The Ravening, page 1
ANGRY ROBOT
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In the deep dark wood.
An Angry Robot paperback original, 2024
Copyright © Daniel Church, 2024
Cover by Sarah O’Flaherty
Edited by Simon Spanton Walker and Andrew Hook
Set in Meridien
All rights reserved. Daniel Church asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Angry Robot and the Angry Robot icon are registered trademarks of Watkins Media Ltd.
ISBN 978 1 91599 838 5
Ebook ISBN 978 1 91599 839 2
Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY.
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d_r0
For Emma Bunn,
Beta-reader Extraordinaire.
MASHT!
THE LOST KNIGHT OF RUAD
In 1302 Christendom’s last remaining possession in the Holy Land, the tiny coastal island of Ruad, fell to a Mamluk army under the command of Sayf al-Din Salar. Its garrison of Templar Knights surrendered following a promise of safe conduct, only to be massacred. The few survivors were taken to Cairo, where those who refused to convert to Islam died of starvation and ill-treatment.
Those are the facts. This is the legend:
After the slaughter, one of the Templars, Robert de Lavoie, could be found among neither the prisoners nor the dead. At first he was believed to have hidden in a room in the fortress, which had been locked from the inside. But when the door was forced, it was empty. No trace of de Lavoie was ever found.
Three Mamluk soldiers, however, claimed to have seen a figure flying away from the castle, although their stories were considered doubtful, the product of sunstroke or exhaustion. One insisted it was an angel, the second a demon or jinn; the third believed that it had been clutching a man in its arms, bearing him away.
Where the forest takes over
Where the forest gives birth
Lisa Baird
CONTENTS
1.
2.
PART ONE: 2022 Day of The Wren
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
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10.
11.
12.
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22.
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25.
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28.
29.
PART TWO: Walking the Greylands
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31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
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40.
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42.
43.
44.
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46.
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48.
49.
50.
51.
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PART THREE: The Children of Saturn
54.
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56.
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58.
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60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SKELETON SONG: TALLSTONE HILL, 2007
1.
The road through the forest didn’t end. It unrolled in the headlights, the centre line flickering past like little white sparks. It was almost hypnotic; Elaine had to blink every few seconds to retain her focus.
There was a loud knocking sound and the car shuddered as if from a blow, then swerved. Elaine shouted in alarm; beside her, Jenna jumped and dropped her phone. Another knock sounded, and another, each one louder than the last.
The car swerved again, the steering wheel spinning out of Elaine’s hands. “Shit,” she said, and immediately bit her lip – she was forever chiding Jenna about her language and she wouldn’t live down a slip like that – but then all that mattered was grabbing the wheel and steadying the car as it slewed across the road towards the ditch beside the tree-topped embankment.
With a final effort Elaine got the car into the left-hand lane and pumped the brakes. It juddered to a halt; there was a thump and the motor cut out, dead.
The only sounds were the hot engine ticking in the cold night air, and the tinny yammering of Kate Nash from Jenna’s earbuds. She yanked them out, glaring at Elaine. “What the fuck, Mum?”
That kind of language would have earned Elaine a slap across the face at Jenna’s age, but nowadays they’d call that child abuse. Political correctness gone mad, in Elaine’s opinion, but this wasn’t the time or place. It was pretty understandable anyway, given the shock; she’d be better letting it slide.
“I don’t know,” said Elaine, quite truthfully. She tried in vain to restart the engine, but it only made a faint, rattling groan. “God, I just had it serviced.”
“Did we hit something?” said Jenna. “Deer or a rabbit?” She looked genuinely stricken at the thought: at fifteen, she already knew everything, despised her parents and humanity in general, but any hint of cruelty to animals reduced her to tearful anguish, unfocused rage, or both at once. She unfastened her seatbelt and opened the door.
“Jenna–” Elaine began, but might as well have tried to command the wind. Not for the first time, she thought she knew how King Canute had felt. Maybe he’d had teenage daughters too.
Jenna moved into the glare of the car headlights – the only source of illumination in the darkness and a decidedly limited one, as Elaine was uncomfortably aware. They reached a hundred or so yards ahead, beyond which the road might as well have ceased to exist. Likewise, the black trees looming atop the embankments could have extended beyond them for yards or miles. Impossible to tell.
“Can’t see any blood,” said Jenna.
“We didn’t hit anything,” said Elaine, hoping that was true. She’d been struggling to concentrate, had been wondering if she should pull over for a rest stop before carrying on; maybe her attention had wandered and something had run out in front of the car. Deer were tough: she remembered from working in the Claims Department how many vehicles ended up written off after cannoning into one, while the animal trotted away, seemingly none the worse for wear.
But surely a deer would have done far more damage. Unless it had been a baby one – and oh God, the fuss Jenna would make then! Some other woodland creature, maybe, like a badger.
Something moved outside Elaine’s window. She choked back a cry of alarm, but not enough: Jenna – because that was who it was – shook her head in disgust, then walked on to inspect the back of the car.
Elaine put a hand to her mouth. So distracted she hadn’t realised her daughter was next to her, and she was trying to convince herself she couldn’t have run an animal over out of sheer inattention. Or a person. Oh God, not that. She threw the driver’s door open and climbed out. “Jenna, don’t.”
“Get back in the car, Mum.” Jenna scowled: the taillights’ red glare made her look even more baleful, and the dark behind her more menacing. They didn’t reach as far as the headlights, so there was even less of a clue as to what might be behind the car than what might lie ahead.
Elaine shook her head. They were in Cornwall; there were no wolves or bears or lions here. She shook her head again; Jenna snorted irritably, then turned and crouched behind the vehicle. “Nope,” she said. “Doesn’t look like you hit anything.” She straightened up again. “Suppose we should be thankful for small mercies.”
Without waiting for a reply, she walked back round to the passenger side and climbed into her seat. “Well?” Jenna said. “What now?”
Elaine returned to her seat and shut the door. “Not a problem. Just give the AA a call.”
But, when she picked up her phone, there was no signal, not even for the emergency services. “Shit,” she said again, but this time managed to do so under her breath.
Jenna rolled her eyes. “Told you that phone was crap.”
“Jenna.”
“You just said shit.” Jenna rummaged in the passenger footwell, where she’d dropped her phone earlier as if it was so much rubbish – her brand-new BlackBerry, after she’d whined and pestered for the wretched, costly thing – then punched a button, finally shutting the racket from her earphones off. “Here. Try using a decent phone.” Then her smug look faded. “Oh, bollocks.”
“Isn’t that working either?” Despite the circumstances Elaine felt a small, mean thrill of triumph, but it was short-
They could try and find help, but which way should they go? Elaine tried to remember the last road signs she’d seen, how far the next village was. She knew they were somewhere on a road called Tallstone Hill, but that was all: it was several miles long, and she wasn’t sure how long they’d been on it. Elaine reached into the car, shouldering Jenna aside.
“Mum!”
“Sorry,” Elaine mumbled, though even if Jenna heard her, it probably sounded more like an insult than an apology. She opened the glove compartment, found the atlas and studied it without enthusiasm: she was terrible at map-reading, normally leaving long journeys like this to Martyn.
This road was the final stretch of their journey, leading directly to the coastal village where they were staying, but it was still twenty or thirty miles in all. The question was how far along it they were.
She found the forest on the map, but the road passed through three other woodlands of various size too, and for all she knew the trees on either side of the road were just a narrow scrim beyond which was a farmhouse or even a village, if she only dared venture a little further.
The trees looked uncomfortably thick, but that was easy enough to settle. She leant past Jenna again, ignoring her snort of annoyance, got the torch out of the glove compartment and climbed out of the car.
Elaine crossed to the edge of the road and shone the torch into the trees. The light probed between trunks and branches, but only found more of the same.
Of course, the trees were atop an embankment – hard to see what was beyond them unless you were on the high ground yourself. Elaine stepped over the ditch onto the soft loam, glad she was wearing trainers rather than her usual heels.
“Mum?” Jenna’s voice cracked slightly. “What are you doing?”
“It’s all right, love,” said Elaine, softening a little towards her. The fear in Jenna’s voice had made her sound, just for a moment, like the little girl Elaine had read bedtime stories to, who’d clung to her arm when she heard about the witch in the gingerbread house or the Big Bad Wolf, her huge wide eyes full of fear but also trust, knowing her mother wouldn’t let any harm come to her.
Everything was different now, of course. Elaine’s friends had gone through the same with their teenage daughters, but she’d always told herself Jenna was different, special, because Jenna was hers.
Well, that had proven false, much like Martyn’s belief that he’d never fall prey to male pattern baldness. Her daughter was full of an anger Elaine neither understood nor recognised; she might have chafed against her own mother’s values sometimes, but never with this level of hostility. Unless she’d been as bad as Jenna in her own way, without even realising. Maybe a perpetual state of undeclared war was the norm for all daughters and mothers.
“I just want to see.”
“See what?” A whine crept into Jenna’s voice. Elaine didn’t answer: apart from anything else, she was trying to keep her balance on the embankment’s soft, crumbly earth. She grabbed a branch for stability as she neared the top. It shifted in her grip: Elaine gasped, afraid it was about to snap, but it held. Thank God for WeightWatchers; if she’d still been carrying that extra stone, things might have gone differently.
She made it up onto level ground and shone her torch ahead, but for all that effort there was no reward. The light reached further, but all it revealed was yet more trees.
She might see something if she went a little further in. Elaine picked her way forward. Brambles and undergrowth snagged her shins and ankles; her feet sank into soft, damp earth, then mud. Cold and wetness seeped through the thin material of the trainers. They might be better suited to this than her heels, but that was all she could say for them.
“Mum?” called Jenna again, the fear sharper in her voice. She wouldn’t be able to see Elaine at all now, only the backwash of light through the trees.
“I’m all right,” said Elaine, then yelped as the beam flashed across something that moved. She glimpsed its eyes, palely reflecting the torchlight, before it retreated into the darkness. She wasn’t sure what it was. A deer, maybe. Yes, that was it; it must have been. She thought she’d seen antlers. Whatever it was, it was large and in motion: she heard the crackle of splintering twigs and undergrowth. Thankfully it wasn’t coming at her. It was moving away, to her left, up the road from where the car had stopped.
If they managed to get the car running again, it would be up ahead of them, waiting. But that was silly. Deer didn’t attack people, not that Elaine had heard of. If she’d literally fallen on top of one it might have lashed out at her in its panic, but it was hardly going to wait on the bank for them to drive by and launch a kamikaze attack. She shook her head. Silly.
If it was a deer.
What else could it be? Britain had no large land predators, unless you believed the urban legends of escaped big cats living wild on the moors. Although those stories didn’t seem quite as ridiculous as usual, out among the trees in the darkness.
No; it had been a deer. Elaine had glimpsed the antlers. At least, she thought she had. All she could really swear to was the eyes and a vague, bulky shape. She thought she’d seen antlers; then again, she also had a vague, lingering impression of having seen a face of some kind. A face – or, more accurately, a skull. And that made no sense at all.
It didn’t matter. What mattered was that they were in the middle of the woods, even if she wasn’t sure which ones. Even if she could identify where they were, whichever way she went might take them further from help, instead of closer to it.
Unless, of course, she got the car started again: a solution so simple she hadn’t even considered it. Elaine had to laugh.
“Mum?” Jenna sounded genuinely frightened now. If there was a struggle for dominance between them, Elaine had won this round.
“I’m all right,” she said. “Coming back now.”
Stealthy movement sounded in the undergrowth behind her as she retraced her steps to the car, but Elaine perceived no threat from it. And she was right. They were only the sounds of small woodland creatures that had gone utterly still when something huge and terrible had come near them, resuming their normal activities after it had moved away through the trees.
2.
Jenna breathed out as Mum climbed back down the embankment, half angry and half relieved. What’d she been going to do, hack her way through the woods in search of help? Maybe she was having a brainstorm – have to be mad or stupid to think that was a good idea. Either was possible with Mum.
Well, Jenna wasn’t mad, or stupid. She’d been reading on the internet earlier about big cats living wild in Britain, usually out on the moors. And even if those weren’t real, any animal would go for you if you startled it. Foxes, badgers; even deer. She’d seen a video of a hunter, out with his rifle, who’d been caught off-guard by a stag; the animal had reared up on its back legs and pummelled the fuck out of him with its front hooves. And serve the dickhead right, frankly.
The sensible thing to do was follow the road. With nothing better to do she’d been listening to Made of Bricks by Kate Nash, staring out of the window as Mum drove. Before they’d gone into the woods she’d seen a village, then a sign – five miles to somewhere, straight ahead. But she wasn’t sure how long before: one minute, two or three. Maybe longer. Nor could she remember how long after they’d entered the woods the engine had conked out. By then she’d been half-hypnotised by the flickering trees, the unwinding road, the moon and stars flashing through the branches overhead to the rhythm of “Skeleton Song”.
Jenna didn’t like the idea of walking, which was crap, but she wasn’t waiting on her own in the car. Could be anything out there. Paedos. Rapists. Serial killers.
Anyway, she couldn’t let Mum go on her own. Mum did her head in, but Jenna didn’t want her to die or anything. They’d have to go along the road together, for safety. It’d be all right with the torch, long as Mum hadn’t worn the batteries out dicking around in the woods. What’d she been trying to do there? She could’ve fallen and broken something; what’d Jenna have done then?
She braced herself for the order to get out and start walking, but instead, Mum went round the front of the car, tucking the torch between her neck and shoulder and fumbling at the hood.
Jenna got out. “What you doing?”
