Note: This is my first ever fanfic and it's, um, pretty pretentious to say the least. The title is from Yeats, but there are references to Slaughterhouse Five by the late, great Kurt Vonnegut, Collette's Last of Cheri, and a bit of the old DH Lawrence for good measure. I have a feeling it started with a minor crush on Harry Lloyd as Baines, and kind of snowballed from there.

Away with us he's going

The solemn-eyed.

- W.B. Yeats, The Stolen Child

Being young you have not known

The fool's triumph, nor yet

Love lost as soon as won,

Nor the best labourer dead

And all the sheaves to bind.

What need have you to dread

The monstrous crying of wind?

- W.B. Yeats, To A Child Dancing Upon The Wind

He was on that hill for a long time, and he expected to be there for eternity. The world might change around him, flowers fall, men die, but he would stay. Deep inside him he felt the tiny part that was left of the boy he had taken; an odious boy once, an unthinking, uncaring boy, now only the smallest, dwindling flame of a boy. He did not feel angry. He had, now, what he had wanted all along. There was no need to feel angry.

If anyone ought to feel angry, it was that tiny, dwindling flame, that even now wanted dearly to set all the straw ablaze.

"What do you do when God has gone away?" Eleanor had asked once. They had been out walking, and it was summer, and above them the sky was a hazy violet-blue quite unlike the sharp and painful colour that it was in autumn. They lay together on a blanket in the long grass, and watched the barges move like slow painted swans on the canal. She rested her head in the hollow of his neck.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Oh, you know. The Enlightenment, which they say now was the triumph of reason over all else – it seems bizarre, doesn't it? Voltaire's palpable rage, his anguished despair, at the earthquake in Lisbon and all the horrors of life, is not like the triumph of something so cool and symmetrical. Not at all, to me at any rate. It wasn't a triumph. Voltaire simply realised that he had been abandoned by God. God had gone away. What could he do? Isn't that like you," this last haltingly, "when you think of the war?"

"Yes, of course," he replied. A complete lie, on his part. In the sky, a solitary kite was swooping and crying joyously. He did not feel that God had abandoned him when he thought of the war, but he knew the feeling all the same. He knew that one day he would see the Doctor again, but until then – he was alone.

"Then what will you do, my darling?"

"What Voltaire did, I suppose," he'd said. "I shall go to work in the garden."

He realised then that it was better to have some semblance of doubt than to be certain. He might never see the Doctor again. Since his memories of the future did not contain Eleanor, it was possible that they were not his at all, that they really were figments. This thought, that had been so chilling, suddenly became almost reassuring. For once God is dead, all one can do is to go work in the garden.

Tim was at his desk, writing with his good hand. The right had served him well enough once, but no longer. He could tense it only somewhat, and could not make a fist. He was writing down all of the memories, not chronologically, for they did not appear to him chronologically, so that the sequence became: the light fixture in the hospital, the memorial service, his baby-boyhood in long robes being dandled on a lap, the sound of shelling, the odd and very particular texture of the Norfolk grass filling his mouth as Hutchinson held him down and struck him in the back of the head (had that been the moment when something slipped loose?), mud, thick and suffocating, the memorial service again, the light glinting off a brown eye. After he could do no more with it, he rose and put his coat on.

He was a good-looking, though frail, man in his twenties. He was also a rather peaky-looking boy of fifteen, with large startled eyes and a sunken chest. He was also an old and withered man in the evening of his life. He was also a blond infant.

He opened the door. The air was cold, so he stopped to wind a scarf around his neck, and then left, placing the key under the flowerpot. It was a beautiful autumnal day. He walked up the track on the hill, towards the blue sky.

Tim couldn't say why he had come back here, but Hutchinson was the same. They had picked it over once, without coming to any definite conclusion. "But if I'd not come back here," Hutchinson had said, "I should not have married Jane. And you would not have found your Eleanor." Which was certainly true enough, except for the fact of Tim's uncertainty, the nagging feeling that he had. Eleanor was not in his memories of the future. They were few and far between enough that she might be there, in the gaps, a dutiful wife – for he did foresee a child someday – but he had not yet glimpsed her face. It made him sad. He did not talk to her about it.

Such a vivid day! The wind cast blackbirds, in spirals, across the newly-harvested fields. The blunt, severed stalks did not unsettle him as they would have done a year ago. They did not make accusations or ask questions. He had a corn dolly over the fireplace, its little light body a marvel to him. A year ago he would have wanted to break it in his hands, a futile, childish gesture. Eleanor had no time for futile or childish gestures, and that was why he was going to marry her, because he felt that she had common sense enough for both of them.

A blackbird landed a few yards away. No, not a blackbird, but a crow – he had never been good with perspective. He seemed to see everything pressed into two dimensions, as on a stage backdrop, so that he could never tell a small but immediate danger from a great one that was as yet very far away. The crow hopped along towards him. It opened its beak to emit a few strangled cries. Tim's face was frozen in a grin. He wanted to be light-hearted and smile at the creature, but he couldn't, because it was a carrion bird and they set him on edge. He wondered what Eleanor would say: it was perfectly natural to feel this way. Even men who had not seen what he had seen would feel this way. He need not hear the opening bars of another attack sounding grimly in his head. He grinned and grinned. The bird cocked its head at him, and then suddenly turned and sprang away.

With false jollity, he called after it, "So you want me to follow you, little fellow?"

The crow sprang into the air, but flew close to the ground. He darted after it, teeth gritted, sweat now gathering in the hollow of his back. Under the bright sun everything seemed unreal, and he began to apply a dangerous dream-logic to it all. The crow was leading him to something. He would follow the crow.

Down it led him, down the hill, his heels skidding on the soft soil, until he reached a little hollow in the hillside, and nearly tripped over his feet.

There was a reason for coming back here, one that he had not discussed. When the Thirty Years War had decimated the European soil, had ravaged the crops and scarred the land, there had been nothing to do but to till the earth again. So one drove one's plough over the bones of one's fallen companions, and did all one could to make the soil fertile again. There were precious few men from the village left. He and Hutchinson were not natives, but they must both have felt the creeping sense that they owed something to this place, and the same sadness at the thought of all the unwed maids and empty chairs. Sometimes Tim would fall asleep at his desk, if he had been writing until late the night before, and when he woke he would catch the faintest after-echo in the air, as though, until just a moment before, some very young person had been laughing.

He felt this same sensation when he saw the boy curled in the hollow, in his ragged clothes, with his too-familiar face, evoking everything that Tim had hoped to rid himself of.

"John Smith, a fellow fine,
Cam t' shee a horse o' mine.
Pit a bit upo' the tae,
T' gar the horsie clim' the brae;
Pit a bit upo' the brod,
T' gar the horsie clim' the road;
Pit a bit upo' the heel,
T' gar the horsie trot weel."

He chirruped, as babies will. "Who's a good little boy?" He gurgled. "Yes, a good little boy, you are, aren't you?" Her voice had the lilt of the Hebrides. He liked it on her lap, but she put it him down. "Be a good boy now, for Christine's got to go and run an errand for your Mammy, yes she has." She put him before his playthings, where he sat lumpen and cross, but silent. It was only when she put the little wooden gun in his hand that he started to wail piercingly, and they could not say what had got into him.

"I was just coming to you, Mrs Latimer, ma'am."

"I believe you, Christine. The truth is, he has always been an hysterical child."

He heard the voices above his head but continued to wail. His face was red and snot was flowing from both of his nostrils so that he could hardly breathe, and he made little choked-sounding sobs.

"I din – I don't know what's got into him, ma'am, if you'll forgive my saying, it doesn't seem natural."

"I shouldn't worry, Christine. He only does it to vex us. Leave him, and he'll be quiet soon enough."

The boy sat at the oak table in the kitchen. There were heavy circles around his eyes, which were bright and relatively unchanged. He was still a boy. At the edges of his face, near his hairline, perhaps straying slightly across one cheek, were the little raised bumps of blackheads that had not yet bloomed. There was patchy hair on his chin, and above his mouth. Though confused and hungry and exhausted, his features still had a little of the hauteur that Tim remembered, and that had become so chilling in the hands of another. He was, in short, everything from before. Everything, all of them – his face conjured up all the other faces.

And he was hungry. He ate and ate. Tim gave him a loaf of bread, half of which he consumed with butter and cold beef, the other half of which was smothered with jam that Eleanor had made (in one of her more domestic moments). When he finished the loaf, he began to dig into the jam jar with his long fingers, and force the little globs of raspberry into his mouth, so that Tim leapt up quickly and provided him with a spoon. He drank small beer. He drank a jug of milk. After this he sat and looked at Tim in a way that suggested his hunger had not abated one whit, and cursorily mumbled, "Thank you."

"Baines," Tim said, the word feeling strange on his tongue. As yet he did not question the appearance of this boy, for he was still trapped in the dream-logic. It seemed to make perfect sense that on such a day, with such a cold wind blowing, and a bright blue sky, and the fields harvested of corn, someone might return from the dead. The other thing that prevented him from panicking as much as he might have done was the fact that this was undoubtedly Baines, and if it was not, it was not Son-of-Mine or Brother-of-Mine. What he saw before him was either a human creature or a ghost, but certainly nothing more sinister than that.

Baines nodded. Tim rose from the table and offered him a hand, which he took. When he stood, he was still taller than Tim by an inch or two. But where he was gangly and unformed, Tim was now a man. He knew it, and the knowledge made him melancholy.

They took the stairs slowly, Tim leading, up to the bathroom. The great porcelain bath was cold and empty. Tim returned downstairs for a moment, to fetch the pot of water that he had heated over the fire as they ate. When he returned he saw that Baines was simply standing in the centre of the room, as though he had forgotten everything about what one did in a bathroom. Tim upended the hot water into the bath, where it formed a small sad puddle at the very bottom.

Their eyes met momentarily. With a sigh, Tim went to him and helped him to remove his frock coat – for he was clad in the rags of his uniform. It was unbearable for Tim to even look at it, but he steeled himself, and helped him with the buttons and fixtures that his fingers were no longer familiar with. Kneeling to help him remove his broken shoes, Tim was struck by the look of his feet. They seemed particularly unfortunate.

As the youth climbed into the bath, Tim did not shirk from looking at his naked body. Indeed, he could not stop himself even if he had wanted to. Such a healthy, whole body, with legs that might have been a satyr's haunches for all their mysterious power, a small waist and angelic shoulder blades, was a curious thing. Doubtless such bodies still thrived in many places in the kingdom (for even in his despair, a detached part of Tim noted that the hysteria of others had perhaps exaggerated the damage, that even now it was being reduced to cliché by those who had not felt its sting), but in Tim's mind they had all been twisted and distorted. You are Adam, he thought, as he watched. You are the first man, in this land of crippled shadows.

There was nothing lascivious in his gaze. However, when Baines had crouched down into the bath, he turned and looked over its rim at Tim and said hesitantly, "Latimer?"

"Yes?"

"Would you – would you help me?" he said, and for a moment Tim felt a flicker of something, he knew not what. Of course, Baines was perfectly physically able, but if he was really Baines – if he had spent the best part of a decade imprisoned as Tim believed he had been – he might simply long to be touched by someone. So, not questioning the bizarre logic of this adventure, Tim went and leaned on the cold edge of the bath, and dipped his hands into the hot water, and rubbed the grey soap into a lather. It was a little painful to have to touch this body, to be sure, but he washed Baines' back gently. An odd mixture of scents assailed his sensitive nose. There was the smell of the grey flannel in his hand, the strong antiseptic odour of the soap, and some other component. Baines' body smelled strongly, but not of the usual bodily secretions. Straw was part of it, of course, because there was still straw in his hair. But there was something else, some very wild smell, of fields and crows and soil and the sharp cruel wind, perhaps.

At the base of his neck were a smattering of tiny pink zits threatening to burst into flame. Tim took the pot and dipped it into the water. "Close your eyes," he said gently, and poured it over Baines' head. His hair became a dark smear. Tim again rubbed the soap into a lather, and then mercilessly set about rubbing it into Baines' hair, making his head bob slightly with the motion. When he had washed it out with another potful of water, he stood back, and Baines rose to get out of the bath. Tim thrust a towel at him, but not quickly enough to avoid the sight of a trail of dark hair beneath the boy's navel, that trickled carelessly into a thick thatch between his legs.

Baines rubbed himself dry with the towel, and wrapped it around his shoulders like a cloak. His teeth chattered suddenly and violently, but before he began to get into the clothes laid out for him, he said suddenly, "I'm sorry."

Tim laughed unconvincingly. "Whatever for?"

Eleanor's house was perhaps the oddest that Tim had found himself in. Every surface was painted, had been painted by Eleanor herself, in muddy blues and greens and reds. He could spend an age examining the twin Blakean figures either side of the fireplace, their knotted thighs and placid faces. Between their heads, directly above the fire, was a chalice in which two fish swam; one light, one dark.

He flicked idly through one of her miscellaneous sketchbooks – she absolutely hated his doing that, examining half-finished sketches that he supposed were the visual equivalents of idle thoughts that had not borne fruit. And yet he sensed also that it pleased her. He was permitted to see things that no one else would ever see. He would always say to her:

"Now, what have you been up to?"

"Oh," she would say, and obfuscate for a few minutes, talk about the garden, about the plate she had drawn for some magazine or other, about news from Ireland (she was always alarmingly well-informed).

"Eleanor," he would say then, "you know exactly what I mean."

"Oh," she'd sigh, flustered, "you don't want to see that, I've produced nothing but rubbish…"

And then she would sit by him and knit or clean her brushes while he flipped through it. They would not speak. After the first few times he suspected that she anticipated this request of his and left little messages for him. Once it was a picture entitled 'Jacob and the Angel' (this scrawled beneath it in pencil): two figures, Blakean as was her wont, but one smaller and markedly frailer than the other. The frail figure was supporting the larger figure, whose foot was suggestive both of Byron's clubfoot and the torn tendon in the story that had given its name to the picture – and also of something else. These two figures were alone in a desolate wasteland. He assumed that this meant that she did not mind his friendship with Hutchinson half as much as she pretended to.

This time – he dropped the book.

"What is it?" Eleanor asked with a frown.

He calmly retrieved it from the floor. The page bore a picture of an old man's face, with a large crow-shape tattooed across it, wings spreading blackly beneath his eyes. He didn't know why it had troubled him so. Looking at it again, he realised how ridiculous he had been, and quickly turned the page.

"You are very distracted," she said sadly.

"Am I?" He had hoped he'd been hiding it well.

"I didn't mean just now. I meant always. But that's your cross to bear, my darling." She said this last as though she didn't like the thought at all, and frowned as she said it.

"Maybe it's my 'blood sacrifice'," he said, somewhat spitefully. He knew that upstairs, in the drawer of her dressing table, a mythical land upon which he had discreetly trespassed one afternoon, while she went (naked) downstairs to the larder to fetch them some chocolate, she had a letter that bore the signature of a certain P. Pearse.

"Now I know that whatever disturbs you is serious, Tim, because you try to divert my attention by starting a fight about the letter in my dressing table drawer, when I know perfectly well that you have read it, because you put everything back in the wrong order, and you dropped crumbs all over it." True enough – he had stolen another glance when they had finished eating. "Does it occur to you that Mr Pearse's letter may one day be worthy of exhibition in a museum? Alas, no longer; it bears the chocolate fingerprints of the cautious would-be libertine Timothy Latimer, of whom history will say nothing." She delivered all this in a deadpan tone, without looking at him. Then she looked up with what he realised was excitement – her dark eyes sparkled and her mouth was half-open. "Marry her?" Hutchinson had said bluntly. "Half Alice Liddell, half Maud Gonne…"

The sun was setting outside, and the orange light cast twisted, broken shadows across the room. "Tell me," she said, "is it the war you are thinking of? Or of whatever it was that happened at Farringham School? Tell me, please tell me." She slid out of her chair easily and shuffled on her knees to him, and smiled up at him. "Please tell me," she said.

He had told her once, about a strange Doctor he had known. He had shown her the watch. He told the story insofar as he could allow himself to; there were things that didn't bear mentioning, things that couldn't be explained in terms that would be easily understood. He knew when he told her that the thought crossed her mind that it was all just a figment of his imagination, that it was a story that had arisen when his mind had first been brutally twisted by experience. Yet she was familiar enough with Hutchinson to know that Tim had saved his life (and also to be somewhat jealous of their bond). He hadn't worried too much over it. It was one more thing that he couldn't explain, one more thing that couldn't be verbalised, one more spectre that haunted him. The comedy of the scarecrows' grotesque faces – it was comedy, Grand Guignol, Italian farce, in the light of the things he had seen since. It was still more hilarious in the knowledge of the memory that hadn't happened yet, but which he sensed in the next few decades: of looking at a picture of a box full of wedding rings, more rings than he could imagine, an unbearable multitude. But that memory was yet to come, and so he tucked it away in a dark recess.

After Baines had washed and dressed, in a pair of pyjama trousers and a jumper that Tim's aunt had knitted him under the illusion that, at the age of twenty, he would 'grow into' it, they sat opposite each other at the kitchen table. Eleanor had painted it for him, nothing intimidatingly Bohemian, just a sky blue, with some garlands of flowers here and there. The sun was streaming through the window and the room was the warmest in the house. Baines could sit and drink the best part of a pot of tea while Tim perused his writing. Except that Tim was not perusing his own writing, as he should have been. He was reading "Easter 1916" from the volume that Yeats himself had signed for Eleanor.

Eleanor had told him about this meeting, had spoken of the poet's handsome, distracted appearance. "Not handsome in the way that Byron was, to be sure," she'd said. "But he has eyes that have looked into the other world."

"He cultivates that appearance purely to seduce young women, then," Tim had replied tartly. "All this Irish mysticism – he's as English as you or me." This was one of his favourite ways to irritate her, for she had Irish blood, and some French, and with her dark eyes and hair liked to cultivate an exotic appearance. He suspected, as well, that she was a good deal more involved with Ireland than she liked to say.

"Easter 1916" – Eleanor had explained it to him, all the nuances. He understood it now in the way that most Englishmen, preferring to see it as a paean to violence, could not. He could look at it and see that it was a love letter, to Maud Gonne; he could see the Romantic tug-of-war between the sword and the pen, the pen and the sword. But the reason he was drawn to it just now was the notion contained within it of the stolen child. A children's treasury lay next to it, open at William Allingham's "The Fairies".

He sighed and looked up. Baines was staring morosely into the middle distance, at something Tim couldn't see. It was time to introduce the real waking world, and see if the dream would vanish. "Jeremy," he said kindly.

The somewhat cold blue eyes settled on his face inquisitively.

"I have a few things to see to. I'm going into town to get some more food, and then I'm going to pay a visit to a friend." He did not know why, but something always prevented him from referring to her as his fiancée.

Baines reflected upon this. "Do you want me to go?"

"No," Tim said hurriedly. "No, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to give you that impression at all. I just wanted to warn you."

Baines nodded slowly.

Tim donned his scarf and coat once more and stepped outside into the real world. It was such an eerily calm day that he felt the rest of the town must be dead, but once he'd turned down into the square he was greeted with the usual bustle. He sighed. That was all his bread gone, and the leftover meat from Sunday, upon which he could have subsisted for most of the week by himself. He found himself making odd calculations – how much was it prudent to feed to a ghost who might yet be moving onto some other world? He did not make these calculations as though the boy was real and human.

He passed the village hall, where he had witnessed that fateful tea dance long ago, and saw delightedly that there was to be a meeting of Spiritualists in only a few days time. He might go – he might take his ghost too – and Eleanor would come along, of course, for she had nothing but contempt for the 'knuckle-crackers', as she called them. He walked on to the bakery, and it was there that he saw Joan Redfern.

She smiled at him, but wanly. Tim knew she did not like to talk to him, though she was always polite. People still talked, around the village, about the handsome young teacher at Farringham School who had very nearly made her a wife for a second time, only to wordlessly abandon her.

"Let me help you," Tim said quickly, for she was laden with shopping.

"I'm quite alright," she insisted, moving away. She laughed, a little awkwardly. "How are you, Tim?"

"Ah, I'm keeping well."

"Married yet?"

"Not yet. As soon as we've set a date, I shall let you know." After he said it he felt suddenly awful, as if it were a wounding sort of a thing to say, but she still smiled. "And how are you, Joan?" he asked gently.

"Quite well, yes," she said briskly. She was still a handsome woman, he noticed, and she made him blush. In his youth she had been the only woman at the school, and all of the boys had been somewhat in love with her. Now she had a few streaks of grey in her red-brown hair, but her bright eyes were the same.

When he had first come to the school, he had wet his bed every night for a week. The headmaster prescribed regular beatings to cure him of this. Joan had done something quite untoward; she had hugged him, once, in the infirmary. "Now, Tim," she had said, "the others are brutes, it's true, and it isn't very nice to have to make one's life amongst them. But you must always remember that I have to do the same, and that you and I are in the same boat."

They were still in the same boat.

It was quite a lot of shopping that she had, for a spinster, he thought as he helped her carry it. Her home was not far – couldn't have been far, in such a small town – and as they walked silently he debated whether or not to mention this. She might be losing her wits. Everyone said she was losing her wits. But was he not losing his?

When they reached her door, and he set the things down, he asked casually, "Planning a party?"

She looked at him, puzzled, and then realised. "Oh. Oh, yes, I suppose – a party of sorts. My cousin will be coming up from London, with her little girl, and they do eat an awful lot. Come to think of it, I might have overdone it." She laughed.

He laughed too. "Perhaps you ought to take them to the Spiritualist gathering at the hall, and give them a laugh at the expense of the gullible yokels."

Joan mused upon this rather seriously. "Yes," she said, "you know, I might. Yes, I think that would be rather a good idea."

Tim waited. She would, of course, ask him in for tea. He would decline, but she would ask, as this was the only polite thing to do. But she didn't. She only smiled at him, in an embarrassed manner, until he became so uncomfortable that he nodded to her and offered his hand.

To his surprise, she enfolded him in an embrace, and kissed his cheek. "Oh, Tim," she said haltingly, "you've grown into such a good man."

And with this, she went in.

Baines was still there when he returned. He didn't know what he had expected. He smiled awkwardly at the boy, who gave him a baleful glance.

"I'm sorry," he said softly. "I was bored."

"That's quite all right," Tim said, and went to put the bread in the larder.

Baines said, in the same sorrowful tone, "I read what you were writing, I hope you don't mind."

Tim did mind; his stomach pitched. But he said, "Not at all. I wrote it so that it might be read."

When he looked at Baines again, the boy's face was unreadable. After a moment, he said, "This war – this war that I missed – it was important, wasn't it?"

"It was the worst anyone living has seen," Tim said quietly.

"And you all went. And I was left behind."

Tim sat beside him and examined him carefully. "Would you prefer to have gone?" he asked, with palpable sarcasm.

Baines' face creased as though he had been wounded. "I don't know," he said, "I only know that I wish I hadn't been woken up. Or brought back. Or whatever it is that has happened. I don't want to live in this world, this world that you have described here, and since I am hardly equipped to…" He came, stuttering, to a halt.

Tim thought of letting him know that there were worse tragedies to come, and that he might have the pleasure of experiencing them along with everyone else, if he so wished. But he knew it would be unnecessarily cruel to say such a thing.

"And you think me a stolen child," he said bitterly. "It must seem dreadfully poetic to you. I am nearly a decade behind. Do you wish I had gone, and been crippled and twisted? Do you wish my sleep was ruptured by dreams of mud and agony? Am I an affront to you? Do you loathe me?"

All of those things, Tim wanted to say, but he didn't.

"Do you remember," Baines said, and a most unpleasant smile took hold of his face for a moment. Not an unearthly smile, just the unconscious smile of a bullying schoolboy, that was made horrid by its unconsciousness and the fact that it appeared in the midst of such a serious conversation. "Do you remember the time Hutchinson and I threw you against the wall, and you thought he was going to hit you, so you opened your mouth to say no, and I spat into your mouth? I spat right into your mouth, and the two of us found it so funny, I don't think I shall ever forget the look upon your face."

Tim did remember. It would have irritated him immensely were it not for the fact that he and Hutchinson were now such firm companions.

"Do you see what I mean? Do you see how useless I am? You ought to just snuff me out. No one else has seen me. Kill me, rid yourself of my corpse – it will be like I never existed."

Tim had not realised just how violently he disliked Baines until he found himself considering this. Perhaps before he had not remembered the petty bullying, the beatings meted out by the prefects, the intensity of their disgust for him, which had nothing to do with any external rebellion on his part and everything to do with the fact that they sensed his innate passivism – but this was because it was so insignificant. In the great scheme of things it meant very little. All had suffered, all had been punished, not in accordance with their crimes but simply randomly and without mercy, for such is the way of the world. But Baines had not. And so it was a very inviting thought, and he considered it for some seconds, until the boy made a little movement.

There was a smear of jam on the table, next to Baines' sleeve, and he moved his arm so as not to dirty the jumper. Tim came to himself quickly. He realised that this was a real creature before him, that this really was Baines – and just like anyone else, Baines didn't want to die. Tim knew this because for a long while, that was all he had wanted, or so he'd thought. But the body doesn't want to die. Where the spirit wavers, the flesh is always strong, the lungs always keep breathing, and the heart powers everything and never wants to stop.

"Never do that again," Hutchinson had said. The light fixture in the hospital. They had found him with vomit all over his clothes, his body's refusal to swallow all the pills he had forced into it. Tim had been very placid and had looked at the light fixture, which he had seen many years ago, in his dreams, and he had felt like the light fixture was talking to him. You can't escape that easily. You have a term to serve like anyone else, and you're all the luckier for knowing the length of the sentence and the day of the execution.

"Never do that again," Hutchinson had said, "I won't live in a world without you."

"I have to go out again," Tim reminded his guest. "You wouldn't like a little sleep?"

"I must say, I'm a bit tired," Baines said, and as if to prove his point, he gave a great silent yawn that twisted all his features and opened his jaw wide.

So again Tim led him up the stairs, to the spare room. This was where Hutchinson slept when he stayed, and where Eleanor pretended that she stayed, when in fact she would usually go greedily to Tim's own bed. It was a small but neat room, twice the width of the single bed it contained, with a chest of drawers at the foot of the bed. Above this, on the wall, was a mirror, at the sight of which Baines started back like a frightened cat. Tim went to turn it around, but Baines said quietly, "I'm sorry, but would you mind taking it away altogether?"

Tim acquiesced silently. As he was about to close the door, Baines, who had climbed into the bed and now lay swaddled in the thick sheets and eiderdown, said, "Latimer?"

"Yes?"

"You have really grown a great deal," he said quietly, and Tim closed the door.

Even Tim had trouble with mirrors. If only she didn't look like a little girl, it would be easy not to have any pity.

"What are you doing here?" she whined.

"Go away." He picked up one of the fallen apples, and threw it at her.

She didn't move. "You should be in school," she said accusingly.

"So should you."

"But you're a big boy, and you get to play with guns. My school is silly."

"Go away, Lucy," he snapped irritably. He leaned back against the tree and continued reading.

"If you don't go to school, how will you learn how to shoot the Sambos?"

He winced. "I don't intend to learn any such thing. Go away."

He looked up from his book to see her walking away, backwards, her wide eyes still fixed on him. After a certain point, she turned and ran, her hair in its two pigtails bobbing wildly.

He had to get back quickly, of course. Part of him prayed that the house would be empty – but no, his ghostly visitor was still lying, dead with sleep, in the spare bedroom. Tim lingered awhile in the doorway, then went and sat on the bed. Yes, he was corporeal. His chest rose and fell. His breathing was soft and moist like a child's, which was unsurprising, as he was still a child, Tim supposed. But it was an unbearably innocent sound, that soft intake and exhalation of air. Tim tried not to remember the very young boys that he had seen meet their ends, and failed.

Why this rehashing of the past? This endless reliving? Yet, after the crucifixion, men were said to be living anno domini, and Tim supposed helplessly that they were living now in the Year of the Great War. After the slaughter of one innocent, centuries ago, had come the slaughter of so many innocents that the world had been unthinkably changed. He knew, because the phrase would not leave him, that in time people who had never known such squalor would repeat sadly to one another, "Never such innocence again."

Yet it was not the loss of innocence that was the problem, it was the fact that there was nothing to replace it. There was no wisdom to be gleaned from the experience, the lesson being one that ought to have been learned years ago. Instead there was only appalling squalor, the sense of living as rats lived, of being no better than rats, of being unclean. That was why it was so hard to explain to anyone who had not been there, since they did not have the feeling of having somehow transgressed horribly against their own nature.

He and Hutchinson understood each other, but silently. And whereas Tim had to try very hard not to think of the war at awkward moments with Eleanor, when he kissed her or lay with her, he never had to worry with Hutchinson. They always thought of the war together. It was writ all over their bodies, in their hair, on their teeth, between each lash.

"I can still feel him inside me," Tim said, in front of the mirror. He wasn't sure to whom he addressed this remark. He beamed at his own beer-flushed face, and staggered slightly, regaining his balance with a little hop. He saw that he had a rather raw bite-mark on his neck.

They had been in the pub all afternoon and evening together, and on the way home Hutchinson had stopped him beneath the stars and pointed to something. He mumbled and laughed. His breath misted.

"What?" Tim had asked, and suddenly swayed violently. Hutchinson caught him. They smiled at each other. Then Hutchinson had put a very tender hand at the nape of Tim's neck.

"I can still feel him inside me," Baines said. He was sitting upright in his bed, his expression one of horror. "I didn't want to tell you before, because you might not think it was me. And to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure that it is me. I can't remember what it felt like to be me, before…"

Tim had heard him screaming from the next room, and had rushed through with a candle that was now guttering wildly despite the fact that there was no draft. Tim wished that he had put curtains in this room. The expanse of black outside was too much.

Baines was nearly hysterical. His eyes were like the eyes of a horse that has bolted, an unthinking creature that has seen something it ought not to have seen. "That is to say, I mean, I… before, when it was him, not me, I was like a dream in his mind. And now he is a dream in mine."

Tim shushed him gently.

"And he's so sad," Baines said, "because he almost doesn't exist, because he had what he wanted before, and I took it, or that man, the crow man, took it. And he's so sad because his mother and father are gone, and his sister, his sister…"

"Jeremy," Tim said, taking the boy's hand in his, "I know that it is you. You've had a nightmare."

"How can you know that it's me when I don't know that it's me?"

It was just the sort of question that a child will ask and that an adult cannot reasonably hope to answer.

"And even if it is me," Baines said bitterly, accusingly, "what does that matter? What good am I, exactly? I should either have died, with the rest; or still be trapped, suspended, nothing but a shadow in the mind of – him – the other one."

"So what you're saying," Tim said, slowly, sternly, for it seemed the only possible way to respond, "is that you didn't ask to be born?"

"Bloody hell, Latimer..."

"It's all the same," Tim said. "You are here. You are alive. And aren't you grateful? Don't you just keep gulping down every breath? Of course you do." But Baines was so shaken that Tim leaned close to him and said, in a manner that he hoped was kind, "Don't you think that I feel the same? I still can't understand how it is that I came to be here."

When Tim slept he dreamt that he was in a castle. He was opening the door to a room he was forbidden to enter. He fumbled with the key. When he opened it, he found it empty, but for one thing – there was a crow nailed to the wall, a nail through each of its wings and one through its throat, and it was crying piteously.