by Tim Lebbon
Sleek, he scavenges food. There are several new camps high up on the hillsides where soldiers live, and the only ones he avoids are the couple with dogs. The others he orbits until he sees an opportunity to slip in, steal food and clothing, and move out again. No one sees him. He is the wind, the whisper of a secret, an errant sunbeam. He likes the feel of moving through the landscape without being seen, and he likes even more the occasional turn of a soldier’s head as he or she glimpses something from the corner of their eye. It gives him a sense of comfort, in a situation where comfort is lacking.
I’m only a little boy, he thinks. I shouldn’t be out here on my own.
The noises from the valley have changed. A mile downriver from Longford there are lots of big machines, diggers and bulldozers and lorries streaming up and down the valley dumping piles of boulders and mud. The piles are growing, meeting, and from high on the hillside he can see soldiers scrambling like ants on a giant nest. Over time—days, maybe weeks, he soon loses track—the surfaces of the piles smooth out, and the undulations between them start to level.
The river’s flow has stopped. The boy finds that strange, and sad. It’s as if the blood has ceased flowing through the heart of Longford.
* * *
With nowhere else to go he remains in the valley. Somewhere deep inside, he realises that a small part of him still hopes that this will end and he’ll be able to return home. Logic tells him there’s no truth in that, as does everything he has seen and heard. But at heart he is still just a little lost boy.
Against all instincts, he decides to go back down to the town one more time.
He has been living in the hollowed oak tree. He’s made quite a home of it, with a comfortable bed of old coats in the base and a convenient look-out perch higher up inside. He has a collection of stolen clothing and food, and he has eased back on his thieving in case it is noticed. He dresses in an oversized camouflage jacket, tying it close to his body with belts, and starts back down into the valley early one morning. As dawn sets the eastern hillsides aflame, he mounts a small rise close to the town and looks down upon his old home.
It is the same, but different. He recognises buildings and streets, the church close to the town square and the park on the far side, beyond which is the house where he has lived all his life. He cannot see the house because it’s hidden behind the park’s trees, and in a way he is pleased. He thinks that if he saw the pale pink walls and white window surrounds he might lose himself, run, get caught.
Get shot, he thinks.
In the days or weeks since he escaped Longford, he has not seen a single human being who is not a soldier.
And that is why the familiar town is also so different—because there is no one there. The streets are deserted and silent. No dogs or cats wander the pavements and gardens. A few screen doors hang open, a couple banging in the gentle morning breeze, and scraps of litter roll lazily along the main street. He has never seen Longford so silent.
The tall fence around the town makes it impossible to approach any closer. There are cameras topping the fence posts. They are aimed both into the town and away from it—the fence keeps him out, but perhaps it is also erected to keep something in.
With the sun behind him, the boy makes his way back up into the hills. The similarity with Mohserran and the two other creatures that call this place their home is obvious—they, too, would leave the town at sunrise and go back to their domain in the hills. Not everyone in Longford knew of their existence. Not everyone who knew welcomed it.
Perhaps he is tired, or grief is blurring his vision, but he does not see the soldier until he almost trips over her. She is sitting by a tree, and when she sees him she lets out a small cry of surprise, and then a grunt of fear. She kicks backwards and away from him, bringing her gun up and aiming it at his face.
She is the same height as him, slightly built, and her camouflage gear is grubby and stained, her face streaked with sweat and dirt. She looks very tired.
Very scared.
“No,” the boy says. It is the first word he has uttered since fleeing Longford.
“Who are you? Stay there. Don’t move.” She quickly gathers herself and is now in charge, her weapon aimed unwaveringly at his chest.
“What’s happening?” the boy asks. I have to get away, he thinks. I have to be sleek. He does not trust this soldier one bit. She’s alone, and flustered, but she’s one of them. For all he knows this gun might have shot his mother.
“Let me see your tongue,” she says. “Stick it out. All the way.”
The boy does so. She squints, looks close, then nods. He closes his mouth.
“What’s your name?”
“Robert Bonham,” he mutters. He looks left and right, past the tree she’s got her back to. He’s afraid that others will be close by, and he remembers the shooting he heard, the lines of silver-clad people driving all the living things before them. The bloodied fox. Lucas the mad puppy.
“Eh? Speak up.”
He mutters his name again. This part of being sleek, of being unknown and unseen, is almost instinctive. The soldier frowns and turns her head, leaning in closer.
“Eh? Bone? That your name? Bone?”
Bone, the boy thinks, and then he runs. He dashes towards the soldier and then steps left, sleeking past and darting behind the tree, up the slope, jigging left and right and waiting every moment for the bullet that will take him down.
There is no bullet. There is no gunshot.
With his new name intact, Bone escapes.
* * *
Three days later something else changes. The river, running almost dry for the past few weeks, surges back into the valley with a roar. Its path is now blocked by the massive construction that has been worked on day and night, and when it strikes the structure damming the valley it boils and churns, white water turning dark with mud, dark as blood. From his vantage point high in the hollow oak tree, the boy can see ant-like figures scurrying around both ends of the dam, watching as the river flows, flows, and rises.
He stays there for another three days. When the water rises enough to start flooding the streets of Longford, he turns his back on that place and finally walks away. He crests the ridge above the wide valley that was his home, and even as the drowning town drops out of sight behind him Bone will not allow himself to cry.
* * *
Life becomes complex and dangerous, as does Bone.
The first time he returns to the valley is nineteen years after he left. He knows what he will find because he has followed the story of Longford, both the faked public version and the more elusive truth. He is surprised to discover the old oak is still there. He cannot fit inside now, but he shines a torch into the hollow, amazed at how small it seems. There’s nothing to reveal that he once made this place his home.
He climbs the outside of the tree instead, and perches on a branch close to the crack in the trunk from which he watched, afraid and alone, all those years ago.
Bone sits and watches for quite some time. It’s very peaceful in the valley, as if it has always been this way. Much like him, the reservoir presents a calm surface, hiding the potential for endless chaos beneath.
The next time he returns, another twenty years into the future, that chaos will rise.
2
She flows across this land that she has made her home.
The creature she seeks is down near the valley floor, bathing in a pool and treating its wounds. She has met this one three times since closing the Fold—she no longer acknowledges their names, because now they are simply prey. When it senses her approach it will know what is to come, and she hopes that it will panic and flee, darting away across the landscape seeking somewhere to hide, even though it knows there is nowhere. She hopes, but she is not sure. Even now some of the Kin she brought here are becoming passive in the face of their eternal fate. It isn’t what she sought. A fairy needs stimulation, not wan compliance. She craves the hunt.
Grace’s new home
is not what she intended.
Because of them, she thinks. They’re the reason. They taint the air.
She runs down a steep grassed slope, leaping over rocks and vaulting a low stone wall one of the others has been building. When she arrives at the pool the bathing creature turns its head, and she is upon it before it can splash its way to the water’s edge.
Grace drives it beneath the surface, following it down through the weedy water, pressing it to the pond’s bed and then closing her mouth around its shoulder.
The creature squeals in bubbles. Grace bites and twists. A chunk of Kin flesh warms her mouth, blood mixing with dirty water to pour down her throat, and she lets the creature go and surfaces with her raw prize clamped between her teeth.
Sitting beside the pond, Grace chews and watches the creature drag itself onto the opposite bank. It casts a glance across at her, both angry and scared. Then it stands and staggers away into the trees, seeking somewhere dark and quiet to let its wound heal once more.
Never somewhere secret, though. This is her Fold, and she knows every inch of the place. There are no secrets here.
Perhaps that is one of its failings.
She enjoys the sunlight on her skin and her mind wanders, as is its wont, to other skies and more distant times...
The ancient and vast woodlands of Europe, where she and her kind lived for millennia and their interaction with the humans of the time was a source of enjoyment and competition. They were gods or demons, friends or enemies, and sometimes all of those things at the same time. They saw respect and fear in human eyes, and in the monuments built to them they witnessed the base need of humanity to believe in something greater than itself, no matter whether that thing was good or evil. They played on this, and preyed on it. It was a time of plenty. An era of joy.
There are too many humans now. The gods and demons they pander to are too ethereal.
Grace chews and swallows, feeling the strength and heat from the meat coursing through her ancient body and invigorating her senses. After finishing her meal and picking scraps from between her teeth with long nails she walks along the valley floor, knowing where she is heading but in no rush to get there. Something draws her to the Nephilim. She will never speak with him. She could kill him, but he is not a Kin she brought here by choice, and to do so would be to admit that she made mistakes. Besides, she likes him where he is. He sought to command and control her. She enjoys turning the tables on the fool.
She remembers Mallian from the Time, a young creature, as impetuous then as now. They are all still young to her, like children, playthings, hers to control... she wishes... she thinks she might have...
The fairy sighs deeply and takes hold of her mind. It drifts so much now, old thing that it is. Sometimes it wanders so far that she worries she might never drag it back. On occasion she fears that much of it has already escaped the gravity of her being, and that the mind she has left is a congregation of random memories, thought shards, and glimpses of things she once knew. She feels herself slipping away. This place is an attempt to hold onto everything she has left, keep herself together. But it is not perfect.
Summiting a small rise, she looks down on one of the reasons for its imperfections.
Mallian the Nephilim is on the valley floor, arms and legs held fast as they have been since the moment she cast him down. Some time has passed since that confrontation, but Grace does not know how long, nor does she care. The passage of time no longer holds much meaning for her.
He is thin and gaunt, his once-strong body withered. She has never eaten of him. She did not bring him here, and to take a bite of his treacherous flesh would be to honour him too much. Better to see him trapped down there, suffering in the knowledge that everything he dreamt of has come to nothing.
Elsewhere in the Fold, not too far from here, the human lives in a cave. Sometimes he feeds the Nephilim, and Grace finds amusement in the strange bond that has grown between the two of them. She lets them have that.
She could kill them both, but their blood would taint the soil. For now she is happy to ignore them most of the time. They are no threat to her.
Nothing is a threat to her. Her mind is too great...
My mind is in shards.
She is too strong, too sure of her own strength and future...
I’m weaker than I have ever been.
She has everything she wants in here with her...
Except her. I saw fairy in her.
The memory of the girl is the one aspect of the world beyond the Fold that refuses to let go. Grace is miles and universes away from the world, but the scent of the girl’s flesh, the look in her eye, forms a bridge between her old world and this Folded Land. If Grace could break the bridge, she would.
If she could bring the girl here, nurture her fairy blood, and make her an eternal companion... that would be better.
That would make her already long life, and the eternity still to come, complete.
3
Each morning Angela would wake from a nightmare. She rarely remembered them—that was a blessing, at least—but her sheets were always tangled, her skin damp and hot with nervous perspiration, and sometimes her throat was sore, her eyes stinging, as if she had been shouting and crying in her sleep. If that were the case, Sammi never commented. Sammi was a good kid.
Today was the same. She was used to the sense of rising from somewhere deep and dark, and feeling only mild relief at waking into the real world. The grimness of her nightmares, their dark echoes, accompanied her into the day. It felt so unfair having her mood determined by bad dreams. Plenty about her life felt unfair.
Angela sat on the edge of her narrow wooden cot, rested her elbows on her knees, and looked down at the floor. She was all too familiar with the joints, cracks and knots in the floorboards. Sometimes she looked at the dark lines of the joins and wondered what lay beneath them. The truth was, it was simply the crawlspace beneath the cabin, too narrow for her to enter, home to insects and spiders and perhaps snakes. Nowadays she spent a lot of time looking at familiar objects and spaces—fallen trees, turns in forest paths, dark crevasses in piles of rocks—and wondering what might be beyond.
These were the creatures and places that gave her nightmares and haunted her waking hours.
“Sammi!” she shouted. She knew her niece would be awake and out of bed. She usually saw in the dawn, and sometimes she was already gone from the small cabin when Angela rose. She tried not to feel concerned when this happened. Sammi needed to explore and exist in a world that was anything but safe. Keeping her constrained and wrapped in cotton wool would benefit neither of them.
“Coffee’s already on!” Sammi replied from beyond the door.
Angela smiled. She rubbed her face, trying to wipe away the dregs of her nightmares. Although she recalled nothing of her dreams, they dragged her down. Old memories circled her. She could feel the stare of the Kin on the back of her neck. She could almost taste Vince on her lips, and feel the ghost of his hand in hers.
He had been gone for two years, but she would never forget his taste or touch. He was as known to her now as he ever had been, as if her sleep renewed her memories of him and made them fresh again. If the price of that was a gloom hanging over the beginning of each day, it was a price she was happy to pay.
“Lovely day, sunny and cool,” Sammi said when Angela walked into the living room. She sat down on a tatty sofa and took the steaming mug Sammi offered, closing her eyes and sighing as she breathed in the coffee, groaning in delight when she took the first taste. For someone who did not like hot drinks, the girl sure made a good cup of Joe.
“I’m going for a walk up to the waterfalls,” Sammi said.
“Don’t forget we’re looking at Lord of the Flies again later.”
“Aww, Angela.” There it was. The teenage drawl. And Angela loved it. It was a normality she had despaired Sammi ever finding.
“It’s a great book!”
“It’s boring!”
&
nbsp; “How can you possibly find it boring?”
Sammi was smirking a little as she turned away and went back into the kitchen, and Angela almost called her on it. She knew she was being played. Sammi was the brightest girl she had ever known, and sometimes Angela felt it was her doing the learning and Sammi the teaching.
“Want some scrambled eggs?” Sammi asked.
“Sure. I’ll fetch some eggs.”
“I’ll get them. You’re old.” Sammi darted from the kitchen and through the front door before Angela could respond and disappeared around the side of the cabin.
Angela leaned back on the sofa and sighed. She wasn’t old, but sometimes she felt it. Playing happy families was ageing both of them. They’d spoken about it very openly—about how trying to make things feel normal was the only way to move on—but there was always a falseness to acting like this that remained as an underlying tension beneath and behind every chirpy conversation and light-hearted exchange. Two years might be long enough to begin moving on from loss, but the losses they had both suffered were not so simple to confront.
However much people tried to convince Angela that Vince was gone forever, she did not know for sure that he was dead. In her mind—and perhaps in those deep, dark dreams that bled into and tainted her waking hours—he was still there.
Jay had shown them to this cabin after the confrontation with Mallian and the fairy, the closing of the Fold, and the fighting and killing that had surrounded those events. Jay’s Kin lover Tah had died, and Angela would not have blamed the older woman if she’d handed her and Sammi over to the law. She knew that Angela was still wanted by the authorities for her supposed part in the massacre in London, and that would always be the case. Yet Jay still sometimes came to visit, and she did her best to persuade Angela that Vince was never coming back.