‘Think what?’
‘About what would have happened if I’d taken what the Farrow were offering.’
‘More people would have died, that’s what. Anyway!’ he added brightly, since horror and disease and his foundering marriage were the last things he wanted to talk about. ‘What you got going in here, Mother Nature?’
She took him by the hand and showed him. ‘Spring onions over here, spinach over there, the odd turnip or two if I’m feeling adventurous.’ She looked around as if afraid of being overheard. ‘Maybe even something medicinal for the old, you know,’ and she made a whirling screw-loose sign with her finger beside her head.
David laughed. ‘You’ll get arrested!’
Dennie’s expression was all wounded innocence. ‘Me? A harmless old bat going gaga in her own back garden? Nobody would be so cruel.’ Then her face clouded. ‘Nobody would… would…’ Her eyes wandered up to his. ‘What was I saying?’
He glanced back to the house, where Lizzie was watching through the kitchen window. She saw his look, and her shoulders slumped in a sigh. It had only been with great reluctance that she’d let him see Dennie in the first place; she still blamed him for what had happened. Get in line, he thought. ‘You were telling me what you had planted out,’ he said as cheerfully as he could manage. ‘Spring onions and spinach?’
‘Oh, don’t be silly, Brian,’ she scowled, turning away. ‘It’s entirely the wrong season for spring onions and spinach. Now what did I do with…’ She drifted away, hands fluttering, looking for something that probably wasn’t even there. ‘What did I do with…’
Then Lizzie was there with her arms around her mother. ‘Come on, Mum,’ she said. ‘Let’s go have a cup of tea, hey?’ As she guided Dennie carefully away, she turned to David over her shoulder and mouthed Sorry.
‘I should go,’ he said.
Lizzie nodded and led the echo of her mother back towards the house.
He went back to Briar Hill to have a last look at his old allotment. The Farrow plot was still surrounded by fluttering police tape, and while a handful of his neighbours’ allotments were still being tended, many more had been abandoned and were overgrown by weeds. It didn’t seem likely that the Association would be able to lease his out to new tenants. This place was poisoned.
The earth hid horrors, he knew that well now. It soaked up blood and pain, fear and hatred, and it didn’t take very much effort to dig that all back up again. But as he walked down to his shed and back, scuffing at the soil with his shoes, he thought about all the memories he and Becky and Alice had made here – the time when they had wrestled those old railway sleepers into place to make the raised beds, the time when Alice had chased butterflies, the picnics and Easter egg hunts, the frosty mornings and the long slow summer evenings – and he hoped that maybe the soil soaked up love too, and friendship, and family.
So he found an old plastic flower pot, and he scooped up a handful of earth and filled it. Whether his daughter ended up with a garden of her own or just a window box, he would sprinkle this soil in it and pray that whatever she planted there would grow strong and true.
EPILOGUE
‘THIS IS WHERE IT HAPPENED,’ SAID THE MAN, STEPPING into the clearing. His small entourage of four followed, bundled in thick coats and gloves against the snow. Two were women and two men, but all were young, in their twenties or late teens while their leader was older, in his forties. They all carried backpacks and snow shovels over their shoulders.
‘There were remarkably few casualties,’ he added, ‘but only if you count the cost in lives.’
He led the group through the knee-deep snow to the centre of the open space, where the fallen remains of the great stone column were larger hummocks in the otherwise uniform blanket of white, and they set to clearing the snow with their shovels. This February’s Beast-from-the-East had been harsher than the last few, and though more bad weather was forecast for later in the day, for the moment the sky was an icy blue. Trees had encroached over the years, and there had been a discussion about using them to string up some kind of shelter like a tarp over the top, but he had said no – it was better that they were exposed to the elements. On the cleared ground they laid waterproof groundsheets and thick woollen blankets atop those.
‘With He Who Eats the Moon dead but not consecrated,’ he continued, ‘the first flesh died with him and was rejected by the bodies of those that had eaten it. Fairly uncomfortable, but in the end not much worse than a bad case of food poisoning. For Ardwyn Hughes though, the last survivor of the old Swinley church, it was a bit more serious.’
As the younger members removed their clothes, the older man took from his backpack the objects that he carried, placing them carefully on the stone block as if it were an altar. One of them was a large bronze bowl. The other was a black sickle-shaped knife, its blade broken but still gleaming.
‘When the prison guard went to check on her the next morning, she found a corpse that looked like it had been dead for weeks. I have no idea how old Ardwyn really was. The injuries that the first flesh had healed stayed healed, but time is a wound that can’t be fixed, I suppose.’
‘Though it does come back around,’ suggested one of the young women.
He thought about this. ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose it does.’ When melting polar ice had killed the Gulf Stream in ’31, the islands of Britain had reverted to a climate more in keeping with Iceland or Norway, which some romantic souls were calling a new Ice Age, though this conveniently ignored the fact that there were no more ice sheets or glaciers left and the land was instead being inundated with rising sea levels and catastrophic flooding. The ‘Neodiluvian’, was its proper term. Fifteen years on, people were still arguing whether it was settling down or speeding up.
‘There are wounds that can’t be healed, though, and maybe shouldn’t.’ The man removed his coat and jacket and rolled up the sleeve of his right arm, exposing an underside that was scored with ranks of old, parallel scars. He took up the ancient sickle in his left hand. ‘This may work, or it may not, but either way we will at least have tried,’ said Joshua Neary, and put the knife to his flesh.
‘Now, shall we begin?’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
WHEN PEOPLE ASKED ME WHAT I WAS WORKING ON and I told them it was a story about improbable horribleness on an allotment, far more than I was expecting replied either with an enthusiastic, ‘Ooh! I’ve got an allotment!’ or a wistful, ‘You know, I’ve always wanted to get an allotment,’ or a furtive sidelong glance as if afraid of being overheard and a, ‘Let me tell you what really goes on down our allotments.’ If I’d wanted to, I could have written a book of handy hints, tips, and shaggy dog stories for allotment holders, and one day I might, but in the meantime the people I need to thank for letting me pick their brains, weed their plots, and put up their sheds are: Mike and Debs, Dan, Julian, Arwen, Ju, Sharon, Lindsey, Megan, and my Dad. May your strawbs be fruitful and your plots be ever slug-free.
I may have taken some liberties with historical details. While the lands of the Cornovii were around that part of the Midlands, there’s no evidence that they worshipped a boar-headed god. Moccus was a real god, however – or at least as real as gods go – worshipped by the Lingones people around Langres in France. However, boar worship was very real and very widespread, so it’s not inconceivable that such cults might have existed in ancient Britain. Any glaring holes in this or the details of the WWI chapters are entirely my fault, for which I hope the history nerds will forgive me. Find me at a con and put me right; I’ll buy you a beer. But no pork scratchings.
The cultivation of my own plot (see what I did there?) would not have been possible without the keen eyes of Cat Camacho and Jo Harwood at Titan, and the encouragement and support of my agent Ian Drury at Sheil Land.
But last and forever to Eden for her gay apples, Hopey for her priapic cacti, and T.C. for being Mother.
J.B., January 2020
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JAMES
BROGDEN IS A PART-TIME AUSTRALIAN WHO grew up in Tasmania and now lives with his wife and two daughters in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, where he teaches English. He spends as much time in the mountains as he is able, and more time playing with Lego than he should. He is the author of The Plague Stones, The Hollow Tree, Hekla’s Children, The Narrows, Tourmaline, The Realt and Evocations, and his horror and fantasy stories have appeared in various periodicals and anthologies ranging from The Big Issue to the British Fantasy Society Award-winning Alchemy Press. Blogging occurs infrequently at jamesbrogden.blogspot.co.uk, and tweeting at @skippybe.
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