Дженни Ниммо - The Snow Spider

"Where is she then?" His father sprang past him and strode across the lawn to where the Land Rover waited in its shed.

"The Herberts called," he shouted. "They said she left two hours ago. Slipped out of the house into the storm. Came to see if you were well, they thought, because you weren't at school!"

He disappeared into the shed and the Land Rover burst into life. It crashed down to the road and rocked and roared its way through the mud. 1

Two hours? Gwyn thought. And in the storm. Can she have fallen somewhere and I didn't see?

In the kitchen his mother had put four soup bowls on the table. "Your dad'll find her," she said when she saw Gwyn's worried frown.

Gwyn was not so sure. There was that thing in the air. That awful something that had destroyed Nain's room.

They heard the Land Rover returning only minutes later. Gwyn ran to open the front door. His father was already out of the vehicle. The door was swinging wide and he was gathering something into his arms, something gray, streaked with mud.

Mr. Griffiths walked through the gate and up the garden path. As he came within the arc of light from the porch, Gwyn and his mother saw the gray bundle more clearly. The girl's pale hair was black with mud, and her white face was covered with smudges of brown. She had lost her shoes.

Gwyn held his breath. He realized that he had known the girl for a long, long time. What a dull magician he was not to have understood, just because her hair was pale and her face white.

"I found her in the lane," said Mr. Griffiths, "just beside the Lloyds' wall. I can't imagine how they didn't see her. She's unconscious, from the cold probably. But I can't see any broken bones."

"I'll call Dr. Vaughan." Mrs. Griffiths ran to the telephone in the kitchen.

"She's staying here, Glenys," her husband called after her. "In Bethan's room. I'm not having them take her from us."

He carried the girl upstairs. Gwyn followed, mopping at the drops with a tissue. When Mrs. Griffiths had finished with the telephone, she ran up and covered the pillow with a towel. Then they gently removed the sodden gray coat and laid Eirlys on the bed.

They stood around the bed. Without saying a word, without even looking at each other, they knew that they had all seen this girl lying on the bright quilt before. They had seen her there long ago. They knew that Bethan had come back.

"You go and have your tea. I'll stay with her." Mr. Griffiths drew a chair up to the bed.

Gwyn did not move.

"Don't worry, lad," his father said. "It's all over now."

But Gwyn knew that it was not all over. Instead of eating, he took the flashlight down to the gate to watch for the doctor's car. Something black was lying beside the hedge, all huddled in the mud.

Gwyn bent down and picked up poor Long John's limp body. The black cat's eyes were closed, and his^ nose was full of earth. His three good legs had let him down at last, and he had drowned, unable to escape the malice of the storm.

"Who d'you think you are, you thing?" Gwyn screamed into the night. "I'll get you! Just you wait!"

The doctor came late. He had many visits to make that night. Other mysterious accidents had occurred— falls, burns, and near-drownings.

When he had finished listening through his stethoscope, he held the girl's wrist for a long time, feeling her pulse. Something puzzled him. She reminded him of someone he had seen in the same house in that very room, only the other had been dark with golden skin. "It seems you have recovered," said Dr. Vaughan. "But you had better stay where you are for a day or two."

"Watch her," the doctor told Mrs. Griffiths before he went. "She's well, but her pulse is so weak I can hardly feel it. It's almost as though… no one were there."

Gwyn was allowed into the girl's room the following morning. It was still dark and the bedside light was on. She was sitting up in one of Bethan's old nightdresses. Her hair had been washed and looked paler than ever.

It's strange she hasn't grown, thought Gwyn. Now we are the same size.

She was gazing round at all the things that made the room peculiarly Bethan's. A group of rag dolls on the dressing table in faded cotton dresses, a picture of bluebells on the wall, a yellow dress in a plastic cover still hanging on the back of the door, and the blue and pin forget-me-not curtains that Bethan had chosen.

They did not refer to the past just then. They talked about the thing that had come hurtling out of the storm to throw her down into the mud, and about the terror of the animals, Nain's devastated rooms, and poor Long John.

"It's my fault," said Gwyn. "I know it is. I gave something to the wind that I should not have given. An old, old broken horse. I was told to keep it safe, never to let it go, but I wanted Arianwen back and I thought it was the only way."

"It seems to me," she said, "that if you are to stop the thing, you have to get its name, discover what it is."

"How can I do that?" Gwyn asked. "It could be one of a million names, like Rumpelstiltskin, and we can't wait that long. Who knows what damage it may do while we're searching for a name"

She rested her chin upon her hand, like Bethan used to do, and said slowly, "If you are your namesake, if you are Gwydion, the magician from a legend, perhaps the broken horse is from a legend too. Perhaps a demon from a true story was trapped inside the broken horse by magic, to keep its evil locked up safe, away from the world."

Gwyn frowned. It seemed to make sense. It had felt so very old, that broken horse.

All at once the girl leaned forward and said quietly, "There was another gift, wasn't there? Nain gave you five. You have only told me about four of them!"

Gwyn looked hard at the girl in Bethan's bed. Then he said, "A yellow scarf. Your scarf, to bring you back!"

They grinned at each other. Gwyn felt as though all the heavy air that he'd been holding tight inside himself was flowing out of him and he could breathe again. He had so many questions to ask, he did not know which to choose. "Where have you been, Bethan?" he said at last.

"I'm not Bethan," she replied. "I might have been Bethan once, but now I'm Eirlys. I'll never be Bethan again. I've been out there!" She inclined her head, indicating a slither of darkness dividing the forget-me-not curtains.

"On the mountain?"

"No." She seemed reluctant to continue, and then said, "Out there! Further than the mountain! Further than the sky!"

"How?"

"It will be hard for you to believe."

"Go on. I know what it's like when people don't believe you. Tell me about the night you went to find the black ewe."

It was several minutes before Eirlys spoke again. Gwyn waited patiently while she searched for words to tell him what few people would believe.

"I wasn't frightened," she said slowly. "It was exciting out there with the rain shining in the flashlight. I had a feeling that something was going to happen. Something that I'd always wanted, but never understood. I couldn't find the black ewe. I called and called. You gave her a name, remember? Berry! Because her wool was purply black, like dark fruit. I had to go higher and higher, and it began to get cold. I'd forgotten my gloves and my fingers felt so stiff I could hardly hold the flashlight. I wanted to rest and warm my hands in my pockets, but I couldn't because of the light. And then I saw Berry. She was standing by that big rock, just past the last field, where it's quite flat. I called to her and I put out my hands — and I dropped the flashlight. It was so black. I tried to move in the dark, but I fell. I rolled and rolled, I don't know how far. Then I managed to grab a tuft of grass and stop myself."

The girl stopped speaking and stroked the patchwork quilt, spreading her fingers out as though she wanted to feel her way back to a place where she had once belonged.