Fallow Heart

by K. C. Finn

  They walked together to the rim of the cart, taking up positions. Allardyce was right, and Lori’s teeth ground as she admitted it to herself. What were her other options? Go home and lie awake worrying about her own condition? Pretend to live her normal human life? This was where it was all happening. Nobody here was afraid of the ‘d’ word. There was a flutter in Lori’s stomach as she braced herself against the cart. When Allardyce smiled his usual warm smile, she even returned it a little.

  “Ready!” Addy called. Lori could no longer see him over the burbling, jostling bag before her. “And… heave!”

  The hill took forever to climb. Lori could have done it in about three minutes normally, though she’d have been totally out of breath by the top, but with a cartful of demon to haul, the task was Hell on earth. Twice she slipped and fell onto the cobbles, cutting her knee open as the wet tracksuit ripped with the slide. Worse than that, the scent of blood was just the thing to send the contained beast into a fury. By the time they reached the top of the hill, the bag was shaking wildly, thick limbs pushing hard to escape. Lori heard the rattle of the chains within, and the unnerving sound of metal clanging against metal.

  “Take a breather before we unbag it, everyone.” Marax rubbed his hands together. “Just a minute or so should do.”

  “Easy for him to say.” Lori’s teeth were gritted. “He didn’t help at all with the push.”

  She hadn’t spoken to anyone in particular, but a moment later she found Owe and Allardyce both looking at her. She spared another glance for Addy, but he’d moved so far around the thundering bag that he was lost from view. Owe took a step closer to Lori, cocking her head back in the direction of the contained demon.

  “Do you know what that is?”

  “Heavy,” Lori replied, still panting.

  Owe’s eyes widened to match her smile.

  “That’s the demon that infected me.” She gulped. “That’s the Faunus.”

  Lori watched the jostling bag. Marax looked around, up in the direction of the windows of the nearby buildings. It was a wonder that none of the little cottages they’d passed had put any lights on. If someone wandered down this little cobbled backstreet now, they’d all have a lot of explaining to do. Once again, Marax drew close to the mass of flailing limbs, finding a spot where he could lean in close. Lori saw his lips moving, and the beast inside calmed again.

  “He caught it for you?” Lori asked.

  Owe nodded several times, her shiny horn-stumps flashing in the darkness. By the navy light of near-morning, her skin’s reddish glow had turned violet.

  “Even better,” she said. “He’s sending it back. No Harvest for me.”

  “Back?” Lori repeated. “Back where?”

  “To Hell, of course.”

  Owe turned and took the last few paces up the hill. Lori watched her heavy coat swaying to and fro. She had a prance in her step. Marax began to speak to the assembled group, and Lori sped up to join them. In the last few steps, a flighty feeling overtook her body, prickling her skin and sending waves of nerves into her gut. She didn’t understand the sudden surge in energy. It hurt. Frowning, Lori looked around at the others. Owe had a fist to her chest, her smile tighter than before. She blinked a few times, her sideways eyelids sliding back into place slowly. One of Marax’s other employees was a tall guy of about eighteen. His face was pale and taut, and Lori was pretty sure he hadn’t looked that way a moment ago.

  “Sir,” the boy said suddenly. His lip quivered. Marax raised a hand, and he fell quiet.

  “Tyler, Owe, Lori.” Marax’s eyes flashed to each of them. “You’d better come here. We’re verging on Holy Ground. Sown don’t do well in sacred spaces.”

  There was a switch of positions, and Lori saw the spire of St. Mary’s. It had been behind her before: a church which had long-ago given up its services and become a community space. Lori could remember watching some kind of choir perform there with Granddad a few years ago. The spire inked a black and brown prism into the navy sky, casting its shadow on them all. From this new angle, Lori spotted something else too. Marax and the others were moving towards it, leaving the three Sown to watch as they dragged the cart across the street with them.

  There was a gate in the wall. No. On the wall. It didn’t pass through. The stone wall was probably the end of the church cemetery, overgrown with spiny branches losing their leaves ready for winter. The gate was dark green and it had fallen off its hinges, but beyond it the wall was solid. Even if the gate could be opened, it didn’t go anywhere. Another Door to Nowhere.

  Marax and his crew were unbagging the demon. Lori watched Addy in particular, his set jaw and deep focus. It was so far from the nervy, grinning lad that he normally was, sopping wet with river water. As the bag came off on his side, one of the Faunus’s haunches gave a sudden kick. Addy caught it by the hoof, wrestling the limb down to the ground again. For the first time she noticed its wide eyes, fluttering and blinking. It had those sideways eyelids that had shocked her the first time she met Owe. Addy patted the Faunus like it was a pet horse, and Lori couldn’t suppress her laugh.

  Owe sidled closer. “What?”

  “It’s unreal.” Lori shook her head.

  “You should worry.” Owe scoffed. “That’s the thing I’m turning into.”

  The beast was fully revealed now, with Marax holding the chains around its head and forelimbs. Lori saw the reddish-purple hue in the humanoid skin of its chest, leading down into the furry underbelly where its other four legs took over. Once again, Lori saw the two-toed cloven hooves. She turned and looked at Owe’s feet. She was wearing big Doc Marten boots. Too big. The shoes shuffled.

  “Quit it,” Owe said.

  “Jesus!” Allardyce cried suddenly. “Grab it! Hold it there!”

  There was a rattle of chains. Lori’s head snapped back and got a face-full of beast. The Faunus had turned and made a lunge for it, charging towards Lori and Owe with a sudden snarl. Though its cries were muzzled by the chains, its mouth opened around the metal. Its jaws gnashed and slapped together with a wet thump. Lori’s gut jolted at the memory of the Cervinae, glowering down at her with the same foul maw. The smell of blood and flesh and death was hot in her memory.

  “Eww!” Owe cried. “Cow breath!”

  She was right. Lori breathed, and there was no scent of death on the Faunus. No aroma of rotting meat, like there had been in her own attack. It smelled foul, for sure, like dung and grass and fungus, but not blood. Allardyce yanked a chain, and the Faunus fell backwards onto its rear haunches. Lori’s eyes lingered on its mouth as the others forced its head around.

  “Now, quickly. Before one of these houses wakes up,” said Marax.

  He approached the gate in the stone wall. Lori stepped closer, craning to see over the huge hunkering Faunus, but the sudden prickle of fire stopped her in her tracks. She glared at the spire of St Mary’s a moment, balling one fist. Owe reached out a cloaked hand, hooking it into the crook of Lori’s elbow.

  “Up here,” she said.

  Lori was dragged around the bagged body, up against a building with cartoons painted in the windows. A brief glance told her it was a nursery school. Here, she and Owe leaned against the wall and looked down on the beast and the gate: a perfect vantage point. Marax had yanked the green gate off its hinges, pulling it out of the bracken. He propped it against another part of the wall, metal scraping stone. At the sound, Lori felt a new sensation. A wave of heat had entered the little street, like a warm breeze through a window. She stared into the square of stone Marax had revealed. It didn’t look any different, but it was.

  “And… heave!” Addy called.

  The men heaved. All of them, even Marax this time. The Faunus was twice as big as the gap in the wall, skittering towards it with its hooves digging into the ground. But the group pressed forward, pushing, slapping and yanking on its chains. The yowling head of the Faunus vanished. Lori’s mouth fell open, staring at the headless beast. Its neck and torso began
to vanish too, then the front limbs, then the back. Melting into the place where the wall and the bracken were. Lori blinked and rubbed her eyes. The Faunus was gone.

  And so was Marax.

  Before she could even voice a question, he reappeared from the wall, materialising before her eyes. He had the chains in his hands, removed from the beast. Marax and Allardyce picked up the green gate, crushing it back into place with a screech. The remainder of Marax’s cronies began to wheel the cart back down the hill, which left only Marax, Allardyce and Addy to walk up and meet the three Sown who were waiting by the wall of the nursery. Marax dusted his hands off. Lori watched the red matter falling between them. Like brick dust. The kind Matilda Vane always had on her trouser legs.

  “I do apologise for all this,” Marax said. Lori looked up to find his eyes meeting hers. “It would have been nice to break you in more gently. But as you can see, my work does come on rather suddenly.”

  “Your work?” Lori asked.

  “Please,” said Marax. “Let’s get inside. I’ll endeavour to explain.”

  Mysteries, of the fallen and the damned

  The nursery building had a back door that looked like a silver fire door. Marax opened it with a key-card, a bleep coming from some unseen place. Inside, the walls were lit by electric sconces, spaced every four feet or so, leading through a long corridor that seemed to be sloping downwards. Marax went first, followed by Allardyce, then Lori and Owe paired up in the middle. A few feet behind them, Tyler and Addy were lost in a whispered conversation. Addy hadn’t even tried to speak to Lori. There were waves of heat coming off her muscles as she heard the annoying lilt of his strange accent. She focused ahead, feeling the world grow colder. There was a breeze streaming down the hallway. Owe pulled her cloak up around her ears.

  “Welcome to my Holy Ground, Lorelai,” Marax called. His voice echoed back down the hall.

  A few steps later, Lori emerged into a deep cavern with a bluish glow. There were more sconces around the almost-circular walls, lighting up the crags of the rocks above them. A few steel pillars supported the space, and the ground was peppered with the remains of stone walls, slightly raised from the ground. Lori looked at the patterns, which seemed to mark out chambers and corridors on the floor. Growing up in Chester, she knew what they were. She’d seen them again and again on school trips around town, and in the local museum.

  “Roman ruins,” she mused. She looked up at Marax. “You live in a ruin?”

  He frowned. “Certainly not. I live in a stylish Georgian townhouse behind the Cathedral. But this is where I work. Where our kind congregate.”

  Our kind. Lori’s mouth dried out her next words. Marax’s hands were uplifted, and Lori followed them to look higher into the dome of the cavern. Above the sconces, she counted fifteen images etched into the walls. They were painted in white and different shades of blue, and it was their colouring that gave the place its strange glow. She looked at each one in turn, making out the shapes. They were strange figures, like the Dali pictures of Hell that she’d been researching with Granddad, back when everything was relatively normal. Cloven beasts and slim, human-like figures walking together at first. As the pictures changed, fire, ice and war came into view. Something clicked in Lori’s head.

  “They’re like the Mysteries,” she said.

  “Exactly,” Marax replied.

  His voice was closer. Lori’s neck ached from craning, and when she looked back into the room she found Marax standing beside her. The others had dissipated into little groups in different parts of the large chamber. Owe was clinging to what looked like an oil radiator near the entrance they’d used. Addy and Tyler were still in deep conversation, their backs to the room. Mr Allardyce had vanished entirely, and now Lori saw that some the shadows in the wall were tunnels branching away from the central room.

  “These,” Marax continued, “are the Mysteries of our people. Let me ask you something, Lori. What’s the difference between an angel and a demon?”

  Lori pouted a moment. She knew what her Granddad would have said. Angels were good, and demons were bad. The idea made her blood tremble now. Was she bad? She didn’t know any more. If she was, it wasn’t intentional.

  “I… I don’t know,” she replied.

  “And do you know why that is?” Marax asked. He didn’t wait for an answer. “Because there is no difference. Angels and demons come from the same place. They are Demonicus. All of them.”

  “Why have two names?” Lori said.

  Marax pointed up to the Mysteries again, to the sixth one along. Lori saw the human-shaped creatures surrounding one of the larger, more beastly kinds. They waved spears and forks at it. In the top-most corner of the same picture, however, there were other humans worshipping a winged figure that floated above everything.

  “Personal taste,” Marax answered. His smile had turned to a sneer, which was a little less ugly. “Angels are the Demonicus that the human race have decided to venerate. The ones who helped them, years ago. The ones they build churches and temples for. Those with gifts like prophecy and rebirth. Gifts that humanity considers Holy.”

  Lori eyed the beast surrounded by weapons again.

  “And the rest of us?” she asked, a lump in her throat.

  “Demonized,” Marax answered. “No better word for it. The D.C. would have you believe that there’s nothing you can do when a Sown reaches its Saturation point. They fill their wards up with the young, making them ‘as comfortable as possible’ whilst they watch them die.”

  Marax’s words washed over Lori, her mind flashing with visions of the Group A kids she’d seen. The reptilian boy, struggling to breathe under the weight of his own skin. Poor Dipesh, freezing to death because the demon inside him couldn’t handle the climate. And Niamh, wherever she was, slowly being eaten alive from the inside out, a walking skeleton.

  “Palliative care, that’s all they’re good for,” Marax said. He was looking at the ruins in the ground now, kicking an expensive-looking shoe against a stone wall fragment.

  “I thought they were looking for a cure,” Lori replied. “Some of the doctors that I overheard, they were talking about experimenting with medicines and-”

  She fell silent as Marax began to shake his head slowly. He looked up, the silver sheen in his eyes a little less visible than before.

  “Human medicines.” His tone was flat. “Matilda Vane ought to know better. She’s not one of them, but she likes to support their practices. Make the mortals believe that they have some control over what happens on the other side of the gates.”

  Lori blinked. “So Matilda’s… an angel?”

  Marax snorted. He walked a few paces, looking up at the painted ceiling again.

  “Saturation isn’t the end for you, Lori.” His voice echoed upwards and died in the air. “If you’ll assist me, I’ll help you to live beyond the execution date that the D.C. has given you. And I can hunt down the Cervinae and return it to Hell before Harvest, as I did for Owe.”

  Lori’s tummy did a few flips. She too looked back into the reaches of the ceiling, her eyes settling on the last of the Mysteries. Here, seven gargantuan figures glowed from the heights of a mountain top. Beneath them, four creatures stood alone. One was crimson, another olive green, one white, and one black. At the foot of the painting, a legion of smaller beasts seemed to be following them. Something hard swelled in Lori’s chest, and she heard her heart thumping in her ears. When she looked back to Marax, he was watching her, eyes glittering.

  “Two questions,” Lori said.

  Marax opened his arms, palms flat. “Please.”

  “Okay…”

  Lori rubbed her fingertips together with one hand, the other reaching up to toy with her hair. It still hadn’t dried from the rain and the sweaty labour. For a fleeting moment, she thought that she must have looked like crap, but it was only a moment. Nobody else in the cavern seemed to care what anyone else looked like. There were more important things in the world now than s
ome chubby teen in a wet tracksuit.

  “What is it you want me to do, to ‘assist’ you?”

  “I need eyes and ears within the D.C., as many as possible,” Marax explained.

  He gestured, and Lori followed his hand to where Allardyce was emerging from one of the tunnelways. He had changed his muddy suit for a fresh one, looking a lot brighter than before. When he spotted Marax, he began walking towards them.

  “Gregory has been my mole in the D.C.’s British centre for a little under a year now,” Marax continued, “but it’s tricky for him to find the young people who are keen to defect. The ones who don’t trust the D.C., and are willing to break its rules.”

  “Except when they actually do break them, and go wandering around in restricted zones,” Allardyce grinned at Lori. “You made life easy on that one.”

  “And you weren’t found out,” Marax added.

  Lori met his eyes again. He reached out, one hand resting on her shoulder, and she felt nothing but its pressure. No temperature problem either way. No shaking, no burning. A strong grip holding her steady.

  “You’re intelligent, Lorelai,” Marax said, “and strong. Cautious, but brave. Determined, but also affable. Polite, even. Owe does a fair job of keeping an eye on the girls’ groups for me, but her temperament isn’t really suited for it. But you… you’d make a perfect spy.”

  There was a wave of heat behind Lori’s eyes. She tried not to clutch at the scar on her chest, feeling her heart tingle.

  “Taking down a global organisation isn’t easy,” Allardyce added. “You don’t march in there and lay waste to it with fire-breath or super-human strength. If you really want to end something like the D.C., you go for its heart. Turn its own children against it.”

  The ward came to Lori’s mind again. She remembered the sickly shivers in her gut when she thought of that becoming her own fate. It was wrong, what the D.C. was doing, and even more wrong to keep it secret from those they’d promised to help.