Coldfall Wood

by Steven Savile

  Damiola had been sure he was a faker as well as a fakir.

  He’d been wrong, of course.

  The man had a gift, and the Eternal, far from being some exotic Tibetan wise man, was every bit as British as the land itself. Rather than live at the top of some unconquerable mountain, the old man made his home in the ancient wildwood on the outskirts of London. His name was Viridius. It was funny how things moved in circles. He was back at that name again. Viridius, the god of spring.

  His own act might have been little more than smoke and mirrors in the early days, but Alkeran offered him his first glimpse of what could only be called true magic, the greatest of which allowed him the grace to leave his body and soul walk a short way.

  Alkeran had needed to ingest some sort of root to divide body and soul. When chewed, the root possessed hallucinogenic qualities, but when left to dissolve slowly on the tongue it seeped into the bloodstream and allowed the fakir to leave his flesh behind, if only for a short while.

  That was what Damiola needed to do now, but without the aid of the hallucinogenic root.

  All he had was his faith and desperation.

  He needed to believe that the gods of every season were listening now, and cared.

  He saw the face of the divine slowly begin to take shape in the pattern of feathers, ignoring the fact that he couldn’t possibly see anything in that kind of detail from where he was, and concentrated on it and only it, until he felt himself drifting and realized he was no longer looking up at the crow but down at his own body unmoving on the grass below, seeing the world through the eyes of the black bird.

  A silver umbilicus glittered a trail down to his body.

  His eyes were open, staring blindly into the great cosmos, whilst Damiola stared back the other way.

  It was a dizzying dislocation.

  There was no one moment when his spirit began to soar. No silence between heartbeats when his spirit slowly separated from his flesh, no ghostly transition where he rose up, up, and away to fuse with the consciousness of the bird. Damiola felt himself drift farther away from his body, the cemetery falling away vertiginously beneath him until his body was a speck, a smudge of black on the ground, and the canyons of the city streets began to take on shape and form around him. The rooftops did little to hide the poverty to the left of him against the glittering glass wealth of the offices to the right. One hundred feet, two hundred, four, five hundred, up and up, spiraling ever higher. He banked to the left, gliding on a warm current of air.

  Damiola’s breathing turned ragged, coming in short, sharp gasps despite the fact that the last thing he needed to do was breathe; it was all an illusion, a memory of the spirit. He was free of the burden of the flesh.

  He looked out across the rooftops of the city, following the zigzag of tiles and flashing as they moved street by street down toward the water. He didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, only that there had to be some hint, something that marked the gateway that had allowed the wildlings into this world. He needed to find it, and he needed to close it before more of them could come through. He envisioned the Wild Hunt coming: first the champions, then behind them the dancing dead, the chorus of myth and legend, the ethereal figures riding out of the mist and onto the streets of London intent on razing the place to the ground. That way lay madness.

  He willed himself toward the river, imagining the slow beating of wings to carry him south. The streets rolled by beneath him as the glittering umbilicus stretched out ever thinner.

  He could feel it, he realized.

  The other side. The Annwyn.

  It was like a black hole trying to draw him in.

  Its pull on his spirit was relentless. Instinctively, he pushed back against it, and had to stop himself fleeing as fear threatened to overwhelm him. It was the bird’s influence on his personality. He had to fight it to fly on. He’d been naïve enough to expect to see some bright, burning wrongness blazing through the streets, a glowing silver arch lighting up the sky to mark the gateway, something like that. But of course it was never going to be so obvious, why would it be?

  He saw the trees of Coldfall Wood and the rise of Cane Hill in the distance; the natural beauty of the world was laid bare by the deep wounds in the concrete that allowed them to shine through. And they were glorious.

  Mother, the thought bled into his mind. He had no idea where it had originated, but it felt right.

  Damiola willed himself to move, struggling with the dizzying sensation of the riverbank rushing along below. All of the people scurried around like ants beneath him, oblivious to his soul. He knew the city, or had known it, but things had changed beyond all recognition since his grand illusion had opened Glass Town.

  He changed his angle of flight, banking and soaring.

  He imagined he could feel the wind on his face, but of course he couldn’t.

  The silver line shimmered all the way back to the graveyard, stretched thin. Fissures had already begun to appear in the umbilicus. The black lines shot through the silver rope of his soul. The farther he ventured from his flesh, the more tenuous the link would become. Venture too far from the body and the likelihood of returning to a corpse was virtually assured; the autonomic memories controlling the breathing and heartbeat wouldn’t go on functioning indefinitely. They would slowly begin to fail without the proximity of the soul to keep the organs vital and then he would be cast adrift. Those black lines were the first hints of necrosis stealing in.

  Damiola had never pushed it more than a couple of minutes before, but he had to ignore the cracks slowly opening in the tether and focus on the cityscape beneath him, understanding as he did that he didn’t need to see the gateway to find it, all he had to do was surrender to its tidal pull—and with that realization the streets sped away beneath him, all those lives racing by as old industrial red-brick chimneys reared up before the magician only to disappear in his wake as he was drawn over the water and on toward Coldfall Wood.

  Where are you?

  The Rothery looked like Hell from above; everything broken, everything in the grips of decay, weeds growing in vibrant green through the cracks in the pavement, shopping trolleys abandoned in the stream to rust and along with the detritus of everyday, carrier bags, the frame of a bike, the wheel rims stripped of rubber so the spokes jutted out, snagging wrappers from candy bars and a fluttering of black fabric that might have been panties or a bra once upon a time, before all of that innocence was lost.

  He looked away from the stream, toward the trees, and realized how majestic the old wood must have been before the city came. Even in the years he’d fast-forwarded through, the forest had shrunk in half and half again with the houses encroaching on its heart.

  Damiola saw the light through the dense undergrowth of the ancient wood; at first it appeared to be a scattering of coins on the ground, the silver glow filtered through the leaves, but as his spirit neared, Damiola saw the first curls of mist and knew what he was seeing. The silver glow emanated from the dimgate.

  Something stirred down in the foliage.

  He needed a different angle to better see into the clearing, so banked and rolled, angling his flight to skim along the canopy of leaves. They rustled in his wake, more agitated than they had any right to be from his passage. The movement rippled outward from the circle of the fairy stones, and the wooden warrior that in turn circled the stones.

  It was a magnificent creature, unlike anything he had ever imagined even in his darkest nightmares—and it was absolutely a creature of those dark places, capable of instilling fear bone deep in all who set eyes upon it’s twisted grace. The wooden boughs of its rib cage bowed as the beast breathed, alive. The desiccated leaves still clinging to those boughs rustled, a thousand tiny voices filled with the fears of the great wood going back generations.

  The Horned God stood beside his pet, looking up at Damiola. The Knucker crouched beside the antlered man, a boy kneeling at his feet. Arawn held a rowan staff in one hand, while the othe
r rested on the boy’s chest, over his heart. He felt the intensity of Arawn’s loathing all the way back to his bones where they lay in the old cemetery.

  It was the first time he had set eyes upon a god—and there was no doubting that whatever the antlered man was, he wasn’t merely flesh and blood, he was something very much more than that—and it reduced him, stripping away the years of experience and knowledge to leave an infantilized caricature in the magician’s place.

  Damiola was afraid.

  He wasn’t thinking about flapping his stolen wings anymore; all he could think about was bolting, getting as far away as fast as humanly possible, as Arawn’s voice sounded in his mind:

  I see you …

  The words chilled the blood in his borrowed body. He couldn’t fight against them. The air around Damiola chilled as it filled with a weird static charge that thrilled at the promise of the Horned God’s magic. He recognized it as the precursor of real magic; his own spells had a unique signature scent that made it easy for other practitioners to recognize the caster. In his case it was cinnamon. A sweet smell. He’d met others who smelled of freshly baked bread, of vanilla, of grass, and darker fragrances, oil and petrol and smoke. But Arawn’s magic was an ancient one, its signature the heady scent of the forest itself.

  It was overpowering.

  Dizzying.

  Damiola felt his grip on the bird’s mind slipping.

  In that moment—trapped in the heart of the Horned God’s earth magic—he saw the ghostly white stag seem to leap through Arawn’s flesh to meet his challenge head on. The stag charged through the clearing, negotiating the broken stones on the ground, and launched itself up to meet Damiola’s crow.

  The symbolism was as old as time itself, the white stag and the black crow, and fundamental to the battle for Albion.

  He should have known better than to meddle in the matter of men and gods.

  Damiola couldn’t flee.

  The white stag charged into the air, its ethereal hooves sparking with crackles of blue-tinged electricity as they struck the nothing beneath them, rising effortlessly. This was Arawn’s second skin; the form he took at the head of the Wild Hunt. He was King Stag. The ghostly creature broke through the cover of the trees, charging head down to meet Damiola in the sky.

  Ic béo wacende þē, the voice sounded in his mind, and with it came images of a distant battlefield where the Carrion King picked over the remains of the dead, moving from corpse to corpse, no respecter of sides, of right or wrong, as he feasted upon the soft sweet meats of the dead. I know you. I see you. Or, more sinister in its overtones, I am watching you.

  Damiola shook his head, trying to banish the image, to tell the Horned God he was mistaken, that he had never seen that killing field in this life or any other, but he recognized the contours of the land for what they were: the ground beneath them. He was seeing—Being shown? Remembering?—killings that had happened in this very place, and beyond it. It was a glimpse of the real tragedy of this place. This was where King Stag, the Horned God, Arawn—all of the names he owned meant little across time—had been cursed. This was his doom. Where he and his kind had been Albion’s doom, tearing the green grass apart in war. The Horned God was doomed to be her savior now. It all crystallized in Damiola’s mind. He understood the great tragedy for what it was. King Stag was the source of all of the myths around the once and future king.

  The ghostly stag and the stolen crow clashed in a battle of antlers and feathers.

  There could only ever be one winner in the mismatched fight.

  Damiola felt the feathers of his borrowed body mat together, slick with blood as the stag came at him again. A blazing white light burned off the god, the crow’s flesh blistering beneath its onslaught.

  Damiola couldn’t fight a god.

  No one could.

  Cadmus Damiola was dying.

  28

  Charlie Mann didn’t meet their eyes.

  He was shit scared.

  He was sure they could smell the urine that had trickled down his inner thigh. The denim clung stickily to his skin. His heart hammered. He blinked. He clenched his fist. He concentrated on the pain his nails caused, digging into his palm. Fear was going to betray him. There was no way he was walking away from the wood.

  He kept his head down.

  The dirt had never been so fascinating. He stared at the browned, curled leaves from last year’s fall that had turned to mulch in the mud. A few more good rainstorms and they’d be gone, to dirt returned.

  He wasn’t like the others.

  Somehow he was still himself.

  He didn’t know how it had happened—what had protected him, not ignorance despite the fact that he hadn’t grasped what was happening until it was too late; he’d thought it was all some sort of game Penny was playing for his birthday and been happy to go along with it, running behind her, laughing and whooping as he barreled into the ancient forest. And then everything had changed.

  By the time he’d realized it wasn’t a game it was too late; Penny was dead. And then she wasn’t.

  Charlie was fucked.

  Utterly. Completely. Totally. Fucked.

  He wanted to go home. To hide in his room. Pull the blankets up over his head.

  But he couldn’t.

  He couldn’t move a muscle. Not while there was a war being fought inside his body. It wasn’t pretty. Despair was winning hands down; hope didn’t stand a chance.

  Charlie couldn’t begin to understand what had happened to his friend. It didn’t make sense. None of it did. The only thing he was remotely sure of was that it had all gone to shit after she’d touched the lightning-struck tree outside the old pub. But how it had gone from that to Penny stumbling into the stream and the guy in the weird antlers pushing her down beneath the surface until she stopped fighting him?

  Charlie ground his teeth, chewing on his lower lip until he tasted blood. He couldn’t get the memory of how her hair had fanned out around her lifeless body from his mind. The way the bubbles died along with Penny Grainger would haunt him for the rest of his life—however long or short that ended up being.

  Charlie had felt the pull of something then, impelling his feet forward one agonizing step after another as the sweeping echoes of the great song threatened to overwhelm him, and in that moment he almost lost himself, finally. He wanted to. He just wanted it to be over. But when he looked at Penny now, there was no second truth, the filth of the stream clung to her body, and try as he desperately might he couldn’t convince himself that she still had somehow miraculously returned.

  Whatever that thing inside her skin was, it wasn’t her.

  Some basic survival instinct stopped him from running. Instead, he faked it, walking side by side with her as she followed the antlered man in his robe of rotten leaves to the stone circle back in the clearing they called the fairy ring. Danny Ash was there: his knees covered in dirt, his shirt torn; but he was smiling, happy. His face betrayed no flicker of recognition when he saw Charlie. Danny was one of them. Whatever they were. Tommy Summers was there, too. He looked like death. And there were others who’d lived with them at the group home, too. Stephen Blackmoore and Rupert Brooke.

  They started calling each other weird names, and talking like they’d known each other forever about stuff that made zero sense. Rather than risk betraying his difference, Charlie kept his head down. He tried not to listen to what they were saying, but it was hard to ignore talk of murdering kids. He watched Penny make crowns of flowers. She seemed so innocent and childish next to the others as she put the flowers on their bowed heads and promised they’d lead them to the children that needed to die.

  Those two ran off, tasked with the actual killing. Blackmoore and Brooke.

  Charlie watched them go.

  For a moment, he dared to believe he might actually get away with hiding in plain sight.

  The antlered man prowled around the clearing, sniffing the air, turning and turning again.

  Beh
ind the man, the dimgate shimmered, a trail of mist snaking out around the stones at its foot.

  Charlie saw shadows moving about in there. What those insubstantial wraiths were didn’t bear thinking about.

  A frigid breeze blew through the gateway.

  The Horned God stopped moving, tossing his head back and throwing his arms wide. In that moment Charlie Mann knew that he was screwed. He knew he should run, but he couldn’t move. Lank black hair fell across the man’s face as he brought his head forward. Vegetation was matted in the wet locks. As his hair fell away from the root where the horns embedded into the plates of his skull Charlie realized the man wasn’t wearing some weird crown of bone; the horns protruded from his skull.

  Charlie’s feet shuffled in the dirt, barely a scuff but enough to draw the full intensity of the antlered man’s hateful gaze.

  Charlie was face-to-face with the devil himself, and the devil knew he was a cuckoo in this particular nest.