Who Dies Beneath

by L. J. Hutton

  He’d passed through Knighton now, and with it coming up to midnight, the road ahead and behind was deserted except for the odd rare trucker passing him on the other carriageway heading south to make a delivery. That was good, very good, and when he turned off at what he always called ‘Knuckles’, disdaining to give some little place like that its real name, he knew that nobody had observed him. He had to take this road slowly or he missed the turning, and in his urban-focused mind, that always worried him because it evoked images of cars slowing down for a drive-by shooting, only speeding up when they were making their getaway. And if a drive-by in the heart of Walsall or Wolverhampton would be bad enough, at least there someone would know who he was, and someone – even if it was only Sanay and his big brother Caesar – would take revenge for him. But out here he was totally anonymous, and to be thought of as nobody scared Vijay almost as much as the thought of dying.

  At the quarry he pulled in, his first reaction being one of relief at seeing the Hilux where he’d left it. With Caesar Costa being in the motor trade, or in his case, the motor theft trade, Vijay knew that it wouldn’t have taken long for Sanay to get the Hilux going and remove it, especially if Caesar had come with him. Moreover, Sanay knew the worth of the Hilux, and so even if he’d been smart enough not to keep it because it would let Vijay know where he’d been, he would certainly have sold it on via Caesar’s contacts.

  He got out and lit up a joint, dragging the smoke into his lungs and feeling the sense of calm returning. Now all he had to do was try and remember which way Tufty had thrown the bloody gun. The magazine he was less worried about, though that was because he’d not yet thought that the police might lift his fingerprints from it. His concerns had been firstly about the cost of replacing the gun, and secondly, that he’d heard that if the filth got hold of a gun, they could tell if a certain bullet had been fired through it – like a bullet dug out of a corpse. But seeing the scene in the quarry undisturbed, he wasn’t worried about that anymore. He just didn’t want the supplier of arms to the urban gangs to think him such an amateur that he would carelessly lose the bloody thing.

  So he was totally taken by surprise when a woman’s voice came from behind him, saying in a sort of Welsh accent,

  “I’ve seen you here before.”

  Almost jumping out of his skin, Vijay spun around, ready to lay into this stranger. But when he saw her he stopped, frozen. She was gorgeous! Long hair so dark it melted into the night framed an exquisitely beautiful face, with high cheekbones, sensuous lips, and the most amazing eyes he’d ever seen. Was he really seeing stars reflected in them? No, that couldn’t be. Fuck! This weed was good stuff! He must ask Jamal where it had come from, because he wanted more for his personal stash.

  “Hello sexy!” he said, with his best leer. “You bin watch’ me, have yer? Like what you see? Want a bit o’ me?” and he grabbed his crotch and thrust towards her.

  The look of revulsion which swept across her face told him straightaway that he’d got that one wrong.

  “Huh!” he grunted, drawing his hand across his nose as it began to drip. “So, bitch, you lookin’ to blackmail me? Only I gotta tell you, I’m seriously connected.”

  “I do not know what this blackmail is you speak of,” she said icily. “But if by connected you mean that you have friends, then so do I.”

  And out of the night stepped first a woman with hair the colour of summer sunshine, and then another whose long flowing locks shimmered like the light from a moon that wasn’t shining tonight.

  Where’s the light coming from for those three? his addled mind screamed. That ain’t right! They ain’t even standin’ in my headlight beams! And he began frantically looking around for this unknown source of light which enabled him to see them perfectly clearly, yet lit nothing else.

  Yet as he did so, a male version of them appeared. And ‘appeared’ was right. One second he wasn’t there, the next he was. What the fuck is he wearin’? Vijay’s inner voice screamed, already feeling a rising panic. Is that a fuckin’ sword he got? No way, man! Who uses a sword these days? What are they, some freakin’ jihadists or somethin’?

  “We saw you,” the dark-haired woman continued. “We saw you when you brought those poor women into this place and used your evil device upon them. You and that man you killed later on. You gave them no chance, no mercy. What had they ever done to you to warrant that?”

  “Huh!” Vijay grunted savagely, snorting and then spitting. “You wasn’t so brave then, was yer? Didn’t see you four tryin’ to stop me back then when I had a gun in ma’ hand. Naaah! You’m cowards!”

  However, the ice-maiden, as Vijay thought of her as, stepped closer and replied just as savagely. “We did not stop you because the time was not right. We could not cross into this world on that night, but tonight is one of those when we can, and this time we will stop you.”

  “Stop me doin’ what?” Vijay jeered, the weed now enough in his system to lend him bravado. “I ain’t got no bitch in ma’ car this time. So what yer think I’m gonna do, eh? Can’t call the filth for a man drivin’ at night on his own!” and he laughed nastily.

  Yet the foursome simply looked a little perplexed.

  “You make no sense,” the golden-haired one said irritably, “and it is clear that we are wasting our time trying to speak with you. Your soul is black and corrupt, just as the other one’s was. You have no understanding of how far you have fallen from grace, nor of the depth of the suffering you have brought to others. Or at least you do not yet. Before this night is ended, though, you will.”

  “Phfah!” Vijay laughed, with another hawk and a spit. “You know nuffin’, bitch!”

  The last word had barely left his lips when he felt something very sharp, hard, and very cold touch him at the nap of his neck. It penetrated even though his knock-off Armani jacket’s collar. In his younger days, Vijay had been held at knife-point – who in his neighbourhood hadn’t at some time? But this time it was different. Why did the chill from this blade feel as if it was seeping down into his heart?

  “You will move,” the male voice said, giving an extra prod with the sword tip.

  How had he got behind him, Vijay fretted? He’d not heard a thing, yet the moment he took one step forwards, he could hear the gritty surface crunching beneath his expensive converses. He couldn’t make a move without them hearing him, so how was it possible that all four of them were now moving in complete silence?

  “This way,” the dark-haired one said, beckoning him, and then turning to walk away from him.

  Shit she was confident if she would risk turning her back on him! Back on his own turf, nobody turned their back on Vijay Bose. He had too much of a reputation with a knife for that. Yet this woman – and the fact that it was a woman was a double insult for Vijay – was clearly so not bothered by him that she would do what hard men wouldn’t.

  I’m gonna cut you, bitch, he thought, just as soon as this fucker gets his sword out of my back. I’m gonna cut you like you never been cut before!

  It was hollow bravado, though, because by now there was another part of Vijay’s fuzzy brain which was registering that this time he was really in trouble. The dark one was leading him out of the quarry and along to where there was just open hillside leading upwards. With an ease which really had Vijay’s mind reeling, she began walking up the hillside with apparently as little effort as if she had been going for a stroll across some perfectly flat lawn.

  “Up!” the male behind him commanded, giving Vijay an extra prod with the sword tip.

  And if Vijay had been hoping that the male whatever-he-was would lessen the contact of that sword tip with Vijay’s spine, he was soon disappointed. The pressure on the tip never wavered, and there were no sounds from behind as if the male was puffing and panting the way Vijay was. That as much as anything finally convinced him that against everything he believed in or knew of, he was dealing with creatures who were not wholly human. He blinked and wiped his hand across his eyes, be
fore staring hard at the woman in front of him again. She wasn’t even bending the grass she stepped on! That big tussock she’d just walked over was as upright as it had been before she passed over it, yet the moment he put his foot on it, he crushed the grass stalks flat.

  Too lost for words to even mentally swear anymore – and swearing aloud was far beyond him now that he was gasping for every breath on the steep climb – Vijay could only stagger onwards and upwards. He was in trouble, that much he’d worked out, but what these strange things were going to do to him was completely eluding him. This kind of tramping over wild hills had been Tufty’s thing, not his, and his fancy, high-topped converses had no grip on the surface, making him slip and slide all over the place, and weren’t thick soled enough to give his feet any protection. He could feel every stone and bump in the ground, so that his feet were already giving him a lot of pain, and then he went down, twisting his ankle badly.

  As he howled in pain, grabbing his ankle with both hands and unable to keep the tears from his eyes, he was seized roughly by the arms by the other two women. With an ease which raised Vijay’s fear to outright terror, they simply dragged him backwards up the hill, it seeming to cost them no more effort than if he’d been a rather naughty puppy refusing to walk on his lead. When the slope started to ease off a little, he realised that they had turned to walk along it, for he could now see the hillside continuing to rise on his right, while it fell away to his left. Dare he try to wriggle free and risk rolling down that slope? He wasn’t fooling himself that he could walk, and he knew he’d pick up a lot of bruises on the way, but maybe, just maybe, if he could fall to the road, he’d be able to limp back to the Audi before they caught up with him. It was his right ankle that was wrecked, but at least the Audi was an automatic, and he’d use his left foot on the accelerator, sitting at whatever odd angle he needed to, if it got him away from here.

  That was a foolish hope, though. He couldn’t begin to break either one of their holds on him, and it was only after they’d hauled him over a dry-stone wall, that they dumped him at the base of a tree. He still had the sensation of that male with the sword behind him, even though his back was now up against the rough bark, but the three females now arrayed themselves in front of him.

  “Who are you?” he whimpered. “What you want with me? What’s it to you bitches what I do? I never even seen you before!”

  “Nor have most of your kind,” said Helyglys, the dark-haired one of the women. “We do not come into your world much anymore.”

  Vijay’s head was hurting. “What d’yer mean, ‘into your world’? Walsall?”

  The three looked at one another before golden-haired Pelydryn replied, “We know not of this Walsall you speak of. My sister said your world, by which we mean this world of men. We are Cymry. Do you understand what that means?”

  Vijay shook his head, and heard them sigh.

  “Has it been so very long that you no longer remember us?” Claerwyn asked, her accompanying shake of her near-white tresses flinging tiny flashes of moonlight across the landscape.

  “Remember who?” Vijay was hopelessly lost.

  “The folk. The kin. The elven kind. The guardians of the forests and rivers and wild places,” Claerwyn expanded.

  “What’s ‘elven kind’? Never heard of it!”

  They all looked shocked.

  “You’ve never heard of elves?” Pelydryn said, as if she couldn’t believe that such ignorance was possible.

  “Elves? Oh yeah, heard of them, but they’re just fairy stories for kids. They ain’t real.”

  “Aargh!” the male voice behind him snarled. “Fool! What do you think the fae are? These fairies you speak of with such disrespect? We are the fae! Elves are the fae, your fairies as you so disrespect us by calling us. We are the watchers of the trees. The guardians of the land.”

  “Yes, we are,” Helyglys snapped, “and you have polluted our land with your foul acts. Are you fallen so low that you do not know that all life is connected?”

  “You slaughtered innocent souls on land which we stand guard over,” Pelydryn elaborated. “Bad enough that others of your kind should come and rip it apart for its rocks. We have been coming regularly to give what healing we could to that place since your kind left. But theirs was destruction of a mindless sort. They knew not that what they harmed was alive, seeing stone and earth and plants as dead already. But you! You knowingly brought living souls into that place and severed them from life. Well now you shall pay!”

  For the briefest instant, Vijay was lost as he tried to imagine what she could possibly have in store for him. Seconds later he found out. Something as cool as a mountain stream flowed into his mind, completely bypassing any resistance on his part, and took him over. No longer in control of himself, he was suddenly being shown his actions in the quarry from the point of view of the women he had killed, but not just visually. Each and every one of them was brought into his head as if he now stood within them, feeling very personally their terror, their pain, and their dying moments. But in the process of doing that, the elves showed themselves to Vijay, and more than the suffering of the women, it was the nature of them which reduced him to gibbering terror.

  Never in his life had he considered what it would be like to be so connected with everything, to feel the life force flowing in the sap of the tree he was against, and the grass he was sitting upon. And they were old, really, really old, measuring their lives in tens of centuries. They had known this land, this very hillside, before even the Romans had set foot in England, and they remembered. They actually remembered!

  That sweep of memory reduced Vijay to nothing but an inconsequential blip on the historical map, a nothing, less than a speck of dust, and his mind couldn’t cope with that. And yet as he reeled back from it, the only way his trapped thoughts could turn was towards the tree. As his mind inadvertently leaned back into it, the flow of the sap caught him and dragged him inwards and downwards. Down and down he went, the scent of rich damp earth filling his nostrils, his eyes blind to anything but darkness, and it was this which finally made him break. The knowledge that this was what it must be like to be buried alive was more than he could stand, and his thoughts began thrashing wildly, even though his body was beyond their control, and sat inert.

  “He is beyond turning,” Helyglys said with a sigh. “He sees only dirt. What is wrong with men like him that they cannot see beyond to the Otherworld?”

  To her and her sisters, and Tarian-derw, the connection with the tree wasn’t dark at all. It was stepping into a flowing tide of radiant, luminous green, teaming with life, and passing through it took them to their world, where every living thing shone that bit brighter. Where nothing was polluted or fouled. And where respect for all living things didn’t need to be enforced, because it was so fundamental to those who lived there that they couldn’t imagine living any other way. Only on this side of the veil did they need to go armed against the evil which men wrought, which on rare occasions included those of their own kind, driven mad by the contact.

  For Vijay, though, there was only so much his mind and body could take, cemented as he was in a world immutably ruled by money, avarice and violence. All he saw was loss, and there was only so much of that he could take before his panic levels rose so high that his drug-weakened heart gave out. With a mental scream which never made it to his mouth, Vijay died.

  Sensing him go, Tarian-derw sheathed his sword. “That felt like poor justice for those he brought so much pain and terror to,” he observed, as the four of them opened the way back into their world. “Was it worth it, do you think? Will others like him not come too?”

  However, Claerwyn was more optimistic. “That one would never have stopped, you could sense that once the barriers in his mind had been opened. Even at the end, he did not fully understand what he had done that was so wrong. But at least we have stopped him from bringing any others here to their deaths. And do not be so discouraged, brother. If all men were like him, we wo
uld have bodies piled up in every grove and hollow. The fact that the violence and fear he brought here could be felt reverberating by us from miles away, surely tells you that it was an abnormal happening. We may no longer feel what happens in those places where they congregate and build their houses up towards the sky, and I understand why those like us had to leave their homes there. But out here we can still be sure that such things are mercifully few and far between.”

  Chapter 14

  CAREFULLY CLOSING THE TT’s door again, Bill retraced his steps, this time swishing the branch over where he’d walked to clear any imprint he’d left in the dust. It wasn’t likely to withstand a minute forensic search, but hopefully, if whatever boot prints he’d left didn’t look fresh, they might be taken for the perpetrators’, or after all of these months, maybe even Bose’s own. Then back at the quarry’s entrance, he walked back a few paces to the dip in the track, and the thin line of woodland snaking its way uphill, following the line of yet another streamlet as it trickled down off the hillside. Were there crab apples up there? Was this why Bose wasn’t in the quarry?

  With a sigh, Bill knew that he was going to have to scramble up there, and was just glad that in the absence of any kind of track, that at least there were plenty of branches on the steep slope to help haul himself up by. It was hard going, and by the time he’d been going for fifteen minutes, he was already sweating hard. The distance to the top of what was barely a wooded gully couldn’t have been more than half a mile, and yet it took a huge amount of effort before Bill emerged out onto the open hillside.