Relics--The Edge

by Tim Lebbon

  “The armies of the Kin.”

  “Yours to control,” Mallian says. “Under my overall command, of course.”

  “Of course,” Markus says, glancing aside, and Mallian thinks, Already there’s scheming going on inside his tiny mind.

  “You’ll tell everyone what I did?” Markus asks.

  “Everyone will know.”

  The mongrel nods once. Then he pushes his long, sharp tongue out beneath his teeth, stares Mallian in the eye, and bites down hard.

  10

  Next morning, after a restless night in a cheap motel, they stood looking out across a desolate landscape.

  Angela had never seen anything like it. It took her breath away. It looked as if an artist had swept a broad grey brush across the valley. Both apocalyptic and strangely beautiful, the landscape before her was almost leached of colour, tinted only with light and dark greys and varying shades of beige. Where they stood, high on the hillside—above the level of the old reservoir—they were surrounded by lush trees, shrubs and grasses, colourful blooms speckled the view, and even the dawn sky above them seemed deeper and bluer than it was above the grey valley. Such vibrant colours made the contrast all the more striking. Even more startling was the stark dividing line between normal landscape and colourless valley, reality and bland, unreal monotone. The reservoir levels must have been consistent over the years, and now the water was gone its bed was revealed, drying and cracking in the sun. Lower down near the valley floor some dirty brown pools remained, reflecting nothing of the clear blue sky. A winding river flowed through the basin, a dark band of filthy water that continued until it met and flowed through the ruin of the dam further down the valley.

  The blasted landscape, and the river, pools and puddles, bereft of colour and sun, might have been part of another world.

  “It looks like the moon,” Sammi said.

  “Sort of beautiful,” Lilou said.

  “It’s like we’re looking back in time,” Angela said. Sammi raised a questioning eyebrow. “Like old black and white TV pictures.”

  “I’m too young to remember.” Sammi smirked.

  “Sort of beautiful, but frightening as well.” Lilou took a few steps forward, and seeing the nymph set against the vast greyness, Angela thought the whole scene looked even more alien. The view made her dizzy. The revealed reservoir bed was two miles across, and stretched maybe four miles from the ruptured dam and back into the foothills. Somewhere down there, buried beneath decades of silt, lay the remains of the small town of Longford. The scope was staggering.

  It was so far apart from the world she knew that it made her think of Vince.

  Often over the past two years she had wondered about where he was. Lilou could offer no clue as to what the fairy’s Folded Land might look like. All she said was that it was her own world. Angela had glimpsed the place, but at the time she’d been fighting for her own life and Sammi’s, and had not had a chance to take it in. It had looked like a valley—possibly a little like this place before the dam was built and the reservoir grew to wash it away—but any more than that was subject only to her imagination.

  The fairy Grace was a creature beyond her level of understanding. She remembered her as a victim of Mary Rock, trapped and tortured. No one—not Lilou or Mallian, or any other Kin she’d questioned about it—could guess how Mary Rock had managed to capture and imprison such a powerful Kin. Perhaps the fairy had grown weary of hiding, and become careless. Perhaps Mary Rock had tricked her into believing that she had some benign aim in mind, rather than the terrible tortures she’d put the fairy through. She and her sick clients had been trying to eat her. Her deep age had already set Grace apart, but Mary Rock’s treatment might have driven her mad. And in madness, what worlds might she conjure?

  Perhaps the Fold looked much like this place, a blasted and bland landscape where life was forced to struggle and scratch its existence from the ashes, mud and bare sun-bleached rock. Maybe it was a lush place, a forest or jungle with exotic wildlife singing a constant natural jazz, day and night filled with different sights, sounds and smells. Vince might spend his time hiding from the cruel sun and struggling to keep warm at night, or he could pass every hour avoiding inimical wildlife intent on stinging, biting or poisoning him.

  A flooded world, a parched place, a landscape of sharp rock or smothering trees. He could be anywhere like that, or nowhere at all, and sometimes what she imagined for him made her feel sick.

  Was he missing her? Did he remember her at all? Was he alive or dead? He was so far away in space, time and understanding that sometimes these distinctions didn’t seem to matter. Like Schrödinger’s cat he could remain alive and dead in her mind forever, because he was so unreachable that she would never know otherwise.

  That didn’t stop her from talking to him, in her mind and sometimes out loud.

  “There’s something wrong with this place,” she muttered, and she closed her hand by her side, imagining Vince’s fingers entwined in hers.

  “You feel it too,” Sammi said.

  Lilou glanced back at them. “It’s just a flooded valley,” she said. “Longford’s down there somewhere, or what’s left of it. Just down past that hump in the land, towards the river, I think I can see the remains of a building?”

  Angela couldn’t see it, but she did not care. Vocalising the wrongness of this place seemed to amplify its effect on her. Its greyness and blandness gave it the appearance of being unfinished, yet perhaps that sense was misleading. In truth, it looked and felt like somewhere that had been finished long ago, and which had since shed itself of humankind. This place had moved on.

  “Other people have come,” Angela said. She could see signs across the valley—the glint of early morning sunlight from vehicle windscreens, a couple of columns of smoke that might have been from camp fires.

  “The curious,” Lilou said. “It’s not often a dead town is revealed to the world again.”

  “Nice way of putting it.”

  Lilou smiled. “It’s fine. It’s an adventure.”

  “I’ve had enough adventure to last a lifetime,” Angela said, and for a moment she felt Vince squeeze her hand, and she knew what his response would be.

  Maybe just one more.

  * * *

  To their right, and further down the valley, was the dam. It was a vast structure stretching from one valley slope to the other, its side facing them the same grey colour, the deep fault in its centre obvious, a wound on the land. It looked like a huge cleaver had come down and smashed the dam in two. Angela guessed that a minor leak could progress over time into something more substantial, rocks undermined, concrete cracked and swept away, until one tumbling rock led to a chain reaction. There had been no cataclysmic failure, but downriver beyond the dam the landscape was still flooded in places. It had been a slow disaster.

  As they descended through the forest towards the shore of the old reservoir, Lilou called a halt.

  “There’s security ahead,” she said. “I can hear them.”

  “Security for what?” Sammi asked.

  “They don’t want people getting to Longford,” Angela said.

  Sammi shrugged. “Maybe it’s just ’cause the ground’s dangerous. If this has only just happened there’ll be quicksand and stuff, and the river’s flowing pretty quick.”

  “Maybe that’s it,” Lilou said.

  Angela was unconvinced. “Lilou?” she asked.

  Lilou glanced back and forth between them.

  “What else could it be?” Sammi asked.

  “Plenty more,” Angela said. Her heart sank. She shouldn’t have been surprised that Lilou had lied to them, but now they were here she needed to know why, and how much.

  “It’s pretty much like I told you,” Lilou said.

  “Pretty much?”

  “My friend might have died here. I want to know how and why.”

  “So do I,” Angela said. “Before Sammi and I go a step further.”

  “Angela,
it’s an adventure!” Sammi said. But Angela held up a hand, saying nothing.

  The silence hung heavy.

  “There’s nothing dangerous left, Angela,” Lilou said at last. “Everything bad happened years ago. A military experiment that the government tried to cover up, a mistake.”

  “Military experiment?” Angela asked.

  “I’ve only heard rumours, and most of those are from Jay.”

  “You talk to Jay?”

  “Of course I do. We’re both doing our best to look out for the two of you.”

  “I don’t need babysitting!” Angela snapped.

  “What experiment?” Sammi asked.

  “They used some sort of drug or virus on the townspeople,” Lilou said. “It drove the residents mad. They died horrible deaths. So the army used a suppressant on the population to negate the virus, made sure everyone was dead, then flooded the valley. Wiped the whole place from memory.”

  “They knew about the Kin here?” Sammi asked.

  Lilou shrugged.

  “They infected the town. Gassed it. Then made sure everyone was dead,” Angela said. “What the fuck are you bringing us into?”

  “That was forty years ago,” Lilou said. “It’s just a place now, hardly even a memory. It’s not dangerous here anymore, Angela. We’re here to tell the end of the story.”

  They continued downhill, skirting around a couple of casual police officers who were sitting on the bonnet of their cruiser. One was smoking, the other surfing on his phone. They didn’t seem at all concerned about the exposed valley before them.

  That didn’t make Angela feel even slightly better.

  11

  Bone found it hard looking down into the valley and seeing it so changed. He walked along the ridge instead, looking left across beautiful open countryside whilst also painfully aware of the greyness to his right. There lay home, in a sea of almost featureless silt and water, a ruin that threatened to overwhelm him if he dared look at it for too long. His heart beat harder than usual, his tongue was dry and stale. He’d never believed that he would feel so sad coming back home.

  Last time he’d returned he had seen the peaceful, rippling waters of the reservoir and found some affinity with them, hiding the truth beneath the surface just like him. Perhaps with the water flooding the valley there had still been a possibility that Longford persisted as it once had, a town beneath the surface, preserved and continuing on through life and death set apart from the world above. Now, he knew that it was a ruin. Longford was no more. He had spent his life adrift, and seeing the emptied, drying valley snipped the last thread that had kept him pinned to the world.

  There were other people here. That was inevitable, but it set him on edge. Sightseers were to be expected, and he could slip past and around them easily enough, silent and sleek as ever. They wouldn’t know what to look for, and would not understand even if they had any inkling of what he sought.

  What troubled him more was the police presence. They stayed high in the hills and seemed casual and laid back—there simply to ensure the safety of those visiting, rather than anything else—but he had no desire to tangle with the authorities. He sleeked past them as well. He came so close to one officer that she frowned and glanced around, rubbing at her eyes as if she had dust in them, or the itch of a painful memory.

  Soon he found himself in a place that he recognised from long ago. The hillside had changed—trees had fallen, others had grown—but the contours were the same, and if he stood facing uphill it might almost be forty years before. But he could smell death in the valley. The scent of silt and reservoir bed was on the air, the decayed remains of countless fish and plant life, like time itself had slowed and sunk to the bottom of this valley that was once home.

  Bone closed his eyes and breathed out slowly, then looked again.

  He saw his tree. He’d known it was close, but hadn’t realised how close. It was up to his right, past a small rise in the valley side, and even though it was changed so much he knew it was the place from which he’d once watched his life change. Nestled inside that tree he had observed his childhood ending, and felt the cruel coolness of the world closing around him, indifferent to his struggle and loss. Such coolness had remained with him ever since. His search for those like him was a way of insulating himself against it.

  He went to the tree and looked inside. It was dead now, and over the years it had been reduced by time and rot. One whole side of the trunk had fallen away, offering the inside to view. No one could have hidden in the old tree anymore, even if they were small enough. He tried to imagine it as it was back then, but it had changed too much. Instead he reached out and plucked a shard of soft timber from the trunk. It was damp and slick. He dropped it.

  It was time to move on. In his life, and in his purpose for that day. Time to go down into the dead valley to ensure that the past remained the past. He turned his back on the tree and started downhill.

  Across the hillside and to his left he saw three people looking down into the valley. He didn’t know them, but something about them seemed familiar. He’d had this feeling before, and nine times out of ten he was wrong. But when that one-in-ten time occurred, he found someone else like him.

  Kin.

  He froze and dropped down, hiding behind a corrugation in the land. His heart fluttered like a nervous bird in his chest. He’d come here looking for a dead Kin—his father—and to discover more of the story of his life. He had never expected to find some living. They were so scarce, like the rarest of treasures, that he never grew used to finding them.

  From this distance it was hard to make out any details about the three figures, only that they were women. Their eye colours were unknown, their shapes hidden, the shades and textures of their skin uncertain. Yet two of the three seemed to radiate an inhuman aura.

  Perhaps it was simply that one Kin was always able to recognise another.

  He guessed they must be here for the same reason as him, but he didn’t want to mix with them right now. He concentrated, gathering the sleek around himself, then started downhill. When he reached the junction between the living world and the dead he paused. He looked down at his boots where they still stood on green grass and damp soil, with ants crawling around them and a small spider exploring the thread of one lace. Then he took three steps and he was standing on the dried mud of the reservoir bed. He was a grey man in a grey world, and he started down the featureless slope towards whatever might be left.

  * * *

  Everything had changed, but he still found his way to the cave on the hillside, as if he was drawn there by something, a thread still connecting him to whatever might be inside after all this time. As a child he had never been allowed to visit the caves, but he and his friends from the town had often crept close. Others in town had dared each other to knock on the door of Old Man Parsons’ house, because Parsons had died when he was one-hundred-and-four and everyone said he would haunt that house forever. For Bone, Emily and Jake, the cave was the equivalent of their haunted house.

  In truth, Bone had never been afraid. With him it was more fascination, and a subtle rebellion at going close to a place that was forbidden to him.

  He was surprised to see the cave entrance still visible. It had been submerged for decades only a handful of metres beneath the reservoir’s highest level, and though silt had built up and swallowed part of the opening, some water flow or current must have persisted to prevent the cavern from becoming totally filled with silt. He recalled a stream trickling from the cave mouth all those years ago from higher up, singing from the darkness and throwing occasional rainbows if he crept up to spy on it at just the right time in the afternoon. Maybe the stream still poured in from high up on the hillside, finding its way down between rock strata and through cracks to provide a gentle current to clear some of the persistent sediment.

  He also feared that once he was into the cave mouth, all he’d find would be a wall of mud.

  With the sun on his back, an
d keeping low and quiet so as not to attract attention, he approached the cave where his father had once lived. Then, for the first time in his life, he entered.

  It was cooler inside. His boots sank into the mud. Muck clung to the walls, caked hard, forming features that almost looked like a giant creature’s insides. Stalactites of mud hung down, dripping muddy water. The floor of the cave mouth sloped towards the opening, so much of the water had drained when the reservoir flowed out through the damaged dam. Still the silt was fluid around his feet, sloppy mud that grew deeper the further in he went, until it flowed over the top of his boots. He didn’t mind.

  As it grew darker, the lifelessness of the place struck him. There was no plant life here, as there should be this close to the mouth of a cave—moss on rocks, ferns, creeping plants probing in from outside. There were no insects or flies. Nothing crawled, nothing buzzed. When he breathed he could taste only dampness and mud. There were no memories of this cave carried on the air, because until recently there had been no air in here at all. Any echoes of his father and the other Kin that had lived here had been dissolved in the reservoir waters, spread through the whole lake and then let out in the constant flow that had taken it all away.

  “There’s nothing alive here,” Bone said, because he felt the need to fill this place with sound. His voice was muffled, swallowed by the land and forgotten. He felt that there was a danger of it doing the same to him.

  Plucking a torch from his belt he flicked it on and started deeper into the cave. Daylight still penetrated past him, casting his shadow ahead, and the yellow torchlight flickered from pools of water and slick mud. Shadows danced and glimmered. As the darkness grew, and the torch was his only light, his shadow filtered away to nothing.

  He slopped through mud that was almost knee-deep, trying his best to make out the shape and size of the caverns. Bone so wanted to see the place as it had been before, but it was changed just as surely as the rest of the valley. Perhaps given the right equipment, he might be able to clear out the cave and restore it to something resembling the place where his father, the selkie Mohserran, had once lived with two other Kin. But he did not have the time.