Chapter Sixteen #2
The station building was about as desolate as he remembered.
Most of the glass in the windows gone, the main doors jammed partway open, detritus on the floor inside and out.
Dead leaves scampered and scraped about his feet as he walked in.
Three wood-paneled phone booths on the far wall, one with the door torn off and lying on the floor, a second with it hanging drunkenly from the top hinge, the third sealed shut.
The waiting room off to the right. On the left, one big difference from last time—there was a skeleton in a station master’s uniform pressed forward through the broken glass of the ticket booth window, lying on the counter.
Twin bullet holes punched through the brow of the graying skull.
Last time he’d been here, the station master was still alive.
Twined about and penetrated with creeper and ivy, pinned in place at the booth by explosions of bushy growth that had burst from the wall behind him, tendrils spiraled through his eyes, into his ears, cramming his mouth so full his jaw was dislocated.
But somehow, through some filthy woodland glamour—still alive.
It looked as if he’d smashed the booth glass himself, tried to drag himself through and out, but whatever had erupted inside the booth had dragged him back to have its way with him at leisure.
As Duncan stood there and watched, what was left of the man kept trying to drag his throat down onto the jagged edges of the broken booth window, presumably to saw it open.
But the creeper gave only teasing fractions before wrenching him back up.
He’d seemed to sense Duncan’s approach. Twisted around, tried to bring his tendril-infested eyes to bear. Impossible to know what choked, rustling plea came gagging out between the dislocated jaws, the stuffing of creeper and leaf. Duncan took a guess and honored it.
He put a .445 round from his Webley service revolver into the man’s head.
Then another.
Short, thuggish reports in the stillness of the deserted station, flat echoes off the walls.
Inside the booth, something seemed to thrash and wail.
The remaining fragments of glass blew out on a vicious gust of wind that smelled of green and rot.
The station master sagged until his head touched the counter woodwork and lay there at rest.
Duncan stood frozen in recall for a moment, then crossed the room, shoved open the far door, and went out onto the westbound platform.
More dead leaves, twitching and shifting on the concrete, as if dying to rush up and meet him.
A forlorn ribbed steamer trunk, abandoned and rotting halfway down the platform’s length.
A porter’s trolley, lying on its back. Sundry smaller items of luggage scattered around—handbags, suitcases, a hatbox, a slim instrument case that looked like it might contain a trumpet or trombone.
Like sparse markers in some avant-garde cemetery for unimaginable times, each one a memento for a soul now gone.
Farther along to the left, the tailing slope as the platform ended, then the rise of the railway cutting and eventual tunnel, where gnarled oak and yew had erupted from the embankments at crazy angles and clogged the way.
Looming in the channel, rusted now to the rails, the shrine to human ingenuity he’d come to beg favors at—the long, black iron hulk of L&YR Thunder Child, her tender and carriages.
He didn’t know the locomotive—the name was detailed in time-dulled bronze lettering arched over the L&YR crest—but from the size of the thing, it must have once been the pride of the Lancashire and Yorkshire line.
He wondered, as he had the last time he was here, looking at the stalled train, the abandoned luggage on the platform, how it had been when the Forest stormed Miller’s Frith.
Had the erupting trees across the cutting been enough to panic passengers and crew?
Had they already come through something worse to the east and dared not reverse course?
Or had something else come out of the darkness of the tunnel and scattered them screaming from the station in madness and despair?
Duncan moved cautiously up to the quiescent bulk of the locomotive, stepped across the short gap from platform to footplate, ducked into the driver’s cab.
Broad loom of the boiler backhead with its fire-hole hatch, cracked glass in the forward ports, a festooning of gauges and pipes and levers everywhere—he had not the faintest idea what most of it did.
It was a taller, more comfortable space than you’d think.
But there was no fast way into it that didn’t involve touching iron in some shape or form.
He was safe.
He unshipped his pack, stowed it with the McCulloch in a corner between the fireman’s bench and the fire-hole hatch.
As the weight came off his shoulders, all the breath seemed to come out of him at once.
Relief, this time absolute. His cheeks puffed out with the force of his sigh.
He slumped boneless on the driver’s bench.
Spiteful stitching of pain across his ribs from the knife wounds, but the furrows in his shoulder, the fang gash in his scalp, these were down to no worse than a dull ache.
It dawned on him that this was the first moment he hadn’t been wound tight and combat tense since he entered the Forest last night with Garner at his side—he checked his watch—the best part of twenty-four hours ago.
He fed himself with provisions from the pack—only realizing then how hungry he was—and then he sat there blank for a while. He let go of his pains and thoughts, as if soaking in a hot bath—strung-out nerves slowly easing, tensions dissipating, all thought washed away…
Easy, lad. It might almost have been Garner’s voice in his ear. We’re not out of the woods yet.
Awareness crept back in behind the admonition. Shadow stripes across the cab. He rolled his head to look up at the driver-side forward port. Reddish evening light caught there in the cracks. The day was almost done.
Reluctantly, he sat forward, gathered his thoughts.
Brooded on Stordalen’s blood-daubed head where it dangled to the floor of the cab, staring away at an angle, as if offended.
Duncan thought there might still be a fractional amount of smolder where the dead Fae’s cheek touched the iron floor.
Couldn’t be sure. Finally, he got up and unfastened the hair, hefted the head between his cupped hands, held it before him like a football. The dead black eyes stared up at him.
“Time to make thisel useful, lad.” Managing a passable imitation of Garner’s Lancastrian twang. “Let’s go see the vicar.”
He collected the McCulloch from where he’d leaned it.
Checked the load, put the gun across his shoulder, picked up Stordalen by his hair, and stepped back out onto the platform.
Cooling evening air, overpowering scent of greenery and mulch.
He sniffed at it, grimaced, then pushed through the station building again and out into the streets of the village.
Nape of neck prickles—the station master’s skull, watching him go.
On up to the church.
Duncan supposed that even in its medieval heyday, St. Oswald’s at Miller’s Frith had only ever been a fairly homely place of worship—part timbered, part sandstone, a huddled, truncated nave and a stubby square tower, trading as much on its elevated position as anything architectural to assert itself over the hamlet it served.
From the station, you reached the lych-gate up a short rising curve, a street now overwhelmed with waist-high brush and wild grass.
The growth had washed right up to the front doors of the modest two-story Georgian houses that lined the street, drowning low garden walls and gates in the process, making the thoroughfare seem much wider than it actually was.
Duncan picked his way carefully through the grass, around the thickest of the shrub growth, trench gun leveled, ready to drop Stordalen’s head at a moment’s notice and fight.
The houses stood mute on either side, like witnesses to some awful crime.
The empty gaze of top-floor windows bore down on him all the way—gave him sniper’s itch, a constant urge to look up, stare back, be ready.
He held it down. He reached the top of the rise.
You came across abandoned churches all over the Forest, in varying states of rot and disrepair.
Some had been smashed apart by the returning trees, some had simply been swarmed with moss and creeper over time and left to decay, mute testimony like the unloved moss-grown marker stones in their graveyards.
These places were not, in the grand scheme of things, much different from any other ruin.
Duncan had heard tales of more outlandish remains, glamoured sites, but St. Oswald’s was the only one he’d seen for himself.
The church was neither smashed nor decayed.
Instead, it seemed to have come to some kind of otherworldly life.
Wherever the building was timbered—the upper levels of the tower, the broad door porch, ornately carved beams under the huddled roof—planks had sprouted fresh twigs and tendrils as if in memory of the living wood they had once been.
Not to be outdone, the stonework elsewhere was veined with the same soft blue light as the cairn Duncan had desecrated the night before.
The whole structure appeared to breathe gustily to itself—hard to tell if this was some glamour-induced illusion, but the cracked and crumpled earth around the church’s walls seemed to suggest not.