The Scar-Crow Men soa-2

by Mark Chadbourn

  The rumbling sound ebbed and flowed. The echoes suggested the intruder was turning his head, looking up and down the walkway.

  The spy tightened his grip on the hilt of his sword, his muscles taut. The blood pulsed in his head, the familiar rhythm of his life, the music of impending death.

  After a moment, the footsteps padded away. Will waited a few heartbeats and then stepped out into the shadowy walkway. He glimpsed a figure disappearing around the edge of the backstage, too indistinct in the gloom to tell if it was devil or man. Silently, he followed, keeping close to the wall, and low.

  When he turned along the rear of the stage, he came up hard. The figure waited for him. Instinctively, Will swept his sword up ready for a fight before he had even registered the identity of his opponent.

  It was Jenny. His long-lost love.

  The spy reeled from the shock. Long-dammed emotions flooded up, his incomprehension washed away by the plangent yearning of all those desperate years without her, followed immediately by a pure joy that he was seeing her again, not a hazy, half-formed memory, but Jenny, really and truly there. He lowered his rapier, his lips silently forming her name.

  She looked exactly as she had done the last time he saw her all those years ago, when she had disappeared from his life, in full view, in that Warwickshire cornfield on that hot summer day. When she had walked out of life and into mystery. Still wearing the same blue dress, the colour of forget-me-nots. Her hair still a lustrous hazel, tumbling across her shoulders, her features pale and delicate yet filled with strength of character and intelligence.

  Questions flashed through Will’s mind, each one dying in the heat of her glorious return.

  ‘Jenny,’ he murmured. The word fell close to him with the dull resonance of a pebble dropped on wood.

  The woman held out a hand to him, and he wanted to feel her fingers in his more than anything in the world; it was all he had thought of, for years, since that awful day.

  Sheathing his rapier, Will stepped towards his love, unable to take his gaze from her face. All around him, the world fell into shadow until there was only the moon of her presence, drawing him in.

  Jenny’s face remained still and calm. Will watched her lips for the familiar ghost of a wry smile, but it was not there.

  ‘Speak to me,’ he whispered.

  And then Will looked deep into his love’s eyes. They were as black as coal from lash to lash, not the green eyes of his Jenny; devoid of any of her warmth, empty of all her love and her compassion. These were the eyes of a devil. In them, Will saw his own pale, desperate face reflected, and he realized he had been tricked. But there was no time to feel the bitterness of hope dashed, or the anger of the cruel blow that had been struck at him. The hands of Jenny-that-was-not-Jenny clamped on the sides of his head and pulled him in until those black eyes were the only thing he could see. His vision swam, and any thought he had of fighting free was washed away. With barely a murmur of protest, he tumbled into deep waters that were beyond his understanding.

  He stands under the cold eye of the full moon. Pearly mist drifts across the silver grass of a meadow, the swirling snowy tufts parting to reveal a sable slash of woodland in the distance. Glancing up the slope of the grassland, Will sees a scarecrow silhouetted against the white orb of the moon, its angular form topped by a wide-brimmed hat. He thinks that this chiaroscuro world is not England, perhaps Scotland, or the Low Countries, though he does not know why he feels that.

  The scarecrow troubles him, oddly. Will has passed many like it, rough figures made from a timber frame and straw-stuffed old clothes, but this one feels like something more. It feels, he decides with a note of mounting dread, like the judge of all his life.

  In a dreamlike state, the spy draws closer to the stick figure. The shadow thrown by the brim of the hat cloaks the face. Though his heart pounds wildly with dread, he cannot look away. The dirty undershirt is tied at the waist by a piece of cord, the hem flapping in the night breeze. Straw hands poke out from the sleeves of the outstretched arms. Obliquely, Will thinks it looks like a crucifixion under the cruel judgement of the god of the fields. These feelings, this experience, are not his, he knows.

  Though every fibre tells him to turn away, Will has to see. He peers into the dark beneath the hat’s brim. A pair of staring eyes gaze back, wide with terror. But there is no mouth, and it cannot voice the agonies of its dreadful existence. The spy finds those eyes chillingly familiar, and with mounting horror he feels that he is looking at his good friend Kit Marlowe, trapped there.

  Pleading for help.

  Reeling backwards, his heart pounding fit to burst, the spy whirls to see he is not alone. Moving steadily out of the drifting mist across the meadow are indistinct figures, like shadows on a moonlit pond: five, ten, more. As the strangers take on more substance, he feels a palpable sense of threat. Their clothes echo the cut of long-gone times, bucklers, belts and breeches all glistening with mildew as if buried long underground. They draw nearer.

  The Unseelie Court, the great supernatural Enemy who used to torment all England, stealing babies from cribs and luring unwary travellers to their underhill homes.

  One of the figures clutches a staff. He is of indiscernible age, his cheeks hollow, dark rings under his icy eyes. The skulls of small rodents and birds have been braided into his long, straggly gold and grey hair. Green robes marked with strange symbols in a gold filigree are caught in the moonlight.

  Will remembers his first glimpse of this strange being, on a warm night deep on lonely, haunted Dartmoor. Deortha is the Unseelie Court’s equivalent of Elizabeth’s adviser Dr Dee, a keeper of secret knowledge, perhaps a black magician, Will cannot be sure. But dangerous, certainly, as are all the Enemy. The figures want him dead for what he has discovered here; for what he is about to discover.

  Turning, the spy runs. Terror strips his wits bare. Careering down the meadow, he plunges into the mist, glancing back to see the shimmering figures loping hard on his trail. There is no escape, he thinks. They will never stop now he has seen.

  The world shifts around him, the grassland folding in on itself, and Will is now racing through a dark place, stone walls, low ceiling, the throb of a hammer on an anvil beating out the rhythm of his heart. Screams ring in the distance, throats torn in agony. The suffocating heat of a furnace sears his flesh. It is hell, it is hell, and he is trapped.

  The spy runs into a wide chamber where a brazier burns with a dull, red light. And there horror floods through him as he sees … he sees-

  Convulsively ejected from his vision, Will fought back a flood of nausea and staggered against the wall. The dream-scene in the meadow burned into his mind.

  The scarecrow, alive yet not. That hellish underground. What had he seen?

  Standing still in the gloom, Jenny observed him with those cold, black eyes, a perversion of the woman he loved. Sickened by the sight, he felt his disorientation slowly turn to anger. Will could recall the touch of her hand, and her lips, he could remember the exact note of his feelings the last time they lay together on the edge of the Forest of Arden, all as if it were yesterday. He could only imagine what lay behind the mask of the face he saw in front of him.

  ‘What was the meaning of the vision?’ he spat.

  Jenny continued to watch him, as if her silence were answer enough.

  ‘Was it intended for me? Why do you appear in the form of Jenny?’ He staggered forward, drawing his rapier. ‘What are you, truly?’

  Caught in the grip of those terrible eyes, Will’s head swam and his vision blurred. When his sight cleared, he saw the figure in front of him falling into shadow, or perhaps it was as if the dark was rising up like a flood tide. In mounting desperation, he thrust with his sword, but the blade met no resistance.

  As the sharp brimstone odour faded, Will found himself alone in the backstage walkway. Caught up in a whirlpool of confused feelings, he raced along behind the stage, calling out Jenny’s name. He knew it was not his love, yet he
could not bear to lose her again.

  But it was too late. She was gone.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  On his knees, Nathaniel forced his way among the feet of the heaving audience. Boots cracked against his head, his back, his hips, stamped on his fingers. Just when he thought he would have the life crushed from him, he scrambled out and lurched up against the plaster at the rear of the upper gallery, sucking in a huge gulp of breath. Struggling bodies hurled him back and forth, as if he was caught in the wash of a stormy sea.

  Clawing his way to the stairs, the young assistant was struck by the roar of mayhem rising up from the lower levels. What could terrify them so? With plague, impending war, famine among the poor and bodies piling high in the streets, he would not be surprised if the devil really did walk the streets of London.

  Nathaniel threw himself down the timber steps two at a time. Bodies slammed him against the walls, spun him round, crushed him so that he could not draw air into his lungs. Panic gripped him, but Will had given him a job to do. At the foot of the stairs a dense mass of people were crushed around the door, their cries ringing so loudly it made his ears ache. Against the wall, three women and a man slumped like rag dolls, eyes shut, but still the press continued.

  How was he supposed to open the doors when he couldn’t get near them? His master seemed to take perverse delight in giving him impossible tasks.

  Nathaniel yelled for calm until his throat was raw, but the shouts and curses drowned his voice. Red-faced men sputtered or roared, eyes swelling with fear, the women caught up with the furious flow. Pressed against the wall near him, one woman in a corn-coloured dress grew white, her eyes fluttering shut.

  A youth with a tuft of brown hair, one of Henslowe’s stagehands, juddered to a halt behind Nathaniel.

  ‘Help me!’ Nathaniel urged, throwing himself into the press of bodies. Dragging one man back, he shouldered two others to the side, ignoring their furious protests. Battered and buffeted, Will Swyfte’s assistant fought until there was space for the stagehand to join him. They each grasped an arm of the unconscious woman and hauled her along the wall and out on to the stairs.

  Once he had seen the woman still breathed, Nat shouted, ‘We must open the doors or there will be deaths aplenty.’

  ‘I have the key, but there is no room to use it,’ the stagehand yelled in reply, glancing back towards the crush.

  Nat gripped his shoulders and demanded, ‘There are more ways out of here? A stage door?’

  ‘Beyond that.’ The youth waved a hand at the heaving crowd.

  Nathaniel grew anxious at the pounding of feet above his head. The audience in the upper galleries was surging towards the crush. An idea struck him. ‘The windows?’

  ‘You will break your neck if you attempt to climb from that height.’ The stagehand hunched over the prostrate woman, fanning her with his hands.

  ‘Nothing valuable, then.’ Nat snatched the key from the youth and drove himself back up the stairs, squeezing past the first trickle of what would soon become a deluge.

  Dragging himself into the corridor that circled the perimeter of the first gallery, Nathaniel put his head down and kept close to the wall. Small, diamond-pane windows glittered along the Rose’s fourteen sides, the only source of natural light in the theatre’s gloomy interior beyond the central well above the stage and yard. Pressing his face against the glass, he peered out across the darkening landscape. It was a drop of about thirty feet to the chalk and stone path that circled the theatre. Horses grazed on the surrounding grassy common land, and beyond the remnants of the old rose garden that gave the theatre its name was a small orchard sprawling towards the grey, slow-moving river. The young assistant saw he was on the wrong side of the building to where he needed to be.

  Fighting his way around the first-floor gallery, he found the going became easier as the flow of audience members slowed. At the third window, he glimpsed the silhouettes of the stews, inns and rough houses of Bankside. Candles were being lit in the windows. Near to the theatre was an old, thatched, timber-framed cottage that Henslowe had established as a brothel for his players and guests.

  Nathaniel wondered if he could leap the gulf to the roof, decided it was madness, and continued to the front of the theatre where he found the window above the entrance. He threw it open. The cool late spring air swept in, laced with woodsmoke from the house fires and the stink of rotting refuse.

  Below was a small thatched porch over the entrance, flimsy and easy to miss. The spiralling cries of distress carved through his doubts. He climbed into the window space. With a whispered prayer, he allowed himself one glance down to mark his course, then he gripped the window frame and dropped.

  The small porch shattered, showering straw and shards of wood around the theatre’s entrance. Nathaniel slammed into the chalk and stone walkway. Winded and seeing stars, he shook the fog from his head. No broken bones. The porch had slowed his descent just enough.

  An unfamiliar woman loomed over him. Her hair was flame-red and she wore a bodice and skirt of black taffeta and gold. When he looked into her green eyes, Nathaniel felt he was a mouse before a cat, but she was sophisticated, definitely not one of the Bankside whores.

  ‘Let me help,’ she said with a hint of an Irish accent. She offered her hand.

  As Nathaniel limped to his feet, he was enveloped by the sweet scent of her perfume. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘A friend.’ The Irish woman took the key from his hand.

  ‘I am always wary of friends who announce themselves as such.’ The clamour on the other side of the door almost drowned Nathaniel’s words.

  ‘You are right to be cautious, for terrible deeds are planned this night.’ The stranger’s green eyes flashed towards him as she slipped the key into the hole.

  ‘What do you know?’ Nat asked, concerned.

  ‘That before this night is out, the Rose Theatre will be the scene of a murder.’ The woman turned the key. ‘And that the victim will be England’s greatest spy, Will Swyfte.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  Will was slammed against the plaster wall of the walkway outside the tiring house before he even realized he was no longer alone. His head throbbed from the impact, jarring the last vestiges of his thoughts of Jenny. Before he could recover, strong hands grasped his shoulders and thrust him into the dressing room. He fell, sprawling across the hard mortar floor. Shattered bottles drove shards of glass into his flesh and drenched him in wine.

  Ignoring the pain, he rolled on to his haunches, whirling towards the doorway. Looming out of the darkened walkway was a crimson face with black-ringed eyes and horns. It took only a moment for Will to see it was a mask, not the devil returned to destroy him but a man, as tall as Will and wrapped in a black woollen cloak. To his back, he had affixed the angel wings that had been suspended in the storage rooms. Silver glinted in the light of the single candle on the floor in one corner. The spy saw it was a blade gripped in his opponent’s right hand, not a cut-throat’s knife but one lovingly crafted for ritual purposes, with a slight curve to the tip, and a cleft for cutting ligaments. Black symbols had been inscribed into the steel.

  The attacker lunged like a raven falling on a dead rabbit, thrusting the knife towards Will’s neck. Still shaky from his vision, he sluggishly pulled aside. The blade missed him by a finger’s-width, gouging a furrow in the wall plaster.

  Will lashed out at his attacker’s groin. When the masked man danced away, the spy found a moment to leap to his feet.

  ‘You are confused,’ Will mocked. ‘A devil or an angel?’ He couldn’t see any sign of the masked man’s true identity, or guess the purpose of the attack.

  From the yard in front of the stage came relieved chatter and the hearty laughter that is heard only after the release of fear. The audience was creeping back inside. The theatre manager loudly directed the throng to their positions, promising wonders to come.

  Lunging forward, the knife-wielding foe drove Will back against the wall,
and with a strength as demonic as his appearance, crushed the breath out of him. Gradually, the attacker increased the pressure. Fire burned in Will’s chest.

  ‘Will? Are you here?’ Nathaniel’s voice echoed along the walkway.

  Distracted, the devil-masked attacker flinched. Will head-butted his opponent, smashing the mask from the top edge to just above the painted, grimacing mouth. As the man threw himself back, clutching at his crumbling disguise, Will glimpsed wild eyes filled with fury. He lashed out, trying to knock the mask away. It slid off further, revealing a hint of a familiar face, but before Will could fathom the man’s identity, he stumbled back, dragging the mask into place.

  ‘Will!’ Nathaniel’s concerned voice rang out closer.

  ‘Show yourself. I would know what name to carve upon your gravestone,’ Will growled, drawing his rapier.

  Closing the rift in his mask with his left hand, the murderous foe bolted from the room.

  Will pursued the man into the walkway, ignoring Nathaniel’s surprised cry. The angel wings shimmered in the half-light, creating the illusion that the devil-masked man was flying just above the mortar floor.

  Ahead, excited chatter filled the passage. A group of five players in garish make-up and wigs hurried back to their rooms from the front of the stage, eager to return to their performance. The masked attacker darted in front of them into a corridor to his left. Barely noticing his drawn rapier, the players swarmed around Will. Roughly, the agent thrust them to one side. Turning left, he was confronted by a large door hanging open.

  Will raced out into a small area of hard-packed chalk where the wagons were unloaded. The sweet-apple scent of horse dung filled the air.

  Night had fallen, hiding whatever path the devil-masked man had taken from the Rose. In the distance, the lights of Bankside gleamed. Clouds obscured the moon, and the wind took away any sound of disappearing feet.