Right at this precise moment in time she couldn’t allow herself to care about anything more than that they looked old and frail and very possibly hittable.
‘I don’t think they’re in much of a state to stop me,’ she suggested and stepped over him again. ‘You want to see what “weak” is?’ She held the rusted point over his chest, like a tiny soot-and-tear-streaked vampire hunter. The skavag-crones became agitated, mewling piteously.
‘Not them,’ he croaked. ‘The ones you can’t see.’
The shadows around them suddenly seemed to be very busy.
‘They’ve come for me,’ he continued. They are scared of you, yes. Barber’s cut them loose. Cut us all loose because of what your boy did. Only got their own strength now, don’t want to hurt you, but they will if you don’t let me go with them.’
Bex was trying to look in every direction simultaneously. ‘That’s not going to happen. You don’t get to walk away from this.’
Carling made that awful tearing noise which was as close as he could get to laughing. ‘Stupid. Look at me. Walk away?’ He spat. ‘Okay. Make it easy for you: tell you where he’s taken your boy.’
‘Why would you do that?’
‘Mended my ways, haven’t I? Sorry for all the bad shit I’ve done.’ He laughed again, mockingly. ‘Why do you think? So that you can go and take him down, that’s why.’
‘And if I can’t?’
He shrugged. ‘No skin off my banana, is it? I’m still fucked.’
She shook her head in disgust and disbelief, but dropped the point of her stake all the same. ‘Fine. I hope you’re happy. You deserve each other.’
The three skavag crones shuffled forward and gathered him up in their gnarled arms like a pile of loosely-jointed driftwood. Rosey started to slip away in the opposite direction, drawing her gently with him. ‘Why are they doing this?’ he whispered.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘Maybe they recognise one of their own.’ She called out after Carling: ‘So what about it, then? Where’s he gone?’
Carling seemed to have regained some of his strength already, because his answer returned clearly. ‘Barber’s taken your boy back to where this mess all started. He’s going to finish it once and for good. It’s a place called…’
‘Holly End. I know.’ She could have kicked herself; it was so obvious.
‘Yeah, well here’s two things you didn’t. First, it’s also the place where he’s strongest.’
‘Fabulous.’
‘Plus it’s hidden, like your place here used to be,’ he chuckled. He had nearly disappeared, borne into the night, and all she could see of him was a pale gleam, like old bones at the bottom of a well. ‘But if you can find the stone that anchors his power, it would seriously fuck him up. You might even get out alive again.’
‘What stone?’ she called desperately. What do you mean it ‘anchors his power’?’
‘Big brave clever girly like you should be able to work it out.’
‘You son of a bitch!’ she yelled after him. ‘Tell me!’
But all that came back to her was the echo of his mocking laughter.
PART 3: VILLAGE
1 Ted
Holly End, Thursday December 19th, 1957
‘Ted!’ called his mother from the kitchen. ‘Make sure you take Sam with you!’
Twelve-year old Ted slumped in the act of putting his duffel-coat on and groaned. ‘Oh mother, must I?’ he complained. Another ten seconds and he would have been safely out of the front door and on his way to an adventure in the Rimwoods, but now…
‘Edward Clee!’ she replied in the sharp, no-nonsense tone which every hand on the farm feared, even his father. ‘It won’t kill you to look after your little brother for a few hours, and it might make you think twice about going anywhere silly!’
How did she know? How did she always seem to know?
‘And make sure that you get branches with plenty of berries. We need all the good luck we can get this year.’
‘Yes mother,’ he intoned.
He dutifully checked that in the old burlap sack there were some secateurs and a pair of workman’s gloves (not her good gardening ones, not on his life), by which time Sam was standing by the back door, his wellies shining almost as brightly as his eyes.
‘So are we going somewhere silly, then?’ his eight-year old brother asked.
‘Not now,’ Ted grumped.
But a hundred yards down the road, he’d already changed his mind.
***
Collecting holly branches so that his mother could make wreaths for everybody in the village was the last thing Ted wanted to do, but volunteering for the job was the best way of getting out of the house without having to either run errands or chop wood. It gave him licence to roam far and wide – at least, as far and wide as it was possible to go in the valley without running afoul of the Spinny – to delve into gullies and forge his way through thickets as if he were exploring a tropical jungle. Though if the truth be told, there weren’t many gullies and thickets left whose secrets he hadn’t already plundered, and his recent forays had taken on a bit of an air of desperation. More and more he found himself edging up into the forbidden Rimwoods, and the Spinny which lurked there ready to turn you about and plop you back in the valley when your eyes and feet told you different. The Professor told them that the Spinny was protecting them from what was left of the world outside, but it didn’t feel like that to Ted. In Ted’s one and only experience of the Spinny – having run away from home when he was younger than Sam, due to a dispute over bedtimes – it didn’t feel like he was being protected at all.
It had felt like he was being laughed at.
‘What’s the plan, Desperate Dan?’ Sam chanted as he bounced alongside, stomping puddle-ice with his wellies. They were on the main road through the village, though ‘road’ was a bit grandiose for it. After five years with no traffic but horse-carts, it was rutted and overgrown.
‘Well,’ replied Ted archly, and performed an elaborate pantomime of looking to make sure they weren’t being spied upon, ‘I thought we might go for a spot of target practice. What do you say?’ From the deep pocket of his duffel-coat he produced a sturdy-looking slingshot. He’d made it himself from a fork of yew, with a cord-whipped handle and a band of thick inner-tube rubber. At full stretch he’d measured its range at over a hundred yards, and close-to he’d once put a stone through a baked bean tin. It was, as far as he was concerned, quite the most lethal weapon known to man or rabbit.
Sam’s eyes widened. ‘Can I have a go?’ he begged.
‘As long as you don’t take any of your own fingers off, of course, but only on one condition.’
‘What? Yes! Whatever it is!’
‘That you don’t tell anybody where we’re going. Mother will have absolute kittens if she finds out.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Can’t have target practice without any targets, can you? We’re going to see Rabbit John.’
They passed a few more cottages, then the Black Horse, and St Kenelm’s church with its square, ivy-covered bell tower. One of the many secrets which none of the adults suspected he knew was that the crypts of the church were still nearly half-full of the supplies which the Professor and Reverend Lyttleton had put aside before they’d raised the Spinny. Life in Holly End was hard enough these days; he imagined that without those stockpiles, his father and mother and all of their friends would be dead of starvation or disease, or else forced to find some way out through the Spinny and into the radioactive wastelands beyond, to be preyed upon by the bands of marauding Rouslers who lived out there. Ted also knew that of all the bogeyman stories which grown-ups told children to make them behave, the Rouslers were actually real. He’d seen them himself.
Now they were passing the Bu
rnouts – the blackened ruins of cottages at the village’s edge which had been destroyed in the one and so far only Rousler attack. There had been mercifully few deaths; most of the village families had, as usual, been gathered for the evening in the Black Horse. Rabbit John had come tearing down from his poacher’s hut in the Rimwoods, shouting the alarm, and prompting a very calm sort of panic such as only people who had survived the Birmingham Blitz could manage. In the brief chaos while the women herded the children down into the shelter of the pub’s cellar and the men dashed off to find weapons, Ted had caught sight of a screaming band of wildly-dressed figures throwing flaming torches into the thatched roofs of the outlying cottages. It was all he saw before being dragged to safety, but he still heard the sounds of fighting clearly enough – the gunshots and screams. He had made his slingshot the very next day.
Strangely – at least to Ted – the attack seemed to make people think that Rabbit John was even more of an Odd Sort than before. As if he’d somehow brought it down by living apart from them, and so close to the Spinny. Spending any time with him beyond bartering for rabbit meat or fur was heavily frowned upon.
This, of course, was why Ted did it. Plus the fact that Rabbit John was teaching him all kinds of super things, like tracking and trapping.
Uphill into the thin outliers of the Rimwoods, and Sam was chattering away brightly about what he thought he might get for Christmas, when the world unexpectedly shifted.
For a moment – no more than the space of a few footsteps – it seemed that the path was lengthening away beneath his feet, and that despite his legs telling him that he was still moving forwards his eyes insisted the opposite. Disorientated, he stumbled.
‘Did you feel that?’ he asked Sam shakily, but his little brother was oblivious. ‘Sam, I said did you…’
Sam shushed him violently. He was staring ahead, pale and trembling.
There was someone on the path ahead of them.
They couldn’t see the figure clearly – just hear its clumping footfalls on the hard earth and its ragged breathing – but soon there was a glimpse of tattered clothing and wild eyes staring out of a grime-streaked face.
Rousler.
Sam whimpered, a small animal noise of terror.
With shaking fingers Ted slipped a stone into the cup of his slingshot. He aimed and, convinced that he was going to miss, let fly.
His stone struck the Rousler square in the centre of its forehead, and before it could react Ted fired again, pulling the band right back to his ear. Baked beans! he thought and laughed a little hysterically. His second shot was as true as his first; the Rousler grunted and collapsed backwards into the bushes.
‘Oh cracking shot, Ted!’ Sam yelled, and together they approached cautiously to inspect their prize.
2 Wreckage
Bex wandered the ruins of Moon Grove long after everybody else had abandoned it. The building was beyond repair, uninhabitable. Even if the skavags hadn’t inflicted so much damage, their invasion of what should have been the safest of refuges would have made the Narrowfolk leave. Nobody could feel safe here again.
Nevertheless, she found it surprisingly difficult to tear herself away. Running away from Mum and Shithead Dave had been a doddle in comparison: empty her purse, pour a pint of milk into the engine vents of his Beemer and disappear into the night.
Here, though.
She trailed in and out of rooms, picking her way over smashed furniture, gouged floorboards, and – in too many cases – large, dark bloodstains.
She salvaged what she could from the kitchen. Kerrie the Kook’s cauldron lay overturned, cold and empty, next to the corpse of a skavag with a crushed skull. Of Kerrie herself or her Kitchen Tarts, there was no sign. The great blackboard in the dining room had been torn down and broken in half across the refectory table. Everywhere, rain blew in through broken windows and through cracks in the ceilings, in steady pattering streams down the wide, gutted stairwell, pooling on the floors and bloating the carpets. The whole building wept.
When Rosey came back, he found her in Walter’s study, surrounded by a strewn mess of maps and books. She’d heard him clumping up the stairs and had stuffed several maps into her rucksack along with her few other treasures: Dodd’s A-to-Z, his dowsing rods, Andy’s stake with the weird cross-quartered circle stamped into its head, several ounces of rolling tobacco and an eighth of hash traded off Stirchley for some spare Christmas light bulbs which she’d nicked from Andy’s flat. Remembering the look of hopelessness on Stirchley’s face as the ambulance doors closed on him, she came close to tears again.
‘I’m glad to find you still here,’ he said.
She sniffed hard. ‘Elementary, my dear flatfoot,’ she replied. ‘The others okay?’
He so-so-ed. ‘The ones that would come with me, yes, mostly. You are very stubborn people.’
‘We’re not charity cases, or scroungers. We keep out of everybody’s way and help each other because we’ve learned that no other bugger will. Used to, anyway.’
‘The ones that got hurt are at casualty in Selly Oak. The mothers with kids have gone straight into B&Bs. That was easy enough. Some of the men – I pulled some strings and got a few into Snow Hill and Firside. That was out of the few that would even agree to let me try. The rest have disappeared off somewhere to another squat. As I say, stubborn.’
She squinted at him, calculating. ‘You’d do the same to me if you could, wouldn’t you? Get me in a hostel, call the social workers.’
‘In a heartbeat. Look at what happened here.’ He gestured around at the wreckage. ‘How can you prefer this? How could you, even before?’
‘Put it this way: do you know how many social workers saw that little girl Victoria Climbie while her religious nut-job of a mother and her sicko boyfriend kept her tied up in a bin bag in the bath and stubbed cigarettes out on her thighs?’
‘That’s hardly the…’
‘Five. Guess how many times your precious social workers and doctors and police saw Baby P while his mum and boyfriend broke his spine and eight of his ribs. Go on, guess.’
‘It…’
‘Over sixty.’ She was coldly furious, advancing on him, knowing that none of this was his fault but helpless to stop. ‘Don’t tell me the system works or that it’s imperfect but the best we’ve got, because it fucking doesn’t and it fucking well isn’t. I’ll take my chances with the monsters I can see rather than the ones pretending to care for me.’ She pulled up her left sleeve and showed him the cuts running along the underside of her forearm. ‘The only one cutting me is me, and we’re both fine with that, okay?’
If she’d been hoping to provoke him, it failed. ‘Okay,’ he answered. Some of the cuts were very fresh, inflicted in the last few hours, while he’d been away. ‘It’s not your fault, you know,’ he added. ‘What happened here.’
There was no point trying to respond to such hollow platitudes, no matter how well-intentioned they were. Of course it was her fault. She’d brought Andy here and everything that had followed him. She’d insisted that he stay and try to help them, not because he had anything to offer the Narrowfolk but because she’d wanted payback for Dodd’s murder.
‘I need answers, Mr Penrose,’ she said, shoving her sleeve back down and stooping to strap up her rucksack. ‘If all of this is dead and finished, I have to know why before I let the nice men in white coats take me away, do you understand that?’
‘I understand that you’re going to follow me to Holly End whether I take you with me or not, so I might as well keep you where I can see you. Did you find the map?’
‘Right here.’ She patted a pocket, and straightened up. ‘No, scratch what I just said. I’m only a scavenger, Mr Penrose; I trade fags and food for a roof over my head, and that’s pretty much it. I’m not in this to solve the mystery of whatever mad scheme Barber’s got pl
anned. All I know is a friend of mine has got himself into trouble on my account, and I’m not going to let that happen a second time.’
‘That’s the most sense I’ve heard from any of you lot since I got here,’ he replied.
‘It’s just that…’ she stomped out onto the landing, waving around at the empty shell which the house had become. ‘This, you know? What happens if I come back and this is all…’ she couldn’t finish and stood gazing around helplessly.
‘If it’s all gone?’ he finished gently. ‘Look around, Bex. It already is. There’s no coming back here, whatever happens.’
It was easy to leave after that, as if hearing it from somebody else made it alright, made it less like she was abandoning something that still needed her. She found that for all that he was a similar age to Walter, Penrose had none of the secret smugness which had prevented her from ever truly trusting him. She suspected that he was simply being kind. Her stubborn, self-destructive streak rose up against the idea like bile – wanting to tell him to piss off, that she didn’t need his pity or his help – but for the first time in her life she swallowed it back down again and followed him out of the house.
***
Walter’s map located Holly End in the Warwickshire countryside south of Stratford-Upon-Avon, but that was where its usefulness ended. It was ancient, made from some kind of heavy cloth-card, and had seen so much use that the folds between its panels had disintegrated until they were held together by nothing more than the underlying fibres. The place-names were miniscule, written in a font which seemed to be all verticals, and there was no distinction between A and B roads – all of which were helpfully marked in red ink that turned almost invisible in the sodium streetlight as Rosey drove them down the M42. Not that it indicated any motorways, either, of course.
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