The Future of Horror

by Jonathan Oliver

  The big, red-faced, dirty guy was all the way out, and he reached back into the pipe with both hands and pulled Margaret out. She hugged him before she hugged Felix. The homeless guy growled, “You better tell somebody, dude.”

  Into Felix’s neck Margaret said, “I’m scared, Felix.”

  “Of him? What’d he–”

  He felt her shake her head. “Of Mom. She makes me do stuff. She doesn’t take care of us. My friend says it’s not right, kids shouldn’t be treated like that.”

  “Felix, you found her!” Mom went to hug Margaret but Margaret turned away. “I knew you could do it – I’ve always had faith in you.” To the homeless guy she said, “Thanks, Woody,” and kissed his cheek.

  “You sent her out here, right?” Felix didn’t care who heard. “A test for me.”

  Mom looked at Margaret and lowered her voice. “She loves magic but she didn’t inherit my abilities. You did.”

  “I want it!” Margaret wailed. People were looking at them. Woody patted her head, told Felix again to tell somebody, and shambled off to find saner company. Felix finally found his phone.

  “You have great talent, son. And if you didn’t find her, I was your back-up.” She was actually proud of herself.

  She’d think he hated her, but he didn’t. He just didn’t have anything more to say to her. He waved his hands once, twice, and the lines danced around them. He didn’t know if Mom couldn’t see them, but she definitely couldn’t see him or Margaret. He called 911.

  CAD CODDEU

  LIZ WILLIAMS

  Liz Williams is somewhat familiar with magic, running, as she does, a witchcraft shop with her partner Trevor Jones in that most magically evocative of places, Glastonbury. I first encountered Liz as a science fiction reader, with her brilliant novel Empire of Bones (2002) and have since also enjoyed her terrific short stories. Liz seemed like a natural choice for this anthology and the tale that follows is steeped in ancient magic and myth.

  THE STORM BROUGHT the warriors, and perhaps the girl as well. I know that it was not I who conjured her, and at first I did not understand how they had drawn her forth. I first saw her as she ran through the groves of birch, a swift doe, and though she was not in her human form, I knew her for one of the Changing.

  The warriors followed her as far as the lake, but then she lost them. I, floundering behind, did not see where she went: perhaps into tree or water, or dissolving into mist. Hidden among the briars, I watched as the warriors splashed along the lakeshore: big men, with armour the colour of oak bark and hair like a fox’s coat. They searched around for a little while, but then gave up and stumped back the way they had come. When they turned, and I could see their faces, my suspicions were confirmed. They were wood-warriors, with rough features carved in the middle of rougher heads, and soon their movements grew slower and they became a pair of oak stumps. They would not, I knew, stir again until morning, and it was now twilight, with the air heavy after the rain.

  The Changing stepped out from a swarm of gnats at the lakeshore. She had left the doe’s shape behind and was human now, more or less. Her hair streamed down her back, dappled silver and fawn. Her face was small and pointed, a little pinched, and I could see a prickling beneath her skin as her form congealed. Her eyes were as yellow as a wolf’s: pale and cold like piss in winter. There was something familiar about her, but I did not know why. I did not think she could see me, but then she turned and looked straight at my hiding place.

  “You,” she called. She had a clear voice, and that was familiar too. “Come out from there.”

  I both wanted to do so, and feared it, but she gave me no choice. She lured me out with the strength of her gaze. I stumbled forward, my legs turned to dead-wood weight. I saw a crease between her brows.

  “Don’t you know me?” she said.

  “No. Yes. I don’t know.”

  Her frown deepened. “Do you know who you are?”

  “I am a man,” I said. “Not much of one, it’s true.”

  “Don’t you even know your own name?”

  “No.” But I knew what I was: landless and mad. Sometimes I remembered a little of who I used to be, but more often not. I recalled a woman with a fawn in her lap, a castle wall, a bitch with a litter of pups lying in summer sunlight, but it was all snatches and fragments like the ruins of a song. I didn’t know whether it was my past, or someone else’s. I used to be someone’s kin, perhaps, but now I was little more than hair and bones and the skins of others, a reed through which the wind whistled. But I knew the Changing, and that they were other.

  “And you are one of them,” I whispered. She gave me a gracious smile, the reward of royalty.

  “Of course.”

  “And the warriors?”

  Her lips twisted. “They say they are my brothers, and thus can do what they wish with me. But they’re no kin of mine. They are wood-made, where I am living. They are not my brothers.” She gave me a strange look.

  “Who made them?” I asked.

  “An oak-lord, one of Mac Derga’s men. Skilled, I suppose, if you admire that sort of thing.” She spat. “Ash-born, split from the wood. Not born of anything female.” Her form shivered in a sudden wind and I thought she would go. There was no reason for her to be talking to me, after all.

  “And yourself?” I said.

  “I am of the deer.” She was proud of that, I could tell. Beast-born, then. A small voice from the tatters of my memory told me that there weren’t many of them, and those that there were came out of bloodshed and war: the havoc of magic men. But I did not want to tell her that, and risk her anger. Besides, mad though I was, she was still the most beautiful thing I had seen for a long, long while. It struck me as an odd thing, then, that I knew so much about the Changing, and so little about myself.

  “Well,” she said next. “I must go now.”

  “What of the wood-warriors?”

  She laughed. “What of them? They will be back, no doubt. But they will never catch me.” The surface of her skin boiled and bubbled. Next moment, there was nothing more than a cloud of gnats, skimming across the surface of the lake.

  I DID NOT expect to see her again. The Changing may be a part of nature, but their creation means that they can never stay long apart from the world of men, and that is not my world any more. My world is the woods, the lakeshore, the caverns beneath the earth, and sometimes it is none of these, but the world in-between, the dragonfly world of the dead. It was in that world that I saw her for the second time.

  My madness is tied to the wheel of the stars and the moon. When the moon goes dark, and is eaten by the great beast, then my madness reaches its peak. I was scuttling through trees and bones when I saw her. The lake had turned to blood. I felt that something vast had been slain and there was a squealing inside my head. She stepped out of shadow and moths to place a hand on my brow. Her skin felt cool and prickling, like the skin of a toad. She said, “You are running mad.”

  I said, or thought I did, “What does that matter to you?”

  “Hush. You are disturbing things. You should not be here. This is the wild, not the home of men.”

  “It is my home.” But the pressure of her hand increased until all I could see was the castle wall, yellow with lichen, and the bitch yawning in the sun. My mother was standing before me. I fell to my knees.

  “The trees are coming,” my mother said with a fearful glance, and was gone into a haze of black air.

  IN THE MORNING, just as the dawn’s light touched the lake, I woke. There was no sign of the Changing. My head felt cold and clear, water-still. I stumbled to my feet and looked around for her, seeking her in the gnats and the flickering trout among the cress, but she was nowhere to be seen, or not showing herself. I felt filthy and old. I stripped the skins from myself and washed, for the first time in months. When I came out again from the lake, I felt as though I had been peeled down to the pith.

  She was standing on the shore, not bothering to hold her form too greatly. H
er face was the muzzle of a doe. She said, “They’re coming.”

  “Who?” I asked. Had she been a human woman, I would have been ashamed of my nakedness, but despite her beauty it was like standing naked before a beast.

  “The wood-warriors.” Her lip curled. “I need your help.” It was not clear whether it was the warriors she despised, or myself.

  “What kind of help?” I asked.

  “You know the caves, don’t you? They have Mac Derga’s oak-man with them; he can force my form.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Force me to take one shape and one shape only. If he does that,” she shifted from foot to gleaming foot, “it will be easy for them to capture me.”

  “Why do they want you so badly?” But I already knew the answer to that.

  She shrugged. “Beauty. I think they plan to give me to one of Mac Derga’s men, perhaps Mac Derga himself. For no more than a night, most likely. He is betrothed already, to a chieftain’s daughter.”

  “Then come with me,” I said, snatching up the skins. I felt filled with purpose, for the first time in months. She said nothing more, but followed me through the bramble and briar, which seemed to shrink away from her skin.

  Sometimes, the caves were not where I expected them to be. The woods seemed to change with the moon, just as the sea does, or perhaps it was only my madness. I found them with some difficulty, but the Changing betrayed no impatience or surprise. Perhaps the woods really did alter and shift. And the mouth of the cave seemed more overgrown than I remembered it. I stepped through into clammy cold. The Changing followed me and as she did so, she gave a long breathy sigh.

  “You’ll be safe here,” I said, but I wasn’t sure if I believed it.

  “That isn’t why I came,” she said. I looked back to see her eyes, a chilly gleam in the darkness.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I need something. Something that is down here.”

  I stared at her. “There’s nothing here. You can see for yourself. No treasure, no gold.”

  She gave a shrill little laugh. “Oh yes, you are a man, no mistaking that. Even your mad head is filled with metal, just like all the rest. I’m not looking for gold.”

  “Then what are you looking for?”

  “You will see, if it comes to it.”

  I did not like the sound of this, but it barely mattered to me any more whether I lived or died. A thin voice at the back of my head told me that there were worse things than dying, but I did not want to listen to it. The cool ghost beside me was the only thing I cared about now. We went on.

  I couldn’t keep track of time at the best of it, and if I could no longer see the sun or the moon, then I was wholly lost. I took the flint from my skins and struck a bundle of tinder.

  “No light!” she said sharply. “Put it out.” So I did.

  Her own faint gleam lit our way, but we were deep into the cavern, where water dripped and pooled, before she next spoke.

  “He’s here.”

  I turned to look at her. She had stopped in her tracks. Her face was beginning to lengthen, but then it flattened out once more, back to human.

  “Who?”

  “Mac Derga’s oak-man. I can feel him. He’s sent his spirit out to look for me.”

  “Can his spirit find you, this far below the earth?”

  “I do not know. He has allies, many of them. I hoped–” She grew still and trembled. I longed to protect her, but did not know how. Something was snuffling and grunting in the tunnel. Without a sound, the Changing fell apart into a series of water droplets and melted into a nearby pool. Her light was gone. I was alone in cauldron blackness. The grunting grew louder: something grumbling and angry. I blundered against the wall of the cavern, scraped my arm. I smelled blood, briefly, and then I ran.

  It was not my thought to abandon her and escape. I hoped to draw the thing off, away from her. I was nothing, and she had become the light of the woods. And even in the dark, I knew the way. I had been down here before and the tunnel led only up and out, without branches. I ran along it as swiftly as I could, with the thing close behind me. I could smell it, too: a thick earth stink.

  Teeth grazed my ankle, but I was out. The woods were waiting, still and cool, and there was a slice of new moon above the trees. The power of the oak-men is strongest when the moon is waxing, they grow together. I fell, rolling down a bank of earth, and the thing tumbled out behind me. I glimpsed it, briefly. It was a badger: huge-shouldered, claws outstretched. A gold torc glinted around its throat. And then it shimmered, Changing into a man.

  Mac Derga’s oak-man was old, perhaps forty or more, a sinewy form covered in the blue. Old markings lined his arms and chest; he was naked. His hair was limed into spikes, black and white like the badger’s. I am not a small man, but he swept down on me and picked me up by the throat.

  “Where is she?”

  I did not care if he choked me. It was almost a relief that the end had come at last. I managed to say, “Where you will never find her,” and he dropped me.

  “Then that is no place at all,” he spat. He raised his arms to the woods. “Rise! She is here.”

  I thought at first he was talking to Mac Derga’s warriors, but it was the woods themselves that woke. He spoke their names, the secret ogham names that I had come to know through their own whispering: fearn, duir, nuin, tinne. He spoke to the male trees only, the chieftain trees, calling them up, and where they had stood, wood-warriors stood in their place. Holly men, straight as their spears, sharp toothed; alder men, with need-fire flickering around their wet skins; rowan men whose hair was tipped with blood. Their eyes were hollow. They stepped forward. Their spears were levelled at me and I did not close my eyes, but waited to die.

  And then there was a voice behind me. The oak-man’s head snapped round and I saw a fierce exultation cross it. Whatever his plan had been, it had worked. The voice was hers and she spoke the name of the other trees: the women’s trees. Straif and quert and beth and huathe, blackthorn, apple, birch, haw – and they too rose from the wood and ran shrieking forward, to where the girl was standing.

  “Deire!” the oak-man shouted, “See this, you bitch of a doe?” – and cast a glittering net from his hand. The Changing hissed and fell back, scrambling into the cave. The oak-man cursed and bolted after her: I followed them both, but a wood-warrior blocked my way. He was a holly man. His teeth glittered, even in the darkness. I discovered that I did, after all, care whether I lived or died. Behind me, I heard hisses and cries as the wood-warriors fell upon one another with the rustle of branches. I reached for the flint, nearly dropping it, and struck kindling. It was dry, the spark caught. I threw it. I saw the holly man’s mouth open in an O and then he was gone in a rush of flame. The wood-warriors cried out. Clutching the burning kindling, I went into the cave and a rush of wind sent the smoke after me.

  I found them down by the pool. He was stalking her, and I wondered whether he wanted her for Mac Derga after all. I could see his erection, strong for an old man. She was merging and changing, too far away as yet for him to cast his net, but his power filled the little chamber. I rushed him. He was not expecting it, and we both fell to the floor. His hand flew out and I saw the sticky strands emerge from it, bloody as they left the skin. But he missed her. She gave a cry and a doe was standing there for a fleeting moment. Then she was back. She struck him about the head, but she was too small and slight to do much damage. And so was I, in my half-starved state. The oak-man rolled me over and hammered my head on the stone floor until the cave spun. His hands closed around my throat. I heard her shrieking, but I was choking, and, I saw dimly, so was he. The smoke from the burning kindling had drifted upward. The air was thick with it. My ears hummed, louder and louder, as the blood rose. I could think only of her. I beat at him, feebly, but it was no use. The humming grew and suddenly, with a great cry, he was off me. I hauled myself to my feet, faint with coughing.

  The Changing was nowhere to be seen. Th
e oak-man writhed on the cavern floor, beneath a crawling, moving mass of bees. Wondering, I looked up and saw the paper cone, high in the roof of the cave. The oak-man lay still. There was silence outside the cave. I watched, breathless, as bees became woman again. The clear cold place in my head was growing: no more humming, like the voice of bees. I felt the oak-man take my madness with him, as his spirit fled. She looked at me.

  “Well?” she said. “And now?”

  I was able to tell her, for I knew. “My name is Suibhne Gelt,” I said. “I am the son of Fergal Mac Maigen. I come from Dun Dubh Fort and the People of the Deer. I am your brother.” The bitch yawned in sunlight: her name meant Summer. My mother walked smiling around the fortress wall with a pail of milk. My sister stood before me, lately bees.

  “It’s really you,” I said.

  She nodded, smiling. “It’s really me. I knew I could get you back. I just needed the right form. Gnats and deer weren’t enough. I do not have the power to take a wolf’s shape. So it had to be something little and dangerous.”

  “I remember him,” I said. I looked down at the motionless, bloated face of my enemy: Mac Derga’s high druid Coann, who had sought to kill my father’s only son and so take Dun Dubh. But he had not slain me, and my sister had come to take me home. I reached out and took her hand and led her from the cave, through the quiet morning wood, past holly and blackthorn thicket and the songs of birds, to the high land and home.

  PARTY TRICKS

  DAN ABNETT

  Dan Abnett is a writing machine, producing vast amounts of work in many different genres and many different mediums. Unlike a machine, however, Mr Abnett has wit and soul and a quick and clever way with words, all of which he brings to his fiction. In the following tale Dan shows us the benefits of keeping our enemies close.