Chapter Thirteen
Thirteen
The Haughton place.
They reached it on the run, panting again—farmhouse, outbuildings, big, high-roofed barn, all sunk in under-ocean silence and gloom, crosshatched pale and black in what little moonlight there was.
Scattered silver birch trunks in the surrounding woodland, caught in the corner of the eye, gave the unnerving impression of a pallid siege army, watching and waiting.
The two men circled warily in through the trees, scanned the dark, abandoned structures for threat or signs of life.
Creeper and climbing plants had long since swarmed the farmhouse walls, grown like cataract across the windows that still held glass, thrust eagerly in through the frames that did not, then gripped and tangled on upward toward a sagging roof with problems of its own.
Less than a sense of siege, it gave the two-story structure a softened look in the moonlight and murk, as if it was melting slowly into the Forest floor.
The clearing the farm stood in was thick with grass and saplings, rising higher in some places than the low drystack walling that delineated the yard.
A gateless gateway gave access. They found the farmhouse door, moss-grown, cracked and rotted, flat in the middle of the yard like a murdered body.
At some point, something had torn it off its hinges and tossed it contemptuously away.
Adjacent to the farmyard, the long, low outbuilding had been shattered by the eruption of a massive yew tree through one end.
What roofing had not been smashed aside by the emergence of the tree had later collapsed inward, dumped its tiles and joists across the interior, and taken some of the supporting walls down with it.
The resulting space was ragged and exposed, far too open for two men to hold against numbers.
Taller, more intact, the barn stood a little farther off, but much of the roof looked to have fallen in there as well, and the doors were gone, leaving a wide-open gape too broad and high to usefully defend.
The house itself, then.
Duncan moved cautiously up to the empty doorway, peered inside.
Saw a derelict kitchen space within, an earthen tile floor, cracked and cratered as if by repeated violent blows.
Up through the cracks, the Forest was already sprouting its early assaults in sprigs of green and flowering yellow.
Over in one corner near a slumped and shattered porcelain sink, a decent-sized bristling of bushes had gotten a hold.
Elsewhere, wooden kitchen furniture—table and chairs, Welsh dresser, sideboard—was scattered about, tumbled or upended, yielding to moss and rot just like the door in the yard.
A single window over the fallen sink still had glass, was overgrown with vines.
Hard to come through in a hurry, and the casements looked to be iron.
On the other side of the room, doors ajar led off into other rooms, two of them, where the gloom descended into near total darkness. Duncan grimaced. Not ideal, but—
Long, floating howl from out among the trees. It sounded close.
He wondered if they’d found their fallen comrade.
“Right, this’ll have to do.” Stepping fully into the kitchen, scoping it with a fire trench commander’s eye. “That dresser. Quick! Help me get it across the door here.”
They dumped off their packs, dragged the massy chunk of carpentry screeching over the cracked tile floor, rammed it side-on across the doorway.
It formed a fairly serviceable parapet. Duncan knelt behind it experimentally, glanced up and saw the upper hinge of the kitchen door was still in place, hanging like a stiffened iron pennant from the frame.
He grinned and worked the rusted hinges until it jabbed slightly outward into the night air.
Might dissuade any overly enthusiastic warrior caste from trying to leap the dresser top.
They checked the interior doors. One led into a low-beamed sitting room, overfilled with heavy dark wood furniture, hosting a broad brick chimney breast, a fireplace you could stand in, and a staircase to the upper level.
The other door opened onto some kind of larder, shelves long denuded of all but a few forlorn rows of canned goods, no window beyond a tight iron grate set high up in the wall.
“This one we don’t need to close,” Duncan decided. “Let’s get that table jammed against the other door, pile the chairs on top and behind.”
“This going to be enough to keep them out?” wheezed Garner as they hauled the table. “What if they try to ram it open from the other side?”
“Then we tickle them through the door with small grape until they fucking stop. I can hold the main doorway alone while you do that, if it comes to it.”
They rammed the table the last couple of hard inches in under the handle, pinned the door closed. They went about gathering the chairs, piled them on the tabletop to add weight. Then they stood back and looked at the resulting blockade in silence. Duncan grunted in satisfaction.
“Ought to hold up well enough. Short of smashing through from the floor above, which I don’t think they’ll come equipped to do, their only way in now is the kitchen door there.
And that’s fifty feet of open ground we can turn into a killing field.
” He clapped Garner on the shoulder. “You know what—a bit of luck and a following wind, we might live out the night.”
—
For a while, it got very quiet in the darkened kitchen.
Garner leaned against the edge of the table with the Woodward over-and-under grounded butt-down between his spread feet, hands clasped on the barrel.
With his head bowed in the gloom, he looked like some somber memorial statue of a sentry on eternal guard.
Duncan sat on the floor across the room from him, back to the wall, knees up.
He rested the McCulloch sideways across his lap.
The cracked tiles were hard on his arse, but he’d learned long ago that you take your ease as and when you can; no telling when and for how long you’ll be back up and on your feet for the fight.
The silence hung between the two of them like an early morning mist waiting on the sunrise.
Duncan let his eyes defocus, ran the preparations they’d made in his head, just in case they’d missed something.
A soft sigh eased out of him. His mind bounced around in a state of mild arousal: Niamh in the sheets of his no longer lonely bed; movie-star looker Irene Rush mourning in her flimsy nightgown by the window; Wolfbane Sal Bethune and her raucous, unapologetic aura of sex.
Damp moss for a bed and the eldritch, twiggy fingered weave of the tree spirit as she descended upon him…
Jesus, Duncan! Give it a rest! Not like you didn’t get laid yesterday, is it—
“That Fae I killed in the woods back there.” Garner’s voice came mild enough, but Duncan felt the other man’s gaze on him. “It called thee by name.”
“You heard that?” Trying not to sound evasive.
“And…it said we’re coming for you? Something like that?”
Duncan sighed. “Close enough, aye.”
“So, lad. Tha’ve been making friends in t’ Forest tha dinner tell me about? Want to tell me what we’ve got ourselves into here? Tha knew this was going to happen all along?”
“You keep saying that,” Duncan snapped. “What am I, a fucking witch? You think I have the Sight? You really think I would have walked us both slap into this barnyard bollocks if I…”
Voice suddenly robbed of all force, fading out as he said the words…
Wolfbane Sally, her scented oils and candles and spells. Her widdershins walk. All good stuff for a barnyard squabble.
Somehow, she’d seen this—and prepped him for it.
Garner picked up the broken thread of the conversation, voice still low. “All as I’m saying is, tha don’t seem very shocked by any of this.”
“Shock won’t help.” He said it automatically, an old truth from the trenches. “Shock’ll just get you killed.”
“Is that right?”
“From my exp—”
Somewhere overhead in the abandoned house, timbers creaked.
Garner’s head tilted up a fraction. “Hear that?”
Duncan nodded. They listened, eyes raised to the ceiling above. The sound was not repeated. Garner swallowed audibly.
“Old beams,” he whispered. “This place has—”
He saw Duncan’s eyes widen. Jammed to a halt.
Duncan lifted one hand, pointed in utter silence. Garner looked behind him.
The handle to the door they’d blocked with the table. Turning stealthily, left, then right…
It was all the warning they were going to get.
Duncan, up on his feet, stabbing with his finger, nodding, a snatching fist gesture—Garner spinning to point the Woodward’s barrels at the door, close by the handle—
The over-and-under bellowed—wood splintered apart, leapt from the cheap paneling in bits. Beyond the door, something shrilled in shock and pain.
Duncan grinned at the sound—was already turning away to the dresser barricade—
Two Huldu, swarming over the dresser, fangs bared, awful, blank black-pupil stares…
The noises they made as they saw him…
He swung the trench gun up, grin still gripping his face—
The canny Glaswegian engineers at McCulloch & Ross were, on their own admission, great admirers of Winchester and Remington, and had digested all the two American firms had to offer on the subject of wartime weaponry.
As with the shotguns that carried those two names, the McCulloch Trench Tactical gave you the option to simply hold down the trigger and pump until the gun ran dry.
The Americans called it slamfire.
Duncan clamped the trigger, slamfired three shells, the old accustomed rhythm, point-blank range. The reports blended almost into one.
The two Huldu fell back off the barricade in shrieking ruin.