The Queen of Sinister (22 page)

After half an hour, she wondered if her pursuer would come, but then she heard the click of the front door opening with secretive care and she knew her instincts had been correct.

With the wind rustling around the outside of the house, she closed her eyes and instantly slipped into her practised trance state. The sigil she required formed against the velvet of her imagination; the words came to her lips without any conscious thought. When she stood up, she knew she was a ghost, no longer visible to any prying eyes. Whoever was there would hear the whisper of her breath, feel a breeze at her passing, but that was all.

She had left the bedroom door ajar so she could slip out easily. If she had timed it right, her pursuer would still be exploring the lower level. She moved to the top of the stairs and waited. No sound came from below. He was good, she thought; a ghost, like her.

Arthur Lee's warning hiss came just as movement flickered at the corner of her eye. It came straight out of the master bedroom, moving faster than she had ever anticipated. A blur of speed, then a few seconds of eerie, awkward slow motion, then another burst of movement.

It had the shape of a man, but it looked as if it had been built from discarded pieces randomly stitched together. The pelvis was twisted so one side pointed forward, while the legs were almost in one line, one in front of the other, mystifying her further at its incredible speed. The arms appeared deformed because the joints had been attached irregularly. It was naked, its distended penis permanently erect. Yet the most disturbing thing was the head, which was on backwards. There was something in that image - human yet not human, living but should-be-dead - that horrified her much more than if it had been alien in appearance. A Jigsaw Man.

Mary was rooted in shock for just a second too long. Even though its eyes faced away, it knew exactly where she was and within an instant was upon her. Her misdirection spell worked just well enough to prevent it from killing her outright. Hands that appeared weak and flailing gripped with preternatural strength, broken, dirty nails puncturing her flesh easily.

Mary yelled in fear, lashing out with the knife she had been carrying for defence, but the thing's powerful hold prevented her from striking home. 'Get off me, you ugly bastard!' She brought up her knee towards its groin, forgetting its deformed shape. Her knee crashed against the twisted pelvis and made her yelp in pain.

The Jigsaw Man forced her down with increasing pressure until she felt sure her bones would break. She was too weak, too scared. Rough hands worked their way inexorably up her arms towards her throat.

Finally she collapsed to the floor at the top of the steps, the full weight of the creature crushing against her chest. She felt the erect penis dig into her leg and somehow that gave her the impetus to move when she saw her opening.

As the Jigsaw Man shifted its balance, Mary brought her knee up into a position of leverage. The creature teetered. With one jerk that brought stabbing pains up from the small of her back, she launched it towards her head.

The action was enough to break its grip and send it over, though it tore flesh from her arms in passing. With its limbs flapping awkwardly, it crashed down the stairs, hitting the bottom with a sound like dry wood snapping.

With tears in her eyes, Mary hauled herself upright using the banister. Her back was in agony, and the pain from her muscles and ligaments, aged and never used to such a degree, made her feel sick.

'You bastard!' she said with a stifled sob that contained all her anger and fear.

It was still writhing at the foot of the stairs, and as it forced itself up on its twisted arms, Mary could see that its neck was broken. The lolling head scared her even more, and for the first time she wondered if it was even possible to kill it.

She hobbled down the stairs as quickly as her back would allow, and just as the Jigsaw Man was pulling itself up from its knees she kicked out sharply at the base of the skull. The bone shattered under the force.

Mary scrambled by it and out of the front door. She was already muttering under her breath and painting the sigils in the air with her hands as it hauled itself up and launched itself at her. The barrier came up just in time. The Jigsaw Man bounced back impotently, still lurching, still grasping.

Mary allowed herself a moment's satisfaction. She'd done better than she had anticipated; perhaps she wasn't as weak and ineffective as she had thought. 'You see, you bastard, you can't get me. That should hold you there for...' Her mood deflated a little. '... five minutes.' It wasn't long; but that wasn't the end of her plan.

She stepped back, closed her eyes; more mutterings, more sigils. When she looked again, she had a sudden spurt of fear that it wasn't going to work. Finally the flames flickered across the floor of the hall, just a glow of light at first, but within seconds an inferno raged within. There was a noise like metal being twisted and broken, and Mary realised queasily that it was the Jigsaw Man's cries; of pain, fear or anger, she didn't know. Though the conflagration engulfed it, the thing still tried to get through the door, still fought wildly, wouldn't lie down and die as she'd hoped.

With a sinking feeling, Mary realised she couldn't wait any longer. She turned and hurried back along the main street, glancing behind only once with a quiet, desperate hope that she had done enough.

chapter eight 
Wildwood

'Why was I always suffering, always browbeaten,
always accused, forever condemned?'
Charlotte Bronte

The dark wood loomed before them, vast and low, breathing the slow, measured breath of the predatory animal. Beneath the thick canopy, only shadows lay; sometimes they moved of their own accord. Nettles, brambles and emerald ferns clustered around the forest's edge, the only easy access along the thin path that wound into the heart of it.

Midges danced in the uncomfortably hot morning sun while birds fluttered here and there, but never appeared to enter the trees.

Caitlin wiped a thin slick of sweat from her forehead and thought of the book she had been reading to Liam. The echoes still reverberated through her mind and she mulled over Crowther's suggestion that the impression of this world was created by the people who viewed it. Was she plucking this wood from her memory? Was she remaking the entire place as fractured and desperate as her own deep subconscious? If that was the case, what chance did they have?

'This place has haunted us since we crawled out of caves.' Crowther was at her side, drawn and weary, but at least he was finally talking to her again. Unsettlingly, he appeared to be reading her mind, or perhaps the troubled expression she wore whenever she glanced at the deep dark forest. 'It's the Wildwood,' he continued, 'the primeval forest of our deepest, darkest memory, where all the real terrors lay. This Otherworld is a land of archetypes, and the wood is one of the most affecting. Do you feel it?'

She nodded, thinking oddly of The Wind in the Willows, of Robin Hood and his green men, of the place where Laurence Talbot loped amongst the trees. 'Have you forgiven me?'

There was a long pause before he replied, 'No. I'm simply good at making accommodations with life - always have been.'

Matt came up, swatting away the flies that buzzed around him. 'Better get a move on,' he said cheerily. 'With the Whisperers on our trail, we can't be sitting around.'

'Has anyone told you that your continually perky and upbeat attitude is monumentally irritating?' Crowther said sourly before stalking away.

'You'd think he'd take off his hat and overcoat in this heat,' Caitlin said.

'He thinks it makes him look like Gandalf,' Matt replied caustically, 'when actually it makes him look like a fat old git in a hat and an overcoat.'

She laughed. 'You can be very unkind.'

Caitlin was aware of Matt standing so close that their shoulders almost brushed. It gave her a strange flush of excitement, and that made her unconscionably guilty; how could she even begin to have such thoughts so soon after Grant's death?

'I'm sorry we haven't had time to search for your daughter,' she said, bringing the conversation firmly back to family.

'There'll be time. I didn't bring it up because I didn't want you clubbing me round the head and dragging me off.'

'The professor was different—' she began to protest until she saw that he was joking. His teasing grin brought another unnecessary flush of something.

'I think about Rosetta all the time,' he said, 'but I understand our responsibilities to the people back home. If we don't find a cure for the plague, there won't be any human race left for me to take Rosetta back to.'

'I promise you, once we've delivered the cure, I'll come back here to help you search ... however long it takes.'

'I appreciate that.'

A moment of mutual support and tenderness swelled between them. Matt saw her dismayed confusion and moved to ease it. 'This place looks like it might be dangerous. We need to have somebody at the front and back on guard, and I think weapons should be drawn until we're sure of how it's going to play out.'

Her mood changed as she turned to practical matters. She organised the others into a group at the entrance to the wood, despite disruption from Mahalia, who had plainly taken it on herself to challenge Caitlin's authority at every turn.

'Keep Carlton at the centre of the group,' Caitlin said. 'We have to protect him at all costs.'

Though she undoubtedly agreed with the sentiment, this comment appeared to annoy Mahalia immensely, for her knuckles grew white around the Fomorii sword.

After the blazing heat of the day, the air was cool and sweet beneath the thick canopy of leaves that cast the world in emerald and grey. Where the branches were at their thickest, the forest floor was almost bare, but in the areas where the sun came through in gleaming shards, thick vegetation rising high above them reduced the path to a ribbon so narrow that they could only walk single file. At those points where visibility was limited, they most feared an attack. Constant movement in the undergrowth kept them permanently on edge.

They broke for food after a couple of hours' hard trekking. Matt had brought some of the food regularly left for them in their chambers at the Court of Soul's Ease - fruit, dry bread, cured meat. They refreshed themselves with rainwater collected in the cups of exotic blooms that occasionally spread across their way; it tasted sweeter than any water they had drunk before, and its effect was potent: weariness was flushed from their limbs.

'Look at this,' Jack said curiously. He cupped in his pale palm the head of one of the flowers. The petals were black and withered, dripping the liquid of rot.

Mahalia made a disgusted face. 'You're getting it all over you. Put it down!'

He tossed it away, flashed her a smile. Her response, blunt and challenging but secretly teasing, was lost beneath a low rumble that rose to a high-pitched shriek, somewhere deep in the woods. It was clearly a large animal, though it was impossible to tell if it was hunting or in pain.

They all jumped to their feet. The cry affected them on some primeval level, where the race memories of prehistory were fossilised.

'What the hell was that?' Matt said.

Crowther remained rigid. 'What would be here, in the Forest of the Night?' he mused to himself. 'That wasn't the Wild Hunt. What other dark myths, what other archetypes . .. ?' His words turned to muttering and retreated inside him.

'Let's move,' Caitlin said.

They set off quickly, the animal call still echoing in their heads.

'Could any of you estimate the size of the forest from the view we had when we were wrapped up in the mask?' Matt called.

'Vast.' Crowther wheezed as he levered himself along on his staff. 'But that doesn't matter in a place where time and space are meaningless. We might be through it this afternoon or a hundred years hence.'

'Thanks for the boost,' Matt said.

'We'll be all right as long as we don't stray from the path.'

Mahalia tried to read Crowther's face, saw his subtle mischief and couldn't resist a smile. He was surprised how warm the connection made him feel, and he responded with a smile of his own. Strangely, she didn't scowl or glare, but held his expression briefly.

Not even the jagged rocks could keep out the brutal winds of the Ice-Field. Caitlin huddled in a nook, watching the others. Brigid sat cross-legged, cackling to herself like some caricature of a witch from a child's fairy story, while Briony paced back and forth, chain-smoking and bitching to herself. Amy hugged her arms around her, scared as she always seemed to be. Occasionally, though, the little girl would wander over to Caitlin to check that her other self was all right.

The figure in the shadows at the back of their feeble shelter, the one who scared them all, had moved forward enough that Caitlin could just make out her shape against the deeper darkness. She was angular and predatory, her hair wild, and at times she resembled a giant bird more than a woman. Her influence was growing stronger. Sometimes she would call to Caitlin with an insidious whisper, luring, cajoling; at other times she would bellow with a terrifying rage, and on those occasions the others would back away to the very edge of the shelter where the glacial sheets encroached. Although she didn't know why, Caitlin dreaded what would happen when the woman finally emerged into the light.

Amy sat next to Caitlin and slipped an arm around her. 'There's a lot of upset ahead. But whatever happens, don't ever, ever give in to despair. It's easy to slip into that ... and once you do, everything goes wrong.' Her voice had taken on a dark tone.

'Despair doesn't just come from the inside,' Brigid said. Her cackling had gone; her face was grave. 'Events conspire, people conspire. You've got to watch out for ... anything that might drive you towards despair. Because that's what they want.'

'What who want?' Caitlin's nerves were prickling. This wasn't just part of the conversation; Brigid was imparting something important.

'All the forces lined up against life. The things that want to destroy anything that's good. And behind them all is one thing, one force.'

Caitlin moved away from Amy's comforting arm. She felt cold, colder than she ever had before. 'What do you know?'

'Things are falling into place. You have to be on your guard.' Brigid sighed. 'But it's not all down to you. Sometimes despair is like a spike and others drive it into your heart. They haven't decided yet ... they're still thinking. Is the one too precious to them? That's what they think. It could go either way...'

'You're not making any sense!' Caitlin said desperately.

'In the end, it's all down to people,' Amy said sadly. 'Good people and bad people - and sometimes there's nothing you can do but pick up the pieces. If it goes wrong, it won't be your fault, Caitlin. Remember that. Just try ... try not to let despair poison your heart.'

'It depends,' Brigid mused, 'on how they drive the spike. She might not have a choice.'

'So sad,' Amy said. 'So sad.'

Caitlin was overwhelmed with a desperate sense that things were falling away from her. 'Stop talking in riddles! If something bad's going to happen, tell me so I can stop it!'

Brigid shook her head. 'I can't tell you any more. I'm not allowed.'

'Not allowed by whom?' Caitlin demanded. There was a long pause while Brigid turned the question over. In the end, she simply said, 'Not allowed.'

She returned to her detached cackling and Amy got up and wandered away. Caitlin stared out to the bleak horizon where the black sky merged with the white Ice Field, terribly afraid of what lay ahead.

An hour passed, two, and then they started to lose all sense of time. There was just the greenwood, dense and never-ending, like green static hissing at the back of their heads. Oak, ash, elder, hawthorn, rowan, thick banks of creeper, fern, nettle, gorse, long grass. Sometimes they would chop the path clear with Mahalia's rusted sword, only to see it mysteriously close up behind them. Yet it was hypnotic in its monotony, lulling them into a somnambulistic state.

Perhaps they even slept as they walked — none of them could be wholly sure - but it was a while before Caitlin's conscious mind accepted that it was seeing movement under the trees on either side. 'Did you see that?' she asked lazily.

No one responded; the only sound was the rhythmic plod of their feet.

She glanced back and forth, seeing nothing unusual, but when she looked ahead, the flickerings on the edge of her vision disturbed her once again. 'What is that?' she muttered with irritation, plucking at her eyelashes to see if dust was distorting her vision.

A breeze; her skin turned gooseflesh. Or was it wind, for despite the heat of the day it was cold and it was here and gone in a fraction of a second; it felt like a breath.

As she continued to walk she became more receptive to movement, on both sides. At first it looked like the flashes of shadow and light that appear outside a fast-moving car on a summer's day, but the more she concentrated, the more they fell into relief. Shapes. Figures! Insubstantial, like mist forming the essence of a person. They moved quickly, flickering amongst the boles of the trees, some near, some far away.

Now she had realised what it was, the spectacle was mesmerising. She was in a dream, sitting on the lawn on a summer's eve as the curious moths came from all over to investigate the lamp.

In this half-detached state, it took her a while to realise that one of the shapes had stopped and was allowing itself - if that was the right way to consider it - to stand in full view. She looked directly at it and was surprised to see a man with long white hair and a pleasant, smiling face beckoning to her. Still insubstantial, he had a Regency look, wearing a frock coat and pantaloons, and his mood was one of cheery optimism, as if he had just spotted a long-lost friend.

Behind him, the other shapes continued to flit hypnotically amongst the trees, scores of them, perhaps hundreds.

Caitlin smiled and the ghost smiled back. He beckoned again. He had something he wanted to show her, or hospitality he wished to offer.

She wondered briefly why a man in Regency costume would be haunting a forest in the middle of another world, but the thought came and went as quickly as his brethren. She was fascinated: by him, by the way the light broke through the leaves, by the constant movement, but she barely considered the fact that all sound had disappeared from the world.

'Come,' he appeared to be saying in his silent way, 'we shall have such fun together.'

Something large thundered through the trees deeper into the wood; an enormous oak cracked and fell, jarring the ground so forcefully that she almost stumbled. Whatever had crashed into it continued on its way, but the disruption broke the spell.

The ghost looked over his shoulder in shock and in an instant his appearance changed. Caitlin had a fleeting impression of something old and twisted, not human at all, and then it was gone into the trees, screaming silently.