‘You’ve invited some kind of occultist?’
He laughed. ‘A university professor,’ he said.
She looked suddenly crestfallen. She said, ‘My dad doesn’t want it stopped. He wants to be well again. He’s prepared to pay any price to buy that particular miracle.’
‘Your dad needs to wake up and smell the coffee,’ Curtis said.
‘You’ll be the last she’ll take,’ Fran said. ‘You were never going to need that gun just now. You’re Gregory’s descendent. That’s why the likeness is so strong. She brought you here. It was always going to be you and it was always coming to this. And she’s always known it.’
‘Yeah, well. She doesn’t know everything,’ Curtis said. He shivered. They both did. The sun had gone briefly behind a cloud. She smiled at him and he thought her courageous and clever and worth more than what fate probably had in store for both of them.
‘You could leave,’ she said.
‘No, Fran, I can’t. I started it. I have to do what I can to make it stop.’
Saul Abercrombie injected himself with the last vial of the solution his Harley Street Doctor Feelgood had concocted for him. He rather felt that the moment had come. A tipping point had been reached. Events had accelerated to the point where there was really no going back to how things had been when the land he owned had been a wilderness.
He’d just accessed and then studied some satellite pictures he’d had taken at considerable expense that morning. They showed the extent of the forest. It covered the whole of the coastline now and all of the territory inland at the southern extremity almost to Raven Dip. To get to Puller’s Reach from the room where he studied the pictures meant crossing two miles of open country and then five of densely planted wood. There was woodland to the north, west and south of Loxley’s Cross.
Only to the east did the forest falter. And falter wasn’t really the right word because the regeneration was occurring at pretty staggering speed. More than sixty per cent of the land he owned lay in the cool and loamy shadow of leaf canopy. What had been that phrase he’d used with Curtis at the outset? ‘Broadleaf, brother, far as the eye can see.’ They’d gone and done it and taken overall what they’d accomplished was pretty fucking cool.
It was time to make contact with the original owner of his domain. It was time to call in the considerable favour he’d done her in restoring what she had capered among and capriciously ruled back in ancient times.
He knew about the disappearances. He felt personally quite sad about Dora Straub. He’d known she taught at a university and thought her way too cool for school. She’d been drop-dead glamorous and he’d enjoyed her laconic sense of humour. It hadn’t hurt that she’d flirted back with him. Ten years younger and in decent health he’d have made a serious play for Dora.
He regarded the disappearances generally as collateral damage. You had to expect something of the sort. There was a price to be paid for tampering with the natural order and that was just the way it was. There’d been no bodies and itinerant workers were nomadic by nature. He didn’t think any of them would be returning any time soon but without a corpse there was no crime and he didn’t think anyone would have any real success in trying to offload blame on to him.
One very singular occurrence had decided him on action today. He didn’t think he had an awful lot of able-bodied time left to him, but it hadn’t been that spurring him on to do what he was about to. It had been something revealed on the satellite pictures you wouldn’t yet see from the ground.
One of them had been taken above Loxley’s Cross. And it detailed in a darker green than the surrounding grassland the precise patterns and turns of a hugely substantial maze.
The privet was no taller than the grass still covering most of the open land at the Cross. Probably it wasn’t yet as tall as the grass or someone would have noticed it over recent days and called this phenomenon in. Curtis would have known and would have told him about something so curious. But he hadn’t, because it had only just occurred.
It was symbolic of her growing power and confidence. It was a defiant retort to what Crawley had done to her in preventing her original scheme from being fulfilled. She had influenced Crawley’s daughter Muriel to want to plant willow and silver birch. Now Saul Abercrombie had seen to it that those species were planted across this richly forested land in their thousands and he wanted the reward owing him for doing so.
He wanted recompense. As they said so often in those eighties cop dramas he was actually secretly quite fond of, it was payback time, baby. He put on his steampunk goggles, adjusted them over his eyes and kicked the quad under him into snorting life.
He was in no great hurry that day to get to her. He felt pretty confident that she wouldn’t stand him up or blow him out. Paying your dues was a principle well known to the players of the medieval world. She’d expect him to demand something. And he wasn’t demanding much. She could probably accede to his request with a single benevolent thought. He didn’t anticipate potions and spells. She didn’t strike him intuitively as some occult drama queen. She was the real deal, a one off, a class act.
He belched. He had breakfasted on a fry up of his own clumsy devising. Jo and her kitchen people had departed at some point during the night. His staff had gone, finally too freaked out to stay. Things were a little weird. They might even be frightening, unless, like him, you were firmly in the loop.
They met Carrington at the railway station at Haverfordwest. He didn’t seem at all put out to Curtis by the fact that Fran Abercrombie had come along. He sat in the back of the Land Rover and told them blithely about his theft of priceless artefacts from a museum. Then he asked if he could smoke his pipe, a request Curtis didn’t reasonably think in the circumstances he could refuse.
He told them about the cosmological map etched in tin and buried with the king who had bought the items in his bag from Gregory’s wastrel son. Then he took them out and Fran, in the front passenger seat, examined them. ‘They’re engraved with planetary symbols,’ she said. ‘What does that signify? Do you think Amelia came originally from another world?’
‘Amelia isn’t a person, dear. People don’t live for a thousand years. We’ll never know where she came from but what she’d be more accurately described as is a force, like gravity or the tide.’
‘Only more destructive,’ Curtis said.
‘Certainly more antagonistic,’ he said. ‘She’s neither a natural nor a neutral force in that she’s deliberately harmful. She relishes human pain and destruction.’
‘She appears in the guise of a woman,’ Fran said.
‘That’s both her strength and her weakness,’ Carrington said. ‘It’s what seduces her victims. It’s why protagonists through history have tended to underestimate her. It’s also a flaw we can exploit.’
‘Crawley thought there were lots of monsters, or demons or devils,’ Curtis said. ‘He thought the fight in the Dark Ages with demonology was real.’
‘I think he was absolutely right,’ Carrington said.
Fran said, ‘Warriors like Gregory were schooled. They were formidable and well-prepared. We’re totally out of our depth. We haven’t really got a hope, have we?’
‘Gregory wasn’t invincible,’ Carrington said. ‘He wasn’t that Pre-Raphaelite sap in stained-glass and shining armour you’ve seen staring piously from the window in the church at Raven Dip. He probably fought very dirty and used every trick in the book.’
Curtis said, ‘Such as?’
‘He was summoned by a magus or warlock to help with the struggle against the creature who calls herself Amelia. For a start, he would have done something to protect Gregory from being devoured by the parasites that guard her.’
Fran said, ‘Something magical?’
‘Only a very practical sort of magic that owes something really to common sense,’ Carrington said. ‘This chap would have possessed an apothecary’s skills. It’s my belief he would have polluted Gregory’s blood to deter them from feeding on him, deliberately infected him with something. They’d have sniffed out the corruption. It would have acted as a repellent.’
‘We don’t have polluted blood,’ Curtis said.
‘We will have,’ Carrington said. ‘I have three doses of flu jab in my bag. We’ll be polluted when we’ve injected it.’
‘That will act as a repellent?’ Fran asked. She sounded unconvinced.
‘Practical magic,’ Carrington said, who sounded up for the fight.
The phrase put Curtis in mind of Crawley’s thorn bush.
‘The other important thing is choosing the ground,’ Carrington said. ‘Gregory had no choice over that. He had to enter her lair. It was a frontal assault. We by contrast have some things she wants very badly. We can stay away from the shore and away from the trees. We can make her come to us.’
This prospect didn’t sound welcome to Curtis – it sounded terrifying. He swapped a look with Fran and saw that she felt the same. They were going to deliberately goad and defy an ancient and malevolent creature. They were going to try to trick and defeat it. The outcome would likely be painful and grotesque.
‘Courage, my friends,’ Carrington said from the rear seat. ‘We’re going to need all our strength and resolution for this.’
‘Amen to that,’ Fran said.
‘I have a letter for you, Tom,’ Carrington said, fumbling an envelope from his jacket pocket, reaching it forward.
Curtis opened it one-handed in his lap. The single page contained just three words and a signature. The signature was Sarah’s. The three words were
Come home safe.
He thought he’d take a look at the camp. It was deserted now, but he’d never seen Dodge and he’d paid for its construction and was curious to see the Kevlar and titanium township his money had enabled.
His route there was a trawl through thickening vegetation. Ferns were growing densely everywhere. Saplings were poking their slender vertical paths upwards from what had been virgin ground.
Here and there mature trees he knew hadn’t been planted by Curtis and his people loomed stately out of a slight layer of mist. There were pale clusters of toadstools around their trunks. The smell of bark and leaves and air-borne pollen permeated the air and something else, some other smell he couldn’t readily identify. It wasn’t the sea, the smell of ozone drifting inland. It was slightly sour and sulphurous and he thought it was probably the odour that had risen from this land a thousand years ago. It was returning to itself, wasn’t it? It was reverting.
Dodge was looking already pretty ragged with neglect. Ivy in heavy clusters had begun to spread over its buildings. It groped across windows and doorways and masked interiors from the light. He pried a vine away from one window, looked inside and saw that fungus had claimed the floor of a gloomy interior, swollen around chair legs, bloated and yellow under a sheltering tabletop.
He rode to Loxley’s Cross. The maze was clearly visible by now. In the time since the satellite pictures had been taken at first light, the privet had grown to a height of a couple of feet. He dismounted and switched off his engine and walked among its leafy avenues. He could hear it grow. It was a rustle, almost like speech, the furtive language of something urged into life by enchantment.
He passed abandoned machines. Ivy afflicted these too, looping and coiling through their cabs, wrapping their steering wheels and gear levers, congealing across their caterpillar tracks in deep green clusters and swathes.
Eventually he reached the trees. Saul Abercrombie felt the fond embrace of the forest. The gloom of its permanent twilight was grey and opaque in the mist he had first noticed in Dodge and thought now slightly thickening, the closer he got to the coast and his destination.
He was headed for Puller’s Reach, for the cairn and the spot where weeks earlier the first tree had been planted. She would find him there. This was her land now. He had restored it to her and would claim his rightful reward from her before departing forever. He would take Francesca with him, treat her to some of the energetic fun for which he’d had such a gift and which had been so tediously absent from her life over recent months.
Curtis was still around too, somewhere. He’d have to remember to write Tree Man a cheque. The job was completing itself now the tipping point had been reached. Curtis had done as much as he needed to. He’d earned his fee and played his part in restoring his employer’s health, which had been the whole point of the whole gargantuan project. What happened to him afterwards was a matter of complete indifference to Saul Abercrombie.
He dismounted when the foliage got too thick for him to continue to ride through. He would walk the last hundred or so metres to his destination. The stuff he’d been given by the Harley Street guy would give him the stamina to do that. Soon, he would have no further need of such expensive and temporary help.
She was there, waiting for him, as he’d known she would be, standing beside the cairn on the cliff edge, looking out over the water, the sea pale green and calm in wan sunshine through the mist. She had a shawl wrapped around her shoulders and she was a slighter figure than he’d expected. Her loosely worn hair was a dark blonde lustrous even in the matt light.
It worked both ways, didn’t it? He had restored her strength and vigour in the way she was surely about to return his.
‘You want me to make you well.’
‘It’s all I’ve ever wanted from you.’
He heard something rustle behind him. He could afford to ignore it. There was surely no danger here, with her.
She turned around. She was beautiful, clear-eyed and, when she smiled, kindness came off her like radiant heat on a cold and wintry day.
He heard the rustle again. It was a loud, rude noise through the branches of yews, a squirming, eager sound. And there was a smell, too, wasn’t there? Something corrupt, decayed.
She held his gaze. She said, ‘It’s done.’
And he felt it. He felt a great weight unshackled from him, actually felt his own cellular integrity returned as the blood coursed purely through him from the heart pumping strongly in his chest. For the first time in months he tasted saliva, performing the swallow reflex without a grimace of pain. He could feel his own firm musculature. He felt solid and exuberant and alert and almost youthful. He was himself again. The frailty had been suddenly and completely drained away from him.