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trainers.
    “Sit down and I’ll show you,” said Kate and proceeded to teach her how to tie a shoelace. Erda watched once, then did it perfectly.
    “Good,” said Kate, smiling.
    “Good,” said Erda and smiled back.
    “Where are you from, Erda?” asked David.
    She put her head to one side as though she was listening.
    “I don’t know. Everywhere.”
    Kate tried another tack. “How long have you been here?”
    “Since I woke up in the garden.”
    “A few days?”
    “A few days.”
    Kate wasn’t sure if it was an answer or if Erda was just repeating her words.
    “It’s just that we thought we remembered seeing you once before, but it was eighteen months ago and you weren’t here then, were you?”
    “I wasn’t here then.”
    Kate bent to look in the oven. The pizza was nearly ready. She and David busied themselves with plates and cutlery for a minute, Erda watching them curiously.
    “I saw you out there,” she said suddenly. Kate looked up. “When the man pushed me outside. You were both there.”

THE RIGHT TIME
    Five times now they had stepped into the pool and emerged from the cave to find day or night or twilight; a ruined chapel and a city spread before them, or bare hillside and the distant flickering fires, and each time it had been only seconds before Morgan muttered, “No. He’s here, but not now.”
    For two days they had waited as the sky in the little pool changed and changed again, venturing out into the Wildwood to rest or eat, for it seemed impossible to do either in the briar glade.
    Morgan prodded the sleeping Thomas with the toe of his boot and got to his feet. “It’s a while since we looked. We ought to check.” Thomas nodded, not properly awake, and followed him yawning.
    The sky in the pool was the washed, clear blue that comes after rain, wisps of white cloud trailing across it like tattered banners.
    Thomas looked at Morgan expectantly. He sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe it’ll be different if we go through. I can’t tell from here.”
    They clasped hands and stepped …
    … through, into a morning that smelled of spring and green things growing. Thomas looked around and saw a chapel on the slope in front of them, not ruined this time, but whole, and recently built by the look of it.
    “Well, it’s a different …” he began, turning to speak to Morgan, stopping as he saw his face.
    “He’s here.
Now
. We’ve found the right time.”
    Thomas let a slow breath out. “Can you tell where?”
    “That way.” Morgan pointed immediately to the walled town that clustered along a spur of rock a mile or two away. At the far end a castle dominated the highest point. Streets sloped away from it down the rocky spine to another large building, a church or monastery, near the bottom of the hill on which they stood. Between the hill and the monastery lay a loch, silver-blue in the morning light. “Somewhere in the town maybe.”
    “So now we …”
    “… go and find him and bring him back through the Door and take him to the Empty Place or the Heart of the Earth.”
    “And if he doesn’t want to come?”
    But Morgan was already walking towards the town and didn’t answer.
    ***
    Erda, Kate and David had become quite used to each other now and one or both of them managed to visit the house on most days, finding some excuse or other for their families. That part wasn’t difficult: there were so many after-school clubs and friends they could be visiting that it never occurred to their parents to wonder at these absences, which were, in any case, seldom very long.
    Erda’s speech was becoming more fluent and she nolonger seemed such a strange creature as she had at first. Not just because they’d become used to her either; it was as though she absorbed facts from her surroundings, plucked knowledge straight from people’s brains.
    She looked less odd now, dressed in clothes that Kate and David had managed to find that more or less fitted her. Kate had also persuaded her to