Darkest Hour (Age of Misrule, Book 2)

by Mark Chadbourn

  “Oh, that. A bit of horseplay that got out of control. If the manager wants us to pay for cleaning-“

  “Get out of the van. Now.” The policeman’s body grew rigid with tension.

  Shavi tugged at Church’s jacket from the back. “He thinks we killed Ruth,” he whispered, too low for the policeman to hear. There was something in his voice that suggested he wasn’t simply reading the policeman’s mannerisms.

  Everything seemed to hang for a second. Church saw Veitch’s eyes narrow, his forearm muscles tense, and an instant later he had snapped on the ignition and popped the clutch. The van roared away, leaving the policeman yelling furiously behind them. Veitch drove wildly until the police car was out of sight, then he slammed on the brakes and reversed up a rough foresters’ track which wound through ranks of pine. When the trees obscured the road he killed the engine.

  “Big macho idiot,” Laura said coldly from the back. “Now we’ll be on everyone’s most wanted list. We won’t be able to travel anywhere.”

  Veitch glared at her. “You haven’t got any right to talk. We wouldn’t be here if not for-“

  “Leave it out,” Church ordered.

  Veitch grew sullen. “The moment he got a look at my record we wouldn’t stand a chance of getting out of the area for days,” he continued. “We can’t afford to waste that time.”

  “You did the right thing, Ryan.” Church put his head back and closed his eyes wearily. “If things are as bad as they seem … if things are going to get as bad as we expect … the cops will have too much on their plate to worry about us. It might make things a little more difficult, but if they’re not putting a dragnet out, I reckon we’ll be okay.”

  “You better be right,” Laura said gloomily.

  Church recalled Shavi’s apparent knowledge of the policeman’s thoughts and turned to him. “You can read minds now?”

  Shavi shrugged. “It was empathic.”

  “But you can get into heads, you’ve shown us that.” Shavi wouldn’t meet Church’s gaze.

  “What are you getting at?” Laura asked.

  “I think Shavi should try peeling back the layers of your memory so we can find out what you really did see last night.”

  Even Laura’s sunglasses couldn’t mask her concern. “Not in my head.”

  “What have you got to hide?” Veitch asked coldly.

  Laura’s face froze.

  “Ruth and I went through something similar when all this mess started.” Church tried to be as reassuring as he could, for Shavi’s sake as much as Laura’s. “It wasn’t so bad. And it really helped us to get all those trapped thoughts out in the open.”

  Laura moved her head slightly and Church guessed that behind her sunglasses she was looking at Veitch, weighing up his words and her options; his barely veiled accusations made it impossible for her to back out.

  “Okay, Mister Shaman. You get to venture where no man has been before.” Her voice was emotionless.

  Church clapped a hand on Shavi’s shoulder. “It’ll be okay.”

  Shavi smiled at him tightly.

  They locked up the van and ventured into the pines until they found a spot where the sun broke through the canopy of vegetation, casting a circle of light. Laura and Shavi sat cross-legged in the centre, facing each other, while Church, Veitch and Tom leaned on tree trunks and watched quietly. Shavi had already eaten some of Tom’s hash to attune his mood. He spent a few moments whispering gently to Laura; after a while her eyes were half-lidded, her movements lazy.

  The atmosphere changed perceptibly the moment Shavi leaned forward to take Laura’s hands; the birdsong died as if a switch had been thrown, even the breeze seemed to drop. There was a stillness like glass over everything.

  When Shavi spoke, the world held its breath. “We are going back to last night, Laura. To the hotel, after the dance. You and Ruth had gone to bed early.”

  “I wasn’t in the mood. I’d had enough of Miss Prissy. And too many people were looking at my scars.”

  “You both went into your rooms. And went to sleep?”

  “I lay down on the top of the bed. I was tired, the booze was knocking me out.” Her voice was soporific. “I don’t know how long I was asleep. Couldn’t have been long. I heard a noise-“

  “What was it?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Try.”

  She thought for a moment. “It was Ruth. She cried out.”

  “What did you do then? Tell me, step by step.”

  “I got up. I felt like someone had beaten me around the head with a baseball bat. I walked to the door … Actually, it was more of a stagger. I thought, `I’m glad Church isn’t here to see this. I’d never live it down.’ There was another noise. Sounded like a lamp going over. I thought I could hear voices through the wall. I stepped out on to the landing …” Her breath caught suddenly in her throat.

  “What was it?”

  Tears sprang to her eyes and trickled down her cheeks. “I …” She shook her head, screwed her eyes up as if that would prevent the images forming.

  Shavi’s reassuring voice grew so low the others could barely hear it. “Concentrate, Laura. Focus on the interloper.”

  “It was …” A shiver ran through her. “No, no. I see a large wolf. It reaches right up to the ceiling. Bigger. Passing through. It’s growing to fill the whole hotel. It has sickly yellow eyes and it turns them on me. And it smiles … it smiles like a man.”

  She started to hyperventilate. Shavi let go of her hands and put his arms around her shoulders, gently pulling her towards him until she was resting against his chest, where her breathing gradually subsided.

  “A giant wolf? She’s making it up,” Veitch hissed.

  They moved into the circle of light and squatted down, waiting for Laura to recover. She wouldn’t meet any of their eyes. “That’s what you get delving around in the depths of my mind. I told you I’d done too many drugs.”

  “What do you think? A shapeshifter?” Shavi seemed to have gained renewed confidence from the success of the exercise; the faint, enigmatic smile Church remembered from the first time they met had returned to his face.

  “I don’t think so.” Tom’s expression was troubled. “The wolf could be representational of whatever she saw. She might be converting her memory into symbols to help her deal with it.”

  Church remembered his own experience of regression therapy to try to unlock the memories of the terrible sight beneath Albert Bridge, images so horrible his mind had locked them away. Although what eventually surfaced had proved to be the truth, the therapist had talked about false screen memories designed to protect the mind’s integrity from something too awful to bear.

  “This is doing my head in,” Veitch said. “It’s like you can’t believe anything you see or remember or think!”

  “That’s how it always was,” Tom replied curtly.

  “So how do we break through the symbolism to get to what Laura really saw?” Church asked.

  Shavi rubbed his chin uncomfortably. “I would not like to try again so soon after this attempt. I think Laura … both of us … need time to recover. The mind is too sensitive.”

  “Yeah, and it’s the only one I’ve got.” With an expression of faint distaste, Laura rubbed her hands together as if wiping away the stain of the memory.

  “At least we know Laura saw something … someone,” Shavi continued.

  “So do you believe me now, musclehead?” With her sunglasses on, Church couldn’t tell if she was talking to him or Veitch.

  “I still think she could be making it up,” Witch said suspiciously. “None of you know what’s going on here, what her mind can do, what’s real and what’s not. She might have dreamed it up this way. Some kind of self-hypnosis, I don’t know.” He turned to Laura. “You didn’t say anything about how you got the blood on you.”

  “I remember that now. Whatever I saw turned my head upside down. I wandered into Ruth’s room like some kind of mental patien
t and I just, sort of, touched the blood because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

  “Fits together perfectly, don’t it?” Veitch sneered.

  As Laura bristled Church jumped in to prevent further confrontation. “We can’t stay here any longer with that cop driving around.” He glanced among the trees. “Who knows what’s in these woods anyway? We need to get to Edinburgh.”

  “That cop will at least have put out the van’s description and number,” Laura said. “Face it, we’re not going to get far in that.”

  “Then we dump it, find another form of transport,” Church said. “Time to use our initiative.”

  Before they left, they took Ruth’s finger and buried it in the leaf mould. It made them sick to leave it there, but there was nothing else for it. Then they took the A84 to Stirling where they found a dealer who took the van off their hands for two hundred pounds. It was an effort to lug their bags, camping equipment and remaining provisions to the station, but they didn’t have long to wait to pick up a train to Edinburgh Waverley. There were only two carriages but apart from a trio of people at the far end of their carriage, the train was empty.

  “I thought they would have shut the trains down by now,” Church said to the conductor as they boarded.

  “Make the most of it,” he replied gruffly. “The last service is tonight. Indefinite suspension of the entire network.” He shrugged. “I still get kept on at full pay, at least for the moment. Not many people travelling anyways.”

  They settled into their seats, lulled by the sun-heated, dusty interior, and once the train gently rocked out of the station they found themselves drifting off after their night without sleep. The journey to Edinburgh would be under an hour, but they had barely got out into open countryside when they were disturbed by the loud voices of two of their fellow travellers. It appeared to be a father and daughter conversing in a heated manner. His greying hair was slicked back in a manner popular during the war, and he had on an old-fashioned suit that seemed brand-new. A cracked briefcase was tucked under one arm. The daughter, who was in her early thirties, wore clothes that were smart, if unstylish. She was quite plain, with a complexion tempered by an outdoor life.

  Drifting in and out of half-sleep, Church made out they had a farm somewhere outside Stirling which was experiencing financial problems and they were heading into Edinburgh to attempt to secure some kind of grant. But there was an edgy undercurrent to their talk which suggested some other issue was concerning them and they couldn’t agree about how to deal with it.

  Veitch shifted irritably in his seat and plumped up his jacket as a pillow. “Just shut up,” he said under his breath as their voices rose again.

  They all managed to get some sleep for the next ten minutes, but then they were jolted sharply awake by the farmer snarling, “There’s no bloody fairies in the fields! No bloody God either! It’s not about luck! It’s about those bastards in the Government, and in Europe!”

  Church glanced around the edge of the seat ahead. The woman was pink with embarrassment at her father’s outburst and trying to calm him with frantic hand movements. But there was something else concerning her too.

  “What are you talking about, girl? Words can’t hurt anyone! Who’s listening?” The farmer’s face was flushed with anger. “This is what’s important: the farm’s going broke and we’ll all be in the poorhouse by the end of summer if something’s not done!”

  His rage was born of desperation and tension bottled up for too long, and he probably would have carried on for several more minutes if the woman hadn’t suddenly jumped to her feet and marched to the toilet.

  The strained atmosphere ebbed over the next few minutes as Church drifted again. In that dreamy state, he found himself faced with an image of Ruth pleading with him for help in a scene disturbingly reminiscent of when the spirit of Marianne had begged him to avenge her death. His anxiety knotted: so much pressure being heaped on his shoulders, so much expectation he was afraid he couldn’t live up to. And then he looked into Ruth’s face and all the emotions he had tried to repress came rushing to the surface. He had tried to pretend she hadn’t suffered, wasn’t dead, butA piercing scream echoed through the carriage. All five of them jumped to their feet as one, ready for any threat, hearts pounding, bodies poised for fight or flight. The woman had returned from the toilets and was standing opposite her father, who had his back to them; her face was frozen in an expression of extreme shock.

  Shavi was the first to her, grabbing her shoulders to calm her. She was shaking her head from side-to-side, oblivious to him, her eyes fixed so firmly on her father Shavi was forced to turn to follow her gaze. The old man was no longer there; or rather, his clothes and his briefcase were there, but his body had been replaced by straw; it tufted from the sleeves, dropped from the trouser legs to fill the shoes, and sprouted from his collar into a hideous parody of a human head, like an enormous corn dolly.

  “Dad!” the woman croaked.

  Veitch reached out to prod the shoulder curiously and the mannequin crumpled into a pile of clothes and a heap of straw. This set the woman off in another bout of screaming.

  “What happened?” Laura asked with a horrible fascination.

  While Shavi led the woman to the other end of the carriage where he attempted to calm her, Tom knelt down to examine the remains. “You heard the things he was saying,” he said.

  “I don’t get it,” Laura replied. “So he was a crotchety old git like you-“

  “In the old days, the people who worked the land were terrified of saying anything which might offend the fairies, the nature spirits, whatever,” Tom snapped. “They even had a host of euphemisms like the Little Folk or the Fair Folk in case the powers took offence at their name.”

  “And now they’re back …” Veitch began without continuing.

  “They always were a prideful race,” Tom said. “They demanded respect from all those they considered as lesser.”

  “But all he said was …” Laura caught herself before she repeated the farmer’s words. She glanced back at the sobbing daughter. “Poor bitch. At least the old man will be able to keep the crows off the fields.”

  “Oh, stop it!” Church said sharply. He looked at the broken expression on the daughter’s face and read her future in an instant; he felt a deep pang of pity.

  “It simply shows the contempt in which they hold us,” Tom noted. “We need to be kept in our place.”

  Veitch looked round suddenly. “Wasn’t there someone else in here?”

  “That’s right. There were three other passengers.” Church looked to the seats where the third traveller had been. “I don’t remember him getting up. No one got off.”

  “That might have been one of them.” Tom hurried to the adjoining door to peer into the next carriage. It was empty. “Now they are back, I presume they will be moving among us, seeing how things have changed.”

  As if in answer to his words they heard a sudden scrabbling on the roof of the carriage, then a sound like laughter and footsteps disappearing to the far end. Veitch ran after it and pressed his face up close to the window in an attempt to peer behind, but all he saw was a large, oddly shaped shadow cast on the cutting. It separated from the train, rose up and, a second later, was gone.

  Soon after, the train trundled slowly through the regimented green lawns and blooming flowers of Princes Street Gardens into Waverley Station, the volcanic ridge topped by the imposing stone bulk of Edinburgh Castle rising high above them. The daughter was bordering on hysteria by the time Shavi led her out on to the platform in search of a guard, who promptly took her off to the medical centre for treatment. There were few travellers around for such a large station, but that only made the small pockets of police more obvious; at the furthest reaches of the platforms where they would be unobtrusive to the majority of travellers, armed troops patrolled.

  “This is creepy,” Laura hissed. “It’s like Istanbul or something.”

  Paranoia crept over them
when some of the police started looking intently in their direction, and they hastily collected up their bags and moved off. “Do you think that bastard in Callander radioed through our descriptions?” Veitch said under his breath.

  “Just another worry to add to the list,” Church replied darkly.

  They argued briefly about conserving their cash-a policy favoured by Church and Shavi-but eventually agreed credit cards would probably be useless within a short time and so opted to live in style while they stayed in the city. It was Laura who won the argument when she said, “Might as well make the most of it. We may not get the chance again.”

  For accommodation, they selected the Balmoral, an opulent Edwardian pile that loomed over Waverley Station at the eastern end of the bustling main drag of Princes Street. They all laughed at the comically shocked expression on Veitch’s face when he first walked into the palatial marble reception, but although he slipped to the back, where he furtively eyed the smartly uniformed staff as if they were about to throw him out, he was soon making the most of the luxurious surroundings when they were shown to their rooms with views of the castle and the Old Town.

  Despite all that was happening, at first glance the city seemed virtually unaffected; cars still chugged bumper-to-bumper through the centre, people took their lunch in the sun in Princes Street Gardens and the shops and bars of the New Town seemed to be doing a brisk trade.

  But as they took a stroll towards the Old Town, they could see it was different. It was almost as if the people had taken a conscious decision to avoid its long shadows and gloomy stone buildings, driven out by an oppressive sense of old times. The pubs, restaurants and shops still remained open, but the crowds that moved among them were thin; they always kept to the sunny side of the street, expressions furtive, shoulders bowed by invisible weights.

  It was Shavi who characterised it the best as he stood on the Esplanade and looked from the jumbled rooftops of the Old Town to the clean lines and Georgian crescents of the new: it was a city split in two, Jekyll and Hyde, light and dark, night and day.