So this was Will…  The Will whom Lyra had only mentioned in passing.  I'd thought that was because he was someone she only knew casually; someone who was not important to her (or so I'd hoped).  Now I realised her apparent lack of interest meant the exact opposite of that, and just how much they meant to one another.

Lyra dabbed her face with her handkerchief, opened the door, and got out of the car, her feet squelching over the wet morning grass. Will had stepped back to give her room and was standing a few feet from the side of the car, his face frozen, his son John standing by his side.

A hush fell over us all, in that bright summer's morning with the newly risen sun shining through the trees at the edge of the field and the sleepy cows beginning to stir around us.  I couldn't see Lyra's face as she slowly walked over to Will.  I can't begin to imagine how she must have appeared to him.  A devil?  An angel?  Or something else altogether?

She stopped a foot in front of him and raised her right hand.  It was bunched up into a fist.  She drew it back and hit Will on the left shoulder, hard.  She struck him again and again and again.  He stood with his arms hanging down by his side, absorbing every blow, his face still impassive.

'I know how to make omelettes now.  I'm very good at it.'  Thump.  Thump. Thump.  She was hitting him with both fists now, harder and harder.  'Shall I show you?  Shall I?'

Will found his voice, though it was little more than a croak.  'I wish you would.  I'd like to try one.'

'Peter!  You!'  It was Arthur.  'Come here!'  The boy ran round to the other side of the car, his cat-daemon in his arms, and we got out and joined him.

'Let's go for a little walk, shall we?'

We turned away from them then, not looking back, not wanting to see them (though I can imagine the scene in my mind's eye now, over and over again; the coming together, the embrace, the tears), not wanting to hear any of the things they said to each other (the softly spoken words), walking and walking and walking until we had crossed two fields and, all of a sudden, found ourselves standing by the towpath of the canal, facing the opposite bank.  With a low gurgling in its wake an early-starting boat passed us; a pleasure boat full of people on holiday, their children running up and down the deck and waving at us, mother at the tiller and father down below, cooking breakfast no doubt.

'Amateurs!' snorted Arthur.  We all laughed.

Will and Lyra found us sitting on the canal bank.  They were more composed, but with my heightened senses (for as I said, my alethiometry training included the development of my observational skills) I could tell that their meeting had been a thing both wonderful and terrible for them.  I shouldn't have known it, there was no reason why I should have even considered it, but it was instantly clear to me that their meeting, joyful and long-awaited as it was, contained its own nemesis within itself, as the best of men have the potential to do terrible deeds.

Their parting.

They would have to part again; I knew it as soon as I saw them, but I knew not how I knew.

While were waiting for Lyra and Will, Arthur, John and I had found that we had no wish to talk.  We were aware that something of great significance had happened – was happening – and words seemed wrong, somehow, like, oh, belching in the Oratory during Divine Observance.

Were they holding hands?  I can't remember.  I know that, in some way, an aura surrounded them, and it was a blessing to stand within sight of it.  Their daemons were running together by their feet as they crossed the field and joined us by the bank of the canal.  Their faces were animated – they radiated joy.  The air crackled with it.

'First things first.'  Will was a powerful-looking man and his voice was deep and resonant.  'Let's get that car out of sight.'

The car was stuck in the mud.  Its wheels were pushed up into the tops of their arches and I guessed that the car's undercarriage had been damaged by our inexplicable fall.  Not that that was the only inexplicable part of the situation we found ourselves in.  Where was the house?  And where were the garage, and Miss Morley, and that poor bereft boy?  How far had we travelled, while the universe had been, for all I knew, switched off?

Will had a rugged-looking vehicle with big wheels and a high ground clearance.  He drove it into the field from the lane beyond and attached a wire rope to the Boreal's car's front axle.  Will's own car must have been very powerful as, while making very little noise itself, it dragged the Boreal car, creaking and clanking, up the sloping field and onto the lane with no effort at all.

With Arthur at the tiller of Miss Morley's car and the rest of us standing by the side of the hedgerow Will towed it away into the distance, Lyra's eyes following him all the way.  He returned a few minutes later and leaned out of the open window.

'We've dumped it in the wood, a mile and a half down that way.'  He pointed.  'Towards Banbury.'

Banbury!  So, wherever we were, there was a place called Banbury.  Perhaps I could get used to being here after all.

After a while, I wasn't so sure.  Remember, Jim, that we'd had nothing to eat for hours and hours.  John took a packet of cheese sandwiches from a cubby-hole in the car's floor and passed them around, and we drank hot kaffee from mugs that were made of some warm flexible material – it wasn't delft, that's for sure.  I stood looking over the countryside around us and ate and drank gratefully.  Then we all piled into the car and drove off.

I've been on trains, and autobuses too, so I knew all about being driven about in wheeled vehicles.  But this was something else!  Will drove carefully enough, so far as I could tell.  What bothered me was just the speed at which he drove, and the number and closeness of the other cars (all of them oddly shaped and brightly coloured) and the incredible size of the roads, much wider than they were at home.  It wasn't long before the motion of the vehicle was making me feel pretty queasy.

John tried to distract me from my discomfort by chatting to me as we drove along.  He introduced me to his Persian-daemon Rosalind and Viola said hello to him.  I noticed that he was wearing a silver earring in his left ear and asked him about it.  No boy I knew wore an earring – he would have been laughed at, or beaten up for being a queer.

'Oh, you mean my phone!  Yes, anybody can wear an earring if they want, but all my friends wear their phones in their ears.  It's so handy.'  I didn't understand what he was saying, so I let it drop.

The fields and hedges that had flown by us at first had given way to houses and manufactories, and eventually I could tell that we were approaching a big city.  To my horror, although the cars surrounding us were nearer and going faster than ever, Will took his hands off the car's controls and turned his seat around to face John, Arthur and me, where we sat in the back.  Lyra's seat spun round as well.

'We're on auto,' Will said, and smiled.  ('The car's driving itself.  Don't worry, we won't crash!' John said in my right ear.)

I should say that the car had a clock – a most peculiar clock, fitted in the roof above the windscreen.  It had no hands, just four green glowing numerals that changed with the time.  It read 08:13.  I wondered how it worked and where the mechanism was.

'We're about, oh, car, how far?'

'Eleven minutes from home.'  A pleasant female voice came from nowhere.

'Thank you, car.  Eleven minutes away, then.  I've called Judy and she's waiting for us.  In the meantime; welcome Arthur and Sal, Peter and Viola.  I can't tell you how wonderful it is to see you here in my world.  And Lyra and Pan too, of course.'  Lyra looked down and clasped his right hand in hers.  Beside me, John frowned.

'I need to tell you, Peter and Arthur especially, a few important things about this world that you have found yourself in.  Lyra's been here before, so she knows more about it than you do.

'First and most important – your daemons.  Fortunately, Sal and Viola have both taken forms that are common in this world.  That is fortunate, because you must keep them inconspicuous, or hidden.  Most people here do not have daemons. Rather, they do, but they are internal daemons, and not visible.  I have Kirjava,' he stroked his beautiful cat-daemon's back, 'and John has his Rosalind, and Judy has her Skaven, in jackdaw-form.  We are very unusual in that respect.  I know only one other person in this world who is aware of her daemon, and you will be meeting her tomorrow.'

'Mary!'  Lyra cried out.  'You didn't tell me!'  I thought she was going to start hitting Will again.

'Let me keep some surprises back for you!'

The car drove itself into the garage of Will's house (not large, standing in a road of other houses very like it) and we filed out of it and through a door that led into the kitchen.  Will's wife Judy was there to meet us.

You know how it is when you have relatives to stay?  You're looking forward to seeing them, you like them, and you're going to enjoy having them around.  But, at the same time, there're worries and, that word again, undercurrents which, especially if you're a chap like me you pick up and which can spoil things, more or less.  I could tell straight away that Mrs Parry was determined to do her best to like Lyra, but there were many things that had happened in the past that made it difficult for her, and for Lyra too.

John tried to explain it to me later that day (or the day after) as we lay in his room with the lights out; him in his bed and me tucked into in a funny kind of cloth bag on a low mattress (they called it a "futon") on the floor next to it.

'Dad and Lyra; they met when they were younger than us, and then they had to separate from each other.  The way he talks about it, they had the most amazing adventures together, and they fell in love, (I knew that by then, but John's words still chilled my heart) but then they had to break up again, for the good of everyone, he says.  Having her turn up out of the blue like this is really giving Mum problems.  You do know that this is a different world from the one you were born in, don't you?'

'Yes.'

'They couldn't stay together, in the same world.  You can't – you die if you stay too long away from your home.

'It was around the time that Mum and Dad started going out together that somehow, they, Lyra and Dad I mean, found a way to talk to each other again, across the gap between the worlds.  It seems there'd been a promise made to them that, if they tried hard enough, they'd be able to do that.  I don't think Mum enjoys that much, either.   They talk in their sleep – it's like lucid dreaming, he says.

'There was something else, too.  They were all mixed up in – they won't tell me exactly how – the Culham Incident.'

'What was that?'

'It happened about the same time as everything else.  A fusion reactor near Oxford exploded, and they were quite close to it.  The way they tell it to us at school it was the most incredible thing.  It shouldn't have happened at all.  That sort of reactor shouldn't have been able to blow up like that.'

Like a lot of the things John Parry told me I only understood every third word he said – and that was when I was doing well…

'There was a lot of energy given off, but something else happened too.  The laws of the universe changed, just a little.'

'What?'

'Some numbers, physical constants they're called, changed.  Things that hadn't worked before, like fusion reactors, started working, although nobody had altered anything in their construction.  Some other things stopped working altogether.  There were people killed by faulty electronics – computers that crashed, that sort of thing.'

'I see.' (I didn't).

'What do you think they're talking about down there?'  Even though John's clock (more glowing figures, on the ceiling this time) said 02:33, we could hear the low hum of adult voices coming up from downstairs.

'Old times, I expect.  They're all pretty old, after all!'  Even Lyra.  I changed the subject quickly.

'What was that game we were playing?'

'Resident Evil XXIII?'

'I mean the one with all the, what-do-you-call-them, zombies.'

'That's it.'

'Can we have another go?'

'Of course.'  John threw me a headset and I clipped it to my temples as he'd shown me before.

'Game?'

'Yes John?'

'Savegame sixty-eight.  Engage!'

The virtual world that the games machine threw us into was no stranger than the one I was already in.  It was such a relief that it didn't matter the way real life did.