by Paul Cornell
She did honour to the four compass points, raised the three forms of the goddess within her, as she’d done hundreds of times over the last few years, and found some slight calm in the familiarity of the ceremony. She had chosen, all those years ago, to investigate that which had harmed her, to understand it and encompass it. She fought her mental illness on its own territory. Now it was early afternoon, and her serotonin levels would be low, and, as she thought she might, she thought she heard the music begin again, at the edge of her perception. However, now she was ready. She took up the yoga stance she’d selected, closed her eyes, and addressed her own illness.
“I know you’re not real,” she said. “You’re a false memory I created, something to punish myself with.” She clasped in one hand the protective pentagram on her necklace, that she’d selected after much consideration, for its shape, feel, and materials. “I bring to the surface all the strength of the woman I am. I gather everything that can help me, I summon those forces to me. There is no such thing as an evil force that can harm me.”
“Well, that’s bollocks.”
Autumn’s eyes snapped open. She saw that a customer had entered somehow without ringing the bell, an angry-looking old lady it took a moment for her to recognise.
“Are you going to stand there spouting New Age wankery,” said Judith, “or are you going to help me?”
Judith was someone Autumn had heard about from her other customers ever since she’d opened the shop—someone who might have been in her core customer base, an actual local practitioner of . . . well, what Judith was actually into varied depending on who was telling the story. She had, it seemed, been thrown out of every local coven and circle from Swindon to Cirencester. “Aleister Crowley in a frock,” as one white witch had put it, letting out a long sigh of recalled exasperation.
The fact that, despite that, Judith had never actually ventured into the magic shop had long been a source of nagging worry to Autumn. So her being here now was perhaps actually a positive sign, a synchronicity showing that the universe and Autumn’s mind were now on the same upward path. Judith slapped a shopping list into her hand and marched round after her, grabbing each item off the shelves as Autumn found it. Judith seemed to share the occasional feeling that some of her customers expressed, that Witches was perhaps not arranged for browsing.
The old woman seemed to have an urgent desire to assemble a collection of items and ingredients that indicated a need on her part to shortly practice the craft in a rather worrying way. Autumn had tried and failed to communicate with her many other customers recently who’d also come here looking for troubling items, but this was different. Having Judith Mawson here was both a major coup and the chance to help an old lady who might be scared, lonely, confused even. “You seem,” she said, as Judith threw another sprig of herbs into her basket, “to be seeking protective ingredients, protective crystals. It’s all about protection for you today.”
Judith grunted.
“So is there some new situation in your life, some new problem which has made you seek such protection?”
Judith stopped, as if realising she wasn’t going to get away without being talked at, and seemed to consider for a moment. “Nothing you can help with. I’ve found my materials in nature rather than in this jumble sale of a shop because you don’t believe in magic. Now things have gotten to a bloody terrifying point where I need everything you’ve got as well as everything I’ve got. You’re asking because you want to know if you need protection. The answer is yes, girl, loads of it, right now.”
Autumn found her nails had dug into the palms of her hands. She made herself breathe. “Whatever seems to be happening, with the proper mental adjustment—”
“You won’t save yourself with frigging aromatherapy. You at least have the sense to be wearing that.” She pointed at the pentagram around Autumn’s throat. “The sealed nut can work wonders, with sacrifice and whatnot. What you do with that nugget of actual useful info is up to you.” Judith opened her handbag and dumped everything from her shopping basket into it with one chuck, then reached in her pocket, immediately found the exact money needed, and slapped it into Autumn’s palm. “Magic is real,” she said. “Stop running away. You’ve had some contact with the fairies of the Summerland, whether you’re aware of it or not. I can smell it on you. If they come back, now the borders are wobbly, don’t accept any invitations or cheques. If they say they can take you to meet royalty, they don’t mean at Buckingham Palace, and you’re not prepared for what you’d see.” Autumn was too shocked by her words to speak, and before she could muster urgent questions, Judith was marching out. “I might have to come back,” she called, “even at these prices.”
Autumn was about to follow, but then she heard once more, distantly, from behind the shop, the music. She’d just been told everything she’d fended off was true. It was like the sound was laughing at her.
That morning, Lizzie had found Mr. Parks asleep in his nursing home, his breathing shallow, his son and daughter taking turns at his bedside. She had taken the opportunity, when his consciousness had surfaced briefly and he’d greeted her, to pray with him and administer the last rites. She’d done all this, not feeling the words herself. She’d been there as he’d passed away, holding his hand. Then she’d gone to the church, looked again at the wad of cash on the collection plate, and still not been able to touch it. She’d finally grabbed the plate, and hidden it under a duster inside the organ stool. She’d gone home to the vicarage and found she was too tired to make tea. She’d slumped onto the sofa, and soon she was asleep.
In her dream, Joe walked beside her again, on the road where she’d killed him. “Take the bloody money,” he said, “give it to the poor. They don’t care about what’s going on inside your stupid head.”
“I know,” she said, luxuriating in being arm in arm with him, knowing it was all going to go wrong, but—in a dream—not knowing why or how.
“Maybe faith doesn’t suit you anymore.”
“This isn’t actually you, is it?”
“Right. I’m just the sensible bit of you. I’m not ‘watching over you from the other side.’ There probably isn’t an other side.”
Lizzie’s feelings on the afterlife had always been complicated. The Bible was actually much stronger on the idea that everyone was going to be resurrected together, physically, at what sounded like the end of the universe, than it was on the idea of heaven. “I never thought you were playing guitar with Jimi Hendrix.”
“Do you want me to stop meeting you in dreams?”
She shoved him playfully. “Of course not!”
He staggered into the road just in time for the car to hit him again.
Lizzie woke slowly, every muscle aching. She felt too lost in grief to cry. One year gone, and she still felt like this. One year was how long people thought you were allowed to grieve. Maybe something had to give. Maybe that thing was her. The money was just money. She would write and post her resignation letter to the bishop, then go and get the money and pay it directly into the food bank charity’s account, and then she would go far away. That row of decisions, falling silently in her head like demolished tower blocks, made her feel the closest to contentment she had in weeks. She hauled herself to her feet, and stumbled towards the first of them.
Autumn stood by the counter, shaking, listening to the increasing volume of the music outside. Judith had arrived in her shop, like something out of the writings of Jung, at the very moment Autumn had been calling in everything she could to help her. What she’d said had matched what was in Autumn’s head. Everything in her rationalist readings of magic said she should listen to the words of the wise woman who’d stepped over her threshold.
She had to face the possibility that what had happened to her was true. It was that or collapse, break down, curl up into a ball.
She made her decision. She went to the aisle of unicorn ornaments and found the most pointy of them. She strode to the back door and flung it open. She
marched out into the car park her shop shared with the hot stone massage place and the accountancy business. The music was clear out here, blaring, terrifying. Other shop owners must have heard it. If they had, though, why weren’t they out here complaining? “Where are you, you bastard?” she yelled, aware that she was giving her neighbours plenty to talk about.
He walked out into the light.
She had to take a step back. She had no idea of what he’d walked out of, if there had been a shadow there or . . . but no, now she couldn’t do anything but look at him.
He was real.
He was exactly the same as he’d been all those years ago: so achingly thin, like a skeleton in leather trousers—leather jacket, hair down his back, eyes that looked every moment like he was going to take some sort of immediate and drastic action. He was carrying a radio straight out of the 1950s. It was playing the music—the music that had suddenly become absolutely clear and played by instruments no human had ever played: utterly impossible in the way it was constructed and yet obviously natural and terrifying on that basis alone, as if the sound itself opened up possibilities beyond this world. Autumn felt dizzy. She was breathing too fast. Was she hallucinating?
He switched off the radio and she nearly fell with relief at the silence. He was looking at her. Like she was the object of his next immediate and drastic action. “Digital,” he said, pointing to the radio. “Better than the old panpipes, eh?” His accent was, as always, impossible to place, an accent they didn’t make anymore.
She could find no response.
“Can I come in?”
“No!” She hated even talking to him, that acknowledgement he was really here. She had her defences. She was not going to let them down by inviting him in.
“You’re looking lovely today.”
She was frozen with anger.
“I’ve been trying to make you come out and see me. I didn’t think you were going to pay attention to my summons. I wondered if you’d forgotten the music.”
“I tried to.”
“What?” He looked startled. “Why?” He took a step closer, those eyes searching her face. She made herself stand her ground. “Oh. You thought I . . . wasn’t real.” She remembered how he could read things like that from faces. “You actually thought all the beauty I showed you, all the treasures I shared with you . . .”
He sounded like he was actually getting angry, like he was the injured party. That gave her the right sort of anger to allow her to speak. “All you took from me!”
“Took? That’s damned ungracious. You held my hand willingly. You entered my nation willingly—”
“You shoved me in!”
“Well, okay, yes, but only because you were hesitating. And what did I say to you immediately afterwards?”
If this was all true, then she remembered that, and she didn’t want to. “That’s not the point.”
He roared at her. “What did I say?”
She stumbled backwards, feeling the force of his voice in her head. She used everything she’d learned to put a boundary around who she was and shoved him back out again.
He leapt back, as if he’d been slapped. He stared at her, sizing her up once again. “Oh, you’ve been studying. Interesting flavour to it. Practical. Different. A bit . . .” he gestured to his radio, “modern, like.”
She had actually faced him down. The relief and exultation inside her threatened to make her start laughing or sobbing, and if she started she felt like she might not stop. If these were memories, not dreams or imaginings, then she remembered what had happened and she had to keep the moral high ground. “You said that every step I took was of my own free will. But I don’t know how much you were influencing me to stay.”
“Not at all, because you actually bloody left in the end, didn’t you? I told you what you had to do to go home—”
“To let go of you . . . of your hand . . . for more than a hundred heartbeats. That’s also true. But again—”
“You put it to practical use. You tried it. It worked. You ran out on me.” He stopped, suddenly realising. “Are you saying I forced myself on you, influenced you to—?”
“Did you?”
“No. Because I’m a prince of the blood, not some human cowson, out for whatever he can get in his short lifetime. As if I’d soil such honour for you.” She swore at him. He looked pleasingly outraged. “I didn’t even lie to you, did I?”
“You didn’t tell me where we were going.”
“You still don’t believe it now, so you wouldn’t have believed it then.”
“I’m talking about informed consent here.”
“You consented after you saw the Summerland. Several times.”
“You kept me—”
“I did not keep you.”
“I was in there, in the kingdom, for—”
“A weekend.”
“A year! It was a weekend for us in there, but for me it was a year away from home! Thanks to you, I lost my job, my family thought I’d run away or been murdered—!”
He stared at her. She couldn’t read his face. “I can navigate across the border, I could have brought you back to the right point, but you ran—”
She didn’t want to hear it. “I got out of your bed, I . . . I went for a walk, and I kept counting heartbeats.” She remembered . . . she had to accept that was the right word now . . . she remembered her awe at the clusters of what she now knew to be magic ingredients growing all over the building, a tree or cave or something which had seemed like part of the landscape, the bright fields of what her reading had since told her were things of value to her craft seen through circles and gaps, the sheer meaning everywhere. She had thought since, on those few occasions when she’d allowed herself to imagine the experience to be real, that what they called magic in this world was just a gathering of scraps from that one. Then, however, came the part of the dream that hurt her. The curiosity about how all the corridors and branches and breezes led one way, to an enormous door that was open just a crack. How she had run, knowing her time was short, to that door, and had looked inside like a child expecting to see a secret. She had seen . . . her memory shied away from it still. “I saw . . . I saw your father, on his throne. I saw . . . !” She didn’t want to remember the sight, slammed the door in her mind now.
“You saw what he ‘really’ looked like?”
“Yes!”
“What I must ‘really’ look like, whatever this really word means?”
“Yes!”
“And you ran from the sight of my father, leaving him furious at such judgement of him on your part, offended to the depths of his pride, which is why he—who is, himself, the land and also thus the border—made you arrive back a little late. When he didn’t have to let you go at all.”
So . . . so that had been deliberate? She just shook her head. Couldn’t deal. “You make it sound like I should be grateful.”
“You ran away because you realised I wasn’t so attractive without my makeup. Because I’m not a young white male.”
Something felt sick inside her. She checked her own defences, found he wasn’t trying them. “You’re twisting my words. This is what you do, you trick people.”
“People trick themselves and blame us. Whatever ‘us’ is the latest us.”
“You . . . you can’t be saying . . .” She needed to make clear to him the tremendous hurt he’d caused, what the shock of what she’d seen and the time away had done to her. She needed to tell him about the harm done by the stories she’d made up for herself and others about where she’d been in that missing year, stories that she’d come to half believe herself, about the distance the experience had put between her and her family, between her and Lizzie. She found she had no words to do that now, but she would have some one day. Now, though, there was something more urgent to ask. “Listen. Why have you come back? Why are you here?”
“Because trouble is coming. You can help.”
“I’m not going to help you.” She indicate
d the pentagram at her throat, remembering what Judith had said. “This protects me from going with you.”
He looked hurt. “You’d need cold iron for that, I could walk through that thing. Not that I intend to. Not with me being so disgusting to you. And as for that—” He gestured vaguely towards the unicorn ornament she’d forgotten she was clutching, “it’s only just occurred to me that it’s meant to be a weapon and not a vastly inauthentic gift. Listen. My father—”
“I don’t want to hear about your father!”
“My father is considering going to war. Those old fools at that town meeting last night, they don’t know what they’re up against. Only one of them seems prepared, and nobody was listening to her, so I came to you.”
Autumn found herself wrong-footed. Again. “Your father is considering going to war against a supermarket?”
“You’ve all spent decades ignoring it, but the shape of this town, the magic you call ‘planning permission,’ it’s vitally important. This town is the lynchpin that holds all the barriers in place.”
“The barriers?”
“Like the one you stepped over.”
“Was pushed over!”
“Don’t start that again.”
“If I could do that, how is it a barrier?”
“Well, obviously the barriers allow a certain amount of traffic, passage to those who know what they’re doing, at the proper times and places. Did you ever go looking for that border again?”
“No.”
“Oh, and I see that’s actually true. Weird. If the barriers collapse completely, there’ll be chaos, disaster, as everything from the other worlds tries to rush in and plunder at once. Rather than allow that, my father will intervene to establish order, with sword and spear and glamour. By ‘glamour,’ I don’t mean he’ll be—”