Swan on the Moor

Chapter 16

The first sensation that assaulted Aine's senses was music; a low, steady hum, edged with pain, as if something that sang for joy every moment of its life was hurting, but could not for a moment bear to stop the song. Over the top of the music she heard a loud groan, which prompted her to realise the ache in her own muscles and wince.

"Ow," she said, with feeling, and an assenting grunt came from her left. Reluctantly, she opened her eyes, and immediately wished she hadn't as a blaze of light hit them. She winced again and shielded her eyes, waiting for them to become accustomed to the glare, then very slowly let her eyelids unclench to take stock of her surroundings.

Wherever she was, it wasn't Dartmoor. She remembered...looking at the menhir...a shock on touching Jessie's hand...a feeling of absolute bliss...then waking up here. And it was...bizarre.

On first impression, it was a corridor, such as could have been taken from any stately home, stretching off as far as Aine could focus; apparently endless. The walls were hung with tapestries, flickering candles in gold brackets – no, not candles, now she came to think about it, something quite different, almost alive and independent of the untouched wax on which it sat – and old, old portraits of beings that could have stepped from a fairy tale. The one closest to her was wearing heavy brocade and flowers in her hair, and her face was fine boned, subtly inhuman. Her skin was a very faint violet colour, and her hair flowed out of the reach of the canvas, rippling down her shoulders and back like a stream. It was black, but also tinged with purple. Her eyes were huge in her narrow face, and a bright, vivid green. Aine wanted to reach out and touch her, stroke a finger down the painted cheek, flushed a deeper indigo. The woman's eyes were strangely sad.

There were doors dotted every few paces on each side, each slightly different but carved in the same heavy oak, inlaid with gold and silver. No windows. The first word that jumped into her mind was underground. They were in a cave, somewhere; a strange, ornate underground mansion, built by some eccentric

billionaire (from what she had gleaned of the rich, they were all slightly mad). She lowered her gaze to the floor, which accounted for the pain and brightness. It was gold, liquid gold, undulating under her feet, making her slightly dizzy. It seemed almost out of place with the somewhat organic nature of the rest of the corridor. The walls, although presumably painted from the little she could see uncovered by artwork, had the bumpy ridged pattern of earthworks, something she was familiar with from her own hideaways, which had occasionally been bequeathed from a badger or a fox and once cleaned, served as a winter hidey-hole. There was a rich earthy scent in the air, although it had a faint tone of sticky rot. She wrinkled her nose. In fact, now she came to study it, the corridor itself, for all its luxury, had a faint air of deterioration, of going faintly to seed. The corners of the tapestries were fading and unthreading. The doors looked a little battered. The only thing that was truly perfect was the river of blinding gold beneath her, leaking on down the corridor into the darkness beyond. The flickering things in the brackets trembled and seemed to whisper on the cusp of her hearing.

"What is that sound?" a pained voice came again from her left, and Aine remembered, Jessie! She wasn't here alone. She remembered the woman's hand tightening on her shoulder before the world faded out, an anchor to reality for a moment before the light took her.

"Jessie?" she said, turning, to find the woman trying to prop herself up on a column sitting almost incongruously next to a door. Grapes wound up the marble, withering at the top. Jessie hauled herself to her feet, eyes screwed up.

"That noise! How can you stand it?" she mumbled, clapping her hands over her ears. Aine looked at her in consternation. It wasn't that loud...invasive, certainly, but not unbearable.

"It sort of grows on you," she said, hurrying over to help Jessie stand upright. The woman's brown eyes flicked up and down the hallway, and the same confusion entered them as had surely entered Aine's a few minutes ago.