Hekla's Children, page 27
It wasn’t her room. It occupied the same physical space as her room once had, but anything that might have made it hers had disappeared. Even the walls were a different colour. What was left was a clean, comfortable, minimally furnished spare bedroom, which a visiting stranger or distant relative could use without too much fuss. She sat on the edge of the bed, wondering how she’d ever managed to sleep on anything so soft and insubstantial, then experimented with lying down. The duvet closed in on her from all sides, as if trying to swallow her.
‘No,’ she grunted, struggling up. ‘Just no.’
Her mother had the loft space open and was up a stepladder looking for ‘Catharine’s’ old things – it seemed her parents had moved on, but only so far – when Scattie found her father out in his shed, tidying up the mess she’d made blundering in. There was no sign of any way back to Hywelan’s forge, but she knew it was there all the same, like a thin place in the surface of the world back amongst the boxes of jam jars and bottles of home brew. Maybe every father’s shed harboured a way into Un.
He was horrified when she told him how soon she was going to have to leave. ‘What?’ he demanded. ‘But you’ve only been back – what – an hour? Why did you even come back at all, if you weren’t going to stay?’
‘I just…’ She shrugged, at a loss. How could she tell him that home was the last place she’d intended to be? ‘I found myself with a chance to pop by and let you know that I’m okay, that’s all. I’m sorry it can’t be for longer, but it can’t be helped.’
‘Your mother will be devastated again!’
‘She’ll get over it again.’
‘What makes you think she got over it in the first place?’ he shot back, with a harshness she knew she deserved. ‘You think either of us did?’
‘In a week’s time this will seem like a weird dream. It’s better that way, trust me.’
‘No. Absolutely not. I’m not letting you go again. Whatever trouble you’re in, we can fix it—’
‘Dad, listen to me.’ There was steel in her voice that she knew he’d never heard before, and it shut him up in surprise. ‘I am going. I’m sorry that it hurts you both, but that can’t be helped either. What you can do is choose how I go – either with an argument or not.’
He softened, as he always had – not because he was weak, but because at the bottom of it all he understood. You look old, she thought. That wasn’t part of the deal. ‘What do you need?’ he asked. ‘Money?’
‘It’s not going to make any sense, I warn you.’
‘Nothing has so far. Why start now?’
‘Okay then, I need something that can be forged into a spearhead.’
‘See? Compared to the time you were sick out of your bedroom window and all down the back of the house, that wasn’t so hard, was it?’ He rummaged amongst the garden tools hanging on one wall and took down an old hand trowel. It was dented, and its wooden handle was split and weather-worn. ‘This was your grandmother’s,’ he said. ‘She was a stubborn cow too. A spear, you say? I think she’d have liked that.’
He dusted off his hands and squared his shoulders. ‘Right, I’m off to break the news to your mother. I suggest you hide out here; it’s always worked for me. Bring you a cuppa?’
She hugged him tightly.
‘I know,’ he whispered. He disengaged, wiped his eyes, and wagged a finger at her. ‘No more custard creams, though. You think we’re made of biscuits?’
When he brought the tea out and found her gone, he wasn’t entirely surprised. Then he cried in a way that he could never let Carol see.
* * *
NO TIME APPEARED TO HAVE PASSED IN HYWELAN’S FORGE. The smith and the boatman were exactly where they had been, and the familiar smells of wood smoke, sweat and river mud surrounded her, letting her know she was home. She passed the trowel to Hywelan, who inspected it critically, nodded, and turned towards his forge. She caught him by the shoulder and turned him back. ‘Just what the fuck was all that about?’ she demanded.
‘Most believe that the strength of a weapon lies in the way the iron is forged,’ he replied. ‘They are wrong. It begins with the way that the iron is obtained. Are you finished detaining me from my business?’
She let him go, and he set to work without another word.
‘Did you know that was going to happen?’ she said to Tuonen as they waited.
‘Hywelan is his own law,’ the boatman replied, and would be drawn no further.
Less than an hour later the smith presented her with the spear that had once been Bark Foot’s and was now hers, but reforged for the same purpose. Unlike most of the other weapons in his hoard, its iron blade was undecorated but it gleamed just as brightly as any of them.
* * *
THEY JOURNEYED THROUGH THE DAY AND LONG INTO THE night, and Tuonen taught Scattie the secrets of Un – what it was, and how it might be navigated. Then in the darkness around her she heard the water take on a new music: that of a swift-running stream. The boatman poled his craft to the bank with expert strokes, finding a calm bend out of the current for her to alight. Trees crowded one bank, but not the other, and she recognised the smell of the place immediately: damp bark, moss and a lingering trace of decay.
‘No,’ she warned, gripping the haft of her spear. ‘Not again. I won’t live through that again. I’ll die first.’
‘As we agreed,’ said Tuonen. ‘I have brought you home, not back. This is your home. Guard it well.’ And with a few strokes he was gone, his dugout canoe lost in the gap between a prehistoric river and a narrow stream trickling through Sutton Park.
She gaped: the sky on the other side was glowing, the clouds underlit in a way she thought she’d never see again, by thousands upon thousands of streetlights and headlights and the windows of countless houses filled with human souls in every direction as far as she could see, and she wept at the unseen beauty of her city. She found that she was standing at the top of the timber track, which zigzagged from her feet down to the stream’s bank and became the footbridge for which she and the others had so desperately searched. It did not span the water entirely, however – one plank lay to the side, ready to make the bridge complete. Hers now, at her feet, to open or close as she wished.
Then the thudding of helicopter blades split the air, and the spell was broken. Electric torches bounced over the brow of the hill (Fireflies! she thought. They look just like fireflies!), accompanied by shouts and the crackling of police radios. She drank in every detail, almost overwhelmed, and nearly didn’t see the man running ahead of them. His shape was a momentary silhouette against the sky as he panted and stumbled in the dark, and she backed a little way into the shelter of the trees on her side of the stream as the figure reeled to a halt at the water’s edge.
‘No!’ it moaned. ‘Not like this. Please, not like this.’
Brookes.
An amplified voice from the sky ordered him to put down the knife. She watched him paw and scrabble at the water’s edge, apparently unable to see the timbers right in front of him, and remembered what he’d told her about how he’d fled from the police, and she knew that this wasn’t just a vision – this was happening right now, right in front of her. If Bark Foot was dead, he’d asked her, who or what opened the track for him?
Now she knew.
She froze, dizzied with questions and implications. Why had Tuonen brought her to this place at this moment? Was it because she had offered to kill the afaugh in Brookes’ place? What if she did something different instead? What if she kept the track closed and let him get caught and saved him the trauma of his time in Un?
‘What do you want from me?’ she yelled at the boatman’s absence. Brookes gave no sign that he’d heard. ‘I don’t know how to do this sort of thing!’ Looking at Brookes, though, she knew one thing: letting the police catch him wouldn’t save him from any kind of trauma – it would just replace the one she knew about with another, because the sickness of it was something that Brookes carried inside him. At least in Un he’d have some happiness with Ysil, for what that was worth.
The cops were yelling at him to drop the fucking knife, and a Taser was making its dry-twig-cracking sound, and Brookes collapsed to roll face-down in the water. All other arguments aside, she simply couldn’t stand there and watch a human being drown. Knowing that the police wouldn’t be able to see her unless she opened the track, she muttered, ‘Ah, fuck it,’ to herself and stepped down the bank to drag him from the stream. It wasn’t very far to Bark Foot’s camp.
Her camp.
She dumped Brookes in the wreckage of a lean-to shelter and looked around at the camp she had inherited. It would need a lot of work, she decided, but for the time being there was a young woman and her children who were not beyond her help, so she took her iron spear and set off into the world to do something about that.
33
THE AFAUGH IN UN
THIS IS HAPPENING NOW.
It is always happening, in the tepid twilight of a present without a past.
He is driven away from the timelessness of the Far Pastures by its guardian and into the icy mountain wastes of a past thousands of years before his own birth – bereft, finally, of everything except the gnawing, raging fixations that brought him here in the first place.
He stops, pulls out the piece of paper that he stole from her bag – the risk assessment, as if there has ever been a more ridiculous idea – and he tears it into strips, cramming them into his mouth, chewing, eating, swallowing them until he chokes himself. He weeps and laughs as he does this.
He rages at his abandonment across leagues of empty snow and rock. Soon he is starving and beaten raw by exposure, stumbling naked on emaciated legs across the high back of a glacier older than dreaming, and to a saw-toothed ridge of granite outcrops. Between two of them he finds tracks: human footprints. He follows them eagerly, desperate to not be alone. Maybe Ysil has forgiven him, and followed after all.
The tracks end at a body, half-covered by the drifting snow. It is little more than skin stretched over bones, but the cold has done its job well, and the corpse is not so decomposed that he fails to recognise his own face staring up at him in death. He looks behind and sees that there only ever was one set of tracks, and that his own feet make no prints in the snow. His gaze travels up from the broken, claw-like nails on his feet, his knock-kneed legs and wizened genitals, and the bloated swag-belly that hangs over them. Then his hands go up to feel the thin pipe of his own throat – too narrow, surely, to support the throbbing mass of his head – and then, finally, he explores inside his own mouth, his touch recoiling from the sharpened cannibal teeth he finds.
And the afaugh, finally knowing itself, looses a cry of such desolate, world-consuming rage that its echoes are carried in the blizzard-winds’ howls for a thousand years.
The people of the Four Valleys hear its hunger in the depths of their ten-year winter and make sacrifices to their ancestors to save them, but the afaugh comes out of the mountains and begins taking their children because it remembers being told a long time ago by a person long forgotten that this is the way of the world, so they create a guardian who is One From Many and give him a great spear and set him to guard the crossing place of Un, and so the afaugh is trapped.
But over time the memories of men fail, and the guardian grows weak, and in its own desperation it reaches into the world and takes sacrifices for itself; becoming, by so doing, like its enemy, and sealing its own fate. The afaugh knows these children, though all they see is its monstrous hunger. Ryan is taken and Liv escapes, but Bran and Scattie go deeper into Un and the afaugh follows. It strikes a deal with Bran: power in return for the death of its human husk, who it hates even more than Bark Foot. Now that it is beyond life and death and time itself, the afaugh does not fear meddling with its own past. Bark Foot is unearthed, and while it is distracted the afaugh lures Brookes with visions of the children, because it is linked to him; it is him. Oh, how it loathes and covets its long-dead humanity. It despises his weakness and his childish delusions of morality and longs to see him crushed, beaten, weeping, dead. At the same time it desires above all things that which he has – or nearly has – and so when the idiot finally dreams himself into Un, the afaugh takes him with a savage and unbridled joy at the notion that in the end he had only ever been possessed by himself. The bloodletting which follows is almost as sweet as his expression when the afaugh moves on and grins at him from behind another man’s face, and he understands that it finally has what it has craved for three thousand years: the woman and her children.
And then it is now, as it has always been, a world without end.
34
THE ERINYES
TARA AWOKE FROM A DREAM THAT SHE WAS BEING SMOTHERED and found that it was true. Panicking, her hands went to her throat to claw away whatever was choking her, and found bandages swathing her thickly from chin to collarbone.
Hands laid themselves gently over her own and a voice murmured, ‘Hey now, none of that. You’ll spring a leak.’
With the voice came vision, and a face swam out of the blur.
‘Mark?’ Her lips formed the shape of his name, but her throat wouldn’t give it life.
Pryce smiled. Looking at him closely, she saw that his cheeks were heavily dimpled with the fallout of what must have been terrible teenage acne. To others the scarring probably looked ugly, but when he smiled it seemed to her that the effect was like seeing something rumpled and strangely comfortable that a girl could curl up in on a cold night. She reached up and stroked his cheek, noting that there was a tube going into the back of her hand.
Ah, she thought, that’ll be the drugs talking.
And yet.
‘Thank you,’ she mouthed.
He actually blushed. ‘For my next trick,’ he said, to cover his embarrassment, ‘I will read your mind and answer all of the questions you currently can’t ask.’ He placed his fingers to his temple and frowned as if concentrating. ‘You are in hospital in Bangor. You have been unconscious for nearly fourteen hours. I am single, available, straight and reasonably well house-trained.’
She laughed – a little snort through her nose.
He took a seat beside her and his smile disappeared. ‘We don’t know where Brookes is. He dumped your car and switched it with another, which we didn’t pick up until he’d got to Birmingham, where he attacked Susannah Vickers’ family last night.’ He paused, obviously holding back extra bad news. ‘He also broke into your lab and set fire to it. Everything was destroyed. I’m sorry.’
Everything. She recognised the words he was saying, but couldn’t connect them to anything real. Rowton Man couldn’t have been destroyed. Three thousand years of lying preserved in the earth, surviving wars and farming and industrialisation couldn’t just be gone. It was inconceivable.
‘No,’ she whispered.
‘There’s more, I’m afraid. The hospital staff who saw Sue Vickers and her kids were pretty sure that she said it was her husband who attacked them, despite the fact that Brookes actually phoned and told us he was going to do it – it’s like he wanted to be caught, but then changed his mind and legged it. We trailed him to Sutton Park, but he disappeared in exactly the same spot where Olivia Crawford was heading when she kidnapped you. Crawford committed suicide in her cell last night – hanged herself from a light fixture. Everything’s connected, but none of the connections make sense.’
‘Why,’ Tara whispered, and pointed to herself.
‘Why am I telling you all this? Because I interviewed Steven Vickers a few hours ago, and he said that what attacked his family was a demon – from his description the same demon that Crawford described in her interview. But he didn’t know Crawford, he never met her, so how could they be having the same delusion or hallucination or whatever? And he said that this thing jumped from Brookes to him, and then from him to Hodges, though he was in such a state I’m not sure he even knew what he was saying. I’ve driven back and forth between here and bloody Birmingham three times in the past twenty-four hours and I’m absolutely knackered. I want this all to be a load of bullshit but that’s a luxury I don’t have any more.’ He laughed shortly and rubbed his eyes. She suspected that his lack of sleep was only partly down to all the driving. ‘I can’t believe I’m going to ask you this,’ he went on. ‘But is it true? Is that what attacked you? Is this afaugh thing real?’
Tara saw the cannibal teeth again, stained with her blood, and suddenly her heart was hammering. Something seemed to have sucked all the air out of the room. Seeing her struggle for breath, Mark stood, concerned, and moved to call a nurse, but she grabbed his hand and shook her head. The face of the demon leered at her in her imagination, daring her to name it, to summon it, so that it could finish what it had started.
Fuck you, she thought, and nodded. ‘True. All of it.’
* * *
MARK WAS ASLEEP IN A CHAIR BESIDE HER BED. WHEN THE nurses had tried to move him he’d waved his warrant card and pulled rank, so they let him be. The nurse who brought him a pillow stopped by again after he’d dozed off and gave Tara a wink. ‘That one’s a keeper, love,’ she said. ‘When I was in for my biopsy, mine, well he brought me a magazine and a packet of biscuits and buggered off down the pub to watch the football, didn’t he?’
The surgeon who’d operated on her throat told her that there’d be no lasting damage but she wouldn’t be able to speak for a week or two. There’d be a scar, obviously, to which she whispered some quip about a whole new world of scarf-shopping opening for her. She hadn’t even lost that much blood, really. She was lucky.
She thought of Liv Crawford hanging from a light fitting in a police cell. For some people, luck – good or bad – simply wasn’t part of the equation.
She tried to sleep, but visions of Phoelix clutching the red ruin of his stomach screamed at her whenever she closed her eyes, so she asked for something from the nurses and they brought her some little white pills, which did the trick nicely.
