Nocturne

by Louise Cooper

  Sanity came back in a dizzying rush and Indigo felt as though her legs were about to buckle under her. But Forth was oblivious to her state; he was already starting after Esty, dragging Indigo with him. Indigo stumbled in his wake, tripped, somehow stayed upright: then suddenly the fear of being left behind, alone, sent a surge of adrenalin through her and with it new energy, and she was racing desperately at Forth’s side, following Esty’s fleeing figure and shouting her name like a charm against evil.

  •CHAPTER•IX•

  I won’t go back there!“ Esty said savagely, through clenched teeth. ”I don’t care if we leave everything to rot—I won’t go!“

  Forth released his grip on his sister’s wrists and looked helplessly at Indigo. “It’s no use. She won’t see reason.”

  They had caught up with Esty on the slope of a gentle escarpment, had succeeded eventually in calming her, and sat now on the scarp edge, unwilling to look over the brink into the well of intense shadow below. Their camp fire was faintly visible in the distance—and with it were all their belongings.

  Esty pulled her arms away from Forth’s hold and sniffed, wiping her eyes on her remaining sleeve. Forth crumpled the other, which he’d torn away as he tried to stop her flight, and dropped it on the grass.

  “Well, someone has to go back,” he said firmly.

  “No, Forth!” Esty protested. “You didn’t see it—”

  “Then I haven’t got so much to fear, have I?”

  “But it was the Jachanine! The hair, the teeth—and those eyes!”

  “Wait.” Indigo spoke sharply, catching Forth’s arm. “What did she say she saw?”

  “The Jachanine,” Forth told her tersely. “It’s a troll that haunts pinewoods in our homeland. Our Mam used to tell us stories about it when we were little.” He repressed a shiver.

  “What does it look like?”

  Forth frowned. “You saw it for yourself, didn’t you?”

  “I saw something. But I gave it another name.” She leaned forward so that Esty was less likely to hear her. “We have tales in the Southern Isles of a demon called the Brown Walker. It’s immensely tall and thin, and it has one arm, one leg and one eye. Its mouth is in its stomach, and it hoots.” She tasted bile in the back of her throat as the image resurged in her mind, and forced it back. “That was what I saw. Does it describe the Jachanine?”

  “No.” Forth’s eyes narrowed. “So you and Esty didn’t see the same thing, did you? She believed it was the Jachanine; you believed it was a Southern Isles demon. And I saw nothing at all. It wasn’t real, then. It was another illusion.”

  “Yes.” Indigo stared speculatively back towards their camp and the menacing wall of trees beyond. “But what manner of illusion? That’s what troubles me, Forth. Did we create it ourselves, out of our own imaginations? Or did some outside power see into our minds, and conjure the images to reflect our childhood fears?”

  Forth uttered a soft imprecation and looked back at the forest, his eyes furtive with unease. “By the Mother, that doesn’t bear thinking about. It’d mean that this demon knows we’re here, and it’s watching us.” He glanced at her obliquely, furtively. “Playing with us, perhaps.”

  He echoed Indigo’s own suspicions, and she said, “I think we Should go. There can be no question of returning to the campsite for any longer than it takes to retrieve our belongings: even if Esty was willing I don’t think it would be wise. I believe we should move”on, and quickly. If you and I fetch our things—“

  Forth shook his head. “I agree; but Esty won’t wait here alone. One of us will have to stay with her. Better if I do the fetching.” In the dark his smile was a pallid but determined attempt at humor. “I’m the fastest runner among us.”

  Indigo was reluctant to let him venture back to the camp alone, but had to admit that there was little choice. Esty crept close to her, gripping her hand tightly, and together they watched in some trepidation as Forth loped away over the turf towards the fire’s fading light. As he bent to gather their possessions the forest canopy rustled suddenly and ominously. Indigo’s pulse missed a painful beat, and Forth looked up quickly; but the trees quieted once more and he resumed his task, working rapidly and not stopping to stamp out the dying fire. When he returned, Esty hugged him wordlessly; then they all turned to look out at the shimmering, night-drenched land that stretched away towards the distant horizon.

  “There’s a track, of sorts.” Indigo, whose night vision was sharper than average, pointed to where a ridge ran diagonally between two steep-sided vales. Along the crest, faintly and patchily phosphorescent in the deep gloom, was what might have been a narrow, uneven path.

  “No way of telling where it leads,” Forth said dubiously.

  “Away from the forest.” Esty cut in. “That’s good enough for me.”

  In the distance, on the forest’s edge, the dim blue flames of the fire still glowed. As they shouldered their packs, Indigo looked back and wondered whether that small, chilly light would eventually fade and die. She continued to gaze at the fire until she heard her name called, a tentative, puzzled query, and it broke the thrall of her musing. Forth and Esty were watching her, and Forth asked,

  “Indigo? What’s on your your mind?”

  She turned towards them, back to the dark sweep of the unknown land ahead. “Nothing that won’t keep for a while,” she told him, and made herself smile. “Shall we go?”

  Time and distance had no meaning as they walked through the silent night. The thin, phantasmic twilight didn’t change, the fells and scarps and moors reached endlessly in all directions, and no landmarks were distinguishable from the surrounding barrenness. Tiredness had given way to an odd, dreamlike sense of inevitability, and even Indigo, who hadn’t slept at all, felt that she could have trudged on under the featureless sky forever.

  Esty had put the worst of her terrors behind her, but her courage had suffered a blow and she had been uncharacteristically subdued since they left the scarp. Indigo and Forth had explained the nature of the apparition in the woods, but it made little difference. What had happened once, Esty argued, could happen again. And there were far worse childhood nightmares than the Jachanine lying buried in her mind. What might the next phantom be? Another troll? A voracious pack of the Wichtlenen? Or even the Oaken Worm itself? Sharply, Forth told her to hold her tongue and stop being so foolish: did she want to invite further trouble? Though the names Esty had conjured meant nothing to her, Indigo could see that even Forth’s determined bravado was shaken by them, and she intervened, anxious to change the subject before the fear became too contagious. Hoping to lift the prevailing mood, she told them of her experiment with the fire, and of how she had banished a burn on her own hand by believing that it couldn’t exist. Esty was excited by the idea, and studied her scorched fingers with new interest.

  “You mean that if I say I don’t believe in it, it’ll go away?”

  “It’s not quite that simple,” Indigo warned her. “You can’t merely say you don’t believe: you must be convinced of it.”

  Esty frowned, flexing her hand. “But it still hurts. I don’t see how I can stop believing it doesn’t when it still does.”

  “Try,” Indigo urged. “Esty, this could be vital to us! If we can learn to manipulate the forces that are at work here—”

  “Like the voice?” Esty’s eyes lit.

  “Exactly like the voice.” Indigo glanced at Forth, who nodded understanding. “Try, Esty—please.”

  But nothing happened. She had, perhaps, been expecting too much of Esty, Indigo told herself. Self-will was a subtle weapon even to the most skilled mind, and she had few illusions that she herself was anything but a poor practitioner: for the Brabazons this was new and untried territory, and wouldn’t be easily conquered.

  “Don’t fret,” she told the frustrated girl. “It will come, in time. You must be patient.”

  They walked on. Esty still stared at her hand with determined concentration, and Forth too was preo
ccupied, so that for some while no one had anything to say. The ground was beginning to rise perceptibly, though the landscape was still an uneven patchwork of ridges and valleys: peering into the gloomy distance Indigo thought that a mile or so ahead-perspective was impossible to judge accurately—it changed to become high, flat moorland, which would make for easier going and also, possibly, give them a broader vista from where to plan their direction. Privately she admitted that she would be glad of the change, for the vales that yawned to either side of the ridge were beginning to unnerve her. Deep, silent and utterly lightless, they were more like pits than true valleys: they might reach down for ten feet or ten miles, and it was all too easy to imagine nameless horrors shifting down there in the blackness, sensing their presence and slithering up from the abyss in blind, mindless hunger. She thought of the Bruhome sleepwalkers, wondering with an unpleasant inward shudder how many of them might have stumbled, in the throes of their enchantment, into one of these gaping pits. The fact that thus far they had seen no trace of any of the forest’s hapless victims added an extra dimension to her disquiet, but she kept her speculations to herself, not wanting to sow new seeds of fear in Forth’s and Esty’s minds.

  The ground was still rising, becoming noticeably steeper now, and when they paused to rest for a moment on the slope it was possible at last to see that Indigo’s surmise had been right. A short way on, the land leveled out on to open moor; and where the ridge joined the moorland, a lone, gnarled tree stood, leaning at a drunken angle as though battered by prevailing gales.

  The gradient abruptly increased, and they were forced to use their hands to scramble the final slope to the top. Reaching the top of the rise they straightened, breathless, and stared in awe at the new landscape stretching away before them.

  The moor was vast and almost entirely featureless. A smooth black sward, patched only by the occasional tussock of rougher grass, reached away into immeasurable and unbroken distance. Far off was a will-o’-the-wisp gleam of phosphorescence; water or mist or something less natural, it was impossible to tell. There were no hills to speak of, no valleys, no trees. And, as before, not one sign of life.

  “Great Mother,” Forth said with feeling.

  Indigo made no comment, but she guessed what he was thinking. For all they could tell, it might be possible to walk forever across that bleak, unchanging plain without finding anything to guide or lead them towards their goal. Even with careful rationing, their supplies of food and water were strictly limited, and though the unnatural laws of this dimension might enable them to survive without sustenance, she wouldn’t care to put such a theory to the test.

  The lone tree stood a few paces away to her left, and she went to examine it more closely. It was, she saw now, little more than a stunted bush, leafless and covered with small, sharp prickles, like a withered hawthorn. The scoured and leaning boughs seemed to point like a petrified finger, and when she sighted along them she saw that their direction aligned perfectly with the phosphorescent glimmer in the far distance. A hint? Or merely a misleading coincidence? Weighing the thought in her mind she idly fingered one of the black branches, then glanced down as a twig snapped off in her hand. The twig felt dry, brittle; for a moment only it retained its shape, then even as she looked at it, it crumbled to flakes of bark and dust.

  Dead … Indigo raised her head and stared again at the faraway glimmer. Forth, who had moved to stand beside her, said, “That way?”

  “It’s as good as any other,” Indigo replied. “And that light may be significant.”

  Forth shrugged. “Whatever it signifies, it can’t be any worse than what we’ve already passed. Those valleys … ugh.”

  “You felt that, too?”

  “Yes. I couldn’t stop asking myself what would happen to anyone who missed their footing and fell from the track. It didn’t make for pleasant thinking.”

  “Well, we’ve only the moor to trouble us now. Let’s hope it doesn’t hide any deadly secrets.”

  Forth nodded, then, quickly and a little surreptitiously, gripped her hand and squeezed it. “So long as we’re all together, eh?”

  His face was faintly flushed and he was suddenly unwilling to meet her gaze directly. Indigo’s heart sank. Not this, she thought; not Forth. They had sufficient problems; surely he must realise that there was no room for further complication? Gently but firmly she withdrew her hand and stepped away from him, putting a clear distance between them and hoping that her message would be conveyed without offence. “Come on,” she said, not unkindly. “We should be on our way.”

  She glimpsed his face only briefly as she turned aside. He wore a peculiar expression in which embarrassment, hope, resolve and resentment all vied for precedence, and part of her wanted to stop, face him and say: Forth, don’t be foolish; put these notions out of your mind and don’t even consider them again. But she couldn’t. The painful pride of Forth’s nineteen years would neither understand nor accept such a rebuke; he was too young—and the fact that he believed her to be only a few years his senior added its own hollow irony to the dilemma. Forth would have to learn that the reality of their relationship couldn’t mesh with what he saw in his imagination. But she would hate to be the one to teach him that lesson.

  The way across the moor proved a good deal easier than the uneven and precarious track along the ridge. Though the path itself—real or imagined, Indigo still couldn’t reach a conclusion—had vanished at the edge of the plateau, there were no pitfalls to make the way hazardous. Esty was trying to compensate for her earlier somberness by being determinedly if artificially cheerful, at first launching into a flow of brittle, inconsequential chatter, then when neither Forth nor Indigo responded, singing a riddle-song to herself. Though she was reluctant to sully Esty’s mood, Indigo found that the singing jarred on her already taut nerves, and constantly had to crush an urge to look back over her shoulder lest anything might be following them. Everything was too quiet, too empty. Where were the sleepwalkers? They should surely have found some trace of them by now. Where could they possibly have gone?

  They walked on. Esty still sang, though now the tune had changed to a bawdy ditty that Stead had long ago banned from the Brabazon Fairplayers’ official repertoire. The peculiar glimmer seemed perceptibly closer now, no more than half a mile away, Indigo surmised; and she tried to listen to the acute silence that gripped the land in the moments between Esty’s crude verses. Perhaps it was imagination, but she thought she could feel a growing tension in the moor’s atmosphere. It was a little like the airless hush before a storm, but closer, more confined. A sense of waiting.

  “Esty!” She had to listen to the atmosphere; needed to. “Esty, I’m sorry, but could you—”

  She didn’t get any further. For out of the blackness beyond vision, far away across the moor, came the chilling, shivering howl of a wolf.

  “By the Mother!” Forth stopped with a visible jolt and looked wildly about. “What was that!”

  Esty had cut off in mid-song, and stared at Indigo with wide eyes. “Was it … ?” she began nervously.

  The dying echoes of the howl were shivering away across the moor. “I don’t know,” Indigo whispered. “But …” no, something inside her said emphatically. I know Grimya’s voice, and that wasn ‘t her. That was no flesh and blood wolf. She wetted her lips. “No. It wasn’t Grimya.”

  “Then there are other wolves out here.”

  Other wolves. Indigo recalled the first time she’d heard that cry, while keeping vigil by the camp fire. They’d covered many miles of ground since then, which made her suspect that this pack, whatever its form, whatever its nature, was following them; keeping a distance but tracking them none the less.

  She looked quickly across the moor to where the thin patch of light glowed, now no more than five hundred yards away.

  “It might be another illusion,” she said tensely, “Another image drawn from our minds …”

  “I wouldn’t lay a wager on it,” Forth said. “You
were the one who warned us about the rules, remember? I think we should move from here, and fast!‘’

  “Make for the light!” Esty pleaded. “Even if there’s no shelter there, I’ll at least feel safer.”

  It made sense. They were vulnerable in this semi-darkness; it would be all too easy for some silent denizen to creep up on them unseen. Light would given them an advantage, however small.

  The unnatural night was silent again. There was no repetition of the howling as, wasting no words, they set off at a fast walk through the grass. The peculiar, ethereal glow drew closer, closer—then at last it was only a few yards ahead of them, and the light’s source was abruptly revealed.

  All thoughts of wolves fled from Indigo’s mind as she and her companions slowed, stopped and stared. Before them, cut into the moorland turf, was a still and perfectly circular pool. It was some twenty feet in diameter, and far too symmetrical to be natural—and the chill, eerie light seemed to be emanating from below the water’s smooth surface, filtering up from a depth impossible to guess and spilling out into the surrounding air. Around the pool’s edge for a distance of some three paces—again, disturbingly symmetrical—the grass gave way to what looked like greyish-white shingle, as smooth and level as though some proud tender had recently raked it.

  Esty was the first to move. Cautiously at first, then with growing confidence, she stepped to the edge of the shingle and tested it with a foot to see if it would bear her weight. It seemed to be only two layers deep, and the ground beneath was solid.

  “Just shingle,” Esty said wonderingly. “But why? What possible purpose could it serve?”

  Even if her question had an answer, it would probably make no sense to them, Indigo thought. She crouched, and picked up one of the pebbles that formed the shingle circle. It was smooth, surprisingly light, almost like pumice; and it felt neither warm nor cold. A neutral thing, lifeless. On an impulse she tossed it at the pool. It struck the surface with a small splash, and sank like any normal stone in normal water.