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THE DISSOLVING WINDOW

And then, at last, he had reached it, was walking under it, then standing for a moment to read the inscribed names of the Heroes. Carlyon’s name was there, freshly cut into the old rock. Heriot put a tentative hand out to touch the names, trying to imagine his own name carved among them. But the stone would not accept his name, even in imagination. He wasn’t noble, and only men who were born to nobility were free to fight on Cassio’s Island. Heriot moved out from under the arch to stand on the island itself.

Directly in front of him, the forest began. Looking into it, he felt uneasy—and this first uneasiness grew stronger. It could not be shaken off. On his right, the road skirted the edge of the wood for a little way, while on his left, the long, sinuous, swelling waves cast themselves onto the rocks over and over again. Fountains of spray, forcing their way through unseen blowholes, leaped into the air, while the whole island creaked and muttered and gurgled. Heriot could hear it, even though he was concentrating on something else.

The forest in front of him had a door. It hung on huge iron hinges between two columns of black stone. But there were no walls on either side, and it was a gate that seemed to demand walls.

“No wall!” Heriot mumbled. “Door but no wall! Hey, you! You couldn’t keep a cat out! It’d just walk round you.” But the door would not be mocked. Out of its stones and iron and its dense wood there reflected, like ancient stored heat, a terrible weariness, as if the gate might choose to fall on him, crushing him into the dirt, out of boredom and nothing more. Not only this; little by little he began to feel certain that someone was watching him.

Abruptly he was invaded by a single terrifying image. Somewhere behind his eyes a window of black glass sprang into existence. It seemed it had always been there, though he had only just become aware of it, and he suddenly believed that, for years and years, a hand had been rubbing, rubbing against the glass with a soft patience as the black barrier had grown thin and then thinner. In a minute it would finally dissolve under the pressure of the preoccupied hand. In another moment he would be able to look not only forward but backward, too—far backward—backward into himself, and he would see something terrifying, something that would change him forever.

This waking dream, almost a vision, came and went in a moment, but it frightened him so fiercely that he spun away from the gate and saw, in the long grass on his right, a flattened patch as if some animal, no larger than a dog, had been lying there. The grass blades were still moving, in the act of springing up again. Heriot understood that, only a moment earlier, something must have been curled up there, hiding itself from him. Only a moment earlier something must have been watching his approach and had chosen to disappear. He clapped a hand over his puzzled eye and stared at the space with the eye that saw straight. So he fled—fled from the gate without a wall and from the flattened patch of grass; fled away from the fringe of Cassio’s Wood, out under the arch, and onto the causeway.

© 2009 Margaret Mahy