Blue lightning flashed all around. Mallory heard a voice that wasn’t Sophie’s, or his, or anyone he knew, saying, ‘There are worlds beyond worlds. Which one is real?’
And then the night snapped shut.
Darkness lay heavily over everything. Only the glow of Mallory’s sword provided any illumination. They stood in a dense forest, the trees so tightly packed that they couldn’t see a beginning or end of it. The thick canopy of branches and leaves made it impossible to tell if it was night or day, but they guessed from the cool, strong aroma of vegetation that it was dark.
‘Where are we?’ Mallory said.
‘I don’t know.’ Sophie sounded dazed; the effects of whatever she had done had taken their toll.
As Mallory shucked off his disorientation, the words of the strange beings at Old Sarum came back to him. ‘The Forest of the Night,’ he muttered. The place where they would become the prey of the Wild Hunt.
As if in echo of his thoughts, the dim sound of a hunting horn rang out through the forest. The density of the trees made it impossible to tell if it was distant or close at hand. He slipped a hand under Sophie’s arm to help her to her feet.
‘Come on,’ he said insistently. ‘We have to move.’
‘Where to?’ she said, confused.
And that was it: he had no idea where they were supposed to be going. ‘Just move,’ he replied.
The forest was unchanging, never-ending. There was a faint ambient light, enough to guide them, but Mallory couldn’t comprehend its source. They ran as fast as they could amongst the trees, occasionally tripping on creepers or ploughing through bushes, jumping gently trickling streams or clambering through boulder-strewn hollows. Most of the time Mallory had to help Sophie along; she was drained of energy, at first a little delirious even, but gradually coming to her senses.
The sounds of pursuit drew closer. He heard the yelp of hounds above the crackle of his footsteps on the dry forest floor, felt the rumble of horses’ hooves in the soft leaf-mould, and always the intermittent threatening dissonance of the hunting horn.
‘We have to find him,’ Sophie gasped, during one of her occasional moments of confusion. ‘The … the Devil.’
‘The Devil,’ Mallory repeated bitterly. He wondered what hell would look like, recalled the last days of Stefan’s rule in the cathedral and thought perhaps that he had seen the start of it.
The first inkling he had that the end was near was the appearance of shapes moving fast amongst the trees on both sides. They bounded low, like ghosts in the gloom. He found it hard to look and run in the obstacle- littered environment, but eventually he realised they were hounds, long, thin and whippetlike, but with an unnatural colouring of red and white.
Running, he thought with a sick desperation. He was always running. A metaphor for his life.
The dogs began to close in with a pincer movement. It was hopeless; it had been hopeless from the moment he had set off from the cathedral, but he had tried his best. He wondered if that was enough.
A storm of hoofbeats filled the air. And still they ran. A laugh escaped his lips. It was crazy. They should just lie down and be trampled or torn apart.
They leaped another stream where white water cascaded over glistening rocks and almost became bogged down in the mud on the other side. A rider jumped it easily. In the thin light, Mallory had an impression of furs and leather, and of a long pole with a sickle attached to the end. The horse, as he glimpsed it, looked like a horse in every way, yet he strangely felt that it was some unrecognisable alien beast. It danced amongst the trees in a way no horse could ever achieve. Mallory sensed more riders at his back, just the slice of a sickle away.
The rider to his left began to close in, raising the weapon to his underarm in a jousting position. Not long now, Mallory thought. At his side, Sophie was lost to her running and her thoughts.
The rider drew closer. The sickle glowed silver, cruelly sharp.
Suddenly, Mallory grabbed Sophie’s hand and yanked her to a halt. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked, dazed. He pulled her to him and wrapped his arms around her, a feeble protection and a final act of communion with the woman he loved. He smelled her hair, kissed her gently on the forehead.
The closest rider reined in his horse and came back. The others circled in a wide, lazy arc, the hounds baying and whimpering in the gloom beyond. Mallory held up his head, waiting for the killing stroke, but the huntsman lowered his weapon and waved it curtly to prompt them to move forwards.
They continued that way in silence for ten minutes, Mallory’s arm tight around Sophie’s shoulders, until they came to a clearing. In a circle of well-worn grass at the centre was a standing stone slouching to one side. Overhead, Mallory could see the stars for the first time, but no constellations that he recognised. The full moon, though, looked down brightiy. There was a cathedral-like stillness and gravity.
The riders brought their horses to a halt around the edge of the clearing and a deep silence descended; even the hounds were quiet.
Not long after, the black dog padded out into the moonlight on the other side of the clearing. When it reached the standing stone, it dropped down to its haunches and stared at Mallory and Sophie in such a human way it made Mallory’s flesh prickle.
‘We come with the night,’ it said in a voice like iron on gravel. Mallory started in shock.
Its red eyes looked as big as saucers. Sophie surfaced from her daze, gripping Mallory’s arm tightly.
‘What you seek lies beyond,’ the dog continued. ‘Follow the path. Do not turn from it, whatever you might see.’ The dog rose up and began to leave, pausing halfway to turn its head back to them. ‘Nothing is as it seems. Ever,’ it said. It lost itself beyond the riders.
‘I can’t see a path,’ Sophie whispered.
As Mallory scanned the tree line on the other side of the clearing, the moonlight illuminated the standing stone at just the right angle and a trail of energy ran out from the base of it into the forest. It was undoubtedly of the same essence as the Blue Fire, but this had a milky luminescence, like the moon on waves.
Sophie’s eyes were wide and distant. ‘I suppose we should go,’ she said.
When they passed the standing stone it felt as though they were moving through a gauzy veil. Briefly, they appeared to lose touch with each other, although they had been holding hands, and were again shordy after. And then they were across the clearing and plunging into the dark beneath the branches.
A night wind slipped amongst the trees like a spirit, bringing with it aromas of pine and grass and sleeping flowers. Mallory was filled with something close to peace.
This is the end, he thought dreamily. We’re going to see the Devil.
As they followed the shimmering white path, they became aware of movement amongst the trees: shapes drifted by, as insubstantial as mist, some human in form, some animals, some a combination of the two.
‘What are they?’ Sophie asked.
Before he could answer, they were both overwhelmed with a tremendous sense of presence, as if the ground on which they walked and the trees and vegetation were all one being. They gripped each other, rooted to the spot, Existence spinning all around them. Their own thoughts and emotions were intermingled with something from outside, so far beyond them in every aspect they couldn’t begin to comprehend it.
Eventually, they found the strength to progress in faltering steps, unable to speak.
They were suddenly aware that they didn’t know how long they had been there; it could have been years, or just a second. Their own sense of personality appeared to be dissipating too, or at least growing weaker, merging with what was around them.
At the point where they felt they were about to cease to be, the path wound down a bank and into a dense mass of vegetation. They tried to pause before it, not seeing how they could pass, but some force pulled them in, the leaves and creepers, brambles and ivy parting and then enveloping them so hard that the mass pressed against their faces
, chests, backs.
Mallory could no longer see Sophie. Desperately, he called out her name.
‘I’m here!’ she said. Her fingers fumbled for his and locked on; not there, but there, always.
They continued that way for a while, drifting in a world of green. But then the vegetation became more hard-packed. Leaves pushed into Mallory’s mouth, pressed against his eyes. He lost touch with Sophie’s hand, fought for it but couldn’t find it anywhere. And when he tried to call her name, the leaves and creepers forced further into his mouth, pressing against the rim of his throat, making him gag. The prick of thorns was sharp against his wrists, growing sharper still until he would have yelled out if he had been able. With a sickening realisation, he knew the brambles were breaking into his veins, forcing their way along them. Yet the veins weren’t being torn apart, in the same way that he wasn’t choking as the creepers found their way down his throat - though he gagged and gagged - and continued on into his stomach. The vegetation was consuming him from the inside out. Soon there wouldn’t be any him at all; just green.
Before he lost consciousness, a voice echoed around him, repeating the words he had heard before. ‘There are worlds within worlds. None are real.’
‘The Devil … the Devil
The car sped away. Blood trickled over his knuckles, splashed on the steering wheel. In the rear-view mirror, he saw his face … saw into himself … Horrible … horrible …
He could feel it looming ahead of him, a shadow so big it threatened to block out the moon and stars and all of Existence. He could feel subtle fingers reaching into his brain, twisting the very essence of him, tweaking memories and half-thoughts. There was a darkness like that experienced only in the thickest forests where human feet never trod. It was coming, across space, across the worlds, through the trees, towards him, daring him to scream, entreating him to break apart in fear.
Mallory fell from here to there and back again, falling still.
It was coming …
‘You have the smell of my enemies on you.’ The voice sounded like branches swaying in the wind, yet strangely like his own voice reflected back at him.
Mallory stood in another clearing, much smaller than the last. Before him sat a man composed of leaves and branches instead of flesh and bones, clear eyes staring beneath a brow of fronds. Ander horns protruded from his head. He lounged on a throne made of living willow, oak, rowan and ivy, appeared to be part of it, and both of them part of the surrounding flora, which was as dense as a wall on every side. Mallory recognised echoes of Green Man carvings he had seen in ancient churches, hints of Robin Hood in the way the vegetation arranged itself like clothes; here was Pan, the living mind of nature. Or the Devil, depending on your point of view.
Through the hazy dream-atmosphere that swathed everything, Mallory felt his thoughts stir with anxiety, laden with the burden of propaganda subtly insinuated from the moment he had set foot in the cathedral; from the moment his education began. He recalled that same profile looming, ghostly, above the city, considered every picture he’d seen of Satan - it was all here in the figure before him.
‘I have been with your world since the earliest times,’ the Green Man said, as if he could read Mallory’s thoughts.
The sense of presence was so powerful - much, much bigger than the figure before him, bigger than the world - that Mallory could barely speak. His mind couldn’t cope with what it was perceiving, his thoughts like quicksilver, slipping away from him before he could get a hold on them, the gaps in his consciousness filled with visual and aural hallucinations so that he couldn’t tell what was experience and what was imagination.
Panic, he thought, grasping at reason. The dread of the beating heart of nature, of Pan, the mind that lay behind it all.
He was dwarfed by everything, expecting to be destroyed at any moment, eradicated by a thought or a whispered word.
And then, in some strange way, he was standing on the downs with the warm summer wind at his back and the moon beaming down on the circle of standing stones, the atmosphere heavy with mystical possibilities. Below him, men wearing the antlers of their totem spirit moved on two legs, then on four, howling at the moon and the stones in a dance that was ancient even then. The Neolithic world called out to him, not with the brutality of a mean existence, but with spirituality and a sense of something greater.
‘Here.’ The disembodied voice sent tingles up his spine.
The world fell away and he was in the sacred grove where the sickle cut the mistletoe, and gathered around were naked men prepared for battle, their hair bleached and matted with lime so that it stuck out in nail-like spikes. The wise men who kept the oak-knowledge, the great knowledge, whispered and moaned and felt the universe move through him, and all those assembled sighed with wonder.
‘And here.’
And he was in the golden fields where the workers made the corn dollies and left them in the silence of the harvest night. And then in the greenwood where the villagers crawled through and under the crushing yoke of the rich and powerful, impeaching the trees for aid to bring back the wealth to the poor. And he heard the answering call of the hunting horn and glimpsed the movement of a green-clad hero in the emerald depths. In the thundering, sulphurous heat of the iron foundry as the Workshop of the World made cities and empires, he heard the apprentice knock on wood. The rural churches where the vegetative face stared out from pew and column, the other churches where the horned faces had been disfigured, made into a grinning devil, a feeble attempt at supplantation that would never, ever work.
‘Here, here, here.’
Then, like some god, he was above it all, with a vista over all time, all place, hearing the whispered names - Cernunnos, Puck, Jack o’ the Green - seeing how they were stitched into the fabric of everything, from the very beginning to the very end.
No Devil, he thought. And no Evil anywhere, just shadows and light, inextricably bound. Tears welled up at the wonder of it all; the meaning that he knew he would never grasp when the glue of his thoughts returned.
‘I am part of it, and part of something greater, of Existence,’ the Green Man continued, his eyes filled with a gleaming, unearthly light. ‘An aspect. One face. To attack me is to attack everything.’
They were back in the grove. Mallory could smell lime, then cherry blossom, then decomposing leaves; everything was so rich it was all distracting. With a struggle, he forced himself to concentrate on why he was there, still amazed he had made it that far, doubting he would ever leave. ‘Why’ve you allowed me to come here … to you?’ he asked cautiously.
‘All may come to me, if they do so with an open heart. I care for all living creatures, for life itself.’
‘You attacked the cathedral.’ Awe made his voice a whisper; still he feared he would be knocked down like an oak before the tempest, like the sand before the wave.
The words hung in the air for a while before they were obscured by the whisper of leaves. ‘I defend Existence. When it is attacked, I strike back.’
‘They took something—’
‘They stole from Existence. They attempted to control the very essence of everything for their own aims. And in doing so, they caused disruption … and suffering … and death … the opposite of life.’
Mallory’s mouth was dry. Power lay everywhere; a scratching feeling at the back of his mind hinted at some tremendous consciousness circling him. His dread began to flourish again. ‘There are good men who are suffering. If I return what’s been stolen, will you leave them alone?’
‘If wrongs are righted.’ The quality of light in the Green Man’s eyes became more intense. ‘You have it in your power, Brother of Dragons.’
Mallory flinched; was this mysterious quality in him so powerful that even such a force acknowledged it?
‘You are part of me,’ the Green Man said, answering his thoughts, ‘and I am part of you.’
Mallory began to search those troubling eyes, but snapped his gaze away as they began
to suck him in. He felt as if he was staring into a vast ocean of intelligence, one that stretched to infinity; unknowable, dangerous in its alienness, one that could swallow him whole in an instant, so that he would be lost to everything as if he had never existed. Worse than that, it knew him, knew his deepest secrets, his worst fears, appeared to want something of him; or wanted him to want something of himself.
‘You have a choice,’ the Green Man said. Mallory had the strangest feeling he was talking about something other than the matter at hand.
‘If you call off your army, let me get back into the cathedral … I’ll do what I—’
‘You have it in your power, Brother of Dragons,’ the Green Man interrupted. There was a lull; a rustle moved through the vegetation. ‘This is your time,’ he continued. ‘There are two paths before you. Everything hangs in the balance. Your choice, Brother of Dragons. Your choice.’
Again, Mallory could tell he wasn’t talking about the cathedral and the stolen relic. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said desperately. But another voice at the back of his head appeared to be telling him that he did, but it was lost, driven back, as always.
The Green Man only smiled.
Mallory had no idea what happened next; it was as if a light was switched off, but things continued to go on in the dark. The next thing he knew he was back in the church in Knowlton with Sophie standing beside him. It was daylight, but it felt as though days had passed. Where there had been a thaw before, the snow lay thick across the whole landscape, frosted in place. For a moment, they stood, still lost to the place they had been, but gradually it faded, like the wind across the fields, until it was almost as if they had never been there.
‘What happened to you?’ he said, dragging her into his arms with a force born of euphoria, and love.
‘What happened to you?’ she replied, also giddy with her renewed life.
‘I saw the Green Man.’
‘So did I.’
They stared at each other for a moment, then burst out laughing.
‘They had it all wrong from the start - Cornelius, Stefan, all of them,’ Mallory said, as they walked across the henge in the bright sunlight. ‘He was the good guy and they’d badly wronged him—’
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