Chapter Thirty-Two #2
He lay looking up at the radiating pattern for a while, listening to the rain and feeling Niamh breathe rasping into his side. Hungry, he realized. He was hungry. He twisted and fished the Mappin & Webb from the bedside table, held it up to see the time.
Nearly two in the afternoon.
Fuck.
The witch.
Duncan eased himself out of bed, trying hard not to disturb Niamh.
She mumbled and shifted, but didn’t wake.
He carried his clothing from where he’d left it strewn on the floor, seated himself in a big red velvet upholstered armchair on the far side of the room.
He dressed as quietly as he could, watching Niamh sleep.
His thoughts churned like the wheels of an ambulance stuck in mud.
Flashlit recall, no more coherent than his dreams.
Boyle’s death—the detective’s face, mottled with rage and fear, just before Duncan put the dumdum slug through it, turned it to senseless clay—you’ll hang for this!
The wink of light from across the river, the brutal slap of the sniper shot as it scorched his skull.
Another kind of war—Hardy, officer-urbane over tea and cake—with new enemies and rules we have yet to learn.
Enemies he now seemed to be stacking up like sandbags on a redoubt.
Svalenkari wills vengeance, and he will not be stopped. Mebhuranon’s warning while he twisted and crawled on the park path at her feet. And so you are warned.
Right now, it was the least of his worries.
He had enough to deal with right here in the realm of mortals.
His apartment watched by the police, his bank accounts unsafe to access, his face no doubt about to be printed out on a thousand wanted posters in police stations across the city.
Garner and Niamh hunted by Hardy and the Forestry Commission, and now by Special Branch, too.
Crammond and his associates, dangerously exposed the longer they insisted on helping Duncan out.
His welcome at the Doorbell Club wearing out faster than the barrel of a Vickers on the Somme.
And lost somewhere in the midst of it all, who knew where, Mimi Rush, whom he’d promised to bring home, and the mother he’d promised it to as well.
You will search for the child again. Bainbridge was apparently certain. Nice of him, that. Strong vote of confidence. But where and how he’d search, and with what desperate scavenged resources, were questions Duncan had no answers for.
This is gettin’ oot o’ hand, Duncan.
True enough.
Sitting with his boots still unlaced, watching Niamh sleep in the rapidly eroding island of safety he’d brought her to.
Christ, Duncan. What are we going to do?
The two Webley revolvers gleamed darkly on the floor by the bed, partly shrouded in the folds of his coat where he’d dropped it. He retrieved them with stealthy care, stowed them either side in the long pockets of the coat, and slipped out of the room with the garment over his arm.
What are we going to do?
For now, he was going to see the witch.
—
He went down the corridor to the landing, found Arthur seated there on the floor at the top of the stairs with the casual lack of concern for clothing or available furniture that you saw in a lot of men who’d come home from the trenches.
There was a folded copy of the Manchester Guardian beside him on the carpet. He looked up as Duncan approached.
“Afternoon. Your girl all right?”
“I think so. She’s still sleeping.” Duncan sat down next to him on the stairs. “Nice shooting last night. Meant to say.”
“My pleasure. Been a while. Was worried I’d lost the knack.”
“Sharpshooter, were you?”
“Tried out for it. Waiting on orders when this happened.” He gestured, almost apologetic, at his fright-mask features. “Never got the chance after that.”
“What I saw, you’d have made the grade for the Lovat Scouts, no problem.”
Arthur approximated a smile. “Thanks.”
“I’ve to go out for a bit. You mind keeping an eye out for Niamh when she wakes?”
“Consider it done. More or less what I was doing up here anyway.”
“Man, don’t you ever sleep?”
“Not well.” Another gesture at his fire-ravaged face. “Not since this. Got a couple of hours after you left, been up since about ten. I’ll tell you what, though. If you’re going out now, you’re going to want a hat.”
Duncan looked up at the skylight in the ceiling above the stairs. It was awash with rain. “Any chance I could borrow one?”
“Sure, we’ll find you something. Belle’s got a wardrobe for the girls like you wouldn’t believe. You want to grab something from the kitchen before you go?”
“No, I’ll get something on the way. You seen my Lancastrian pal?”
“Garner? Yeah, he already ate. Breakfast with the girls in the back dining room, a while ago. Think he’s still down there reading the papers.”
“I’d better go talk to him. Is Belle about?”
Arthur chuckled. “Now you want unicorns. Belle won’t be up for at least another two hours. Creature of the night, she is, just like Carmilla in that Murnau movie. You seen it?”
Duncan nodded. “Greta Schroder. I think Schroder’s got a bit more meat on her bones than Belle, though.”
“All that bloodsucking, I expect. Can I give her a message? Belle, I mean.”
“Aye, well, just wanted to apologize to her for the inconvenience. Tell her we’ll be out of her hair as soon as I can organize something else.”
“Have you got somewhere in mind?”
Duncan grimaced. “Not really. Got some ideas, a favor I might be able to call in. But it’ll take some putting together.”
“My advice? You need to get your girl out of town. Maybe down to London.”
“Aye. Maybe.”
“Or out somewhere remote, fringes of the Forest where no one’ll dare come after you, but not too far in. They say there’s still some Gypsies living that way. Garner’s a woodsman, too, isn’t he? Could he live like that?”
Duncan said nothing. He’d left the Forest running on basic goals—find out why he’d been betrayed, pay it back with interest. When the phone calls he made from the Turk’s Head in Maltby went unanswered, he’d understood there would be more to do, and the bad news on Skoldergate just drove the point home.
To the list of what had been taken from him, he added Niamh and shoveled a fresh load of fuel onto his rage.
But it was only now, in the cold, rainy light of this new day, that he grasped how completely, in little more than a week, the life he’d built for himself here in Erlsley had been blown apart.
“Think about doing that myself sometimes.”
It took a moment for Duncan to realize that the other man had spoken again. “Sorry, what?”
“I think about heading to the Forest fringes sometimes. Maybe even the Forest itself.” Gesturing at his fright-mask features.
“Y’know, when this just gets too much, I wonder about it.
Being alone out there, if it’d be so bad.
Spent a year sleeping rough in London after demob, didn’t really want to be with people, and I was drinking a lot.
That wasn’t so bad. I mean, nothing is, after what we went through over there, right?
You’re not scared of much anymore. You can take the cold and the rain—at least there’s no fucking mud!
—and the busies, they mostly leave you alone.
People were actually kind a lot of the time.
You know, they’d see the face, they knew.
They’d give you money. I just wonder how bad the Forest can be, is all. ”
“It can be pretty bad,” Duncan told him grimly.
“Well, so can I. You don’t think I’d scare the Huldu off, looking like this? They’re supposed to love beauty. They say they only take the most beautiful children, say they look beautiful themselves, that beauty is the only thing they value.”
Duncan thought about Mebhuranon. “It’s not beauty, exactly.
It’s…hard to explain. And anyway, they can shape-shift into things you should be glad you’ll never have to see.
Believe me, Arthur, the Huldu aren’t anything you want to be around.
You’re better off sticking with what you’ve got here.
Paid work, bed and board, the girls. Is it so bad? ”
“Belle pays her girls to fuck me.” Trying hard for lightness of tone, not quite making it.
“Sometimes I suspect there’s a morbid curiosity in it for them, too, but that’s about the best I can hope for.
Even with the kind ones, it’s more pity than anything.
You know, you get tired of seeing that in people’s eyes.
You wonder whether you’ll ever belong again. ”
There was a short answer to that, but Arthur didn’t deserve it. Duncan settled for a noncommittal grunt. The other man barely noticed. His voice grew musing.
“They say that when the Huldu revel, they do it with the abandon of beasts, whole writhing masses of them across the floor of Forest clearings, that their women use human thralls for their pleasure in those ceremonies as happily as their own kind, and do not care what they look like, how they’re made. Is that true?”
True, to a point—though thrall involvement was a lot less common than the Russell Maynard Dalton Faerie romance crowd liked to believe. Duncan had seen it only once or twice, each time through the eyes of a child, for whom it was a sight more terrifying and incomprehensible than arousing.
He shook his head.
“You don’t want to be a thrall to the Huldu, Arthur. Really. You think you’re not scared of much anymore? There are whole levels of fear in the Forest you haven’t seen.”
Arthur stared away down the staircase. “Sounds like a challenge to me.”
He wouldn’t be the first, Duncan knew, to head into the Forest with a headful of inchoate longing and misconception and death wish daring, never to be seen again.
Tales of demobbed, damaged, and rootless men last seen entering woods near X were rife, so common in the first couple of years after the war that in the end the papers gave up printing the stories.
You could, Duncan supposed, blame the myth base—knights, warlocks, poets, and dreamers down the centuries, riding off into the realm of Faerie in search of some heart’s desire or other, sucked in by the promise of abandon, escape from the harsh gray strictures of the world and the affairs of men.
Or you could just blame the times, the war, and the general sense of despair, the keenly felt hollowness of things.
But in the end, it came down to a fairly basic truth—when you’ve charged across no-man’s-land into scything machine gun fire and lived to tell the tale, the foundations of your relationship with mortality shift.
Survive the same thing enough times, and something structural gives way in your sanity, too.
You hear siren calls you were once deaf to.
Your fear is a floppy, unreliable thing, no longer fit for purpose.
And a walk in the woods, however haunted, might well seem like a good place to finally make your peace.
Few attempts were ever made to track and bring back the men who disappeared.
Where family or local well-wishers did organize to search, the searchers almost always came back empty-handed or, on one or two famous occasions, did not come back at all.
It was not long before a general acceptance set in that such departures were no more admitting of remedy than those involving a pistol to the mouth or pockets full of stones and the jump off a high bridge.
Duncan looked sideways at his companion. Arthur’s gaze was lost somewhere far beyond the stairwell walls of the brothel they sat in.
“Do me a favor, man,” he said.
Arthur stirred. “Hmm? Yes, of course. If I can.”
“Come down and talk to Garner with me. He’s a woodsman from way back. He’ll set you straight.”
—
“It’s the bloody cinema, that’s what it is,” was Garner’s unexpected opinion. “If tha ask me. Never had that to contend with when I were a lad.”
Arthur blinked. “Come again?”
“Cinema!” Folding his newspaper closed, putting it flat on the long wooden dining table with a thump. Warming to his theme. “All sitting there in the dark, staring into that light like it’s the door to another world. It’s not healthy.”
“Ah, come on,” Duncan protested. “It’s only like theater on a screen.”
Garner snorted. “That’s what tha bloody think, lad.
Theater’s physical, it’s a thing, it’s real.
It’s carpentry, and paint, and flesh-and-blood actors right there in front of thee, living and breathing just like thee.
Tha have to make the effort to forget they’re actors.
But what’s up on that screen, that is another bloody world.
Eternal faces and bodies that tha conner touch, that’ll never age.
It’s just like Faerie. And we’ve made a bloody industry out of selling it to people, a dream they can never have, a place they’ll never go, people they can never be, but they’ll spend their whole bloody life yearning for it.
No wonder they run off into the bloody Forest! ”
Duncan and Arthur looked at each other, wordless for ticking moments.
Finally, Arthur shrugged.
“Problem solved, then,” he said. “I guess I’ll just go to see Carmilla again.”
Duncan was silent a moment longer.
Then, abruptly, he chuckled. Arthur made his approximation of a smile. Duncan chortled again, louder. Arthur joined in. Garner looked from one to the other, as if they’d both gone barking mad.
“Oh aye,” he said testily. “What’s so bloody funny?”
Arthur closed his ruined mouth with a snap.
Shook his head. But the damage was done.
Duncan tried to clamp his own mouth shut, couldn’t prevent a silly smirk spilling out.
The laughter bubbled inside him like a witch’s spell out of control, rancid old tensions clamoring for release.
Arthur snorted, made a noise like a choked belch, and that was funny, too…
And then, suddenly, the dam burst and they were both cackling like fishwives, nothing really to do with anything that had been said, roaring with laughter for its own sake that built and built, squeezed tears from their eyes, ached their sides, robbed them of breath and still scaled upward, until the cook and a couple of Belle’s girls looked round the dining room door like small, wondering children—a sight that started Duncan and Arthur off again—and finally came in to demand, along with Garner, just what the bloody hell all this unlooked-for fucking hilarity was supposed to be bloody about, then.