The estate agent had been talking with Caroline for half an hour, leaving Arnold sitting in the car. He hadn’t been taking much notice of the house, or of anything else. Since his stroke, everything—even talking—had been an enormous effort.

At last, a little guiltily, Caroline came to him, breathless and red. “Dad, I’ve decided to buy it!”

Arnold nodded and smiled, and his face muscles ached with the strain.

“Come on, Dad!” she pressed. “Have a look with us!”

The estate agent, fortyish and impeccable in her close-fitting business suit, marched up behind Caroline. “Hello, Arnold!” she boomed, as if encouraging a timid child. “I’m Mrs. Deacle. Please, come and see the house with us. I understand you’ll be living here with the family.”

Caroline helped him out of his seat. Taking her arm, he went with her up the wide path toward the huge shambling house. The autumn sun pierced the clouds, illuminating the red bricks, as red as the leaves on the gnarled old oak in the garden. Something stirred in Arnold’s dim memory, some timeless recollection that touched his heart. He remembered his own first house, long ago, and felt excited for Caroline and the kids.

Suddenly, in his tired old mind, there was an impression of two houses. Two separate images superimposed: one bathed in unearthly waves of shimmering light, the other sunk in October greyness. He rubbed his eyes, smiled inwardly and shook his head. One house—sunk in October greyness.

The Quanruzaman House. The fading letters were etched in creamy Cotswold stone.

“An unusual name, I know!” laughed Mrs. Deacle. “Oriental origins, I think.”

“Well, we heard a few stories about strange things happening here.”

“Nonsense!” shot back Mrs. Deacle, far too loudly. “Don’t tell me you believe any of that rubbish!”

Caroline looked at the floor.

The moment they were through the door, Arnold immediately felt something different, something unique in the place. It hit him from all around: exciting and magical. A new element that could not be defined, but which spread something beautiful, healing and restoring. He smelled it in the clean air, saw it move in the tranquil sunlit dust. Neither of the other two seemed to notice it.

But he thought there was maybe something sinister here too. There seemed to be other voices, eerie whispers from somewhere else. He tried to tell the women, but they couldn’t hear his croaking voice; tried to plead with his eyes, but he could not reach them.

Then the clouds enveloped the sun in gloom again. Hope, memory, love and fear died in Arnold’s breast and he became a grey, wizened old man once more.

Mrs. Deacle, ignoring Arnold, homed in on Caroline and re-launched her sales pitch. She didn’t need to. Arnold could see that. The rapt, silly expression on Caroline’s face told him that it was a done deal.

“Oh, disgusting!” grimaced Mrs. Deacle suddenly, pointing to a vase of dead flowers in a side room. “I’ll move them in a minute! Now, Caroline…”

Arnold couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but he had a fair idea of the dopey images going through Caroline’s mind: the kids rampaging loudly through the house, the gloriously lazy smell of the Sunday roast, the tasteless wallpaper she would want hurled up. And himself, installed in a poky attic granddad flat.

“Arnold!” shouted Mrs. Deacle suddenly. “We’re just going upstairs for another look round. You stay here, there’s a dear, and we’ll be back in a moment.”

She smiled a huge, patronizing smile and screwed her eyes up. Then she led away the excited babbling Caroline.

A strange dusty silence fell. In that side room, Arnold laid eyes on the vase of aged flowers that had repelled Mrs. Deacle. Long dead, their bitter ugly stalks were topped by dried petals that crumbled on the tablecloth. The cold unthinking thievery of time had punched cruel black holes in the leaves. If he touched them, they would disintegrate completely.

The two women were clumping about upstairs.

Arnold sat, until the autumn sun pierced the dreary cloud canopy again, and a slant of gold touched the tablecloth, then the flowerpot, then the ragged leaves.

The two women were still clumping about upstairs, babbling, but their voices seemed further away.

Shimmering sunlight was moving round the table, almost in a circle, alighting on the tortured petals of the plant. They drank in the curious rays, till they seemed to enter inside, and the dead leaves glowed with a new light of their own.

No one was moving upstairs.

The circle of light wrought a miracle. The flowers were renewing—perfect blazing violets with green luscious stems. Burgeoning, growing, springing back to life, and blazing now with a light that was not of this Earth, their beauty outstripped anything in the room, in the house, in the world. It was a wild, savage beauty that made his heart knock jealously.

Nothing else in the house was moving.

Arnold walked slowly, greedily, into that circle, felt that light in his own eyes. Then he felt the holy warmth, the light of the ether, the beams that rode the spaces between worlds. A ghost light, a ghost lie that, for humans, was wrong and frightening. In his earthly frailty he wanted to turn away. This gold from Outside was forbidden to poor mortals.

No, forbidden to most mortals.

His gnarled thread-veined skin was bathed in a circle of light from another sun, a greater sun. The nuclear fires in his blood burnt the dross from his addled mind; the worn dead flesh was stripped away and the holy flame re-clothed him in youth’s supple skin, fired his mind to greatness. New colors, new vivid impressions, new life.

He stood, breathing madly, feeling the furnace in his blood subside.

There were lots of people moving upstairs.

A new house forming around him, a house floating in eternal bewitched autumn: perfect, whole and glorious. He was part of it now forever.

Everything filled up with strangeness, with wonder and passion, with youth and promise. The ghost light came in from the windows, touching everything in the room with Midas fingers, burning away dirt and grime and corruption, brightening everything to a new eternal pattern, no longer bonded to decay and misery.

He breathed in the cinnamon-scented air with new lungs, opened up new pure eyes to the serene rays of a red ball sun, spoke with a boy’s voice, marveled with a child’s mind.

Footsteps were coming down the stairs. There was something familiar about them.

“Arny! Arny!” came a fruity voice behind him.

“Kate?”

He whirled. Kate was still Kate, but young-old ageless. She beamed, and ran to hold him. Real, chunky arms, the arms he’d known; the arms he’d missed.

“We’ve been waiting so long for you, sweetie! So long, in this Place of Light,” said his wife.

“You knew?”

“For sure! There are many portals to our world. We knew that today was the day, though, and that you would join us at The Quanruzaman House. That’s why we’ve all come to welcome you. Your Mom is here too. There are some others tidying upstairs for you. Arthur is lawn-mowing down the lane—and Hilda’s baked you a raisin cake!”

Arnold’s world was complete and wonderful.

The other, kinder sun rose above the hallowed street, brightening the red-bricked houses to a furnace. The Quanruzaman House was the finest of them.

For a second, Arnold looked back into the old house and the pale world he’d known. Caroline was babbling inanely as she came down the stairs; Mrs. Deacle was moving in to ruthlessly sweep away those wretched dead flowers.

Then both of them stopped short, gasped and whitened. Mrs. Deacle’s condescending smirk was wiped from her face.

There was the old Arnold, slumped and dead on the table next to the brittle husks of aged violets.

The earthly part of him reached out to Caroline in longing and pity: but the new Arnold understood much more now. The grey lights of the old world faded. He joined his old-new family in the Quanruzaman House, and the sun painted all the road, and the hills beyond, autumn gold.

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