However, once Rob and Vetch enter the Unworld, the PoV switches between Chloe and Rob, and the chapter prologues focus on Father Mac, Rob's godfather and the family's spiritual advisor. Initially this story is told from the Rob's point of view (but in the third person), with Chloe's coma-thoughts appearing as first person dream-like prologues to each chapter. Vetch offers to guide Rob through the Unworld, which they will enter via the Darkhenge portal by climbing down the inverted oak tree that is at its centre, enclosed by a ring of wooden posts.

He also reveals that the archaeological dig, on which Rob is being employed to draw their finds, is actually a portal to an underworld in which Chloe has become lost, having been taken there by the King of the Unworld, who wears seven masks made from the same materials as the seven Caers (castles) that protect the Unworld. He tells them to call him Vetch and as Rob gets to know him, Vetch tells Rob that he can help Chloe. At more or less the same time, he gets caught up in a ritual at the Avebury Stone Circle, where a New Age group, the Cauldron Tribe, are trying to invoke the presence of a poet-shaman he arrives, apparently from another world, in animal form and shape shifts several times until he takes human form, and Rob hauls him out of a flood ditch. One day Rob finds Chloe's diary and discovers something of the depth of her resentment of him. Chloe's mother, a BAFTA-winning actress is turning down work in order to keep a bedside vigil, leaving Rob and his theatre-manager father to the mercies of the Italian daily help.

Then one day, as she's out riding along the Ridgeway, Chloe has an accident near Falkener's Circle and as a result she has been in a coma for three months when the story opens. Her attempts to become a writer have gone largely unnoticed and Chloe has become quite resentful of the attention that Rob gets. 14 year old Chloe has grown up in the shadow of her older, artistically-talented brother Rob. Catherine Fisher's Darkhenge is part of the Definitions series, meaning it's a book that can be read on two levels, like Fisher's Corbenic and Jonathan Stroud's The Leap.

Darkhenge by Catherine Fisher