That was the enemy’s time.
Yet his night vision was far better than it used to be before the stubborn residue of magic coursed through his veins. It wasn’t just his eyes that sometimes took on a deep maroon when his adrenaline was up. He was more sensitive than he used to be of subtle changes in the air, things a door-kicker like him ought not to be able to feel. Certainly the rest of the team in Empire One would have given him a ribbing for sounding like one of the “Turtles”, the lab geeks that forged their occult equipment.
Yet Usher had to admit, he could feel it in the air. The faint residue of Thaumaturgy like static electricity. Reports from the fleeing staff were that the flames that had licked through the building had been green.
That was no ordinary fire. It’s the Unseelie trying to hide their footprints.
Usher opened the lockbox next to the passenger seat and took out a Sig Sauer pistol, slotting it into a discreet pancake holster under his arm. From under his seat he drew a foot long sheathed blade and slid it into a specially constructed pocket in the jacket lining. Lastly he took a small leather pouch from the glove compartment. Something from his missing friend’s collection.
Well you can’t hide from me.
It was magic hour and rusty sunset reflected off the bonnet of his car. Dappled streams of light poured through a skeletal willow tree and illuminated a brass sign next to the gates.
Usher got out the car and stretched out his muscles. He rolled his neck and shoulders, hearing them crack and pop. After years of fighting the Unseelie and a body mapped with old scars, Usher thought it wise to limber up before a fight if there was ever the time. There rarely was.
Showing your age there Thom. Enhanced healing or not I’m starting to feel every fight I ever had. What next, Werther’s Originals during a debrief?
Usher narrowed his eyes at the shell of a building through the gates. He gritted his teeth and strode forward. The gates themselves were bound with a padlocked chain and an off kilter sign.
DANGER DO NOT ENTER: LOOSE MASONRY.
Usher drew his Soulblade and in one fluid motion severed the chain. It rattled to the ground and the rusting gates creaked slowly open.
Usher sheathed the blade and walked forward into the grounds. He passed a corroded brass sign on the redbrick wall.
MARKSLEY WILLOWS.
Established 1849.
Bring us your lost
As Usher walked slowly up the long driveway he could only hear three things; his own steady footsteps crunching the gravel, the low moan of the wind and the complaining of the crows that hunched on the dead branches either side of him. However as he got closer to the manor, he began to hear the groaning of the parched timbers in the carcass of Marksley Willows. The strange heat haze hung around the building as if it was still burning deep inside. The last rays of the setting sun cast a deep amber glow across one half of the old manor, turning the dead wood into a glowing ember. Usher narrowed his eyes and brought a hand up to his brow against the glare.
He started when for a moment he thought he saw a small figure peeking out from one of the filthy upper windows. No larger than a child, it raised a dirty hand and waved to him. Then the glare of sun reflected off the glass and the figure was burned away to nothing. Usher rubbed his eyes and scanned the few intact windows staring down at him on the north side of the building. He gritted his teeth and tried to slow down his heart. No more welcomes, just empty windows.
Keep going Thom. One foot in front of the other.
The butterflies took off within Usher’s intestines. What frightened him and fascinated him about the Unseelie more than anything else was its unpredictability and almost infinite variety. Ariel Speedman had tried to describe it to him one night over a bottle of bourbon in a dingy Hereford pub.
The Unseelie realm is essentially formless Thom. It’s like clay that we imprint our dreams and nightmares upon. It’s as real as our very worst thoughts. Once it’s found form though, we can’t un-dream it. We can only hunt it and kill it. Before it gets us.
Usher had never fully understood the philosophical or occult explanations for the supernatural phenomena created by the Unseelie, but he had fought in enough unofficial and morally dubious missions across the world in a very long military career to know that there were few limits to the horrors the human mind could dream up. He had seen infant’s heads bashed in with rifle butts, fathers forced to mutilate their own families at gunpoint, seen captive’s heads hacked off for following the wrong faith. If our darkest dreams gave nourishment to the Unseelie realm, Usher had little doubt that we would eventually do their job for them and give them all the ammunition they needed to annihilate us. On his good days Usher wondered that if bad dreams gave the monsters substance, what do our good dreams make? He hadn’t lived enough good days these last few years to form much of anything, let alone a golem of hope.
The dreams of soldiers rarely make good viewing.
Then he remembered Ursula, the Valkyrie that had come into his life when he needed help the most. His very own slightly terrifying guardian angel sent to watch over him.
I could do with you here with me today you big horny bird-girl. This place feels very wrong. But I need to know what happened here.
He stepped across the threshold, under the remaining half of an arched porch. Blackened walls rose up around him, punched with holes into a honeycomb of unexplored rooms. There was a reception room to his left, protected behind a wire mesh. Usher frowned. Marksley Willows had been an institution for children and teenagers, yet this looked like the foyer of a prison. Usher felt protective of all children, even more so since he had lost his own son to the darkness of the Unseelie.
What kind of therapy were those poor children getting here? Or was it more like punishment?
A crow suddenly flapped from the rafters and settled on a bannister a few feet in front of Usher. It fussed and preened its ragged plumage then gave a hoarse caw. Usher realized that his reflexes had already drawn his pistol for him and he stood in a weaver stance pointing it at the bird. He focused on his breathing and the foresight. The bird’s head jerkily turned above the tiny blade of black metal at the end of Usher’s gun. He breathed a sigh of relief and lowered the weapon, regarding the crow and mirroring its cocked head.
“You the spookiest thing in here, fella?”
The crow held something in its beak. As if in answer it twisted its head and tapped the object on the bannister.
Knock-knock-knock.
Usher looked at the long stem of plastic caught in the bird’s beak, and then at the cracked square of glass that glittered at its end. It was a pair of spectacles.
Usher felt a horrible spider of recognition crawl up his spine.
I know those glasses.
Usher had seen the childishly excited blue eyes of his friend glitter behind those lenses on deadly missions all across the world, eyes that belonged to the sharp minded scalpel in a team full of blunt instruments.
Ariel.
“Here boy. Stay still.”
Usher crept forward, hand out in a ridiculous gesture of peace to the bird.
“That’s it you sombre little prick, give those here.”
The crow cocked its head at Usher and hopped backward on the bannister.
“Don’t make me put a 9mm in you.”
The crow hopped again then took off in a flurry of dust and feathers. It flapped erratically down the corridor and into a dark doorway that opened onto a flight of descending stairs. Its prize was still fixed in its beak.
Fuck.
Usher shook his head and peered down the dark stairwell that vanished into the gloom.
“Croaky little bastard. You just had to lead me the place I least want to go. Didn’t you?”
Usher illuminated the small tac-light on the underside of his pistol and directed the barrel down the creaking stairs.
A couple of sleek rats scuttled from the light, tails dragging like greasy shoelaces. Usher extended a foot and tentat
ively prodded the first stair with his toes. The blackened wood groaned but it held. Holding his breath, Usher stepped out and began to slowly descend, illuminating the blackness in sweeping arcs. He kept his back against one wall as he crept down, his breath muffled and raspy in the stifling air.
After climbing deeper for almost a minute, Usher ended up within the basement storerooms and cellars of the old house. It was oppressive and he was acutely aware of the tonnes of unstable masonry tottering above him. A cave-in was the last thing he wanted. He toughened his resolve and started slowly down the dark passage.
At the end of the passage Usher began to see a vague glow. It was a sickly light like the lure of a deep sea fish. The air here was even hotter and Usher felt that he could not fully fill his lungs. Was it possible that deep in the foundations of the building, parts of it really were still smouldering? He looked around and saw that the floor was covered with junk. Mouldy cardboard boxes stacked high and bursting with reams of old hole-punched computer paper. Broken garden tools, unspooled VHS cassette tapes, books and comics, dated toys from the Eighties. Every item of unwanted or malfunctioning kit from decades of the institution’s daily function, dumped carelessly down in the basement.
An oubliette for forgotten and unwanted things.
Usher crept closer to the source of the light. He turned off the tac-light on his pistol but kept it aimed high.
But children aren’t things.
Usher wondered what kind of orderlies and psychologists had worked here. Had they been diligent and hardworking people, doing the best they could with little funding and support, or were they the dregs of their profession, sadists and bullies drawn to the fringes of care work to find an outlet for their peccadilloes? Usher began to hear an odd scraping and clicking sound, over and over. As he moved forward he began to make out the huge trumpet of an old gramophone, it’s sticking needle constantly dragging back and holding time in a maddening loop. Reaching out with his free hand, Usher delicately lifted the needle and replaced it on its holder. The silence was suddenly very loud.
Usher was fighting to control his breathing as he slowly rounded the corner to face the source of the eerie light. The claustrophobia and heat was causing sweat to burst out of his pores, his face glistening with beads. Usher felt his eyes sting and ran a sleeve across his brow.
Christ it’s like a greenhouse in here.
Usher turned the corner and his heart almost stopped as he realized that was exactly what the room was.
An Unseelie greenhouse.
He walked into a wide cellar with crumbling arches on all sides. It looked like somewhere that barrels of spirit may have been kept in the days before Marksley Willows was an institution. The glow Usher had been seeing was emanating from luminescent mushrooms that studded the walls and ceiling like designer lightbulbs. Patchy rugs of phosphorescent moss hung from the exposed rafters. Both gave off a light that was altogether ghoulish and sickly.
Thorny vines and creepers had covered almost every inch of wall space, and from them trailed long thin veins throbbing with rich red blood. This crude network of blood vessels hung across the room, all connecting to something that sat in a ceramic pot at the end of the cavern.
Usher’s eyes were taking a moment to adapt to the unusual light, but as he crept closer it started to become obvious what the object was.
“Well I’ll be…little tiny World Tree.”
Sitting in a ceramic plant pot was what looked like a gnarled bonsai tree.
Oh Ariel I bet this was right up your street. You must have had a geek-semi when you found this.
It was two foot tall and clearly dead, its grey branches naked and flaking. The thin trailing veins connected to it and were pumping it with fresh blood.
But blood from where?
Usher sensed something to his left that made his skin tingle. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, not wanting to face what he knew he would see. Then he slowly turned.
Not everyone made it out of the fire. Oh dear Lord.
Lining the walls of the cellar, almost invisible behind layers of thick vines, were people. They were pale and incredibly thin, technically clearly dead but their system kept somehow pumping blood. . The thorny foliage did not just encase them, it grew through them. One chubby man in a tattered hospital worker’s smock had a spiny growth protruding through both cheeks, his mouth open in eternal shock and his tongue impaled. Another had a spiralling vines puncturing in and out of his body from ankles to neck, turning him into a spiny Caduceus. Usher could barely bring himself to look at the children.
But I have to look, don’t I?
Usher forced his eyes to scan the walls. He was sickened with himself that a secret part of him felt relief.
Four children…three adults…none of them Ariel. So maybe my walking dream really happened. Maybe he is alive out there…somewhere.
Usher heard a ragged asthmatic breath and turned back to the strange dead miniature tree. Lying at the bottom of it was something his adjusting eyes had taken to be a pile of rotten wood. Now it moved.
Usher raised his pistol, stepped back a pace out of hand-to hand- range. The thing on the floor tried to raise itself on spindly double jointed arms but it began to shake like a new born gazelle and collapsed back down into a quivering heap. The stench of vomit and dead flesh rose up to assault Usher’s nostrils. That Unseelie smell. He covered his mouth with a sleeve. He had never seen anything exactly like this before, what his missing friend would call Dark Botanicals, but Usher certainly knew Unseelie when he saw it.
“Having some trouble there, my friend?”
If he was honest Usher was having trouble identifying body parts on the putrid tangled mess that lay on the stone floor.
What is that, its arse or its face?
A misshapen neck craned around and the least attractive face Usher had ever witnessed stared up at him with a mixture of wretchedness and hate. The teeth were charred sharpened pegs of wood driven into the gums.
“Ah that’ll be the face then.”
That was when Usher noticed the umbilical cord stretching from the creature’s distended belly to the trunk of the tree, and all the pieces feel into place.
This was the Unseelie creature that Ariel had been hunting the night he disappeared. Whatever fight had ensued had left this thing diminished and crippled. What Usher now realized really was a miniature World Tree (If you’re alive Ariel I bet you want one of those for your desk) had been damaged. Whatever the ultimate fate of Ariel, he was nowhere to be found. This…thing meanwhile, was attempting some sort of Thaumaturgic medical procedure. A blood transfusion with dark magic.
It’s drained those people…tried to breathe life back into this tree…get it functioning again. Get the conduit open.
Usher frowned at the horrific stricken creature that had thought nothing of sacrificing more men women and children to get what it wanted. He wondered if his hatred of these creatures would ever fade.
“It didn’t work though, did it Stumpy?”
The Unseelie clicked its teeth at him and stretched out an arthritic hand, but not in greeting. It did not have the strength to rise though. Spiny leaves shuddered down its cracked-bark spine. Usher had seen some odd creatures slip through over the years, but a being somewhere between goblin and bonsai tree was a first. He holstered his pistol and unsheathed his Soulblade. In an unthinking moment Usher glanced around at the drained corpses of two children bound to the wall with razor thorns.
They’re about the age my boy was when he was taken. Is this what happened to him? Is this what they did to my fucking son?
Usher felt the blood boil in him, his eyes darkened to a deep maroon. He turned to glare down at the Unseelie creature.
“All that sacrifice and you still can’t use it. You can’t crawl through a hole back home can you? Like a cockroach.”
That spider crawled up Usher’s spine again. He turned very slowly to look at the blackened and spent miniature World Tree. A conduit
between worlds.
Ariel …did you cross over...and then burn your bridge? So it couldn’t follow.
Ariel what were you thinking? Alone, without backup…without your friends. We’re the reckless ones, you’re meant to be the brains.
Usher couldn’t imagine a human surviving for even an hour in the place where the Unseelie crawled from.
Usher took out the little leather pouch he had brought from Ariel’s laboratory. He turned to the Unseelie. It regarded him with baleful red eyes.
“My friend, the one who you were trying to kill, and is now missing in action and in the most dangerous place in the universe…he liked to tinker. Liked to tweak. Came up with all sorts of strange contraptions and chemicals, most of which I can hardly pronounce of course.”
Usher shrugged and untied the chord on the little bag. He placed a hand on his chest. “Just a door kicker. Don’t expect big words.”
The Unseelie hissed at him and a long splintered wooden tongue rasped out and quivered.
“He however, was somewhere between a mechanic and a mage. He knocked this stuff up a week or so ago, presumably expecting to tackle your sort at some point along the way. He said it was some kind of concoction to liquidate Dark Botanicals, as he called them. He theorized that the Unseelie would have their own version of the nature magic Arborists like Arrik and his lot used. He kinda went all uber-smart since he merged with that Bear-God fella while back, never really got him out his system. I kinda know how that feels. Anyhow, so he called this some kind of yadda-yadda I can’t remember chemical. Know what I been calling it?”
Usher raised the bag and tipped its black granules over the twisted grin of the Unseelie creature.
“Weedkiller.”
The Unseelie screamed in rage and pain but immediately it began to shrivel and dry. Usher knelt down beside it and spoke in a soft clear voice.
“Why did he end up here alone? Unprotected?”
The Unseelie shook its head and spat. Usher poured more of the powder onto its skin, which began to smoke.
The Last Line Series One Page 68