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Chapter One
Light
Light was woken on the morning of her father's funeral by a pneumatic hiss. She rolled to the side but she was too slow.
Whump.
A heavy steel and glass message tube landed on the duvet above her stomach, knocking the air out of her.
Ow.
Light coughed and spluttered, picking up the tube.
Stupid message system.
Her family had a history of eccentricity, and this was her great-grandfather's contribution: a system of wide brass pipes laid through the house, by which rolled-up notes could be sent from room to room. Subsequent generations had kept the tubes, despite the advent of mobile phones and intercoms. It felt right, somehow, a part of the house's soul. If Light wanted to say something to someone without leaving her room, she simply wrote a message, rolled it up, put it in a tube (there was a pile by her bed for this purpose) and then held it inside the left pipe using the slot provided. Some invisible force she did not understand (science was not Light's forte) would take the tube and whisk it down to the kitchen, or to another room, or to the hall.
Light opened the tube that had just landed on her bed and unrolled the message inside:
Good morning. You'll get through this.
Love, Butler.
Light smiled. Even now that she had moved rooms, Butler always found a way to wake her up in the morning. She had a wing of the house to herself now - something she would have been excited about a few years ago, imagining herself sliding down polished corridors in her socks, and having midnight feasts every night with...well, with Butler, she supposed. But Light found that, with her father gone, the magic had gone out of these dreams.
Light added the message tube to her pile and slid out of bed. The window was covered with a light filigree of frost which formed swirling patterns on the glass. But the morning was bright - late-autumn sunlight played magician's tricks on the world outside, causing patches of the lough to shine like polished silver. Light narrowed her eyes against the glare and peered out at the grounds and the lough - a lake that stretched to the horizon, almost the whole way across Northern Ireland. She was three floors up, at the top of the old mansion, and she could see all the way down to the lush green trees by the shore and the red-brick, crenellated folly one of her ancestors had built. On the seamless surface of the lough, a pair of swans glided sedately. Far away over the water, black clouds boiled.
In the early morning, with the sun shining, Light could just about forget it was her father's funeral today, or at least trick her mind into not thinking of it. She was enjoying the view of the lough and the gardens when something strange caught her eye. Standing together on the lawn below her window was a group of ravens, arranged in a perfect circle. They were big - Light wasn't sure she'd ever seen such big ones, even when she'd visited the Tower of London with her father - but that wasn't the only strange thing about them. They stood perfectly still, as if keeping watch over the house, or waiting for someone within it to come out and meet them. Light stared at them for some time, but they showed no inclination to move, only stood, heads cocked, eyes sharp, as if awaiting instruction.
Light turned away from the window, feeling disconcerted. She took her funeral outfit from the wardrobe - a simple black skirt-suit with a white blouse. She hung the suit on the brass knob on the wardrobe door, then laid her black patent-leather shoes on the floor beneath it. The effect was a little uncanny: as if an invisible girl was standing there. Deciding that her imagination was definitely on overdrive this morning, Light took off her pyjamas and put on the blouse, then shrugged herself into the jacket. She looked at herself in the ornate mirror set into the wardrobe which was a relic of the seventeenth century when the house had been built. Silvery tarnish marked the corners of the mirror, framing Light's face. The contrast between the black fabric and her snow-white hair was startling. Her skin was white and glowing as the moon.
Because Light was an albino, she usually disliked dressing in black, but for the funeral she was making an exception. Putting on the skirt, she thought she looked like a black and white photograph - where her mother and father had been invaded by the colours of the world (the blue of the sky was in her father's eyes, the green of the earth in her mother's) she had been left untouched, white, with only a touch of pink in her eyes. An observer would notice that those eyes were usually shining and intelligent - except occasionally when they would go blank, as if Light was tuning into some private, internal channel.
As satisfied as she would ever be with her appearance, Light took off the funeral outfit again, and put on her usual tracksuit and T-shirt.
The suit was itchy.
It could wait.
She left the room and headed down through the old house to the front door. Given the brightness of the day, she picked up a pair of sunglasses from the hall table to protect her sensitive eyes.
There were no tears, despite the approaching funeral. She was aware that the staff talked about her, that some of them thought she didn't care about her father just because she didn't cry all the time. But Light did care: she simply had to remain strong because at the edge of her mind was a terrible, vacant grief that demanded to be let in. And mixed in with the grief was fear - abject terror at the idea of being left alone. This maelstrom rushed around the borders of Light's consciousness like high-altitude winds, and she was dimly aware that if she let it in, if she cracked open the door of the pressurised plane that was her personality, it would rip apart everything within, pulling it around and out.
Light needed a moment outside before facing anyone. She wanted to delay the start of the day - delay the moment when her father's empty coffin would be lowered into the ground. She opened the heavy front door of the house and stepped out onto the lawn, shivering slightly at the cold. The crows were still standing on the lawn and now they turned to look at her. She frowned at the black birds, unable to remember ever seeing so many of them in one place. As one, silently, the birds flapped their wings and took to the sky, sculpting for a moment a twisted black silk flag that hung, shimmering, in the air, and then flew off over the lough.
Light set out across the lawn - emerald-green and so perfectly flat that you could play croquet on it if you wanted to.
Light didn't.
Before her lay the woods. To her left, the gardens of the estate ran all the way down to Lough Neagh; to her right, they rose until they merged with Mount Carmel, a medium-sized hill with delusions of grandeur. At this time of year, the hill was covered with purple bracken - in combination with the green grass, it reminded Light of a lump on someone's head. Lough Neagh, on her left, was grey and still, vast and foreboding. They said that the lake had just appeared one day, back in the time of the Celts. A flash flood. They said there was a village drowned underneath it, and that on a clear day when the water was still you could see the houses. Light had never seen them.
She walked to the lough and sat down on a rusted iron bench that looked over a grey, pebble beach. The water hung over the stones clear and pale blue, wavering like gas flames. The dark clouds over the lough seemed closer and higher, threatening heavy rain later. To her right and in the distance, Light could see the squat buildings and church spire of the village of Toome. The village had a town hall and an eel fishery, and little else.
It was a beautiful place, Light's home, but it was deathly dull.
Light took a deep breath, preparing herself for the day ahead. In a barely acknowledged part of her mind, the black birds had disturbed her, reminding her of the bizarre circumstances surrounding her father's disappearance. Nearly nine months before, her father had left to go to the Arctic, for research purposes. It had been six months, three weeks and four days since he had last been heard from. He wasn't an amateur, one of those foolhardy explorers who get themselves killed as a short cut to a reputation. In fact, he'd been to the same research station more or less every year since before Light was born, conducting experiments to measure the impact of rising C02 levels on the sea water of the far north.
This time, taking his cue from research which had been done in America, he had packed several cases of iron filings. In theory, dropping these into the sea would increase the plankton population, which in turn would remove carbon dioxide from the water. Sadly, it remained a theory, with no evidence that Light's father had carried out his research. Since his disappearance there had been no emails, no satellite phone conversations. The high frequency Morse code paddle and receiver he had installed in Light's room had gone dead. Worse, his blog entries had ended. Light could no longer turn on her laptop and read her father's musings - could no longer think about the blog, in fact, as the memory seemed to have grown thorns and she could no longer touch it.
After some months had passed, her father's lawyer had recommended declaring him dead. Usually, when someone disappeared, the family had to wait seven years before the law would consider them officially deceased. But in exceptional circumstances an earlier application could be made. Since Neagh House was run - and the salaries of its staff were paid - from Light's father's accounts, the circumstances were deemed sufficiently exceptional. And anyway, the Navy had searched his research station and the surrounding ice. If he was alive, they would have found him.
When death had been declared Butler had become Light's guardian, and the executor of her trust fund - it seemed that her father had drawn up a will and left it in...
