Last Stand in Lychford

by Paul Cornell

  Lizzie wanted desperately to fall to her knees, as a lot of people around her already had. She looked to her friends. Zoya had one eyebrow raised, her hands over Jas’s ears, unimpressed. Trill was furious. Luke was sobbing in wonder.

  She looked back to the angel. Every cell in her body was saying that it was her job now to submit to divine judgment, to give herself up to the ecstasy she could feel waiting for herself and everyone around her. Here was blissful completion. All she had to do was give in.

  She looked back to Cummings. There was a suppressed glee on the face of the fairy he inhabited, a smugness. They were trying to sell her and everyone else on an idea of what this was. They were hoping her emotions, her zeal, would get the better of her rationality.

  Lizzie took a moment to compose herself. She stepped forward and addressed herself to one of the angel’s several faces. “Bollocks,” she said.

  * * *

  Autumn was making her way down some stairs. Or was inside the cavities of someone’s body. Or was in a cave. Her absolute assurance that each was true changed every moment. Ahead of her she could hear a sort of white noise which might be a voice. It was perhaps getting incrementally clearer. The terror, on the other hand, was all around her.

  Autumn didn’t want to reveal her presence, but at the same time, she had a feeling this was the voice of the being she had come to see. There was a tune in her head she’d never forgotten, one Finn had always sung or whistled when he’d strode jauntily across the border from the summerland. She tried it now, whistling it, a high, repetitive, six-note strain followed by a recurring three-note summons. Well, that was the closest she could get with her human voice. She hoped it was perhaps some sort of signal, or at least an indication that she was familiar with some of the local customs.

  The moment she started whistling, the sound ahead stopped.

  Before Autumn could react further, the nature of what she was walking through changed. It changed from diagonal to vertical.

  Suddenly this black hole was a pit, and Autumn was falling.

  * * *

  The angel was staring at Lizzie, as if it still couldn’t quite believe what she’d said. A lot of the townsfolk couldn’t either; they were already calling for her to shut up. “Lizzie!” hissed Luke, astonished. There were some furious rants being directed at her from all sides, but Lizzie ignored them and kept her eyes fixed on this being that was doing its best to make her shiver and exult.

  “You’re not welcome here,” she said.

  “Oh, but I am,” said the warm voice. The angel indicated the people all around, who were indeed nodding and looking angry at her.

  “To give everyone their just deserts. Revenge and reward. Who here deserves better than they have had?”

  There were a lot of shouts in the affirmative. “It’s lying,” she called. “All it can offer you is death. Don’t you remember? It already killed a lot of your friends and relatives with that wall.”

  “My wall selected those who are to be saved,” the angel replied, still ferociously calm. “Each to their own reward. There is no death now. They have all just gone on ahead.” Someone somewhere was singing “Jerusalem.” Ecstatic cries were starting to come from everywhere.

  “I have been told,” she called, “directly told, by these beings, what is really going on here. They’re trying to take over our world.”

  “Lizzie,” sighed the angel. “Lizzie, I know it’s hard. You’ve been so alone. Because you couldn’t face the alternative. I have tested you. And you have not been found wanting. What you were told, that was a story. You’ve been led up the garden path by your friends, the witches, quite a few times, haven’t you? Just because you heard what sounded like the truth, a truth you held onto, doesn’t mean that’s how things are going to be. There aren’t going to be any big revelations that matter now. This is the revelation. It’s time for all these good people, who’ve all suffered so much, to get the fruits of their hard work. It’s time for them to get back everything they’ve lost.”

  “You’re full of shit,” called Zoya. But there were now lots of much louder voices calling for her to shut up. Luke got up to look threateningly at her, but Trill stepped forward and he backed off.

  “If enough of you want it,” the being continued, “if you all say out loud to me that you want it, I can bring down all the barriers between worlds, and you will all be together, as one, forever. All your beloved dead will be returned to you. There will be no more secrets. Just one land, united, forever.”

  People around her were calling out their approval. Lizzie desperately looked around for dissenting faces in the crowd. She found a few, but only a few.

  “That’s why they filtered out the nonbelievers,” said Zoya. “They were concentrating you all here, ready to do this. Maybe nonbelievers are harder to con.”

  “Or,” corrected Lizzie, “maybe they have less power to offer. But yes. This is also why the assassins only zapped one of Autumn and me, but made sure we both felt threatened enough to bring everyone together. They probably thought I’d be under their control so they could use me to help finesse that.”

  “If you want paradise, a solution to all things,” the angel was saying to the crowd, “you must gather everyone worthy and then all say it together out loud.”

  “Clap if you believe in fairies,” whispered Zoya.

  “I will return, in an hour, to find you all assembled here and ready for your reward,” continued the angel, to cries of disappointment. “Then you will all give your assent with one voice, and everything will be perfect.”

  The glow around it intensified, and, to more cries of woe, it vanished.

  The fairy with Cummings’s presence inside glanced at Lizzie. “Don’t try anything,” he said. “We’ll be watching.” And then his expression left and the face was blank again. The possessed fairies all moved as one and went and stood together in line, ready to act should they be required.

  Lizzie felt the absence of her God like a stone in her heart. She felt as if whatever message he’d had for her had already come and gone. And here was the enemy disregarding them now, as if they could do nothing further to hamper its plans. What could they do in an hour?

  “They’re going to vote yes,” said Zoya. “Talk about exactly the right offer. They’re giving the bloody English a chance to live in the past. Oh God, who’s this now?” She was indicating the road up from the marketplace.

  Lizzie looked in that direction. Sunil Mehra was running toward the church.

  Trill stepped forward as if this could be an attack. But before Lizzie could tell him that this was a friend, probably, the fairy spasmed. He nearly fell to the ground. But then he staggered to his feet again.

  Sunil slowed down, looking surprised at what he could see ahead of him.

  Trill pointed at the restaurant owner and screamed.

  * * *

  Autumn hit the ground. She’d been screaming, expecting to die. The end of the fall had been a complete surprise. The floor caught her and prevented her from harm. And yet it was like being caught by a warm predator. She was still in darkness, but now she was in the bosom of something, that sound of life now a whisper that was right in here with her, and she was held fast in . . . no, as quickly as she’d had that thought, she was lying there with nothing holding her.

  There was enormous presence in this perfectly dark . . . chamber. Yes, it felt like a room. The whispering remained on the edge of earshot but the reverberation of it suggested an enclosed space with amazing acoustics. Gradually, the whispering faded. The presence became the silence. It was like the moment in a classical music track before the orchestra started playing. When you could just feel them there. She became very scared of how the voice that must come would sound. “Hello?” she began, breaking the silence herself.

  A small voice, right in her ear, asked her who was there.

  “Ahh!” she yelled, leaping up.

  The voice asked again.

  “Autumn Blunstone,” she s
aid quickly. “Wise woman of Lychford.” That was the first time she had assigned herself that title. Though she guessed it was implicit. But it had always felt before that that name still belonged to Judith. She felt suddenly bad that she’d done that now, out of a desire to somehow defend herself against being in the power of the thing all around her.

  The voice hardly reacted. It told her it was asleep. That all meaning was gone. That it was going again. And then it was gone and the whispering began again.

  “I’m here to wake you up,” said Autumn. But there was no reply. She was pretty sure she was in the presence of the king, because just over there . . . yeah, she could feel the enormity of him. There was no physical component to that size. He was a conceptual hugeness. Like a galaxy. Like a theory.

  And what was this in here with him? There was some sort of . . . extra idea in here, something inserted, that hadn’t grown in this space. Only it was now forcibly associated with the enormous presence. Oh . . . this must be whatever the enemy were using to influence the king, to poison his blood, to make him broadcast the controlling fantasies to his people.

  Autumn moved around the space, trying to feel the limits of it, but she could find none. She couldn’t put her hands on some sort of device to smash it. Whatever magic had put it there was beyond her. So, she couldn’t start to clean the king’s blood. Back to plan A. She reached into her bag, feeling increasingly desperate. How had she ever hoped to wake an idea with a potion? Nevertheless, she found the bottle. She couldn’t even see the container, never mind any sort of mouth to pour it into. In her heart of hearts, she didn’t want to wake him up, because that would mean giving him existence, and she remembered what that existence was like, from the glimpse she’d had all those years ago. And here she was inside his heart. Inside that hugeness. Waking him would bring the old terror. Waking him might be the end of her.

  But no, that didn’t matter.

  Distracted, she found her sweating hands slipping on the bottle. She grabbed for it.

  The bottle fell. Horrified, Autumn heard it shatter.

  * * *

  Zoya had stepped forward immediately, aiming to get between this new arrival and Trill, whose bellow she’d initially taken for rage. But now the fairy’s expression had changed to one of fear, and pain. Uniquely among the fairies, who were otherwise still blandly staring straight ahead, Trill had been somehow enormously affected by the man’s arrival. The fairy was stumbling, still trying to point, but looking on the point of collapse. All control, in every sense of the word, seemed to have left him. “I have . . . a message,” he said, in a voice which sounded like making the shape of the words had been an effort.

  “What is it?” said Lizzie, going to him and putting a hand to his face.

  Zoya looked to the crowd. Of course, they were listening intently to every word. They were very interested in any message that might impact upon their deliberations about immediately saying yes to the first glowing person who’d asked them if they’d like the world to end. The new arrival, who Zoya was pretty sure she recognised from the Indian restaurant, was looking at them all in utter bafflement.

  She looked back as Trill slapped Lizzie’s hand away, an entirely different expression settling on his features. Then he pushed past them all like someone climbing out of a hole and went to look more closely at the new arrival.

  “I just went to lock up my restaurant,” said the newcomer. “I have no idea what’s going on.”

  “Us neither,” said Lizzie.

  Trill gave a sudden shiver. Then his whole posture changed. He stopped shaking, and adopted a slight stoop. He looked around with a wry sort of puzzlement and slight displeasure on his face. Then he found the restaurant guy again and he smiled. “Sunil,” he said. “There you are.”

  “Why is he impersonating an old lady?” asked Zoya, now at the peak of her tolerance for weirdness.

  “Oh my God,” said Lizzie. “That’s Judith.”

  5

  AUTUMN WAS DESPERATELY, ridiculously, on her hands and knees, looking for the remains of the bottle, for the wetness of the liquid that had been inside. She couldn’t find it. It was gone beyond gone.

  She slowly straightened up.

  She’d had her little plan. But plans would not suffice here. Not here at the end of everything.

  Here was the time for the greatest sacrifice. It was all she had. The king needed new blood. She had that.

  She carefully felt inside her bag once again, and her fingers closed on the hilt of her penknife.

  * * *

  Lizzie watched in amazement as Sunil Mehra slowly backed away from a fairy who, with the shuffling motion of an old lady, seemed to be advancing on him with romantic intentions.

  The crowd of locals were dealing with this with a mixture of awkward puzzlement and annoyance that this was kind of getting in the way of the end of the world. “This is a frigging joke,” the red-faced man from before was saying. “We just have to say yes. All of us. We just have to say yes together. Say it with me now.” A lot of the crowd joined in with him. “Because what happens if we don’t? The end of the world without us? The rewards for someone else?” Lizzie was relieved that the crowd seemed to have decided to ignore this little sideshow. And the fairies hadn’t woken up either.

  “I think,” Lizzie whispered to Zoya, “that Judith might have left the heart behind as some sort of hidden preparation against this invasion. I think we might be about to hear some sort of important message that could save us.”

  “Great,” said Zoya. “Who’s Judith?”

  “This is an important message,” said Trill, in Judith’s voice. “For my boyfriend.”

  “Oh fuck,” said Lizzie. But still. Still. Whatever this was would be worth hearing. “Let her touch you,” she called to Sunil.

  “Really?” said Sunil. But he stayed put.

  “That’s Judith!” Luke called out, excitedly. “Judith Mawson! Communicating with us from the afterlife!”

  “So we get to hear what’s what from the horse’s mouth,” said one of the ladies from the church down the road that was kept at a bit more ecstatic a temperature than Lizzie liked to keep St. Martin’s.

  “She’ll tell us what’s waiting for us up there,” added Luke. Lizzie held back an urge to slap him.

  Judith/Trill had now reached Sunil and was stroking his hair. “This is a recorded message,” she said.

  “It’s not that I mind . . . you know,” Sunil said. “It’s just that this isn’t . . . isn’t Judith and I don’t know how or who—"

  “It’s a fairy,” said Lizzie.

  “I would never use that word,” said Sunil, desperately.

  “It’s me,” said Trill, in Judith’s voice. “And if you’re hearing this, I’ve kicked the bucket. You see,” and Lizzie realised that she was indeed sounding chatty and completely out of context for the situation, as a recorded message would be, “one day on the edge of town, I found a poor fairy dying. He were lying under a tree branch. There’d been a storm the night before and the branch must have landed on him. Anyway, I didn’t know how to make him right, and he weren’t in no state to tell me, so I did what I could to preserve his life. I used a lot of spells, and concentrated his whatnots all in one place, put some enormous protections on him so nothing could hurt him by way of infection and those who wished ill to him couldn’t find him, and reduced him down to summat he could grow eventually back from.”

  Lizzie realised he . . . or she . . . was talking about the heart. And now they knew why Trill hadn’t been affected by the poisoned blood.

  “I thought,” continued Judith, “that one day I’d learn how to grow him back. But as I got older, I started to think ‘this fairy fellow is going to outlive me,’ so I made a note to myself to tell whoever was due to take over from me all about it. I’m hoping either me or her’s told you all about the secret stuff of Lychford, Sunil, or you’ll be thinking I’ve lost it.”

  Sunil seemed to be believing what was in front of him no
w. He reached out and grabbed Trill’s hands, holding onto them and looking into Trill’s eyes as if he could see more of Judith there.

  “I’m sure I’ll have made sure all that’s happened before this gets delivered. I’ll have seen to it. I’m going to give that fairy heart to whoever this apprentice I’ve chosen is, right at the end of my life when I know I’m on my way out, and explain what it’s all about, and say it includes a message for you, Sunil, and if that’s the way this has gone, I’m glad, because you’ll be ready to hear what I have to say to you. If that hasn’t happened, for some reason, the heart will come straight to you, soon after I pop my clogs, because I’ve made a magical arrangement with the post office. Not that they know anything about that. There’ll be a powerful suggestion with the heart for you to seek out a source of magical power. I can only hope that person knows how to bring a fairy back to life.”

  “Judith forgot to tell us about it,” whispered Lizzie, amazed and sad. “Because of her dementia. Or maybe she just thought it was none of our business.”

  “You’ve got a lot to fill me in about,” said Zoya.

  “So the message is this, Sunil,” said Judith. “I always loved you.”

  “Oh,” said Sunil. “Oh no. Please, no, Judith—” He sounded like he thought this wasn’t quite proper. For most of the time he’d known her, of course, Judith had been a married woman. One he’d flirted outrageously with, but still. “I’m sorry I was never your boyfriend. Not really.”

  “You were my sunshine. You were my escape from the obligations I’d fallen into. You never judged, even if what I was saying sounded loopy. So I’m quite pleased to think of your face now. I can see it in my mind’s eye. And in a minute, after this message is recorded, I’m going to go over and see you for real and order a chicken korma extra mild and some chips and you’re going to ask me what I’ve been doing today and I’m going to say I was preparing a fairy heart. I hope you’ll remember me being so daft. I hope I finally got to say summat like I just did to you while I was still alive. But if not . . . well, now you know.”