Chapter Nine
Nine
Garner rang Irene Rush’s old landlord from the pay phone in the White Mare’s public bar. He offered money. It seemed to do the trick.
“An hour,” he told Duncan. “He’ll send someone to let us in. It’s close; we can walk it from here in a quarter of that.”
“You say why we wanted to see it?”
Garner stared at him. “Don’t be daft.”
An hour later, past sundown but with plenty of residual light in the sky, they stood waiting outside Number 17 Tegg’s Road.
It was part of a modest Victorian terraced row in red brick, set back a little from the road behind waist-high iron railings and gates for the short paths up to each door.
Tall sash windows looked out over the road from the first floor, gave views into fairly spacious front rooms at ground level.
Soft curl of smoke from chimney pots, homely odor of it on the evening air.
Duncan saw fires in fireplaces, lamps already lit against the promise of evening, cozy rooms. In one, a well-dressed middle-aged man sat and dozed over a book.
In another, a young mother played with two toddlers on the rug.
In sharp contrast, the windows of Number 17 were shuttered, nothing to see behind the glass but white-painted wood panels locked across.
“Odd they haven’t rented it since,” Duncan mused.
“Not necessarily. Lot of lost jobs around here the last year or so. Money’s tight, and they say it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.”
“Aye, might be that.”
Garner caught his tone. “Tha think different?”
“I don’t think anything yet. Oh, look—here we go.”
A taxi had come puttering to a halt just ahead of them in the smoky, early evening light.
The rear door opened and a small, gray-whiskered man in a suit bustled out clutching a satchel.
He introduced himself as Simon Wilkins, agent for the owner, opened the gate to seventeen and led the way up the path.
At the door, he wrestled a large key ring out of his satchel and worked his way round it until he found the right key.
“Most irregular, this,” he insisted in a slightly high-pitched voice, which, combined with his painfully unfashionable mutton chops, put Duncan in mind of comic characters out of Dickens. “We really would expect to see references before…”
“Got thy references for thee right here,” said Garner impassively, handing over one of Duncan’s ten-shilling notes. “I was told that’d be acceptable.”
“Oh, yes,” Wilkins sniffed. “Mr. Carruthers made himself very clear on the amount.”
He made a show of unfolding and turning the note over, though the green and brown print was visible at a glance, marking it out pretty clearly as 1918 issue and perfectly legal tender.
Duncan cleared his throat, shifted impatiently.
Wilkins looked his way, flinched as their gazes met.
He stuffed the note away and got on with opening the front door.
Inside, the house offered a short no-nonsense hallway, staircase straight up on the right, doors off ahead and to the left.
“As you can see, it’s spacious living over two floors,” Wilkins exaggerated and threw the switch by the door.
A feeble bulb glowed to life inside a small stained glass lampshade over their heads “Fully electrified. Comes fully furnished, too, though I believe there’s space in one of the bedrooms for—”
Duncan shouldered past him and up the stairs. Sudden gooseflesh along the inside of his arms. Whisper of something unquiet, up there waiting for him.
“I say…”
Garner slid in behind Duncan, turned to block Wilkins on the threshold. Duncan heard him talking in uncharacteristically plummy tones.
“My client’s in the way of being a bit peculiar about these things, Mr. Wilkins. He’d rather form his own impressions alone, if that’s all reet with thee. It’s a habit of his. Perhaps tha could wait for us down here while he gets a feel for the property.”
Wilkins coughing, muttering, “Irregular, highly irregular,” but by then, Duncan was up on the short landing, looking at another set of closed doors, listening to the stillness in the dark and dusty air.
He found a light switch, flicked it, and watched more feeble light spring up in lamps along the wall.
He felt the trace again. It wasn’t much—if it was four or five months old, he was honestly surprised it was there at all—but he could feel the slight rise in his pulse as he cast about and—
This room.
He opened the door. Stepped into a darkened bedchamber.
Soft loom of furniture under dust sheets, the faintest filter of light through cracks in and around the shutters closed across the window.
Bare boards underfoot, a threadbare Persian-style rug laid across the center of the floor, most of it under what looked, under its sheet, like a brass-frame double bed.
The small fire grate in the far wall was dead and cold.
By the shuttered window, a basketweave rocking chair, uncovered. He looked at it and felt every hair on his nape stand up.
Something was sat there, grinning at him—
Ah, there you are, Duncan, so glad you came. We’ve been waiting for you…
Death and the Forest, right there, woven together in some nightmare embrace of bones and pale dead tree limbs, spilled and lolling in the embrace of the chair.
A worm-eaten grayish skull crowned and grown through with ivy and thorns, a mossy rib cage hung with more of the same.
Skeletal fingers gripped the arms of the chair, as if the thing was poised to rise and greet him in some parody of manners it had been told must be honored—What a pleasure to have you here finally!
—and the twig-dry grip of those fingers around his own.
The eager grin of the skull. So much to talk about, so many, many things to show you…
A Huldu claim spell—marking territory, the way a wolf might raise its hind leg and piss on a tree. A vortex of disturbance in the order of things, chaos peeping through. Magic laid down like a proclamation nailed to a forest oak. I was here. I did this. Witness, if you dare.
High-pitched Faerie voices calling him from beyond—Duncan, Duncan, come to us, Duncan…
Something behind him.
It reached out and touched him lightly on the shoulder blade. He whipped around in the darkened room, fists clenched.
“Duncan!” Garner, backing rapidly off, hands raised. “Come back, lad! Get a grip!”
He swallowed, grunted. Nodded jerkily. Garner lowered his hands, but not all the way. Duncan stood aside a little, gestured at the rocking chair.
“Can you see that?” he asked tightly.
“Not clearly, no.” Garner grim faced, hands still partway to the instinctive guard. “But I know it’s there. I can feel that much.”
The thing in the chair seemed to shrug. It rustled, it grinned. The shadowed empty eye sockets in the skull dragged at Duncan’s gaze. He felt like someone off the Titanic, flailing desperately against the suck of icy waters as the big ship plunged into the depths and tried to bring him with it…
Duncan, Duncan, come to us, Duncan…
“Are tha all reet, lad?”
Garner’s voice, too faint, coming from too far away. He clung to it like a piece of driftwood, drew a deep breath and shut out the vision in the rocking chair.
It’s just a fucking chair, Duncan. All right?
As if huffily disappointed, the thing seemed to shrug again, fold in on itself in whispers and wavering resolution he had to blink to focus on, a cold wind moaning, a hole in something through which the core of the apparition flowed, and then nothing much at all but a musty green odor that hung in the air and a kind of floating dust that sparkled briefly and then went out.
It’s just a fucking chair.
It is now.
But he knew that a little over four or five months ago, some Huldu of rank had sat in that same chair with unhuman immortal patience, watching Irene Rush and her daughter sleep together in the big brass frame bed, perhaps night after night, for who could tell how long.
And then, at some point—maybe that night, maybe a few nights later—that same Huldu had risen unhurriedly, cast a casual glamour, taken the sleeping child from its mother, left a changeling in its place, and slipped away with its prize into the Forest.
Duncan knew these things with the same conviction he knew that the men he’d killed in France and Flanders were still dead.
And with the knowledge came the same icy, murderous rage he’d used to kill those men, the same rage he carried unslaked into the Forest with him, as ever, time and again, to unleash there in the woody gloom like some savage chemical flare.
—
“Tha’re sure about this, lad?”
“A trace that strong?” Duncan unrolled the oilskin gun wrap on the bed in his low-ceilinged room under the eaves at the inn.
The McCulloch gleamed up at him in the low light.
“A trace still hanging around like that, better than four months after the fact? You got any idea what it takes to leave that kind of imprint in our world? Had to be high-caste Huldu. No one else gives off magic like that. This fucker’s a thousand years old, at least.”
“One for the trophy hall, eh?”
Duncan took the trench gun from its retaining loops. “That isn’t what I meant.”
“Is it not?”
“I’m not being paid to kill Huldu. Not unless they get in my way.
” He opened the ammo pouch on the wrap, scooped out a handful of Crumley & Kegg’s small grape cartridges.
Fed them one by one into the McCulloch’s loading port.
“What they pay me to do is bring back the weans. For that I need a trail. And a high-caste Huldu passing through the Forest with a human child in tow is going to leave a lot of trace. Local Fae will talk about it, the Haunts will talk about it, Christ, even the fucking trees will talk about it.”
“And tha think they’ll talk to thee?”