Advent by James Treadwell

Author:James Treadwell [Treadwell, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery, Young Adult, Azizex666, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Adult
ISBN: 9781444728460
Goodreads: 12484258
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2012-02-02T05:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

It took Gav a very long time to make up his mind to go outside.

For a year and more he’d dreaded the sight of Miss Grey. Since he’d got to grips with the awful discovery that she wasn’t real, he’d wished for nothing more than never to see her again.

She stood unmoving, her shapeless cloak gathered around her, looking at the window from which he looked at her. The unkempt curtains of her hair hid her face. Even so, Gav could tell she was watching him, as he’d so often seen her watching, waiting. The alien murmurs floated around him all the while.

He remembered how he used to talk to her, back in the time before he’d understood that she wasn’t supposed to be there. It had never seemed to matter that she didn’t answer.

He’d never be that child again. That particular happiness was dead and buried. There was no unlearning what he’d learned so painfully from Mum and Dad and Mr Bushy and everyone else. Yet his heart had betrayed him, leaping with joy when he’d seen her, just the way it always used to.

He tiptoed to the front door and opened it as quietly as he could. He was afraid she might have vanished in the interval, but as the night air poured in, he saw her there still, waiting. Hester had hung his coat by the door. He slipped it on.

A wintry desertion lay over the road. The houses with their meagre front gardens petered out to his left into unlit barrens of fields and empty roads. Everything seemed frozen. You couldn’t imagine dawn coming, windows lighting up, people getting into cars and driving away.

Something about Miss Grey was different.

Her stillness had changed. Gav couldn’t have said how. Maybe it was just that she was standing under the lamp, interrupting its pool of bleached light like a rock jutting from the sea. He was more used to seeing her at the edge of things.

He remembered a word she’d said to him: Come.

It occurred to him that he had a choice. He could, if he wanted, go back inside, shut the blind and head up to his makeshift bed. That was the sort of thing he’d been doing recently when she showed up. She was easy enough to ignore when he set his heart on it, or at least she had been until she’d started climbing in trains and shouting in his ear. Still, he could close the door on her if he liked. Shut her out like a vagrant. It was in his power.

But if he didn’t do that, if he went out into the road to join her, he’d be doing what she’d told him to do. Come. He’d be giving in.

He looked around. It was past midnight. His parents weren’t even in the country. He was in a village he couldn’t name, hundreds of miles from home, standing on the doorstep of a house full of singing masks that belonged to a woman he barely

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