The Lights Go Out in Lychford

by Paul Cornell

  “It’s fine,” she said now, lying.

  “What is?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Can I come in?”

  This was a bit like with the lads down the pub. If she said no now, it’d be a real indicator that all was not fine. She let him in. He reacted to the darkness and the smell of chemicals.

  “Oh,” he said. “Is this the house of a serial killer?”

  “No!” She realised that had been a shout, which had genuinely startled him, both with its noise and its implications. She turned it into a cough. “I mean, sorry, I’ve been making stuff in the back, I’ve been really busy.” She hadn’t kissed him during this visit. They were at least usually doing that. She really should have already. But now the moment had kind of passed.

  “Busy with what? Can I help?”

  Which was when something went bang in Autumn’s workroom. She jumped, looked over at the door. The bangs continued. Something was banging on the door between the shop front and her workshop in the back. She looked back to Luke.

  “I think it wants to get out,” he said.

  Maybe he thought she owned a dog? “Oh, don’t worry about that,” she said. The bangs started to get faster.

  “Autumn . . .” Luke began, “are you . . . ?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you a dominatrix?”

  She found she could laugh. “Oh, entirely the opposite. I mean,” she quickly added, “I’m not in control of anything.”

  “So, are you going to tell me what that noise is?”

  Autumn was actually quite afraid of that noise, because she had no idea what it could be. She marched, nevertheless, over to the door, her hand on the protective charms she now habitually kept in the back pocket of her jeans. She reached out with her magical senses through the door and found only a loud sense of her own presence. So whatever this was, it was something she’d made. Feeling slightly reassured, she opened the door.

  Something flew past her, straight at Luke, and hit him in the crotch.

  With a little agonised yelp, he fell forward.

  She ran to him. He was wincing but didn’t seem to be . . . whatever that would do to a bloke. Attached to his groin, or rather to his pocket, which must have saved him from some of the impact, was her incursion meter. She hadn’t been able to think of a more mystical name for it. It was a pebble with a toy magnet stuck through it. She’d searched for an appropriate rock at a crossing point of three of the borders. She’d been hoping that, over the centuries, the rock had picked up a sense of . . . borderness. The magnet was to give it a sense of . . . magnetness. Magnetry. Not actually magnetism but the magical, storybook version of that. She’d put it together as an experiment to find out if she could detect whether or not something had come into town across the slight, almost gestural barriers they’d managed to put in place in lieu of the real thing. Like a compass, it was supposed to point at anything that had come over. She hadn’t had time to test it very much.

  So, wait, did that mean that Luke was some sort of occult threat? Was this even the real Luke? Or had just his todger somehow been replaced by an evil duplicate? Wow, how would that work?

  “What the hell?” He tried to pull the pendant off him, but it wouldn’t budge. “Is it stuck in my—?” He pulled the wallet from his pocket. The pendant leapt after it and attached itself, pinning the billfold to the ground.

  So, not Luke himself, but whatever was in that wallet. There was something in there that had come through the barriers. But before she could look into that, she had some explaining to do.

  “It’s a magnet I’ve been working on,” she said. “You know. Magic. I mean stage magic. Children’s parties.” She knew that Luke’s understanding of what had just happened, given that he didn’t share her magical senses, might have been more prosaic. But how mundanely could one experience a levitating rock attacking one’s nads?

  “I didn’t know you did that sort of magic. I thought you were all about New Age meditation stuff. But there’s nothing in here that’s metal . . .” He started pulling out his bank cards, membership cards, business cards . . .

  The amulet leapt again. It thudded onto the floor, pinning down an ordinary rectangular card.

  “Wow,” said Autumn carefully, “that card must have a lot of metal in it.”

  “It must have. Weird.” Had he bought that explanation? His expression wasn’t giving anything away.

  “Are you okay? I mean, is your—? Is everything—?” She realised she was making descriptive hand gestures and stopped.

  “It’s . . . all in working order, I think.” He bent closer to the ground to look at the card, and Autumn bent with him. “Maitland Picton,” he said. There was only an address apart from that: Brightlands on the Close, which was where the poshest of the posh lived, a lane of driveways and lawns and no house numbers, which really annoyed postal workers.

  “Who’s that?”

  “I think she came to talk at the college, a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, that was her. I only met her for a couple of minutes.”

  “But she gave you her card?”

  “I guess she was just handing them out. I could ask someone if they heard anything else about her.”

  “Please.” She saw that he was smiling, as if he’d been worried that she might never have another reason to call him. But she couldn’t deal with that now. “Listen, could I keep this card? I’d like to find out what’s in it.”

  “Me too. Open it up.”

  “After . . . I do everything else I have to do. You can come back, and I’ll show you what’s inside. Promise.”

  They stood, and he seemed annoyed that she’d made him a promise like he was a child. It kind of annoyed her too. “So, I was thinking, we haven’t been out on a date in a while . . .”

  “Luke, I’m so busy—”

  “Okay. Are we still going out?”

  “Yes.” That had come out without her even thinking about it. “This is just stuff. That’s getting in the way. But it won’t be this way forever. I’m sorry.”

  “Okay.” He hesitated, as if expecting a kiss, then, when she hesitated too, headed for the door. “Let me know about the magnetism.”

  She watched him go. Oh, she wanted to. In so many ways. Metaphor had crashed into reality, again. But now, she had work to do. Who the hell was this Maitland Picton?

  * * *

  Judith had written stories in her youth. They’d been very naïve stories, about magical lands and creatures. She’d been extremely influenced by Tolkien. She’d filled volumes. When she’d discovered that there actually were magical lands and creatures, she’d stopped. That moment of discovery, her hair dripping with the waters of the well in the woods, Mother Roseborough laughing, bucket in hand, a few of them standing there, all naked . . . that moment had been a long moment, several months of ecstatic discovery, of marching excitedly through all the new dimensions of forest and lands beyond forest. She’d always thought she’d get back to her stories one day, only they’d now be informed by all she knew. But then, the realities of magic had started to cudgel and betray and lure her. And soon Mother Roseborough was gone, and all Judith’s friends and supporters were gone, and she’d made bad alliances, and she was cursed, deep in guilt, never to fully find her way from it, and the old Judith Mawson was born from the young.

  She realised she was standing now at the edge of a ploughed field, by a forested track between the new estates and the school. It was night. She was well wrapped up, at least. Some part of her had made her put her coat on. That wasn’t always true when she ventured out after Shaun had left her. Which she did often, now she remembered. For some reason. Well, if Shaun really wanted her to stay put, he should lock her in. The rise of the field, the edge of the world with the half-moon above it, a clear cold sky but for some wisps of cloud, was a glorious sight tonight. The soil shone with the life waiting beneath it.

  New life. That was a good thought. That felt like summat she could hold on to. Not that she could, i
n the end, hold on to anything. It were too late for that.

  What had she been thinking about? Oh ah. She’d just been remembering in beautiful detail, remembering her stories. There was the upside—all the things she hadn’t previously remembered that now she could. It was like a slow rehearsal of everything before the ending. She’d given up fiction for magic, but magic was like stories, so like stories in every way. Magic was about telling, spieling, spelling. Saying something into the world.

  Stories have endings.

  Oh, she was going to have to be brave. Still, it was easier to be brave when you didn’t have a choice. She looked in her bag and found she still had a few posters left. There was some postering that had to be done at night. Who’d told her that? No idea.

  She had a strange thought in her head. It was that she’d come out here for some reason of her own. This was one of those places in Lychford where the shape of the land let you feel what influences were working on you. She’d been cursed a few times in her life, in one major way and several minor, and she’d always come here then, having chanced across the place, then worked out what it could do. What was the shape of the land telling her now? That there were two presences influencing her. They were both terrifying. As she let her mind feel them out, she glimpsed the truth of them, just for a second. She couldn’t help but cry out. Her mind fled the touch. The sound of her voice in the air scared her all over again. And then her thoughts fled her again, and there was nothing but memories.

  And then later, she was leaning on a fence. Where was she? Oh ah. There was that field. Why was she here, again? No idea.

  She took one last look at the field and went on her way. Her sister walked beside her. Out of the other side of her vision, Judith saw a new path swinging around across the field, the near end of it following her like the beam of a searchlight. It made her shiver.

  Her sister took her arm. “All be over soon,” she said.

  * * *

  The next day, in the morning, after she’d opened up the church, Lizzie went over to Witches and knocked on the door.

  The Autumn who opened the door was the one Lizzie had got used to in the last couple of weeks. Every muscle in her face was tense. Her eyes were deep pits, and her hair was even more ridiculously chaotic than usual.

  “Something came through the boundaries,” she said, without even a greeting. “My detector hit my boyfriend in the balls.”

  “Wow,” said Lizzie, “that sounds like the first two lines of a really weird musical.”

  “Yeah. Sorry. Come on in.”

  She led Lizzie inside and locked the door behind her. Lizzie persuaded Autumn to let her make tea before Autumn started explaining. After they’d had three calming sips of whatever this was Autumn kept in the most ordinary looking caddy in her kitchen, Autumn seemed to not be able to take the calm any longer and leapt up to start telling her, with hand gestures, a story about a pendant, a business card, and, indeed, her boyfriend’s balls.

  “Ouch,” said Lizzie. “So are you and he . . . ?”

  “Moving swiftly on—”

  “No.”

  Autumn rolled her eyes. “I don’t know. Maybe doing this, being the new wise woman, I shouldn’t have a boyfriend.”

  “Judith is still the wise woman.”

  “So, what, I shouldn’t be trying to step up? Do you really think we can still leave it to her?”

  “I mean you shouldn’t let this ruin the other parts of your life. If we asked Judith about this, maybe she’d know—”

  “I don’t want to put any more stress on her. I might find something to help her. I don’t want her to get any worse in the meantime.”

  Lizzie wanted to say this was too much. But Autumn clearly knew that. She was a grown-up. All Lizzie could really do was be here for her. “Also, Judith didn’t do this alone. She had a husband.”

  “Who turned out to be dead, mostly, so he didn’t get in the way.”

  “You sound like Judith.”

  Autumn raised her hands in surrender. “Well, maybe I’m turning into her, dementia and all.”

  Lizzie took that opportunity to share with Autumn what Shaun had told her. “Shaun’s doing okay, but I think he’s being optimistic about his mum’s condition.”

  “Yeah. We need to be ready for her to go into some kind of . . . home. God, what if she did go into one and started randomly doing spells? It’d be like handing them a bomb.”

  That thought hadn’t actually occurred to Lizzie. It was another awful bump in the road ahead. She put it aside for now. “So, getting back to your worrying news of right this minute, have you found out anything about this Maitland Picton?”

  “I have, and it’s even more worrying. I was going to ask if you’d heard of her. I thought you knew everyone posh.”

  Lizzie had to admit that was indeed the demographic of a large part of her congregation. But she had no idea about this one. “I’m trying to think of where that house is on the Close. I’m not sure I know it.”

  “That might not be a coincidence.” Autumn led Lizzie into her workroom, where printouts and files were spread on the big table. On top of them lay a stone on the end of a chain. This, Lizzie assumed, was the pendant that had so painfully intercepted Luke’s nethers. Autumn picked it up, started it swinging, and it suddenly stiffened, in an absurd, cartoonlike manner, pointing ramrod straight to . . . Autumn put her finger on the paper. “Mrs. Maitland Picton, on the electoral roll.”

  “Wow. How does it know there’s anything special about her, just from a name on a card or paper?”

  “That was the first thing I wondered. But it’s not just a name on paper.” Autumn went to a drawer and came back with a handful of red dust. She sprinkled it onto the paper. It formed a rough circle around the name and address, as if every particle had been pushed aside and wouldn’t fall on those details. “I think this isn’t just a record of something, but an . . . alteration to reality, an alteration that’s present in the data in the town council office computers, onscreen when that data is displayed, and even when it’s printed out, like on the business card Luke had. It’s like the magical version of a computer virus, a way to force an idea into the world.”

  Lizzie realised, with a shiver, that she’d experienced something similar last Christmas, when that couple who turned out not to actually be human beings had changed her perceptions. “So why can’t I think of where she lives?”

  “I think maybe part of the . . . code . . . is that the special senses you and I have aren’t set off by this stuff.”

  “Almost like it’s been programmed to deal with us.”

  “Yep. But it wasn’t prepared to deal with this pendant. So whoever we’re dealing with is clever, but we’re still one step ahead. I’m going to go have a look at the house this afternoon.”

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t get Judith to—”

  “I will if you really want to, if you think it’ll do any good.”

  Lizzie considered. “We should go see her anyway, find out how together she is.”

  “Okay. Tomorrow. I might have more of an idea what we’re dealing with.”

  “Have you heard from Finn?”

  “No. There’s nothing coming out of fairy. I think maybe they are having some sort of . . . civil war. Maybe Finn’s dad has been overthrown. If Finn was okay, and could get a message to me, I know he would have. So . . .” She had to stop talking or, Lizzie sensed, she’d have started to cry. She put a hand to her own brow and closed her eyes.

  Lizzie gave her a moment and sipped her tea.

  “Don’t do that,” said Autumn, after a second. “I need to keep going. The world needs me to.”

  “You need to let me help too.”

  “I am. You’re here. I’ve also been researching the rest of Maitland Picton’s life.” She picked up several of the pieces of paper and showed them to her. “Every detail of an everyday—well, posh person—human existence is here. There are records of what school she went to, a Facebook page, land ow
nership details . . . and all of that makes my detector prick up, but not my senses. I talked to the lady down the third charity shop on the church road, because she’s posh, and she couldn’t remember anything about Picton, but she was sure she’d been to school with her. It’s all a lie.”

  “That’s pretty powerful stuff. So we think she’s here in Lychford to . . . ?”

  “To, I should think, take a look around and report back to whatever weird shit is waiting out there to invade.”

  Lizzie felt scared and angry and determined at the same time. Just for once, they were ahead of the game. “Autumn, this is amazing. I mean, we’ve actually got the drop on her. We could go over to her house right now—”

  “No. Lizzie, we don’t know who she is or what she can do. Maybe Judith could just march up and have her, but for me, discovering something exists is one thing, actually leading a confrontation . . .”

  Lizzie wasn’t sure how much this was lack of confidence talking, and how much was good sense. Perhaps this was the time to err on the side of caution. “So, what do we do?”

  “Luke asked around at his college about Maitland Picton. Nobody seems to remember why she was there. She gets around. The records of various local bodies show that she’s actually a member of just about all of them.”

  “Anything directly church related?”

  “No.”

  “Hmm. Indicative.”

  “Hey. Most people in this town aren’t—”

  “I’m just going to raise an eyebrow and say ‘indicative’ again.”

  “But, getting swiftly past that, one of those organisations is meeting tonight. And even if it isn’t church related, the local vicar would have some good reasons to pop along.”