Coldfall Wood

by Steven Savile

  Which Gogmagot knew was true, but looking down at the kid in the bed he realized how wrong he’d been to think he could be a part of snuffing the life out of a sleeping child.

  Corenius took the killing out of his hands. His brother reached down for the tube and pulled it out of the girl’s mouth. Blood bubbled up with it from where the tube had cut something in her windpipe on the way up. Corenius didn’t care. He simply leaned forward and clamped one hand over the girl’s mouth, while with the thumb and forefinger of his other hand he pinched her nostrils shut to the panicked alarm of the respirator.

  It didn’t take long. The girl’s body bucked against the tight sheets as the death throes shook her; her body resisting, desperate to live.

  “Let go,” Corenius whispered. “Just let go. It’s okay.” And to Gogmagot, “Come over here, hold her steady.”

  He did as he was told, leaning forward to put his weight on her shoulders and pin her to the mattress.

  She bucked against him.

  The alarm seemed to grow louder, becoming more insistent with every spiraling tone.

  And then she lay painfully still.

  Even then, with the girl dead, he couldn’t shake the expectancy that someone would come racing in to save her, some hero or villain drawn by the discordant beep of the machine.

  His brother yanked the power cords out of the wall, silencing the machine. It was as easy to kill as she had been.

  He leaned in close, part of him hoping to feel just the softest feather of breath against his neck, but there was nothing. It was done. One of them was here for good.

  When he looked up from the dead girl he saw the smallest buds of leaves on his brother’s crown had begun to open.

  As they left the room the leaves were lush green, full of life that would in time kill another child just like this one.

  33

  Jenny Greenteeth remembered everything her body had been through in Herla House. All of it. His touch. The foul odor of his rancid breath as he leaned in close, drooling over this skin. All of it.

  Bracken had no right. None whatsoever. This wasn’t the world they had left. It was different here. The children weren’t his possessions. He was not lord and master. He was meant to protect them. What he did was a violation. She closed her eyes, tapping into the fading memories. That girl had lived with so much pain from his hands. They all had. Even the boy she’d saved from the Hunt. Her heart quickened at the thought of betraying her own father.

  She wanted to make it right. It felt important to her. This man, Bracken, should experience the same kind of pain.

  Jenny Greenteeth smiled through a mouthful of jetsam, a cruel smile filled with the green teeth that gave the water witch her name.

  Could he swim?

  Sometimes the old ways were the best.

  That pretty face of hers was nothing more than a mask over a dark soul.

  She let the girl loose for a moment, allowing the memories bubble up to the surface. She knew these streets. Each turn was ingrained into her muscles. She only needed the flesh to remember for long enough to find the house, and then she would lure him out.

  The house was so central to everything she didn’t have to dig deep.

  Jenny’s nostrils flared as she inhaled.

  Her eyes rolled up inside her head, showing the whites as her eyelids fluttered rapidly and her jaw fell open. Her entire body went completely rigid. Turgid water gargled deep in her throat, bubbling up and spilling out of her mouth until it seemed she might drown standing on dry land. When she opened them again her eyes were shot through with threads of blood where the smallest capillaries had ruptured. She knew where he would be.

  She followed the stream out of the forest.

  Taking those first faltering steps out of the sanctuary of the ancient wood left Jenny shaking, gripped by a physical withdrawal. Without Penny Grainger’s pain to lead her down toward the streets waiting at the bottom of the hill, she might never have been able to make it. Even then, those first few steps on the dead tarmac of the road were like crossing over from life to death, and on the other side she felt utterly bereft, cut off from the vibrancy of the forest and the soul of Mother.

  But she followed her through the warren of streets with red-brick houses and blacktopped roads like scars on the land. They acted as a barrier between her and her world. She was cut off from the residual magic of the Earth Mother, unable to tap even the thinnest vein of that vital energy. She had never felt so alone in her life, not even that day when it had all ended for her here the first time around. Still, she focused on what she had to do, and why, and drew strength from that as the city around her transformed into a downtrodden hell on earth. Decay was everywhere, despair entwined with it. She understood now what they were fighting for. And that she was prepared to die for a second time if needs be.

  She stopped outside the high wall of Herla House.

  The brickwork was topped by a budding clematis. More climbers dug into the render on the house itself, suffocating it. The iron gate was open. It led through to a secret garden that had been left to run wild. The weeds were already ankle high and would only get higher.

  She waited, out of sight of the windows in the shadow of a tall tree. Resting her back against the trunk, Jenny Greenteeth began to sing a haunting melody. Her siren song brought faces to the windows, but the song was sung for one man and one man alone. Bracken. He appeared in the doorway a moment later, disheveled and confused, scratching at his scalp as he shuffled down the few short steps into the garden. Behind him the sign named the house. She couldn’t help but wonder if he had any idea of its origins or its link to Arawn’s Wild Hunt. It was wonderfully appropriate that the girl had dwelt under its roof.

  “Who’s there?” Bracken called out uncertainly. He looked left then right then left again, like he was practicing his Green Cross Code, then stepped out onto the cracked paving stones that led to the gate. “Come on, out with you, you funny fuckers. Stop pissing about.”

  Jenny’s voice rose in a haunting sweep of emotion. There were no words to her song. She channeled deeply buried emotions, calling out to the primal instinct at the man’s core, her tune one of seduction and promise that drew him two steps along the path, then two more, and two more until he was at the garden gate looking up and down the street for any sign of the singer.

  She moved in the shadows, her footsteps silent on the damp grass, and projected her voice; her song seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. Bracken stumbled out into the street, the door and the gate both left open behind him. She followed, her song rising and falling with a promise only Bracken could hear within its delicate harmonies. His feet shuffled on the paving slabs, the rubber toe of his slippers catching on the uneven edges of the flagstones.

  She led him down to the water’s edge, through businessmen and schoolkids who looked at him like he’d lost his mind; an Alzheimer’s victim wandering the city, lost. But those who took the time to look at Bracken properly saw a look of bliss on his face that defied description. He was in the grip of the highest high.

  He found the stone steps cut into the side of the riverbank and walked willingly down into the water. She watched Bracken from the embankment as he took his first faltering steps into the water as the Thames lapped at his slippers, sliding on the mud-slick pebbles as the river washed over them. The evangelical euphoria of his expression didn’t change as he plunged into the river. The water swallowed him up to the waist, and then another step took it up to his neck as he went over the shelf. It was only then, in those last couple of seconds as the River Thames closed over his head, that Bracken knew fear but he was helpless to stop his body from dancing to Jenny Greenteeth’s tune as she led him to a watery grave.

  It would have been better if he had suffered, the water witch thought. He deserved to suffer for what he had done to the children in his care, but for now it was enough that he wouldn’t abuse any more vulnerable souls. They were protected. She took some satisfaction in t
hat. She had done a good thing here. In death she had saved so many more from suffering. In that realization she understood that the Horned God was right, in death they could save this broken land of theirs.

  34

  Julie wouldn’t have seen the pattern if it wasn’t for Alex talking about the locked-in kids.

  He wouldn’t have even known to look, never mind where to look.

  He had ringed two names in red: Annie Cho, and Bethany Laws.

  He put the phone down, and picked up the pen, bouncing it on its point half a dozen times, thinking.

  The girls had too many things in common for their lives—and deaths—not to be linked. Even if taken individually, the events around their deaths weren’t suspicious—strange, yes, but not suspicious—but collectively they should have been enough to raise more than just an eyebrow. Not least the fact that they’d all sleep-talked the same five words over and over: The Horned God is awake. Three of the girls who had been admitted to hospitals across Greater London as lock-ins in the last twenty-four hours had died in the last six, all seemingly of natural causes. Talking to their doctors, the general consensus was that their bodies had simply failed them. It was possible, of course, that whatever had caused them to shut down initially had taken too much out of them in the end, but for one thing, in two of the three hospitals nurses reported seeing a pair of disheveled youths milling around the wards in the time leading up to their deaths. Julie had emailed photographs of some of the missing children Tenaka had given him, and got a positive ID on Stephen Blackmoore and Rupert Brooke. In both cases, the witnesses were at pains to say that both boys appeared to have been sleeping rough for a long time and remarked upon their smell and that their faces were smeared with streaks of white chalk, like war paint.

  Now he had a direct link between the disappearances and the locked-in kids, one he could file on a police report, even if he couldn’t say what had caused him to look for one in the first place. There were several more connections he could never file, like the fact that he believed Blackmoore and Brooke were agents of the thing that had come into this world because of what he and Josh and Damiola had done to Seth, and that they were removing the anchors that allowed them to cross over from Hell so that they couldn’t be banished. He bounced the ballpoint pen half a dozen times more, thinking back to that first call to the Rothery that had opened the door to this nightmare. He’d never hated Taff Carter more than he did now. If Taff had never taken Seth Lockwood’s bloody money, none of this stuff would have been happening to him.

  Julie put the pen down and sank back into his chair.

  He needed a drink. Not that drinking would help.

  Ellie Taylor stopped at his desk and looked over his shoulder as she put a cup of black coffee on his desk.

  “Thanks,” Julie said, without looking up.

  “Three?”

  He nodded. “And I got positive ID on Blackmoore and Brooke being seen inside two of the hospitals.”

  “What the hell’s going on, Julie?”

  “No idea,” he lied.

  “You’ve seen the other reports coming in this morning? Dozens of isolated incidents of gangs of schoolkids attacking people in the streets of South London.”

  He’d seen them.

  “It’s getting ugly,” he agreed.

  What he couldn’t say was what he feared the most: that this, too, was linked to Arawn’s return, and that the disaffected youth were being manipulated into fighting his battle for him. And that, in turn, was pretty much on Julie.

  The coffee was still too hot to drink.

  Tenaka appeared in the doorway. “Taylor, Gennaro,” he curled a finger in their direction, “the incident room, now.”

  Julie left his coffee where it was and followed his chief inspector to the Major Incident Room that was being set up upstairs. An hour ago it had been a big empty space. Already, in the space of the half an hour since Julie had poked his head into the room, an array of computers, desks, chairs, and noticeboards had been installed, along with a large conference table where a map of the city had been laid out and locations were being marked in to match the incident reports coming in that morning. The left side of the incident board was taken up with faces; victims first: Oliver Underwood, Aisha Kahn, and Musa Dajani beneath them; then to the right, the row of missing kids: Charlie Mann and Penny Grainger, both current residents of Herla House, the ex-residents Stephen Blackmoore and Rupert Brooke; and last, the suspects column was filled with three pictures: Jamshid Kirmani, with a line linking him to Ollie Underwood and Aisha Kahn’s photographs, and Daniel Ash and Tom Summers, with a line linking them back to Musa Dajani’s photograph. All the details they knew: times, dates, locations, witness testimony, and such were linked to each case. Two words stood out: HERLA HOUSE.

  One computer had been set up to monitor Twitter feeds for the relevant hashtags that had been trending since last night, looking for links to the reports of violence coming in this morning. Another monitored Facebook and a third Instagram. Correlations were being run against the Police National Computer, looking for cases of grievous and actual bodily harm linked to the owners of those accounts. It was all about trying to find the red thread that wound between them all; the one thing that tied the evidence together and proved it was all linked the way that Julie knew it was but wasn’t able to explain.

  Stills from security camera footage had been taped to the incident board.

  Julie hadn’t seen them before.

  There were four in a line, and they showed Daniel Ash and Tom Summers dragging Musa Dajani out of the park. The angles weren’t good and the images weren’t clear. The CCTV cameras were from two locations. The first two captured the trio’s passage for a couple of blink-and-you-missed-them seconds from shops close to the park. They were hard to make out in any sort of detail because they were in darkness. The two remaining stills, close to the gates of Coldfall Wood were taken closer to dawn, with lightness creeping into the image. They showed the two boys walking away alone. Julie knew that out of camera shot Musa Dajani’s body had been strung up and crucified on the sign.

  “What are you thinking?” Tenaka asked, behind him.

  “The obvious motive here’s revenge for Underwood. It’s a racial thing. White kids hitting back at the Muslim, they lay in wait for Dajani after football practice, lure him away and kill him, tit for tat. I don’t think they give a crap about the girl at this point, she doesn’t fit their narrative, she brought it on herself, Ollie was just an innocent victim.”

  “Agreed. And?”

  “And the board’s not right.” He moved the photographs of Stephen Blackmoore and Rupert Brooke from the Missing column to the line of Suspects. “Or at least it’s only partially right. Blackmoore and Brooke aren’t victims.” Tenaka didn’t say anything, but several of the officers working the incident room looked up from what they were doing to follow the exchange. This was new information. “We’ve just had visual confirmation in the last few minutes that both boys were seen in wards at both Guys and Kings this morning. By itself, it’s noteworthy, the first two sightings of two of our missing kids, but two patients died within a few minutes of their sightings. And while it might be coincidental, I’m inclined to think it isn’t.”

  “You think Blackmoore and Brooke killed them?”

  Julie nodded. “Bear with me. Both patients had been admitted with a condition known as parasomnia.” Tenaka looked at him like he was speaking Swahili. “Locked-in syndrome, you know, a waking coma.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Tenaka shook his head. “So you think Blackmoore and Brooke hunted out these locked-in cases? Talk me through it. How do you see it fitting in? Big picture.”

  “It’s not my case to make,” Julie explained. “An emergency services dispatcher, Erin Chiedozie, noticed something weird was going on in London. In any given year there’s no more than a handful of cases across the whole country. She started looking for points of similarity, anything that might link them: a single point of contagion
if it was viral, something like that.”

  “Did she find anything?”

  “She found a link, but I’m not sure it’s something we can act on.”

  “Let me be the judge of that,” Tenaka told him.

  Julie took his notebook from his pocket and made a show of thumbing through the pages until he reached his notes on the short conversation he’d had with Chiedozie even though he didn’t need to. The words were blazed on the back of his mind: “They all said the same thing; one line, that linked them all. ‘The Horned God is awake.’”

  No one said anything.

  “Like I said, it’s not exactly a tangible link.”

  “Some kind of cult thing, maybe? Like the Scientologists?” Ellie asked.

  Julie nodded. “Something like that, I guess.”

  “So, they made some sort of pact? Drank poison like the Heaven’s Gate mob, expecting a UFO to take them away to a better afterlife? In this case one with horned devil gods? It’s no crazier than Xenu.”

  Julie shrugged. There were worse connections they could draw.

  “And Blackmoore and Brooke are tied into this?”

  “It would explain the disappearances,” Ellie said, putting two and two together and making something a long way from four, but which had her excited. It was something that made sense. Something they could work with.

  “Okay,” Tenaka mused, the side of his fist resting on his lips as he thought it through. “Maybe there’s an angle there. Some sort of doomsday cult in the city we’ve not heard about poisoning a bunch of kids, then sending their most devoted out to finish them off when the drugs didn’t do the job? Look into it, Ellie.”

  “You should know that there were five cases of parasomnia reported in hospitals across London yesterday,” Julie said, letting that sink in before adding, “A third patient died at St. Thomas’s this morning. If there’s a link, if Blackmoore and Brooke are going after them, that means the other two are at risk. Twice might be a coincidence, but three times is a pattern.”