by Paul Cornell
Lizzie shook her head, snapped back to reality by the question. “Kinky?”
Just the sound of it made Autumn sad. It was like Lizzie’s sense of humour had forced its way up out of her, but the face it came from hadn’t noticed. “Tutti-frutti,” she decided, and got some ice cream from the fridge to provide the first ingredient. Her own brain kept rolling around with the idea of whether Luke would like the smell of vanilla, and shouldn’t she go back and see how he was, and of course the slaps were going to be a bit muffled now, so she’d better bloody get on with it. She rushed around the lab, grabbing what she could, letting her unconscious guide her. “The opposite of rose is . . . thorn! The opposite of sugar is . . . salt. The opposite of lemon is . . . lime.” Which was such bollocks, but she knew enough about magic by now to know that wouldn’t matter. She kept adding ingredients until the boiling mixture smelled like an industrial accident at Holland & Barrett. She added Luke’s blood from the syringe and stirred it in. She was disturbed to find she felt affection even for the liquid. Now came the difficult bit. She’d only had a few lessons from Judith on the subject of projecting one’s intent into matter through gesture and sound. She didn’t know where to begin. If only she could just say, “and here’s one I made earlier,” like on the cooking shows. The three ways of empowering something were to make a sacrifice, use a sort of judo to fool the universe into doing something for you, or appeal to a higher power. Autumn didn’t actually believe in the existence of any higher powers, but before she’d gained her extra senses, she had always relied on them as a metaphor, so now, as she made the basic hand movements she’d learned, she brought her own more nebulous icons of what she’d always regarded as he unconscious process in her own mind to bear on the working. The power of blood, which was meant to be mighty, would help.
It was going to have to be enough.
* * *
Judith was in hell.
That was the only conclusion she could come to. She was still aware, though it was a bit like being asleep. There was a cold darkness all around her, and she was falling. The fall was endless. So the cold kept chilling her to the point of fear, and her body kept jerking with the sudden realisation she was falling, over and over, and there was no stopping it.
She was falling through the architecture of the curse. In other words, she was falling through a simulacrum of Arthur. She felt who he’d been and her love for her at every moment, enormously, through every pore of her skin.
She was in hell.
She was aware of her body, vaguely. She felt naked. Her eyes didn’t seem to be working. Or there was nothing at all to see.
Robin, her old lover, had made this curse, all those years ago. His field of study had been necromancy, that bloody awful pit of dark clothes and graveyards and loving the dead. Whoever she’d ended up with as her sweetheart after Robin, the necromancer’s trap had been set for them to fall into on their deathbed. Could you fight your way out of a curse? Had anyone ever been confronted by their just desserts and said “sod you” and got out of it?
Judith was lost. She didn’t know where to begin. But she got the feeling she had forever to think about it.
* * *
Autumn lowered the mug from her lips, having drunk down the potion and felt, just for a moment, sad about . . . it was going, yes, it was actually going, she was losing the feeling, and that was making her sad! Sad but . . . no, why the hell would that make her sad? It was gone, that horrible feeling was gone, banished by her anti-love potion. It had worked. She was free of it, free to act. She slammed the mug down onto the table and pulled Lizzie to her, shaking in sheer relief. “Right,” she said finally. “They took their best shot against all of us, whoever they are. But they didn’t get me. Now let’s see what we can do about you.”
“Nothing to be done. Everything’s fine. Let me get back to my work.” Lizzie actually shook her head as she said the words, desperately denying them.
“Can you tell me why you’ve been trying to hurt yourself? What’s this ‘thing’ someone wants you to do?”
Lizzie shook her head once again. “Nothing.” She was looking ashen, as if whatever was wrong had increased in intensity, just in the time Autumn had been working here.
“No hurting!” called the ghost child.
What was the connection between the boy and Lizzie? Judith had called Autumn to warn her that something unusual might happen to her. Presumably her sudden passion for Luke had been one of the distortions in reality the old witch had been trying to sense. Was the child another? She had no idea how to get rid of it if it did turn out to be dangerous. Autumn looked at the clock. It was already past midnight. If Judith had, by some miracle, just been sulking at home all this time, she’d be long in her bed by now. But no, how likely was that? “Come on,” she said to Lizzie. “Let’s see what they’ve done to her.” Whoever, she silently added, as they headed out, “they” were.
* * *
Standing outside Judith’s house, Autumn could feel stark coldness radiating from one of the upper-floor rooms, beyond the cold in the street and the snow starting to fall around them. It was, she realised, a sensation she’d felt before, when passing Judith’s house. It was only now she’d come here on the lookout for some kind of threat that it had become meaningful. She went to the door and paused. Okay, this was a bit like a police officer believing harm was being done inside a building right now, wasn’t it? She looked to Lizzie and the ghost child beside her for an approval that was met only by Lizzie’s look of agonised distraction. Okay then. Autumn took a run up and aimed a flying kick at the door.
She bounced off it and collapsed onto the pavement.
It turned out that doors were a bit harder to get through in real life than on TV. And of course Judith would have the sturdiest possible door.
“Did I really just see that?” a familiar voice said. Autumn looked up to see Judith’s son, Shaun, heading over, the lights of his police car behind him. “Tell you what, let’s say I didn’t.”
* * *
It turned out that Shaun, aware that his mother hadn’t been in touch for what was, even for her, a long time, had just come off shift, and had decided to come by to see if everything was all right. Autumn told him the truth about his Mum’s absence from the shop in recent days, and Shaun used his own key to open the front door, which, worryingly, wasn’t actually bolted. They stepped over a pile of mail to get in.
“Mum?” Shaun called up the stairs, his voice an aching compromise between professional and personal. He called twice again as he led the way up them, the former sound gradually taking over from the latter. He hadn’t even asked why Lizzie was with them, and of course couldn’t see the child, who was looking around himself in greater agitation the higher they climbed.
Shaun also obviously couldn’t see, as they entered the bedroom, the strange sight that greeted Autumn and, she was sure from the look of surprise on her face, Lizzie. Alone in the room, there was a man, an old man, who was radiating the dark and the cold. He was standing by the window, his arms by his side, as if communing with something far away.
Shaun couldn’t see him, but he reacted with alarm to the absence of Judith. He headed straight back out, presumably to mount a quick search of the rest of the rooms. Autumn and Lizzie stayed as the old man turned slowly toward them. “Amateurs,” he said, in a voice meant only for them.
“She’s not here,” called Shaun from outside the room. “The place hasn’t been lived in in days. Okay, that’s it. I’m going back to the car to call it in.”
They waited until they heard his steps recede down the stairs, then Autumn looked to the old man and realised she had now to say in deadly earnest a recurring joke from so many movies. “Who are you, and what have you done with Judith?”
The man laughed. “So she hasn’t mentioned me? She wouldn’t. I’m her husband, Arthur. Well, her ex. And what I’ve done has already given me a window on the world again, and is about to make me real, to set me free.”
Autumn was desperately trying to get her head around what the relationship between Judith and this ghost had been. He looked like he’d been here for . . . had Judith really been living with this all this time?“Yeah, right,” she said. “If we let it.”
The man stepped toward them in anger. Autumn raised a finger in a basic protection gesture, the first thing Judith had taught her, and he shrank back. His bark looked to be a lot bigger than his bite. “They promised,” he whispered. “They got in touch from far away, asked me. I let them inside me, let them change me, they said it’d end up with me getting away from here, being able to go anywhere, becoming a whole person, all of my own.”
Autumn wished she knew more about the nature of whatever this being was. The only way she could learn was to keep it talking. “It’s pretty obvious something’s trying to get into the town. Why would it care about you getting away?”
“They changed what’s inside me. They set it up so that when she—”
“When she what?” He’d meant Lizzie, Autumn was sure.
The man shook his head, realising he’d said too much.
Judith had never liked Autumn using the word experiment, but maybe it was time for just that. “So it’s about what’s inside you? All right.” Before the ghost could react, Autumn reached out and put her palm to the surface of its skin. She could feel such cold, such . . . wait a sec, why was the man suddenly smiling?
The sudden sidelong gravity wrenched her off her feet. She was hauled towards, no, into, Arthur with horrifying force. She threw out a hand, and grabbed, not Lizzie, as she’d intended, but whatever this oxygen tank thing was. But it lifted off the ground—
—and Autumn slammed into the ghost. And straight through it . . . into . . . where was she?! She screamed. The darkness was all around her, so dense she couldn’t see. It felt like there was an infinite drop below her. She was . . . she realised she was still holding on to something with one hand. She flailed around with her free hand. She was being pulled downwards, and if she fell, she would fall forever.
She reached up, trying to blindly find with her other hand what one was still desperately clutching. She missed it. She tried again. The hand caught. She held on. She heaved. Something was coming for her from below, she realised. She felt, but couldn’t see, something clutching, a hand, something like a human hand! Only it was so cold!
She broke the surface. She got her head out. She saw she’d been clinging to the oxygen tank, wedged against the end of the bed. She slapped one hand on it, then the other, and hauled herself out of the ghost, hand over hand, calling out all the time for Lizzie to help. Because if she fell back, if she didn’t keep out of the reach of that hand, if she fell back, Lizzie was the only one left to—
Then Lizzie was there. She grabbed hold of Autumn and heaved.
Autumn fell onto the carpet. She looked back to what she’d crawled out of. Something was happening to Arthur. The expression on his face was suddenly horrified. “No,” he whispered. “No, no, I’m real. Please, let me be real. They’re closing this end of it. But they promised!”
“Who promised?!” yelled Autumn.
“The couple. The family. From out there. They got me to do that to Judith. She’s still inside. She’ll always be inside now.”
“Are you saying that’s where Judith went, that she’s in there?”
But Arthur couldn’t answer. His face had contorted impossibly. A great sucking vortex had developed inside his chest, reaching for Autumn and Lizzie, only it couldn’t reach far enough. Instead, it was consuming him. “No,” he cried out forlornly. “No, I’m a person—!”
And suddenly he turned inside out like a sock and was gone into a twist of darkness, then nothing. Something slapped onto the carpet and vanished.
Autumn lay beside the oxygen tank, panting. She looked back to Lizzie. “The couple, the family. That’s what he said. That’s who’s doing this to us. Do you have any idea who he’s talking about?”
Lizzie helped her up, shaking her head, a look of distant horror on her face. Then all at once she relaxed. “Oh,” she said. “Oh. Oh God. Thank God. It’s gone.”
“What?”
Lizzie started to laugh. “Autumn, you did it. Whatever was trying to get across the borders, that was their way in, and somehow you closed it!” Lizzie grabbed her and held on. “Sorry I didn’t help. Sorry I’ve been so weird. I was trying to hurt my hands, wasn’t I? It was making me do that, I don’t know why.”
Autumn looked back to where Arthur had been. “But . . . I didn’t do anything.”
“Maybe disturbing the surface of that thing was enough to make it collapse?”
“Maybe.” Autumn couldn’t find it in her to share what felt like an odd and rather desperate sense of triumph on the part of her friend. There were still too many unanswered questions, too much still at stake. “Judith was in there. I think she’s still in there. Even though the . . . door has gone.”
“Oh no.” Lizzie broke off and looked worried. “Can we get her back?”
Autumn sat down on the bed. “I don’t know.” She looked across at the ghost boy, who was still looking horrified at Lizzie. One thing above all was troubling her. If they’d just won . . . why was he still here?
Lizzie looked in the same direction and smiled sadly. “Looks like I’ve got a follower for life. Ah, well.”
3
The Reverend Lizzie Blackmore, vicar of Lychford, spent December 23rd merrily attending Lychford’s Christmas Fayre, and several people mentioned, as she went from stall to stall saying hello and distributing sweets, that they were pleased to see her smiling again, and were also a bit surprised that she hadn’t mentioned, given her past form, that there was no “y” in “fair.” On every occasion, with a laugh in her voice, she told them that fair was foul and foul was fair, which tended to get a slightly perplexed laugh in return. Mostly.
That day she also took Communion in the Nine Lives old people’s home, and attended the rehearsal for the crib service. This involved the junior school and nursery children, so Lizzie had to put on an especially big smile when she saw Jamie Dunning in the audience. She was even called upon, as she ran the children through their parts, to put a doll in the manger. It turned out to be relatively easy not to think about what would happen the next time Jamie was in this building. There was, since Arthur had said those words to her in a different voice while Autumn was away, now something in her head to let her deal with all that. She wasn’t compelled to hurt her hands, and that was a great relief. She could barely hear that small part of herself that was still free, screaming inside a distant room in her head. The actual crib service, since it was scheduled after the wedding on Christmas Eve, would of course never come to pass. But there was no point in letting the cat out of the bag about that.
Mind you, every time she looked at the ghost boy, things still got difficult. She wished she could be rid of him. Why was he still here? What was he for? He was terrified of the presence of the real Jamie Dunning, had tried helplessly to stop her from approaching him at every point.
As she locked the church that night, Lizzie wondered distantly what the town would look like after tomorrow, after Christmas Eve? She had been told that everything would be wonderful after the change, after the breaking down of the borders and the inversion. She had been told that Christmas would never come, that it would never come again. What would that be like?
There was only one more normal service to get through tomorrow, Holy Communion at 10 a.m., and then would come the wedding, and then it would all be over, for her, for Lychford, and for the world.
* * *
That evening, Autumn sat in the Plough, Christmas happening all around her, friends filling the pub with laughter and the literal warmth of bodies. Nothing could warm her. Despite Lizzie’s assurances, and nothing setting alarms off in her own extra senses, she couldn’t make herself believe the danger was over. She’d spent the day researching possibilities for how to rescue Judith. She hadn’t even
found the terms she needed to use to address the problem. If it were possible at all, it would take years, maybe a lifetime. She’d done everything she could to contact Finn, even replying to his email, but had gotten no response. Perhaps the fairies had decided the humans were on their own.
She looked up when the door opened. It was Shaun, in uniform, his face a picture of worry. She wished she could tell him the truth about Judith, so at least he’d stop searching in the real world, but no, she decided, she would only do that if she could also offer him hope. “I’m just stopping for a coffee,” he said to Rob. “Another missing person tonight. Mum was the first one we’ve had in a decade, then two come along at once, maybe it isn’t a coincidence.”
“Who is it?” asked Autumn, intercepting him.
“A toddler,” said Shaun. “He was at home in his room, then he wasn’t. I can’t go into more detail than—”
“What’s his name?”
“Jamie Dunning.”
Those listening reacted, some of them knowing the parents. A mutter of worry went round the pub. But it was nothing compared to the sudden fear Autumn felt. She carefully put down her pint. “You’re right,” she said. “That’s not a bloody coincidence.”
* * *
Autumn asked a few of the locals, found out where the Dunnings lived, and went into the Backs to find their semi-detached house. The police car lights identified it from quite a way off. She didn’t know what she’d been hoping to see here. The best her extra senses could manage was a sense of . . . not quite a presence, just a shadow of something having been here. The shadow felt huge, painful, askew from everything, and utterly in hiding. Whatever it was a shadow of . . . Autumn felt a chill at the thought of facing the reality, of how big that would be. It reminded her, she realised, of whatever had grabbed for her in that endless darkness. “The couple, the family,” she whispered under her breath. Those were the words Arthur had used.