Dogfighters: Under the Hill

by Alex Beecroft

  He pictured himself pulling the knife from his boot and jabbing it down where the fibres were most tangled, watching the pulse of darkness follow the wound, laughing in the strange blazing ecstasy of the pain.

  “Stop it!” Kanath writhed on the derelict roof, trying to bury his head in the cold dirt to get some relief from the stabbing ache. He rolled onto his back, felt the lip of the roof too late and fell, flailing, into the narrow street in front of the shrines. Dust broke his fall, fountained up all around him, and the wind whisked it away with a hiss.

  The fall shocked them into an uneasy truce, for long enough, at least, to notice how the light had changed. Kanath heaved over and got his feet back on the ground. His jaw landed with a muffled thud on the street and, as he was pawing at his sore muzzle, he opened his eyes and saw, through the bracket of his claws, the priest of the shrine, lantern held high, watching him with mingled wariness and concern.

  The idea struck Flynn readymade. One of his rare moments of inspiration. “Sumala, quick, put a piece of your soul in him. Tell him he has to warn the skipper about the invasion. Tell him I said ‘remember Doncaster’. You’re pretty much divine already, he’ll think it’s a message from his goddess. He’ll be glad.”

  “Have I not done enough for you already? I want out. I want to go home.”

  “Please. If Skip can stop her getting through my world, then she won’t ever get to yours. You’ll still have a home to go to. Sumala!”

  “Very well.”

  Kanath was already looking at the man. Close to, one could see he was not young at all. Age had piled up in his gaze like the dust on his world. Out of the corner of Flynn’s mental eye, he thought he caught a glimpse of something golden, glittering, that passed like a comet’s tail along the locked gazes. Then the priest frowned, shook himself as if from a sleep, and picked up a conversation Flynn had not been aware they had been having.

  “No, windlord. I am too old for the vanity of war. I cannot tell you what you ask. I have not paid attention to anything beyond these four walls for a thousand years.”

  Kanath’s disgust was like a red itch beneath the skin. “Go back to your dead god, then, priest, entombed in your mausoleum. You have been no help to the living, lo, this millennia, why should you start now?”

  The dragon paced back into the garden of sculptures, found the highest and climbed it, his claws leaving gouges in the undefined shape. There might have been a crown on the head where he perched for a moment, getting his breath back. Then he tossed himself out into the streamers of dust. The great wings snapped out, caught the wind, and he allowed himself to be swept away like a kite with a cut string.

  This time the journey through space passed slowly enough for the dragon to begin to feel the burn of oxygen deprivation in his muscles, the maddening urge to breathe. When they reached the ground, Flynn felt as wrung out as if he’d just put down after a twelve-hour flight over Happy Valley. He knew the feel of a joyride well enough, and that—that had not been it.

  “Look, Kanath. I apologise for being rude and for causing you pain. But you showed us that for a reason, yes? Help us now. Help us to get free so that we can do something about it.”

  “He’s Oonagh’s dog, after all.” Sumala’s tone was grim. “He showed us this just to make us sad, because he thinks we are powerless.”

  She slipped through the loom of consciousness and tugged on the threads that moved the dragon’s head, pointing him at the palace, at the waterway entrance through which Flynn had sailed to save her. “Go there!”

  Kanath grumbled but obeyed, landing in the stream, swimming like a huge black crocodile into the darkness.

  This time they passed boats coming in the opposite direction, watched the boatmen cover their eyes and look away. The scent of fear was like frankincense. It made Flynn think of Sunday service and quieted Kanath almost in the same way. “I am no dog. I am a god,” he said.

  Hauling himself out of the water at the landing place, he shook himself and was for one moment surrounded by flying diamonds of blue-lit drops. Then he writhed up to the stairs and put his head in the arch of the first spiral of the stairs. A certain smugness had now come back into his thoughts.

  “Go on!” Sumala kicked out again, the jab of pain uniting with Flynn’s sudden realisation of the truth. He rode along and felt the jolt of cold stone against his own shoulders as Kanath tried to squeeze into the hole. It was far too small for him.

  “And the stair down to the sleepers from the Gate of Will is smaller.” Flynn reached out to soothe with his imaginary hand the place they had battered between them. The flow of current rejoined itself seamlessly, and Kanath raised his head higher, put up the ridge of his back as a crest and gave a full-body shake.

  “Exactly,” he said. “I cannot because I cannot. You should have chosen another host, my parasite friends. I cannot free you from your prison. No matter how you torment me, I cannot reunite you with your bodies. So now the question is, do I let you stay on whole in my mind, or do I pull you into such tiny pieces you will never come together again?

  “Fee fi fo fum, I smell the soul of an Englishman. Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his mind until it’s fled.” He laughed with a burst of purple flame. “What do you say to that then, you who dared to command the windlord of a queen?”

  Chapter Two

  “Need to talk to you, Padre.” Chris thumbed his phone open and shut, watching as the reflection of the stained-glass window was deflected up to hit one of the angels of the roof beams square in the face. A service of baptism had just finished, the proud parents and godparents departed, and Grace, in full ecclesiastical vestments, was putting out the candles and smoothing the cloth that covered the altar.

  She smiled to see him, though it was a smile with a touch of exasperation. “All right. But you can turn that thing off and put it away. You’re in the house of God, nothing more important than that is going to happen while you’re here.”

  With a little laugh, he switched the phone off and tucked it into his back pocket. “It’s a deal. Grace, I want to talk to you about—”

  “Just one moment.” She finished her tidying up, pulling a small plug out of the font and wiping it dry with a linen cloth that she passed to a beaming child in a surplus. Chris made his way into the Lady Chapel, where a modern-art Mary, looking like an Isle of Arran chessman, sat in front of the mutilated remains of an earlier statue. Evidently the queen of heaven was making a cautious comeback now the iconoclastic passion of the more zealous kind of Protestant had been tamed.

  For lack of something to do, and for luck, he put 20p in the collection box and lit a candle, standing it upright in the sandy tray in front of her niche. The light was calming, still and upright, golden as the summer morning outside.

  “So.” Grace returned to sit next to him on one of the modern upholstered chairs. She had taken off the gorgeous green silk and the floor-length snowy linen of her vestments, and was now resplendent in a ragged skirt, tie-died T-shirt and a pair of Doc Martens. “Tell me what’s on your mind.”

  Easier said than done. Chris picked up one of the meditation stones that had considerately been placed nearby, next to a rack of leaflets on new and trendy ways to pray. “I think Geoff’s alive.”

  Grace crossed her legs at the ankle and leaned forward, intent. “The Geoff you told me about? The one…”

  “My lover, yes.”

  She looked startled, a little offended, but he didn’t have time to play games. She’d brought this out into the open herself, now let her deal with it. “To be more specific, I think he’s alive and a prisoner in Faerie. Tell me how I can get him back.”

  Grace lit her own candle and pondered it. The flame picked out the lines of her frown in gilding. “Why do you assume that I know?”

  “Because this is your job, Padre—the supernatural. If you don’t know, you can find out. I want him back, and I don’t care what it takes.”

  Her sigh echoed in the tall, empty room. “Yes.
That’s why I worry.” She raised a hand to forestall his protest. “No, don’t say anything. I know all the arguments. I just wish you weren’t going up against them while you are in such a morally fragile place.”

  “Bollocks, Padre.” Chris leapt to his feet, instantly enraged at the silence, the dim sepulchral loftiness of the room, the cross on the far altar and even the light streaming through the stained-glass saints. “I could go down the road to St. Andrews right now and find a priest there who’d be glad to marry me to Ben or Geoff, bishops’ guidance notwithstanding. Don’t try and tell me you’re the only one who’s got the inside gen on this. The church is practising a Christian charity it doesn’t preach, and I’m all for that. If you’re going to be a hypocrite, you ought to do it that way around. I’d still rather you weren’t a hypocrite at all.”

  Grace stood too, her mouth gone hard, her pink hair looking ridiculously festive atop an expression that promised hellfire. “Don’t call me a hypocrite, Chris. You know I believe what I believe, and I’ve never claimed anything else.”

  “I didn’t come in here to argue theology.”

  “Why did you come?”

  He considered for a moment taking one of the meditation stones and throwing it through a glass angel’s wing. But the colour was so beautiful, the painting so subtle, a master craftsman’s heart and soul had gone into it, and he couldn’t. He couldn’t even hold on to the anger. She believed what she’d been taught, so had he, not so long ago.

  He sighed, sat down. “I came for help.”

  At his surrender, Grace softened. She perched on the edge of her chair and gave a quiet laugh. “You have such a way of asking for it, Chris. But then I’ve always known that. I shouldn’t let you rile me up. I’m sorry.”

  Chris spoke to his joined hands, wedged beneath his knees where they could not betray him by trembling. “I know it’s been fifteen years. Nearly seventy years, even. I just want it dealt with now. I hate the waiting.”

  “I hate”—Grace gave a little laugh—“that my church doesn’t seem to know what to believe any more. I know God’s there—I can feel him—and that should be important. Yes? Yet we’re bickering over gay rights the same way we bickered over women priests. It should be obvious—the answer should be obvious. The way should be lit, so that we know how to follow it. And it isn’t, and I don’t know why not.”

  “Crisis of faith, eh?”

  “No.” She laughed again with a little more heart to it. “Or not at least in Jesus. But in the church, yes. And it makes me sad. My father always says that in Nigeria we preserved the faith as it was handed to us. Those who came and taught it claimed that they knew the answers to everything. But now it seems that they were lying about that too, he says. We have kept it alive the way it was handed to us, and in the meantime, in the home church, they were falling away—or rising up—and leaving us behind. And now you expect us once more to do things your way, even though you keep changing your mind.”

  Chris reached out and picked up the stone again, rubbing it. It was soothing, strangely enough. “Who’s ‘you’ in this context?” he ventured at last.

  Grace shook her head. “Don’t mind me. It’s a shock, I suppose. I thought we were agreed about this, you and I. It was a comfort. Now I’m not sure what to think.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you what I think about your problem. Then you give me the gen on mine, okay?”

  She tilted her head, he took that as a yes.

  “When you can stop a teenage boy from thinking about sex every five minutes, then you can talk to me about ‘it’s not your fault how you were made, it’s all about how you act’. That’s bollocks too, as Jesus knew perfectly well. Guy who looks with lust at a girl—just as guilty as the one who lies with her. So don’t try to give me that middle-of-the-road clever little compromise. It doesn’t work. What I do or don’t do, being gay is what I am. And if that’s abominable, then I’m abominable. Hate the sin but love the sinner isn’t possible in these circs. I am the sin.”

  This was not what he’d come in for, but there was something undeniably satisfying about saying it aloud. Here of all places, where the sunlight nesting amid the rafters was blue with incense, and the silence had a quality suggesting a listening ear. “So, Grace, you’d better decide now what you really think. Am I deserving of eternal punishment because I was once in love with the bravest, though the most indecisive lad you ever did see? If Him up above opened up the furnaces right now, would you throw me in?”

  She looked insulted. “Of course not!”

  And he swallowed a little feeling of relief. One friendship saved at least. On shaky foundations still, but with hope of improvement later. “Glad to hear it. D’you think God’s more or less merciful than you?”

  “All right.” She got up, jerked her chin towards the back of the church, where, behind carved ash doors, a small kitchen was hidden. “You’ve made your point. Feeling the thirst after righteousness? Shall I put the kettle on?”

  “I could do with something.” Tea, as usual, calmed the friction, brought order back into a frayed world. “Got any biscuits?”

  With a mug and a chocolate digestive in hand, they opened the nave door and sat on the worn flagstones together, looking out at the graveyard, which was clad in trumpets of bindweed and shaggy with long grass that was turning champagne blond in the long hot summer without rain.

  “So,” he said, eventually, “any ideas?”

  Grace twitched as her expression of deep thought passed through bemusement—catching up with the change of subject—and then into wariness. “I’d suggest prayer, but I know you’re not a praying man.”

  “I’ve been known to shriek for help from the Almighty now and again. But I agree it’s not something I should do in the main course of things.”

  “To get someone out from Faerie you need magic. Strong magic. I don’t know whether it can be done without an unshakeable faith in something.” She propped her chin on her curled hand and contemplated the toes of her boots. The scuffed red leather looked in the sunshine like ruby slippers—if slippers had calf-high lacing and extreme grip, kick-ass, black rubber soles.

  “Do you have an unshakeable faith in anything, Chris?”

  He thought immediately of Geoff. Geoff who always knew which way to turn, which way would lead him home. Lost in a white shrouded world of nothingness, flying on artificial horizon and compass, with half an hour’s fuel and no idea where England lay, he’d say, “Navigator, can I have a course,” and the coordinates would come back before he had time to breathe. But Geoff—well he was obviously bloody trying, but he was equally obviously failing to find a way back here, and if he didn’t know, then what else was there?

  “Beer and cigarettes?”

  “Don’t be facetious.” Grace rooted around in the cutlery drawer and then the pile of hassocks, emerging with a triumphant “Ha!” and a small red pot of saccharine tablets. “I’m thinking about sacraments. A sacrament is a physical thing which represents and focuses a spiritual power. I could give you holy water. I could even give you the Host—I trust you that much. But could you really be resigned enough to God’s will to allow Him to work through them effectively? To work through you effectively. I don’t know that you trust Him enough.”

  “I don’t know that you do either, Padre.”

  “No,” she said, smiling. “That’s why there are so few miracles these days. It’s hard to give up power entirely without knowing the outcome first.”

  A sparrow flew from the yew trees of the churchyard into the carven boughs of the church. Chris had a strange flash of sympathy for it, imagining hot little feet on cool stone, delicious shade, welcome after all that glare.

  “So,” Grace continued, “Faerie is a spiritual realm, not a physical one. Its laws are responsive to your willpower. What you need, to force a way in, is to find something which works as a sacrament for you.” She steepled her fingers and pressed them to her lips. “Something which helps you to realise your own strength, whi
ch enables you to connect your will to your ability to use it. Does that help?”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know! It’s a personal thing—I don’t know better than you do what’s likely to unlock the inner recesses of your soul. The MPA logo, maybe? That stands for everything we’ve been doing these past three years. We’ve seen off our fair share of paranormal beasties, and the MPA was always your baby. How about that?”

  Chris imagined himself sewing the logo onto his shirt, going into battle with it on his chest, like a long-winded Superman. “I’ll have a think about it.”

  “Do.” She put her palms behind her on the warm flagged floor and stretched. “And I’ll have a think about what you said too.”

  The sky slowly clouded over as Chris walked home, along roads clogged with tourists and ramblers. Unhappy red faces all around him, for the grey clouds seemed to trap the heat. The roads sweltered as in an oven. Far off, over Matlock Peak, darker grey clouds held thunder, and the world seemed to crouch down, breathless, sticky, waiting for the rain.

  The downpour had started as he opened his front door, switched on the computer and moved into the kitchen to give it time to boot. By the time he had filled the kettle, rain was tapping like fingers on the window. The light continued to fail, and when he stood by the sink and looked out, a sense of wrongness niggled him. Something was up. But the distant hillsides looked dour and calm as ever. Something in the garden, then? He focussed on the forlorn shapes of the engines he had taken apart to see how they worked and not quite managed to put back together. But they were as rusty and disheartened as ever in their tangles of quick-growing roses and pennyroyal.