by Leo Hunt
“She has her tricks,” Titus says. “Have a little faith, brother in arms. Why swore we to the Tree if not for faith?”
“We swore as exiles,” Dumachus says bitterly. “We swore for none else would have us. That is the truth.”
They continue downhill, Titus’s armor crashing as he lurches and hobbles. Fresh snowflakes spiral down from the fog-dimmed gloom above us.
“Do not speak such, dear friend. Let us return to the Tree,” Titus is saying, remarkably cheerful despite his limp, “and see if by her grace I may not be healed.”
The Knights continue, out of sight. When they’ve vanished into the fog, and their awful voices are lost as well, we scramble out of our hiding place. We run as fast as we can down Wormwood Drive, feet pounding on the snowy ground. I can see my front gate, half open, but like Elza’s house, the mists of Deadside haven’t enveloped my house. The hazel charms have held firm. I expect at any moment to hear the hooves and cries of the Knights behind us, but we make it to the gate and through, past the line where the fog stops. I double over in my front yard, panting, unable to believe we’re really here, at the end of our bizarre journey. My house is dark, but I can see firelight glimmering in the front room.
Someone is home.
I unlock the front door and push it open slowly. I’m reasonably sure this must be Elza and the others, since nobody else apart from her and Mum know where the spare key’s kept, but on a night like this, there’s no way of knowing for sure. Firelight shines from the living room, and there’s the buttery light of a candle in the kitchen. Bea hears us and starts barking up a storm in the laundry room. I take a deep breath.
“Hello?” I say loudly.
“Who’s there?” comes a voice from the front room.
“Luke and Holiday. What are you doing in my house?”
“Luke!”
A woman emerges from the living room. Red hair down to her waist, wearing brown pants and a purple sweatshirt. It takes me a moment to recognize her.
“Margaux?”
Darren’s sister embraces me tightly. She smells of incense and hairspray. Her fingers dig into my back in a way that isn’t entirely pleasant.
“Thank goodness you made it here,” she says. “They’re in the living room.”
She takes hold of my arm and pulls me through, Holiday following behind. Saying I’m confused would be an understatement. I’d almost forgotten about Margaux Hart. The front room is warm, the fire roaring, and Mark is lying on the big sofa, his face a grim mask. He’s wearing his boxer shorts, a sweater, and there’s blood stained all over the cushions and carpets. Elza’s crouched beside him, wrapping his leg in what looks like an improvised bandage.
“Mark!” Holiday cries. She rushes over to him and kisses him.
“Hey,” he says faintly.
“What happened?” I ask.
“One of the Knights got him,” Elza says without looking up. “Kirk saved him. Nearly cut the horrible thing’s leg off.”
“Where’s Kirk now?”
“I don’t know — he went upstairs. Now, look, let me —”
“Why’s Margaux here?”
“We met on the road here,” Margaux says beside me. “Elza was good enough to let us shelter here.”
“Us?” I say. This is all going too fast. I thought I’d be relieved, but finding Margaux here has thrown me off. I feel confused.
“I found this girl in the snow,” Margaux says calmly, pointing over at the armchair in the far corner of the room. Alice is sitting there, hands folded in her lap, staring into space.
“Where’s she been?” I ask. “What happened to her?”
“She won’t speak to us,” Margaux says.
“Luke!” Kirk shouts from behind me, grabbing me in a tight hug.
“Kirk, what —”
“Mate! I’m so glad to see you again.”
“Luke, do you have any antiseptic?” Elza cuts in. “This bite doesn’t look good.”
“Just hold on,” Holiday says to Mark. “You’ll be fine.”
Mark groans.
Alice stares at the wall.
“Luke! Antiseptic!”
“All right,” I say, stumbling out of the room. My head is buzzing like a wasps’ nest. I feel like I’m on fire. I stagger into the kitchen, lit by the single candle. It’s cold in here. I open the door to the laundry room. Bea bolts past me, yelping, and vanishes into the hallway. She’s messed the floor in here. How long has she been locked in here? She’s drunk her water dish dry. I step around the dog poo and rummage in the utility cabinet until I find our first-aid kit. I bring it back through to the front room. Margaux is crouched by Holiday, watching Mark intently. Bea is barking at her, hackles raised. The noise is deafening.
“Bea!” I snap. “Not now! These are guests! It’s all right!”
She barks at Margaux again. I swipe at her with my foot, and she runs out of the room, yowling. I hand Elza the first-aid kit. I never paid attention when they taught us about it at school.
Mark’s face is graying, the skin under his eyes a ghastly purple. Sweat has shaped his hair into a cascade of wet spikes on his forehead.
“How you doing, mate?” I ask.
His eyelids flicker.
“Hurts,” he says.
The bite’s gone deep into the calf. I can see ragged flesh, dark-red meat. It looks like a shark got hold of him. It must be agony.
“Hang on,” I say.
I leave the front room again and head upstairs. It’s as dark as anything up here, but I know the layout of the house with my eyes closed. I go into Mum’s bedroom. The door is ajar, and Bea is sitting on Mum’s bed, a black shape in the dimness. A blue flash outside briefly illuminates the room.
“Hey,” I say. “Sorry about that.”
I sit down next to her and stroke Bea’s soft head. She whines and licks my hand. Her small thin tail thumps on the bedspread.
“You miss Mum, Bea?” I ask her. “Yeah, I do, too. I hope she’s OK.” I remember Mum crying, walking away from me down Darren’s track. What if that’s the last time we ever see each other? My stomach churns. I’ll apologize to her properly. If I get out of this, that’s the first thing I’ll do.
Bea grumbles again, rubbing her head on my arm. I think this is the most affection she’s shown me since we got her.
“It’ll be all right,” I say. “I’ll be back.”
I move over to Mum’s bedside table and open the top drawer. I find what I was looking for: plastic prescription bottles, a whole bunch of them. Her headaches haven’t come back since the mess with Dad’s Host last Halloween, but I knew she wouldn’t get rid of the painkillers, just in case. I pick the bottle with the most pills inside and head back to the living room.
“Try some of these,” I say, holding the medicine out.
Elza takes the bottle and examines the label in the firelight. She whistles.
“Persephone had these on prescription?”
“Two a day,” I say. “They were bad headaches.”
“They must’ve been. All right,” Elza says, and gives Mark a couple of the tablets. “I don’t want to overdose you. Let’s try that for now.”
“I need some water,” he rasps.
“The faucets aren’t working here either,” Elza says. “I already tried them.”
I get up again, go to the fridge, get him a glass of juice. The power might be cut, but the kitchen is an icebox, and I don’t think we’ll have to worry about the food going bad anytime soon. I hand him the juice, and Mark swallows the pills.
Margaux is sitting at the back of the room, in the armchair next to Alice. They have the air of people who were talking about you just before you came into the room. Margaux is bright-eyed, alert, watching us all with interest. Alice’s eyes are like dull coins. Why is Margaux Hart here? How did she get to Dunbarrow from Darren’s place? Why isn’t she dancing around a bonfire like the others? Does she know what’s going on here?
I make my way over to Margaux
and Alice. The back of the room is darker, shadows clinging to their faces. I can hear Mark groan with pain, Holiday saying something to Elza that I don’t catch. Margaux smiles politely at me.
“How did you get here?” I ask her.
“Oh, to your house? We walked.”
“You know what I mean,” I say. “We were at Darren’s place. Something happened. I can’t remember what. You were there, too, and now we’re trapped here.”
Margaux shakes her head.
“The last thing I remember is sitting around a bonfire,” she says dreamily. “Beautiful firelight. Then I was walking through the snow and fog, and I wasn’t sure where I was. And I found this poor girl”— she gestures at Alice, who says nothing —“in the snow. She was lying down. I was worried she might be dying. So I got her up, and we started walking, and we found ourselves on your road. The mist was very thick.”
This somehow manages to leave me with more questions than I had before. Margaux doesn’t sound particularly worried as she relates this story to me, as if blacking out and waking up during a snowstorm and saving a stranger from freezing to death happen to her on a daily basis.
“Do you know where Darren and Persephone are?” I ask.
“I’m afraid I haven’t seen them,” Margaux replies. “I could ask the cards if you like.”
“The cards — Oh, yeah.” I’d forgotten all about her tarot pack. “I think we’re OK for now. Are you all right, Alice?”
Alice doesn’t look at me. She doesn’t react in any way. I’m starting to worry about what might’ve happened to her out there. She’s alive but seems almost comatose, like she’s sleeping with her eyes open. Elza just ran into these two in the street outside my house?
“She doesn’t seem ready to speak,” Margaux says.
“She never spoke that much to me anyway,” I say. “Margaux, do you understand where we are?”
“This is your house, isn’t it?”
Is she just brain-fried or something?
“I mean, like, Deadside?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t understand what that means.”
“Do you believe in magic?” I ask.
“I mean, that’s quite a broad question,” she says. “Are you sure you’re all right, Luke? You seem upset.”
“My friend’s leg nearly got torn off. We’re holed up in here, no power, no heating, a snowstorm raging, a night that doesn’t seem to end, and the whole world’s gone crazy. Or haven’t you noticed?”
“We’re in the palm of fate,” Margaux says calmly. Her tattooed hands are folded in her lap. She has to be drunk or something. I’m not sure if she’s taking in anything that I told her. She hasn’t gone crazy like the people in the town square, but something’s clearly wrong with her.
Whatever. I don’t know what either of these two are going to do to help us. I still don’t know what we need to do at all. The Book of Eight is upstairs, my sigil and the witch blade, too. I’m hoping the answer, the way out of this, is inside the Book. Otherwise we might all be lost.
I’m sitting upstairs in my room, with Elza beside me on the beanbag. We’ve got a candle burning in a saucer in the middle of my floor. Bea snuck in next to us and is sleeping by my leg. Elza still has traces of Mark’s blood on her arms and hands. We came up here, away from the others, so I could tell her about my journey to the house, and we could try and decide what to do. The Book of Eight, Dad’s nine rings, and the bone-white witch blade that belonged to Ashana Ahlgren are on the floor in front of us. Candlelight gleams on the eight-pointed golden star embossed on the Book’s cover and the precious stones laid in Dad’s binding rings. The octagonal black stone inset into his sigil, the master ring, reflects no light at all.
“And what did the Oracle say to you?” Elza asks me.
“She said tree and goat no longer love each other. Something like that. Then she said the book was a knot of knots, but I could unravel it like Alexander did.”
“Strange. Tree and goat . . . does she mean this Barrenwhite Tree?”
“Maybe. Goat . . . I don’t know. I’ve heard people call Berkley the Black Goat.”
“OK. So this Tree and Berkley don’t like each other.”
“According to the Oracle. We think.”
“All right,” Elza says. She frowns at the Book of Eight. “And the book . . . what else could she be talking about? It must be the Book of Eight, right?”
“What does she mean, Alexander unraveling knots?”
“Alexander the Great,” Elza says. “He was a conqueror. There was a famous knot, the Gordian knot.”
“A famous knot.”
“Yes,” she says, swatting my ear, “a famous knot. Look, it’s a legend — just go with it. It was an impossibly complex knot, and supposedly if you could untie it, you’d become king of all Asia.”
“Right.”
“And nobody could untangle it, but Alexander the Great cut through the knot with a sword. Lateral thinking, see?”
“Also, I bet whoever was judging the untying was like, This guy’s got a sword and knows how to use it. I won’t say anything about how this is definitely cheating.”
“Well, sure. But back to the Oracle . . . She’s saying the Book of Eight is like the Gordian knot?”
“So I’m meant to hit it with a sword?” I say. “Kirk does have one downstairs.”
“No,” Elza says, “I doubt that’s what she meant. It’s about thinking outside the box.”
“Elza, everything that happens to us is outside the box! We’re so far outside the box that the box is, like, no longer visible to the naked eye. We’re living people stranded in the world of the dead on a New Year’s Eve that doesn’t seem like it’s ever going to end, and we’re trying to work out if it’s the Devil or some kind of evil tree that’s responsible for it all. We left the box behind a long time ago.”
“True,” she says. “Why do oracles always have to speak in riddles? Couldn’t she just tell us what to do?”
“Maybe it has to come from us. Maybe if she just tells us outright, then what she saw won’t happen.”
“So what are we going to do now?”
“There’s only one thing we can do,” I say, putting my hand on the Book of Eight.
“Do you have to? Really?”
“We can’t just sit in this house and wait for all this to blow over. You know that. The only way we can find out about the Barrenwhite Tree and learn what’s really going on tonight is by reading the Book of Eight. If you’ve got another idea, now’s the time to let me know.”
“It just scares me. I don’t like that thing. Who knows how long you’ll be in there for? Who knows what it’ll do to you? Just because you’ve survived twice, that doesn’t mean a third time will be all right! What if it takes you off somewhere and you don’t come back? What then?”
Elza stares into my eyes, unblinking.
“I —”
“What if you leave us? What if I’m stuck here with Holiday and Kirk and Alice and Margaux, and your mind never comes back to us?”
“There’s no choice! There’s nothing else to do!”
“It’s already inside you,” she says. “I hear you speaking at night sometimes, when you’re asleep. You say words I can’t understand.”
I shudder. I know the dreams those words must come from: dreams of stars and whirling sigils, the secret speech of the universe.
“That’s why I should do this,” I say. “It already has me. The pages of the Book aren’t coming out of my mind. Why shouldn’t I look at them one more time, if it might save us all?”
Elza lowers her gaze.
“I know,” she says. “I just worry that it must all be building up in there. Ready to, like . . . burst the dams or something. You’ve already read it twice because of me. I don’t want there to be a third time.”
“Elza, I read the Book of Eight because of Dad and the Devil and the Shepherd and Ash. It’s not your fault. It never was.”
“It doesn’t feel like
it,” Elza says. I hug her tightly, kiss her.
“It’s not.”
She smiles thinly. “I’m dying for a cigarette now,” she says.
“No gum left? I mean, I’d offer to go get some from the corner shop, but . . . you know.”
“I have some,” she says, frowning. “It’s not the same, though. I just miss that scratchy-throat feeling, I guess. Oh, why am I even talking about this now? It’s not important.”
I kiss her forehead. “It’s going to be fine,” I say. “I’ll read the Book, find out what we need to do. We’ll make it out of this.”
“All right,” Elza says.
Bea gets up and wanders over to my bedroom door. She scratches the wood lightly, then noses the crack under the door, whining.
“You OK, Bea?” I ask. She looks back at us, her eyes glimmering in the candlelight.
“Does she need to go outside?” Elza asks.
“Maybe. All right, I’ll take her out the back door.” I stand up, disentangling myself from Elza. I put on my hat, my scarf, my thickest coat. Bea sits by the door and waits. Elza lies back on the beanbag, holding my sigil ring up to the light. She runs a finger over the black octagonal stone and puts it back on the floor with the others.
“Don’t be long,” Elza says. I nod. I open the door, and Bea rushes out onto the dark landing, vanishing into the shadows. I hear her soft little feet on the stairs. I close the bedroom door behind me, blocking off the faint candlelight, and stand there for a moment in darkness. I can hear wind outside, low voices downstairs, the crackle of Bea’s claws on the kitchen tiles. She knows exactly where we’re going. The landing and stairwell are a maze of silhouettes.
I walk downstairs, pausing at the entrance to the living room. Mark is still lying on the sofa, seemingly asleep. If we make it through this, I don’t know how I’ll explain the blood to Mum. Maybe Bea will take the blame somehow. Margaux is sitting cross-legged by the fire. She’s turning tarot cards, but listlessly, without looking down, like she’s not interested in what they’re telling her. I see one with an image of a man hanging from a post by his ankle, another card with the image of two warriors fighting, and a third that shows white stars against darkness. I can see the tattoos coiled on the backs of her hands, soft orange firelight playing over the contours of her fingernails and knuckles as she shuffles the deck. Holiday is sitting in an armchair, watching Mark. Kirk is on the floor with his back up against the wall, one hand resting on the hilt of his sword. Alice is still sitting in her chair at the back of the room, staring at nothing.