Coldfall Wood

by Steven Savile

  “Not that one. That would be too easy. Say my real name,” the fawn demanded. “You know it. I know you do. I can see it in the front of your mind, just waiting for your tongue to curl around it. Do it. Say it. Let me inside you.”

  Danny named him again, a different one this time. He whispered the name that felt right, that belonged to this trickster and this trickster alone: “Robin Goodfellow. The Holly King.”

  In his mind’s eye, it was Danny who had the cloven hooves and a fawn’s legs.

  He owned the name.

  Something was happening to him. He saw the wisps of fog curl back away from the gate into the Annwyn. That he knew the true name of his Otherworld prison—the Ande-Dubnos—was proof enough that by naming him the god-borne creature was one with him now.

  With that acceptance of what he was becoming the pain faded.

  Danny raised his hands to his face, not trying to push his attacker away, simply to weep with joy at having found a way back here after all this time.

  They were russet colored now with the dirt of the forest floor smeared into them.

  The Song of Albion swelled, accentuated by the incredible cathedral acoustics of the wildwood. He felt its harmonies in his blood. He knew every note instinctively. The panpipes fused seamlessly with the melody of the forest creating something at once beautiful, haunting, and greater than the sum of its parts.

  He became the song and the song became him.

  Long is the day and long is the night, and long is the waiting of Arawn.

  Arawn, the Lord of the Underworld hell he had just escaped. Arawn, the antlered man. Arawn, the Horned God. He knew things he couldn’t possibly know. He understood. Tommy had said the dimgate was open. It was the way for the children of the Wild Hunt to return, and marked Arawn as the Once and Future King, with his curse to protect the land, to stand at the moment of her greatest need.

  “My life for yours,” Danny breathed, understanding that he would be no more; that he was becoming the host to the ancient trickster pressing down upon his chest. There was no Danny Ash anymore. He felt those words reverberate deep within him, calling out to him. “I will rise,” Robin Goodfellow promised the Horned God, becoming in that breath the last of his champions.

  His promise, his pledge, that Albion would recapture its lost beauty. It was that or leave her to wither and die, and with her the last of the earth magic that had dwindled to virtually nothing in the years since Arawn and his champions had last stridden this green and pleasant land. He looked at it now, in the stolen memories of Danny Ash, and saw the monstrosity that their land had become with the choking concrete and suffocating steel where there had been ancient wildwoods nourishing the earth magic. He made another vow: those towers would fall. They would be swept away before the Wild Hunt. All those man-made markers of civilization would fall so that the natural beauty of the land could flourish. It was the only way Arawn’s champions could bring forth fresh magic from the land. There needed to be an end for there to be a beginning. As with the night, so with the day. Seasons end. It was time to usher in the Kingdom of Summer.

  Robin stood slowly, rearranging the scraps of his torn shirt, and pulled up his jeans in an attempt at modesty he didn’t really feel; it was a last lingering leftover from the young man he had been.

  The children bowed down to him, falling to their hands and knees in worship, pressing their temples to the earth, echoes of the great song in the chant they offered the coming dawn. Behind them the Gatekeeper matched their benedictions, his own voice adding to the Song of Albion.

  Robin raised his hand, causing them to fall quiet.

  There was only the music now and the sound of the rain falling down through the leaves.

  The Knucker lumbered into the grove; its immense bulk dwarfing the fairy ring as it cast its long shadow.

  “Come to me. Brothers, Sisters, mine,” Robin said, “Our wait is over. The time is upon us. This land, our land, needs us.”

  “We shall rise,” the children said as one, answering the call.

  He smiled as the first blush of dawn touched the sky, bringing an end to the Time Between Times.

  “We shall rise,” he agreed.

  PART 2

  Albions mountains run with blood, the cries of war & of tumult

  Resound into the unbounded night, every Human perfection

  Of mountain & river & city, are small & wither’d & darken’d

  —WILLIAM BLAKE, JERUSALEM

  17

  Julie found the old man exactly where he’d last left him, sitting on the bench outside Ravenshill Cemetery. It was easy to imagine that Damiola had been in the same spot for six months without fail—sunrise to sunset, sunset to sunrise, and all the times between—because he wasn’t a normal man.

  Julie walked toward the wrought-iron gates with their rusted raven’s wings. He’d been thinking about what he was going to say all the way here, and still didn’t know how he was supposed to ask for help, never mind the kind of reception he’d get from the old man.

  Damiola dipped grubby fingers into the newspaper wrapper to pluck out a cold chip and stuffed it into his mouth. To anyone who happened to walk down this narrow street in this quiet part of the city he would have looked like any of the city’s eight thousand homeless people with his fingerless gloves and layer upon layer of torn and frayed coats swaddling his skeletal frame. Damiola’s unkempt beard offered a home to remnants of dinners scavenged and consumed and his body odor was fierce enough to put up a physical barrier between him and the rest of the world. But looks could be deceiving and that was the essential misdirection of the magician’s art.

  Julie nodded in greeting as the old man recognized him. He didn’t move to make room on the bench, forcing Julie to remain standing.

  “I didn’t expect to see you again,” Cadmus Damiola said.

  “I could say the same,” Julie agreed.

  He noticed a telltale flicker of movement in his eyes, an involuntary twitch that had him look toward the cemetery.

  “Whatever it is you think I can help you with, Officer Gennaro, I can’t. Whatever it is you think you want to know, you don’t. Believe me, the world is better that way. You shouldn’t be here.” His voice, speech patterns, and comportment made a lie of his derelict frame. “It would be better for both of us if you just moved along and left me here to rot, if I even can.”

  “It would be,” Julie agreed. “But we both know that’s not going to happen.”

  “We can dream,” the old man said, almost wistfully.

  Julie laughed; he couldn’t help himself. “I could say I’d missed you, old man, but that’d make a liar out of me.”

  “And given you’ve come cap in hand, that’s not a good thing.”

  “One question, then I’ll go.”

  “One answer is all you’ll get.”

  “Sounds fair to me. So, my question: Does the phrase ‘The Horned God is awake’ mean anything to you?”

  “Should it?”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Did they teach you nothing at school?”

  “For argument’s sake let’s say they didn’t.”

  “Cernunnos. Kernunno. Karnayna. Janicot. The antlered man. Herne the Hunter. Lord of the Wild Things. He has many names, but a singular nature. Potent. Virile. The Horned God is born in winter, impregnates the Earth Mother during the heady months of spring, is Lord of the Summer, then dies during the autumn and winter months only to be reborn, birthed by the goddess at Yule, completing the cycle. His aspects can be divided into different deities at different times of the year, including the Oak King and the Holly King, among others. He is among the eldest of the gods still worshiped in some form today, known to his adherents as the Lord of Death. He rules the Summerland where souls reside as they await rebirth. In the old faith that place was sometimes known as the Annwyn, and its master was given the name Arawn. He is the Lord of the Wild Hunt, and his horns may well be where we draw our Christian impressions of t
he devil from. Consider that today’s lesson, and your one answer.”

  “The devil?”

  “The devil,” the old man repeated, picking at a bit of gristle that had stuck between his teeth.

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that.”

  “Why do anything?”

  “Because five kids have been mumbling that phrase over and over since dusk yesterday. An old woman woke up in a hospital bed after years in a coma, offering the same portentous warning; an old man with his throat full of tree came back to life in front of my own eyes; and I hit a naked man with antlers in my car last night. That’s why.”

  “One answer, Officer Gennaro. Now one piece of advice, given freely: walk away. This is not your fight.”

  “Five kids,” Julie repeated, because that had to mean something, even to an old man like Damiola. “They’re locked inside themselves; they can’t express anything beyond the warning that the Horned God is awake. If you know anything that might help us, you’ve got to share it. You bent time, for fuck’s sake. You made a prison out of a tomb and locked Lockwood out of time. I can’t think of another person better placed to understand what is going on here.”

  The old man inclined his head slightly, tilting it to the right as he studied Julie. “It wasn’t that simple,” he said, which wasn’t an answer to the question Julie had posed—but then he’d only promised one answer, hadn’t he? “I didn’t bend time. No one has that kind of power. And Lockwood isn’t out of time, that’s just a convenient way of thinking about what happened.”

  “Okay, and this is relevant to the Horned God how?”

  “The Underworld. The Annwyn. Glass Town. They’re aspects of the same thing.”

  “Are you trying to tell me you trapped Seth Lockwood in Hell?”

  “If you believe in Hell.”

  “Who—or what—the hell are you? Jesus Christ, you talk about this stuff like it’s normal.”

  This time it was the old man’s turn to chuckle, but he didn’t answer, at least not directly. “Perhaps it is normal where I come from,” he offered, as Julie realized what he’d said.

  “So, what are we talking about really, if not Hell and Heaven. Parallel worlds? Is that it?”

  “It’s not as simple as that, at least not in my case. It’s not worlds, just world, singular. The Annwyn. Though it has many other names, the Underworld, the Otherworld, the Summerland, the Netherworld, Tartarus, limbo, purgatory, the Inferno, the Kingdom of the Dead. And like its master, it has a singular nature. Do you understand the concept of Newton’s Laws?”

  “You mean gravity and stuff?”

  “Action and reaction,” the old man said.

  “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,” Julie said, remembering the phrase without remembering where he’d first heard it.

  “Think of it in terms of our world and the Annwyn, and the nature of contact interactions. Whenever these two worlds interact with each other they exert forces on each other—in Newtonian terms, action and reaction. When I sit on this bench I exert a downward force upon it, but simultaneously it’s exerting an upward force on my backside. It’s all about pairs. Two objects interact, two forces act. Take that bird,” he pointed at the starling walking along the iron railing beside them. “Its wings push the air downward, but because of mutual interaction, the air is pushing the bird upward, making it possible to fly.”

  “Okay,” Julie said. The concept wasn’t a complicated one, but the implications were. “So, what you are saying is we did this? By opening a doorway into the other world to banish Lockwood we opened a door out of there, too?”

  “And the Horned God stepped through. One for one. Equal and opposite.”

  Julie remembered where he’d seen the words one for one before. They were burned into the floorboards of Josh’s flat in Rotherhithe, the place Josh had inherited from his grandfather with its walls of crazy, including one dedicated to the old ways, an incredible tree that he’d seen echoed on the door of Damiola’s workshop. One for one. Boone had worked it out. He knew what it meant, and the implications of what they’d done.

  “You said five children have taken up the chant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then he is looking to bring through five of his champions. Equal and opposite. Five souls find themselves drawn into the Annwyn so that five others may leave. As foretold, at the time of the land’s greatest need he will return. Arawn is here. That is what it means. The Horned God is awake. And it is all my fault.”

  “How do we fight him?”

  “We don’t.”

  “There has to be something we can do. We can’t just sit here and watch the world burn. Equal and opposite, right? What if we free Lockwood?”

  “Arawn is already here. It would do no good. The interaction has already happened, the forces played out. We can’t just take it back. I never should have indulged Joshua in his vengeance. It was stupid. And now look where it has led us.” He seemed to think of something then. “You are right, equal and opposite,” the old man said, as though it explained everything. “As long as Lockwood is alive in there—or whatever passes for life in the Underworld—there is a link between the pair. That is the only answer you need to take from this meeting, Officer Gennaro. Equal and opposite. Five for five. While the champions live, the children are lost to that other place. To bring them back, the link has to be broken.”

  “The champions must die?”

  “Or if you look at it from the other side of the Newtonian equation, for the champions to live here in our world without fear of being dragged back to the Annwyn the children must die,” Cadmus Damiola said. “They are in grave danger.”

  Julie finally understood the lesson the old man had been trying to teach him. “How do you know this stuff?”

  “It is why I am still here,” he said, again, not offering much in the way of an answer. Did he mean why he was here, outside the cemetery, watching, or why he was here in London, now, waiting? He was too intimately familiar with this stuff not to be a part of it, somehow. But before Julie could press him, the old man said, “Now, tell me about this resurrected man?”

  Julie told him all there was to tell, about the call out and the weird carapace of bark that seemed to be some sort of cocoon around the dead man’s body, and how when Ellie had accidentally touched it the bark had begun to flake away, exposing far-too-young skin for a man who was supposed to be in his nineties. How he’d found the leaf between his lips and pulled the sapling out of his throat, allowing the man to breathe again. He repeated as much of the man’s words as he could remember, though to be honest he was vague on most of them, and fixated on the threat that the returning deity had marked him and just what that might mean. “We took Viridius to the hospital to get him checked out. Ellie insisted on a full psychiatric work up. I didn’t have the heart to tell her the old guy was sane; it is the world that’s fucked up,” Julie said, earning a chuckle from the old magician.

  “His name was Viridius? Who else but the god of spring should be born again by pulling a branch in bloom from his throat?”

  “A god?”

  “Well, he was worshiped once, so what would you call him?”

  Julie shook his head.

  “And he is returned?”

  Julie nodded.

  “Well, that is something, at least. Perhaps we have an ally in this?”

  “If they let him out of the psychiatric ward.”

  “I warned young Joshua that there would be consequences,” Damiola said. “Now we must face them.”

  18

  There was a scar in the Rothery where Gideon Lockwood’s pub The Hunter’s Horns had burned to the ground. Corrugated iron fences had been erected around it, covered with posters for concerts that had happened months ago, and layers of inventive graffiti. The police station was less than three hundred yards away.

  Julie parked in the underground garage and trudged up the ill-lit stairs to the station. The concrete stairwell reeke
d of piss. It was vile. Astringent. Someone had snuck into the garage and left a message for the constabulary. Julie took some small comfort from knowing that if he was ever on fire, there was at least one local who would do the right thing.

  Smiling tiredly, he punched in his four-digit code and when the lock clicked in response, pushed open the security door.

  “Evening, handsome,” WPC Melissa Banks said, seeing him from across the room. “The boss is looking for you.”

  “Which can’t be good,” he said, changing direction midstride.

  “You might be surprised.”

  “Will I be?”

  “Nope.”

  “Didn’t think so. Cheers, Mel.” He pushed through the fire doors to the backstairs. So much for five minutes in and out, and then off home to bed. He climbed two at a time, meeting the Chief Inspector halfway, meaning she’d called up to let Tenaka know he was on his way up. Traitor. He caught himself smiling as he looked up at the boss. It was a power play. Tenaka was only five foot six inches, so he liked to catch officers on the stairs where he could talk down to them.

  “Gennaro, just the man I was looking for.” The man’s voice was like grinding stones.

  “Sir?”

  “Underwood and Kahn, bad business. Any closer to finding the Kirmani boy? It’d be good to get this thing wrapped up before things turn ugly.”

  “There hasn’t been a single sighting of Jamshid Kirmani since he fled the boxing club,” Julie admitted. It bugged him. The kid wasn’t smart enough to simply disappear. In this day and age it took serious nous to cover every track, and until a few hours ago Jamshid Kirmani was an ordinary kid, not Ronnie Biggs.

  “Known associates? School friends? Anyone who might harbor him?”

  “We’re running down leads at the moment. Our best bet’s the family. We’ve got them under surveillance. We’re hoping that Kirmani will reach out to them for help. He can’t run forever. He’s just a kid, and he’s running scared.”