The Lost Child of Lychford

by Paul Cornell

  Okay, time to slowly get moving, find out where her feet were, get some serious coffee into . . .

  She felt something move in bed beside her.

  She looked across and saw the naked back of a man. Whose name was . . . no, that wasn’t coming to her. And it was also now suddenly very important that she was naked, too.

  Oh no. Oh no.

  “Oh, hi, are you awake?” He turned over and looked anxiously at her. At least he didn’t look like the cat who’d gotten the cream. Had he gotten the cream? It didn’t quite . . . feel like he had. She realised she hadn’t said anything, and was just looking at him in a way which was getting a very worried reaction. “Nothing happened,” he said quickly. “Please don’t worry.”

  “We’re naked!”

  “You kind of . . . insisted on that. I tried to get out of bed a couple of times, but you’d switched the light off, and I couldn’t see anything, and I couldn’t find my clothes, and it was cold—”

  “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

  He suddenly looked very serious. “Because I would never—you wanted to, but you were about to pass out.”

  She wished her new senses could tell her if someone was lying. But no, she didn’t need that. Just by looking at him, she could see he was offended by the mere implication, and worried for her, too. She nodded. “Okay.”

  “Okay. So. Would you like to . . . talk about it?”

  “What?”

  “This.” He gestured vaguely at them both. At least she hoped that’s what he was gesturing at.

  She could only shake her head.

  “Well . . . that leaves us with the option of one of us closing our eyes while the other finds clothes, and us never speaking of this again.”

  Autumn was about to agree when her mobile, on the bedside table, rang. Gathering the covers to her in a way which suddenly made her feel like she was in an American TV show, she saw who it was, hesitated, then felt she had to answer it.

  “Quickly,” said Judith’s voice on the other end of the line. “What’s going on there?” She sounded urgent. The volume on the phone was loud enough that the guy . . . whose name still escaped her . . . could hear every word.

  “Nothing. Why do you ask?”

  “I mean, is anything unusual happening to you?”

  Autumn wanted to say really, yes, there was. But she knew this wasn’t the sort of unusual Judith meant. “No.”

  “That young man who’s there with you, is there anything strange about him?”

  Autumn was about to say, yes, he seemed weirdly decent, when she felt a sudden movement beside her, and turned to see more than she should have seen, as the guy . . . whose name would come to her soon . . . was getting quickly out of bed and grabbing for his clothes. “I should be off,” he said. “Sorry.” He gestured at the phone. “Interestingly intimate relationship you two . . . anyway, early start. Sorry again. Really sorry.”

  “No, wait—”

  But he was off, out of the door and down the stairs, looking back to awkwardly wave, then clearly feeling he was in the wrong and shouldn’t be chancing a merry gesture. A moment later Autumn heard the shop door close. Which meant she’d left it unlocked last night.

  “Well?” said Judith on the phone. “He’s gone now, so you can tell me.”

  “That’s all you’re bloody getting,” said Autumn, reflecting that that might as well be the title of her autobiography. “Apart from he wasn’t strange at all, he was . . . great. And I’m fine. So you needn’t worry.” As Judith started to say something equally urgent, Autumn switched off the phone and threw it after—

  Luke. That had been his name.

  She heard the phone bounce down the stairs and then the sound of glass shattering. Then something dripping.

  Autumn threw the covers back over her head and waited for death.

  * * *

  Judith tried a couple of times to call Autumn, but the phone kept going to voicemail. She would have to go over there.

  In the pub, Judith had made a series of notes on a beer mat, comparing how far Autumn’s magical shouts differed from what they should have been, and had thankfully gotten everything she’d needed before Autumn had abandoned the magical working altogether, snogged that lad’s face off and dragged him out of the pub to, as she’d put it, “show him her wise and shadowy artefacts.” The sampling she’d taken on her palm had told her something was wrong, but it had also told her it was going to take time to work out what it was.

  That morning, before it was light, Judith had taken her notes and compared them to those she’d taken that summer, on a particularly placid day when she’d decided Lychford was about as normal as it was ever going to get.

  That had given her a musical sense of the nature of the distortions. At dawn, ignoring what younger, weaker women would call a hangover, she’d climbed to a high place overlooking the town, and come out with a shout that approximated the gap between how things should be and where they were now. The resonances of that shout returned, to her enhanced senses, an idea of where the distortions were. As she’d suspected, they weren’t fixed, but building, like water slapping back and forth as the ground underneath it juddered in a gathering earthquake.

  It was where those distortions were focussed that worried her most: at the magic shop; at the Vicarage; at Judith’s own home. With Lizzie and Autumn in their beds, that might mean they themselves, or, in Autumn’s case, who they were with, had been got at. In Judith’s own case . . . she had a horrible feeling she’d already felt the change in her own home without registering it as important. It had happened to someone . . . something . . . that was such a regular part of her life that she tended to overlook . . . him.

  She would have to tell Lizzie and Autumn about this as soon as possible, but first she had to deal with her own house. Judith went to the foot of the stairs and looked up them, bracing herself. She could feel the coldness from down here, had gotten used to sleeping beside it, even. She knew she deserved this curse, for employing the darkest of workings, decades ago. But she couldn’t say she’d changed. As soon as summat difficult had blocked her path, when the three of them had come together to resist Sovo, she had gone straight back to the darkness.

  She put one foot on the bottom step. Arthur’s voice, of course, immediately came from upstairs. “You been out already, woman! You been off with your fancy man?”

  “Course I have,” she called back. “We’ve been making mad passionate love in the dewy grass. You hang on, I’ll tell you all about it.” She’d been doing the minimum for Arthur in the last few days, just nodding in the direction of her duty of care. Taking care of him was a nonsense, she knew it was, but she couldn’t seem to help it. Perhaps that was part of the curse. Or maybe it was just human nature. If it was, that said good things about her which she wasn’t quite willing to believe. She started to climb the stairs.

  “You don’t even want to see me during the day. You spend all your time with that whore now. Encouraging her. Letting what she does get your juices flowing.”

  “Summat has to, because you can’t!” Judith’s mind was racing. Had that been a reference to what Autumn had got up to last night? If so, how did Arthur know about that? It wasn’t as if she shared information with him.

  Judith had to pause for her usual moment on the threshold before going into her bedroom and finding Arthur, or rather what she had to start making herself think of as the ghost of him, attached to his ventilator, which was, unlike him, entirely real and a burden to her electricity bill. He was, as always, watching his whodunits on Sky, the remote, which was also a real artefact, accessible to his fingertips whenever he wanted them to be solid. He met her gaze with his usual baleful expression. “Oh, you’ve decided to come and spend a few moments with me. I’m honoured.”

  “You should be.” If whatever distortion of reality had touched Lizzie and Autumn had also reached out in her direction via what might well look to it like her weak point, via Arthur, then it might have
also made itself vulnerable. If it had altered him, then perhaps she could learn something here. She had to make use of Arthur to seize that thing which was trying to sneak up on them all, and was building and building towards something terrible.

  She made herself sit down on the side of the bed next to his chair. She watched Murder, She Wrote for a few moments. Some people were being very jolly about a corpse. She tried not to think about what she was contemplating. She kept her eyes fixed on the screen and slowly made herself reach out. Her fingers touched the ice of Arthur’s head. There was a sense memory there, a little charade of familiar skin. That softness where he hadn’t shaved for about four days. The scent of him came to her, so familiar in this place as to be normally unnoticed, but back at the centre of her senses now, the same as when they’d met. With it, the memory of dances in the town hall. That suit he’d worn with chalk on the cuffs, his lapels always so scuffed. She made the hand go further, through the skin, something she’d never before dared do. Why would she have? She’d known when she’d first seen him here that he was a punishment that had been entirely deserved. She’d never tried to escape him. Though she also longed to. Stupid.

  “What you doing, woman?” He said it with the same playful tone as when she used to reach out for him in bed. He knew how to play every note of her. He was her curse. With every inch her hand reached, she felt more and more like she was compromising herself with intimacy, holding desperately to a corpse, a corpse that had infected her, had hurt her, and why, oh why, had she been so weak, so foolish, to never tell anyone? She was like her friends who didn’t go to the doctor and had died out of pride. Only this had lasted much longer. She was sobbing, she realised. He was chuckling at the sound.

  Her hand reached a point of nothingness, right inside Arthur. She flexed her fingers in the darkness at the centre of what had started as his body, but was now pure void. It really should have come out the other side, but there was more space inside him than looked possible on the outside. “Judith?” he said suddenly, and his voice now was horribly different now. “Judith, is that you?”

  “Of course it’s me!” she managed to blurt out.

  “I don’t know where I am. I’m inside something. I can’t see you. Give me your hand!” The words were still being spoken by the cold ghost sitting next to her, but they sounded distant, echoing from the impossible space inside him, and different, loving, young. Was her Arthur really somewhere inside this thing? How had she not realised that? Or had she always known it? Was this the change the ripple across reality from the border had made?

  She was stretching out her fingers before she could even frame the thought. She was trying to reach the real Arthur.

  Something brushed the tips of her fingers. A hand that was about to close on hers.

  Its fingertips were cold.

  She jerked away. The hand grabbed hers. She yelled, and tried to wrench out of its grasp. It had locked onto her hand. She looked urgently at Arthur, and he was grinning all over his face, which lapped like a pool of water around her arm, his features distorted by her being inside him, and he said, with that bitter, clever voice back in place again, “One down, two to go.”

  It was a trap, she realised, one that had been baited with love and with her own arrogance.

  Judith had no time to cry out before the hand inside Arthur, impossibly strong, heaved on hers, and she fell headlong into her husband.

  * * *

  Over the next few days, Lizzie attended another Christmas dinner, this one at Deanery Chapter, with a lot of other local vicars all looking equally put upon, and the conversation deliberately bright and cheerful to the point of mutual hysteria. She couldn’t help feeling the others were only under the normal pressures of Christmas, and didn’t have to deal with whatever was weighing down on her. Then she presided over a carol service at the school, after which a mother had told her that those carols had been much better than the ones in church, not so religious.

  Most nights now she was working late, trying to put out of her mind the little noises from elsewhere in the Vicarage. She was hardly sleeping. The stress seemed to be increasing every day. It was like she was missing something that was heading straight for her. Her plans for reorganising the crib service in order to bring a few more actual children into it weren’t getting very far. So when she saw the familiar number on her phone, Lizzie was more than ready to give in to the distraction. Besides, she’d probably reached capacity on her answer phone. She hadn’t spoken to Autumn in days, not since the tree stump. She had been unconsciously waiting, she realised, for Judith to call them all together and explain what this subtle threat they were facing was all about. She’d been ignoring the possibility that the answer might involve her. “Hey, how are you?”

  The voice at the other end of the line had an undercurrent of desperation to it that it took a moment for Lizzie to realise she actually felt nostalgic about. This was Autumn as a student all over again. “Kind of . . . weird . . .” And she went on to describe her night at the Plough and the morning after and how awkward she’d felt in the days since.

  “So,” said Lizzie, when she could get a word in edgewise, “what did you and this guy Luke actually end up, you know, doing?”

  “I may have . . . jingled his bells.”

  “But did you jingle all the way?”

  “I don’t think so, and you’re smiling at having come up with that line, aren’t you?”

  Lizzie deliberately killed her grin. “Do we have to hunt him down and . . . actually, no, don’t tell Judith about this, she really would want to hunt him down.”

  “I don’t think he did anything wrong, I think he was kind of . . . lovely, actually, and Judith already tried to sort of warn me about him. She hasn’t been in to work since, or I’d have asked her what that was about. I haven’t gone after her because I kind of want to sack her, but then she might sack me, or worse, not, and then she’d be completely in charge of me.”

  “Did you get Luke’s number?”

  “I . . . found it. About lunchtime that same day. When I went for a shower. I don’t know why I wanted him to write it down there. I copied it using a mirror.”

  “You know you’re wonderful, don’t you?”

  “You’re smiling again, at my distress.”

  “Are you going to call him?”

  There was a long pause. “I’ve already called him—“

  “Not at all needy.”

  “—eight times—”

  “Indeed, ‘needy’ is absolutely not a word I would use.”

  “—and left eight voicemail messages.”

  “Saying what? Needily.”

  “That I want to apologise to him, to try to explain—”

  “You once told me you always did what the Duke of Wellington said, ‘never explain, never apologise’—”

  “Yeah, and you told me the Duke of Wellington ended up as the most hated man in Britain. And I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to keep working through a list of rom-com clichés. But I don’t want to be alone, okay? And I’m fed up with . . . trying without it looking like I’m trying. He was lovely, and I’ve fucked it up. Like I always fuck everything up . . . I’m sorry.”

  “Come on over.”

  “No, it’s fine, I just . . . I love him.”

  “What?”

  There was silence for a moment. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m messed up. I’m going to try to get some sleep.”

  “Autumn, wait—” But she’d hung up. Lizzie immediately tried to dial her back, but the call went straight to voicemail. She thought about going over, but it was late. There had been an edge of weird desperation to her friend’s voice that Lizzie hadn’t heard before. Sleep might be the best thing for her. Like it would be for her.

  “No hurting,” said the small voice from the doorway.

  Lizzie looked up to see the little boy again, and yet again the sight chilled her. He had both his hands up as if to hopelessly defend himself. “No hurting,” he
repeated, imploring.

  “Are you . . . afraid of me?” asked Lizzie, getting slowly to her feet. If so, why had he come into her house? The movement seemed to startle the boy. He turned and vanished even as Lizzie took a step forward. She stopped, and rubbed her brow. “Coffee,” she said. “Maybe some rum.”

  * * *

  Autumn lay in her bed and tried to sleep. She had never felt like this before. She felt weirdly guilty at having let Lizzie hear a little of it. The feeling had risen up in her during the afternoon, and made her keep going back to her phone, keep trying Luke’s number, over and over, until with an effort of will she’d called Lizzie instead. She was breathing harder than she normally would, a great weight of twitching anxiety in her chest. She wanted to hear Luke’s voice, to have him reassure her that she hadn’t offended him, that everything was okay, that she would see him again. That might lead to more. No, that wasn’t the most important thing, just being okay with him, that was where it had to start.

  The same set of thoughts rolled over and over in her head. She should make herself get undressed, have a hot drink. How was she ever going to sleep? She clutched the covers in order to feel something in her hands. She’d been in love, possibly, a couple of times in her life. She thought that was probably what people would call the sensation she’d felt on those other occasions: a nervousness about the bloke in question finding someone else, a desire to make sure everything was okay between them. But this was ten, twenty times as intense. She’d made herself think that he might have someone else, and she’d been suddenly filled with hatred towards an imaginary person, the agricultural-student nature of whom she’d sketched out in her mind to the point where her rival had a ponytail and a checked shirt. Like someone in a musical.