It was a little before nine o'clock, the sun was setting into a bank of smokyviolet cloud and I had lost my way. I reversed the car in a gateway and droveback half a mile to the fingerpost.

I had spent the past twenty-four hours with a client near the coast and wasreturning to London, but it had clearly been foolish to leave the main route andhead across country.

The road had cut through the Downs, pale mounds on either side, and then runinto a straight, tree-lined stretch to the crossroads. The fingerpost markingswere faded and there were no recent signs. So that when the right turning came Ialmost shot past it, for there was no sign at all here, just a lane and highbanks in which the roots of trees were set deep as ancient teeth. But I thoughtthat this would eventually lead me back to the A road.

The lane narrowed. The sun was behind me, flaring into the rear-view mirror.Then came a sharp bend, the lane turned into a single track and the view aheadwas dark beneath overhanging branches.

I slowed. This could not possibly be a way.

Was there a house? Could I find someone to put me on the right road?

I got out. Opposite me was an old sign, almost greened over. the white house.Below, someone had tacked up a piece of board. It hung loose but I could justmake out the words garden closed in roughly painted lettering.

Well, a house was a house. There would be people. I drove slowly on down thetrack. The banks were even steeper, the tree trunks vast and elephantine.

Then, at the end of the lane I came out of the trees and into a wide clearingand saw that it was still light after all, the sky a pale enameled silver-blue.There was no through road. Ahead were a wooden gate and a high hedge wound aboutwith briars and brambles.

All I could hear were birds settling down, a thrush singing high up on thebranches of a walnut tree and blackbirds pinking as they scurried in theundergrowth. I got out of the car and, as I stood there, the birdsong graduallysubsided and then there was an extraordinary hush, a strange quietness intowhich I felt I had broken as some unwelcome intruder.

I ought to have turned back then. I ought to have retraced my way to thefingerpost and tried again to find the main road. But I did not. I was drawn on,through the gate between the overgrown bushes.

I walked cautiously and for some reason tried not to make a noise as I pushedaside low branches and strands of bramble. The gate was stuck halfway, droppedon its hinges, so that I could not push it open further and had to ease myselfthrough the gap.

More undergrowth, rhododendron bushes, briar hedge growing through beech. Thepath was mossed over and grassy but I felt stones here and there beneath myfeet.

After a hundred yards or so I came to a dilapidated hut which looked like theremains of an old ticket booth. The shutter was down. The roof had rotted. Arabbit, its scut bright white in the dimness of the bushes, scrabbled out ofsight.

I went on. The path broadened out and swung to the right. And there was thehouse.

It was a solid Edwardian house, long and with a wide verandah. A flight ofshallow steps led up to the front door. I was standing on what must once havebeen a large and well-kept forecourt—there were still some patches ofgravel between the weeds and grass. To the right of the house was an archway,half obscured by rose briars, in which was set a wrought-iron gate. I glancedround. The car ticked slightly as the engine cooled.

I should have gone back then. I needed to be in London and I had already lost myway. Clearly the house was deserted and possibly derelict. I would not findanyone here to give me directions.

I went up to the gate in the arch and peered through. I could see nothing but ajungle of more shrubs and bushes, overarching trees, and the line of anotherpath disappearing away into the darkening greenery.

I touched the cold iron latch. It lifted. I pushed. The gate was stuck fast. Iput my shoulder to it and it gave a little and rust flaked away at the hinges. Ipushed harder and slowly the gate moved, scraping on the ground, opening,opening. I stepped through it and I was inside. Inside a large, overgrown,empty, abandoned garden. To one side, steps led to a terrace and the house.

It was a place which had been left to the air and the weather, the wind, thesun, the rabbits and the birds, left to fall gently, sadly into decay, forstones to crack and paths to be obscured and then to disappear, for windowpanesto let in the rain and birds to nest in the roof. Gradually, it would sink in onitself and then into the earth. How old was this house? A hundred years? Inanother hundred there would be nothing left of it.

I turned. I could barely see ahead now. Whatever the garden, now "closed," hadbeen, nature had taken it back, covered it with blankets of ivy and trailingstrands of creeper, thickened it over with weed, sucked the light and the airout of it so that only the toughest plants could grow and in growing invade andoccupy.

I should go back.

But I wanted to know more. I wanted to see more. I wanted for some reason I didnot understand to come here in the full light of day, to see everything, uncoverwhat was concealed, reveal what had been hidden. Find out why.

I might not have returned. Most probably, by the time I had made my way back tothe main road, as of course I would, and reached London and my comfortable flat,the White House and what I had found there in the dusk of that late eveningwould have receded to the back of my mind and before long been quite forgotten.Even if I had come this way I might well never have found it again.

And then, as I stood in the gathering stillness and soft spring dusk, somethinghappened. I do not much care whether or not I am believed. That does not matter.I know. That is all. I know, as surely as I know that yesterday morning itrained onto the windowsill of my bedroom after I had left a window slightlyopen. I know as well as I know that I had a root canal filling in a tooth lastThursday and felt great pain from it when I woke in the night. I know that ithappened as well as I know that I had black coffee at breakfast.

I know because if I close my eyes now I feel it happening again, the memory ofit is vivid and it is a physical memory. My body feels it, this is not onlysomething in my mind.

I stood in the dim, green-lit clearing and above my head a silver paring of mooncradled the evening star. The birds had fallen silent. There was not theslightest stirring of the air.

And as I stood I felt a small hand creep into my right one, as if a child hadcome up beside me in the dimness and taken hold of it. It felt cool and itsfingers curled themselves trustingly into my palm and rested there, and thesmall thumb and forefinger tucked my own thumb between them. As a reflex, I bentit over and we stood for a time which was out of time, my own man's hand and thevery small hand held as closely together as the hand of a father and his child.But I am not a father and the small child was invisible.

It was after midnight when I got back to London and I was tired, but becausewhat had happened to me was still so clear I did not go to bed until I had gotout a couple of maps and tried to trace the road I had taken in error and thelane leading to the deserted house and garden. But nothing was obvious and mymaps were not detailed enough. I needed several large-scale Ordnance Survey onesto have any hope of pinpointing an individual...