Awakening (8 page)

‘What about?’

‘The law,’ said Katherine. ‘She’s worried that one of her village friends will find out about Judith and start asking questions. Let’s give it a few more days at least . . .’

She took Judith from him and put her to the breast.

‘Ow! She bites. In fact . . .’

She pulled Judith gently from her nipple and felt her gums.

‘She’s got a tooth!’

‘Impossible,’ said Jack.

‘Really. Look!’

Her nipple was bleeding.

‘She’s a vampire,’ said Jack.

Gingerly Katherine put her back to the nipple.

‘
Ow!!
’

She pulled her away again, whispered an affectionate ‘No!’ in her ear and then put her back.

Judith did not bite a third time.

‘If she’s a vampire she’s learning fast not to be,’ she said.

They went back to the house, their moment of sharing feeling like respite.

It was, but it didn’t last long.

Half an hour later Judith began screaming again.

9

A
WAKENING

F
our hundred miles to the east, across the North Sea, far beneath the surface of the Earth, a mortal form lay cocooned in a nineteenth-century dentist’s chair of rusting iron and mildewed leather.

Around him in the terrible dark were the chair’s accoutrements: flexible tubes, drills on leads, an extending spittoon, a cast-iron footrest, a treadle to turn the wires that turn the wheels that turn the drills, and counterweights.

Leather straps with buckles hung loose from the chair by his hands and arms, ankles and legs, adjacent to his chest and up by his head. As if, sometime in the past, the chair had been a place of horrible restraint and might yet be again.

This antique assemblage was in the centre of a rock-bound Chamber so vast that it could have accommodated a human Gothic cathedral.

There was no light, none at all.

Only darkness palpable.

Had explorers found themselves on the threshold of this lost place and tried to penetrate the dark with the darting beams of their torches, the dreadful chair and its ghastly occupant would not have been immediately obvious.

They would first have been lulled by a sense of wonderment. For one thing, an endless drip, drip, drip of subterranean rain fell from the rocky shadows of the Chamber’s roof. It created a swirling mistiness driven by strong draughts and sudden winds.

Then there were the strange unnerving objects that were scattered like ghosts across the vast, uneven floor.

The Chamber was human-made. It had been used as a sorting floor for grading coal and rock. The machinery for these operations had been left behind when the mine was abandoned, along with a host of wheels, derricks and chains, rail tracks, hawsers, giant tools and trolleys. Over time every single thing had been covered by thick layers of rock-hard lime deposited by the continuous ‘rain’. These secretions had turned the objects into swollen versions of their former selves, some still identifiable, many not.

There were piles of pit props, massive spanners, a bucket, rectangular tanks, a table and three chairs and even a pit engine standing on its old track, complete with boiler, funnel and driver’s cabin, all subsumed beneath deposits of lime.

Only when the explorers had passed through these unnerving relics, stumbling and slipping on the slimy floor, would they have found their lights fixed finally on the dentist’s chair protected from the rain by a sloping canopy that kept it dry. Even then, they would have had to go very near to comprehend the appalling nature of the thing they had found.

It was a hydden, his wasted flesh mottled with decay; his muscles and sinews so twisted by disuse and shrinkage that his limbs and joints had contorted beyond any recognition of who and what he had once been; his teeth were discoloured and rotten, his hair, once sleek and blond, had thinned into transparency and was so matted with filth that it formed a cakey plaster on his scalp.

Yet he was not dead.

This ruination of a living thing lying helpless in a chair made for humans was Slaeke Sinistral I, Emperor of the Hyddenworld, most powerful hydden who ever lived, progenitor of the Empire and all its works, once a son, a spouse, a lover and a friend.

It was age that had struck him down, and that he was still alive at all seemed a miracle. The records clearly showed that he was over one hundred and sixty years old when he was incarcerated in the Chamber.

He had gone there voluntarily, not to die but to sleep. He had hoped and believed that when he finally woke certain prophecies would have come to pass and the means to his salvation, even his full recovery, would finally be at hand.

That was eighteen years ago.

How he had survived so long was not obvious, but there were small and large footprints in the slime about his chair, discarded rags which had been used to clean him up, and the tubes appeared to have been utilised to feed him water and nutrients. If so, he and his unseen helpers were running out of time. The Emperor’s rate of decay was now such that keeping him alive in his state of sleep had become a losing battle, which was why he had sunk so far.

Now something had woken him to the nightmare of terminal decline to which time had delivered him . . . and down there in the dark, unseen, alone, he was struggling to let it be known that he was awake again.

A finger trembled, an eyelid struggled, lips stuck fast with filthy phlegm tried to part. But even had he opened them no meaningful sound would have issued forth. He was quite unable to call for help from hydden in the normal world above.

What had woken Slaeke Sinistral was a tremor of the Earth, the very same tremor that in those early hours of the first day of Summer had revealed the gem to Stort in Englalond.

Now Sinistral hoped his time had come again.

Life, so long lost to him, was going to return.

Power would be his once more.

Redeeming love, which did not quite elude him in all his long and dreadful years, might be enjoyed again.

He could not smile – his facial muscles were too wasted for that – so he smiled inside.

He could not speak, so the words he uttered were silent ones . . . and strange though this may seem, joyful.

His mouth finally opened into an attempted laugh. All that came forth into the darkness was the hiss of fetid breath and a dribble of gritty phlegm down his creased and straggle-bearded chin.

Yet still he strained to make his body work again.

A foot stirred, his left thigh twitched, his head began to move from side to side, faster and faster as if to hurl something from its brain.

An eyelid trembled once again, then the other too, the top and bottom eyelid struggling to pull apart lashes stuck fast with congealed, hardened, yellow tears, their hairs entangled. He wanted to open his once-beautiful eyes in the dark, to seek light, to see
anything
. To be trapped as he was by his own decay, able to hear but not to see, to think but not to speak, was a torture for the hydden who once ruled the world.

The part of his body he most needed to move was his right hand, with which, if only he could find a way, he could do a very simple thing: touch a finger to a button that would ring a bell and signal he was alive to someone from the upper hydden world who could help him. He tried to move his fingers and failed, utterly exhausted. He knew that though he was awake now he was also dying fast.

His head stilled and he ceased to struggle, controlling his panic with the same strong will that once created an empire. He decided to rest a little, to recoup, and try again.

His equilibrium returned. Slaeke Sinistral spoke silent words inside his head which, had they been able to break through his skull and be heard, might have sounded like the tolling of a warning bell right across the Hyddenworld.

My Summer has begun and I am coming home
, he told himself.

10

R
ECOVERY

S
tort remained in a bad way for several days after he was taken home and put into the care of Goodwife Cluckett.

She brought order and calm to his life, established the routine of a healthy diet, daily exercise, sleep and no visitors.

Try as they might, his friends Master Brief and Mister Pike could not get past the goodwife, who kept the door on a chain, eyed them beadily and claimed, ‘My master is not yet ready to entertain!’

‘Really, Madam!’

Cluckett invariably closed the door in the face of protest.

But after a week, when Stort was beginning to recover his old spirits and wished to see his friends, she relented a little.

‘I have sent notice to Mister Barklice that he may attend you for tea today, sir,’ she announced over breakfast.

It was a wise choice and a happy visit.

Barklice’s friendship with Stort, built up over the years of their travels together, was of a gentler tenor than that which he enjoyed with Brief and Pike. The two had often talked late into the night by the campfire, usually of their deepest yearnings and most intimate desires. The mystery of love was their theme, along with the seeming impossibility of wanderers of the pilgrim road and independent spirits such as themselves ever finding an understanding mate.

Barklice was middle-aged and wiry. He was worn with the travel his job as a verderer, sorting out legal problems of land and property, made necessary. He was gentle by nature and liked harmony, perhaps one reason he had never been spoused.

‘Mister Pike has a good marriage, of course, and Master Brief has no need of one since books are his bride,’ he observed, their conversation turning to the old subject the moment Cluckett had brought them tea and left them.

‘Indeed that is so,’ said Stort, who was wrapped up in a fluffy dressing gown, with pink, quilted slippers on his feet and a tasselled hat upon his head, ‘and I suppose the wonders of the Universe should be bride enough for me. But you know, Barklice, there are times when I wish to share those wonders with the beloved I seek but know I can never find, and there are times too . . .’

He fell into a ruminative silence.

‘Times too . . . ?’ prompted Barklice.

‘When I have worries I would wish to share, doubts that rack me and burdens I . . . burdens that . . .’

‘My dear fellow!’ cried Barklice, seeing that Stort was becoming upset, ‘is there something that burdens you now?’

It was clear he had something on his mind – perhaps that same thing that had troubled him so much when he had been found outside the city on May Day.

‘No . . . no . . . I am happy and comfortable.’

He smiled wanly – and unconvincingly. The truth was that the gem of Spring, of which he had so far told no one and which he had successfully hidden in the very parlour where they sat, bore down upon him. With it went that concern and worry for the Shield Maiden who, he was quite sure from all the signs of Earth and stars, violent and otherwise, had most certainly been born the same night – perhaps at the same moment – he had found the gem.

‘I am really very happy, Barklice . . . um . . . yes . . . really I am.’

‘Well, if there’s something . . . ?’

‘There’s nothing,’ said Stort, ‘so please have another cup of tea and a piece of this delicious cake.’

Though he could see Stort’s continuing worry and unhappiness, Barklice did not press the matter.

‘I must say that Goodwife Cluckett is looking after you very well. Your home is as clean and tidy as I have ever seen it . . . and you look . . . I mean you . . .’

Barklice eyed the fluffy dressing gown, slippers and nightcap.

‘You look very ah . . . well . . .’

Stort looked mournful.

‘I know what you are thinking and you are right. This garb she has dressed me in looks ridiculous. But if I removed it my life would be made miserable. To be happy when she is in my home I must be obedient.’

‘But Stort, that is against everything your free and independent spirit stands for. Can you not defy her in such matters while accepting the good things she does for you?’

As often before, his friend had shown the way to go.

‘You are right,’ he cried impulsively, ‘I will try to find a way!’

‘When?’ asked Barklice.

‘Now!’ replied Stort.

He stood up, kicked off his slippers, removed his hat and was in the act of taking off his dressing gown when the heavy tread of the goodwife was heard approaching down the corridor towards the parlour.

Blind panic overtook Stort at once and he cravenly returned the hat to his head and the slippers to his feet as Cluckett opened the door.

She stared about the room and then at them, her nostrils flaring as if she had smelt trouble. She spied at once that his dressing gown was loose and advanced upon him to pull it tight once more.

‘I hope, sir, that your friend here is not putting wild ideas into your head about these warm clothes which I insist you must wear for a little time yet?’