The Black North (26 page)

‘Follow me, Oona! Follow me now, sister dearest, and you shall see!'

Oona was hurrying, knowing that she was near to the heart of the blackened forest – she sensed secrets ready to be discovered. And it was Morris leading her. Almost just out of sight always, his heel seen and then vanishing, his fingers were lingering to curl with beckoning:
‘Follow me, Oona! Follow quick!'

Those watching eyes were ripening in branches. Widening, dark crimson. Oona ran on.

And finally she was somewhere, the place she'd been moving towards ever since she'd first held the Loam Stone in hand and heard the King's voice, his promise: she saw home, Kavanagh cottage, Morris standing by the window on tiptoe to look in, his back to her. Oona heard him whisper,
‘Come see, sister! Come see!'

Like they were younger, like a game.

Oona ran soft and reached the cottage and on tiptoe beside strained to see in. But the pane was misted, couldn't be seen through or wiped clear by any hand.

‘Wait,'
whispered the voice of her brother. But his voice was less like himself, closer to that of Oona's nightmares – the King of the North speaking. And still he kept his face hidden as he said,
‘Just listen now and watch – things will become clearer.'

And then a shout from inside the cottage that Oona knew instantly as their da's voice. He was demanding –

‘What the hell is happening to me, Mammy?'

Oona remembered only then how fond the man had been of raising his voice. She heard some soft reply but then her father shouted louder –

‘Shut up you! Don't know what you're talking about! One of you hurry up and do something to fix it! It's creeping up the arm more by the minute! What are all your potions and bits for if you can't fix things like this?'

Another voice that she recognised in the first syllable as her Granny Kavanagh said, ‘I don't know what this is, son. Never seen the like of it. Some North magic and I don't know how to –'

‘Get away from me!' cried Oona's father. ‘Bloody useless. And she's not much good either, is she? Sitting there, doing her pictures!'

Again: same soft reply.

‘What was that? Speak up, woman!'

Oona heard Granny Kavanagh say, ‘Leave her be, son. She'll be no use – she's a dreamer, that one. I told you that when you married her.'

‘Do you hear that? Me own mother didn't want me to take you!'

Oona wanted so badly to see but still the window wouldn't clear. Then the voice of the King through the mouth of Morris told her,
‘Accept what you are hearing, and then you will see.'

Oona thought, Accept what? Mother and father arguing? Granny goading, not helping?

But as she thought it – dreamed it, same way she'd dreamed fire on the rooftop in Loftborough – the window began to allow her: like frost shrinking to show what was beneath, slow thaw, and Oona saw into the Kavanagh cottage. Saw this scene, twilit –

Mother seated at the family table, a sheet between her elbows, head lowered and hair fallen, paintbrush poised. Oona angled her head to see more. The painting was almost complete: picture of that unlikely land that rolled, emerald-coloured, scattered with thin trees of silver and small stone cottages. Oona's father stood close to her mother, leaning in but not in a way that meant love. He was breathless, all of him damp with sweat and shivering, one hand held delicately against his chest as though injured. And then he roared –

‘
Speak, woman
!'

And father struck mother with his injured hand.

‘No,' said Oona. She recoiled, almost toppled. The window began to cloud and she murmured, ‘No. This is made up – nightmare, not real.'

‘The Stone tells no lies,'
said the voice of the King.
‘Some might call it the Nightmare Stone, or the Darkness and the Seeing, but it tells only truth.'

‘Liar,' said Oona. She swallowed, pressing both palms to her face and roaring as loud as her father, ‘You're lying!'

‘Some view the truth as nightmare,'
said the voice of the King,
‘because they cannot bear to know it. But you must look. You must know – there is more to be seen.'

Oona looked – the window remained opaque. No, she thought. I want to see. Need to.

And things began to clear, slowly. And Oona heard – Father: ‘Look at me now! What the hell's happening?'

Granny: ‘I said I don't know, son, but calm down! Doing no good getting upset.'

Oona saw her father weeping frustrated tears.

‘Some filthy magic them Invaders have put on me!' he shouted. ‘Pray for me! Pray for it to stop!'

Then he held his hand to the shrine for the Sorrowful Lady: the hand was grey, like he'd rubbed it with cinder. Not just the hand but all the way to the elbow and crumbling, one finger already missing.

‘Like it's rotting away,' Oona heard her father say. ‘Turning to dust! Sorrowful Lady help me!'

Oona thought,
The Echoes.

‘And you!' her father shouted, returning suddenly to Oona's mother. ‘What have you got to say?'

Oona's mother remained: same position, unmoving, as though nothing was happening.

‘You think I'm stupid and don't realise?' her father said, teeth gritted, spittle flying. ‘But I know things, woman. I'm not so slow! It was you that brought this North magic into this place, isn't it? It's you that's doing this because you want rid of me, isn't it? So you can go back to that filthy North? Back to that woman you were so friendly with? That's the answer. See – I'm not so slow!'

‘Son,' said Oona's grandmother. ‘Leave her be – she's no use to man or beast, that one.'

But the attention of Oona's father – the anger – was all for Oona's mother: ‘Why are you still painting that place?
Tell!
'

A long time of nothing. And then Oona heard her mother say in the lowest whisper: ‘Because it is home, and soon it will be gone. Like everywhere in this Isle – it will change. Like you – it will Blacken, and rot.'

A breath, and Oona saw her father lift his hand to strike –

‘Now you see,'
said the voice of the King.
‘Now you know.'

Oona looked to Morris – at last he showed his face, and it was the face of their father.

‘
There is no escaping,
' whispered the mouth of her father,
‘No denying this truth.'

And same scene inside the cottage as out: hands raised to strike and Oona feeling the blow as it fell on her own back, in the same nightmared moment the same pain breaking on mother and daughter. In the same moment, same scream.

Some nightmares know no end. Oona opened her eyes, yet every dark thing remained. She felt a festering inside her, and waking did nothing to soothe it: she couldn't escape new knowledge. She had to move. She reached out but discovered nothing – the press of Whereabouts Wolves was gone. They'd left her. Again, Oona was alone.

No,
the Loam Stone told her. It felt like the rawest wound on her palm.
Not ever alone, not now.

And what Oona had seen she saw anew: Kavanagh cottage, Morris at the window peering in, father with his hand rotting and mother and grandmother and then –

‘Ach look – she's awake now! Sure isn't she just the most delicate wee mite!'

Oona struggled to make sense of the world. She was being shadowed. What she'd taken for all those stacked stones, were they all leaning close?

‘Must have had a bad dream, the look of her! Now don't go too close, ladies. We don't want to go and crush the poor dear. But let's look after her, surely. Cuddle her and keep her safe, should we not?'

And then a dark hand came reaching and grabbing and Oona was up, scrambling back with satchel thudding against her side, voices from everywhere saying –

‘What's wrong with her? Skittish wee thing – like she's scared of us old beings! Maybe she's never seen a creature going through the Change?'

Oona tried to see more clearly –

Thickset pillars of stone, but did she imagine them like legs? Smooth bulges of stone – bellies? Great hunks with dark spaces that squirmed – surely eyes and mouths and nostrils? And – heart still a thundering thing wracked with pain – Oona was struck by a notion, a word:
Giants.

Indeed,
the Loam Stone told her.

‘What she needs is a good looking after and that's the truth!' said the Giants, their flabby heads turning on stone shoulders; what must be hair crackling like straw and swinging like frost-stiffened rope. Each moment things made more sense: the Giants could move their arms, hands, but little else, too much of them covered in stone. Some didn't move at all, as though they'd transformed long before.

Oona said again, ‘The Echoes?'

‘What this one needs is a good family to cuddle and comfort her and that's that!' the Giants announced.

And again came hands reaching and Oona felt a scream suddenly build in her throat that needed to be released: ‘Just get back and don't touch me! Leave me alone! I'm sick of this damn Black North and all the filthy things in it so stay away! If you touch me I'll cut your bloody fingers off and don't think I won't!'

And again her words echoed and echoed on, in her hand the Loam Stone blazing bright. Quiet. And then the Giants all said, whole lot crying loud –

‘Bless and save us! In the name of the Hollow Mountain and all that's holy – the wee creature has the Nightmare Stone! That damnable plague of ages, surely to goodness! Enduring dark! Worst dreams of the world and she has them in her wee hands!'

All? Whole lot? To Oona's ears it had sounded like the Giants spoke all together, but not in clamour – their voices rose and fell in unison, a low rumble forming words, collaborating on same sentences.

‘We can't let her leave! Take her now!'

So many hands came snatching for Oona but they were futile – she was too fast, and the Giants too anchored by stone to shift themselves. She hardly had to dodge or duck to evade as they wailed on: ‘Get her! Capture her or else!'

And then one voice spoke alone –

‘You have nothing to fear from us, child, as you can see. No more reason to feel terror at the sight or sound of us than you do from the clouds in the sky! We are undergoing the Change. Like all in this Isle – we are not what we once were.'

Oona looked for the source of this speaking: to the highest tumble of stone. But not stone at all. Oona knew better than to judge quick so waited, and then sure enough saw: like a memory of a face, a ridge of sharp stone for a nose and above it two dark openings for eyes with somewhere darker below to speak from.

‘Who are you?' asked Oona.

The other Giants chorused a reply –

‘The Aged One, so she is! More ancient than any! And she'll know what to do for the best, oh aye. She'll tell us all what to be doing! But she doesn't have long left for chat, not long at all!'

Oona watched the high tumble of stone. Saw it shift, and the voice of the Aged One said –

‘Such a burden to carry for such a delicate little thing as yourself. That Stone: you do not know what power it commands, what terror could be wreaked in the wrong hands if you do not –'

‘Look: I'm not
delicate
or nothing like it so stop calling me that!' Oona had heard enough and let anger again rouse her: ‘And I know what this thing is! I know what it can do! I'm no fool.'

A fresh glimpse, cold needle driven into the heart: cottage, father, mother, grandmother …

‘No,' said the ancient Giant, ‘indeed you are no fool.'

Oona saw swathes of dark moss covering the Aged – like sleeves on stone arms, like a bodice across the chest, like a crown encircling a head that was neither skin nor stone. There was no separating what might've once been flesh and what was no longer.

‘This Change you're going through,' said Oona. ‘Is it the Echoes?'

The Giants all around groaned, moved as much as they could, but the Aged One said –

‘No. The Change is something that our kind have gone through always. It is no shame, no cause for weeping: all things must know the Change, in the end. As the rain falls and freezes, the woods rise and fall and mountains turn to dust – all things transform. But these Echoes – they are not a change, but an ending. Like the horror of the remaking that is taking place all around us, the Echoes lead to nothing except destruction.'

And Oona thought: if the Cause are suffering from it, what might be happening to Morris?

‘The only place safe now is here,' said the Aged. ‘Only these Melancholy Mountains can be a haven for you, child.'

‘No,' said Oona. ‘I have to keep going. I need to warn people.'

‘It cannot be halted,' said the Aged One. ‘Our husbands in the Hollow Mountain have spent years trying to unravel the mystery of the Echoes, to discover its source or secret. But they have failed. And even our husbands – wise and well-read! – are not destined for long life in this remade world, longing only to sleep.'

‘But we need to –' began Oona.

‘The King is destroying so that he can raise his new Kingdom,' said the Aged One, words unstoppable. ‘Smell the air – foul and dank with decay! Nothing is the same – the very foundations of things, the natural ways are being disrupted! How long has it been night? How long has the moon been full? How long will winter cling to the world? There is no stopping him.'

‘There has to be,' said Oona. She held the Loam Stone tight, as thought she could squeeze answers from it.

‘As long as the King of the North exists,' the Aged One told her, each word fading, the Change soon t o seize her completely. ‘As long as that creature lives, then so will these Echoes. But know this too: so long as men have evil in their hearts, so long as this Cause persists so thoughtlessly, then the King of the North cannot be defeated. That Stone in your hand, child – if you cannot master the nightmares within, cannot take what truth it offers – then it will mean the end of everything.'