Darkest Hour (Age of Misrule, Book 2)

by Mark Chadbourn

  “The ally is obviously Cernunnos.” Ruth examined the mark that had been burned into the flesh of her hand by the nature god. She had a sudden flashback to the rainswept night in Manorbier, the terrifying power she had seen in the being as its body melted and changed like oil on water.

  “Your ally,” Veitch noted. “You’re his big pal.”

  “As long as I’m with you, he’s with you. But how are we supposed to show him respect?”

  “These beings,” Shavi mused, “seem to expect deference from those beneath them in the hierarchy of power.”

  “I’ll just tug my forelock in front of the toffs,” Veitch sneered. “Blimey, talk about things being the same all over.”

  “The Celts rightly believed islands were prime places for carrying out rituals,” Tom stated. “Not far from here, in Loch Maree, there’s an island called Eilean Maree, with a sacred grove dedicated to the Tuatha De Danann, where we can make an offering to-“

  “How do you know all these things, wise teacher?” Laura asked pointedly.

  Shavi eyed Tom incisively. “Tom knows all of the lore of the Celts, is that not right? You told us you were tutored by the people of the Bone Inspector-“

  “And so the knowledge of being a freak is passed down,” Laura sniffed.

  “And the Bone Inspector spoke of his people, an unbroken line of guardians of the old places stretching back through history,” Shavi continued.

  Church threw another branch on the fire. “Well, we all know what cleansing the darkness from the chieftain means,” he added sombrely, “though a little guidance on how to go about it wouldn’t have gone amiss.”

  “There was one other thing,” Ruth said. “What did for the source of the threat, look within as well as without mean?”

  “As if you don’t know.” Laura stared deep into the heart of the fire. “It means one of us is looking to earn thirty pieces of silver.”

  After the others had retired to their tents, Church and Laura sat warming themselves by the dying embers. In the midst of all the chaos and tension, Church felt remarkably comforted to have Laura curled up next to him. With his arm around her and her head on his shoulder, the emotional closeness to another human filled him with a sense of well-being.

  “This is what it’s all about,” he muttered to himself.

  “You’re talking to yourself again.”

  Although they were entwined, Laura still seemed a little stiff and distant. He had started to strip away the many defences she had erected to protect herself, but he knew it would be a long time before she gave her inner self up freely. In fact, the more he got to know her, the more he felt the acid-tongued, confident, aggressive Laura was a character that had been completely constructed, and whatever lay within was something he might not recognise at all. But that sense of protecting the vulnerable heart of their being was something they shared, and possibly what had attracted them in the first place.

  “So this Marianne must have been a big thing in your life,” she said after a long period of introspection.

  “We’d been together a long time. We were going to get married. So, yes, she was a big thing.”

  “I suppose that explains why you were knocked so out of whack when she died. Do you think you’ll ever get over it?”

  “I don’t think anybody ever gets over something like that. You just learn to accommodate it.”

  She thought about this for a moment, then said, “What was she like?”

  “Oh, I don’t know-“

  “Go on, I want to know. Was she a good person?”

  “I suppose. I never really thought of her like that. She was pretty much a malice-free zone. But she had her bad qualities-who doesn’t?”

  “Yeah, right. But it’s a balancing act, isn’t it? There aren’t any real goodies or baddies. Most people manage to keep that scale just right, a little bit up, a little bit down, over the course of a life. And just a few go up one side or the other.” She dug him sharply in the ribs with her elbow. “Christ, it’s like getting blood out of a stone with you.”

  “I think that’s a black kettle and pot situation.” He sighed. “She was smart. She read a lot. She liked to talk about ideas, about things that mattered. She made me laugh. She took the piss out of me when I was being pompous. She didn’t take the piss out of me when I was talking about a list of dreary finds from some boring dig in Somerset. She could argue the case for northern soul when I was banging on about guitar music. She’d watch Star Wars with me and wouldn’t beg me to watch jean de Florette with her. And she allowed me to be weak.” He paused, feeling the rawness of some of the emotions that were surfacing. “Lifes good as long as you don’t weaken-that’s a pretty good rule of thumb. We all have to keep up a resilient front, but you know you’ve found someone good when you can let the barriers down to show that weak, pathetic, characterdestroying side of you, that part that you have to let out every now and then or go mad, but you normally have to do in the privacy of your room.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Is that good enough for you?”

  “It’ll do. For now.”

  “Why did you want to know? For the sake of comparison?”

  “No. What’s gone is gone. That doesn’t bother me. But you can find out a lot about someone from the way they view the love of their life.”

  Her words made him give pause. “Very lateral thinking. So what did you find out?”

  “You don’t think I’m going to tell you, do you?”

  “Okay. Tell me about the love of your life.”

  She laughed. “You must think I’m a real sucker. Sorry, pal, my past is a closed book.”

  He pulled her in tight and gave her scalp a monkey scrub.

  “Ow! Just because you can’t compete with my intellect.” She pinched him hard until Veitch hollered from the depths of his tent for them to be quiet. Then they giggled like schoolchildren and continued their conversation in hushed tones.

  “So,” Church said eventually, “do you and I get a happy ending, do you think?”

  There was a long pause that surprised him, and when he looked up at her face he saw the humour had drained from it. “Come on, Church, you’re a big boy now. Look around you. There aren’t going to be any happy endings.”

  Church sighed. “Why’s everyone so pessimistic? Ruth said something similar.”

  “Yeah, I knew she’d been talking to you. Well … maybe it’s a chick thing. You boys have no perception. No happy endings. We just have to make the most of what we’ve got for as long as we’ve got it.” There was a note of deep sadness in her voice, but a second later she had forced herself to brighten and was tugging him towards the tent. “Come on. I want my brains removing and you’ve got just the tool to do it.”

  chapter two

  turn off your mind, relax,

  and float downstream

  is beautiful.” Pressing her face against the window, Ruth looked out at the tranquil expanse of Loch Maree. The water was as glassy as it had been the previous day, reflecting the overcast sky punctured by bursts of blue and the hillsides that soared up steeply in a breathtaking wall of brown, purple and green. In the centre of the water lay Eilean Maree, serene and secret among its thick trees.

  It had taken them only twenty-five minutes from Gairloch after a hearty breakfast of farmhouse bacon and eggs. They were all eager to continue on to Edinburgh and civilisation, but Tom had convinced them that a brief pause to make an offering to Cernunnos would pay dividends in the long run.

  “I’ve got some reservations about this,” Church said as they parked up on the water’s edge. “Making an offering is a tacit admission that we accept they’re our gods rather than simply beings that are more powerful than us. I have no intention of doffing my cap and being fawning-“

  “Even if it means saving your life?” Tom interrupted.

  Church radiated defiance. “Even then. I’m not bowing down. I’m not folding up and showing my throat-“

  “Then don’t see it as
an offering. See it as a bribe.” Tom marched off across the pebbles to a small boat that had been pulled up on the bank.

  Witch rowed Laura, Ruth and Tom over first, then came back for Shavi and Church. The island was small and rocky along the shoreline, but heavily wooded with a thick undergrowth. They moved cautiously away from the light at the banks to the shadows that lay beneath the leafy covering. There was a tangible atmosphere of peace which put them at ease; it reminded Shavi of the aura of calm that hung over the grounds of Glastonbury Abbey. Yet despite the idyllic setting, no birds sang at all.

  Tom led them through the trees to the tip of the island. In a grove, out of sight of the road, an obvious altar had been created from a tree stump. Wild flowers lay on it, along with a cup of milk and the remnants of a loaf of bread. The air of sanctity was at its most concentrated in the altar’s vicinity.

  “Looks like someone’s been here before us,” Church noted.

  “The power that Cernunnos represents didn’t die away when the old gods left,” Tom replied. “In places away from the cities there’s been an unbroken chain of worship. Some people are still close to the land. Some refuse to forget.”

  “Fuckin’ nutters,” Veitch muttered.

  “And there’s the arrogance of the urban dweller.” Tom pressed his spectacles back on to the bridge of his nose, a mannerism which Church recognised as a sign of irritation. “I thought you would have learned by now not to judge by surface. Whales move in deep water and leave no mark of their passing.”

  “Whales?” Veitch said distractedly. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  They stood in front of the altar for a moment, deep in thought. Then Ruth said, “I want to make an offering too.”

  Church looked at her in surprise, but Tom said, “As you choose. You must respond to your feelings.”

  High in the branches above them echoed a long, mournful hoot which seemed to come in response. Church picked out Ruth’s owl looking down at them. “Your familiar seems to be happy about that.” He had a sudden twinge of uneasiness when he glanced back at Ruth; he couldn’t shake the feeling she was being sucked into something she couldn’t control.

  “What would make a good oblation, I wonder?” Shavi asked.

  “Something important to us,” Tom replied.

  Shavi searched in his pocket for the few remaining magic mushrooms which he used to induce his shamanistic trances. Church thought he laid them on the altar with undue gratitude.

  While the others discussed the offering, Laura drifted away. She had little interest in what they were doing, certainly little belief, and sometimes she was overcome by an abiding need to be on her own, alone with her thoughts; since they had joined forces there had been little opportunity for that.

  She leaned on one of the trunks and looked through the trees, watching the rippling waves sparkle in the scant sunlight. The place made her feel good in a way she hadn’t really experienced before; it was so peaceful she wouldn’t have complained if they’d decided to pitch camp there for a few days, maybe even longer.

  It was only when the tranquility blanketed her that she realised how anxious she always felt, a constant buzz that set her teeth on edge and locked her shoulder muscles. Gradually, though, the stress began to ease away, and the droning voices of the others slipped into dim awareness. It stayed that way for long enough that she felt a wash of damp emotion when she realised something had changed. It took her a second or two to grasp what it was: no one was speaking in the background. An unsettling tingle started at the base of her spine. Her first thought was that they had all stopped talking to stare at her. She prepared an acid response and turned to confront them.

  She was surprised and unsettled to see they were still standing in the same position, unmoving; a deep unnatural silence lay over them. They weren’t holding their breath, or listening for something. Everyone was frozen, hands mid-gesture, mouths poised in question or response, as if time had stopped in that one small spot.

  Laura felt a chill creep over her. A change had come to the soothing atmosphere on the island too; it was now heavy with anticipation.

  Soniething”s conning, she thought, without quite knowing how she had recognised that.

  Her eyes darted among the trees. The island wasn’t so big that someone could creep up on them unannounced; they would have heard something. As if in answer to her thought, she did hear a sound. Branches cracked, leaves rustled suddenly. She spun round quickly, her heart hammering.

  Light and shadow changed on the periphery of her vision. It could have been an illusion caused by her blinking, but, coupled with the sound, she was sure: something big was lumbering around in the trees. But whenever she tried to pin it down among the undergrowth it had already moved on to somewhere else. She caught a flicker of a silhouette, then gone. A heavy footstep that sounded only feet away, then another one near the water’s edge.

  She backed up hastily to the others, tugged at Church’s arm in the hope of somehow waking him, but when her fingers brushed his skin, it felt as cold as marble. Something like a stone seemed to grow in her throat. She crouched down to lower herself below the line of sight, then moved forward through the vegetation. If she could get to the boat, she could row out on to the water and reassess the situation, possibly go around the island until she could get a good view of what she was up against. Either that, or she could just run back to the van and drive off.

  But the moment she was away from the tiny clearing surrounding the altar, things became even more confusing. Sounds were distorted by the undergrowth, the shape began to move faster, its thrashing becoming more animal-like. Anxiety knotted in her chest. She put her head down and dashed, but she hadn’t gone far when her foot caught on a branch which she was convinced hadn’t been there before. She went sprawling; the impact knocked the wind out of her. As she attempted to scramble back to her feet, a dark shape loomed above her like a cloud moving across the sun. Cold, unforgiving. She glanced up into a face which registered for only the merest instant before her consciousness winked out under the protest of an incomprehensible, alien sight.

  When she came round, Church was crouching next to her. The others had gathered a few feet away, watching her with concern.

  “Stop looking at me,” she snapped.

  “What happened?” Church asked.

  “There was something here, in the trees.” As her thoughts whizzed, she became aware of a dull ache on the back of her right hand. She raised it slowly, turning it until she located the right spot. Burned into the flesh was a familiar design: interlocking leaves in a circle.

  Laura’s attention snapped on to Ruth who was staring in shock at the tattoo. It matched the one she carried: the mark of Cernunnos delivered to her after the confrontation in Wales.

  “Get a grip. It doesn’t make us sisters.” Laura rubbed her hand, obscuring the sign.

  “It looks as if our great nature god has decided to honour two of our number,” Shavi said thoughtfully.

  “He told me there were two of us.” Ruth looked at Laura curiously.

  “What’s the matter? Can’t believe you’re not special any more?” Laura let Church haul her to her feet, then quickly thrust her hand into her trouser pocket. “So does this mean I’m going to be a witch-bitch too?”

  “It simply means,” Tom said, “that Cernunnos has some plan for you.”

  “That’s a relief,” Laura said sourly. “I thought it was something bad.”

  They rowed back across the water in silence. Laura seemed even more locked-off than normal, ignoring all their attempts to get her to talk about her experience, but they could see it lay on her shoulders like a rock. Church, who probably understood her the best-and even then, not very well at all-saw something in her eyes that made him want to take her on one side and hold her; it was a look that suggested she was ready to run from something with which she could no longer cope.

  As they gathered at the water’s edge, mulling over what the encounter meant, Shav
i glanced towards the van and raised the alarm. They all scrambled over the rocks as one, but Church was the first one to reach it, not quite believing what he was seeing. On the bonnet was a dead rabbit, its blood trickling down towards the radiator grille. It had been gutted, the stomach cavity splayed to the air, its internal organs carefully laid out beside it.

  “What the fuck’s this?” Veitch said in disgust.

  Shavi stepped forward and examined the carcass without touching it. “It was left for us particularly,” he said after a brief moment. “You can see the precise nature of the cuts. Someone took the time to do this.”

  “Is it linked to what happened on the island?” Ruth asked.

  Tom shook his head. “I wouldn’t think-“

  “Wait!” Shavi leaned forward to peer into the stomach cavity. “There is something in here.”

  “Don’t touch it,” Ruth pleaded.

  Church watched her from the corner of his eye; she seemed unnaturally fearful, as if she were sensing something without being aware of it. “Be careful,” he cautioned.

  Shavi looked around until he located two twigs which he held like chopsticks. Cautiously he used them to investigate the rabbit’s interior. A second later he retracted what at first appeared to be a small pink slug smeared in blood.

  “That is gross!” Laura screwed up her face, but couldn’t tear her eyes away.

  It was a finger, severed at the knuckle.

  Shavi laid it on the bonnet and they all gathered round, as if they expected it to move. “Who could it belong to?” Shavi mused. “And why was it left here for us?”

  Veitch scanned the deserted hillsides, which were suddenly unwelcoming and lonely. “We should be getting out of here.”

  The grisly discovery cast a pall over their journey south. For the first few miles they travelled without speaking, struggling to make sense of it all, feeling a deep dread creeping out of the mystery. There was something about the image that was inherently evil, ritualistic, beyond mere threat. Yet it made no sense, and it was that which wormed its way into their subconscious and lay there, gnawing silently.