Chapter Thirty-Six #2
The thin witch turned on him, bright eyed.
“Listen to me, woodsman. I have seen the Black Crab, I have stood in its path and tried everything in me to break its will. I was at Charlatan Nell’s side in the Gloaming Chapel, long before the Unbinding, long before magic was suddenly so fucking fashionable again.
I spent my talent and my will, I gave up my blood on iron, I pledged years of my youth to any dark thing that might want them.
I foraged day and night for every herb and bark scrap that might infuse a healing spell.
I begged favors from the Bright Folk when I could find them and whore myself to them.
And you know what? Charlatan Nell still died!
The Black Crab would not be denied. Will not be denied. There is no fucking path to this!”
She flung herself to her feet and stormed out of the narrow kitchen space. Angry heels across Sal’s wooden board floors, the slam of the front door. Duncan and Sal sat quiet in the wake of her departure like men after the burst and dirt shower of a near-miss shell.
“Who’s Charlatan Nell?” Duncan asked eventually.
“Her mother.”
More quiet. Duncan traced a pattern absently with his index finger in the pastie flakes and crumbs across the kitchen table. The rain insisted at the windows, tap tap-tap tap tap, senseless lack of rhythm, an inexhaustible natural chaos that did not care.
“She’ll get drenched if she goes out in this,” Duncan said.
“She’ll have taken a coat. I know Annie, she’s not stupid, even in anger.” Sal looked sadly at him. “I’m so sorry, Duncan. You bear enough as it is.”
“It’s fine. We all die of something.”
“I would hope—” The witch stopped and cleared her throat.
“I hope you won’t be stupid in anger. I know it’s a lot to ask, especially of a man, especially a man who’s seen what you have.
But take a leaf out of Annie’s book. Mine, too.
” An unconvincing attempt at a smile. “We’re wise women, Duncan, after all.
Weird sisters. Take it from us. Stupid in anger serves no one. ”
Duncan forced a thin smile in answer. “Aye—wise and weird, that’s you, right enough, Sal. And tell me, are you happy?”
The witch shrugged. “We reach an accommodation with things, I think. A knowing balance. So yes, near enough.”
Duncan nodded. Stared at the pattern he’d drawn in the flakes and crumbs on the wood of the table.
“Wisdom,” he repeated. “A knowing balance.”
But he said the words as if naming some exotic land overseas he would never afford the tickets to reach. And when the witch heard him, he saw her turn away, swallow and clear her throat again, thumb small tears from the corners of her eyes.
—
Annie came back late in the afternoon with most of the day’s light already drained from the sky, and the rain still at the windows in soft but implacable assault.
She banged about in the hall, made a lot of obvious noise with the door and taking off and shaking out her coat and hanging it up.
She came into the living room and found Duncan seated in a chair near the window, eyelids heavy, a borrowed book in imminent danger of slipping from his hands.
She put a hand on his shoulder and Duncan blinked, looked up.
“Sorry,” she said succinctly. “Where’s Sal?”
The book fell from his fingers, hit the floor with a clunk. She bent and reached down with a lithe grace that belied her years, scooped it up again. Duncan gestured at the door to the inner sanctum he’d never seen.
“She went in there to do some…preparation, she said?”
“Oho, did she?” Annie nodded, looked absently at the book. “Prufrock? Eliot? Never heard of him. Any good?”
Duncan shrugged. “It’s poetry.”
“Well.” The witch pulled a face. “Sooner you than me.”
She turned and went to the door Sal had retreated behind.
She knocked, a bit diffidently, Duncan thought, and Sal’s voice called her in by name.
She gave him a witchy parting smile, opened the door a crack, and slid inside.
Billow of some faintly sulfur-scented fumes, an odd blue light, and then the door was closed tight again and Annie was gone.
Duncan sat up straighter on the sofa, rubbed his eyes, tried to rouse himself from the stale late-afternoon neurasthenia that had stolen over him.
He took out the Webleys, one by one, and checked the load.
He walked about the living room a bit. He picked up the Prufrock again.
Put it down. Finally, inevitably, he found himself standing in front of the window, staring out at the rain and the gathering murk.
The witch’s home muttered to itself around him, rush of water in plumbing, floorboard creak, other, less easily explainable sounds…
Some unreckoned space of time later, he was roused from his doze by the self-important, ratcheting blurt of a car’s klaxon in the street outside.
Nimble Shanks Annie came back out into the living room, smelling strongly of woodsmoke and sulfur.
Over the threshold of the open door, weird shadows played on the floor at her heels.
Still the faint bluish light from within.
“Well, that’s us,” she said brightly. “The hero’s hour come around. Get your coat. We’d better go down.”
Sal appeared in the doorway behind her, smoke apparently writhing directly from her hair in half-suggestive forms.
“You be careful, both of you,” she said maternally.
“I’ll keep exhorting the storm at this end, but it’s a ticklish thing to get right.
Should stay murky enough to cover your approach, but I make no promises for how long it’ll last. Duncan, you let Annie handle the water tangling on her own, she’s very good at it. Don’t interfere.”
Annie smiled brilliantly at him. “She’s right, I am phenomenally good.”
Down in the street, the converted Vauxhall ambulance stood in the rain like a patient draft horse.
For all its flanks were no longer daubed with the red cross, the vehicle gave Duncan’s memory a sharp kick, back to an evening near Dernancourt, another ambulance getting rained on, the bitten-off groans and curses of injured men within, someone yelling orders, distant rumble of artillery like thunder across the sky…
As if some vast, unsuspected force tore a hole in time, merged memory and present in a hallucinatory fog for him—rip and roll of thunder in the sky over Crawgate. Sheet lightning flickered on gray behind the tall tenement roofs. The rain redoubled its drenching efforts.
“You getting in or what?” Mikey Collier, leaning across the driver’s bench with a broad grin as he shouted. “Better out of sight in the back, I reckon. The lady there can ride up front if she likes.”
It made all kinds of sense. Duncan pulled open the door and handed a very amused Nimble Shanks Annie up onto the bench. She settled there with the poise of minor royalty being given a tour of a battlefront.
“Hello, young man. Anna Spence. But you can call me Annie.”
Collier’s grin turned appreciative. “Mike Collier, at your service.”
“Collier.” Duncan, snapping his fingers for the other man’s attention. He had to pitch his voice over the drumming of the rain on the Vauxhall’s roof. “Mike! You know where we’re going?”
“Arthur said the East End? The old industrial strip?”
“Aye. The munitions works. South entrance. Just take us up to the gates, we’ll go on foot from there.”
“In this rain?” Collier saw the look on his face and shrugged. “As you like. Sooner you than me. Oh yeah, Arthur’s in the back. Brought you some toys.”
“Arthur came with?”
Collier laughed. “What, you thought he wouldn’t?”
—
At the height of the war, Duncan knew, the Erlsley Number One Munitions Plant was turning out ten thousand shells a week, employing over fifteen thousand workers, almost all women, and sprawled over a couple of hundred acres including a working dairy farm.
Accidental explosions killed more than three dozen in the course of the conflict.
Production all but stopped with the Armistice, and the factory would likely have been mothballed altogether with the signatures at Versailles, if the Forest hadn’t come and eaten much of it in the interim.
As with Maunston, as at ten thousand points across the whole country, managed shutdown gave way to panicked retreat.
The whole place had lain abandoned ever since.
“Dairy farm?” Arthur wondered, bemused.
“Aye. Offsets the effects of cordite, apparently. You work with that shite for very long, your skin starts turning yellow. Drinking milk fixes it.”
“Is that right? Learn something new every day.”
The Vauxhall bumped to an angled halt and Collier banged on the panel between them.
They rolled up the canvas drop sheet, dropped the tailgate, and climbed out into a mercifully mild drizzle.
Murky light all around and the looming, prison bar silhouette of the factory gates.
Heavy-duty chain-link fencing ran off to either side, reinforced by the bushes and small trees that had grown there, intermingling with the metal.
Dimly, through the murk beyond the gate, you could make out the angular lines of the armory buildings, the long, low run of railway loading quays between.
There was scrub growth almost everywhere; some of it looked pretty high.
Trees fringed the far borders of the site, and here and there you could see where fresh Forest growth had erupted like smallpox across the previously cleared ground.
Tall stands of ash and elm and yew, one corner of a storage shed shattered as if by bombardment, a tentacular oak waving thick triumphant arms in the gap.
Moonlight slipped between separating clouds for a scant few moments, put a hard gleam on a generous heaping of padlocked chain around the closed gates.
Collier ducked into the back of the ambulance to find his bolt cutters.
They took the chain off in sections. Duncan draped a half-yard length around his neck under his coat collar.
“Never heard of the Huldu making incursions here,” he said when the others looked at him askance.
“I guess there’s nothing much to interest them, and too much abandoned iron lying around.
But I get the feeling that times are changing, for us and for them.
As much as we can, we’ll follow the rail lines and the buildings.
But sooner or later, like it or not, we’re in the woods.
” He patted the length of chain. “Never hurts to have the extra iron.”
Arthur had brought him the trench knife, the McCulloch in its sheath, an ammunition pouch of extra shells, and a box of dumdum .
455s for the Webleys. Through the thin cotton of his shirt, the wet, cold iron links on his neck felt forced and needlessly dramatic, and maybe they saw that doubt in his eyes.
Mikey Collier took another length, but he let it hang diffidently from one hand.
“Going to be parked here in a metal box anyway,” he said apologetically. “Iron gates, fencing’s chain-link, too. Think I’m safe. Maybe I’ll keep it on my lap, like?”
Arthur said nothing. But he fished up another slightly shorter length of the discarded chain, put it over his shoulders in imitation of Duncan. Nimble Shanks Annie just snorted and shook her head.
“I’m a witch, Duncan, not a gladiator. I’ll be all right.”
Duncan shrugged. The chain’s links shifted against his neck, already warmed by contact with his body’s heat.
“Hope you’re right,” he said curtly. “Maybe you can scry ahead a little for us anyway, just to be on the safe side.”
“If you ask nicely.”
“Thought I just did.”
They forced the left-hand gate, dragged it open together against grating, stony resistance, made a gap wide enough to pass. Then, one by one, they slipped through, into the quiet of the rotting dead industrial landscape beyond.