It was a desolate sort of place, even in the searchlight glare of a strong sun. The great silence engulfed the small peeps of heather-dwelling moorland birds and the hiss of the wind. When a car went by on the distant road, all it did was to bring home the emptiness of the land before and after.
Nine dancers, apparently. One had fallen onto its side and was covered in moss and yellow lichen. A red mark on it looked like a handprint. It wasn’t until one of the fingers began to elongate, to pool and drip that Chris realised it was a handprint—the print of a man’s palm in blood.
Stan had seen it now, was frowning as though the sight did not compute. He looked up into Chris’s face, down at the machine, fiddling with the dials unnecessarily. “Do you want to go back to the car?” Chris asked, seeing scraped-up turf, the gouged marks of a struggle. “I think I can find it from here.”
Stan put his machine down with enormous care, then grabbed hold of Chris’s pocket. “No way I’m going back to the car on my own. You know what’ll happen then. I’m sticking with you.”
Too many late-night horror films flashed into Chris’s memory. “Good point. All right, we’ll keep together. Hold on tight.”
They shuffled up to the trampled ground. The long scars of claw marks dragged from the closest stone through the centre of the circle and out again to the base of the low hill behind. Beneath the red handprint, the moss had been torn away from the stone in furrows. Easy to see where Ben had tried to hold on, been pulled away, scouring the skin off one of his hands in the process.
Drag marks along the heathery turf and buttercups spattered red. A little farther on, a shoe lay by the side of the spoor, upside down, the toe all but scuffed off. Below the hill, a sliver of silver upended in a flowering gorse bush proved to be Ben’s phone, still on, Chris’s number called up on the menu.
Ten accusing furrows like claw marks showed where someone had scrabbled against the ground. They slid up to the hill, disappeared into a tiny hole, a badger’s set. Crumbled soil around the base of it, and long, verdant grass at the top. Chris couldn’t see in more than a foot, but he knew that—even if he could—he would not have been able to see through to where they had taken Ben. It should have been a comfort to know that the handprints did not really culminate in that earthen grave, but it wasn’t.
Unwanted, the memory of Ben’s flashback recurred to him—his terror of the underground, his parents’ death, his need for a therapist. And to go like this, dragged into crumbling earth, clawing for purchase every step of the way…
Chris picked up the phone, bent over it, seeing his own face reflected in the scuffed plastic surface. God, he looked every bit of his near ninety years, and so he should. Pathetic old man, who had promised to protect Ben and failed, who had promised never to leave Geoff behind and broken that promise with a thoroughness that staggered. “Damn them. Damn them and damn me too.”
After a short period of heartbreak, he tipped the phone into his pocket, looked up and found Stan kneeling next to the abandoned tracer. The boy’s straggly hair looked as if it were made from copper wires, as though he’d become some kind of cyborg in sympathy with his machines, but no machine would have worn such a softly forlorn expression. “I thought this was going to be fun. Something to boast about to me mates at school…”
“It’s all fun and games until somebody loses a war.” With an effort, Chris smiled and helped the boy up. He gave a small snort of amusement—not because he felt it but because Stan looked in need of it, and he’d long ago had practice in faking it to cheer his crew. “Don’t fret, lad. Look, he was still fighting when they took him. Chances are he’s still alive. What we need is a way of opening this gateway again, and we need to do it in the next three days because the borders of the world have been weakened by this transfer.”
He picked up the hat which had fallen at Stan’s feet when he put the tracer down, dropped it once more over the small ginger head. “And I’m relying on you to find a way to do that. You’re my secret weapon in this battle, lad. What can you give me?”
Chris began leading the boy away from the stones, hand on his shoulder to stop him from twisting around to look back. “I dunno, Mr. G,” Stan said, cuddling the satellite dish of his tracer as if for comfort. “Open an interdimensional rift? Sounds kind of high-energy to me. Where are we going to get the power?”
“Reopening it,” Chris said, breezily. He ushered Stan into the car, turned up the heater. What they both needed was a cup of tea, something sugary to counteract the shock. His house, then. “And I don’t think it would need to be open for long. Grace was explaining something to me. If you could give me just a moment’s help, just a turbocharge, I can do the rest.”
The drive home passed in silence. Stan had taken out a school notebook and was drawing in it, his foxy brows knotted. He’d put his glasses on and the lenses were fogged up with moisture. Chris thought about offering a handkerchief, but in the end decided that it was kinder not to notice the tears at all.
There seemed to be some kind of incident going on next door, he thought as he turned into Snitterton Close and saw the police car parked in his neighbour’s front drive. The lights were on, flashing blue over the hard faces of two uniformed police officers. When he turned into his drive, a third man behind the wheel of the car drove in behind him, blocking his escape.
He switched the engine off, put his head into his hands and pressed his thumbs to the bridge of his nose to forestall the incipient headache. A callused hand tapped at the driver’s window. “Get out of the car, please.”
“What…?” Stan raised his head, took off his glasses and wiped them. His face beneath was wet with tears.
“I’ll, um…deal with this.” Chris put his elbow down on the door lock for just enough time to say, “You get working on that portal problem, all right? Take it to Phyllis when you’re done.”
“Not you?”
“Huh. I think, um. I think we’ll let your father calm down a little first. Okay? Anything you give to Phil will get to me in the end.”
A hiss of intaken breath and Stan looked up as though he’d been slapped. He glowered at the policeman, who was now shaking the car by the door handle. “Is this my dad’s fault? Did he set ’em on you?”
When Chris unlocked the doors, they were wrenched open immediately, and a large hand in a blue serge sleeve reached through and took him by one arm and the back of the collar in a professional sort of way. “Well, he’s a man of his word,” Chris said, trying to keep up the smile for the boy’s sake. It was getting so hard to do that his face positively hurt with the effort.
“Fucking wanker!” Stan exploded with all the violence his asthmatic frame contained. “He’s got no right to set the pigs on my friends just ’cause I’m actually learning something. You hear that, lady?”
A brisk, blonde policewoman with feathered hair and arctic eyes had emerged from the squad car to take care of the child. She bent down with a reassuring smile that didn’t touch her cool, assessing gaze. “And who might you be, son?”
Her partner was grizzed, bald and fat, playing with the handcuffs on his belt meaningfully. “Are you Christopher John Gatrell of number two, Snitterton Close?”
Well, this was going to hell in a handbasket. “I am.”
Still, he’d committed no crime, Stan would back him up. Trip down to the station, evening of unpleasantness, it would give the boy time to think of something. Then he could hop in the car, drive to Langdale, borrow his “sacrament” and make an assault on the realm of Faerie. He guessed he could give them an evening when he’d only otherwise be spending it in misery and self-reproach.
“I’m going to have to ask you to accompany me down to the station.”
“Of course. May I ask what I’m accused of?”
“Most innocent people don’t assume they’re accused of anything.”
“Most innocent people haven’t just had a run-in with the boy’s father,” Chris said. “Unpleasant man. Seems to regard giving the boy
an after-school job as some kind of perversion.”
“Is that right?” The policeman wrote down some kind of perversion in his notebook. His face compressed together, as though someone were squeezing the juice out. “As a matter of fact we have evidence linking you with a break-in at 20 Castle Road, Bakewell. The owner of which property seems to have gone missing in mysterious circumstances. But we’ll take the matter of the boy under review too, if you like.”
Opening the door of the squad car, he folded Chris into it, Chris unresisting, feeling like he were freefalling—like he’d just pulled the parachute cord and seen the canopy unravel, snap and blow away. “A break-in?”
“That’s right. I should caution you that you do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”
Too late to struggle now, Chris thought as the officer got in the back with him and the car began to drive away, leaving the policewoman and Stan behind, the boy looking confused and very small. But fuck. There really wasn’t any better word for it. Just fuck.
Chapter Three
The minute the grip let go of his ankle, Ben was up and fighting, a stone for a club in his hand, and in his head the raw madness and terror of the bomb. He hardly saw the shapes ranged about him as he staggered out of the earth and onto marshy wet ground. He was struggling with the falling walls, the shrieking train, tapping into the berserker strength of a man fighting for his mother, for his father’s life.
He cut them down like a scythe through grass and ran, trying to get out, get out, and back to his car…get back to…
Brightness began to filter through his awareness—a pearl-grey sky above, the sound of water. Then his ankle was grabbed again and pulled out from under him, and time disjointed again under the impact of his panic. The ground blurred beneath him as he was picked up and carried, upside down, into the sky. Below him, a river twisted. Above him, he could finally see the thing that had brought him here. From its black snout to the lashing black coils of its tail, it was full forty feet long and had the lazy smirk of a crocodile.
“No!” He twisted up, not sure if this was real or if he was still in the grip of madness, and hammered his stone against the beds of its claws, making the dragon jerk and the meadow beneath him swing in dizzying circles. God, they were going fast now, a line of trees rushed towards him and a moment later all he could see was forest below. Some thoughts began to come back online—chief among them the expectation that the forest would sweep up to a mountain, and in that mountain would be the creature’s lair, where he would end his life in its larder.
“No!” he shouted again. “Fuck you. No, I am not… Let me go!”
He got in a better hit, wedging the stone deep in the softer skin between its smallest digit and the next, heard the yowl of protest and had time to think Oh shit! before he was falling headfirst straight down towards the trees.
Branches broke his fall, just. The canopy was tangled, resilient. He grabbed for it, managed to get himself turned around, slid, breaking branches and maybe bones from one perch to the next, tearing further his crimson hands, and not feeling any of it as it rushed towards him and past.
Then he was on the ground and shaking, and the blur inside his mind resolved into the pattern of twigs on leaf mould all around him, the smell of soil and sap, and a gap in the star cover above him through which came a green light and the shadow of circling dragon wings.
The pain didn’t come until he had got up, seen a suggestion of light ahead of him and begun to thread his way through the silent trees towards it, but it had been like this during the bombing of the underground too—superhuman strength, a numbness to pain, and when it wore off, a mental wound that still hadn’t completely scabbed over.
Yeah, don’t think of that. Just get somewhere safe. Okay? Just get… He stumbled over something, was bemused to see it was a helmet, lying between the tree roots, quite clean and unrusted. They were all over the place, in fact, coats of mail lying folded on top of quilted padding, surcoats, green and grey as the wood around him. They lay as if ready for an inspection, bowed and whispered over by the trees. Then a darkness moved in the corner of his eye—he glanced towards it, saw only spiders, scuttling into the cracks of the tree trunks—and when he looked back, the armour was stones and piles of leaves, and he wondered if he’d ever seen it at all.
A thin, high screech came, maybe nothing more than a branch rubbing against another branch, making a sound like nails on a blackboard, but it lanced straight through his head, pressed the button marked “panic”, and he set his head down and ran as he had never run before. There was an odd pleasure to it, scrambling over roots, lunging from one patch of sunshine to the next, discovering to his surprise that he was surer footed, faster, stronger than he would have believed.
Was there something in the air? Was the gravity lower? He felt as though he could run forever, as though it was the only thing he needed to do. But then the tree cover began to draw away. He saw, ahead of him, a long slope up from forest to…to…
He would have stopped and gazed—meadow giving way to silver streets that curved about a massive artificial hill, round and regular as a bowl. Towers covered it—grey and more shades of grey, topped off with silver, hot and molten bright where sunlight beat against windows. A city.
He would have stopped and gazed, but when he looked up, he saw the reflection of the dragon move over the many towers, pushing through the air as inexorably, as perfectly as a Viking longship up an undefended estuary.
Couldn’t stay among the trees, couldn’t stand here on the meadow to be crisped. He got his breath back, summoned a now slightly watery strength, and dashed for the road.
The dragon was circling like a great vulture, head arched down towards the forest. He thought he could get to cover before it looked his way, was sure of it, breath hissing hot through his own teeth, and his legs burning under him. There was a bridge and an arch, if he could only get under…
And a moat opened up practically beneath his feet—a citywide defensive ditch, narrow but deep. Invisible until you were all but on top of it. He plunged in, jarred his already aching head, tumbled into a nest of brambles at the base of it and used every swear word in his vocabulary twice in a flood of profanity that would have purged him of everything, left him calm and collected, if it hadn’t been for the dragon.
He lay still among the thorns and watched it circle against the empty sky. Around and around it went. So it hadn’t seen him come out of the woods. It didn’t know where he was.
The wave of relief that went over him was the worst thing that had happened since the claws. It told him he was safe and, in response, all his hurts rose up to overwhelm him at once. His head. God. His hands, his arms—scraped raw from elbow to fingertips. Oh fuck. His legs, cramping up after the long run, seizing solid.
His foot slipped into the ankle-deep mud at the bottom of the ditch. It was cold in the eternal shade. He thought it had darkened suddenly, but it was only his eyes blurring from fatigue and injury. It was all too easy to imagine himself falling face-down into the wet—drowning in a soup of algae and city waste. Not the way he would have preferred to go. Looking up again, he found the dragon had ridden higher in the thermal above the city, was nothing but a black dot that slowly faded out of sight against a sky of fumes.
It was gone. It wouldn’t see him any more if he found himself a safer place to collapse.
With his last reserves of strength, Ben got hands and feet into the rough-lain stones of the ditch on its inner side and slowly pulled himself out, rolling over the lip and down into a square by the city’s outer limits. There he sprawled, dry and dusty, with mazy sunshine soothing the road map of his bruises, and for a blessed moment he gave himself over to dark and velvety rest.
It lasted all too short a time before his head woke him by splitting apart. He could feel the gape, going all around his skull, through
one eye and back around his jaw. The brain must be spilling out even now and sizzling on the strange grey metal of the pavement. God, that hurts. He pushed himself up onto an elbow—even that was sore—and squinted at the dazzle. At the movement, the headache gave the sort of throb that stole his breath, made his body heave and gag, but his mind had cleared enough to wonder, with the desolation of a lost child, what happened next. Where was he supposed to go to find help? What did they want from him?
He levered himself up to a kneeling position, everything swirling around him, full of sparks and colours. He could almost feel the air moving on his skin, smell a thousand different savours—metal and grease, dust, heat and coriander, kerosine and smog. Not quite what he’d expected from Faerieland.
Nor, to be frank, were the skyscrapers—every shade of metallic grey from pewter to platinum. Carved in a riot of invention, strung together with walkways as delicate as cobweb, painted with shifting colours, they reflected the grimy light down onto streets lined with dying trees. Brown, crisped ivy and trailing plants wound up the mirrored surfaces and shed their leaves with every movement of the wind. Flakes of colour blew off and joined the thick dust on the ground. The corners of many of the buildings were scored and crumpled as if by clutching hands.
In the streets, bustle and energy and dilapidation went on unperturbed by his presence. Music in the distance, a voice calling out a single phrase again and again in a language he could not understand. Yellow lamps creaked above folk of many sorts, hurrying past with their heads down and the air of preoccupied misery he associated with London in the rush hour. Why hadn’t they noticed him? Stopped what they were doing to stare at this invader of their world?
Dogfighters: Under the Hill Page 5