The Hidden World

Chapter 8

Maeve paced nervously about the bedroom. 

She yearned for home, for security, even for the prosaic fears of yesterday. She would give a great deal to believe she was insane. Only insane! Insanity seemed a safe and comforting thing now: a mere ailment, to be diagnosed, treated, controlled. There was no escaping this new terror.

Outside, the dim, waiting shapes had returned, though fainter than before, as if discouraged by her show of resistance—or so at least she hoped. Sleep had been impossible. If she closed her eyes, she saw shrouded, faceless figures and the heads of dogs with burning eyes coming through the walls; several times in the night she had started up from her bed, her heart pounding wildly, convinced that they had returned. She had heard the grandfather clock downstairs chime every hour from bedtime to dawn.

It was no use trying to convince herself that the incident had all been in her head, or that her eyes and ears had deceived her. There was no escaping the truth: the attack had really happened. She had certainly screamed; all evening her throat had been raw and her voice was still hoarse from it. Yet her aunt and uncle, one room away, had not heard her. They had not really faded away, nor had the house: it was Maeve who had nearly disappeared, drawn out of her own world into Annwn by the hounds and their sorcerous masters.

She sat down on the bed, her hands clenched together, rocking to and fro. It was all there—in Grandma's book and in her diary—for, of course, it was a diary. Maeve had spent the remainder of the evening poring over the pages, the scribbled notes. I entered the Other-world again today... Princess Gwenlian calls me Jehane now; I told her I didn't care for my name... The fairies gave me a brooch, which they said would take me back to my own place—and back in time too, so that no one here would know how long I have been gone...

Maeve reached out to the cardigan that lay on the quilt, ran her fingers over the bronze brooch that was pinned to it.

Yes, the notebook was plainly a diary, kept in an effort to hold on to Annwn's elusive memory. Maeve picked it up from the small bedside table and flipped through the pages, hoping to find something new, something that could help her. But except for a few name changes, it was the same account Jean had put in her book: the attacks of the Lochlannach sea- raiders, Diarmait and Gwenlian, the quest. By the time of the book's writing, Jean/Jehane had forgotten that her "adventure" was real, and she had used these notes for her story.

It was here in the notebook, and also in the textbooks Maeve had borrowed from Uncle Roy. She looked at them fearfully where they lay piled on the bureau. The translation of the word "Fomori" was there, and descriptions of nemetons and the need-fire ritual... all there. Yet none of these things was to be found in Grandma's notebook or in her story. Nor had Maeve read of them anywhere else. She could not have forgotten such interesting pieces of folklore had she encountered them before, so they had not come from her memory.

They came from outside her mind.

From Annwn.

She snatched up the textbooks and walked quickly down the narrow upstairs hall to her uncle's study. "Thanks for the books, Uncle Roy." She set them down on a chair, then stood hesitantly behind it.

He scarcely glanced up from his own studies. "You're welcome."

She rested both hands on the back of the chair. They were trembling and the palms were damp. "Uncle Roy, do people here really still believe in the"— she caught herself on the verge of saying the Good People —"the fairies?"

He looked up at that. "Well, I've talked to people here in the outports—old-timers, I admit, but healthy, normal people—who swear they've been fairy-led."