by Paul Cornell
Autumn in that same moment made eye contact with Lizzie and saw such pain and helplessness in her friend’s eyes. She ran at her, the ghost boy yelling in fear beside her. She was aware as she did so that suddenly smoke was pouring from her bag and from her pockets. The protective charms she’d brought along: this place was dissolving them!
Lizzie screamed herself as she swung the knife.
Autumn leapt forward and caught her wrist. She was aware of a strange noise rising from the building all around her. She was sure it was some otherworldly version of laughter. The bride and groom . . . Autumn didn’t want to think about what they looked like, and now they’d gotten to their feet and were standing over the two of them, enjoying the spectacle. “No hurting!” cried the ghost boy. His real-life version was sobbing too much to form words.
Lizzie, her expression desperate, was using all her strength and some that came from beyond her to force the blade down. Autumn realised that she was wasn’t going to be able to stop her. The sharp point of the knife was heading for the boy’s throat. Lizzie had him by the hair. “Lizzie, stop, please, this isn’t you!” But she could see from Lizzie’s face that she knew, and she was already doing everything she could to stop herself. “What can I do? Lizzie, what can we do to help you?!”
With agonising slowness, Lizzie managed to turn her head. It was obviously something whatever was controlling her didn’t want. She was looking, Autumn realised, straight at the ghost boy. She was wanting something . . . from him? Autumn looked back to him. He was nodding, encouraging her . . . reaching out to her.
He was moving so slowly, as if something was holding him back. Autumn was losing her grip on Lizzie’s wrist. The forces acting through her friend were just too strong.
Oh God. Oh God . . . Autumn realised she was going to have to take an enormous gamble. Let every aspect of every archetype inside her be onside now, because . . .
She heaved Lizzie back, and in the same moment grabbed the ghost boy, using all the willpower she had to actually be able to lay hands on him. She felt him cooperate with that. As Lizzie leapt forward again, knife in hand, to finish her bloody task—
Autumn threw the ghost boy at her.
Lizzie reflexively stabbed in the air at the phantom. The ghost . . . disintegrated. Its vapour shot into every orifice of Lizzie’s face and vanished into her.
The only sound now was the screaming of the real boy as he desperately looked up at Lizzie, wondering what she was about to do. She still had the knife in her hand. Autumn realised: the otherworldly laughter had stopped.
The groom stepped forward, a huge shadow that made Autumn cry out as it fell across her.
Lizzie turned to face him and with one reflexive movement broke the knife over her knee. “How dare you bring this to my father’s house?” she whispered.
Autumn had never been so relieved to see her friend angry.
The creature lunged for the boy, but Autumn grabbed him out of the way and leapt back so they could both stand behind Lizzie, who was now shouting out words of what must be liturgy. As the groom reached for them, Lizzie made the cross gesture of blessing.
The groom staggered backwards, swatting the air.
The church physically rocked.
Autumn fell as she felt the ocean of fury slam itself all at once against the boundaries. She clambered to her feet to see Lizzie holding back the groom, and the bride now beside him, with gesture and words and sheer anger. Where had she gotten all this energy from?
The bride and groom were once more forced back. Lizzie turned and started frantically blessing the congregation, marking out the boundaries of the church in gesture. The beings screamed, the tide slammed backwards against the far wall, and rushed forward at them. Autumn cried out as the bride and groom swept toward them at the head of the mass.
She saw at the last second what the groom was trying to do. His extraordinarily cold hand reached out impossibly across so many different directions at once, and it landed on Jamie’s arm. Lizzie turned, reached out at the same instant Autumn did, completing her blessing with a shout.
But that shout made the tide turn, in one motion. Exactly as the groom must have expected. The whole congregation, the bride and groom with it, that whole mass of impossibility shot back towards the door, stretching Autumn’s vision with a blur of painful gravity.
Jamie’s fingers missed theirs. He shot away with the tide.
The big doors slammed. The church was whole again. The forces from beyond had gone.
But they had taken Jamie with them.
Lizzie leapt to her feet. “Come on!” she shouted. She sprinted off towards the door.
Autumn heaved herself to her feet and followed. “Where will they take him?!”
“I don’t know!” They burst out of the church together and saw a blur of something snapping into the white limousine at the bottom of the path, which then suddenly started up and began to accelerate away.
They raced to the bottom of the path. Autumn saw Mick the builder getting out of his van by the cashpoint on the other side of the road. “Mick,” she shouted. “Jamie Dunning is in that car!”
Mick took one look at her, realised she was serious, and ran back to his van. Autumn and Lizzie got to the sliding side door just as he started the engine. “They don’t have a turnoff that way for about a mile!” he called. “We can catch up with them. One of you call the police.”
Autumn was already doing so. At least, she thought, as they took a scary turn out into the traffic, horn blaring, here was something for Shaun to go after. She called the number she’d seen on posters asking for information, and got straight through to someone who seemed far more willing to believe her when she put Lizzie on the line. Lizzie spoke quickly but very precisely, making up on the spot a story about seeing Jamie with someone in her church, who’d fled when she challenged them. It would do, Autumn supposed. Lizzie switched off the phone when the call was over. “We’ve been told not to pursue them, to leave it to the police,” she said to Mick.
“Yeah, not doing that.” Ahead Autumn could see the limo, glimpsed through the trees as it took the curves at speed. But then, suddenly, it veered off the road.
“Oh no,” said Lizzie.
But as they themselves turned the corner, it became clear that the car hadn’t crashed. It had gone straight through a fence and was speeding up across a ploughed field, the mud flying from its wheels. It was heading, Autumn realised, for the woods. “How the hell did it do that?” said Mick. “I can try to take us up there, but the ditch—”
“Stop here,” said Lizzie. As Mick brought the van to a screeching halt, she was already unbuckling her safety belt, and Autumn followed suit.
“You stay here, tell the police where—” began Mick, who was also clambering out.
“No, you do that,” shouted Lizzie, and was out and running before he could argue. Autumn made sure with a look that he was going to stay put and ran after her. Ahead, the limo had stopped, and three figures were running for the tree line. “They’re heading for the paths that the police won’t find,” panted Lizzie. “Only we can follow them there.”
“Why do they still want Jamie? If the sacrifice has been messed up—”
“They must be able to do something with him. Only the two of them left; the others must have retreated over the border. Maybe if they make a sacrifice there, they can at least weaken the boundary enough to let them in. They were going to get the whole thing in one go, but if they do it this way they’ll have to fight for it.”
“You did great in there.”
“I did bloody awfully. I should never have let them—”
“You didn’t let them do anything. They did this to you.” The figures had vanished into the trees ahead. Autumn and Lizzie got there moments later, on the paths only they could walk, and Autumn found she recognised where they were. “If they’re heading for their own border, surely we won’t even be able to see that?”
“All we’ve ever seen,” calle
d Lizzie as she ran on down the path, her breath misting on the air, “is the one border, when Judith had us walk it. Maybe that stands in all directions.”
They reached a conjunction of paths. Autumn realised, at the same moment as Lizzie evidently did, that there were several different directions they could go from here to get to the boundary. “Which is the quickest way?”
“Bit of a toss-up. Damn it.”
As they looked around for any sign of which way the couple might have gone, Autumn realised she could hear something familiar, a long way off. It was something she associated with . . . well, once it had been fear, but now it was confusion . . . it was a high, repetitive, six-note strain, followed by a recurring three-note summons. It was the music, the music Finn often played! “This way!” she said, and sped off down one of the paths.
After turning left and right for a few minutes, following the music, they burst into a clearing. What was normally invisible, Autumn realised, even to them, was now horribly apparent. This must be the border itself, one side of the clearing wildly fluctuating between the scene of the everyday trees beyond and . . . several different landscapes, one of which she recognised as the land of fairy. That was gorgeous, too gorgeous, but some of what she saw in those other moments . . . she wanted to close her eyes. But she would not. Because, above and beyond all that, here they were; the big thing and the little thing, now returned to their human guises, “Alan” and “Emma.” Alan held, in one enormous hand, Jamie Dunning. His other hand held a Stanley knife, up against the boy’s throat.
“What are you?” asked Lizzie.
“We own this land,” said Emma. “We were here millions of years before you people in your swarms, with your weird religions, walked over from the continent, bringing your fairies with you. We’re tired of living in the cracks. We don’t like being banished. We want back what’s ours.”
“And that’s worth the life of a child?” asked Autumn.
“Course it is! These ‘lives’ of yours exist only in time and come to a stop anyway,” sniffed Emma. “Bunch of perverts.”
Autumn was wondering what they could possibly do next. These two were clearly waiting for something, perhaps for when their forces would rally and appear in one of the many landscapes that were appearing in rotation behind them. While she was thinking that, she found herself watching those many landscapes and saw in one of them . . . but then it was gone again. “Keep them talking,” she whispered to Lizzie.
Lizzie did so. “So the changing of the seasons, moments like Christmas, are nothing to you? It’s all just . . . now?”
“Much the better system,” said Alan.
Autumn watched again as the landscapes cycled past, and this time she saw it clearly. Approaching the boundary was some sort of army. All she could see were glimpses of light on sword and shield, but the way she couldn’t quite see what was carrying the weapons was deeply familiar to her. These were the fairies, the army of the Summerland, going to war. And there, she could clearly see, because he must have let her see, there was Finn at the front of them, a look of calm determination on his face she’d never seen, and there beside him, with a sword the size of a small tree . . . oh. Oh. “You’re going to want to start negotiating,” she said to the couple.
“No,” said Emma patiently, “because nothing can get across the boundary unless we allow it. Fixing that was pretty high on our to-do list.”
“Yeah, but things can still go through the other way, right?” Autumn stepped forward until she was looking up at Alan. His size and presence terrified her. She was only going to get a moment to do this, and again, if she got it wrong, a child would die.
“Well of course they can. Or our forces would never have been able to fall back. Even now they’ll be regrouping, ready for—”
Autumn had just seen out of her peripheral vision, as the landscapes cycled back to the land of fairy, and the army was here now, and right here, up against the boundary—
She leapt at Alan, caught him low with her head, under his centre of gravity, and pushed.
He staggered back, bemused more than anything, effortlessly keeping hold of the screaming child. He stepped back to steady himself.
He stepped over the border.
“Hoi,” said a voice from behind him.
Alan spun to look.
Which was the exact moment Judith Mawson swung at him a fairy sword the size of a small tree.
The sword connected with Alan’s neck. His head flew off like a coconut knocked from a shy. Autumn felt but did not see a much bigger event, the visible beheading a metaphor for a death that was harder to comprehend, a mystical sundering that could only have been completed by a weapon like that sword.
The body fell to the ground.
Jamie Dunning fell beside it, yelling in fear.
Judith inclined her head to Autumn. “How’s that for customer satisfaction, then?”
“You’re alive,” said Lizzie, astonished.
“Just about,” said Judith. “I’ll tell you later. Now push her across and all.” She indicated Emma. Autumn realised the boundary had stopped cycling. Whatever power had made it do that had been wrested away from the couple when Alan had died. Finn had squatted down beside Jamie and was reaching out to him with birdsong and a smile, the most human she had ever seen him, while the army behind him continued to seethe with angry intent. Autumn looked back to Lizzie, and realised she was actually hesitating.
* * *
The Reverend Lizzie Blackmore had come to this place with nothing but a desire for justice in her mind, a righteous rage at what these two had done to her, at what they’d nearly made her do to a child.
But she didn’t trust that feeling in herself. She never had.
“No,” she said. “Put her on trial if you like—”
“That’s not how we do things,” said Finn from the other side of the boundary, quite gently. He was still holding Jamie, making sure the boy didn’t look at the corpse.
“Don’t piss this lot off, Lizzie,” said Judith. “They’re here with a good fraction of the big lad’s power. They could just walk in and take her.”
“Then they’ll have to come through me,” said Lizzie, stepping in front of Emma. She gathered that the big lad must be Finn’s father, about whom Autumn had told her enough to know that she’d just done something really stupid.
“I don’t want your forgiveness,” hissed Emma.
“Tough,” said Lizzie. She turned back to address Finn, Judith, and the army. “If I give her up to you to be killed, if I don’t do everything I can to stop that, then midnight tonight won’t mean anything anyway. Not for me. And so this lot will have made the difference they were after. In one person, anyway.”
Autumn looked hard at her, then sighed and stepped up to join her. “Me, too,” she said. “Though that doesn’t mean I think it was wrong to cut his head off.”
“That is a bit different,” agreed Lizzie. “He was going to kill Jamie.”
Judith looked them both up and down. “Idiots,” she sighed. She stuck the enormous sword into the ground and turned to confide in Finn.
Emma leapt for the cover of the trees. Before Lizzie could react, an enormous sound roared past her head. The tree beside Emma sang with the impact of something like lightning and exploded.
Lizzie blinked at the light and Emma had gone. She had escaped back to her own world. Damn it.
Lizzie turned back to see Judith had her hand on Finn’s arm. He was glowering at her, while still smiling at Jamie with the same face. She had, Lizzie realised, spoiled his aim. “They’ll be back, you know,” he said. “That’ll be your fault.”
“No,” said Lizzie. “Now it’ll be theirs.”
* * *
Jamie Dunning was eventually prised out of Finn’s care, the fairy having asked if he wanted to stay in their lands a while, to which Judith, Autumn, and Lizzie together had quickly answered for the boy in the sternest negative terms. Finn had said they were disrespecting the cultural
values of his people, and had added, more seriously, that he and Autumn had issues now; all three of them did. They had frustrated the will of his father, and brought future danger to his kingdom. As the fairies flickered away into the setting sun of late afternoon, taking that dirty great sword and the body of Alan with them, Autumn found that she really couldn’t give two hoots about what Finn’s dad wanted, and flicked two fingers in their direction. “And a Merry Christmas to you, too, you ungrateful sods.”
“We could,” said Judith, leading the toddler along the path with one finger in his hand as the early afternoon darkness closed in, “have ended up with them owing us a favour.” She considered for a moment. “Which might have been worse.”
“How did you get out?” asked Autumn. “How did you get here?”
Ahead of them, at the point where their path met the paths of the real world, they could see a group of police officers, locals, and dogs moving frantically at an angle to them. In a moment the four of them would emerge into their sight. “You get the lad home,” said Judith. “I’ll tell you down the Plough tonight.” She took Jamie’s hand and put it in Lizzie’s.
“No hurting,” said Jamie, proudly. Which made Lizzie smile.
“No,” said Autumn. “Judith, you lead him out and be the hero. Go on.”
Judith coughed a laugh. “You can’t be the one who takes heads and be the hero, too. You’ll learn that, my apprentice.” And without another word, she turned and trudged off in another direction.
Lizzie picked up Jamie, and walked forward into shouts and cries of relief and, growing as more and more people arrived and the news spread, applause.
Autumn watched it all bounce off Lizzie like rain. But when Mike and Allison Dunning were called and ran forward to embrace their child, at least the Reverend allowed herself a smile.
Epilogue
Judith took a long drink from her pint, then set it down. The three of them had found a nook in the back bar of the hugely crowded Plough Inn where they couldn’t be overheard. “I suppose,” she said, “I’ll have to start grieving properly now. So I’ve got that to look forward to.”