Sorry for the posting delay. I thought I would have more time over the summer, and I do. However, I didn't realize that a 9-5 job stuck sitting in front of a computer would pretty much kill any desire I had to spend even more hours in front of a computer updating, especially since this chapter is a bit longer than most. Sorry!
Standard disclaimers apply. Will Stanton and The Dark is Rising series belong to Susan Cooper.
CHAPTER EIGHT
For every up there is a down
For every square there is a round
For every high there is a low
For every to there is a fro
To and fro
Stop and go
That's what makes the world go round
-- The Sword in the Stone, Disney
Peter and Annie had walked up the attic stairs countless times before, but always in broad daylight, when sunbeams streamed through the windows and danced among the dust motes. Now, there was just blackness. Peter raised a hand before his eyes and saw nothing. The smell of dust and cobwebs assaulted his nose, and he felt the abrasive presence of rough wood even through his thick slippers. Annie's hand was clammy, and her fingers clenched at his.
"Will?" he called tentatively into the darkness.
No answer. The only sound was Annie's breath fluttering in the darkness beside him. Peter's stomach began to churn. The darkness was pulling at him, dragging and clawing at the very essence of his body. And then –
Thump! Thud!
Peter jumped and clamped his hand desperately on Annie's shoulder.
"Blast! Stupid, bloody stairs!"
Will's familiar voice cut through the panic like a knife through butter.
Peter sighed and his whole body relaxed. The darkness was growing lighter. By now he could see Will Stanton bending down and rubbing at his big toe in irritation. Annie was giggling. Peter distracted himself from the oddly uproarious sight of a peevish Will Stanton by looking around. Everything seemed different at night. Ever flaw in the wood was glaringly apparent, and the brightness reflected off it's faded yellow surface so that there were no shadows anywhere. It was quite light by now and –
Peter gasped.
He knew well enough that there was no light bulb in the stairwell. It was one of those small projects that his parents kept saying they would accomplish but never seemed to get around to. Just in case, he lifted his head and scanned the ceiling. No, there was no light there. He looked round in confusion. There was no possible place the light could be coming from, except for –
"Will?" he said wonderingly.
The man stopped grimacing and looked at Peter. Upon seeing Peter's shocked expression, all annoyance died from Will's face like a snuffed out candle. He stood up swiftly and shook out his foot. He turned around and once more began heading up the stairs.
"Come on," he ordered sharply.
Peter and Annie glanced at each other and followed without protest. Halfway up the stairs, Annie pulled again at Peter's cloak. Carefully, he lowered his head so that she could whisper in his ear.
"Do you see it too, Peter?"
"Yes."
"He's glowing."
There was no doubt about it. Will Stanton, trudging up the steps before them, was shedding a gentle illumination from the folds of his blue cloak. Looking closely, Peter could see that the light came from a small intricate pattern of lines and curlicues that ran all over the material. It must be some new kind of synthetic material that trapped light, he thought, like glow-in-the-dark t-shirts.
They emerged into the attic, dimly lit by two small windows at either end. The cavernous room bulged with the furniture of previous occupants. Huge piles of books and clothes and boxes towered on all sides. Draped over the larger piles were white sheets that gleamed in the moonlight, creating an alien landscape rather than the hoard of potential treasure that they had plundered so cheerfully (and unsuccessfully) when they first arrived.
Will walked purposefully across the room and opened the hatch that led out onto the balcony, a narrow, fenced-in shelf that perched upon the Davies' slanted roof. Peter followed, puzzled, for he hadn't known that Will knew about the tiny, hidden-away place. The children had ignored it since the novelty of the thing had worn off, for it was old and rickety, and so small that there was standing room only. It collected leaves in the fall and pollen in the spring, and since the view was hardly spectacular, Peter had only been driven there once or twice in his more desperate searches for solitude.
The squeezed through after Will and surfaced into the winter night. A full moon sailed overhead, washing the snow-covered landscape in mystery. Everything was silvery beautiful and quiet.
Will Stanton was standing right up against the center of the railing, his back immovable and his arms folded across his chest. Whatever light his cloak had been shedding was now faded, and his still figure was a dark slash across the sky. The Davies children hung back, watching as he wordlessly stared into the winter night.
"Shut the door, children," Will's voice came at last.
Peter turned and gently let the hatch fall shut behind him. It was only when he felt his fingers slip along the ice-encrusted handle that he realized that he felt no cold within the cloak that Will had given him, although the balcony was snow-covered and the air had that sharp, below freezing bite. He felt the bite, but not the chill. It was an odd sensation.
"Come stand next to me, one of you on each side."
They joined Will at the railing's edge.
"Now watch. And do not be frightened."
With those words, Will Stanton raised his arms to the sky and shouted a strange word Peter had never heard before.
Annie gasped.
Every light on the street had, without warning, been extinguished. And it wasn't only their street. Peter could see darkness stretching as far as he could look in every direction. There was no dim glow coming from downtown Wraithfell, and even the orange horizon haze from the distant metropolis had vanished. Everything was dark, black, except for the blazing immensity of the full moon hanging above their heads. Peter watched it in fascination. It had never appeared so large or bright before.
Then he frowned.
At first he thought he was imagining it. He squeezed his eyes shut and looked again. But it was still there, wavering at the edges of the bright disc: a black, oozing cloud that wasn't a cloud at all, but something that moved with viscous fluidity across the moon's surface. It stretched out over the great light like an oil slick on water, dimming the moon's radiance. For the first time Peter felt a chill – one that had nothing to do with the cold – sweep through his frame.
"Will, what's that? What's happening?" he asked quietly, voice strained.
There was no answer for several seconds. When Will finally responded, his voice was artificially calm, as if he were merely appraising a particularly nasty and complicated math problem.
"That, children, is the Dark."
From the other side of Will's shadowy form, Peter heard Annie's voice, tight and grim.
"I don't like it. It's horrible!"
"Then let us not watch it anymore!" Will said. He deliberately turned his back on the night sky and away from the oily blackness. The streetlamps flared back into life, washing out the sky with their glow. With one last, fearfully fascinated glance at the now rapidly fading black shadow, Peter followed Will's example and turned so that he faced the shingles of the Davies' roof.
Annie was watching Will with a look of comprehension on her face. "That was it, wasn't it?" she asked bluntly. "That's what's making all these bad things happen."
Will looked down at her with wary eyes. "Part of it, yes. But not everything. Not the most important thing."
"What do you mean?" Peter asked, his voice breaking on the last note. His hands were trembling, and he clenched them inside his sleeves to keep Will from noticing. "Did you bring us here just to show us that? What was it? You drag us from bed in the middle of the night to go rooftop stargazing in Star Wars cloaks, and then you show us . . . that?!"
"Yes, Peter, that's why I brought you two here tonight. And I told you what it was: it's the Dark."
"What the hell's the dark?"
Will's hooded head gazed at him, and Peter shivered when those strange, distant eyes fell on his face. This wasn't Will, but a complete stranger, some fanatic alien creature rather than the amiable man who had dangled him on his knees as a baby and who had driven all the way from Buckinghamshire to hear his third grade harp recital. Gazing fearfully at the stranger, Peter could come to no conclusion other than that Will Stanton had become, suddenly and irrevocably, absolutely insane.
But then Will ran a hand roughly over his face and sighed. When he looked back at Peter he was Will again, nothing more than a staid, middle-aged lit professor who spent hours translating ancient texts.
"The Dark is . . . the Dark," Will said slowly. "It'll be harder for you to understand this than Annie, Peter, and it's because you're almost an adult. If you were a few years older you would have pitched me off the roof by now. And you would have thought you were doing it for my own good, too. It's so hard to explain. The best I can do, I guess, is to put it in practical terms that are easy for you to understand."
"Such as?"
"You're a budding mathematician, Peter. Do you know anything about binary code?"
Peter blinked. The last thing he had expected to come from Will's mouth was computer theory. "Of course I'm familiar with it," he said scornfully. "It's a basic computer programming construct that uses only 0s and 1s. Zero means there is an electrical current, and 1 means there is no current. It's kinda like . . . like the 1s are 'no's and the 0s are 'yes's. A positive and a negative. You can have a complete language with only those two things."
"And are you familiar with Newton's Third Law?"
"Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. That's easy. What does all this have to do with anything?"
"The Dark, Peter, is something like your binary code '1.' It's the ultimate negative. The impulse to destroy, negate."
Annie's little voice was strangely stern. "It's evil. That's what you mean."
"It's more than just evil, dear. Evil presupposes the capacity to be good. The Dark lacks that capacity. There is nothing within it but emptiness, a great yearning black pit. To put in perhaps in other scientific terms, it's an absolute vacuum."
"Or, I should rather say, was a complete vacuum. What you just saw wasn't the full strength of the Dark. That's a sight that shall never again be seen by human eyes. The cloud you saw was merely a shadow of the substance, a physical manifestation of the resonance that remained when the Dark left this world forever."
"Left it forever?"
"Yes, Peter. The Dark has been driven out and may never enter this world again. But while it was here it was able to do a great many things, including establish itself in human hearts. Whenever a person abandoned themselves to fury, began to hate without reason and to scorn the idea of love, it opened a channel through which the Dark was able to work. And even though the Dark is now banished, it left behind these traces of itself the way a retreating army buries hidden mines that explode and kill their pursuers. It survived because it had been welcomed into and hidden inside human hearts."
"I don't understand. Are you saying that that black goo made Muscharch do what he did? That it's inside him?"
"Don't be so literal, Peter," Annie scoffed. "I think I know what Will means."
Will looked troubled. "'Made' him? No, I wouldn't say that. Persuaded him, perhaps." He grinned suddenly. "And our job is to un-persuade him."
Peter studied Will. The man's face was smooth and young, his voice low and fervent. He remembered the stranger who had looked out at him from Will's eyes. He choose his next words carefully, not entirely sure what he was asking.
"You asked me a minute ago if I was familiar with Newton's Third Law."
Will's eyes flicked over to him. "Yes?"
"Newton's Third Law says that every action has an equal and opposite reaction."
"Yes."
"So if there is a Dark . . . there must be a Light. The ultimate negation must have an ultimate affirmation. Something that is beyond good, just as the Dark is beyond evil." Peter stared levelly at his father's friend.
Will grinned. "Well done, Peter."
Peter's head spun. Who . . . what was Will?
"Give me your hands, children. There's something I want to show you."
Will extended his left hand to Peter and his right to Annie. Annie grasped Will's hand without hesitation and looked expectantly at her brother. Peter dared not refuse the command. But something inside him balked, panicked, refused to go forward into a new world that he knew would tear apart his old. Hesitantly, he reached his palm out.
Without warning, Will's hand darted forward and grabbed his own in a vice- like grip.
And Peter's whole world exploded.
Standard disclaimers apply. Will Stanton and The Dark is Rising series belong to Susan Cooper.
CHAPTER EIGHT
For every up there is a down
For every square there is a round
For every high there is a low
For every to there is a fro
To and fro
Stop and go
That's what makes the world go round
-- The Sword in the Stone, Disney
Peter and Annie had walked up the attic stairs countless times before, but always in broad daylight, when sunbeams streamed through the windows and danced among the dust motes. Now, there was just blackness. Peter raised a hand before his eyes and saw nothing. The smell of dust and cobwebs assaulted his nose, and he felt the abrasive presence of rough wood even through his thick slippers. Annie's hand was clammy, and her fingers clenched at his.
"Will?" he called tentatively into the darkness.
No answer. The only sound was Annie's breath fluttering in the darkness beside him. Peter's stomach began to churn. The darkness was pulling at him, dragging and clawing at the very essence of his body. And then –
Thump! Thud!
Peter jumped and clamped his hand desperately on Annie's shoulder.
"Blast! Stupid, bloody stairs!"
Will's familiar voice cut through the panic like a knife through butter.
Peter sighed and his whole body relaxed. The darkness was growing lighter. By now he could see Will Stanton bending down and rubbing at his big toe in irritation. Annie was giggling. Peter distracted himself from the oddly uproarious sight of a peevish Will Stanton by looking around. Everything seemed different at night. Ever flaw in the wood was glaringly apparent, and the brightness reflected off it's faded yellow surface so that there were no shadows anywhere. It was quite light by now and –
Peter gasped.
He knew well enough that there was no light bulb in the stairwell. It was one of those small projects that his parents kept saying they would accomplish but never seemed to get around to. Just in case, he lifted his head and scanned the ceiling. No, there was no light there. He looked round in confusion. There was no possible place the light could be coming from, except for –
"Will?" he said wonderingly.
The man stopped grimacing and looked at Peter. Upon seeing Peter's shocked expression, all annoyance died from Will's face like a snuffed out candle. He stood up swiftly and shook out his foot. He turned around and once more began heading up the stairs.
"Come on," he ordered sharply.
Peter and Annie glanced at each other and followed without protest. Halfway up the stairs, Annie pulled again at Peter's cloak. Carefully, he lowered his head so that she could whisper in his ear.
"Do you see it too, Peter?"
"Yes."
"He's glowing."
There was no doubt about it. Will Stanton, trudging up the steps before them, was shedding a gentle illumination from the folds of his blue cloak. Looking closely, Peter could see that the light came from a small intricate pattern of lines and curlicues that ran all over the material. It must be some new kind of synthetic material that trapped light, he thought, like glow-in-the-dark t-shirts.
They emerged into the attic, dimly lit by two small windows at either end. The cavernous room bulged with the furniture of previous occupants. Huge piles of books and clothes and boxes towered on all sides. Draped over the larger piles were white sheets that gleamed in the moonlight, creating an alien landscape rather than the hoard of potential treasure that they had plundered so cheerfully (and unsuccessfully) when they first arrived.
Will walked purposefully across the room and opened the hatch that led out onto the balcony, a narrow, fenced-in shelf that perched upon the Davies' slanted roof. Peter followed, puzzled, for he hadn't known that Will knew about the tiny, hidden-away place. The children had ignored it since the novelty of the thing had worn off, for it was old and rickety, and so small that there was standing room only. It collected leaves in the fall and pollen in the spring, and since the view was hardly spectacular, Peter had only been driven there once or twice in his more desperate searches for solitude.
The squeezed through after Will and surfaced into the winter night. A full moon sailed overhead, washing the snow-covered landscape in mystery. Everything was silvery beautiful and quiet.
Will Stanton was standing right up against the center of the railing, his back immovable and his arms folded across his chest. Whatever light his cloak had been shedding was now faded, and his still figure was a dark slash across the sky. The Davies children hung back, watching as he wordlessly stared into the winter night.
"Shut the door, children," Will's voice came at last.
Peter turned and gently let the hatch fall shut behind him. It was only when he felt his fingers slip along the ice-encrusted handle that he realized that he felt no cold within the cloak that Will had given him, although the balcony was snow-covered and the air had that sharp, below freezing bite. He felt the bite, but not the chill. It was an odd sensation.
"Come stand next to me, one of you on each side."
They joined Will at the railing's edge.
"Now watch. And do not be frightened."
With those words, Will Stanton raised his arms to the sky and shouted a strange word Peter had never heard before.
Annie gasped.
Every light on the street had, without warning, been extinguished. And it wasn't only their street. Peter could see darkness stretching as far as he could look in every direction. There was no dim glow coming from downtown Wraithfell, and even the orange horizon haze from the distant metropolis had vanished. Everything was dark, black, except for the blazing immensity of the full moon hanging above their heads. Peter watched it in fascination. It had never appeared so large or bright before.
Then he frowned.
At first he thought he was imagining it. He squeezed his eyes shut and looked again. But it was still there, wavering at the edges of the bright disc: a black, oozing cloud that wasn't a cloud at all, but something that moved with viscous fluidity across the moon's surface. It stretched out over the great light like an oil slick on water, dimming the moon's radiance. For the first time Peter felt a chill – one that had nothing to do with the cold – sweep through his frame.
"Will, what's that? What's happening?" he asked quietly, voice strained.
There was no answer for several seconds. When Will finally responded, his voice was artificially calm, as if he were merely appraising a particularly nasty and complicated math problem.
"That, children, is the Dark."
From the other side of Will's shadowy form, Peter heard Annie's voice, tight and grim.
"I don't like it. It's horrible!"
"Then let us not watch it anymore!" Will said. He deliberately turned his back on the night sky and away from the oily blackness. The streetlamps flared back into life, washing out the sky with their glow. With one last, fearfully fascinated glance at the now rapidly fading black shadow, Peter followed Will's example and turned so that he faced the shingles of the Davies' roof.
Annie was watching Will with a look of comprehension on her face. "That was it, wasn't it?" she asked bluntly. "That's what's making all these bad things happen."
Will looked down at her with wary eyes. "Part of it, yes. But not everything. Not the most important thing."
"What do you mean?" Peter asked, his voice breaking on the last note. His hands were trembling, and he clenched them inside his sleeves to keep Will from noticing. "Did you bring us here just to show us that? What was it? You drag us from bed in the middle of the night to go rooftop stargazing in Star Wars cloaks, and then you show us . . . that?!"
"Yes, Peter, that's why I brought you two here tonight. And I told you what it was: it's the Dark."
"What the hell's the dark?"
Will's hooded head gazed at him, and Peter shivered when those strange, distant eyes fell on his face. This wasn't Will, but a complete stranger, some fanatic alien creature rather than the amiable man who had dangled him on his knees as a baby and who had driven all the way from Buckinghamshire to hear his third grade harp recital. Gazing fearfully at the stranger, Peter could come to no conclusion other than that Will Stanton had become, suddenly and irrevocably, absolutely insane.
But then Will ran a hand roughly over his face and sighed. When he looked back at Peter he was Will again, nothing more than a staid, middle-aged lit professor who spent hours translating ancient texts.
"The Dark is . . . the Dark," Will said slowly. "It'll be harder for you to understand this than Annie, Peter, and it's because you're almost an adult. If you were a few years older you would have pitched me off the roof by now. And you would have thought you were doing it for my own good, too. It's so hard to explain. The best I can do, I guess, is to put it in practical terms that are easy for you to understand."
"Such as?"
"You're a budding mathematician, Peter. Do you know anything about binary code?"
Peter blinked. The last thing he had expected to come from Will's mouth was computer theory. "Of course I'm familiar with it," he said scornfully. "It's a basic computer programming construct that uses only 0s and 1s. Zero means there is an electrical current, and 1 means there is no current. It's kinda like . . . like the 1s are 'no's and the 0s are 'yes's. A positive and a negative. You can have a complete language with only those two things."
"And are you familiar with Newton's Third Law?"
"Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. That's easy. What does all this have to do with anything?"
"The Dark, Peter, is something like your binary code '1.' It's the ultimate negative. The impulse to destroy, negate."
Annie's little voice was strangely stern. "It's evil. That's what you mean."
"It's more than just evil, dear. Evil presupposes the capacity to be good. The Dark lacks that capacity. There is nothing within it but emptiness, a great yearning black pit. To put in perhaps in other scientific terms, it's an absolute vacuum."
"Or, I should rather say, was a complete vacuum. What you just saw wasn't the full strength of the Dark. That's a sight that shall never again be seen by human eyes. The cloud you saw was merely a shadow of the substance, a physical manifestation of the resonance that remained when the Dark left this world forever."
"Left it forever?"
"Yes, Peter. The Dark has been driven out and may never enter this world again. But while it was here it was able to do a great many things, including establish itself in human hearts. Whenever a person abandoned themselves to fury, began to hate without reason and to scorn the idea of love, it opened a channel through which the Dark was able to work. And even though the Dark is now banished, it left behind these traces of itself the way a retreating army buries hidden mines that explode and kill their pursuers. It survived because it had been welcomed into and hidden inside human hearts."
"I don't understand. Are you saying that that black goo made Muscharch do what he did? That it's inside him?"
"Don't be so literal, Peter," Annie scoffed. "I think I know what Will means."
Will looked troubled. "'Made' him? No, I wouldn't say that. Persuaded him, perhaps." He grinned suddenly. "And our job is to un-persuade him."
Peter studied Will. The man's face was smooth and young, his voice low and fervent. He remembered the stranger who had looked out at him from Will's eyes. He choose his next words carefully, not entirely sure what he was asking.
"You asked me a minute ago if I was familiar with Newton's Third Law."
Will's eyes flicked over to him. "Yes?"
"Newton's Third Law says that every action has an equal and opposite reaction."
"Yes."
"So if there is a Dark . . . there must be a Light. The ultimate negation must have an ultimate affirmation. Something that is beyond good, just as the Dark is beyond evil." Peter stared levelly at his father's friend.
Will grinned. "Well done, Peter."
Peter's head spun. Who . . . what was Will?
"Give me your hands, children. There's something I want to show you."
Will extended his left hand to Peter and his right to Annie. Annie grasped Will's hand without hesitation and looked expectantly at her brother. Peter dared not refuse the command. But something inside him balked, panicked, refused to go forward into a new world that he knew would tear apart his old. Hesitantly, he reached his palm out.
Without warning, Will's hand darted forward and grabbed his own in a vice- like grip.
And Peter's whole world exploded.