Blood Fugue (29 page)

But the worst thing in those loving eyes of Kath’s was the thing no mother should ever feel in response to a son: fear. She knew he could hurt her, change her. She knew in some part of herself that the change he could make would save her and Kerrigan could see that she did not want to be saved.

If he could bind her, he knew there was a chance of saving her. He’d brought plenty of wellspring water with him. One shot with a binder and she could make it out of there. That very binder was already in his hand, his finger curled around it ready to launch it but, as with Amy, the tree was reaching for its children. Would it leave Kath here on the arbour floor if she was no longer in Fugue? There was no time left even to question, he had to try.

It was at that moment Kerrigan heard laughter from behind him and he was iced to his very heart. He’d left Carla unattended for seconds only but the sallow man had been waiting. Perhaps he’d even planned the diversion. Kerrigan hesitated in that last vital second and Kath was gone from the ground. He looked up in time to see her being hoisted by possessive braches into the air and held out, once again, like some kind of protection, the way he might hold out a binder to a Fugue.

Before he lost all control of the situation, Kerrigan turned and sprinted back to where the sallow man now clutched Carla with his many tongues and one of his long-boned hands.

‘I’ve expected so much more from you all these years, foundling. I truly believed you had prepared for this meeting. Now I find you are not worthy of my concern. You are no Fugue Hunter. You are a joke.’

The words cut him, but Kerrigan let fly a binder before the sallow man had finished his taunts, snapping it from his fingers with a will and force he never achieved in casual training. It soloed like an archangel and it flew true, curving in towards the target at the final moment. Because the sallow man had advanced from Fugue into Rage, the opposition caused by the binder was even greater than usual. There was a thunderous clash as it connected with his long swollen head and a flash of lilac fire that illuminated the entire arbour, searing an imprint onto Kerrigan’s retina. The sallow man collapsed backwards against a pine and let go of Carla who stumbled to Kerrigan, half blinded.

‘Are you okay, Carla? Can you see well enough to run?’

He held her face in his hands. Apart from the shock of the impact she was alert and ready to act. He was about to take her hand and accelerate out of the arbour but she clasped her arms around his neck and pressed her tear-streaked face against his skin. After a couple of seconds in which she embraced him with a kind of desperation, she drew her face away a little and kissed him hard on the mouth.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

Behind her the sallow man lay on his back, his tongues and feeding tubes retreating back into him. He’d be unconscious for several hours, but if Kath and Maggie were already Fugues, there was no telling how many others might be wandering the woods. He had to reach the rest of Carla’s family as soon as possible.

With her wrongful kiss still bruising his lips, Kerrigan took Carla’s hand and they ran from the arbour out towards the Eastern Path. The look that Kath had given him weighed so heavily on Kerrigan, the mere thought of it slowed him down. A few yards into the recently cut trail that led away from the giant tree he heard another sound that laid him even lower. It was the excited barking of a dog back in the arbour. Despite the strange timbre to his woofing, he knew it was Dingbat. A moment later the noise stopped and Kerrigan chewed back on his rising emotions.

Long before they reached the Eastern path, the night laid its purple velvet blanket down over the valley and smothered it in black.

Kerrigan pushed the pace. He held Carla’s hand to keep her close. He took a guilty comfort in the warmth of her skin. Twice when she stumbled in the darkness he caught her and helped her regain her footing.

As they emerged onto the Eastern path she broke the silence.

‘You can see where we’re going, can’t you?’

‘Sure.’

‘How is that possible?’

‘I don’t know exactly how but I know I’ve always been able to do it when I needed to.’

‘I’ve seen you throw those —’

‘Binders.’

‘Right, binders. What else can you do?’

‘They’re not circus tricks, Carla.’

‘I know that. I’m just interested. No, I’m fascinated.’

Where was the harm in telling her a little about himself now? He’d never discussed it with anyone; he wanted to let it out.

‘Things just happen, it’s like an instinct. I have no idea what I’m capable of most of the time. But I’ve been doing it all my life. Ever since I was an infant.’

‘What do you call it?’

‘The only word I know for it is Lethe.’

‘What do you call those creatures? What do you call that old man out there?’

‘They’re Fugues. He was once a Lethe like me, but he’s turned now. When they’re threatened or hungry they go up a gear, like he did. That’s called Rage.’

‘Did you kill him?’

‘I wish I had. But binders don’t kill them. They paralyse or stun them for a while. Usually, when they’re in that state, I can heal them.’

‘It’s a sickness, this Fugue?’

‘That’s right. The disease has been in this valley for centuries, maybe since before people came here.’

Carla increased her pace until she was alongside him. She held his hand a little tighter. In the darkness, Kerrigan saw her looking at him, even though she couldn’t see him. There was a look of awe on her face. While he enjoyed the attention, he wasn’t worthy of it. How many people had he lost to the Fugue since he’d left his cabin? Too many to deal with?

He sighed.

‘What is it?’ asked Carla.

‘Nothing.’

There was silence between them for a while but she stayed beside him. His guilt told him he should let go of her hand, but he knew if he did she would trip or crash into something. The other part of him, the part that wanted her in spite of how wrong it was, delighted in that simple touch.

‘You’re like them, aren’t you?’ she asked.

‘What?’ he tried to laugh the suggestion away but she persisted.

‘There’s something about you that reminds me of the ones I’ve seen.’

He dropped the pace and turned to her.

‘What are you trying to say?’

‘It’s in the way they move, the way they talk. It’s like they’ve forgotten what it was they were supposed to be doing. When we met you, you had that same kind of distracted way about you. Do you know you hunt them when you’re not actually doing it?’

Kerrigan drew a deep breath and shook his head in the darkness, but she didn’t see the gesture.

‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘No one remembers anything afterwards. Most of the time I’m a reclusive writer of magazine articles with a crushing fear of the dark. When I turn hunter, I have no other life. And nothing scares me. Well, almost nothing.’

Carla looked up at his face again. Somehow in all that blackness she managed to fix her gaze right on his eyes. For Kerrigan it was like looking into the eyes of a blind girl.

‘I trust you, Jimmy Kerrigan,’ she said.

He was about to tell her not to be so free with her trust when he sensed a presence on the trail. He couldn’t believe the sallow man had caught up with them so quickly. He put his hand over her mouth as gently as he could and moved her to the edge of the path.

‘There’s someone out here with us,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t say another word and don’t move.’

He stepped back into the path and stared into the night. Far along the Eastern path he saw them, a band of twenty or more Fugues coming their way at a run. Among them he saw faces of people he knew from Hobson’s Valley and he covered his mouth to keep from crying out in shock. The rest of Carla’s family ran with them, a look of wild hunger in their eyes.

There were more Fugues than he had binders for, more than he could deal with on his own. He had failed them all. The people of the town and the whole Jimenez family. He had let himself be distracted; ignored a worsening situation for far too long.

He crouched down beside Carla who had curled into a ball and was hugging her knees beside the path.

‘There’s too many of them,’ he whispered. ‘We have to go back.’

‘No, Jimmy. What about Luis? What about mama and papa?’

There it was; the voice of the little girl, so much a part of the woman she was trying to become.

‘Maybe they already got through.’

‘Do you believe that?’

‘Listen to me, Carla, if we don’t go back, no one stands a chance. Not us, not your family, not the town.’

He didn’t give her the chance to respond. He hauled her to her feet and started running back towards the trail that led to the arbour. She dragged her feet this time; all enthusiasm, all hero-worship gone. In the end he picked her up and ran with her in his arms.

A hundred yards beyond the opening of the newly broken arbour trail, Kerrigan stopped and put Carla down. Crouching, near the edge of the trail they waited for the Fugues to make up the distance. As he’d suspected they would, they turned and entered the recently re-broken trail one by one until they were gone from view.

Carla was crying beside him, her face pressed into her hands.

‘They didn’t make it back to the car, did they?’ she sobbed.

‘Carla, for God’s sake keep your voice down.’

‘How many of those things were there?’

‘It was a large group,’ he said, not able to look at her.

‘They were all on this trail together. There’s no way they could have made it past so many Fugues, is there?’

‘They had the binders I gave them. Maybe the Fugues didn’t come along this trail. Those two we saw at the arbour came right through the woods.’

Carla shook her head and looked into the darkness. He knew she couldn’t see a single thing, not even his hand in front of her face if he’d wanted to put her to the test. Still the look in her eyes was a distant one.

‘Don’t try to make me feel better, Mr. Kerrigan. And don’t lie to me either. I just want to know what will happen to them.’

There was no point hiding the truth. The chances were that neither he nor Carla would make it through the night.

‘I saw them,’ he said.

She looked at him in the darkness.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Just now in that group. They’re all heading back to the tree.’

Carla’s hopeful smile was pathetic to behold. He was glad she couldn’t see his expression.

‘So they’re not dead?’

‘No. Being fed upon doesn’t necessarily kill you unless they drain you of so much fluid that you can’t recover. They can pass the disease on to you but, until now, I’ve rarely known them to do that. They like their secrets. They can feed for years on a community if their numbers are small enough and their victims don’t remember a thing about it. Fugue is like a fever that comes and goes.’

‘What will happen to them now?’

‘In normal circumstances —’

‘Nothing about this is normal.’

It wasn’t an easy subject to explain. He sighed.

‘Usually, I find one or maybe two at any time. I hit them with a binder when they’re in Fugue and then put them through a healing ritual to cleanse them of the disease. After a while they carry on with life as normal and don’t ever think about it again.’

‘So, you’re saying you could save my family? Make them . . . normal again?’

‘In theory, yes, but you have to understand, I’ve never seen this many of them before and I’ve never taken on more than two at one time. There are too many for me to handle on my own.’

‘You will try, won’t you?’

Kerrigan didn’t need to think of an answer. His whole life was the answer.

In the silence that followed her words, though, he felt the entire forest and all its creatures, even the very valley and the mountains on either side, speak silently to him. The land wanted to be rid of the pollutant Fugue forever. He drew strength from the thought that he had the Earth itself behind him. He had taken Fugue for granted when he was in Lethe and had done all his life. Sensing the land’s protest so strongly made him wonder for the first time what the origin of Fugue might be. He had a profound conviction that the disease had come a long, long way.

‘Of course, I will.’ he said. ‘It’s in my blood.’

Chapter 32

Some time before they reached the arbour, Carla became aware of a faint radiance illuminating the claustrophobic path. Now that she could see just a little she swung her head from side to side often, in fear of an ambush. The closer they came to the end of the trail the brighter the light became. It reminded her of the many twilights she’d witnessed since coming to Hobson’s Valley, but it was different in that, instead of the light fading away and leaving a dusty purple mist, there was a source from which the light emanated. And it didn’t dim: it became brighter.

Fifty yards farther along the trail and Carla could see well enough to make out the vials of wellspring water on Kerrigan’s belt and the indents where the binders were embedded into the long wrist straps he wore. The straps made her think of ancient swordsmen who’d protected their forearms with decorated leather gauntlets. Even though she could see well enough not to fall over she still clung to his hand, enjoying the feel of his strength and the way his hand yielded to accommodate hers.