A moment’s silence reigned, and Norman felt the old forest press in on them from all sides. He realised just how alone they were out here. With James’s army departed, for all they knew, they could be the only people for dozens of miles in any direction. And this was no ordinary place.
Radden Moor, cloaked in its veil of wandering fog, heath-clad and barren and iron-skied, was a special place.
Something told him that if they became separated in these woods, they would never be reunited, not even if they passed within ten feet of each other. The forest would consume them.
“Billy, wait!” Norman called.
Her distant voice echoed from up ahead. “No time.”
“We’ll lose you!”
“Then move faster.”
“The fog’s too thick. If I lose you…”
“You’ll find me. I feel you.” He could no longer see her save for the dimmest flicker of shadow through the creeping fog. Her disembodied voice crept through the branches. “Don’t you feel me?”
He didn’t answer, didn’t need to.
“How much farther?” Robert bellowed.
Billy’s voice again, sounding even farther away, terrifyingly faint. “Almost there.”
How can the kid be so calm? Calmer than four grown men? She can’t be more than nine or ten years old.
Because kids still had that magic spark alight inside them. The willingness to look into the abyss, see monsters and vampires born of imagination, and keep going anyway. This kid in particular had something extra too. A certain brightness, like she had been spliced into the world from a place where the sun was brighter.
Even from back here he could feel her presence, the intimate proximity of somebody standing only inches away.
If I’m going to get through this, I’m going to have to try relighting my own spark. Gotta keep moving, Norm, and don’t look down. It’s a long fall to crazy town from up here.
Lucian grunted behind Norman. “‘Almost there.’ Wherever the hell that is. Anybody notice we’re going the wrong way?”
“Norman, he’s right. What are we doing out here?” Richard panted. “James went south. Home is south. We have to beat them back. We have to warn them.”
Robert said nothing, yet his reticence seemed loudest of all. There was more than home waiting for him back there, more than their duty to the mission of New Canterbury. He and Sarah Strong had wed the minute before they had departed for this place. Now a bloodthirsty army of ten thousand stood between them.
Their collective gaze needled the back of Norman’s neck like cat’s claws.
A few weeks ago I would have crumbled. Robert or Lucian would be in the lead, and I’d be following them every step of the way. Now…
Now it seemed he saw farther than his eyes’ field of view, felt the soil underfoot through the soles of his shoes.
Something had awoken in him.
Don’t call it destiny. People have pushed that on you since the cradle.
Then what is it?
He answered himself, an unyielding plaintive voice from the root of his mind: I’m awake now. I know what I have to do.
He didn’t know how. He just knew. And so he said nothing at all, just kept running.
Behind him, they followed and said nothing more.
Heart pounding, legs begging for mercy, Norman threw himself over logs and under overhanging branches, narrowly missing losing an eye more times than he dared count. All the while a strange sonar inside his head pinged, picking out the Irish girl streaking ahead, homing in on something.
Exactly what, he didn’t bother to guess. Reality was stranger than fiction.
It sure is now, anyway.
Then light. With a grunt Norman flung a hand up over his shoulder, praying the others were close enough to see it through the fog, and ground his heels into the ground. Billy had stopped dead, and as he skidded to a halt, he realised they had reached the edge of the forest.
He ignored Lucian cursing Richard and stepped from the treeline onto a vast stretch of heathland. As his eyes adjusted, light that had moments before seemed blinding and radiant faded to its true nature: dank and lifeless, painting the world in metallic hue—the antithesis of summer’s golden glow; an anti-glow, such that even Billy Peyton’s youthful rouged cheeks seemed sallow and aged.
She stood beside him, ankle deep in heather, looking out over Radden Moor. Miles away, a ridge of mountains fenced in the landscape, snow-capped, gnarled, and knobbly like some old crone’s arthritic knuckles. A few towns and villages dotted the heath here and there, Victorian and slate-roofed, askew and ramshackle and grey.
“I can’t imagine what it was like before the End,” he said.
“I can’t imagine anything from Before,” Billy said flatly. “Daddy always said there was no Before. Just us from the beginning of time.”
Norman looked at her, searching for a smile. He saw none. She wasn’t kidding.
Is that what we’ve come to? She knows nothing of the Old World?
He knew that many out in the wilds thought as much. But to hear it in person, from one so young and bright…
That was what awaited them all and their children if they failed now. The lords of the North had ravaged most of the country since the End. New Canterbury and the Alliance were the only things keeping civilisation’s flame alive in the farthest south. It would all go away if they didn’t stop the marching horde.
Billy walked slowly through the heather, finding safe footings invisible to Norman. He followed her exact paces, unthinking, trusting, motioning over his shoulder for the others to follow. For a time they moved in single file, a desperate plodding crawl, five lonely figures upon a landscape that seemed set to engulf them through its sheer enormity. Icy wind tugged at his clothes, ripping his hair, cold that he knew somehow had nothing to do with temperature.
The same cold nestling in his chest, the cold that had infiltrated his nerves and bones as soon as he stepped foot in this place. Infecting him, taunting him.
Far away, several threads of diaphanous milky figures milled to and fro across the moorland, going about businesses of the distant past: Echoes of the Old World that had plagued him since all this had started. They were everywhere here in Radden. Any notion of them being figments of his deranged imagination vanished now, for he caught Billy’s eyes glance in their direction.
“You feel it too, don’t you? You see them,” Billy said, up ahead.
Norman blinked. Waited.
“You feel it.”
“What is it?” he said.
“What’s what?” Lucian hissed.
They both ignored him.
“I don’t know. I don’t know a lot of anything.”
“But you see them? They’re from Before. I know they are. I’ve seen their—”
Phones, he thought. I’ve seen them carrying telephones. Wearing suits.
She seemed to sense his thoughts. “I saw a flying machine. Just like them. There, but not.” She glanced at him over her shoulder, furtively searching. “Were there flying machines, Before?”
“Yes.”
She turned solemnly away. “I see them everywhere here.”
“Does it… does it hurt you too? The cold?”
“Yes. And no. Both.”
“Why here?”
“Some places are special, Norm. The Panda Man told me.”
Norman didn’t bother enquiring any further. Some things were just too crazy.
Silence reigned over the group a moment, bar the banshee wail of the wind.
“When all this is over, you’re both going straight into a pair of straitjackets,” Lucian said dourly.
They pressed on like that until the weight of all those hanging on their success or failure grew too much. “Billy, we can’t keep walking out here. Every minute we waste means they get closer,” Norman said. “…Billy!”
She came to a stop, seemingly in a daze, hunch-backed and swaying, rising and falling with breaths that seemed too deep for h
er little lungs. “We’re here,” she said.
Norman paused and looked around. The others came up to stand beside him, and as one, they stared about. They stood, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere: on all sides lay at least half a mile of barren unbroken heather. Not even a single rock or tree or free-standing structure lay in sight.
Except for the ragged hole directly before them. A gap in the soil that dropped into a gently sloping tunnel, big enough for a grown man to descend at a crouch. For all the world, it looked like the entrance to an enormous warren.
“What’s this?” Norman said.
“I don’t know,” Billy said. She blinked rapidly, as though confused as to why they were here. But there was no hesitation in her voice. “We have to go down.”
A silent thud landed in Norman’s chest.
“This can’t be happening,” Richard said, his peaky face whitening further. “Are we really thinking of going through with this? Time is slipping away, real time. I can’t… I can’t believe we’re doing this. This can’t be real. It’s… it’s crazy.”
“There’s a lot of that going around right now,” Norman said absently.
Let’s not mention that I could barely walk when we left home, nursing a few broken ribs and some heavy psychological baggage. Now I feel like I could run a million miles and face a dragon. It’s this—
“It’s this place,” Billy Peyton said, unblinking. She addressed them all, but her gaze lingered on Norman a moment too long, beaming a certain knowing intensity. “The rules are different.”
Norman blinked, stunned. The very same words had been on the tip of his tongue.
He shook off a mental echo of what she had showed him. They had seen one another in their dreams before ever meeting. Putting that particular insanity aside, he also knew she had guided him to something far worse: a dark place where he could have never gone to without her, a place of suffering and pain and eternal labour—a place populated by billions of screaming, slaving people. People who had once lived and breathed and walked this Earth before—
Before the End.
He shivered.
“Norman, I’m with you to the last,” Robert said, leaning down to Norman’s ear, his stature dwarfing them all. His hand wrapped around Norman’s arm, and for a moment Norman’s sense of power was punctured by the gaze of the enormous man beside him—a man ready to tear people limb from limb to get back home. “I’m not going to ask questions. I don’t care. I just need to know that we’re going to get home, and that we’ll get there before Chadwick.” His eyes drilled deep down into Norman’s skull, X-raying him to the minutest detail. “Are you sure about this, Norman?”
Norman felt his old self, who had shirked leadership and responsibility, drag his shoulders towards a hunch, urging him to cower. Even now, after all they’d been through, it took everything he had to look Robert in the eye and say, “I’m sure. This is the way. We will make it back in time.”
“Your word on it, Creek.”
Norman gripped Robert’s arm in turn, his hand reaching only halfway around Robert’s bicep. “I promise.”
Robert stared a moment longer, then released him.
Norman turned to the others. The sight of their filthy sweat-stained faces—especially Lucian’s, who had for all his life seemed an indefatigable bough of strength, now hanging emaciated and sallow-eyed, half-propped by Richard behind him—stalled Norman for a moment. In that bleak second, his will thrummed and threatened to falter.
Weak, we’re so weak. Four idiots running around in the woods, trying to save the world. And how? By following a freaky little magic girl down a rabbit hole.
He steeled himself and said, “Do you trust me?”
Lucian watched him carefully, an appraising look lighter than Robert’s penetrating stare, yet it sent Norman’s flesh crawling. Lucian wasn’t just searching for a lie or weakness; he was seeing him anew. Lucian knew the old Norman was still there and saw it as well as he saw Norman now.
Somehow, that made it all the more raw when the tiniest amusement glimmered on his rugged old cheeks. “For my bloody sins.”
Norman turned to Richard. The young apprentice was looking at Billy, who had pulled out a ragged piece of cloth, rolled up into a scroll. Like her, it seemed too bright, as if it didn’t quite belong in the world.
She unravelled it, revealing strange pictographs and a winding path between them: an archway, a dilapidated shack, stone ruins, the weathered mountaintops that were unmistakably those upon Radden Moor’s horizon, and finally a round black smudge. The rabbit hole.
Billy put the map away without a word.
Richard mouthed wordlessly, silently cursing with a roll of his eyes, then shrugged. “Fine. Whatever. Who needs sanity, anyway?”
“Hold on to that attitude, kid,” Lucian said as they gathered around the hole. “Looks like you’ll need it.”
Norman and Billy crouched around the lip of the hole. “Down then?” he said.
She nodded, the fatalistic grimness of someone decades older. Without a word, she leapt down into darkness.
Norman stared stupidly after her, then something tugged in the base of his gut. The painful chill in his chest twitched as though alive, tugging him down into the ground.
“All righty then…,” he muttered. Clearing his throat, he bounded on the balls of his feet, cursed, then jumped into the hole.
The tunnel floor lay a mere four feet down, yet it felt like he fell for several seconds. By the time his feet touched ground, the air had altogether changed. From bare and stripped of life, robbed of scent and volume by the eerie moors, it became warmer and redolent of decay—not unpleasant, but peaty and rich.
He rolled clear of the opening, his face screwed up in anticipation of stabbing pain from his ribs.
Even a few hours ago I’d be screaming right now.
Instead he felt nothing bar the creak of the soil compacting under his weight. He came to a stop after he was sure he was clear of the hole, then waved his hands around in the pitch darkness.
“Billy?”
To his left: “Here.”
She sounds a hell of a lot calmer than me.
She also sounded too far away. Not because her voice was faint, but because he felt as though in the presence of another; one much closer.
And not just a single presence. For an awful moment his mind conjured an image of an encircling ring of figures, mere inches from his face, bestial and muscular, blowing hot stinking breath onto his skin. Things not quite human.
Billy gave a grunt from somewhere up ahead, and a click rang out. A flame blossomed and threw her cherub-like face into harsh relief, an illuminated head bobbing amidst total darkness.
“There are torches,” she said. She waved a match in her hand. “Grandpa’s magic.”
Norman tried not to wonder how she sensed his questioning stare. There was no way she could see his face.
“Uh huh,” he said. His eyes searched the corners of their sockets, looking for a mouthful of needle-like teeth, fur. Maybe horns.
Because in the brief instant when Billy had lighted the torch in her hand, they hadn’t been conjurations of his imagination. They had been right in front of him.
“What’s wrong?” Billy came closer, watching him carefully. Even at half his height, she seemed infinitely stronger, braced against the dark.
“It’s just… I thought I saw something,” he said lamely, feeling only more foolish as Lucian landed in the tunnel behind him and clapped his hands to receive the few weapons they had managed to salvage from the abandoned camp.
Billy turned to face the tunnel ahead, a gaping maw stretching on to infinity. Darkness seemed to come too soon, sucking the light up a mere ten feet ahead of them and veiling what lay ahead. “Everything is funny, now. You get used to it.”
Norman cleared his throat. “You’re just a kid,” he muttered, shaking his head. “You don’t seem scared.”
She blinked and turned slowly to him as Robert�
�s hulking form came whomping down beside them, his heels sinking a quarter inch into the mud. Billy’s gaze had become aglitter with hurt and confusion. “I’m so afraid,” she uttered, so quiet he wondered if she had spoken at all. “I’ve been afraid for so long I forgot what it was like before.” He caught a glimpse of the little girl under all that callous, and his heart wrenched until he thought it might break in half.
Good thing Allie’s not here, he thought. She’d squeeze the munchkin to death.
Then his heart did the impossible and wrenched a little more as Allie’s face danced before his mind’s eye. She was still back there, waiting with the others. He had left her to come here—because it was what he had had to do. In some book she would be the maiden locked up in a white tower, her hand held to her forehead, upon the brink of fainting and devotedly awaiting his return.
If Allie could have seen that mental image, she’d have busted a gut laughing. Then kicked his arse for being a pig.
A few weeks ago they had been little more than strangers. The famine, the army, all this freakery and the threat of imminent doom, had brought them clinging together. And yet she had done what he couldn’t. If it hadn’t been for her, he might have stayed back home, cowered with the others as the fires grew closer, and all their friends fell silent. But she had been there, had damn near kicked him onto his horse.
He put a hand to his brow and squeezed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I am.”
Billy shrugged. “It’s okay.”
“You lost people.” It wasn’t a question.
She waited until Richard pounded down beside them, then set off down into the tunnel. “Everyone,” she said.
Norman Creek glanced at the others close behind him, their eyes huge and white and staring.
“Who’s down here?” Richard said.
“Stop your yammering,” Lucian grated. “Ain’t nobody but us.”
“I felt something just now. Bats?”
“No,” Robert said. “No guano.”
“What then?” Richard cried.
Lucian bared his teeth, which lit up in reflection as white as his eyes. “Your imagination, sweet pea.”
“Shut up, Lucian.”
Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3) Page 3