The surviving branches that had engaged him retracted now to hide among the healthier ones above.
The Fugue Hunter stood before her, his chest heaving. Blood and sap streaked his hulking body. Carla couldn’t tell how much of it was his blood but she prayed he had some strength left. His eyes did not focus on her, but on some point high up the tree’s trunk. His voice was unrecognisable, as if an animal was trying to speak, but she understood his words well enough.
‘Let her go.’
Kerrigan raised his tomahawk, not at the tree as she’d expected, but above her head where it flamed and rained blue sparks upon her.
‘Let her go and you live to try again. If you don’t release her, I’ll kill her.’
She saw in his eyes that he would do it.
‘Jimmy, please don’t do this. I . . . love you.’
‘Shut up.’ His voice was more the snarl of a beast than it was that of a human. He raised the tomahawk higher and tensed every muscle, ready to bring it down and divide her skull into two.
She felt the tree’s grip give totally in that moment and she slipped to the ground. The pain of being released as her joints replaced themselves more neatly into their proper housings was worse than the original wrenching and she screamed.
The Fugue Hunter leaned down and picked her up carefully so that his bone blades did not wound her. He carried her to the edge of the arbour. With every step he took the tree rustled and shuddered its leaves and branches. A wailing began near the top of its trunk. Kerrigan laid Carla down beyond the entrance to the arbour and stroked her face with one enormous, clawed hand.
‘You didn’t do it.’ She said.
‘No. How could I?’
The pain in her limbs had lessened a little but she knew she could not sit up, let alone walk.
‘It’s over then. Are you going to leave me here?’
None of the humanity had returned to his voice but there was a sentiment behind his words.
‘It’s not over yet but when it is, I’ll never leave you.’
Kerrigan the Fugue Hunter stood up. He strode back into the arbour. The tree’s wailing became a yet more desperate keening at his return. Carla heard the fear in it. Though she could not see the incidents of the next hour she heard every single sound. The sound of Jimmy Kerrigan fighting off the branches that tried to prevent him entering the arbour a second time: she heard his response to each attack in the whoosh of his tomahawk and swish of his staff as he paralysed or cut every limb that advanced towards him. This advance and repulse must have gone on until the tree had no more limbs mobile enough to defend itself with.
The sound of fighting stopped for a short while and she heard only the sound of his footsteps as he walked towards the unprotected tree. Then came the hooted whistles of panic as he used his talons to climb the tree’s trunk. By that time, he was too close to the centre of the tree for any branch to reach him and the hoots of panic became deep honks of terror. They made her think of some vast cathedral organ playing sharp and flat screams instead of notes. And in her mind she imagined a dismembered man, still alive and helpless while his attacker advanced with a gleaming blade and dark intent.
She heard the Fugue Hunter hack into the bark of the tree and was thankful she could no longer hear its thoughts. The hacking made a moist, fleshy squelch as he sliced through the bark and tore into the muscular tissue below. The echoes of butchery resounded across the arbour as Kerrigan bludgeoned relentlessly into the body of the tree. Then Carla heard what she recognised as the sound of stone on bone and the agonised screams of the living tree reached a new and insane pitch. Not long after the chopping stopped she thought she could make out the ragged breathing of the tree as it tried to recover from the quartering it had been given.
Towards the end she heard the faint tinkle of smashing glass as the Fugue Hunter dashed his bottles of wellspring water against the exposed bones deep inside the tree’s wounds and the hot roaring hiss that followed like steam being forced from the ground. Finally, the tree began to collapse. She heard limbs falling all over the arbour, higher ones crashing through lower ones as they fell, taking many more with them.
A moment later the Fugue Hunter was with her again and he lifted her up in time for her to see the trunk of the tree splitting in half and falling open. All the limbs that were still attached came down then with a creaking, thundering crash; the sound of a whole forest felled in a single cut.
Mexico
One year later
When Carla told him she was pregnant Kerrigan was ecstatic.
They went down to Pepito’s place on the beach and drank Coronas and tequila until they could hardly walk. They weren’t married, but it would be easy enough to organise. For the time that the euphoria and alcohol held him in their thrall, he was the happiest man in Mexico.
That night, while Carla slept in something of a stupor, he dreamed of the forest below Bear Mountain. They were standing next to a heap of ash in the centre of what had been the arbour. The broad space was filled with light and saplings sprouted everywhere.
The sallow man fixed him in the glare of his dead eyes.
‘You will destroy everything you fought to protect.’
‘I’ll never hurt her,’ Kerrigan protested. ‘And I’ll never feed. I’ve kept up the rituals just like I always did.’
‘You’ve spoken the words that every Fugue Hunter has uttered when they realise their destiny is to become a feeder. He searches for you even now.’
‘Who does?’
‘The boy you recovered. David Slater. He will find you and when he does you will initiate him or leave the world without protection.’
Kerrigan knew the sallow man was right. But was everything he said true?
‘There’s Fugue outside the valley?’ he asked.
‘Of course. It’s a disease, foundling, and it can occur anywhere.’
‘But surely there are other hunters.’
‘You are the last,’ he said. ‘But that is not the worst of this. Let me show you something.’
Night fell across the arbour and where the pile of ash had been, now the Fugue tree had returned in all its pulsing glory. The sallow man pointed and Kerrigan saw himself in fury, fighting the Fugues that hung from the tree’s branches. He’d never witnessed such brutality, but that was not what the sallow man wanted him to see. He brought the scene closer and showed him the wounds he sustained and the places where the tree’s sap splashed into his cuts.
‘The tree won that night. It lives on in you, foundling, and now you’ve fulfilled your lust, it lives in the belly of my great granddaughter — the place it always wanted to be. She bears its seed.’
Kerrigan heard the tree laughing, the piped hoots of its voice making him scream and cover his ears.
‘Trees thrive on light, foundling, and so too will her child.’
He woke up then, sweating hard with his heart near to bursting in his chest.
Carla slept on.
Acknowledgements
Late in 2011, in a reversal of conventional publishing methods, an editor asked me to submit work to his imprint. That editor was Steven Haynes and Blood Fugue is the result.
‘Just needs a bit of a tweak,’ he said, sharpening his instruments and strapping the manuscript down. Though I shudder at the recollection, I adore the surgically enhanced result. And so, Hacker Haynes, Butcher of Bodmin, I salute you.
Heartfelt thanks to Adam Nevill and Will Hill for their unflinching support and to Donna Condon for advice when prospects were bleak. To every reader who’s taken a moment to write in support of my stories, a hug.
Finally, and most importantly, so much love to my family, nuclear and extended, who weather the uncertainties of my ‘job’ with more grace and stoicism than I ever seem to manage.
Table of Contents
PART I: FOUNDLING
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
&nbs
p; Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
PART II: INFECTION
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
PART III: WAR
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Mexico
Acknowledgements
Blood Fugue Page 24