness that changed position as his eyes tired of such acute expanding and focusing. And it seemed that a blackness moved through the shadows, that he could almost be sure it reached and entered the orchard, stayed there a while, and then went back the way it came. Ping's head fell forward on to the glass. He must sleep.

♥ "I don't know," she said, weary but laughing at calamity, "I really don't. There is no protection against malice."

♥

Tolly and Ping shot up the ladder into the pear tree.

"I hope they can't climb ladders," gasped Tolly. He then saw that not only these snakes were waiting for them at the ladder's foot, but more were assembling. They writhed round the lower rungs, rising on their coiled base to raise their heads, which waved like deadly lilies among the grass. Luckily the ladder was aluminium and they could get little purchase on it.

..Tolly, who always looked ahead, held the glass between his knees while he took off his pullover. He put it on the glass so that no one could see what it was. He hung it by its picture wire from the tree. "If Melanie snoops, it's only half of a dead boy hanging," he said gruesomely.

♥ He and Ping bent over the egg. It was about the size of as hen's egg, but flabby, except at one end which had a polished, crisp feeling.

"It has been opened and stuck up again with sellotape."

..Ping, with his pocket scissors that last night had cut off his hair, cut the sellotape, and they opened the lid.

Inside there was a dried snakeskin rolled up like a bandage. It had been split all the way down from head to tail, scraped and opened flat. On the inner side there was writing.

"Crossing the River!" cried Tolly, and then clapped a hand over his mouth. Voices travel far from the tops of trees. After that they whispered. They spread the snakeskin out across their knees and studied it.

WONKUOYEMANEHTYBUOYDIBISEVOLDLOCYMLIOCSEKANSREHTIHEMOC
"It's a foreign language."

"Try it backwards."

Come hither snakes, coil my cold loves. I bid you by the Name you know.

♥ The moment came wen Tolly, who was holding the egg, felt a cold touch on the back of his knee. He was too terrified to yell, his voice was paralysed. But no pain followed, and the cold touch was repeated. Ping saw that all the snakes were now gathered round Tolly, who had stopped running, for there were as many in front as behind. Level with the top of the grass, their unblinking eyes, with no expression but awareness, were fixed on Tolly, who stood like a martyr holding his arms above his head. Snakes wound round his gumboots and rubbed their chins softly against his thighs. With far worse horror he realized that this was not hostility but caresses. He lowered his arms instinctively, and as the hand holding the egg came down, every craning neck followed its movement and the scaly stroking ceased.

Tolly, beside himself with loathing, hurled the egg with all his might into the river. As he threw, the snakes reared up as high as they could, swaying in the direction of the flight of the egg. Then they sank to the ground for speed, and disappeared. The grass was divided as if a giant comb were being pulled through it and the rustling was as fierce as a hiss. They came into sight again, zig-zagging across the river path, which their bodied rubbed with a sound like sandpaper, but as they poured themselves over the bank their gliding into the water made no sound at all. The white egg bobbed conspicuously on the current, carrying its message of "Come hither, snakes, coil, my cold ones," down the centre of the stream.

Tolly and Ping, released from fear, hopped about on the river path, feeling light enough to fly. As the white egg travelled down past the side of the garden, adders came streaking through the hedge to join those in the water. Though only their heads stuck out, their swimming bodies made the water rough in a new kind of pattern, neither boiling, nor dancing, nor choppy, nor wind-creased, but just thickly alive.

♥ If Melanie had meant to take it she must have been distracted by other things. Those who cast spells must surely have a sense of near-panic when their power goes wrong.

♥ Ping and Tolly were gay and relaxed. They were not for the moment even worried about what might happen next. They had just done what they could never have believed possible—to plunge one's arm into a nest of adders, to walk in a knot of them. One fear was erased from life for ever and they felt the enlarged freedom.

They needed no entertainment. Simply to be at Green Knowe was occupation enough.

The very shape of the house from outside was a perpetual fascination, as simple a block as four walls could be, and yet made up of variations and irregularity, so that each of its four faces was different, but harmonious. It lay in the garden as the Stone of Power once sat among sea ferns in a rock pool, as part of the enclosed mystery and screening of the pool, which is part of the cove in which that stratum of rock lay, which itself was a reciprocal part of the great tides that flowed over it, which were one with the winds and the moon and the sun, which is only a marginal detail of the Milky Way. Just as the Stone of Power held in its nature the truth of all these, so the house of Green Knowe focused in itself and gave out again an innate truth about being and knowing.

Something of this kind the boys understood, if only as a feeling of great approval and delight.

♥ They got to their feet, partly because politeness dies hard, partly because it is better to meet an enemy stranding.

♥ "She won't be back for a long time."

"Yes," Tolly agreed stoutly. "She is a hyena woman, a leopard woman, a werewolf woman, a harpy, a beast, a bluebottle. I don't know any words bad enough. I hate her."

They went along to The Firs and in boldly at the gate. The washing line of birds was still there. They had to bend to pass under it. No one could come in without doing so. It was a degrading gesture of submission to beastliness.

♥ There were no flowers. It might have been a back yard in the saddest part of London instead of next-door neighbour to Green Knowe under the same endlessly varying sky.

♥

The shed was a lean-to, only a little way from the front door. The boys opened the groaning broken door and took a step in, but the door swung shut behind them, this time with a screech, and they were in almost total darkness with their hair standing on end, they didn't know why. Ping quickly pushed the door half open and blocked it with the first thing that came to hand, which was nothing more alarming than an old hand mower. They then had light to look around.

It was a deep shed full of throw-outs such as every established house has. It had a dusty musty smell and long flapping cobwebs. A large grandiose shape was the first to be recognized—an ancient bath chair filling up the opening. The familiar element in the mustiness was now traced, the smell of mildewed leather cushions, of the chequered oilcloth foot-rest, of perishing rubber tyres, clogged oil and the rather nasty metal smell of brass. There was nothing about this brooding old relic to inspire the horror they felt in here. Of course bath chairs are sometimes used for moving nodding old near-corpses about. And could be used for corpses. But the boys disregarded the bath chair and looked further. There was a fat toad sitting in a corner. Above it hung an outsize skein of raffia. Not just raffia. Half hidden by it was a small and dreadful whited mask, from which the raffia hung like hair, long enough and thick enough to dress anyone who wore it. The smallness of the face would make the wearer look very tall, and it was wizened into unspeakable meanness.

This was shaking enough, and yet the boys' instincts or antennae still expected something worse. They were goose-fleshed and their thumbs were pricking.

It was the ordinariness of this other thing that for a long time prevented them from seeing it. Among the ladders, toothless rakes and wooden curtain rods, a simple pole like a laundry prop. But it had two goats' horns stuck in the top. Tolly saw the shadow of the horns on the wall before he saw the real thing. They recognized it at once as absolutely evil.

Ping at last screwed his way in behind the bath chair for a closer look. Winding round the pole all the way up was a shallowly incised irregular pattern.

"It's 'Crossing the River', of course. I'll spell it out, Tolly, and you write it down, and then we'll get out of here. I don't like it."

The writing was not only backward, it was awidder-shins, that is, turning round the pole in the opposite direction from the sun. But Ping read it out from the top downward, touching the pole only enough to twist it round. Tolly wrote down the apparently meaningless letters,

LAILEBDROLDNAREHPSOHPANOGROGOMEDENISULEM
By the time they had finished they were both sweating and shaking, and Ping looked ghastly. They ran as if for their lives, and at last flung themselves panting on the sweet grass at Green Knowe.

..Beginning from the end it made no much better sense.

MELUSINEDEMOGORGONAPHOSPHERANDLORDBELIAL
The old lady put down her sewing to look. "Well, at least we know the last word, BELIAL."

"What does it mean?" asked Ping.

"One of the names of Satan."

"Would she say LORD BELIAL?"

"I'm sure she would."

"Then it ends 'and Lord Belial'," Tolly read triumphantly. "Now we will begin at the beginning. Does MELUS mean anything?"

"Not that I know of. But Melusine is a name. She was the devil's daughter."

"If we are looking for monsters, there's Gorgon later on. She had snakes. But DEMO comes in between."

"We are certainly keeping bad company," the old lady said. "Demogorgon is another of the devil's names. He naturally has a great many, being a many-sided fellow."

"That only leaves APHOSPHER."

"Phospher is the Greek for Lucifer."

"MELUSINE DEMOGORGONA PHOSPHER AND LORD BELIAL," Ping read out. "M.D.P. Melanie Delia Powers. It's her true secret name."

"And her true secret profession," Mrs. Oldknow added.

♥ The sunset was a fine fiery one. Dropping through a geranium-coloured sky, it looked exactly what it was, a stupendous fire blazing in space. Its long spokes of light pierced between the branches, lit up the boles if tees, turned brick walls into a festival glow and the glossy leaves of evergreens into sun candles. Every bush and flower stood up and was bathed in the sun's colour. It streamed into the house, filling it with glory. It painted the shape of the Norman windows on the stone of the opposite wall and woke a lively response in the smooth surfaces of glass or wood or basket. It was hard to believe that such magnificence could be eclipsed by a little wandering moon. It set behind The Firs, which showed as a mere dark obstacle, huddled and unwilling.

It was not until the splendid display was over and the colours had gone cold, that anyone remembered the enemy. What had she meant to do? What would she do now?

♥

On the centre of the door, nailed with four tacks, was hanging what looked like the palm side of a child's leather glove. But it was paper-stiff like dried skin, and showed the lines of a real hand. Across the palm was written:

RUIN FALL ON YOU
Mrs. Oldknow felt very sick.

"For God's sake pull it off," she said. "I can't let the boys see that. It's abominable."

The postman reluctantly got out his pocket knife and prised up the tacks one by one. The hand swung on the last one and then slithered down to the ground. "I wouldn't touch it, ma'am, if I were you," the postman said, getting on his bicycle and riding off.

"It's a question of what you believe is strongest," she answered. But she stood there nonplussed.

At last she went in and brought back one of those venerable much-used prayer books that old ladies have, with which all their lives they have tried to put good before evil. It fell open at the most-read passage. Between those pages she put the defiled, innocent hand and closed the book on it. She then bound it round and round with sellotape in both directions, as if staunching a deep wound. The book would never be opened again. What to do with it now? She took it round and hid it behind St. Christopher in the depths of his ivy and Traveller's Joy.

She had just done this when she heard the boys coming downstairs. She hid her fear from them and they did the same for her.

♥ Minute by minute the world grew darker, and the other birds, who had thought the way was just beginning, began to call danger. Because this was not even dusk. The sun had not gone down; it was failing in mid-heaven. The bees buzzed fretfully round their entrance under the roof, some trying to come out, others anxious to get in again.

A brooding greenish half-dark, suggesting thunderstorms, was gathering steadily, yet instead of heat there came a sickly cold that was neither of night nor of winter, but a presage of death. The cows on the island mooed in long uneasy question-marks and moved about in a procession to nowhere. The horses whinnied and clustered together, and the birds were in full panic.

As totality approached, silence fell over the frightened earth. Tolly, holding up a smoked glass to reinforce his dark spectacles, saw the weird disc of the sun jumping to his own heart-beats. There was something else. He glanced wildly round, at a loss, not knowing in which direction he should look, or for what. A loud buzzing from the bees in the roof drew his eyes upward. Was it the pale bellies of a crowd of tits squeezing up between the tiles? He pulled off his sun-glasses and looked again. He pulled Ping's sleeve and pointed, speechless.

What were those things working about at the lower edge of the roof just above their heads? It was almost too dark to see, but they looked like fingers, without hand or arm. Fingers of some dreadful unknown substance, physical or super-physical, projectible grey matter. If hatred could be seen at work, it mighty look like that. Whatever it was, it worked forcefully and wickedly. As the boys looked, a shower of tiles slithered down the slope in a roar of bees, and the fingers moved on and were prising at the top corner-stone of the leaning wall. Tolly and Ping dragged Mrs. Oldknow into the house just as the big chiselled stone was dislodged and fell where she had been standing. The shuddering moment of horror as the sun disappeared was accompanied by a shower of heavy stones hitting the rail of the balcony and bouncing into the garden.

..At this moment they heard from the spare room the voice of Mr. Pope dictating into his tape recorder. His voice rose and fell in a Latin chant and reigned over a silence that was sudden and absolute like a crack in Time. Then, as he continued, the house shook as when the sound barrier is broken. A stone crashed on the roof of the old chapel. Mr. Pope's voice became louder. The sonorous words rolled out, and it was clear that he called upon secret and mighty names.

Ping and Tolly, awestruck and holding their breath, saw the powerful white fingers fall one by one on to the balcony, wriggle, snatch, and evaporate into puffs of retreating fog.

♥ Just before she came under the tree, the boys put their cardboard trumpets to their lips and a hollow, hardly audible whisper floated out.

Avaunt! Hence, begone! Melusíne Demogórgona Phóspher!


All this time she grew more agitated. She was by now underneath the tree, partly hidden from them by the lower branches, and as Tolly gave the final "pher!" she was contorted into a kind of wrestling match with herself, crying out "Don't leave me" in a voice like wood rending.

"E he ieh," came down Tolly's trumpet.

With a last convulsion the writhing form, now on the ground, broke up into two. Melanie lay sobbing, and an abomination that the mind refuses to acknowledge stood over her and spurned her, and sped away hidden by a line of hedge.

The boys gripped the branches, speechless and near to fainting, afraid their hearts would never start beating again.

Melanie dragged herself up. She was now known, exposed, a failure, and cast off by her demon lord. An empty, powerless woman, crumpled up and distracted. She ran about like a hen, but finally turned again towards the old magnet of her cupidity, Green Knowe. She went hesitantly, her thumbs and little fingers stuck out as if nervously keeping something away.

♥ "We can take the Persian glass down to its proper place too," said Ping. "Though it is wasted there with nothing to reflect except Time."