by Paul Cornell
“How could it have been worse?”
“Watch.” Judith used her foot to manipulate the image again, going back to the moment when Old Rory flew backwards. Then she spun the picture once more, to find . . . nobody there.
“So I’d gone?” said Autumn. “I mean, did I leave the moment after I . . . I blasted—?”
“Hold on.” Judith held the view where it was and “rewound” as she had before. Autumn saw herself triumphantly step back through the hole in the wall, stick two fingers up at Rory, and vanish, the hole closing, leaving only the circle. Judith froze the image and spun it again, to show Rory in the act of putting down the pan.
And then he flew backwards.
Autumn felt sheer relief surging through her.
Until Judith stepped right up to her, furious. “Don’t look relieved, you idiot!” she bellowed.
“Hey! I didn’t hurt him!”
“Oh, didn’t you? Look!” Judith threw something at her from out of her pocket. It was some sort of dust. Autumn flinched . . . and then realised nothing about her had changed, or . . . no, looking down, something seemed to now be wrapped all around her. Had that old witch . . . tied her up? No. No. She couldn’t feel whatever this was, she could only see it.
She went to the full-length mirror in the corner and saw what it was. All around her were wrapped . . . they looked like fibres made of light, hundreds of them, in different colours. They led off from her in many directions, taut, attached to unseen anchors, fading where whatever Judith had thrown on her ended its influence. She was so wrapped up in them it was surprising she could move. She put a hand to them, and it went right through. She could move because they were still intangible to touch, as they had previously been to sight. Even to her own magically enhanced sight.
Judith marched up to her again, grabbed her by the shoulders, and wrenched her round to face her. “Last night you marched right through every line of force attached to the town’s borders. You did what fairies do, walk to what’s inside places, only you had no idea what you were doing. The gestures and words we use when we do magic are sometimes about limiting what our emotions want to do. The worst of us realise that emotions can connect straight to magic and let that go to their heads, don’t try to regulate it, and that’s what you did last night. You smashed through everything in your way, and now you’ve got the boundaries wrapped round you like a . . . bull in a knitting shop. The boundaries. They’re . . . what was I saying? No, shut up, this is important.” Autumn watched, bemused, as Judith stepped away and took a moment to lean on something.
“Judith, are you all right?” Lizzie asked.
Judith just shook her head. This silence, this effect on the old woman, was scaring Autumn more than the yelling had. But before she could start to argue, Judith had turned again and raised a finger to resume berating her. “Do you see? When you heaved off out of his kitchen, Old Rory was caught in the backlash and sent flying like he was on a catapult, off into who knows where. That’s probably what’s happened to the lorry driver that’s gone missing. It might be what’s happened to however many bloody people were at that dance or whatever it is that we’re still hearing. And it’s why the prince had so much trouble coming to see the reverend this morning. That’s why I say what you did was worse than murder. You might or might not have hurt Rory. But you’ve hurt all the rest of us. Maybe everyone in the world. You’ve done what nobody’s ever done, messed up the borders around Lychford. Now every dark thing that’s out there, soon as they realise, they’ll be heading here to mess with us. Some of the great nations too. There’ll be summat happening among the fairies. And I don’t know if there’s anything we can do about it. All because you’d had a few!”
Autumn looked to Lizzie. She didn’t look away, but was there something on her face of what Shaun had had in his expression earlier? “Well . . . what are we waiting for?” she shouted, her guilt bursting out of her as anger. “If it’s so bloody urgent, shouldn’t we be out there finding those people?” And not in here accusing me of something I’m utterly guilty of.
“Don’t you take that tone with me. Don’t you take any tone now.” Judith was still blazingly angry. “I’m only waiting for—” There came a buzzing sound from the pocket of her dress. She put her hand in and pulled out a kitchen timer. “—right. My defences are ready. Come on.”
And with that Judith headed for the door, and Autumn was horrified to see that she was actually running.
2
Lizzie would normally, for the sake of her exercise tracker, have been grateful for the opportunity of an impromptu jog, but when it was across the town, following a pensioner who was now displaying an astonishing turn of speed, with the future of everything at stake, well, that wasn’t really one of the workout settings. Judith was sprinting, and sustaining it. There were cheers and laughs as they dashed past the locals. That could not, Lizzie was sure, be done without supernatural help. It must have taken some restraint, in her younger years, for Judith not to have tried out for the Olympics.
But restraint was what Judith was all about, wasn’t it? And the lack of it was the great sin she was judging Autumn for. But was there something else, alongside that? Lizzie had a good ear for the interactions between people experiencing trauma, and beneath Judith’s fury at Autumn, there seemed to be some unspoken anger, something personal. How gently, she wondered, had Autumn been dealing with her employee’s grief? Or had she heard only stubbornness and replied in kind? And what about in the other direction? Autumn had been down and put upon for months, and Lizzie really hadn’t been paying enough attention to that.
This was what their lives were now, that Lizzie not being there for her friends often enough might have led to the end of the world.
Surprisingly, since she had mentioned her defences being cooked, Judith led them not to her house, but up the hill to the Tatchell farm, baked mud flying from her sensible shoes. The sun was now beaming down on the three figures as they rushed up the spine of the bare hillside, along the track beside Tatchell’s field of ripening wheat.
Judith staggered to a stop, stretched out her arms, and spun slowly, as if seeking something. Autumn just about fell beside her, until Lizzie grabbed her and managed to get her to her feet. But then Autumn started to throw up. Only another intervention by Lizzie stopped it from going over Judith’s ankles.
“Over here,” said Judith, not bothering to notice. She pointed and marched off across the corn, not caring about damaging the crop.
“Are you okay?” Lizzie asked Autumn, helping her to follow. At least the visible threads that had been wrapped around her had faded in the last few minutes. That dust, presumably, was wearing off.
“Of course I’m not bloody—! Sorry. What she was saying, about what I’d done, how . . . I guess, bad magicians? How they use this stuff? Am I going to ‘the dark side’?” Lizzie could hear the irony she’d put into the words. “Like I’m becoming the stuff we’re keeping out. Which is . . . what they’ve been saying to me, or not ever saying out loud. What they’ve been thinking.”
Lizzie didn’t like the sound in her friend’s voice. “You’ve been under a lot of pressure, and I haven’t been listening enough.”
“I want to confess.”
“Well, we don’t do that very much in the C of E, but absolutely, you can confess to me and I can—”
“I don’t want to be absolved. I want to take responsibility for this. Do you think there’s some sort of . . . magical court, maybe with the fairies?”
“Shut up!” called Judith from ahead. “Move faster.” They came to a grassy patch in the middle of the field, which stood out in the middle of the crop. Now they’d stopped running, Lizzie could still hear the distant dance music. Judith squatted slowly down and picked up two spades, which Lizzie was pretty sure hadn’t been there a second before. “Dig,” she said, “quick.”
Autumn grabbed a spade, and set about digging. She was trying to demonstrate her commitment. “Those threads you saw wrap
ped around me,” she said, “won’t me moving about keep on disturbing them?”
Judith made a tutting noise, like this question was an unwanted burden. “The web of them is loose now. Dun’t matter what you do.”
Lizzie saw pain pass across Judith’s face once more. “Are you okay? Doing all this, running like that, you have to pay a price, don’t you? That’s how it works.”
Judith gave her a look that said further questions along those lines would be most unwise.
Lizzie sighed and started to dig. “How is there a grassy patch here?” She wasn’t going to let Judith or Autumn lapse into brooding.
“Paul the builder is one of that lot that goes out with metal detectors. He thinks he found summat huge out here a few months back. He’s got an agreement with Joe Tatchell to not sow on this bit, and he’ll poke around after harvest.”
“And what’s that got to do with what we’re doing?”
“He found an illusion I’d planted at this spot so he’d do all that. In case we ever had to do this. I’m up for fighting the powers of evil, but I’m not so stupid as I’d take on a farmer.”
“But what happens when he realises it’s not here?”
“I know what that lot with the detectors are like. He’d have kept poking around for it, year after year. So the spot’d stay put. Right. That’s deep enough.” She took from her cardigan pocket a tiny cloth bag with thread knotted at the top. “I kept these in the freezer. I had to put them in the oven when I realised what she’d done.”
She’d addressed that explanation only to her, Lizzie realised. It was as if Autumn had become useful only for digging. Autumn had realised that too, and was looking helpless. “And they got into your pocket how?” asked Lizzie.
Judith gave her another look. “What do they call him, the green chap?”
“Is that someone we know, or—?”
“On schoolbags. He were on television when I were younger.” It took a bit of interrogation before Lizzie realised Judith was talking about The Incredible Hulk. “Right. Him. If I go like him, knock me around the head with the brown-handled spade. That should fix it.” And before either of them could ask any alarmed questions, even about why it had to be that particular spade, she’d put the cloth of the bag to her lips and started to blow into it.
Lizzie and Autumn looked at each other. “You’ve got the brown-handled spade,” said Lizzie.
Autumn quickly swapped spades with her.
Judith’s face was changing colour, but it was turning bright red rather than green. She seemed to have been blowing for an impossibly long time, drawing air from who knew where. Lizzie took a covert look behind the old woman and saw that her floral dress had flattened against the back of her legs, as if being pulled in by . . . no, she really didn’t want to think about that.
Judith finally stopped, staggered, righted herself, and, with a little cry of pain, threw the bag into the hole. Light burst from where it struck the soil, and a pillar of it shot up into the sky, a light only they could see. Then it began to slowly fan out, dissipating into a vague glow that followed an arc.
“Basic defence,” panted Judith. “Until . . . if . . . we can knit the boundaries back into place . . . it’ll have to do.”
“So now do we go after the lost people?” asked Autumn.
“In a bit.” Judith looked like she didn’t like speaking directly to Autumn now. She also looked on her last legs, her face grey with effort. “We’ve got three more of these to do first.”
* * *
They raced around Lychford in the heat, putting the cloth bags into prepared sites that were, in order: inside the bole of a tree; by the side of a road, which needed a paving stone to be heaved up and got them curious shouts from drivers; in the playground underneath the slide, which required more digging. All the while, the distant beat of the dance music continued.
“Does it have to be here?” said Lizzie, about digging under the slide, aware that if anyone saw her she’d have some serious explaining, or rather lying, to do to the town council. At least she was getting her steps in today.
“I’m not responsible for where the cardinal points are. I just did my best to get these within twenty feet.” Judith had done the same trick with the bags at three sites now, and now she embarked on it one last time. Lizzie seriously wondered if it would kill her.
Finally, she dropped the last bag into the hole and they filled it in. The light this time flashed up, connected with the other beacons, and from this angle they could now see they were inside a barely perceptible dome, which faded. But Lizzie could still feel the slight sense of added safety its continuing presence imparted.
Judith sat down on the grass. “Right,” she said. “Now we can . . . can find those . . .”
“Let us do it,” said Autumn.
Judith was silent for a long moment, her eyes closed. Lizzie hoped she’d say something comforting, but when she finally spoke, it was as bitter as before. “You’ve done enough.”
“Do we know if anything’s got through?”
Judith opened her eyes and started to push herself up. “It will have. Maybe a few things, at random, shunted here like Rory Holt and the lorry driver and the rave were shunted elsewhere, or maybe loads of ’em, deliberately, if they were waiting ready to seize their chance.”
“Refugees coming over the border,” said Autumn. And now her voice was as hard as Judith’s had been.
Judith finally looked at her. “It’s not a bloody metaphor,” she said. “Everything isn’t about you.”
She’d hauled herself to her feet and set off before Autumn could find a reply. Lizzie put a hand on Autumn’s arm. The look on her face was a battle between anger and absolute guilt. “Just let me try to fix it,” Autumn whispered. “Please. She has to let me try.”
* * *
As the three of them marched down the river toward the route to the woods, Autumn kept looking at Judith. She kept waiting for the old woman to say that Autumn was no longer her apprentice, that after the lack of care she’d shown, she wasn’t worthy. Autumn would have welcomed that. She would have got angry at it too, she couldn’t help but react like that, but . . . oh God, when was Judith going to say it?
What would Lizzie be thinking now, if she’d been the one who’d done this? Would she be seeking judgment? Would her guilt be so extreme? How much had the town Autumn had grown up in made the feeling seep into her skin that, being the only black person here, anything abnormal might be her fault? But no. The thought that she’d allowed this to happen because of how this place had treated her . . . that was a luxury she couldn’t allow herself. Not if she wanted to retain her mental health. That was what other people liked to think of people like her. She wanted to take responsibility. She would find a way.
And yet, that whole circle of awful thoughts was something that would never even have occurred to Lizzie.
They entered the woods, and after a while came to the signpost that marked the point where some routes seen only by those such as them headed off in directions that could never be recorded on any map. It felt . . . different now. Judith sniffed the air. “Borders have moved here too,” she said. “Right, so, we have at least one thing that’s continuously leaking across the boundaries.”
“What?” asked Lizzie.
“That bloody music.” And yeah, there it was, still. “So that’s the first thing we can work with. Try to figure out where it’s coming from.”
The three of them looked around, and managed, between them, to triangulate a direction for the varying beats. They set off that way, through the woods. “Time might be different where they are,” said Autumn, remembering her own experience of journeying to fairy. “They’d have shut down the music and gone home by now otherwise.”
No reply from Judith. It was as if she hadn’t spoken.
After a while, they came to a halt as they all realised, just about at the same time, that the direction the sound was coming from had suddenly shifted, moved to somewhere behind
them.
“It’s like in a video game,” said Lizzie, “when you’re right on top of the marker you’re trying to find, and it kind of slides away around you.”
“I dunno what that means,” said Judith, “but now I see what’s gone on. The . . . rave, is it? It’s caught in what we call a knot, a little loop of border stuff that she made when she went crashing through them.”
“I think you should start using Autumn’s name again,” said Lizzie.
Judith ignored her. “There’ll be different knots all over the place. The ends knit when they’re thrown together, so they form little bubble worlds. I saw it once before, when I were younger. In . . .” She paused for a long moment, and a frown crossed her face. “Don’t remember. Don’t matter. Where was I? Oh ah. The rave might be in one, the lorry driver in another, Rory Holt in another.”
“Do we know how many of them there are?” asked Lizzie.
“Dunno. Could be half a dozen, could be thousands. What worries me most is, are those people alone in there? These aren’t just bits cut off from this world. She made the borders fly about, get mixed up and connected to each other, so there’ll be bits of the other worlds in there too. There might be stuff that’s got into the wrong places, dark things we’ve been trying to keep out, but have fallen into the knots.”
“I think we really should try to find another word for ‘evil’ other than—” began Lizzie, who’d obviously seen the look on Autumn’s face.
“Words I use aren’t what’s wrong. What she did is what’s wrong.”
Autumn took a deep breath and shoved it all down inside her once again. “Okay. How do we get into these knots?”
Finally, Judith addressed her. Because she knew what she was about to say was arrogant and annoying. “You can’t get there from here.”
“Then how—?”
“Not by walking, not by knowing stuff. We need to be lost. Close your eyes, put your fingers in your ears, and start walking.”
“What about our, you know, other senses? The ones we got from the well?” asked Lizzie.