by Paul Cornell
“You lived with the ghost of Arthur,” said Autumn, “all that time.” She’d also got a pint, but Lizzie, who had Midnight Mass to begin preparing for in ten minutes, was on coffee. They’d both had to run the gauntlet of locals, Mick included, offering to buy them drinks. Mick himself had already benefitted from the generosity of those who’d heard he’d been part of the rescue effort. Shaun, hours earlier, had taken the (almost entirely fictitious) testimony of Lizzie and Autumn, to pass on to what Autumn assumed would be a meaningless search for the perpetrators. While doing so, he’d taken, first to his joy, then his annoyance, a phone call from his mum, who, Autumn judged by his reactions, told him she’d been off in London Christmas shopping. She gathered he’d been making some sort of fuss about her being away.
“You get used to things,” said Judith.
“You should have told us,” said Lizzie.
“Why? What would you have done? Apart from moping and telling me I should mope, too.”
Autumn sighed. “How did you get out?”
“I heard you screaming when you fell into Arthur, too. That gave me a reference point, a way to start working out where I was. You giving more power to that ghost, that also had a bit of me in him, that was like a beacon, too. The structure of the curse was still there. It was powered by undead animals a certain someone had buried in the woods. Once I could see the shape of it, I gathered up all the power I could from . . . the sort of recording of the real Arthur that was in there; he couldn’t help but help me, and I found my way out along the shape of the curse, to a real place, or at least as real as the borderlands are. I couldn’t come out on our side of the border, so I decided to come out in fairy instead. Where I immediately had a word with the big lad. Hence them loaning me the Sword of a Billion Heads, I think it were called. Billion and one now.” She laughed again, a very dark laugh.
“The sheer knowledge it took to do that,” said Autumn. “Bloody hell.”
Judith gestured in Lizzie’s direction. “She managed to save herself without knowing a thing.”
“How did I do that?” Lizzie looked puzzled.
“You kept giving your energy to the ghost lad. By letting him in, letting him follow you, trusting him. Without knowing it, you were storing it like in a savings account, protecting it by hiding it in the glitch in the worlds, so you could use it later.”
“The light in the darkness,” said Lizzie. “The hope out of nothing.”
“Are you carrying on an old conversation again?” said Judith, clearly disapproving of the application of poetry to magic.
“Yeah,” said Lizzie. ”You could say that.”
“Oh, hey.” Autumn turned at the sound of the familiar voice. Standing in the entrance to the back bar was Luke. Autumn found herself without the power of speech. After all she’d gone through today, this was beyond her ability to cope with. “I heard what you two did. Are you okay?”
“She was a complete hero,” said Lizzie, before Autumn could self-deprecate. “It was all down to her.”
“You two go and talk in the front bar,” said Judith. “Me and the vicar have got matters of high import to discuss.”
Annoyed as she was by that blatant bit of social engineering on Judith’s part, Autumn did as she was told, and let herself be bought drinks, and told Luke the (almost but not quite so much entirely fictitious) story of what had happened. She could only tell him, when he asked about her apparent former desire that he go away, that things with her were always complicated, that she’d thought she’d been doing something good, and actually had been, but sometimes doing something like that seemed to lead to good things in return that were totally undeserved. Autumn was nudged by Lizzie as she went off to arrange Midnight Mass, and she found herself, as the hour approached and they’d both had a few, with Luke under that mistletoe in the middle of the front bar. He looked as surprised as she was. He put a hand to the side of her face. “Merry Christmas,” he said.
And it turned out, in the end, that Autumn really didn’t mind getting to the end of that list of rom-com clichés.
* * *
Lizzie looked out at her considerably larger than normal congregation for Midnight Mass, including two relieved parents and their sleeping toddler. The crib service had been cancelled this year, due to the unexpected circumstance of the vicar becoming a local hero. People had wondered if this service would go ahead. Lizzie had told them that her not missing this had been the whole point of her day. “Welcome all wonders in one sight,” she said, “eternity shut in a span. Summer in winter, day in night, heaven in earth and God in man. Great little one whose all-embracing birth brings earth to heaven, stoops heaven to earth.”
She hadn’t known what her sermon was going to be about until, just before joining Autumn and Judith down the pub, she’d done some random research. Tonight she was going to talk about the values underlying Christmas, and how the famous writer of what was often thought of as a sarcastic festive hit had declared he loved Christmas, but that he was actually protesting how commercialised it had become.
She wondered though, looking at the relative youth of this lot, how many of them would have heard of Greg Lake.
About the Author
© Lou Abercrombie, 2015
PAUL CORNELL is a writer of science fiction and fantasy in prose, comics, and television, one of only two people to be Hugo Award nominated for all three media. A New York Times #1 bestselling author, he’s written Doctor Who for the BBC, Wolverine for Marvel, and Batman and Robin for DC. He’s won the BSFA Award for his short fiction and an Eagle Award for his comics, and he shared in a Writer’s Guild Award for his TV work.
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ALSO BY Paul Cornell
Witches of Lychford
British Summertime
Something More
A Better Way to Die (collection)
THE SHADOW POLICE SERIES
London Falling
The Severed Streets
Who Killed Sherlock Holmes?
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
1
2
3
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by Paul Cornell
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organization, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE LOST CHILD OF LYCHFORD
Copyright © 2016 by Paul Cornell
Cover photograph by Getty Images
Cover design by FORT
Edited by Lee Harris
All rights reserved.
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ISBN 978-0-7653-8976-3 (ebook)
ISBN 978-0-7653-8977-0 (trade paperback)
First Edition: November 2016
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he Lost Child of Lychford