Orfeia Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Step on a Crack

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  London Beyond

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Hellride

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  The Night Train

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Norrowa

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  The Hallowe’en King

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  The Shadowless Man

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  The Hallowe’en Queen

  Chapter One

  By Joanne M. Harris from Gollancz

  Copyright

  Prologue

  ≈

  Der lived a king inta da aste,

  Scowan ürla grün

  Der lived a lady in da wast,

  Whar giorten han grün oarlac

  Child Ballad no. 19: King Orfeo

  One

  They say the madcap Queen of May once fell in love with a man of the Folk, and followed him to his World, forsaking her life and her memory. All of Faërie grieved for her, and longed for the day when she might return, but the Queen had forgotten her kingdom, her glamours, her kindred and even her name, so that she could never look back, or recognize her people. Only sometimes, in her dreams, did she catch a glimpse of what she had lost, and heard the music of days gone by, and awoke with tears on her pillow. And yet she was happy with her man and the daughter they had together.

  But the lives of the Folk are as brief and as bright as skeins of summer lightning, and soon the man grew old and died, and the Queen and her daughter were left alone. Even in her grief, the Queen’s daughter was all she needed. But with the death of her father, the child had grown fearful and melancholy. Once as bright as the sun on the sea, she grew ever more listless and forlorn. Her hair, which had been long and fair, grew as fine as spider silk. And in her dreams, she saw a man with eyes the shade of a moth’s wing: a man who never spoke or smiled, and walking, cast no shadow.

  Almost every fairy tale begins with the death of the parents. But the death of a child changes everything. The death of a child means no journey; no coming-of-age; no adventures; no happy-ever-after. All that remains of the tale is grief. Grief, the wingless bird in its cage, singing and singing and singing.

  But a song can climb higher, live longer, see more than any bird that ever flew. A song can pass from mouth to mouth, changing with the seasons. And a song can pass between the Worlds, even to the Kingdom of Death, where the Hallowe’en King on his bone-white throne watches the Worlds through his all-seeing eye, and contemplates the honey-comb.

  This is the story of such a song. A song born of a mother’s grief, given wings by a mother’s love. A song of memory, and loss, and of the magic of everyday things. A song of rebirth, and rejoicing, and a love that lasts for ever. The song of a journey to Death and beyond.

  And it starts with the death of a daughter.

  Step on a Crack

  ≈

  My plaid awa, my plaid awa,

  And ore the hill and far awa,

  And far awa to Norrowa,

  My plaid shall not be blown awa.

  Child Ballad no. 2:

  The Elphin Knight

  One

  When Daisy Orr was six, she began to avoid the cracks in the pavement. It started as an unusual attentiveness to paving slabs, a reluctance to walk over cobblestones, and evolved into a complex series of skips and jumps and diversions, designed to carry her safely across the many pavements of London.

  Children are ritualistic. Their lives are filled with ancient lore. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back acquires a grim significance for a child who has just lost her father. But six is a resilient age. While her mother struggled with grief, Daisy was coming to terms with death in a way she could control. The pavement game was Daisy’s way of making sense of the irrational.

  This, at least, was what her mother believed. Later, she came to reassess her reading of the pavement game. But by then it was too late and she herself had slipped through a crack, into a world without Daisy.

  There should be a word, Fay Orr tells herself, for a woman who loses a child. A woman who loses a husband can at least put a name to her loss. She is a widow. Her grief has a name. That name gives her a narrative. But this is a different kind of grief. She is a woman who has lost a child. She was a mother. Now she is not. Now she does not know who she is. Now she is adrift, alone. Nameless, she casts no shadow.

  Who am I? she asks herself. What am I doing in this world? It all seems very wrong, and there is no one here to tell her what to do. She has tried counselling. It doesn’t work. Words and affirmations have no meaning any more.

  How are you feeling this morning, Fay?

  She wants to say something. Really she does. But the question is meaningless. What is there to feel? Daisy is gone. Her daughter is gone. In her place there is nothing.

  Why don’t we look at your diary, Fay?

  Ah yes, she thinks. The diary. It’s supposed to help her counsellor (whose name is Janine, and who thinks that Fay would benefit from sharing her thoughts) understand how she fills her days. Fay would like to explain to Janine that she has no thoughts. She is only a mechanism, going through the meaningless rituals over and over every day.

  You’re keeping fit. That’s good, Fay.

  Janine is a great believer in the healing properties of exercise. As if tighter calves or more defined abdominals might help her reach an epiphany. Fay knows better. The running has become a compulsion. King’s Cross to Trafalgar Square without stepping on a single crack. Euston Road to Regent’s Park without thinking of Daisy. The thing is, Daisy is everywhere. Daisy at three; Daisy at six; Daisy dead at twenty-one, stolen away by the Shadowless Man. Children look to their parents to tell them monsters don’t exist. But what if they do? Fay asks herself. What if the monsters were here all along, but only Daisy saw them?

  This is excellent progress, Fay. Any more dreams?

  She shakes her head. There are no dreams she wants to share. Dreams are how this all began. Besides, there’s only one dream that counts. She has it almost every night. She dreams she could have saved Daisy, somehow. That she could have known what was happening.

  It’s not your fault, Janine repeats. There’s nothing else you could have done. Daisy was suffering from a neurological disorder. She was off her medication. There was no way you could have known.

  But that isn’t true. There have always been ways. Secret ways to see the world, through dreams and charms and mysteries. Daisy believed in the power of dreams, though Fay dismissed her fantasies.

  And now, every night, Fay dreams that she arrived in time to save her. That instead of those twenty-four hours she spent in ignorance – watching TV, going to the gym, sitting in the garden and listening to the sound of the birds – she had somehow instinct-ively known. That instead of reading an email, she had guessed by osmosis. And now there is no way to banish the thought: Daisy fell through the pavement cracks. I wasn�
�t there to save her.

  And so she runs. She runs through the pain. When she can no longer run, she walks until she can run again. The pain is like a dark cloud that shows no sign of lifting. People are no more than shadows here. Only the cracks in the pavement are real. Sometimes Fay wonders whether it is she who has slipped through the worlds, somehow. She feels she has become as flat and blank as a piece of paper; trapped between the pages of a continuous narrative, in which Daisy’s death replays over and over, like a fragment of dialogue that no longer has any meaning.

  Once, she might have turned to music to console herself. Music has been at the heart of Fay’s life; music, singing and the stage. It was her husband’s life as well – he was a concert pianist. But Allan Orr is as dead as an empty stage in the moonlight, and Daisy is a silent ghost that music cannot exorcize.

  And so Fay runs – always at night – along the towpath from King’s Cross: or along Euston Road into the West End, Shaftesbury Avenue, Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus. She likes to run in the small hours, when there is no one else around but the homeless people. Barely visible by day, at night, when the the-atres and pubs are closed, when the last Tube home has gone, they come out into the light of the bright shop windows. And there they sit drinking and smoking on the tiled floors by the department stores, wrapped in blankets and bedclothes like children up late on Christmas Eve. Fay feels no urge to speak to them, and yet she feels a kinship. They, too, have slipped through the cracks. They, too, cast no shadow.

  She has no destination in mind. She has no sense of time passing. She feels no sense of achievement at having run so far, so fast. The best she can possibly hope for, she knows, is the oblivion of exhaustion. And so she runs with her backpack through the broad, bare London streets in her running shoes that do not match her leggings or her T-shirt: runs past the displays of jewellery, of toys and household objects; feet pounding the pavement slabs; running, as if from a predator.

  And yet, there is something different tonight. Something in the air, perhaps. She remembers that it is Michaelmas, the end of the harvest season. Even the city knows it somehow, in its ancient, forest heart. The shadows will lengthen after this: the city will swing into darkness. The leaves are already falling fast; there is a change in the sound of the wind. And tonight, the sky is cold and clear, with the full moon standing sentinel.

  There are no stars in London. The city is too bright for their pure, cold light to compete. But the moon is full for the second time this month, and larger than she remembers. They call that a blue moon, she tells herself. She does not recall how she knows this. The blue moon rises above Shaftesbury Avenue, luminous as a jellyfish. She moves to get a better view, and as she does, her foot catches on something. Only on looking down does she realize that the paving stone on which she is standing is cracked right down the middle. For a moment she is still, looking down at the paving stone. It must be a trick of the moonlight, but in that moment it looks as if the stone is illuminated from below; as if there is a crack in the world, through which a light is shining.

  She does not know for how long she stands, pinned by that mysterious light. But it is in that time – seconds, or hours, she does not know – that Fay slips through the crack in the Worlds, into another story.

  Two

  She must have blanked out for a moment, she thought. Wasn’t the blue harvest moon supposed to have magical properties? Fay did not believe in such things. But there was something magical here. She felt it like an ache in her teeth; her mouth was filled with sweetness.

  She looked down, but the light at her feet had been replaced by a shadow so dark that she could not see the ground. The lights from the theatres and billboards were gone, overlaid with darkness. And there was a scent, too; a distant scent of woodsmoke. Woodsmoke, on Shaftesbury Avenue? Looking towards Piccadilly, she saw that all the streetlights were out. On Regent Street; on Coventry Street; around the Shaftesbury fountain. The Coca-Cola sign was dead; and over Piccadilly Circus there was nothing but moonlight…

  A power cut, she told herself. Or maybe a cost-cutting measure. At this time of night, who would even know? And yet it made her uneasy to see the familiar landmarks darkened. It made her imagine all kinds of things hiding in the shadows. She made her way slowly down the street towards Piccadilly Circus. The scent of woodsmoke was stronger now, mingled with something else; a scent of cedar and spices and sandalwood. Looking up, there was another surprise: she could finally see the stars.

  Three

  Her eyes took a minute or two to adjust, but the moonlight was surprisingly bright; bright enough to cast shadows, and the stars formed an astonishing bridge of light, spanning the city skyline. There was no light at all from the streets: no shops, no billboards; no street lamps. Even Centre Point was dark. The power cut must be city-wide. Except for a dim and flickering glow around the entrance to the Tube, a glow that looked like firelight.

  Slowly, Fay moved closer. The scent of smoke was stronger still, making her think of Bonfire Night, and fallen leaves, and fireworks. As she reached the statue of Eros, she saw a group of people huddled around a burning container, which might have been a galvanized pail. They looked like homeless people; their faces bright with reflected fire. Fay counted five; a pale man with long hair; a teenage girl in a wheelchair; a woman in a long coat and two others of ambiguous gender, one slender and purple-haired, the other heavily tattooed, and wearing a patch over one eye. They turned towards her as she approached: even in that moment of calm, they looked ready for battle or flight. They could have been storybook travellers, she thought, sitting around a campfire; pirates, on the deck of a ship; adventurers in a hostile land.

  She raised a hand in greeting. ‘What happened to the lights?’ she said.

  The pale man, who was closest to her, gave her an appraising look. His eyes were dark and pinned with gold, like spinners in the firelight. Looking at the Tube entrance, Fay saw that the gate was open, and there was a haphazard pile of tents all the way down the stairs and beyond.

  Daisy had a tent, she thought: midnight-blue, and embroidered with stars. She used to sleep there in summertime, on a bed of cushions, surrounded by stuffed animals – cats and bears and elephants; tigers and dogs and unicorns. The animals were supposed to stop the Shadowless Man from getting in. But the Shadowless Man always got in. However many mirrors they placed, or animal guardians, or strings of lights. The Shadowless Man would always come, with his sackful of dreams. Fay wondered if she was dreaming now. And she realized, with a little jolt, that for the past ten minutes or so, she had not thought of Daisy at all.

  ‘You’re limping,’ said the pale man. ‘Sit down.’ He indicated a fishing chair set up by the side of the fire pail. His voice was gently accented, but she could not tell the region. Now Fay could see him more clearly, she saw that his dark hair had been shaved along one side and left to grow long on the other. A sickle of diamond studs in one ear gave him a corona of fire.

  ‘What you run for, anyway?’ said the girl in the wheelchair. Her voice, too, was accented – more so than her companion’s – and her face was broad and brown, her eyes as bright as a bird’s. ‘You a fitness freak, or what?’

  Fay shook her head.

  ‘So what do you do?’

  ‘I used to sing.’ It was true, though now it seemed like a story to her, a montage from another life. She remembered singing Daisy to sleep with songs from Assassins and Company: remembered how Daisy slept on the couch in the dressing room at the Palace, or watched her from the wings at the Queen’s, her eyes drowned in reflected lights.

  ‘You famous, then?’ said the girl. ‘Done anything I might’ve heard of?’

  Fay shrugged. That’s what they always ask. They always imagine it’s glamorous. A few stage roles in the West End, back when Allan was alive. Some concert tours, with songs from the shows. There was even a CD or two. Then mostly ensembles, and character parts, then panto and adverts, and audiobooks. Then nothing. It had been years since she sang.
She wondered if she still knew how; what would happen if she tried.

  ‘I quit. I lost my voice,’ she said.

  ‘Too bad,’ said the girl in the wheelchair. ‘Where did it go? Down the back of the sofa, I’ll bet, or over the sea to Norroway.’

  Did she really say that? thought Fay. Or did I just imagine it? Since Daisy died she has been finding it hard to separate dream and reality. Dreams are supposed to be unreal, filled with fantastic details. But now it is reality that seems like make-believe to Fay; a world turned on its head, in which Daisy no longer has a part.

  ‘Quiet, Cobweb,’ said the man. ‘Mind your manners. We have a guest.’ Once more addressing Fay, he said: ‘Don’t mind her. She means no harm. Sit with us awhile, and rest. These are my friends. Cobweb, you met. Here’s Mabs, and over there are Moth and Peronelle.’ He indicated the other two; Moth with the tattoos and the eyepatch; Peronelle with the purple hair. He held out his hand. ‘I’m Alberon.’

  Fay gave her name, and allowed the man to lead her to the fishing chair. His fingers were strong and slender, adorned with many silver rings. And there was a scent that clung to him; something like woodsmoke and spices, a woodland scent somehow, she thought – a world away from Piccadilly Circus. Fay sat down, feeling suddenly tired and dazed. Someone – the woman he called Mabs – handed her a plastic cup of some kind of spirit, hot and harsh, but comforting as it settled. The taste was strangely smoky, but sweet, and it went to Fay’s head almost at once. Mabs poured another shot.

  ‘Drink up. Winter’s in the wings.’

  Fay sipped a little more. She wondered how Alberon and his friends would manage once the weather turned. She had heard of rough sleepers finding their way underneath the city, into the disused Tube stations and under ventilation grates. Was this what they had done? How had they managed to open the gates that led to the Tube station, anyway?

  Mabs reached into the fire pail and lit a skinny cigarette. The scent was both familiar and strange, the smoke as strong as incense. She cupped her hands around it, sending tendrils of smoke around her head. In the light of the fire it was hard to tell her age or ethnicity. Her face was small and sharp-featured, and her long hair might have been white or blonde, arresting against her dark skin. She was wearing a long velvet coat that might have been blue, or purple, or brown; opulent in the firelight, though Fay could see it was ragged and worn. Behind her Moth and Cobweb shared one of those tiny cigarettes, its scent both un-identifiable and tantalizingly familiar.