She didn’t wait for the others to follow her into the woods.
Alex knew the path to take as the trail led up the winding slope through the woodland. She brushed aside trailing branches, and pushed through overgrown bushes and bracken until she could see the glow of the gateway in the fairy ring in front of her, and the teen standing between her and another world.
41
They watched him from the shelter of the trees.
The teen didn’t move from his position. Julie whispered his name: “Tommy Summers.” For the longest time Alex was convinced that whatever entity had been piloting him had gone, leaving him empty. His stare was utterly vacuous. He saw nothing. He heard nothing. He simply waited.
For something.
He wasn’t going anywhere.
The gate itself was a thing of otherworldly beauty: wholly natural, with curls of mist rippling around its foot. A trick of perspective made it look as though the branches of trees behind it formed the arch. The illusion meant that from where they were crouched the leaves of each tree appeared entangled. The moonglow cast the gateway in molten silver.
She didn’t realize she was holding her breath until her lungs burned and she was forced to breathe.
Julie mimed making a rush at the gate, but that wasn’t going to work.
They needed to think.
She shook her head.
Josh scratched at the rough patch of bristle growing through his cheek.
They weren’t going to be able to get through the gate with the teenager blocking their way.
“We need a distraction,” she whispered. “Something to draw him away from the gate.”
Josh nodded.
He rooted around in his pockets, digging down beneath the layers of Damiola’s coat to the pocket of Boone’s greatcoat beneath it, and pulled out his grandfather’s lighter and tobacco tin.
She thought for a moment he was planning on lighting up, but as he whispered the word, “Fire,” she understood.
He had everything he needed to make a small blaze right there in that tin.
The trees were too green, and the forest itself was still damp from the rain of yesterday.
Josh peeled Damiola’s coat off, and wadded it up in a heap on the ground. She watched him loosen the screw on the petrol lighter then splash the smallest flecks of lighter fluid onto the material. It seeped in through the weave. “Give me some space. He’s going to come this way; you circle around, get through that gate.”
“You?”
“I’ll be right behind you.”
They broke rank, running almost silently between the trees, coming around in a wide arc to rush the gate from the other side the moment the Gatekeeper moved.
Alex couldn’t take her eyes off her brother as he thumbed the lighter’s wheel. That one tiny motion conjured a small flame. Josh watched it for a second, mumbling some sort of prayer or promise over it, then touched the flame to the material.
For a long moment it looked like it wasn’t going to burn, then she saw the vapors turn blue as the flame took hold. Seconds later it was burning. Josh backed away, moving off to the right, careful to keep the denser brush between him and the burning coat. The flame would do the trick; the erratic movement would draw the eye, and given his nature it was a safe bet the Gatekeeper, like the rest of his kin, was attuned to the forest in some way. Wood burns. Fire is the most natural threat to his ancient habitat. If anything was going to pose threat enough to draw him away from the gate, it stood to reason it would be fire.
They just had to make those few seconds of opportunity count.
Alex crouched and waited, every muscle tense, ready to bolt.
He didn’t move.
He didn’t blink.
“Come on,” she urged. “Come on.”
It worked.
The Gatekeeper hurried to investigate, curiosity turning into panic in a couple of seconds.
It was now or never.
Alex burst out of the cover of the trees and ran, head down, arms and legs pumping furiously, trying to force every millisecond and millimeter of speed out of her body before her legs buckled. Twenty feet from the gate she risked looking up and around. The gateway looked like a solid wall, a thick soup of impenetrable mist. The illusion of the branches as keystones holding the portal in place was betrayed by her angle of approach. There was nothing holding the gateway open or in place; not the stones around it, not the trees above and behind it. It simply stood there, a gateway to another world. To her left she could see Julie and Ellie running hell for leather toward her.
She couldn’t see Josh.
Alex half-turned; the move costing her momentum as she tried to see her brother within the trees.
She heard him shout, “RUN!”
And did as she was told, still looking back over her shoulder as she stumbled into the mist.
She saw him then, trying to dodge around the brutish Gatekeeper, but before she could cry out, her momentum carried her into the mist and he was lost to her.
She felt something brush up against her face—not curls of the mist she had plunged into, something soft that beat at her face and eyes over and over, buffeting, battering, a ceaseless assault of black wings—crows. Guardians on the threshold, keeping watch between worlds. The birds churned around her, cawing and crying louder and louder, their voices becoming awful shrieks in her ears. It was impossible to tell how many of the birds assailed her as they became a vortex around Alex’s body. She didn’t fight them, even though every instinct screamed for her to put her hands up to her face to ward them off. Instead she tried to slow her breathing, to control the rising fear, and keep on walking into the mist one step at a time.
And then the birds were gone—if they had ever been there to begin with.
The shift left her disorientated. She pushed on as the ground beneath her feet lost its solidity. One heartbeat, it was there; the next. it was simply gone and she was falling forward with nothing to break her fall. She couldn’t trust her own senses. Sensations assailed her. She could still feel the sting of the crows’ wings, and the scratches of those black beaks against her cheek and chin, but everything was different now. Robbed of sight, the other senses amplified the intensity of the transition. The air against her skin turned cold, the chill of the mist a dozen degrees lower than the evening she’d stepped out of. Elegiac whispers wove around her, voices of the lost and damned begging her to save them. They were so much colder than the air. Her nostrils burned with the acrid sting of blood and carrion and days-old death.
Alex flailed out, grasping frantically for something to take hold of as she fell forward. And still the barrage of sounds, tastes, and foul smells assailed her senses, overwhelming her.
There was nothing to grab a hold of in this No Place. There was nothing of any substance. What there was were other noises that took focus to distinguish from one another; the clash of steel, ancient battles being fought out endlessly, the dead dying all over again and again in this land between lands, where time held no sway and the gods had long since forgotten. Bright spots of light danced across her blind eyes, flaring in the endless darkness like fireworks going off against her retinas. Finally, the whispers merged into a single voice welcoming her home in a tongue she knew she had never learned, but knew. The meaning of the words were rooted deep in the primitive part of her brain. The voice, too, was familiar: Emmaline Barnes. The Badb. Macha, the Morrigu, Anu. Whatever the name she went by, the voice belonged to Mother, just like the crows that had met her as she moved between worlds.
Suddenly she wasn’t falling. The shift was jarring.
Alex stumbled a step, her knees buckling beneath the sudden resistance of the unseen ground, before she straightened up. She reached out blindly, calling out into the mist. There was no answer. The mist was no less claustrophobic, visibility no better, but the world at last felt as though it had a horizon, even if she couldn’t see it, and that made all the difference.
The mist, she realized, wasn’t a mist at al
l. It was the spirits of the dead, wisps of their life force still bound to this place, living between the cracks of our world and the next, unable to let go of the life that had already left them. The chill gripped her heart and, like the dead that instilled it, refused to relinquish its hold on her. She’d never been religious, despite her upbringing. She’d never had faith, not like her mother. She’d only ever gone to Sunday school to collect the stickers, and when she’d got fed up with trying to learn off by heart the little passages from the bible, those stickers had lost their appeal. With the realization of the mist’s nature, faces began to form within it. They weren’t familiar. They weren’t her dead haunting her, though she had enough of those to last a lifetime thanks to Seth Lockwood. They were just faces—and more likely than not, just figments of her imagination; her mind seeing things that weren’t there, like the kid’s game where you tried to find shapes in the clouds.
Alex put one foot in front of another, taking a first step in this other place.
And another.
And with each successive step the mist seemed to thin, the faces dissolving, and through the wisps and smokelike tendrils, she began to recognize the features of an unspoiled landscape taking shape around her. Off in the distance to the left, she could just make out the silhouettes of the first trees of a great wood; to the right, rolling hills, and spread out before her, vast open fields.
Free of the cloying fog at last Alex stumbled and sank to her knees.
She fell forward onto her hands.
She was alone. An endless landscape stretched out in front of her, no sign of humanity to mar the land. There was a flickering glow far, far in the distance: a beacon calling out to her. She yearned to push herself up to her feet and walk toward it, but something, some deep buried instinct like her gift with the language she’d never learned, warned her away from that light. No good could come of walking toward it.
They come, Mother said, her voice all around Alex.
She saw a low, dry stone wall marking off one side of the field. It was crumbling in places, uneven in others; the flat stones piled one on top of another. They gave her a detail to focus on as she tried to gather her wits.
She felt sick.
Her stomach churned. Nausea clawed up at her throat. Her head spun, her balance completely undone by the translocation. She felt as though she could no longer trust the proof of her own eyes, that the world as she knew it might suddenly veer away beneath her at any moment and leave her hanging. It was a momentary sensation. It didn’t last.
There was no color in any of it though, she realized. The place was devoid of life, like the mist that clung to it. The great gray land of the Annwyn, home of the banished gods of our past. Thick cloud patterns swirled and churned overhead, moving faster than they had any right to, like time-lapse photography had been used to re-create the world around her.
Alex turned to look back the way she’d come, only to see the rising bank of a muddy hill, clumps of long grass spiking up in patches here and there, and no sign of the ancient forest. The gate was nowhere to be seen.
There was no moon in the sky, no sun, but then there was no night and no day here, only a gray grim world.
Ellie Taylor collapsed out of the ancient path they had traveled into the thin air in front of Alex’s eyes. Julie was three steps behind her; hands over his face and eyes, as he struggled to keep the sights and sounds of the mist at bay. Ellie stumbled away from him, and doubled over, retching violently.
Julie knelt beside her, but she pushed him away.
A chill breeze blew across the hillside.
He saw Alex on her knees looking up at him and ran to her, sweeping her up in a fierce embrace.
“Where … I just … I don’t…” He couldn’t manage a full sentence. She couldn’t blame him. She just … she didn’t … either. “I saw him … Taff … I think … in there … But it couldn’t be him … That blackness … I can’t go back in there.” He shook his head, a little at first, but every time it moved from right to left the shaking became more exaggerated and he couldn’t stop it.
“You don’t have to,” she promised. It was a promise she knew she couldn’t keep, not if he wanted to go home again. But with no gate in front of them, only those few receding tendrils of mist that had clung to Julie and Ellie as they’d stumbled out of the ancient pathway, there was no easy way home for them to take. “Where’s Josh?”
“He was right behind us,” Julie told her, looking back over his shoulder as though he expected to see Josh right there and not a world away. And as though summoned, Josh stumbled out of the rolling mist into the gray landscape of the Annwyn, Boone’s greatcoat flapping around his legs as he caught his balance. He staggered forward, twisting around awkwardly as though fending off some unseen blow. A scream tore from his lips as he flapped ineffectually at his face.
Alex looked at her brother as he struggled to stay on his feet.
Something was wrong.
As he turned back toward her, she saw that his face was deathly pale.
“Josh?”
He slumped forward, clutching at his side. As the coat fell away from him she caught the glimpse of silver—steel—buried deep in his side.
Blood spilled between his fingers.
It took her a moment to realize he was trying to pull the knife out.
She yelled at him, “No!” and ran toward him.
He didn’t listen.
He pulled the knife slowly out, screaming at the pain as it slid through the meat of his body, the serrated edge doing more damage on the way out than it had on the way in.
He didn’t look up. He only had eyes for the knife. His hands pressed down against his blood-soaked shirt. There were three other tears in the fabric, each one bloody, and one long slash across his chest, which wasn’t deep but looked the worst of them all. He looked back over his shoulder, fear written deep in his gray flesh, but there was no sign of pursuit.
She had no way of knowing that it was the same knife that had killed Musa Dajani to open the gateway. She couldn’t see the symmetry involved in that same knife delivering the killing blow to her brother. The knife had been acting like a plug, stemming the loss of blood. Without it, the life was pumping out of Josh one heartbeat at a time. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.” Everything she said was coming in double sentences, the same imprecations repeated. “Look at me, Josh. Look at me. I’m here. I’m here.” And again, “I’ve got you.”
He didn’t have the strength to argue.
He let go of the knife and sank forward, collapsing into his sister’s arms. The knife fell at his feet.
“I’m not ready to go,” he managed. His eyes were glassy, the light flickering and failing behind them. “I did this. I need to make it right.”
“Shut up, stupid man. You’re not going anywhere, Josh, you hear me? Because those are shit last words. You are not going to die on me.”
PART 3
Albion goes to Eternal Death: In Me all Eternity.
Must pass thro’ condemnation, and awake beyond the Grave!
No individual can keep these Laws, for they are death
To every energy of man, and forbid the springs of life;
Albion hath enterd the State Satan! Be permanent O State!
And be thou for ever accursed! that Albion may arise again.
—WILLIAM BLAKE, JERUSALEM
42
Josh lay on the muddy hill.
They gathered around him.
Silence hung heavy around the intruders.
Alex held her brother’s hand, willing him to live.
“We can’t stay here,” Julie said. He had a flair for stating the obvious.
“We can’t just leave him,” Alex argued.
“I know.”
“Then what do you suggest? We can’t go back, there’s no gate here. And it’s not like we can carry him in his condition. It’ll kill him.”
“I know,” he said again.
“Then do me a favo
r and shut the fuck up until you do know something,” Alex snapped.
That shut him up for all of thirty seconds. He shook his head. He scanned the mist-wreathed horizon, eyes drawn toward the fire burning in the distance. It seemed to be closer than it had been just a moment ago. “Maybe someone there can help us?”
“No,” Alex said, definitively. One syllable that brooked no argument.
He didn’t push it.
“Look, I’ll carry him. We can’t just leave him here, and we can’t just sit here waiting for him to die. We’ve got to do something.”
She shook her head. “We can’t move him. Not yet. I’ve got to get the bleeding under control.”
“We can scout around,” Ellie offered, meaning her and Julie. “Tell us what you need. See if we can’t find something that will…” she was going to say help—that much was obvious—but without a miracle, nothing was going to help.
“Do that. I need to try and pack the wound. Stop the bleeding as best I can. I’m going to need a fire. Gather some wood, anything that will burn. We’re going to need to get the metal of that knife hot.” She was thinking aloud, but at least she was thinking. Boone’s old lighter by itself wouldn’t burn anywhere near hot enough to cauterize the wound, even temporarily, but the metal blade of the knife that had almost killed Josh might just be what would end up saving him. That is, if she could get it hot enough. “And look for bark, willow bark, that’s good … hawthorns … the thin vines of willow, something like that we can use to bind the bark over the compress to keep pressure on the wound. Anything that’ll buy even a little time.” She was trying to think of anything the land might provide. Superglue would have been better, but it wasn’t like that was something people carried around in their back pockets.
“On it.”
“See if you can find something we can use to build a makeshift stretcher, while you’re at it. Let’s be positive. Because you’re right. I know you’re right. We can’t stay here. So as soon as I’ve got the bleeding under control, we’re moving out.” She pressed down on the wound. Josh’s skin felt cold and sticky through the cloth.
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