Last Stand in Lychford

by Paul Cornell

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  For Louise Bignell

  Prologue

  THE REVEREND LIZZIE BLACKMORE was staring at the carnage in front of her. Or, she gradually realised, the lack of carnage. A few moments ago, the fairy prince Finn, who’d once been in some sort of ill-defined romantic relationship with her friend Autumn, had been in her kitchen at the Vicarage. He’d been on fire, but he’d been alive. Before Lizzie could react, however, before she could get her hands on the extinguisher or the fire blanket, he’d . . . exploded.

  He’d exploded, and she’d thrown up her hands instinctively to protect her face, terrified in that second that she was going to die. The horrible adrenalin of that was still coursing through her.

  But she’d realised the explosion hadn’t hurt her, hadn’t done anything to her. She’d lowered her hands. And now she could see what the explosion had done. At the centre of a very real pattern of burns on her kitchen tiles was lying . . . Finn’s head. It lay on its side. There was no blood. His eyes were closed.

  Oh God. Oh God.

  With a great effort of will, she made herself squat down to look more closely, wondering if, as in a horror movie, his eyes were going to open again. They didn’t.

  “Finn?” she said, desperately. There was no reply. Of course there wasn’t. The bottom of his neck was . . . smooth, sealed. There was just a base, like he was an action figure. The inside of his neck was dull gold, without any features, without organs. Feeling like she was in a dream, she reached out and touched it. It felt slightly rough. Almost like plastic. Or was that just a matter of associations on her part? Yes, because this didn’t honestly feel like any material she’d ever touched.

  She felt herself wobbling. What could she do for him? Nothing she could think of. He’d been blurting out some sort of warning.

  She stood up. She wasn’t going to cry. She wasn’t. She started backing out of the kitchen. Her heel encountered something. She looked around.

  There on the carpet lay Finn’s hands. They were also both perfect. They were sealed at the wrists, golden inside.

  Increasingly lost in the surreal, Lizzie looked around for more fairy body parts. She found, on the landing, part of his leg. It was still in a rounded section of what looked like leather trouser. It looked tailored, almost, to his current situation.

  She took a deep breath and thought of her training, accessed that stoic part of her reserved for the most awful funerals. And the occasional wedding. She went to get her gardening gloves. She searched the house wearing them, and found the rest of the bits, handling them with the gloves as if she might disturb evidence in a police investigation that would surely never come to pass.

  In the end, she was pretty satisfied that she’d found all of him. But what to do with him? She tried just holding the parts together, wondering if they’d somehow fuse and he’d come back to life. (She’d started with the thigh and calf to try to avoid the worst horrors of that.) It didn’t happen. He was cold, she realised. Not like human corpses were cold, but like an object. The absence felt incidental, as if he could just be heated up again. But then, perhaps that was how those who weren’t used to the dead felt about their dear departed. Lizzie was very used to the dead. The human dead.

  Where could she put him? The kitchen table didn’t seem respectful. She was thinking about Autumn now. About how she was going to break this news, what she’d have to show her. She decided it was going to be pretty awful no matter what or how. This purpose-built Vicarage had odd storage spaces here and there, including a room behind the room where the washing machine and drier were kept that contained nothing but an old broom and seemed to offer no suggestion as to what the space might be used for. So Lizzie now found a use for that room. A macabre one. Along its small collection of shelves she lined up what could only be described as pieces of fairy.

  Then she called Autumn. She woke her up at half four. And, using the voice she kept for breaking bad news, she told her to prepare for a shock.

  * * *

  An hour later, they both stood there in that little musty room, all the lights on, darkness still outside on this September morning, cups of strong, sweet tea in their hands, staring at what lay on the shelf.

  “Are you sure that it’s really him?” Autumn asked. She’d already touched his face. She’d done that immediately.

  “He was talking to me before it happened. You always said there was an element of unreality about his nation, his people. When you went there, you said it was like a dream.”

  “A nightmare.”

  “It’s almost as if when he comes here he’s . . . a story. A prop in a movie.”

  Autumn put down her cup and went to touch one of the exposed gold surfaces. “Or maybe this is just what the attack or the blast or whatever that was did to him.”

  “I think you can call it an attack. He mentioned the fairy court and his father, as if something had happened to them. He said ‘they’ were going to bring the war here, that we were all . . . going to die.”

  Autumn didn’t even acknowledge the threat. “So we were right about there being some sort of conflict going on inside the land of fairy. Some sort of civil war. Fomented by the agents of Maitland Picton’s ‘people,’ whoever they are. They want to annex fairy, then us.” She stroked Finn’s hair. “God, I was so fixated by him, then I was so scared of him. Then you and I started to treat him as some sort of annoying . . .”

  “That was mostly you.”

  Autumn looked momentarily guilty. “You joined in.”

  “I think he was a person. Of a sort that we hadn’t really begun to understand. I’d say we should have a funeral, but the way those parts are, they sort of say to me . . .”

  “That he can be fixed.”

  “Yeah.”

  Autumn was silent for a moment. Then she seemed to decide she was going to say something. “Me and Luke . . . we, err, got together.”

  Lizzie didn’t know if she was meant to attempt surprise. That was frankly a bit beyond her right now. “Finally.”

  “Before marriage. Couple of times. I hope that’s okay.” The look on her face was a mixture of nervousness and cheeky glow.

  “I’m not judging. I hope that’s okay. Was it . . . ?”

  “Wow. Just wow. Leaving it at that.”

  That was obviously what Autumn had most wanted to tell her. “Really? You’ll leave it at that?”

  “Well, without drinks.”

  This was not the first time that Autumn had grandiosely failed to read the room when it was only her and Lizzie in it. Lizzie really wanted to say two things. One: that she was glad for Autumn, if tired by her continual assumption of puritanical judgment on Lizzie’s part, but that maybe she could also consider how long Lizzie had been without romance in her life and . . . no, gah, that was unfair. Why was she feeling angry about this? Oh, possibly because of two: the pieces of fairy. “Autumn, was this really the best time—?”

  “He doesn’t look dead. He doesn’t look real. I can’t react to that. Not like I—”

  “Sorry. Sorry.”


  “No. I’m sorry.”

  They looked at each other in silence for a moment. There was still an awkwardness between them. What was this about? Suddenly, as if her brain had said sod this, Lizzie realised that a terrible joke had popped into her head. “Oh,” she said. “No. I mustn’t say it.”

  “What?”

  “It’s . . . awful. Just an awful joke.”

  “You always say people come out with awful jokes at funerals. And that it’s healthy. And you just had a go at me for—”

  “I did not—”

  “And I’d really like to hear a normal reaction from you right now.”

  “Okay. I just thought . . .”

  “Go on.”

  Lizzie looked helplessly at her, biting her lip. “The elf on a shelf.”

  Autumn managed a very solemn nod. “That is . . . indeed a terrible thing to say. You should be ashamed of yourself. Points will be taken off your vicar licence.”

  “I want to say Finn would have liked that. But I really don’t think he would.”

  They both, finally, managed to laugh. Perhaps not as much as they could have. Still, the tension was punctured. A bit. Autumn hugged Lizzie. Lizzie held her, still aware of some little distance, some awkwardness entirely on her part that she hated and didn’t want to acknowledge or understand. She squeezed. She didn’t want Autumn feeling that emotion off her.

  “Lizzie,” whispered Autumn, “what are we going to do? I mean about . . . everything?”

  “We’ll work it out,” said Lizzie. “It’s not just us now.” She hoped that sounded like she meant it.

  1

  THAT WAS HOW LYCHFORD came to be waiting.

  Of course, that didn’t mean Lizzie and Autumn had had that luxury. As people started waking up on the morning that Finn had exploded, Lizzie had begun phoning around or physically going to see every local organisation, explaining to them the warning that had been delivered to her, why it had been so urgent, and why they now needed to prepare for the worst.

  She’d found that to be an unexpectedly terrible process. The people she spoke to had, these days, every reason to believe her. Everyone in the town had now shared in the waters of the well in the woods. They could all see the things that lay beyond the everyday, the things they had been protected from for so long. But more importantly, they could all now feel, with extra senses, the fragile nature of the now really pretty slight barriers around their little Cotswolds market town, behind which were other realities, with other inhabitants, some of whom had now declared they were coming to get them.

  What took Lizzie by surprise was that, even though they knew what Lizzie was talking about was real, they often still didn’t want to know. Their nervousness at what she was telling them became, surprisingly quickly, irritation. They seemed to want her and Autumn to deal with it. One or two, by the end, Lizzie felt, had actively started to blame her for the situation.

  “It’s a bit much,” said Sheila Parker, a widow from Prince Street who’d seemed affronted ever since she’d shared in the waters, probably because she’d always hated Lizzie’s now deceased old friend Judith, the hedge witch, and positively disliked having new insight into what the old woman’s point of view had been. “I mean, it shouldn’t be up to us. We pay our rates.”

  Lizzie had had to suppress a desire, during that particular conversation, to say that she wasn’t entirely sure the county council were up to funding the magical defence of all reality. And that if they were, being based in Gloucester, they had no more knowledge of the problem than anyone else who lived outside the bounds of Lychford itself.

  She found, as she delivered her message in the next few days, this same negativity and deliberate obtuseness everywhere she went. It wasn’t going to happen. It was somebody else’s problem. Someone else would deal with it. Why wasn’t Lizzie herself doing something?

  Lizzie had expected the population to flee. She had been comfortable with that. She and Autumn had already decided they could more easily defend the town, defend this focal point of all human reality, without worrying about saving innocent bystanders at the same time.

  But no. These buggers, valuing the comfort of their lives over the continuing actuality of those lives, largely decided to stay put.

  A few left—several of the younger folk with young families.

  But in the next few weeks, to Lizzie’s horror, those started coming back.

  “Well,” said Stacy Latislaw, who worked behind the counter at the town’s third best charity shop, talking to Lizzie at her kitchen table. “Luna didn’t really like it in Nantwich with my sister, and we thought, well, we can always leave again if whatever it is happens.”

  “Whatever it is,” repeated Lizzie, numbly, sure that by now she was getting close to the end of her reserve of goodwill for the people of this town. She had preached from the pulpit, week after week, telling her congregation to leave. That was the opposite of everything the Church of England had trained her to do. They’d listened to her. They’d nodded. They’d stayed.

  Lizzie had looked at the calm, placid face of Stacy Latislaw and thought of Richard Burton’s narration at the start of Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds, and she wanted to swear at her. She wanted to run into the marketplace and bellow, “They’re coming!”

  Perhaps there were some good reasons for this urge to stay put. Perhaps some of it was down to the fact that nobody outside of Lychford would believe or understand the reasons why anyone inside it had left.

  Or perhaps the people of this town were just stupid, complacent sheep who loved their comfortable lives so much they hadn’t noticed the slaughterhouse in the next field.

  Lizzie had struggled with her faith in God before. But all her extraordinary training in the ways of human life hadn’t prepared her to so lose her faith in people.

  She decided, a couple of weeks into the waiting, to instead turn her focus to the town’s organisations. And, of course, the committee members of all of them had looked seriously at her and had nodded and agreed, and then things . . . a few things . . . had actually started to happen. The Women’s Institute, who were already doing a sort of neighbourhood watch scheme for the homes on the edge of town, had organised “magical self-defence” courses in which the (all organically sourced and fair trade guaranteed) protective charms Autumn had recommended were mass produced in jam jars and everyone was instructed in their use. The History Society had got their members to seek out useful occult books. (So far, according to Autumn, they had found one and a half, whatever that meant, and neither the one nor the half were any use.) The Festival committee were staging regular open mic nights at the Plough, which had seemed a strange response, but perhaps the best they could do.

  The University of the Third Age had even invited Lizzie to speak to at one of their meetings at the Fincham Hall. She realised about a minute into what she’d planned as a talk about looking out for strange beings in one’s garden and putting extra magical defences around one’s house that members of the elderly audience were talking over what she was trying to say, calling out the refrain she was getting used to: if this was so important, why wasn’t she doing something about it? Why wasn’t that coloured girl at the magic shop doing something about it?

  Lizzie wanted to walk off there and then. She got to the end of her piece. But she didn’t take audience questions. She’d already heard enough.

  Perhaps there was one sign that, at least on some level, the locals were taking this threat seriously. Autumn’s magic shop, Witches, gradually became, in the weeks since the message, a centre of the town’s conversations, a place people went to like a favourite news website when they needed reassurance, when they needed grounding in tense times. But having too many customers to deal with on her own was, for Autumn, a completely new and rather taxing experience. Especially when they largely wanted nothing but reassurance. Especially when she was at the same time working out how to defend the town and how to bring a fairy back from the dead. She
’d put up a card in the window of the supermarket, seeking an assistant, but hadn’t had any applicants. “They think,” she’d said to Lizzie, “it means they’d also have to, you know, defend against the dark arts. And that is something, as we’ve discovered, that they absolutely do not want to do.”

  Lizzie felt that she hadn’t even begun to describe to her friend the despair she’d started to feel. There was still a distance between them, and she had no idea why. “I’m so scared for them,” she said. “And for us. I don’t know what they’ll do if and when anything actually shows up.”

  “When,” Autumn had said.

  The truth of which led to another source of dismay. Lizzie found that her email backlog began to again contain an increasing number of mundane matters. People were still dying, of course, baptisms were on the rise, and people from the town were once more feeling able to get married in her church. Her church wardens were starting to talk about preparing for Christmas.

  “What the hell,” she said as she stared at the screen one evening. “We are the turkeys, and we are voting for Christmas.”

  She was pretty sure that this state of complete denial and refusal to prepare was exactly what their enemy, whatever it was, wanted.

  * * *

  Autumn Blunstone sat behind the counter in her magic shop, looking at the stool where Judith Mawson used to sit. It wasn’t opening time yet. But already customers had appeared outside, nervously hanging about. She had regulars now. People who regularly wasted her time, that was. Who would have thought that, running a shop, she’d have to put up with the general public? She had a duty to serve them, but she didn’t feel up to it yet today, despite several coffees, so she was leaving it until she had no choice. She had a horrible weight in her head, made up of a sort of distant, complicated grief for Finn and a solid continuing grief for Judith, and also the fear that she didn’t have time for either. The lack of urgency on the part of the townsfolk that Lizzie kept anxiously reporting made her feel more urgent. How could the locals be like this? How could you fail to change, when you had this sudden awareness of where you actually stood in the cosmic scheme of things? She supposed it was like that line from Spinal Tap. There was such a thing as too much fucking perspective.