His gaze fell on two large pale eyes.
They peered out at him from the blackness of the forest, just paces away. There was a rustle of leaves and a shifting of shadows and then the cruel snout of the beast emerged into the clearing. It had wide gashes across its face and Sylas could just make out that it was carrying one of its paws off the ground as though injured. Nevertheless its huge frame looked more powerful and terrifying than ever. Its greasy fur flew up around it as the breeze became a wind that whistled between the broken limbs of the trees.
Sylas felt a chill in his bones, but, to his surprise, there was no panic. He turned his eyes from the hound to the bell, which was now crashing through the forest, gathering pace as it went, sending twigs, leaves and branches flying through the air in all directions. And suddenly, as the wind became deafening and swept the air from his lungs, he felt entirely calm.
He was only dimly aware of the hound crouching back on its haunches, preparing to pounce; he did not see the forest buckling under the raging power of the bell; he saw only the bell itself – its radiance, its perfect glistening surface; its vast mysterious message depicted in runes about its rim. As it glided towards him and the wind became a hurricane, its beauty filled his vision and stirred a new emotion in him, an emotion that was so unexpected, so out of place that at first he did not recognise it.
Joy. A pure, overwhelming, wonderful joy that filled his heart, grew like a sob in his chest and made him want to cry out.
And, as the wind ripped at his clothes, as the beast launched into the air, he reached out to touch the approaching bell.
Then he heard Mr Zhi’s voice in his head.
“You have nothing to fear.”
“It seems that Nature welcomes their very touch, bending to their will not because it must, but because their will is its own.”
Her palm was warm on the back of his hand, and he could feel her fingers pressed between his. He looked down and saw their hands clasped together: her delicate white skin a sharp contrast to his own grubby wrist. He had always loved her hands. They were so fine and gentle that he sometimes felt he should not touch them. When they were at work, moving in confident sweeps across the paper as she drafted graphs, equations, diagrams, they had all the elegance of her creations, all the beauty of her brilliant mind.
He pulled his eyes away and looked ahead at the sunlight that danced brightly on rippling water and in that moment he was aware of a warmth that he had forgotten. He tried to look beyond the beautiful radiance, but the light dazzled him. He tried to shift his feet, but they seemed distant and numb. All he could see was the light, and all he could feel was her hand on his. He wanted more than this – he wanted to speak with her – so he turned to look into her face.
Sylas woke with a start. The warmth that had felt so real just moments before disappeared and in its place he felt the dull ache of a chill in his limbs. His arms were splayed wide and he pulled them across his chest to try to warm himself, but they only pressed his damp clothes to his skin, making him gasp. All that was left of sleep disappeared and his mind began to clear.
His first thoughts were of the beautiful bell, tearing through the forest towards him, sending branches flying in its path. Then he recalled falling backwards, unbalanced by the great wind that had risen before it. But he could not remember landing, or the bell reaching him, or anything since, except his dream. Something else filled his thoughts: a growing unease that gradually formed a picture in his mind – a picture of the beast. He could see it clearly: its glaring eyes, its jaws gaping wide, its filthy claws outstretched as it launched itself towards him.
He forced his eyes open and saw a blackness so complete that he would have thought them still closed were it not for the dim light at the very edges of his vision. Ignoring the stiffness in his neck, he turned his head and saw that, sure enough, there was a line of blue-grey light through which he could just make out the angular shapes of broken branches and twigs, some silhouetted, some dimly lit. He turned his head the other way and there too was the strange strip of light. As he craned to see more, his rucksack pressed into his back and he shifted to ease the discomfort, but a sharp pain ran across his shoulders, making him groan.
The groan echoed back.
His heart quickened and he held his breath. “Hello?” he said in a husky voice.
The word echoed back to him, then again, and again. The voice was his own, but the sound was cold, metallic and hollow. His mind flew back to the chase, the factory, the woods, the clearing – and the bell. Pushing himself up into a sitting position, he glanced around at the wide circle of light and for the first time he understood.
He was under the bell.
He seemed to be lying at the very centre of the bell’s massive black shadow. The light at its edge, which he had at first thought to be a thin strip, was in fact a gap of at least his own height between the bell and the ground. The darkness made him uneasy and, glancing about for signs of movement, he heaved himself to his feet among the broken branches, wincing as his weight fell on his sore knee.
He began to make his way towards the light, choosing the easiest path through the undergrowth. The sound of snapping twigs and crunching leaves echoed eerily around him, setting his nerves on edge. His eyes scoured the darkness for any sign of the beast, lingering on ragged silhouettes that looked all too much like angular shoulders or crouching haunches. But nothing stirred beneath the bell.
Sylas drew near the light and he paused, squinting into the gloom. Ahead of him he saw the pathway of mangled trees stretching off into the distance, bordered on both sides by the forest. It was as he remembered from the previous night, but there was one difference: it bore a strange, wintry cloak that was quite wrong on a July morning. Many of the trees had lost their leaves and were dusted with a white frost; a cold mist hung low over the ground and his breath formed clouds in the air, which drifted upwards to join the featureless grey sky. Everything was still and silent – there was no wind, no chime of the bell, not even the call of birds in the trees.
Sylas peered left and right, then stepped out from under the bell and into the light. A new edge to the chill made his teeth chatter, and he gathered the collar of his jacket round his neck as he picked his way through twigs and branches. He stopped next to the stump of a great old oak, which now sent spears of broken wood into the sky where its canopy had once been. He turned and leaned back against it, slowly raising his eyes.
There, just paces away and rising to a point high above the treetops, was the perfectly smooth polished surface of the bell.
It was an unusual shape for a bell, resembling a gigantic golden teardrop. It had a dark circular opening at its base, bordered by a fluted lip bearing the runes that he had seen the previous evening. Above, its great curving sides bowed outwards in gleaming arcs and soared to an astonishing height before tapering inwards at the top. Here the bell narrowed and narrowed until, at the highest reaches, it came to a bright ring of gleaming metal. Sylas found himself peering above to see what supported the great weight of the bell, but there was nothing. It was as if it was suspended in the air itself.
He looked back down at the band of vast Ravel Runes etched deeply into the shiny surface. He stared at them long and hard, moving his eyes from one to the next, hoping that in some way they might work together to form a message: something to explain what was happening. As he gazed at them, he had the strange sense that they were familiar, that he may even have seen this sequence before.
A pheasant suddenly crashed through a bush to his right, launched into the air and flew across the clearing, clucking with each