Lizzie would normally, for the sake of her exercise tracker, have been grateful for the opportunity of an impromptu jog, but when it was across the town, following a pensioner who was now displaying an astonishing turn of speed, with the future of everything at stake, well, that wasn’t really one of the workout settings. Judith was sprinting, and sustaining it. There were cheers and laughs as they dashed past the locals. That could not, Lizzie was sure, be done without supernatural help. It must have taken some restraint, in her younger years, for Judith not to have tried out for the Olympics.
But restraint was what Judith was all about, wasn’t it? And the lack of it was the great sin she was judging Autumn for. But was there something else, alongside that? Lizzie had a good ear for the interactions between people experiencing trauma, and beneath Judith’s fury at Autumn, there seemed to be some unspoken anger, something personal. How gently, she wondered, had Autumn been dealing with her employee’s grief? Or had she heard only stubbornness and replied in kind? And what about in the other direction? Autumn had been down and put upon for months, and Lizzie really hadn’t been paying enough attention to that.
This was what their lives were now, that Lizzie not being there for her friends often enough might have led to the end of the world.
Surprisingly, since she had mentioned her defences being cooked, Judith led them not to her house, but up the hill to the Tatchell farm, baked mud flying from her sensible shoes. The sun was now beaming down on the three figures as they rushed up the spine of the bare hillside, along the track beside Tatchell’s field of ripening wheat.
Judith staggered to a stop, stretched out her arms, and spun slowly, as if seeking something. Autumn just about fell beside her, until Lizzie grabbed her and managed to get her to her feet. But then Autumn started to throw up. Only another intervention by Lizzie stopped it from going over Judith’s ankles.
“Over here,” said Judith, not bothering to notice. She pointed and marched off across the corn, not caring about damaging the crop.
“Are you okay?” Lizzie asked Autumn, helping her to follow. At least the visible threads that had been wrapped around her had faded in the last few minutes. That dust, presumably, was wearing off.
“Of course I’m not bloody—! Sorry. What she was saying, about what I’d done, how . . . I guess, bad magicians? How they use this stuff? Am I going to ‘the dark side’?” Lizzie could hear the irony she’d put into the words. “Like I’m becoming the stuff we’re keeping out. Which is . . . what they’ve been saying to me, or not ever saying out loud. What they’ve been thinking.”
Lizzie didn’t like the sound in her friend’s voice. “You’ve been under a lot of pressure, and I haven’t been listening enough.”
“I want to confess.”
“Well, we don’t do that very much in the C of E, but absolutely, you can confess to me and I can—”
“I don’t want to be absolved. I want to take responsibility for this. Do you think there’s some sort of . . . magical court, maybe with the fairies?”
“Shut up!” called Judith from ahead. “Move faster.” They came to a grassy patch in the middle of the field, which stood out in the middle of the crop. Now they’d stopped running, Lizzie could still hear the distant dance music. Judith squatted slowly down and picked up two spades, which Lizzie was pretty sure hadn’t been there a second before. “Dig,” she said, “quick.”
Autumn grabbed a spade, and set about digging. She was trying to demonstrate her commitment. “Those threads you saw wrapped around me,” she said, “won’t me moving about keep on disturbing them?”
Judith made a tutting noise, like this question was an unwanted burden. “The web of them is loose now. Dun’t matter what you do.”
Lizzie saw pain pass across Judith’s face once more. “Are you okay? Doing all this, running like that, you have to pay a price, don’t you? That’s how it works.”
Judith gave her a look that said further questions along those lines would be most unwise.
Lizzie sighed and started to dig. “How is there a grassy patch here?” She wasn’t going to let Judith or Autumn lapse into brooding.
“Paul the builder is one of that lot that goes out with metal detectors. He thinks he found summat huge out here a few months back. He’s got an agreement with Joe Tatchell to not sow on this bit, and he’ll poke around after harvest.”
“And what’s that got to do with what we’re doing?”
“He found an illusion I’d planted at this spot so he’d do all that. In case we ever had to do this. I’m up for fighting the powers of evil, but I’m not so stupid as I’d take on a farmer.”
“But what happens when he realises it’s not here?”
“I know what that lot with the detectors are like. He’d have kept poking around for it, year after year. So the spot’d stay put. Right. That’s deep enough.” She took from her cardigan pocket a tiny cloth bag with thread knotted at the top. “I kept these in the freezer. I had to put them in the oven when I realised what she’d done.”
She’d addressed that explanation only to her, Lizzie realised. It was as if Autumn had become useful only for digging. Autumn had realised that too, and was looking helpless. “And they got into your pocket how?” asked Lizzie.
Judith gave her another look. “What do they call him, the green chap?”
“Is that someone we know, or—?”
“On schoolbags. He were on television when I were younger.” It took a bit of interrogation before Lizzie realised Judith was talking about The Incredible Hulk. “Right. Him. If I go like him, knock me around the head with the brown-handled spade. That should fix it.” And before either of them could ask any alarmed questions, even about why it had to be that particular spade, she’d put the cloth of the bag to her lips and started to blow into it.
Lizzie and Autumn looked at each other. “You’ve got the brown-handled spade,” said Lizzie.
Autumn quickly swapped spades with her.
Judith’s face was changing colour, but it was turning bright red rather than green. She seemed to have been blowing for an impossibly long time, drawing air from who knew where. Lizzie took a covert look behind the old woman and saw that her floral dress had flattened against the back of her legs, as if being pulled in by . . . no, she really didn’t want to think about that.
Judith finally stopped, staggered, righted herself, and, with a little cry of pain, threw the bag into the hole. Light burst from where it struck the soil, and a pillar of it shot up into the sky, a light only they could see. Then it began to slowly fan out, dissipating into a vague glow that followed an arc.
“Basic defence,” panted Judith. “Until . . . if . . . we can knit the boundaries back into place . . . it’ll have to do.”
“So now do we go after the lost people?” asked Autumn.
“In a bit.” Judith looked like she didn’t like speaking directly to Autumn now. She also looked on her last legs, her face grey with effort. “We’ve got three more of these to do first.”
* * *
They raced around Lychford in the heat, putting the cloth bags into prepared sites that were, in order: inside the bole of a tree; by the side of a road, which needed a paving stone to be heaved up and got them curious shouts from drivers; in the playground underneath the slide, which required more digging. All the while, the distant beat of the dance music continued.
“Does it have to be here?” said Lizzie, about digging under the slide, aware that if anyone saw her she’d have some serious explaining, or rather lying, to do to the town council. At least she was getting her steps in today.
“I’m not responsible for where the cardinal points are. I just did my best to get these within twenty feet.” Judith had done the same trick with the bags at three sites now, and now she embarked on it one last time. Lizzie seriously wondered if it would kill her.
Finally, she dropped the last bag into the hole and they filled it in. The light this time flashed up, connected with the other beacons, and from this angle they could now see they were inside a barely perceptible dome, which faded. But Lizzie could still feel the slight sense of added safety its continuing presence imparted.
Judith sat down on the grass. “Right,” she said. “Now we can . . . can find those . . .”
“Let us do it,” said Autumn.
Judith was silent for a long moment, her eyes closed. Lizzie hoped she’d say something comforting, but when she finally spoke, it was as bitter as before. “You’ve done enough.”
“Do we know if anything’s got through?”
Judith opened her eyes and started to push herself up. “It will have. Maybe a few things, at random, shunted here like Rory Holt and the lorry driver and the rave were shunted elsewhere, or maybe loads of ’em, deliberately, if they were waiting ready to seize their chance.”
“Refugees coming over the border,” said Autumn. And now her voice was as hard as Judith’s had been.
Judith finally looked at her. “It’s not a bloody metaphor,” she said. “Everything isn’t about you.”
She’d hauled herself to her feet and set off before Autumn could find a reply. Lizzie put a hand on Autumn’s arm. The look on her face was a battle between anger and absolute guilt. “Just let me try to fix it,” Autumn whispered. “Please. She has to let me try.”
* * *
As the three of them marched down the river toward the route to the woods, Autumn kept looking at Judith. She kept waiting for the old woman to say that Autumn was no longer her apprentice, that after the lack of care she’d shown, she wasn’t worthy. Autumn would have welcomed that. She would have got angry at it too, she couldn’t help but react like that, but . . . oh God, when was Judith going to say it?
What would Lizzie be thinking now, if she’d been the one who’d done this? Would she be seeking judgment? Would her guilt be so extreme? How much had the town Autumn had grown up in made the feeling seep into her skin that, being the only black person here, anything abnormal might be her fault? But no. The thought that she’d allowed this to happen because of how this place had treated her . . . that was a luxury she couldn’t allow herself. Not if she wanted to retain her mental health. That was what other people liked to think of people like her. She wanted to take responsibility. She would find a way.
And yet, that whole circle of awful thoughts was something that would never even have occurred to Lizzie.
They entered the woods, and after a while came to the signpost that marked the point where some routes seen only by those such as them headed off in directions that could never be recorded on any map. It felt . . . different now. Judith sniffed the air. “Borders have moved here too,” she said. “Right, so, we have at least one thing that’s continuously leaking across the boundaries.”
“What?” asked Lizzie.
“That bloody music.” And yeah, there it was, still. “So that’s the first thing we can work with. Try to figure out where it’s coming from.”
The three of them looked around, and managed, between them, to triangulate a direction for the varying beats. They set off that way, through the woods. “Time might be different where they are,” said Autumn, remembering her own experience of journeying to fairy. “They’d have shut down the music and gone home by now otherwise.”
No reply from Judith. It was as if she hadn’t spoken.
After a while, they came to a halt as they all realised, just about at the same time, that the direction the sound was coming from had suddenly shifted, moved to somewhere behind them.
“It’s like in a video game,” said Lizzie, “when you’re right on top of the marker you’re trying to find, and it kind of slides away around you.”
“I dunno what that means,” said Judith, “but now I see what’s gone on. The . . . rave, is it? It’s caught in what we call a knot, a little loop of border stuff that she made when she went crashing through them.”
“I think you should start using Autumn’s name again,” said Lizzie.
Judith ignored her. “There’ll be different knots all over the place. The ends knit when they’re thrown together, so they form little bubble worlds. I saw it once before, when I were younger. In . . .” She paused for a long moment, and a frown crossed her face. “Don’t remember. Don’t matter. Where was I? Oh ah. The rave might be in one, the lorry driver in another, Rory Holt in another.”
“Do we know how many of them there are?” asked Lizzie.
“Dunno. Could be half a dozen, could be thousands. What worries me most is, are those people alone in there? These aren’t just bits cut off from this world. She made the borders fly about, get mixed up and connected to each other, so there’ll be bits of the other worlds in there too. There might be stuff that’s got into the wrong places, dark things we’ve been trying to keep out, but have fallen into the knots.”
“I think we really should try to find another word for ‘evil’ other than—” began Lizzie, who’d obviously seen the look on Autumn’s face.
“Words I use aren’t what’s wrong. What she did is what’s wrong.”
Autumn took a deep breath and shoved it all down inside her once again. “Okay. How do we get into these knots?”
Finally, Judith addressed her. Because she knew what she was about to say was arrogant and annoying. “You can’t get there from here.”
“Then how—?”
“Not by walking, not by knowing stuff. We need to be lost. Close your eyes, put your fingers in your ears, and start walking.”
“What about our, you know, other senses? The ones we got from the well?” asked Lizzie.
“They’ll be what get us there. But not if we let our normal senses get in the way. This is like . . . looking for summat really small. Summat that’s curled up inside summat else. We need to concentrate. And not. At the same time.”
Autumn did her best to follow those ridiculous instructions. At last she could do something. She put her fingers in her ears, closed her eyes, and took a hesitant step forward, muttering “one potato, two potato . . .” to drown out any external noise. She let her feet lead her, moving slowly, expecting every moment to walk into a tree. She didn’t know where Lizzie and Judith were. She realised, after a minute or so, that it was actually quite amazing that she hadn’t walked into a tree. The air around her seemed to have suddenly got colder.
When she reached one hundred potatoes, she decided now would be a reasonable time to stop. She opened her eyes and took her fingers out of her ears.
It was suddenly night.
She was still in the woods, but now all was illuminated by a full moon. Yeah, it had been a full moon last night. And it was a summer night, but it was still bloody freezing compared to the brilliant day she’d been in a moment ago, and she was only wearing a dress.
She looked round for Judith and Lizzie, who she’d assumed would be somewhere behind her, but . . . no. She took a couple of steps, called their names, and realised she would have seen them by now.
She was . . . alone here.
And she didn’t know how to get back. Because Judith hadn’t told her that part. Perhaps it would be just about retracing her steps? Yeah, okay, let’s go with that for now. So, she had to find if anyone else was in here with her. And hope like crazy that nothing . . . she refused to think of it as “dark” . . . that nothing with evil intent was in here too.
She hugged herself. So she’d successfully entered an area that still looked like it was part of the woods, but where it was still the night before. Because, right, time must be running more slowly in here. So this was . . . probably . . . hopefully . . . a knot that had got snipped off of their own world, and was somehow stuck in this previous time. How was she moving and breathing, then? Nope, can’t answer that yet.
She realised she now couldn’t hear the dance music at all. All was silence. So the illegal rave wasn’t in here. Tick that off the list.
What if Rory Holt was here? How would he react if he saw her? That would be an interesting conversation. Please let him be alive for that.
Cautiously, she started moving through the woods, listening, alert for any sign of movement. But all was still under that big moon. At least moving kept her a bit warmer. The sweat from all that running about was swiftly cooling off.
After a few minutes, she saw something strange ahead of her. Along the top of a ridge, a number of the trees had fallen, a great fan shape of them, with soil tumbling from their exposed roots, turning the climb ahead into a slippery slope. It was as if something had knocked them over. She heaved herself up, stepped carefully over the timber, crested the ridge, and saw that, somewhere in the hollow below, obscured by fallen trees, a cluster of artificial lights was shining. “Hello?” she called.
She thought she heard a sound in reply. Perhaps a call for help. Cautiously, Autumn began to pick her way down the slope.
* * *
Lizzie took her hands away from her face and looked round, startled at the sudden proximity of the dance music. Judith was standing at her shoulder. The sky was light with approaching dawn, the full moon of last night on the horizon. So, right, they’d gone back in time . . . or something. Ahead of them, flashing lights shone through the trees, the music blaring from that direction. She looked quickly around and then turned back to Judith. “Where’s Autumn?”
Judith looked, if anything, more shocked than Lizzie felt. “She . . . she must have walked far enough ahead to stumble into . . . another knot.”
“Right,” said Lizzie. “Okay. Can we get her back?”
Judith shook her head. “When we unpick this, iron out the boundaries, we’ll find her then, maybe . . .”
Why was the old witch suddenly looking so uncertain? “So if we just went back the way we came, then walked as far as she did—?”
“You don’t just go backwards to get out. It’s a whole other thing.”
“What other thing?”
Judith’s face was now a complete blank. Lizzie wondered for a moment if she’d stopped recognising her. Was this the toll for what she’d done today? If so, it had come at entirely the wrong moment. “Complicated,” Judith said, finally.
Lizzie was damn sure she wasn’t going to take more than a step away from Judith before she explained. She wanted to say if Judith hadn’t been too angry to talk directly to Autumn she might have done the responsible thing and told both her apprentices how to get out of what she was leading them into. “Couldn’t you have stopped her?”
“Not my fault if she walked off that quick.”
“You do get that she’s trying to prove herself?”
“Dun’t matter. I can’t train someone that goes and does this.”
“When you were her age, you messed up so badly you ended up being cursed!”
Judith glowered at her. “I don’t have to keep you on, either.”
Lizzie was suddenly very calm. Which was what tended to happen when she got to the end of her tether. “Right now, especially, you need someone telling you the truth. You hate that you just let your apprentice walk into danger. I know you do. You’re on your last legs. There’s clearly stuff you’re not telling me. You need our help. And you and she really need to sit down and talk about all of this—!”
“Don’t you lecture me!” Lizzie was taken aback. She’d never heard Judith bellow like that before. The old woman took a few steps back, her fingers flexing, as if making a great effort to control herself. “I have never, ever, in my life, been spoken to like—”
And then she vanished, like she’d suddenly fallen backward through an invisible wall.
Oh no. Oh no. Lizzie swore out loud several times. “Judith?!” She stepped quickly forward, muttering a prayer, eyes closed and fingers in her ears . . . and stopped when she hit a tree. She was still in the same space. She’d walked right over the spot where Judith had vanished.
She tried a few more times, but it wasn’t working. Maybe it was just that the sound of the rave was too great to ever be entirely blocked out of her ears.
She had no choice but to give up. She turned and headed toward the rave. She had no idea what she could do to get these people out of here, but at least if something nasty was in here with them, then . . . okay, she’d cross that bridge when she came to it. Damn it.
* * *
Judith spun round, and yelled in anger. Then she turned again, reflexively. Gone! The reverend was gone too! No . . . actually, it was Judith herself who’d gone.
Stupid old woman. Where had she—?
Wherever it was, it was extraordinary.
There was nothing about this place that was like a place. It was like . . . a bunch of echoes, of sound and of light, rebounding endlessly, arcing all round her. She could breathe, but she felt it when she breathed in, it was something that was only trying to be air at the moment it hit her nose and mouth. There was nothing deceptive about that, it was a desperate attempt to welcome her, to keep her alive. But it didn’t feel like there was thought behind it, either. It felt like . . . a fairground ride, summat automatic, summat that was creaking, that was being pushed too far.
She took a step, and the light and sound changed around her again. The thick air slid past her hands, maybe only skin deep. Fire, the place said, fire was near, only the world was shielding her from it, keeping her alive when she shouldn’t be here.
She closed her eyes, trying hard not to panic.
She was so tired. It felt like she was going to faint, and if she did, she didn’t quite know how she was going to wake up again. She’d been using it up today, burning it up so fast . . . No. She made herself shake her head and found that place inside her where she would always be tough with herself. Come on, girl. Hold on. Those two need you to get out of here and find them. Not that they deserve . . . no, enough of that. Enough. Now. Where have you got to? It didn’t seem like she was in the worst of the many possible situations she could have ended up in. There were worlds which had informed . . . and she’d had conversations with a couple of Lizzie’s predecessors about this . . . the human idea of hell. It wasn’t that they were all pitchforks and fire. It was that they were about the person who’d stumbled into them. Those worlds responded to people’s fears, or even to their desires. If this was one of them, well . . . that would make her life into a fine shaggy dog story, eh?
But no. She was pretty sure this world was genuinely trying, with all its strength, to help her. The problem was that it didn’t have much strength left.
She opened her eyes again, and made her mind seek . . . land, a horizon, summat to get a fix on. And then, slowly, there were shapes, she was making herself adjust, and the land was helping her, showing her ways to see. The light rolled around her and showed her how far everything was in every direction.
Oh. It was a bubble. A literal bubble. A piece of space from another world, then, where time continued as normal, but which had been sealed off from its surroundings. This would actually be the easiest sort of knot to explore, to find anyone in. Of course, if there were a nasty in here, it would also be easy for it to find her.
How had she come here while absolutely not blocking out all the noises and sights of a world that had had a rave in it?
Oh. It had been anger, damn it. For the first time in decades, she’d let the pure force of magic run through her, uncontrolled, as she’d been thinking about how to traverse the knots. She’d only gone and bloody well done exactly what Autumn had done. This individual knot, still taut, had burst open to let her in. At least no more harm could be done.
She took a few steps forward, and then, sure she was now calm and aware enough to not fall into any knots within knots, she began to walk more confidently. She wished she had brought her stick. The physical energy she had mortgaged against her future well-being was slowly leaving her.
A flat surface, black like obsidian, but not reflecting, had appeared ahead of her and under her feet. She’d made it come to her. This place knew it needed help. In the “sky” above, the light was still whirling and rebounding. So little space for it to play in.
Ahead, on the surface, she saw something.
A set of footprints was materialising. There was someone else in here.
Judith gave a little groan and made to follow.
* * *
Autumn had stumbled down into the hollow, and had immediately realised what the lights were. At the end of a trail of destruction, where it had carved a road for itself across the wooded hill, a huge articulated lorry lay on its side. She’d run to the cab, managed to put a foot on one of the wheels, and had climbed up onto the side of it. She’d looked inside, and tried the door. When it had clicked open, she’d managed to haul it upwards and look down into the interior.
There sat a battered man, in his thirties, stubbled chin, donkey jacket, cropped hair. He had a kind, frightened, bemused face. He was out of his seat belt, having managed to heave himself into an upright position. He looked up at her in relief. “Thank you. Where? What happened?”
Was that a Polish accent? Autumn decided she couldn’t answer his questions very well in any language. And even then, the undercutting voice in her head added, she’d have hesitated to get to the point where his plight was her fault. “Are you hurt?”
“My leg, maybe broken. Hurts like . . . hell.”
Autumn was moved that he’d felt the need to spare her delicate sensibilities from a swear word even in a situation like this. She swore in reply, and he managed a smile. In the movies, lorries in these circumstances would always explode, but she was pretty sure that didn’t really happen, and there was no petrol smell, and if he’d been here an hour already it would probably have happened by now. If they’d been back in Lychford, she was pretty sure the best thing would have been to leave him where he was and keep him company until the emergency services got here. Pity she didn’t have that option. “Have you seen anyone else?”
“I thought . . . someone moving. About ten minutes. I have been shouting.”
Autumn raised her head out of the cab and looked carefully around. Everything was silent, apart from the wind moving the trees. The wind and the moon . . . she realised that this pocket she’d created couldn’t be cut off in space, or the area cut off must stretch to the moon, and she was pretty sure it would have been missed. So that must mean it was . . . cut off in time? Or something? The moon didn’t seem to have moved since she’d got here. What would walking through this place be like for someone outside the knot, who hadn’t carefully got lost to find it? Would those unaware hikers suddenly hop to a moment later, a moment that was missing from the world? Would they even notice?
These were the sort of questions Judith never liked her asking. Mainly because the old . . . witch didn’t know the answers. Magic let you jump over the “why” and make use of what was hidden, all from the comfort of your kitchen sink.
She didn’t think she’d ever stop needing to know why. Maybe that, too, didn’t make her a very good apprentice. Just as well she wasn’t going to be one for much longer. That thought gave her an ache she knew she deserved. She dismissed it.
She ducked back down into the cab. “Does your radio work?”
It took a bit of miming and explaining to translate the word “radio,” but when he got it, he switched it on, and Autumn listened to a single sustained note of early hours music on Radio 1. It took her a few moments to realise it wasn’t the more experimental end of the dance spectrum, but that it was going to go on like that forever. She switched it off again.
She looked back out of the cab. She couldn’t put this off any longer. That “first aid for small businesses” course she’d taken was finally going to pay off.
“Okay,” she said, “it’s going to hurt, but we have to get you out and mobile.”
* * *
It had turned out the rave was in an abandoned building that looked like it had once been a cattle barn, a building that Lizzie had walked around a couple of times in the last few weeks when she’d been trying to get her steps in. A large generator on wheels was chugging away outside, and a crowd of young people were milling around, while more had been visible through the barn entrances, still dancing. Lizzie had heard a DJ shouting encouragement. It had seemed like the party was still in full swing.
Most of the crowd outside had been smoking or snogging or sobbing, doing what the people outside clubs always did, but a few of them had seemed to be talking urgently, looking worried. Those were the ones who’d looked up, surprised, as Lizzie had approached. As if they’d been hoping someone would arrive.
One of them, a young man with a big grin and a bigger beard, had stumbled over to her, his arms outstretched. His friends had followed. “It’s a vicar!” he’d cried, and, to Lizzie’s surprise, he’d moved in for a surprisingly sincere hug. Sincere, but, err, he’d obviously been dancing all night. There was a certain moistness. She’d gently disengaged herself. “I’m not religious,” he’d assured her, loudly and immediately, “but I love that you are, like these woods are, like those birds are. Those starlings. They’re religious.”
Lizzie had never previously encountered someone who, prior to asking her name, had ventured theories concerning ornithological theology. “I suspect,” she’d shouted over the music, “that you may have been on more than the cider.”
“Oh no! You got me! Will I go to hell?”
“I tell you what,” Lizzie had said, “you tell me about a few things, and then take me to whoever’s in charge, and I’ll do my best to make sure we avoid that.”
Which was how she was taken into the presence of a man who she was told was “Stewie, just Stewie,” who’d been standing at a little distance from the barn, toying with his phone.
He laughed when he saw her. “Here we go! Is this a delegation from the town?”
Lizzie didn’t want to get into whos and whys. “How long do you feel you’ve been up here?”
“Look, we’ll be off as soon as it’s dawn. This isn’t up for discussion. If I see you reading number plates or taking photos, churches have stained glass windows, right? What’s that they say about people in glass houses keeping their noses out of my business?”
The bearded lad who’d brought her over stepped in, his hands raised. “Hey. Hey. No need for that.”
Stewie just smiled as one would at the actions of a toddler.
Lizzie found herself just a little bit pleased that she knew more about this situation than Stewie did. “What if dawn never comes?”
“Is this, like, a metaphor you’re going to use in your sermon?”
“No, listen, Stewie, something’s going on up here.” The lad was insistent. “That’s what we’ve been trying to tell someone. We can’t get to the cars.”
Stewie was about to go back to playing with his phone, but Lizzie put a hand on his arm, and he looked pleasingly startled at the force of her grip. “How about you show us where the cars are, and then I promise I’ll wander off home to my quaint little church?”
* * *
Judith had been following the footprints that were being shown to her. She could feel the morning’s exertions sapping her strength every moment, but would she notice it getting to her noggin as well? She was better in the afternoons than the mornings. After lunch was when she tended to write angry notes to herself and attach them to the fridge.
She’d lost so much strength today, so much that she’d never get back.
If she bloody lost track of what was real . . . No, don’t think about that now, you stupid old woman, find who made these prints. They were made by a bloke’s shoes, by the look, but you couldn’t be sure of that these days.
She turned at a sound. And realised she had company. Floating in the light above her were five extensions of that light, like weird, shifting interruptions of her vision. Arcs of light flew between them, blazing and extinguishing in a moment. Maybe this was the place migraines came from.
Judith knew that the real world of magic wasn’t like Harry Potter. Everyone had different names for the beings that came from the other worlds that bordered on theirs. And the degree to which those things recognised and understood human beings depended on how much they’d interacted with human cultures. The fairies, for instance, had a long tradition of cultural exchange. Which usually went one way, mind you, but at least their lust and avarice and anger meant they took the time to magic up human languages.
This lot . . . well, she had so little to go on. “Good morning,” she said. Which was more polite than she’d be to most human beings.
They moved closer, interested, worried, maybe aggressive.
“Do you like mints?” She reached into the pocket of her cardigan and brought out a rather old packet of black and white striped ones. “They’re very bad for me.”
A jolt of light hit the packet, grabbed it, and threw it aside.
Judith was about to start telling the damn thing off, because it was either that or lose control of her bowels when there came, from behind her, something that was a mixture of a bellow and a scream.
A figure leapt out of nothingness, grabbed her, and hauled her away in a moment to an area of the black surface where the beings were no longer present. She was pretty sure, mind you, that in a space this small, they hadn’t actually lost track of her, but had held back from following.
The man, because it was a man, looked around urgently. He was shaking with fear. But now Judith had realised who it was. “Rory Holt,” she said.
“Judith Mawson? Oh, that’s right, you work for her, don’t you? Did she get you too?”
Judith didn’t know quite how to answer that.
“We should be safe this far into the bush,” he continued. “She teleported us to another planet, like on Star Wars.”
Judith realised that his senses, limited, unlike hers, to what he’d been born with, were making an entirely different sort of sense of what was around them. “If that works for you,” she said.
“What the hell did you think you were doing, offering those monsters sweets? I hid as soon as I saw ’em. You reckon she’ll come back to finish us off? All right, we can’t talk here, come back to my camp and you tell me everything you know.”
And he grabbed her hand and hauled her off. He couldn’t perceive how small the world he was in was, Judith quickly realised. They were actually walking like two idiots in some theatre show, pretending to go for miles with big, silly steps as the ground rolled beneath them.
* * *
With much yelling on his part, Autumn had managed to get the lorry driver, whose name she’d learned was Marcin, out of his cab. She’d taken his weight and basically let him fall on her to get to the ground. He lay there, sobbing with pain, as she got to her feet and looked around again.
Still the silence. Still nothing moving. Still the feeling there was something out there.
She’d already found a suitable stick, and taken a roll of strong tape out of the back of the lorry. She knelt beside Marcin, and started wrapping the stick to his leg. As she worked, she tried to stay aware of her surroundings. But as she was pulling tight the last piece of tape . . . what was—?
Something was standing right beside her.
She leapt up, spun round. But there was nothing there. It had been just in the corner of her eye. But she was sure something had been there.
“Did you see anything?” she asked Marcin. It was obvious he hadn’t.
She shook her head, checked the binding, and carefully helped him to his feet. The splint held.
“Good,” he said. “Who are you? What do you, about—?” He indicated what was around them.
Autumn decided she had to tell him something. “Good witch,” she said, pointing at herself. Not that she believed that in any sense of the words.
To his credit, Marcin only boggled for a moment. He put a finger to his nose and wiggled it. “Dee dee, dee dee . . .”
Autumn was glad she’d seen clips from Bewitched online. She joined in with humming the theme tune for a moment. “Yeah, and her spells kept going wrong too, with hilarious results.”
“Witch with doctor, leg?”
She felt awkward. Not so much. “I try to do science too.”
“Get us home, okay?”
“Okay—” And there was the thing in the corner of her eye again. This time she managed to stop herself from jumping, and tried to look sidelong at it. This was something that could keep itself just about hidden, even from her extra senses. It was just a white blur, a furtive figure, the same shape as a human being, but . . . no, she couldn’t see any features.
She leapt back, sure that in that second it had moved to touch her. It had been the jerk of a predator striking. She felt like it had only just missed.
She grabbed the startled Marcin and heaved him up. “Come on!” she bellowed.
She was sure he could just about hobble along. But where could they run to?
* * *
Stewie had sighingly headed with Lizzie and the bearded lad to the makeshift car park. It should, it seemed, have been at the end of the lane that ran up the other side of the hill. But as they’d made their way through the trees, Stewie had got increasingly confused, had even stopped to look at the map app on his phone. Whatever he found had just made him swear. “How can we be lost? It was just over here.”
Finally, having walked in a straight line, they’d returned to the barn.
“No,” he’d said, turning slowly round. “No. Who put something in my water? You think that’s funny?” He’d swung to point at Lizzie, his hand going to his back pocket, where he may or may not have had a knife. “Who are you?”
Lizzie had seen two large individuals in high vis jackets coming over to see what was agitating their boss, and had decided to put her cards on the table. “I’m your only chance of getting home.”
It had taken some doing, but in the end, once the big lads had also gone to find the cars and returned from the wrong direction, startled looks on their faces, Lizzie had got Stewie to listen. He’d gone to the tent, got the DJ to switch everything off, and had shepherded the crowd, who were now sure the police were arriving, into an audience around them.
Lizzie had told them the truth, or as much as they needed to know, and had found them, perhaps unsurprisingly, pretty easy to convince of just about anything. Not that what she was telling them hadn’t created its share of sobbing, shouting, and hysterical laughter. At least while she’d been talking she’d come up with the start of a plan to get them out of here.
She pointed back to the tent. “We need to get that PA started up again.”
They showed her how they did that, and she got up behind the DJ’s mixing decks, on stacks of crates at one end of the barn. Thank goodness nobody was taking a photo of her. She would look like the worst possible trendy vicar. The DJ, who looked like she was about twelve, couldn’t stop staring. “Could you turn up the volume to full?” Lizzie asked. She bent to the microphone. “Testing,” she said. “This is Lizzie, calling Finn. Come in, Finn. Or anyone in the Court of the Unseen. Come in.”
“It’s not a radio,” said the DJ, obviously wondering if the newbie knew anything at all about the world.
“But,” said Lizzie, “I know the people I’m talking to can hear it.”
* * *
Judith, getting tired of being dragged along like she was in a half-arsed mime troupe, had finally shouted to Rory Holt to stop. She’d been about to tell him that she was here to rescue him, but then, over his shoulder, Judith had seen something appear out of the nothingness. She’d grabbed Rory, put a hand over his mouth, and, while he was wetly yelling into her palm, spun him round to see.
A group of the flying beings had gathered. More of them this time. Too many to count easily as they shifted and melted into each other. Between them was . . . this was their version of a device, she realised. It was a solid golden sphere that shot between them.
Rory stiffened in horror. “They’ve brought their cooking pot. That’s meant for us.”
Judith didn’t believe for a second that that was what was going on here. “What do you see of what they’re doing?”
“It’s some kind of native religion. We’re in Ooga Booga Land here.”
Judith wondered what sort of books Rory had read when he was growing up. If they could see these beings now, it was because they wanted to be seen, though Rory was now miming parting foliage with his hands, as if he was spying on them at the edge of a clearing. “I think,” she said, “these might be what some call sprites. There are loads of different ones. They’re summat to do with elements, not like iron and whatnot, more like principles. This lot are fire sprites. Back when we lived in caves, they’re meant to have come over and started campfires. To be on speaking terms with one was summat people boasted about, or more often kept to themselves. Then we get electricity and—”
“What are you going on about, woman?”
“—suddenly they’re from ‘Ooga Booga Land.’”
“But you can see them right there, see them with your own eyes.”
“But we’re seeing different things.”
Rory was looking annoyed at her. “Here, I’m on your side, remember? You sound like her. She sent us here, so this is probably where she’s from. She’s been hiding among us, pretending not to be an alien, but now we know.”
Judith didn’t feel like arguing with this idiot. “Right,” she said, and stepped forward to address the sprites. “Afternoon,” she said, doing her best to put on her posh voice. For some stupid reason. “I think maybe we got off on the wrong foot.” She looked over her shoulder and saw Rory hadn’t followed her, but was still “hiding in the bushes,” gesturing urgently for her to come back. “That one can’t see you properly. But I bring the right tribute.” She reached into the pocket of her cardigan and found her big box of household matches, the foundation of any good witch’s pocket contents. She struck one, and solemnly held it up toward the sprites.
They seemed to confer for a moment, and just before even Judith with her Teflon fingers had to drop the match, the fire was sucked away to join their light. Judith looked between them. They’d taken care to position themselves to all get a bit of that flame. Judith took out match after match and lit them, letting them take the fire, until she only had a few left. She showed them those in the box. “Do you want to save some for later?”
From behind her, there came the noise of Rory slowly “stepping out of the bushes.” “Wise woman make fire,” he said. “Very powerful.”
Judith sighed. If only he knew. “Can you understand me?” she asked them. The sprites paused for a moment. Then the golden ball flew at her and stopped an inch in front of her nose. On its surface was an image of a diminishing ball . . . or bubble. It got smaller even as Judith watched.
Judith swore under her breath.
“What is it?” said Rory. “Are they still thinking about eating us?”
Judith didn’t know how to put it in terms he’d understand. This knot was collapsing. Very soon it would vanish out of existence. And they would almost certainly vanish with it.