World's end taom-1

by Mark Chadbourn

  Finally they'd located enough firewood and Marianne helped Church carry it back to the camp. Ruth and Laura weren't anywhere to be seen so they lit the fire together and made some tea. Oddly, Church found himself talking about his own Marianne with an openness that he hadn't managed since her death. The young girl was an easy listener and she seemed to have a handle on his emotions that belied her years. When she said goodbye, with a promise to bring them milk at breakfast, he was sorry to see her go.

  Night still fell quickly at that time of year, and there was a chill to it which made a mockery of the warmth of the day. Ruth and Laura had reached an uneasy, unspoken truce; enough to follow directions from the garage to a local shop where they had bought enough provisions for the evening meal and breakfast: some vegetables for a stew, rice, bacon, eggs and bread, although Laura revealed she was a strict vegetarian. They cooked around 7.30 p.m., keeping close to the fire for warmth, speaking in voices that were subconsciously low. The conversation was muted. The darkness among the trees seemed deep and disturbing; none of them would admit how scary the quiet countryside had become.

  While the food bubbled over the fire, Laura plugged her computer into her mobile. "Thought it would be worthwhile to check up on some of those lines the old guy had been spinning you before he caught his ticket to Neverland."

  When she booted the computer up, Church noticed her desktop wallpaper was a strange design of interlinking trees. "What does that mean?" he asked.

  "It's a design. It means I like looking at it," she sneered. "Shit. The battery's getting low. I'll need to find somewhere to charge it soon. Anyway, earlier I found this site called the Charles Fort Institute, which is like this massive online reference library and archive for all sorts of bizarre shit. They've got lots of links to folklore sites. So why don't we start with the pooch." The screen jumped to The Black Dog Reporter. "Here we are: Black Shuck. Shuck comes from scucca, the Anglo-Saxon for demon." She scrolled quickly down the page. "There's an account of a great storm in East Anglia in 1577 when a black demon dog 'or the Devil in such a likeness' appeared in Bungay Church, leaving two parishioners dead at their prayers and another `as shrunken as a piece of leather scorched in a hot fire.' Loads of tales from all over the country, but he's usually described as big as a calf with saucer-sized eyes that weep green or red fire, and he only comes from his secret lair at dusk. In East Anglia when someone is dying they still say `The Black Dog is at his heels.' Generally seen as a portent of something much worse, death or disaster."

  "Hang on, if it only comes out at dusk, how come you saw it in daylight in Salisbury?" Ruth asked.

  "Maybe he's found a good sunscreen," Laura said.

  "The tales might simply have it wrong. Because he was only seen at night, the people thought he could only come out then," Church suggested.

  Ruth sighed. "Some come out by day, some are nocturnal. This is all too confusing."

  "Nothing about how to drive it away?" Church asked hopelessly.

  "Well, being as how this stuff is generally regarded as not real, there's not much of a user's guide," she replied tartly. "Nothing in the folklore to link him to the Wild Hunt either. But I guess we're in uncharted territory here."

  "What have you got on the Hunt?"

  After she'd jumped to the next site, Church tried to read her screen, but she moved it so he couldn't see. "Lots of conflicting stories. It comes from the Norse tradition, long before the Vikings or Christianity came to Britain." She scanned down to the relevant section. "Odin was supposed to race across the sky on stormy winter evenings with a pack of baying hounds. Anyone who saw the Hunt could be carried off to a distant land, while anyone who spoke to the Huntsman died. Later, Odin's place was taken by the Devil, but the Wild Huntsman has also been seen as Herne the Hunter or Sir Francis Drake, who used to ride in a black coach led by headless horses across Dartmoor. The pack is called Yeth Hounds or Wish Hounds, another bunch of demon dogs, and they say you can hear their screams on the wind as they hunt down the souls of unbaptised babies. Cute. The Wild Huntsman's also known as the Erl-King, which is some mistranslation of an old Danish legend about the King of the Elves leading the Wild Hunt."

  "We've got to remember the legends aren't the truth," Church cautioned. "They're just stories twisted from the few facts people recall-"

  "And isn't that a relief," Laura interrupted. "Demon hounds whisking poor bastards off to some kind of Purgatory. Portents of death and destruction. We're still not in line for Big Fun, are we?"

  "Can't you find anything useful?" Ruth said with irritation.

  "Sorry, I forgot you're a completely useless waste of space. It really is all down to me." She logged off the net and clicked off her computer.

  Ruth didn't bite. "Okay, we've suddenly been swamped with every supernatural creature known to man, but what do you think is really going on?" she said to Church. "These Night Walkers are obviously manoeuvring in the shadows. I mean, why were they all at that depot? Are they all getting regular jobs? I don't think so."

  Church nodded in agreement. "Exactly. If they're so powerful, why haven't they made any move yet?"

  "Maybe they're planning a first strike that will wipe us off the board in one fell swoop," Laura noted.

  "Whatever they're planning, it's something so important they can't risk us messing it up."

  Ruth looked out into the encroaching dark. "They could be all over the country, just mixing with people, and nobody any the wiser. That funny-looking bloke you always think is a bit odd at the bus stop. The weirdo staring at you in the supermarket. Everywhere."

  "That's a good recipe for paranoia." Laura lay back so she could see the moon coming up through the trees. "There's going to be the war to end all wars and nobody knows."

  After dinner, Laura handed out the beers she had bought and they discussed what lay ahead. Church was surprised how optimistic the other two seemed, despite everything, although he knew his view had been coloured by his vision of his own death in the Watchtower. Laura had been entrusted with the stone, although they had never discussed it; it just seemed natural as she had been the one to find it. As their conversation turned to the possible locations of the other talismans, she pulled the stone out from the small rucksack where she had decided to keep it.

  "It's a weird thing," she said. "I still can't get over the feel of it. It's kind of creepy."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You'll know if you touch it. Here, cop a feel."

  She handed it over to Church for the first time. But as his fingers brushed it, an ear-splitting shriek burst from the stone and he dropped it like a hot coal. "What the hell was that?" he asked in shock.

  They all looked at it for a moment before Laura picked it up. "Care to try that again?" Laura held it out to him again.

  Church hesitated, then gingerly brushed his fingers over the stone's surface. The shriek erupted immediately.

  "Jesus, why don't you set off a flare so everyone knows where we are!" Ruth protested.

  "What does it mean?" Church said curiously. "You try it," he said to Ruth.

  She took it from Laura, passed it from hand to hand, then gave it back. "Looks like it doesn't like men," Laura said to Church. "Or maybe you've just got clammy palms."

  Church felt suddenly cold. "The woman in the Watchtower said it had the power to recognise the true king of the land."

  Laura burst out laughing. "King Church the First! That's a good one!"

  Church shook his head. "Don't be ridiculous."

  "You can't get away from the fact it only reacts to you," Ruth said.

  "I don't want to think about that. With this kind of stuff we can spend forever guessing. Who knows what any of it means?"

  Laura was still laughing coarsely. "The king! With his royal carriage, the Nissan Bluebird!"

  Her mockery was so sharp they couldn't help joining in the laughter. It eased some of the tension which had been collecting around them.

  They spent the next couple of hours
drinking beer, talking quietly and feeding the fire from the rapidly diminishing woodpile; a cold wind threatened a storm. The conversation never strayed far from their mission, as they called it (ironically at first, but with increasing seriousness); even Laura's attempts to keep the chat superficial failed.

  Shortly after 9 p.m., Ruth felt a change come over her. It started as a simple shiver that reached from deep within her, followed by a prickling of the skin that suggested the onset of some virus; a moment or two later she heard, or thought she did, her name whispered somewhere among the trees. Church and Laura continued to talk in hushed voices, oblivious to whatever had alerted her. Yet despite their situation, she didn't feel frightened. The pull was too strong to resist; she told the others she was going to stretch her legs and slipped off into the trees.

  As she walked, she realised she couldn't turn back, even though some distant part of her was warning of the dangers of straying too far from the fire; obliquely, she recognised something was in her head, dragging her on and calming her at the same time.

  She had wandered barely a few yards when she regretted it. The light from the fire faded quickly, as if it were being leached by the dark which quickly enfolded her. The noises seemed unnatural and disturbing; the creak of the branches above her head too loud, out of time with the gusts of the wind, as if they had a life of their own, the arms of living tree-gods reaching down to her; crunches in the undergrowth, near then far, which could have been small animals but sounded like footsteps circling her; whispers scarcely reaching her ears, dispossessed words fading out before she could make sense of them. Within moments she felt Church, Laura and all of civilisation were lost to her; she was in a dark, elemental world that considered her an interloper.

  The flap of large wings made her jump and a second later an owl swooped close to her head, its face ghostly white against the dark. The owl shrieked once, sounding more human than bird, and a second later the trees were alive with light. Tiny white flames flickered as if myriad candles had been placed among the branches and for an instant Ruth had a breathtaking vision, as if the stars had been brought down to earth.

  A figure stood next to an ancient, twisted hawthorn bush, its shape distorting amongst the shadows. As Ruth drew closer, she saw it was the young girl she had seen in the park in Salisbury-although she knew in her heart it was neither young nor girl-a cloak of what appeared to be thousands of interlocking leaves billowing in the wind around her.

  Ruth felt drawn to the apparition as if she were in some hypnotic state, yet at the same time she was consumed by fear and awe: the figure was so alien. She knew, on some level she couldn't understand, that the girl had some specific interest in her; she could feel the subtle strands of manipulation in her head, the sense that the girl was trying to communicate something important.

  "He is missing. The night to my day, the winter to my summer." The words came out without her mouth moving; it was the same thing she had said in the park in Salisbury.

  Who is missing? Ruth thought. And what has it got to do with me?

  As if in answer, the quality of the light changed and Ruth could see something large crashing and stumbling among the undergrowth behind the girl. It was a vision, not reality, primal and terrifying. Ruth caught a glimpse of powerful muscles, and a shape slightly larger than a man, but with antlers curving wickedly from his head. Beyond him the small grove of trees went on forever.

  Whatever moved through the trees made snorting noises and began to circle closer, but still beyond the circle of light thrown by the flames in the branches, so it was impossible to see it fully. As the vision disappeared, the girl's flowing dress seemed to fade beneath her cloak, leaving her naked. Her skin was almost translucent, milky like the moon, her breasts small, her belly rounded, hips shapely. Ruth felt an incipient sexuality in the air, as if it were electricity and the girl a generator.

  "Find him and then you must join us. Become our daughter. Our champion."

  Ruth stared into her mesmerising eyes, trying to comprehend. The girl reached out to Ruth, but the thought of touching those alien hands filled her with such dread, the spell was broken. She started to back away.

  The owl that had startled her earlier suddenly swept down into the space between them and stared at Ruth with eyes that were unnervingly intelligent; it made her shudder.

  "A companion," the girl continued, "a familiar, to guide you through the dark. When you see him, remember me."

  She began to say something else, but Ruth couldn't bear to stay any longer. And then she was running wildly through the trees, terrified by the knowledge that she had been recognised by something unknowable, and filled with the awful belief that she would never be allowed to return to the life she once knew.

  "Are you making any sense of this?" Laura lounged back against the twisted trunk of an old ash tree, supping on the last of the beers. In her eyes, Church saw a sharp wit, incisive, and dark things moved beneath it.

  "I try not to make sense of anything any more. If you thought about all the things happening to us in any kind of rational way, you'd go mad. The only way is to just deal with it as it happens."

  She shrugged, looked away into the dark. Since Ruth had gone for her walk, she seemed to have sloughed off some of the superficiality and mocking humour; for the first time Church felt a glimmer of the real Laura. "Sort of screws up the belief system, doesn't it?"

  "Belief," Church said with surprise. "What do you mean?"

  "You know, God and all that. Not much in the Bible about this."

  "You believe the Bible then?" Church asked cautiously.

  "I've got no time for any religious dickheads," she said brutally. In that simple sentence, Church sensed dark currents running, but she made it clear it was something she wasn't going to discuss further.

  "When you get into the historical truth of that whole Bible thing, it's hard to keep any faith," he said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, you know, how the Bible was put together by a council of the religious establishment from all the various texts lying around. Some got put in, some got left out-the Apocrypha-so it presented a simple, uncomplicated teaching guide for the masses, and a unifying cosmology. Politics. So even if the Bible is God's word, it was edited by men. How reliable does that make it?"

  She shrugged. "Maybe it's just like all these legends you keep pontificating about-some truth, lots of crazy stories trying to explain it." She drained her can, carefully slipping it into the rubbish sack. "Or maybe there's nothing out there at all. The No-Point Law-the perfect justification for staying in bed every day until we finally fade out."

  "That sounds a little bleak."

  "You think there's a meaning to it all? To all this we're going through?" Church was surprised; she sounded almost desperate.

  "I don't know. A few weeks back, I thought there was no meaning to anything. Now I'm not so sure. We're suddenly living in a world where anything can happen. These days it's impossible to be sure, full stop." He paused thoughtfully. "Maybe we just think too much."

  The hoot of an owl made them both jump and they laughed nervously. Although he knew Laura irritated the hell out of Ruth, he felt remarkably comfortable with her. He enjoyed the spikiness of her character, and there was something oddly moving about the vulnerability he sensed beneath the patina of hardness; he was surprised Ruth couldn't see it too.

  Laura cracked her knuckles, then seemed to become aware of the night's cold. With a shiver she moved closer to the fire, sitting crosslegged next to Church. "So tell me," she said, the faint mocking smile returning once more, "have you and Miss Goody Two-Shoes done the monkey dance yet?"

  Church looked at her in bafflement at the sudden switch in conversation. "It's not like that. We're friends."

  "Come on! Don't tell me you don't realise she's desperate to get into your Calvins?"

  Church shook his head forcibly. "She's never shown any sign-"

  "What do you expect? A big, flashing neon heart? Believ
e me, she's yearning to get to your loins, boy. So what are you going to do about it?"

  Church shifted uncomfortably. "There are things you don't know-"

  "Well, tell me then."

  It was obvious she wasn't going to back down, so he reluctantly told her about Marianne. Yet as he spoke he became aware that something had changed; the rawness he felt inside whenever he discussed Marianne was gone. He felt sad, but not devastated-for the first time since her death. His hand went to the Black Rose in his pocket, gently caressing the petals, closing around the stem. Had the rose freed him from the despair, or was it because he knew some part of Marianne still existed in whatever place the dead dwelled? A sign that the new Dark Age was not all bad.

  "So you haven't had sex for two years?" Laura said insensitively when he'd finished. "What's the matter? You've got a phobia about it now?"

  He felt his cheeks redden, with irritation rather than embarrassment. "When you've been in love you don't automatically jump to someone new once a vacancy arises."

  "Look, I'm sure she was a nice girl and all that, but she's dead. Get over it. What are you going to do? Spend the rest of your days living in the past while life passes you by? I'm sure all this moping around was touching and romantic in the first few months after she died. But let's face it, it's pretty pathetic at this stage. And not a very attractive quality for the chicks."

  He snorted in exasperation.

  "Ooh. Have I touched a nerve?" Her triumphant grin made him fume, but it was instantly tempered and once again he caught a glimpse of some honest emotion moving behind. "You don't want to cut yourself off too much. In these days, with everything falling apart, you need to have someone close to you, know what I mean?"

  "Yes. I know." He looked her in the eye. She didn't smile, but there was a faint shift of something in her face that suggested they both recognised the subtext of their conversation.

  Ruth saw it too. She was standing in the shadows amongst the trees after trying to find her way back to the camp. She had been desperate to tell them of her unsettling experience, but her emotions had diffused after hearing Church speak about her in terms that suggested little more than acquaintanceship and seeing Laura's obvious-at least to her-attempt at seduction. She felt more excluded than ever as she watched them looking deep into each other's eyes, locked in their own world. She hovered, undecided, for a moment, then hugged her arms around her and turned to walk back into the night.