‘Fix them yourself.’

‘Pig!’

‘Children, don’t bicker tonight. I’ve got enough to cope with feeding James and getting the meal ready without you two going on at each other.’

Beth finished laying the table.

‘I’ll go upstairs and get changed now,’ she called through to the kitchen, ‘so that Daddy can take me to the dance as soon as we’ve had the meal.’

‘All right, dear. I’ve ironed your new dress; it’s over the back of the chair in your room. Don’t be too long; Daddy should be home any minute.’

The girl walked across to the open wooden staircase which ran up one side of the little room. She loved this room; this was the old room, the one that had always been here ever since she could remember, unlike the new room at the end which had been built as part of an extension to the house four years ago and which, although it had been designed to be in keeping with the rest, she had never taken to as being a part of it. It was too well-planned and neat. But the old one seemed to have grown out of the earth itself and she never felt shut in inside it because it gave her the feeling of being outside in the woods. When the winds blew and the rain poured down on winter evenings she felt as if she were underground, and the rough and gnarled black oak beams in the ceiling which glimmered in the firelight were the roots of a large tree. Even when her restless moods were on her she felt content here and would often sit alone, reading, when the others had gone through to the new room to watch television. The magic of the books she read seemed to be intensified by the room with its flickering shadows and atmosphere of secret history.

Beth had reached the stairs and was about to start climbing them when her eye was caught by a movement through the window in the wall behind the stairs. She stopped and bent her face to the glass to look outside. There, to her disbelief, was the face which had grown so familiar to her in her dreams, the face of the boy from the stream. She closed her eyes, counted to ten and opened them again to make sure it wasn’t a dream but the face was still there, looking at her, the smouldering eyes searching into her soul. Now the dream had become reality and she felt strangely calm for she had been with the boy so often in her dreams it was as if she had known him for a long time. This was a moment she had lived through on countless occasions in the twilit world she had been inhabiting, so she knew exactly what she would do.

Outside, Nab was a mass of doubts and uncertainty. He had been to the first window and when he had seen no one in that room he had moved cautiously along to this and had been standing watching Beth for quite some time while she set the table. At the sight of her again, he had been unable to do anything except stare, transfixed, as she moved around the room. She was of course older than that spring day when he had first seen her and she had begun to acquire a grace and delicacy in the way she moved which captivated him; the way her hair flowed around her face as she walked and the way she tucked the sides behind her ears so that it would not get in the way when she bent her head to put the cutlery on the table; the way she had folded her arms when she called upstairs and the way her lips had set when the voice came back down; and the way she had stood talking to her mother with both her hands tucked in the back pockets of her jeans. There were a hundred little mannerisms, indefinable and unconscious, all of which came together to weave a spell under which Nab became entranced so that when she looked through the window and he knew she had seen him he was unable to think what he should do. Then he remembered the ring and he fumbled under the layers of his garments until he found the second locket on the belt. With hands that were shaking in confusion he pushed the catch, the top sprang open and he placed his two first fingers inside to draw it out.

When she saw the boy delicately hold out the ring to her on a hand that was dark and seamed with use Beth knew without any doubts that she had to go with him. It shone with the colours of an autumn morning, just as she had seen it in the dreams. She looked up at the boy’s anxious face and their eyes met. She knew he was nervous and tense, as he had been when they first met. He stood there, ragged and wild, the breeze gently moving the layers of bark that hung around him and blowing his hair over his face so that only his eyes were uncovered. He was as a wild animal; the tension in his body filling him with the energy which is at the source of life itself, magnetic and powerful, his entire being tuned to the rhythms of the earth and the sky. At the same time his eyes, which burned so desperately into hers, were full of sadness and mistrust, of constant persecution, but deep within them was an anger, the perception of which frightened Beth, so resolute and enormous did it appear. ‘I would not like to be the cause of that anger,’ she thought to herself. ‘It would destroy the world.’ She did not know it and neither did Nab but what she was seeing was the fury of Ashgaroth.

Their eyes held each other for a long time and, because it was the only way they could communicate, worlds passed between them. Suddenly Beth became vaguely aware of her mother calling from the kitchen. It sounded far away as if it came through a room filled with cottonwool but Nab heard it and his face froze with tension.

He watched her, through the window, as she called something to her mother; then she turned back to him and placing her finger over her lips in the universal gesture of silence she pointed up the stairs and then down again, and then out to him.

While Nab was thinking about this she began to climb the stairs and he then realized what she had meant. He crouched down under the window up against the back wall to wait for her.

Beth passed the door to her brother’s room and opened the door to her own which was next to it along the corridor. Thankfully she closed it behind her and went to sit on the bed for a minute or two to gather her thoughts. Now that the boy was no longer in front of her she began to wonder again whether it was just one of her dreams; even if it was not, was she mad to think of running away on this freezing snowy night with a boy whom she had known for no longer than ten minutes in her whole life. And the boy! The more she thought about it the more incredible did the idea seem. Every possible rational argument was against it and there was no way in which she could logically justify what she was thinking of doing. Then she remembered the ring and somehow the thought of it filled her with a strange feeling of security. That had been no mere coincidence; neither had it been part of a dream. Something was calling her and she had to go; what it was she did not know but that it was there she could not doubt. There was no real choice, for if she did not go she would be unable to live with herself for the rest of her life.

With her mind resolved into certainty she began to think about what she should take with her. She got up and went over to her little dressing table in the corner and ran her hands slowly along the front edge and then, when they reached the two corners, back along the sides until they came to the wall. She loved this dressing table; it had been given to her last Christmas and was the first big thing of her very own that she had ever had. She sat at it for hours, staring into the mirror and thinking about everything and nothing. At the front was a small crocheted woollen mat that had been made for her by her grandmother and given to her last birthday, and along the back and sides were all her bric-a-brac and personal things; bottles of different types of perfume and scent, hairslides, tubes of make-up, bottles of nail varnish. In the middle was a wooden jewellery box, made for her by her father when she was a little girl; she opened it sadly and looked at the jumble of rings, bracelets and necklaces that spilled over the edges on to the surface of the dressing table. Pushed into the frame around the mirror were rows of little photographs; some were with friends from school and there was a column of four that had been taken with a boy she had known. He was the son of some friends of her parents and had taken her a few months ago to see a film in the city, miles away. When they had come out he had taken her to a restaurant and they had had a meal with some friends of his. She had learnt a lot about herself that day and had lain awake in bed all night, thinking. In this way, as she looked at all the things on the dressing table, fragments and images of the past flashed through her mind.