Log in
The address was in West Erlsley – they often were – in a maze of rundown tenements and concrete walkways that stank of piss and the charred extinction of small conjuring fires. Pathetic remnants of bone and fur and feathers in sheltered corners, where the meagre sacrifices had been made. Huldu runes scrawled across the stone in charcoal or daubed in blood. As far as Duncan could tell, most of it was gibberish. Certainly, there was nothing you’d call a functional spell anywhere on these walls. Here and there, he even spotted the odd piece of mathematical notation in the mix, though his math was not good enough to work out if it had any more coherence than the Huldu symbols it co-existed among.
None of which surprised him in the least.
In the trenches, he’d seen men cling to all and any systems of faith they could muster; some even distilling their own homegrown superstition, ritual, prayer, whatever – anything at all to give the illusion of control over the vast impersonal forces that brought them death on a daily basis. One soldier under his command in early 1915, private Greaves, had carried with him a set of intricately whittled wooden figures. He would take them out whenever he had leisure, set them up in some configuration that evidently had meaning to him – though the configuration often changed – and would then crouch and whisper softly to them under his breath, like a mother soothing small children to sleep.
Greaves had taken some sour ribbing for this early on, but Duncan had ordered it staunched, and after that the other men left him alone. Later, when Greaves had proved remarkably long lived, given the action they’d all seen, a couple of the other soldiers from the company even started to gather round and join in with the ritual. They’d stand and watch diffidently while Greaves set out the whittled figures, wait until he gestured them closer, and then crouch with him, and begin. Their pooled murmuring would softly rise and fall in the lamp-glow and gloom of whatever bivouac they’d lucked into. It managed to be both eerie and strangely comforting at one and the same time.
Now that he thought back, Duncan realised that there might have been something of Huldu slenderness and poise in those carved wooden figures. And he wondered belatedly what home Greaves had come from, what part of Britain, where such things might already have had currency, even back then. It wasn’t something he’d ever find out now – Greaves died in the mud at Ypres, along with almost everyone else under Duncan’s command at the time. The way he heard it later, a tank whose driver was addled on carbon monoxide fumes lost control nosing around a machine gun nest revetment. The tank veered, clipped and toppled three men, Greaves among them, then crushed them into the ground as it churned desperately in reverse. Duncan supposed the slender, whittled wooden figures met a similar fate.
Wake up, Duncan.
Stir of other figures now, blunt and hunched against the cold as they spilled across the concrete walkway ahead; clink as a boot caught an empty bottle and sent it skittering. The sound yanked him back to present concerns. He slowed a little, assessed the spread. It didn’t look like much – local toughs, three of them, pinched pale faces under rain damp hoods, bulky workman’s jackets that made them look bigger than they were. Booted feet, stumbling a little with the booze or maybe just with sitting too long in the cold. Long necked brown beer bottles, too loosely held to be weapons. WAR DEBT MALAISE, blared the headlines, ECONOMY STALLED, NO SOLUTION IN SIGHT FOR FOREST CRISIS. Fear, panic, exhaustion, unemployment spiralling steadily upward, and well, here’s your result.
Duncan eased to a halt.
“Gentlemen,” he said warily.
“Fucking Otherkin,” one of them spat, uncertainly.
Duncan couldn’t really blame him. It was in the cut and weave of the hooded jacket he wore, the boots with their intricate tooled leather. For clients, he dressed to broadcast his trade, to sell how well he belonged in the Forest, and that look wasn’t a million miles from all the cute and cheap and practised signifiers the dress-up brigade pulled to ape the Huldu they’d mostly only ever met in the pages of novels and maybe the sepia-tone projector slides of a Russell Maynard Dalton lecture. To the young toughs’ boozed up eyes, Duncan looked the part. Wannabe fae fuck pretender at large. Dilettante. An easy mark.
If they’d seen Duncan’s eyes and expression and stance more clearly, they would have understood their mistake.
But it was a gloomy autumn afternoon in West Erlsley, glowering black rain clouds hung low and soaking up what little decent light was left in the sky. And these angry, idle young men were neither close enough nor sober enough to pick up on the details of the mess they were about to make.
“I’m looking for Umber Cottages,” he pre-empted them. “This the right way?”
It stalled whatever they’d had in mind. They looked at each other, unsure. The biggest of the three swigged exaggeratedly at his beer. He lowered the bottle, wiped his mouth. Belched loudly. Gestured broadly.
“It’s this way, yeah. But, uh….” swaggering closer, visibly gathering courage. “You gotta pay a toll, like.”
Duncan looked at him. “No, I don’t.”
The moment stretched, twanged and snapped. The tough looked away.
“You’ll want to let me pass,” Duncan suggested.
Confused looks between the other two. They hadn’t seen what the first man had, but they weren’t too drunk to sense the shift. The lead tough stood reluctantly aside. Duncan moved past them with every appearance of casual amiability. He grinned at them, nodded. Later, sobering up, they would try to piece it together and fail, and bicker and blame each other. But Duncan’s eyes would linger in all their memories, and each would privately understand that this was not a scuffle they could have won.
Meanwhile, Duncan made his way along the concrete walkway, undecided if he was happy to have avoided the fight or not. As ever, his rage simmered close to the surface. But something, some remnant of shame and regret for the mess with Ellie Furlough last Spring, was enough to hold it down.
Just enough.
He took a couple of turns in the concrete warren, following the directions he’d been given, and shortly after that, he stumbled on Umber Cottages. It was one of the worst misnomers he’d ever seen – a short, ugly terraced row of two storey worker housing in cheaply finished grey stone. Raw concrete steps led up to wooden front doors with peeling black paint. Pokey little windows sat high up, like eyes peering myopically into a future printed too fine to read. The facades were modern – probably put up in the early days of Re-clearance, when it was still thought the advance of the Forest could be stopped, and thousands were drafted in for the work – but already the stonework looked stained and tired.
Duncan found number sixteen and knocked. A wan-looking woman of about fifty opened for him, looked him up and down with narrow suspicion.
“We don’t want none o’ that,” she snapped, in accents from somewhere a long way south of Erlsley. “She’s to be left alone. G’ahn, or I’ll call the bottles on yer.”
“Duncan Silver,” he explained. “For Irene Rush. I’m expected.”
From within the dimly lit spaces behind the door, something shrieked like a howitzer shell descending.
The noise froze the woman where she stood. Duncan nodded.
“Perhaps you’d better let me in.”
She stood aside, wordless. Duncan ducked his head and stepped through into the hall space. The shriek came again, intensified. He tracked it to a side room, door solidly closed. He moved past into the living room. No gas in these premises, certainly no electric – what light there was came from hurricane lamps stood on the sideboard and main table, wicks cranked up, and a struggling fire in the grate. Shadows capered on the walls.
“Are you him?”
She sat coiled and wrapped in a shawl and nightgown in an armchair at the sole window in the room, staring out at what must have been the backyards of the row. Legs drawn up under her, one naked foot trailing from the under the hem of the gown. Hard to tell in the dim light, but she seemed young. Pale skin. Long dark hair, left down and uncombed, he reckoned, for quite a while. There was a livid mark on one cheek where someone had struck her hard enough to break the skin. Glimmer of recent tear tracks she’d left unwiped.
“Aye, I’m Silver.” He said it as gently as he could. “Like the pirate.”
“Like the pirate,” she repeated mechanically.
Speaking seemed to stir something in her. She turned in her chair to look at him fully, and it dawned on him abruptly that she was an attractive woman. The pale face framed in all that hair reminded him of someone – one of the actresses he’d had postcards of as a boy, perhaps. Ethel Warwick, tits out for Whistler, or maybe that American one he’d liked, Marie Doro. Fey, young, silk-draped things, all big beckoning eyes, leaves and flowers strewn through their hair.
“They say you’ll go to the Forest, Mr Silver?” Her voice was a dredged whisper, a husk. “They say you’re not afraid?”
“A lot of men will go to the Forest, Mrs Rush. Especially for the money you promise. Especially in these times.”
She nodded, moved again in the chair. Both feet touched down on the floor, revealed long, shapely calves above. He saw that the gown was pricey – sheer silk, out of place in the stark tenement surroundings. Irene Rush had fallen on hard times, and maybe not that long ago.
She sniffed and cleared her throat, wiped the back of her hand over each cheek in turn to clear the tracks of her tears.
“Yes, I – I suppose you have seen service? You have passed through the fire?”
He tried not to grimace at the phrase. It was overly popular that year, much delivered from pulpits and lecterns and the benches of Parliament – passed through the flames; baptism of fire; passage through the flaming rites of the War to end all wars. So forth.
“I was in France, yes. And Flanders, for a while.”
“Then you are not afraid.”
“Mrs Rush, a man who goes to the Forest and is not afraid is a man who will not be coming out again. Try not to believe too much of what you read in the pulps.”
The hard-faced older woman came and stood in the room with her back to the window. Arms folded, watchful, touching distance to her ward. He saw in her face that she didn’t trust him any more now than she had when they had their misunderstanding at the door. He wondered how many like him they’d already seen, how much of their obviously dwindling funds they’d seen wasted with no result, how many shysters calling and slipping away with an easy grin. Demonologists, Theosophicals, Sword-and-Orbsters, all the sub-Blavatsky types and splinters, Woodsmen-who-weren’t, fly-by-night witch and warlock fakes, Otherkin flimflam artists, the whole sad circus erupting into their lives one tawdry act after another….
Once again, through the wall from the room next door, the awful, downward hurtling shriek. The older woman’s eyes moistened. He saw how Mrs Rush flinched, how her hand rose trembling towards the livid mark on her cheek. Her gaze fell away into whatever place had stolen the strength from her voice.
“It won’t stop,” she husked, to him or to herself, it wasn’t clear. “It just……won’t stop.”
He nodded. “In all likelihood, it has the Sight. It will know I’m here.”
She looked at him again, then, as if for the first time. As if the whole thing had only now become real in her mind. It was a common enough moment amongst afflicted parents. Duncan took the snuff box from his pocket, crouched beside her to make himself less alarming.
“Look – Mrs Rush, let me be honest. At this moment, I cannot be sure that your child has been removed to the Forest, or that what’s in the next room is a changeling. But it certainly sounds that way. And there is an easy test. Here.” He held out the snuff box. “Open this.”
She took the box, struggled a moment with the ornate catch, then lifted the lid and peered inside.
“Iron filings,” he told her. “Perfectly harmless. Touch them. You too, please, madam.”
The older woman looked at him mistrustfully a moment, then leaned in and put a finger into the box.
“Take a small pinch, please, both of you. Rub it onto your skin.” He watched them obey him like sleepwalkers. “You’ll agree it does no harm?”
They both nodded, like mechanical toys. He straightened up. “Good. Now, will I bring Miriam in? Or would you prefer…”
Mrs Rush looked up at the older woman. The retainer pursed her lips and left the room.
“It’s Mimi,” Mrs Rush said brokenly. “No-one ever calls her Miriam.”
Out in the corridor, Duncan heard a key in a lock, a door opened. The shrieking began in earnest. The woman came back, dragging a thrashing, flailing, diminutive rag-clad figure by one thin arm. It resembled nothing so much as a three or four year old girl with similar features to Mrs Rush herself, and it was clearly terrified of everyone and everything in the room.
“Mama, mama, no, don’t let them,” it wailed. “Don’t let them burn me!”
Mrs Rush dissolved in tears, buried her face in her hands.
“Mama, please, I’ll be good, I didn’t mean it, please mama, please, I won’t-“
Duncan hissed a word of command in skogurtal, and the creature blinked, then shut up as if its jaw were a sprung trap.
It was all the evidence he needed. Nothing human could be compelled in the Forest speech that way. But, of course, it would not do for the mother, and Duncan felt a tiny prickling sensation in his throat at that tenacity, an unquantified blend of joy and rage and loss that threatened to prick out tears in his eyes. even now He swallowed hard. Cleared his throat.
“Let me hold her,” he said, very gently.
And rapidly, before anyone could react, he stepped across and took the child by both thin wrists from behind, held the skinny arms apart. The older woman let go, startled. Duncan lifted the creature forward so it stood right in front of the mother. He felt how its muscles tensed and writhed, fighting his grip. He widened his arms, pulled seeming-Mimi into something resembling a crucifixion. Tears flooded the child’s eyes, flooded down its face. It moaned and writhed.
But it no longer spoke.
“Mrs Rush,” Duncan, urgently now – this had to be done fast, while her fortitude lasted. “For your own peace of mind, I would like you to take some of the iron filings and gently rub them on this child’s arm.”
She stared at him, long moments in which he saw the truth finally breach the walls she’d built in her mind, erupt to the conscious level, where it could no longer be denied. She made a noise, a convulsive sob that wracked her whole body. But when she met his eyes again, he saw the change, the new determination to go with the knowledge she now would not deny.
She pressed her lips together, tears still welling up, still spilling down her cheeks.
But she did it.
She pinched up the iron filings in her fingers, reached out for the thing that looked like her daughter. The creature’s muscles cabled against Duncan’s grip. It kicked out, twisted and thrashed. Duncan grimaced, tightened his hold and nodded urgently at Irene Rush.
“I’m sorry,” she wept.
But she pressed the iron filings onto one thin arm near the elbow.
Duncan averted his eyes.
Flash-flare, magnesium bright, blinding in the dimly lit room.
The mother screamed, but it was lost in the high, ululating howl that broke from the child, and put every hair on Duncan’s body erect. It was all he could do to maintain his grip, haul back and prevent the creature from kicking Mrs Rush in the face.
A sudden reek of scorching stormed the room, made the two women gag.
Then acrid smoke, ribboning up off a wound that glowed moss green in the blotched and blunted vision the flare had left them.
Duncan wrestled the thrashing sprite back, away from the mother it had fooled.
“Your daughter is in the Forest,” he said.
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