Darkest Hour (Age of Misrule, Book 2)

by Mark Chadbourn

  “Do you mind if we come in?” Carolina said when she was already inside.

  Shavi gestured magnanimously; if truth be told, he was keen for company. “How can I help you?”

  Spink seemed awestruck in his presence, so it was Carolina who did all the talking. “The people out there are talking about you like you’re some kind of Messiah.” Her eyes sparkled in the torchlight.

  “I am no Messiah.”

  “They saw what you did in the wood. You’ve got powers of some kind. You do things that no ordinary person can do.”

  Shavi nodded. “But inside I am just a man. Flawed, frightened, unable to know what is the right decision.”

  She shook her head; her black hair shifted languorously. “You’re not convincing me. You told us yourself, you’re a man with a mission. You’re here to deliver us all from evil.”

  “Not like that.”

  “Not a Messiah, then. But a mystic, a wise man. Shaman. You used the word yourself.” This he had to concede. “Then you could teach us all things-“

  “I am not a teacher.”

  “Look at us all here!” she protested. “Why do you think we’ve opted for this kind of life when we could be living in warm homes where there’s always plenty of food on the table, where there’s always some nice loving husband or boyfriend there to make sure everything’s all right?” There was a sliver of bitterness in her voice; she swallowed it with difficulty and continued. “We’re all searching for something, something better. It was a spiritual choice. You must understand that?” He nodded. “We’ve been failed by society, failed by the Church, all the religions. But there’s a deep hole inside us that we want filled.” She hit her chest hard. “You can help fill that.”

  Shavi was humbled by her passion and eloquence. “So you are saying that you want to be my disciples?”

  She glanced at Spink, whose eyes brightened. “That’s exactly what we’re saying.”

  “Let me tell you something,” he began slowly. “I grew up in West London in a family of brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews and … too many even to count. As a child, it was quite idyllic. I never wanted for love. I studied hard at school to make my father proud of me, and he was proud, and I was happier than any boy had any right to be. My father … The thing I remember about him sometimes when I am drifting off to sleep is the way his eyes would light up when I would bring him my school books to show him my work. They would crinkle round the edge, and then he would smile and pull me over to him. There was such integrity and honesty in his face, all I wanted was to be like him.”

  He closed his eyes, the memories flashed across his mind almost too painful to bear. “My family was very strictly Muslim. It was the glue that held everything together. The mosque was as much a part of our life as the kitchen. And for my father and mother, for all my relatives, it was the thing that gave them strength to face all the privations the world brought to their door. But it was not right for me. I tried. I tried so hard I could not sleep, I could not eat, because I knew it would make my mother and father proud. But it did not speak to me, here …” he touched his chest, then his forehead “… and here. It did not feel right, or comforting, or secure, or even begin to explain the way the world works. For me. For I still believe, of all the religions, it is one of the strongest. But it did not speak to nze. And so, in all good faith, I could not continue with it.”

  Carolina and Spink watched every flicker of his face, his deathly seriousness reflected in their own.

  “I told my father. The shock I saw in his features destroyed me. It was as if, for one brief instant, I was a stranger who had washed into his room. And I never saw his eyes light up again. At first he tried to force me to be a good Muslim. And then, when that did not work, at sixteen he drove me out of the house for good. I stood crying on the doorstep, the same good son who had pleased him all his life. And he would not look me in the face. And he would not speak a word. And when the door closed it was plain it would be forever.”

  “What a bastard,” Carolina said.

  “No. I could never blame my father. He was who he was and always had been. And there is not a night goes by that I do not think of him warmly.”

  “Why are you telling us this?”

  “Because I have spent all my life since then searching for something which would give me the same feeling of warmth and security I felt as a child, and which would fill that void inside.”

  “But you’ve found-“

  “No. I have not. Once you set off along that path to enlightenment it is a very dark road indeed, and I have not seen even the slightest glimmer of light at the end. It is a journey we must all make, alone. What worked for my father did not work for me. What will be right for me, will not be so for you. Do not seek out masters. Look into yourself.”

  There was a long pause. Then she said, “Can’t you see? That’s just the kind of guidance I was looking for-“

  He sighed.

  “Okay, okay, I hear what you’re saying. But I tell you now, we are going to be your disciples. We’ll just do it from a distance.” Her smile was facetious, teasing; he smiled in response.

  He could see in her face there was something else. “What do you want?”

  “We want to be with you.”

  It took him a second or two to realise what she was truly saying. “That may not be a good idea.”

  “Why? Because you think we’re being manipulated somehow? We know what we’re doing. This isn’t an emotional thing, it’s a … it’s a …” She searched for the right words.

  “A ritual thing,” Spink said suddenly.

  Shavi nodded. He understood the transfer of power through the sexual act and he certainly understood the power of directed hedonism. But he was uncomfortable with how they were elevating him to the position of some potent seer and hoping that some of whatever he had would rub off on them during intimacy.

  Before he had a chance to order his thoughts, Carolina had stripped off her T-shirt. Her breasts were small and pale in the torchlight. Spink followed suit; his chest was hard and bony, the ribs casting strips of shadow across his skin.

  “Spink’s bi,” Carolina said. “Or maybe gay, I don’t think he’s decided yet.”

  She leaned forward and kissed Shavi, her mouth open and wet. Spink moved in and began to nuzzle at Shavi’s neck. There was too much sensory stimulation for Shavi to keep his thoughts ordered and eventually he gave in to the pleasures of the moment.

  The torch was switched off. His fingers slid over warm flesh. Hands caressed his body, stripping him naked. Their bodies moved over his, both of them hard, at times impossible to tell who was whom. The atmosphere became heightened with energy and for that brief moment he felt renewed.

  The scream cut through the early morning stillness, snapping Shavi out of a deep sleep. He untangled himself from draping limbs, only just stirring, before pulling on his clothes and scrambling out on to the dewy ground. The air was chill; it couldn’t have been long after dawn.

  The first thing he saw brought that cold deep into his veins. There, in the tufted grass by the tent opening, was a slim, pale, severed finger.

  All over the campsite people were falling out of camper vans, buses and cars, staggering bleary-eyed into the light. Shavi lurched past the finger, barely able to take his eyes off it, then tried to estimate the direction from which the scream had come. He didn’t have to look far. In the no-man’s land between the vehicles and the wood, a woman silently dipped down, then rose up, dipped down, rose up, a surreal image until Shavi saw her face was contorted with such grief she couldn’t give voice to it. A shapeless mass lay at her feet.

  Shavi ran as fast as he could, but several people reached the site before him.

  He pushed through them a little too roughly. Lying at the centre of the shocked circle of travellers was Penny, the ground stained in a wide arc around where her finger should have been. She was white with death.

  Shavi felt his stomach knot
, his mind fizz and spark with the awful realisation that he had brought this horror to the gentle, peaceful travellers. The ground seemed to shift beneath his feet and he had to stagger away where he could no longer see the body.

  chapter seventeen

  dust of creeds outworn

  hat do you mean, it’s all your fault?” Breaker’s face was shattered, his cheeks still stinging red from tears. Carolina stood beside him like a ghost while Meg squatted nearby, her hands pressed against her eyes, as if she were trying to stop the image from entering her brain.

  Shavi explained everything, from when it had all begun on the banks of Loch Maree. The others listened intently, their faces impassive; Shavi couldn’t tell if they were judging him. Afterwards Carolina asked in a breaking voice, “So why is it hunting you?”

  “I have no idea.” He swallowed, composed himself. “I thought we had seen the last of it in Edinburgh. I had no idea it was following me or I would not have brought it to your door. You must believe me-“

  “We do.” Meg came forward and hugged him tightly. “We can all see you’re all right. You wouldn’t have put us at risk if you’d known.” She glanced over to where the body lay covered by a sheet. “Poor Penny. Just after she’d found out what’d happened to jack.”

  “That is why it happened,” Shavi said morosely.

  “What do you mean?” Breaker asked.

  “The attack was meant to show there is no hope. Penny was snuffed out just as she achieved it.” Shavi chewed his lip until he tasted blood. “It was a message for me. The finger was left outside the tent, a sign that the killer could have come for me while I slept.”

  “But why?” Carolina looked like she was about to vomit.

  “To make me suffer, I would think. To make me frightened, always looking over my shoulder, so never knowing when the attack will come.”

  “What’s the obsession with fingers?” Breaker asked.

  “I have no idea. Are you going to report this to the police?”

  Breaker toyed with his beard, but it was Meg who gave voice to the thoughts in all their minds. “There’s no point. With all the shit going down, the cops haven’t got time to look into this. They’ll probably just use it as another excuse to harass us.”

  “Then I would suggest we bury her among the trees. The Wood-born will watch over her,” Shavi suggested.

  The grave party ensured the hole was six feet deep, carefully avoiding all the roots that criss-crossed the area. There were enough of them to ensure the work was done quickly, then everyone in the camp gathered for the ceremony; their faces were disbelieving, angry, distraught. Their lives had been disrupted so suddenly and completely no one had quite been able to assimilate what had happened. Breaker and Meg said a few words in a ritual which echoed the cycles of the seasons and spoke to the overwhelming force of nature.

  Once the grave was filled, everyone was surprised to see a spontaneous shower of leaves from all the surrounding trees, until the overturned soil was covered by a crisp blanket of green; it was an act of such respect several people wept at the sight. Shavi felt, in a grimly ironic way, that the bond between the two groups had been strengthened further.

  They decided to postpone any wake until everyone had had time to come to terms with what had happened. Instead, Breaker, Carolina, Meg, and Shavi gathered around a makeshift table in the back of Breaker’s bus.

  “Of course, I will be leaving shortly,” Shavi announced once they were seated.

  “Why?” Meg’s eyes blazed.

  “This sickening thing is pursuing me. When I leave he will follow me and you will be left to return to your lives.”

  “No,” Meg said forcefully.

  “I agree,” Carolina added. “You’re one of us now. We’re not going to desert you.”

  “They’re right,” Breaker said. “They’re always right about everything, that’s why we love them.” His words seemed honest rather than patronising. “There’s safety in numbers, Shavi. You go off on your own across that deserted countryside, well, that bastard could pick you off at any time. We’re organised here. We can do more, better, watches. We’ll get you where you need to go.”

  “But-“

  “Don’t fucking argue,” Carolina said wearily. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Think of your friend. Think of the big picture, all you’re trying to do. Here’s where we do our bit too.”

  Shavi sagged back against the window and slowly rubbed a hand across his eyes. “Thank you. You are true friends.”

  “Just do one thing for us,” Breaker said.

  “What is that?”

  “If you get a chance, any time, ever, bring Jack back. For Penny.”

  Shavi put one hand on his heart and held the other up, palm out. “For Penny.”

  Church perched on a rocky outcropping over a precipitous drop, contemplating how quickly the remaining nine days would pass. Before him the Derbyshire countryside rolled out in the hazy, late morning sunshine, a patchwork of green fields, shimmering water, ribbon roads and small, peaceful villages. But it wasn’t the great beauty of the scene that caught his attention.

  Nearby, houses were burning. The tangled wreckage of vehicles glinted in the sunlight. Things he couldn’t quite comprehend moved along the hedgerows or kept to the dark at the edge of copses. Occasionally one would be forced to cross a field, like a cloud shadow moving across the land. It always made him shiver to see it.

  The Fomorii appeared to be growing in force, more daring in their desperation as Lughnasadh neared. They sensed Ruth and what she contained were somewhere in the area, but the magic Tom had identified at Mam Tor was, so far, enough to blind them to the exact location. But if he allowed himself to admit it, he knew it was only a question of time. For once, he could do nothing; it was a matter of placing his faith in Shavi, Veitch, and Tom.

  Sometimes he saw the Fomorii hunter-warrior circling the area, more intense and threatening than the other shifting shapes, like a localised storm filled with lightning fury. It left him feeling fearful and nauseous. And something more than that: he was starting to feel the bitter taint of hopelessness. Only days to go. What could they do? They were going to fail again, and it would be the end of everything.

  Cautiously he crept back from the edge. What would he do when the black tide did begin to surge up the mountain? Fight them off with sticks and stones like schoolboy war games? Or sit back and pray there really, truly was a God in His heaven?

  Ruth lay in her sleeping bag on a bed made of flattened fern in a corner of the room. Her skin was ashen, her hair matted from the bouts of sweating and delirium that were coming with increasing regularity. Her eyes flickered, her features trembled; terrible thoughts that did not seem to come from her own mind stumbled through her head.

  They had cleaned up the place as best they could. Church and Laura had spent a morning sweeping out the rubbish and depositing it in the shadows at the back of the house. Church had patched up the roof with dead wood and vegetation, but the wind still whipped through the broken windows and sometimes it was uncommonly cold for that time of year; perhaps it was the altitude. Food was a problem. There was little to trap on the mountain and none of them were any good at it anyway. Church had made several forays into a nearby village and had stocked up the larder as best he could. The increasing Fomorii activity in the area made it too risky to go foraging any more. They all prayed the provisions would hold out.

  Laura squatted in the corner, occasionally casting a subdued glance to Ruth’s restlessly sleeping form. The sunglasses rarely came off these days, even at night. Her brooding consumed her. She hated the way Church cared for Ruth; there was real tenderness in his touch, an honesty in his words that made her yearn; the feeling between the two ran so deep it was as if it had formed when the earth was just cooling. She knew it was jealousy, pure and simple; it was the kind of relationship she had always dreamed about, had expected once she had hooked up with Church, yet even though all the facets seemed in pl
ace, it had never materialised, and that was the bitterest blow of all. If she couldn’t find it with Church, who could she plumb those depths with?

  And she could see Ruth was dying; they all knew it, though no one spoke it aloud. Yet there she was, being petty and jealous and bitter. That filled her with guilt and self-loathing, which once more fed all those negative emotions; a terrible, dark spiral that had no end.

  “What are you thinking?”

  Laura started; she hadn’t realised Ruth was awake. “I’m thinking, `Boy, I hope she doesn’t start whining any time soon.”’

  Ruth managed a weak laugh; her voice sounded like autumn leaves. “You’ll never change, will you?”

  “Count on it.”

  Ruth tried to lever herself into a sitting position. Her arms were feeble and her belly was enormous; she seemed to have gone almost full-term of a natural pregnancy in a matter of days. Eventually she gave up and settled for halfsitting, half-lying. She snorted with laughter at her own pathetic attempt.

  “How do you keep so up? You’ve had the bum deal to end all bum deals. Some psycho slicing off your finger. Getting tortured by the Bastards. Now this-“

  “Now I’m pregnant with the one-eyed God of Death and he’s going to burst out of my stomach in a few days and tear me apart. Well, when you put it like that …” She laughed again, before breaking into a coughing fit.

  “What is it with you? When I first met you, you were such a poker-up-the arse kind of girl. Some spoilt little middle-class moron. I thought you’d fall apart at the first sign of trouble.”

  “What’s the matter? Jealous?”

  Her words were lighthearted but they stung Laura as if she’d been slapped. “You have a real sense of the absurd, don’t you?”