by Paul Cornell
She felt relief, therefore, at the bing of an incoming email, and sat down again to open it, hoping it was from Lizzie, who she really should talk to about all this; only it was coming up to Christmas, so she’d be busy for at least a couple of days every week, and Autumn didn’t want to spoil how joyful the season seemed to be making her friend, except . . . now that Autumn thought about it, it seemed that Lizzie had actually been freaked out to a weird degree by seeing that ghost. As if it hadn’t been just one of those things that those who had their gift had to get used to, but was . . . personal somehow. Well, that would give her a good excuse to visit and share their worries over some wine. How about she just went over there right—
She stopped as she saw who the email was from, at a service provider’s address which . . . no, even if she squinted, she couldn’t quite read it. It was like her screen couldn’t handle the language it was written in, so it didn’t matter whether or not her newly empowered eyes could have deciphered the original. Her new senses, incidentally, had only added to her dating problems, because now some of the men she encountered came with added visual baggage that was literally hanging around their necks, and—
“Would you please just bloody read me?” said the email.
Autumn leapt back in her chair. A voice had actually come from her computer. A horribly familiar voice. Then the face associated with that voice appeared, looking out of the corner of her screen, incarnated as a cartoon version of himself. “You seem,” said Finn, “to be having trouble opening an email. Can I help with that?”
“No you bloody can’t. What are you doing inside my computer? Here, can you see my downloads?”
“I’m only ‘inside your computer’ in the sense that I’m an email. Can an email see inside your computer? Hey, what’s in here, anyhow?”
Autumn was in no way going to answer that. She’d once got very drunk with Lizzie and started talking about her very specific tastes in fan fiction, and thank God the Reverend had claimed in the morning not to remember a thing. “How do I get you out of there?”
“Well, if you click on the email—”
Autumn, not being able to stand his patronising tone any longer, did so before he’d finished the sentence. To her surprise, the cartoon figure leapt out of the screen and became his real, solid self. Well, as close to solid as Finn, Prince of the Blood, from a land Judith sometimes called “where the Fairies live,” could get.
“—then,” he finished, “I will appear.”
Autumn pulled her dressing gown tighter. “If I’d known you were going to appear—”
“You would have known, if you’d let me finish my—”
“And what are you doing here, anyway? I haven’t seen you since—”
“I have been deliberately staying away, not infringing on your boundaries. I mean both those of Lychford and your own personal ones. Since you three got together and reinforced all the borders, my lot have slept a lot more soundly. So there wasn’t any urgent need for me to come and see you. Besides, since I became aware of it last time round, I’ve gotten a taste for this Internet thing—”
“You’re on the Internet? You’ve got a computer?”
“Yes and no, in that order. I tasted it when I came here last time, so reached under the border and started swigging it from the air.” He made a gesture as if he were drinking a pint. “And that’s when it dawned on me: the menfolk you have in this world are shite.”
Autumn cocked her head to one side. “Oh,” she said, “what an extraordinary revelation. Mind blown.”
“Yeah!” He nodded excitedly. “I knew if I pointed it out, you’d be quick to see it. You’re clever like that. And when I was drinking in the Internet, I saw everything they’re doing to ladies, all at once, and I was horrified. And then turned on, quite a lot. And then horrified again . . . when I realised I should be. Because last time out, I behaved a bit like that to you. By accident, largely. And that’s when I decided to stay away entirely. To avoid doing that again.”
Autumn stared at him. Oh God, he was serious. It wasn’t like she’d wanted him to stay away. She thought they’d gotten things sorted out. Although a bit of her was pleased that just for once she’d managed to freak him out. He wasn’t going to be all guilty and try to sympathise his way into her affections now, was he? She shook her head. He was running her in circles already. “You could just . . . avoid doing that again. Whatever it was.”
“I could.” He nodded.
She waited for the other shoe to drop, but as always with Finn, it failed to. It was like he only wore one shoe. “So . . . if you’d decided to stay away, why are you actually . . . back?”
She’d half expected him to be affronted by that, but he kept with the serious. “Because something’s going terribly wrong. With reality, I mean. Listen, let me tell you everything. In the form of three songs and a list.”
“Could you maybe just—?”
“The list summarises the songs. As always, I’ve thought of everything.”
* * *
The next morning Lizzie went, as she did on the same morning every week, to stand by the gates of Jonathan Canter, the Lychford school of which she was an ex officio governor, and welcome parents and children as they blocked the roads for miles around. Jonathan Canter, Sue often said, was the main reason for the bypass. The churchwarden had known the man the school was named after, back in the day, a local property magnate whose trust still owned a lot of local land, particularly, it seemed, anywhere Lizzie and her team might want to expand the burial grounds into. That his lasting memorial was traffic congestion would, Sue said, have delighted him.
Lizzie hadn’t slept very well the previous night. Months ago she’d taken the pillows from the other side of her bed, put furniture on the side of the room that she associated with her deceased partner, and managed to find a sort of college dorm room ambience that had allowed her to rest. Before the stress of the last few weeks. Now she couldn’t get the face of that little boy out of her head. It was like he was demanding something urgent of her, and she should know what it was all about, but she didn’t. She made herself be attentive as she said hello to the incoming mass of children, and had a couple of conversations with parents about baptisms and the weather and how lovely it was that Christmas was approaching, and wasn’t it nice that The Pogues and, yes, there we go, Greg Lake were back in the charts, and it must be getting so busy for her, now that she had to work for most of the week. Lizzie found she was searching the children’s faces as their breath billowed around them in the frosty air, mentally matching the little boy’s expression with their hopeful ones, all of them full of Christmas. Full of the thought of presents and food, that was. Full of what money was doing to them and the world they lived in. She shouldn’t be thinking like this, she knew, when she should be full of—
She realised she was looking right at him.
She was looking at him, the boy from the church; there he was, looking right back at her!
He was standing hand in hand with what must have been his mother as she, and what must have been his elder sister beside her, talked to Roz, the deputy headmistress. The boy had a quizzical expression on his face. He was wondering why she was staring, she realised. It was definitely the same child. He was even wearing the same pullover and shoes. Only he had none of that cold loneliness about him. There was nothing her newfound senses found odd about him at all. This was no ghost. This boy was flesh and blood.
Lizzie must have made a sound. The boy’s mother looked round. Lizzie briefly considered what she could say, what she could ask. The mother had long brown hair, was in her early thirties, harassed and loving, also utterly normal. Lizzie decided the best thing she could do was to turn her expression of sudden horror into a cough. Which allowed her to strike up the briefest of conversations with Allison Dunning, as the boy’s mother turned out to be called, about how there was a lot of it going around.
As Allison led the boy away, Lizzie kept staring after him, and he looked back
, seemingly as puzzled about her as she was about him.
* * *
“Like I said,” Judith maintained, poker-faced, from her perch at the Witches till, “not real.”
“He’s an actual, living child, Jamie Dunning, goes to nursery at Magic Carpet. How much more real can you get?” Lizzie was pacing, having not been offered tea, since Autumn was still apparently busy upstairs. Lizzie had come running here, when actually she should be doing a host of things related to her actual job. Because this felt somehow more important.
“I mean what’s in your church isn’t a real ghost. It’s an apparition of the living. A doppelgänger.”
“Trouble,” said Autumn, entering from the stairwell.
“They can be,” said Judith. “They’re usually either a warning of an approaching event, an attempt to stop it from coming to pass, or, when they’re playing nasty buggers, something that can cause that event to happen, a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“I mean,” said Autumn, before Lizzie could ask her urgent questions, “we’ve got trouble with the borders. Something’s trying to sneak over. I’ve been . . . communing with the fairies.”
“Have you really?” Lizzie asked, unable to stop herself from placing a rather adolescent emphasis on the last word of that sentence.
“And he sends his regards,” said Autumn. “He says his people can feel a sort of . . . shakiness to the boundaries, as if something’s messing up the system. He provided me with this list of points of where they’ve felt things are getting weird.”
Judith took the piece of paper and tutted at it. “Bloody fairy geography. They have no idea how to talk to us about where things are.”
“And that’s the translated version. You should have heard the songs. Anyway, he said they can’t work out what’s going on, and so, without consulting his father or anyone else, or so he says, Finn came to me to get us involved.”
“They’d never be seen to ask for help from humans,” said Judith. “Not as a nation. Not directly. He’s actually been sent by his father to get us onside, and he wouldn’t have been unless . . .” She paused. “As a mere employee, am I allowed to swear in your shop?”
“You’ve been swearing all the bloody time.”
“I mean really swear?”
“Why would you want to swear?” asked Lizzie. “What have you just thought of?”
“The doppelgänger in your church might have been caused by some enormous trauma of the borders, the map being shaken up by something. Time sometimes gets muddled up a bit when that happens. And since there’s some connection between you and the ghost . . . oh, I found out there was. Should have told you before, I suppose.” She held up a hand to once again stop Lizzie’s questions. “That’s all I know. It’s something that’s going to take a bit of biting down into. We should walk the bounds tonight.”
* * *
These days, Lizzie found the woods that surrounded the town to be in equal parts beautiful and fearful, especially at night. As she kept a slow pace to match that of Judith on the path that went under the bridge and up into the trees, the taste of the air spoke of forthcoming snow. Autumn was wrapped up in a fake fur that looked like something Marianne Faithfull would have rocked in the 1960s. On anyone else it would have been white, but somehow her friend’s way with clothing had touched it, and there were hints of reds and purples. Autumn was wearing the sort of frown that Lizzie usually associated with her arriving on the doorstep in the early hours. Whenever the subject of Finn came up, there was a flash of that look. She herself was still full of worrying questions, but she’d already had all the answers she could get. Part of her feared those answers.
It was already dark by the time they got up to the ridge the locals called Maiden Hill. There was now a new line of a few saplings, still fenced off, but the trees weren’t yet tall enough to obscure the view of the town. A half moon was rising over the vale, with a few scudding clouds illuminated by it. Below lay Lychford, the shape of it made visible by the lights: the cross of compass-pointing roads that met in the marketplace; the church off to one side, with alignments of its own; the new developments of the Backs blossoming out; the river the artery that ran through all of it. In the dark, the town was like a cluster of small fires that spoke of hearth and comfort, that should speak to her, Lizzie knew underneath it all, of Christmas. She wished she could find that feeling.
But here she was with her two friends, who would now always be kept by the burden of their knowledge at a little distance from that warmth. This is where the three “witches” would always be. They needed to be out here looking over it in order to protect it. Did that distance add to how she was feeling? “And you don’t get proper Christmas Number Ones these days,” she said. “Just whoever’s won the bloody X Factor.”
Judith looked at her and blinked like a tortoise. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“She does this,” said Autumn. “She continues conversations like the eight conversations in between haven’t happened.”
Judith considered them both for a moment, then made a noise in the back of her throat and marched off.
Lizzie was about to follow when Autumn put a hand on her arm. “Are you okay?”
Lizzie didn’t know where to begin. Now was not the time. “I’m fine.”
“Come on, this is me. It always takes me a while to realise, but I always get there. And it’s not like Judith’s ever going to notice.”
Lizzie sighed. She always appreciated Autumn’s moments of empathic clarity, but this time her concern just seemed to add to the awkwardness she felt. “If I’m not fine, I don’t know why. I mean . . . that little boy is absolutely not dead. I’ve made a few discrete inquiries about him. He’s got a loving family, no trouble at home.”
“But—?”
Lizzie hated the way Autumn could always do that. Her rare moments of understanding tended to go all the way. “But he doesn’t . . . feel right. He feels like he’s asking something of me. Or . . . blaming me for something.”
“What, like the two ghosts in The Muppet Christmas Carol?”
“Or just the one in A Christmas Carol, yes.”
“But what would he be blaming you for?”
Lizzie really had no idea. That was where the void was. She felt guilty without knowing what she’d done. She just shook her head. At that moment, thankfully, Judith called to them to catch up.
They found the old woman staring at a tree stump that looked as if, centuries ago, it had been struck by lightning. “I call this the dial,” she said. “What do you see?”
Lizzie took a step closer and looked down onto the stump. Judith had rubbed away some moisture that would soon become frost. The concentric rings of new growth were each, to her newly skilful eyes, differently illuminated. She could feel each colour . . . and somehow flavour . . . leading down into the soil around them, and away under the horizon, where they became . . . associated with the sky. The grammar of the sentences these sensations suggested to her brain, when she tried to put how she felt into words . . . it still amazed her that she could feel and think things language wasn’t designed to cope with.
“It’s like a network diagram,” said Autumn. “Or a nervous system.”
“Yes, yes, science,” sighed Judith. “Stop reducing it to it’s like this or it’s like that. It is the thing it is. Someone, nobody knows who—”
“You mean you don’t know,” said Autumn.
“—and I’m the last one who might, so that’s nobody; someone grew this tree here and tied it carefully to every border that runs in every direction, worldly or otherwise, around the town. The borders were grown into it. Then, I should think as part of that process, it was struck by lightning, as a sacrifice, to give it power of its own, and felled, so everything could be easily seen on the stump. A piece of great magical art, this is. I think when whoever had the trees up here burnt, they might have been trying to get at this.”
“Wasn’t that Sovo?” Lizzie shuddered at the thought
of the company that had set the townsfolk against each other earlier in the year. She still had come nowhere near to matching the money of theirs that she had burned rather than accept.
“I thought so at the time,” said Judith. “But I’ve sniffed the air up here since, and it don’t smell like anything else they did.”
Lizzie took a tentative sniff and wished she had the same experience of the gifts of the well as Judith had. Everything to do with magic smelled the same to her: like bonfire night when she was eight.
“So what does it tell us?” asked Autumn.
Judith took off her left glove, then the glove underneath that one, and put her bare finger onto the stump. Lizzie flinched as all the colours suddenly flashed into her at once, but a moment later it was obvious that was what Judith had expected to happen. The old lady stood there, lit up like, well, a Christmas tree. Lizzie thought for a moment she had broken into a coughing fit, but then she realised it was Judith’s version of laughter. “Oh,” she said, “that always tickles my sensibilities. I sometimes come up here when I really don’t need to, you know. Come on, you do it, too.”
Lizzie looked at Autumn, wondering if this was going to be another moment like when Judith had introduced them to the well water via the distribution mechanism of a bucket. Autumn shrugged, and put her finger beside Judith’s, and Lizzie quickly followed suit.
The colours that shot up her arm were definitely . . . welcome in several interesting places. She didn’t want to look at Autumn now. Sharing this intimacy was right on the edge of too embarrassing to bear.
“Oh, look at you two, like unicorns at your first orgy,” said Judith, for all the world as if that were a thing people said. “Get past that, and if you can’t read it with your bits, read it with your brain.”
Lizzie did her best to read it with her brain. She could feel a . . . lacking of something, a kind of nausea about something that wasn’t working, or that had been . . . interfered with. No, more serious than that, this was like perversion, or . . . she found she was uncomfortable with the concept, but like . . . blasphemy. She tried to see or feel or work out where it was, but couldn’t. She looked to Judith, and found that Autumn was doing the same, with a shocked expression.