Stella had asked this once a day since late November, rather as another child might ask for Christmas. “I’ve told you, Stella. It’s nearly here. Another couple of days and it should be visible.” I said it kindly; I could understand her excitement. The name of the comet was Akiyama-Maki, and it was discovered in 1964 by a pair of Japanese astronomers. It is a Great Comet, a popular name for a very bright visitor to the skies, and it is thought to be one of the Kreutz sungrazers, the remnants of a big comet that broke up in the 1100s. Astronomy was still my job, and I’d been looking forward to this winter visitor for some months—there was something about a comet, a kind of celestial magic all of its own, which had fascinated me ever since I was a boy. So I could see why Stella kept asking, even though the comet wasn’t the first thing on my mind. Other visitations were taking precedence.

“So, we’ll see it soon?” Stella pestered.

“Yes. Not long now.”

After dinner we sank into a Sabbath somnolence with the Sunday papers and early nights all around; the girls were back to school the following morning. I wanted to listen to a radio play, which ended about ten; switching it off along with the light, I fell asleep quickly. When I awoke, I was disoriented. It was very dark. I’d left the curtains open, but there was nothing visible beyond the window: no stars, no moon, not even the lights of the farms scattered across the valley. It was that which alerted me to the fact that something was awry with the world. There is always a light somewhere, a small orange token of human life.

I clambered out of bed and went to the window, stood staring out. The darkness was all encompassing. We’re not that close to any big cities, but there’s a faint glow where Bristol lies to the north; that wasn’t visible, either. I thought it might be fog—we’re prone to mist in these parts, especially in winter—so I pushed the window up to see. A thin, curling tendril of darkness made its way into the room, as if questing. I shut the window damn quick after that. And then I heard it again.

Help him.

After a while, in magic, the messages start to stack up; you’d have to be really clueless to ignore them. The flame, the woman, the dark.

“All right,” I said aloud. “All right.”

It’s hard to feel heroic in a dressing gown and slippers, but the voice was whispering, insistent. I went through the door, and the house had changed. Instead of the carpeted, picture-lined corridor, there was a passage of stone, a rough, porous substance like pumice. I touched it and snatched my hand away; it burned with cold. I took a few experimental steps. My feet, in their old man’s slippers, did not freeze, but the air around me felt constricted, as if there wasn’t enough of it. At the end of the passage, encased in rock, stood my study door. I reached it and pushed it open.

Things happen that should make you die. There was a veil of white fire. I fell back, shielding my eyes. The fire flared and vanished. The door reached onto open space. Seizing the doorframe, I tottered on the edge of a black void, standing now on curving ice. It was moving, almost too fast for me to take it in. Stars whisked by, and I looked up to see a streaming cloud, the colors of an unnatural fire.

Help him!

A tiny voice, imperious, compelling.

“What the hell are you?”

He is dreaming! Wake him!

The colors were coalescing. As I stared, a figure started to form, made out of cascading light. I started shaking. I knew that I was in the presence of death, not the normal end to my life, which, at seventy, could not be that far away, but something which strove to wipe me out, as one might remove a speck of dust from a sheet of glass. It reached out a hand, long finger and thumb ready to pinch, and I felt it touch the edge of my soul, which shriveled.

Then fear overcame me and I slammed the door shut, knees trembling. It took all my strength, as though a vacuum were sucking the door open.

“Granddad? Are you all right?” Serena was standing on the landing. The pictures were back on the cream-papered walls; everything was still and normal and midnighty. In her white nightgown, with her blond hair, Serena looked like a small, pale ghost.

“Yes. Thought I heard something. In the study. Nothing there.” My sentences stuttered out as if I were a puppet.

“Oh, okay.” Serena looked reassured. “Maybe the window catch is loose. It’s really windy out there now. You didn’t shut one of the cats in, did you?”

“I—yes, possibly. Anyway, everything’s all right.” Paternalism was coming to the fore now. Mustn’t worry the girls. “You hop back into bed—you’ll get cold.”

She nodded and vanished into her own room. I staggered back to mine and collapsed on the bed to stare into space—except it wasn’t space, just air and the ceiling. I’d seen space, many times, and it didn’t look like this. What an odd expression that was … But I’d witnessed it from observatories, traveling the world, when I was attached to universities: mountaintop places in the quiet nights, star-staring. I’d never seen it up close and personal, and I didn’t think I wanted to do that again.

Because I thought I knew where I’d just been. I knew what comets looked like.

I didn’t think I’d end up talking to one, though. But had I been? Or was that pale figure something else? If it was on the comet, how could its messenger appear in an English churchyard? Talking to me made a little more sense, magician/astronomer as I was. Yet I had no idea what I was supposed to do about it. What about the woman on the landing? Was she connected? Visitations often come in clusters. I mulled all this over until a chilly dawn began to creep around the curtains, and then I went down to the kitchen and made some tea. I took it back to the study, and I don’t mind confessing that I had a bad moment when I opened the door. But there the room was, the usual bookcases and muddle. No black depths of space, no icy void. I released a breath and stepped through the door. I wanted to look up Akiyama-Maki.

Google gave me the basics, which I already knew. What was niggling at the back of my mind was when the comet had appeared before. We knew it had been named in 1964, but a lot of these comets turned out to be “the great comet of 1569” or somesuch, and given the woman’s apparently Elizabethan costume, I wanted to see just what had been visible in the heavens during the old queen’s reign. Not exactly a precise science; I’d only caught a glimpse of her, after all. I leafed through one of the older books on celestial phenomena and found seven comets during the period of 1558 to 1603. Most of these were known. It should be possible to work Akiyama-Maki’s path backward, so I did some calculations, and it had appeared within that window: in 1571.

I closed the book and looked up. The woman was standing in the doorway. She regarded me gravely. Her lips moved, but I couldn’t hear her voice. Her skin was very pale, and there were lights moving within it; it was then that I knew she wasn’t human, not a ghost. But what was she? A spirit, surely. She looked as though she was standing in a breeze, tendrils of black hair drifting out from her elaborate coiffure, and the dark green skirts of her gown rippled, the heavy silk like water. Emeralds glinted around her throat, above the spikes of her ruff. She held out her hand to me, offering a sprig of sage. Its spicy, late-summer scent filled the room. A moment later, she winked out, as if she had never been. I was left sitting over the book, my mouth open.

I spent that afternoon looking through my library, searching for a sign of her. I failed to find it. We’d lived here a long time, the Fallows, and this is our story: the men in our family don’t do so well. The house had been built by a woman: Lady Elinor Dark, who was widowed and married a Fallow. The names in the family tree interweave through one another: Dark, Fallow, Fortune, Lovelace. The women run the house—formidable chatelaines with hoops of keys, dreamy poetesses, stout orchard wives. The men die young, or simply fade. I am an exception. I’ve never been sure what I’ve done to deserve this honor. My granddaughters all have different fathers: no shame in that, post 1960s. None of them have stuck around.

Moonecote is not a mansion. It was conceived as a farmer’s house, and over the years it grew, but not very much. Elinor’s portrait hangs on the stairs; she has an oval Elizabethan face, like an egg. I’m sure she wasn’t that bland. She does not wear emeralds, nor does she dress in green. She bore little resemblance to the black-haired woman who had just visited me. So who was the latter, then? What could her connection to the comet be? It made me nervous of going onto the landing, but I did. No one was there.

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