1.

Thor half expected the bridge to rattle, but the train was too fast for that. It crossed the channel like a wind that barely gave him time to look down at the sea. Mjoll had told him that was fine, he wouldn't want to look down anyway, but Mjoll, as usual, was wrong. Why would he not want to look at the sea when he was coming to live beside it? Even in the rain – especially – Thor thought – in the rain, the sea was incredible. A wild living thing such as he had never seen in all his life. He had never seen anything beyond the grey of Megacity France, not since he was small and had visited the Lower England Isles with his parents.

He did not want to think about his parents. He was done mourning his father and had felt like more than half of it had been a lie anyway. And his mother. He wanted to believe her when she said she had no problem with his going. He wanted to believe her so hard it was best not to think about it. He looked down at the sea instead, in the little time he had; it was churning and grey and black and oily green and he knew when he got off the train that the rain would be almost impossibly warm.

A disembodied voice cut out of his thoughts telling him that this was Dover, last stop, all to disembark. He wondered why she said disembark. A hangover from the days when this station had been a harbour for boats perhaps. He liked the sound of it, archaic and welcoming.

The station was depressing though, even more than he remembered from twenty years ago. The shadowed underpasses and the disused kiosks reeked of an old sadness, desperation and awful hope. Thor remembered his history; five hundred years ago thousands upon thousands had scrambled to enter England from this spot. Back in the days when Kent was still attached to the rest of Britain by land. He could almost hear the desperation, the clamouring and the terrible quiet, people hiding in vans like livestock, hoping beyond hope not to be found. He was too sensitive, his mother had always said so; the idea, the memories that were not his hurt him.

Now, as he disembarked, only a handful came with him. Maybe a dozen. Nobody could afford the trains or to live outside the megacities. Nobody beyond the painfully rich. Few even wanted to.

He had always wanted to. He supposed that made him strange. He stood for a moment, befuddled beneath the underpass, wondering how he had come such an immense distance in such a short space of time. The trains were so fast he had barely had time to think. Luckily before he could try, he heard a voice yelling and eventually realised it was to him –

"Thor! THOR! HEY THOR!" He turned around frowning – "You gonna stand there all day?"

All of a sudden Mjoll was in his space; she had clearly been running and the sudden appearance of her right up in his face was her equivalent of a hug, he could feel the warmth of it radiating from her face. Or it may have been the rain. It ran down her face from the inside of her hood, and trickled down her jacket shiny as down a window.

"What's happening with your bags and shit?"

"Oh –" it occurred to Thor for the first time that his whole lifetime of luggage had to be unloaded. His mother had helped him load it. He wasn't, he realised, very sure of how this worked. Luckily Mjoll was yelling again and, now, with a guy he didn't recognise was getting his cases from the train. She handed him one, took one, left the newcomer to head off ahead with the other two and punched him lightly on the arm –

"Did you just need help with the bags or is there a doctor's note I ought to see? Come on Thor, Heimdall's loading up the car."

Thor trotted after her, to where the only visible car was parked, the man – Heimdall he supposed – loading up the boot.

"Yeah," Mjoll was saying – "It's the only car on the island. Heimdall drives anyone who wants to be driven anywhere – I'll give you his number. He's also the caretaker at Chistleworth, he'll drive you up there, I'm gonna jump out at the village so you can do all that on your own. Don't wanna get in your way."

Thor was aware that he was frowning at her stupidly, his brain trying to catch up with the strange words like caretaker and village.

"Culture shock," Mjoll was saying now. "Am I right? Either that or you're the only person I know can get like jet lag from a train. Or you're more special than I remember. I know –" she nodded, suddenly taking a dramatic swerve into empathy – "I remember."

She squeezed Thor's hand as they got in the back of the taxi, told him, obscurely, that it ran on vegetable oil and then shut up abruptly to give him peace for the rest of the journey.

Thor supposed it was culture shock. Certainly the green and the stone and the trees that they passed, heading out of Dover, were like nothing the megacity had to offer. Mjoll re-surfaced briefly to point out the ruins of Dover castle to him and then went quiet again. After that they cut across the island, leaving the sea behind for some half hour of country driving. It was amazing to Thor to see, but he realised that ten minutes in he was smiling. There were leaves on some of the trees here, and hedgerows and there was real weather. Even the rain pleased him. It was all so incredible he could not begin to describe it yet. At one point he looked up and Mjoll was looking at him, she smiled to see him smile in a way he knew meant I know right?! He smiled back.

At the first sign of houses the car slowed down and Mjoll got out.

"You want I can come up the house tomorrow and see you?"

"Yeah," Thor figured it was perfect actually – the first night in his very own place on his very own and then company the next day. She had known that too of course. She always knew him without asking or even needing to guess. He supposed that was why they were friends.

As they drove on again, Thor began to feel the strangeness of Heimdall's silence. He opened his mouth several times to break, it but not knowing what to say fell silent again. And then it was only ten minutes driving, out of the village and swinging round onto the clifftop before they reached the house.

"Chistleworth," Heimdall said as he put Thor's cases down on the gravel. He looked at Thor curiously and nodded in a way that made Thor very much want to know what he was thinking.

"Thank –y-" Thor began, but the car was already gone.

Just for a moment, Thor put his head back and let the rain fall onto his face. You couldn't do that back home without getting scars from the water. He even went as far as daring to put out his tongue and taste it. To his amazement it tasted like water. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He looked towards the sea, maybe some thirty metres down from the house, sloping brown green cliff top and scrubby trees. Then he looked back at the house.

It was not pretty. But Thor had not been hoping for pretty. He had been hoping, he realised without having known it, for exactly this. This ramshackle, solitary house that had quite clearly once been pretty. The trees that grew alongside the gravel path, as he headed up to the green door, were stunted but somehow alive. Thor supposed it was the rain. The heat never got less, even here, but the rain was real and vital and, he supposed, could actually make things grow.

Thor clutched the large, carved key that had been in his pocket the whole time. He had already studied it for hours. It was unlike any key he had ever seen; metal, not a plastic disc, with crenulations like teeth at the top and a metal ring at the base. He tentatively touched his own front door. A little dry leafy paint came away on his fingers. To the right was a stone plaque crusted with chalk and salt that read CH-ST-R-H H—SE. He started to make notes in his head of all the things that he would have, he supposed, a life time to get fixed and make bright again. His heart rose to the challenge.

When he put the old key in the lock, he expected to have a challenge already in getting it to turn. But almost as soon as he moved it there was a click and the door swung open as though someone were pulling it from inside.

In truth it felt to Thor as though someone really had exerted pressure from within to open the door and it swung not with a creak but with a sigh that sounded almost human. It was a sigh of immense relief, and as Thor stepped into the house for the first time he could feel the whole place tremble with that sigh. He could almost catch in it a whispered word. The whole place seemed to glow with it, seemed alive.

So completely did Thor feel that he was not alone that, foolish though he felt as he turned on the hall light, he called out softly –

"Hello? Is there someone there?"

He was holding his breath in wait and the house held its breath with him.

Because there was. They both knew that there was.

_x_