Chapter Two #2
“Don’t concern yourself,” he told her. “I’ll deal with that. All part of the service.”
—
He took a few pages of notes after that, careful, probing questions that Irene Rush answered in a dead and distant voice when she could or simply shook her head when she couldn’t.
It didn’t take long. Duncan thanked her, got no reply beyond a brief meeting of his gaze and a dutiful twitch of the lips.
You could not have called it a smile. He left her sitting wordless in the chair, staring into space much as she’d been when he came in.
He met Susan in the entry hall and explained what he needed her to do.
She cracked the door on the imprisoning room, stony faced, and Duncan dragged the changeling out by one arm.
It kicked and wailed and clung to handy bits of furniture, finally to the doorjamb itself, until he managed to tear it loose and get it out into the hall.
Instant change of tactics—now it bared its teeth and flew at him, flailing, scratching, shrilling in his face like a lost soul.
Duncan rode out the ineffectual attacks, then backhanded the creature savagely across the face to still it.
Irene Rush had chosen to stay in the living room; she’d pretty clearly had enough for one day.
But the blow was loud in the hall space, unmistakable, and he heard her stifle a sob in response.
He sighed, dragged the dazed changeling to the front door.
Susan held it open for him, stood aside, and handed him a folded cheque.
From the way she looked at him, she still didn’t like him much better than she had when he came in.
“It’s orl the money we ’ave.” She made sure he knew.
He nodded, dragged the changeling outside and down the concrete steps.
It stirred as it felt the cold, began to weep and beg again for its mother—until Susan closed the door behind them, and then its noise making abruptly ceased.
A change went through it, a complete unpicking of the motions and gestures and expressions that had made it Mimi Rush.
It ceased to cringe and cry, stood up straight and poised.
It cocked its head with preternatural, wholly adult aplomb, watched him out of suddenly unblinking urchin eyes.
“That’s better.” Duncan felt the ooze of blood from a scratch over his eye, thumbed it away, licked his thumb. “You want to live much longer, you shut up and do what I tell you.”
Of course, changelings severed from their intended hearth and purpose tended not to live very long anyway.
The spell-work saw to that. Listlessness set in fast, followed in short order by actual physical decline.
Decay time varied, depending on the age and art of the Huldu who’d built the enchantment in the first place, how much effort went into the spell, and how long the changeling had been in place.
The end result would always be the same.
Dissolution was usually waiting a matter of days, at most weeks, down the line.
But this changeling didn’t know that yet.
Briefly, he tried once again to imagine himself into what it must be like—called into being, fully formed as the simulacrum echo of some other, more important life; put in place of that being with nothing to hold you but a driven instinct to imitate the original and hide your own nature as best you could.
Left forever alone among strange creatures, to fend for yourself and fit in, losing any faint sense of self you might ever once have owned.
And then to lose it all, to be cut loose from any purpose you ever had.
He shivered in the chilly air, sniffed. Papery odor of rain inbound.
“I’m taking you back to the Forest,” he said roughly. “It’s not far. You behave, we won’t have a problem. You give me any trouble, I’m going to take another handful of those iron filings and grind them into your eyes. Are we clear?”
“Ffforessst…” the changeling rustled, apparently to itself.
“That’s right. Time for you to go home.”
—
Back before the war and what the Theosophicals now liked to call the Unbinding, it was a good couple of hour’s brisk walk from the western fringes of Erlsley to anything you could reasonably call forest. Once you were out of town, bleak moorland was the norm, sporadically netted over with the crisscross of dry stone walls and drover’s paths.
The landscape came studded with outlying farms and sheep folds and shepherd’s hides, the safe, monotonous roll of the terrain broken up here and there by occasional copses, lone ancient oak or yew or elm, and the odd squiggle of younger foliage tracking and shrouding the meander of a small river or ambitious stream.
Open ground, easy to navigate, bracing to hike.
No longer.
The oak and yew and elm had bred back overnight, brought forth monstrous atavistic versions of themselves by the legion, taken back the land wherever humans were sparse.
Those who’d been around when it happened—as opposed to overseas and getting shot at—reported the crack and boom and horizon-wide sheet lightning of endless thunderstorms, driving, drenching rain for weeks, unearthly rumbling, tearing, creaking sounds, night after night, making dogs skulk and whine, infants cry, and adults shudder.
According to official record, it drove a small number of people gibbering insane.
Some claimed to have seen the Wild Hunt thundering headlong amid the clouds, others the emergence of the ancient dead in ranks from fiery chasms torn deep in the land.
And so forth.
By the time Duncan got back from the abruptly aborted war in Europe, it was impossible to know how much of this might have been true.
The weather had quietened, as if exhausted by the birthing it had done.
The night skies were eerily clear and quiet.
Any fiery chasms were long gone, or at least shrouded from the human eye.
The dry stone walls and drovers tracks, the outlying farms, sheep folds and shepherd’s hides—all had been swallowed up along with the moors.
They existed now under the new forest canopies like the drowned ruins of some rural Atlantis—overgrown, brooding, silent.
He’d seen them in his work, generally gave them a wide berth.
Often they contained things you were better not having to see.
Whether a similar fate awaited Erlsley itself in the long run, along with all other human habitation across Britain, was something bookish experts in Whitehall and Oxford and Cambridge were apparently still debating.
For now, the massive canopied ramparts of the Forest bulked and loomed and drowsed in the breeze, a scant half mile from where the cheap new housing on the city’s western fringes gave out.
The Number 4 tramline went out that way.
Duncan rode the tram standing up, one hand looped in the safety strap overhead, the other clamped on the changeling’s wrist. Muggy warmth belted out from the carriage heater, steamed up windows streaked with rain, spread the woolly, intimate smell of dampened clothes and human bodies around him.
The tram was packed, people hurrying home from work or errands run, eager to get indoors before night could fall.
They did an intricate, shuffling dance at every stop, as passengers got up to disembark, bumping and pressing and excusing themselves to each other as they maneuvered down the aisle.
The changeling stood quiescent at his side—altogether too much exposed iron and steel in the tram’s interior for any kind of struggle to be worth the risk—and played to perfection the role of small child out with her rather stern father.
They got the odd glance now and then, maybe the cut of Duncan’s woodsman clothes, maybe just someone wondering where this poor little poppet’s mother was.
But the war and its dislocations had shaken family roles loose of their mountings along with everything else, and there was little sign yet that things would settle back the way they’d once been.
People made do, and unusual tableaus just weren’t that unusual anymore.
The tram lurched on the last curve before the turnaround at Rawbury.
The changeling flinched as the motion threw it in the direction of the gleaming metal trim on the nearest seat.
Instinctively, Duncan yanked it back to avoid the contact.
It knocked briefly into him, regained its poise, said nothing. They locked gazes for a moment.
“Just watch yourself,” said Duncan gruffly. “You can get hurt.”
The tram rattled to a halt at the turnaround and people bundled out.
Duncan broke gaze with the changeling, hung on to the strap, and ducked his head in a vain attempt to see through the misted windows.
Rain striping the glass now in earnest. They got out onto slick gray cobblestones in the full horizontal bluster of it all, watched the other passengers tramp off with heads down against the weather.
No one looked back. The driver gathered up his satchel and left the cabin, headed for the warmth of a cozy-looking break cabin built alongside the line.
He nodded at Duncan, but said nothing. The door of the cabin opened onto cheery fire glow within, then swallowed him up.
Boisterous male voices, right down at the limits of Duncan’s hearing, nothing a normal man would have caught.
He thought the changeling was listening, too. He jerked its arm.
“You’re done with this world,” he told it, switching to Skogurtal. “Let’s go.”
Beyond the rails and cobbles of the terminus, a muddy lane unwound up a rolling incline into the countryside.
A waist-high dry stone wall tracked it on the left.
On the other side of the wall were fields of rough grazing, rising to the piled and tangled remnants of the trees felled during the Re-clearance.
And beyond that—like some fantastical frozen tidal wave in autumnal shades—the Forest itself lay waiting.
—
They trudged up the lane in the gusty wind and rain, found a gap in the drystone that had once been barred by an iron gate.
Duncan supposed it had been unhinged and removed to facilitate the carriage of felled timber down the hill and through to the town.
Inured by the long Victorian dream of man’s mastery over nature, the authorities had kept at clearing back the Forest for quite a while before realization set in—that the forces now at work in the land were beyond any human control.
Whatever this change was, whatever it presaged, that splendid Victorian whip hand was lost. Between the freakish accidents and casualties on the cutting line and the unexplained disappearances by night, morale was already sputtering and spiraling down in flames, like a defeated Sopwith Pup Duncan had once seen die in the skies over the Somme.
But what really killed the Re-clearance effort once and for all was the demoralizing rapid regrowth the Forest could put on within days of a fresh cut.
Pushed hard, the logging crews found they could maybe make fifty to sixty yards a day into the encroaching tree line while daylight lasted—no one would work once darkness fell—though clearing the resulting mess afterward took far longer than the cut itself.
Then, after a couple of days, the storms would roll in, bringing torrential rain and near dark conditions all day, forcing the crews to abandon all work and sit the weather out, grumbling and shivering and recounting apocryphal Forest horror stories in taverns and guesthouses nearby.
And when the skies finally cleared, the logged area was regrown once again, if anything, thicker and more impenetrable than before.
Duncan led the changeling into the fields, then up toward the dead tree line.
It wasn’t his preferred approach to the Forest. The felled trunks and tangled branches were a nuisance to negotiate, and reminded him uncomfortably of antitank obstacles the Germans had built at Delville Wood.
As if, in their idiocy, men had attempted to destroy the invading Forest and ended up just furnishing it with a handy demarcation zone instead.
They reached the first of the toppled oaks and clambered up, the changeling proving preternaturally agile on bark surfaces once he let it go.
For a moment they both stood atop the broad curve of the trunk, staring out over the yards and yards of similarly murdered and tangled-up trees and the living Forest beyond.
The wind-driven rain came and striped them both across the face, gave the moment a wet immediacy in contrast to the dreary trudge they’d endured to get here.
The canopies in the tree line tipped and shook and shivered. Duncan pointed at the motion.
“That’s where you belong,” he said flatly.
“Ffffforessssst.”
“The Forest, aye.” Duncan went to give the changeling a hard shove in the back, knock it off the trunk to the grass. At the last moment, something stopped him.
“In there,” he said, pointing again instead, “somewhere, is the one who made you. Maybe you can find that Fae fuck. Ask them what they think you should do now.”
The changeling swiveled its head to look up at him. He thought he heard vertebrae click and crack with the motion. With every passing minute, it looked less and less like the small child it had been spawned to replace.
“Siiiiiilvaaaa,” it hissed.
“Aye, Silver.” Brusque impatience now. “That’s me. You tell them in there, I’m coming for the child. Silver is coming. Tell them I’m bringing the speaking iron. Tell them I’ll cut down anything that gets in my way. Tell them if they’ve harmed her in any way—”
And then, like the hiss/snap of a camera bulb, firing and dying, he was suddenly sick of his own unrelenting rage.
“It’s not your fault,” he heard himself say, unaccountably with the faintest hint of a Welsh lilt. “You did only what you were made for. No hard feelings, eh? Just get going.”
The changeling looked steadily back at him. Wet gleam in its eyes.
“Ffffffffeelingssss,” it said, as if describing a decision it had taken, and then it jumped down to the turf below. It landed like a cat, turned on all fours, and stared back up at him.
Duncan pointed at the tree line again. “Get yourself under cover,” he said. “This rain is going to come down hard. Get in the woods.”
It looked at him a moment longer, then, like the flash of a fish belly in water, it whipped about and was gone, scuttling on all fours into the tangled chaos of felled and shattered trees.
He lost it there, stood watching a minute longer, unsure why.
He thought he caught a flicker of movement, saw it once more, clambering slickly up and over a jutting deadwood branch farther out, slipping instantly back down again.
But in the thickening rain, it was hard to tell for sure.