LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER SIX

      Owen woke early the next morning and ran straight to the Workhouse without even a drink of water. He ran up the stairs and into the main hallway. Even though people were busy, moving with purpose, he saw more than one curious glance cast in his direction. He found the stairway that led to the kitchen and plunged downwards. When the stair opened out into the kitchen he found it calmer than the previous day. The great ovens were glowing and many huge pots were simmering on them. He saw Contessa and he half walked, half ran over to her. She turned to him. Her face was grave, but she spoke before he did.

      “Cati will recover, Owen. I think you saved her. But only just. I had to put her back to sleep in the Starry. She was frozen to the very core of her being. I am suprised that you were not. Perhaps you have a special resistance.”

      “I was cold,” he said. “Freezing.”

      “The cold they emit is not just physical, Owen. It freezes the very quick of you. Your soul. You’re very strong.”

      “Strong,” said a voice. “You’d be good and strong maybe. But maybe they had fair cause not to freeze you. Them ones could have had cause to spare you.”

      Owen turned to see a tall, thin youth with a solemn face. His trousers were torn and on top he wore something that might have been a shirt at some time, but now was so ripped and dirty that it could have been anything, and was certainly no protection against the cold morning air. When Owen looked down he saw that the boy’s feet were bare.

      “Wesley,” Contessa said sharply, “I won’t have malicious gossip repeated in my kitchen.”

      “It’s what people do say,” Wesley said, but he grinned in a mischievous way and stuck out his hand. Owen took it and Wesley shook his hand vigorously.

      “Wesley,” he said. “I do be one of the Raggies. I brung fish for the lady Contessa.”

      Owen looked down for the first time. There were perhaps twenty boxes of fish on the ground around them, bringing with them a smell of the sea.

      “I have an idea,” Contessa said. “There are those who wish to ask you about last night, and their thoughts are not kindly for the moment. You would be better out of the way. Would you take him to the Hollow with you, Wesley?”

      “I will, lady.”

      “I want to see Cati,” Owen said.

      “She is asleep,” Contessa said, suddenly seeming taller, her eyes glittering with a dangerous light. “Are you not listening?”

      “Come on,” Wesley said cheerfully, pulling at Owen’s sleeve, “before the lady do devour the two of us.” Contessa didn’t say anything and her eyes were like stone, but as they walked away with a chirpy “Cheerio, lady!” from Wesley, Owen thought he saw the ghost of a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

      Wesley walked quickly, even in his bare feet, and Owen had trouble keeping up. They left the Workhouse and Wesley started on a path which followed the river down to the sea, curving towards the town and the harbour. At first, Owen fired questions at Wesley, but the boy only turned and grinned at him and pressed on even harder. They came to the place where a new concrete bridge had crossed the road between the town and his house, but there was no bridge and no road. Owen climbed up the riverbank. Despite everything he had been told, he still expected to see the familiar streets of the town.

      The town was there, but with a sinking feeling Owen realised that it looked as if it had been abandoned for a hundred years. The houses and shops were roofless and windows gaped blank and sightless. The main street was a strip of matted grass and small trees, and ivy and other creepers wrapped themselves round broken telegraph poles. Where new buildings had once stood there was bare ground or the protruding foundations of older buildings. The rusty skeleton of what had once been a bus sat at right angles in the middle of the street. A gust of wind stirred the heads of the grasses and the trees, and blew through the bare roofs of the houses with a melancholy whistling sound.

      Owen slipped back down the side of the bridge. The town was starting to crumble back into time, taking with it the memory of the people who had once walked its streets. He remembered what Cati had said about living things growing young, but the things made by man decaying as time reeled backwards.

      “Never pay no mind,” Wesley said gently. “That’s just the way it is now. All them things can be put right, if we put old Ma Time back the way she should be, running like a big clock going forward. You just stick with us. We’ll put all yon people back in their minutes and hours, and Ma Time, she’ll put us boys back to sleep again. Come on,” he said, lifting Owen to his feet, “let’s get on down to the harbour.”

      This time Wesley walked alongside Owen. The water in the river got deeper as they approached the harbour and Owen found himself veering away from it, which Wesley noticed.

      “That’s what I heard,” he said, with something like satisfaction, “that you can’t abide the water.”

      “Who told you that?” demanded Owen.

      “They was all talking about it,” Wesley said, “that the new boy, Time’s recruit, did fear the water.”

      “I don’t like it too much,” Owen said.

      Wesley rounded on him sharply, his face close to Owen’s, his voice suddenly low and urgent.

      “Do not be saying that to anyone. No one. Do you not know? I reckon not. The Harsh can neither touch nor cross any water – not fresh nor salt – and the touch of it revolts them unless they can first make ice of it. If any see you afeared of water, they will think you Harsh or a creature of the Harsh.”

      Owen remembered how the long-haired man, Samual, had reacted when he had seen Owen’s foot touch the water. “I think they know already,” he said slowly.

      “Then it will be hard on you,” Wesley said. “it will be fierce hard.”

      “You

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