He heard that noise again, smelled the stink, which seemed to be strengthening and coming at him from every direction but the one he faced.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘I did it only because of a lesson harshly learned,’ she said.
‘I’m truly grateful.’
And her expression changed. It became as bleak and dark as an eclipse and with a belated clutch of dismay in his soul, he caught a glimpse of her age.
‘It was a practicality, Saul. I can’t feed tainted meat to my followers,’ she said.
They returned to a mantle over the land of thick and sulphurous fog. It wasn’t sea fog. It was a phenomenon remembered from a murkier time and restored in celebration of something bleak and awful. The domain had a new ruler and she was as cruel as she was regal. That was the impression Curtis had, looking at the canted gate through their headlight beams, seeing the deserted post where the security guys usually sheltered. He felt the same certainty he’d felt about Pete and about Dora. Saul Abercrombie, he suddenly knew, was dead.
‘Christ, look at the fence,’ Fran said.
He did. They all did. Ivy covered the wire and wooden posts in a verdant maul. To the right of the gate its weight had made the wire stretch and the fence sagged there, greenly breached.
Curtis said, ‘You haven’t read Crawley’s account of his time at Loxley’s Cross, have you, Andrew?’
‘I’ve always suspected it existed. I’m glad it’s survived. Reading it will be a scholarly treat I’ll indulge if we survive till the end of the day.’
‘He concluded with a warning. He pretty much predicted this. He said it would spread and that other spirits like Amelia might revive as a consequence. He didn’t give us much chance against them.’
‘It will spread,’ Carrington said, ‘like a contagion. This place is afflicting the land around it already. It won’t be contained, I’m afraid.’
They drove in. The ground felt spongy underneath them and Curtis knew from the strong chlorophyll smell that their tyres were crushing ferns as they progressed. They passed trees he hadn’t planted looming like leafy phantoms out of the mist.
Fran asked, ‘Are we going to the house?’
‘No,’ Curtis said. ‘One way or another I think we should get this over with.’
‘I think I know what you intend to do,’ Carrington said.
Fran said, ‘I wish I did.’
‘You’ll have to wear them, Francesca,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to put on her pendant and her amulet. We have to make her furious at the indignity done to her by our defiance.’
‘She doesn’t sound very much as though she needs much help with fury.’
‘Will you do it?’
‘If you two tell me the plan, I will. That’s if there is a plan. Please tell me there’s a plan?’
‘There’s a plan,’ Curtis said. ‘I think it’s our only hope.’
The drive to Loxley’s Cross took forty minutes. The Land Rover’s headlights were powerful and the fog grew no denser. It was strangely even, the absence of detail and light. Uncannily so, Curtis thought. But the land kept throwing up unexpected obstacles: copses and stands and clusters of trees where none had been even the previous day. Crushed ferns mired their axles in sharp-smelling pulp. Stray branches swatted out of nowhere at their windscreen.
Eventually they arrived, each having submitted to their flu jab, Fran having adorned herself too with her new jewellery. Or more accurately her old jewellery, Curtis thought. She had been wearing a sweater. She’d removed it, the better to show these trinkets off. She was wearing only a T-shirt and jeans and the gold pieces looked dull and incongruous, like half-hearted theatre props on an actress unconvincing in her role. She shivered, getting out of the car, either feverish from the jab or frightened, the way he felt himself.
Curtis peered to his left.
‘She isn’t here,’ Carrington said. ‘We’d smell the stink of her entourage.’
‘She won’t take them everywhere.’
‘Just everywhere she feels threatened,’ Carrington said.
To Curtis, Fran said, ‘What are you looking at?’
‘Crawley’s maze is back,’ Curtis said.
It was. They walked towards it. It was a hedge wall, perpendicular to them and it marked the eastern boundary of the maze. It stood about eight feet high and closer to it they could hear the strain and crackle of exuberant growth.
‘Fucking hell,’ Fran said.
‘Quite,’ Carrington said.
‘Magic should stay on the stage,’ Curtis said, his voice a confidential murmur. ‘It has no place in real life.’
Carrington said, ‘You invited it here.’
‘That’s not strictly true, Professor,’ Fran said. ‘The truth is it never left.’
They followed Curtis to the spot. He located the well cover. He poked around until he found the hinge. Within the well there was only an ominous silence. At a point opposite the hinge, he gouged the turf with the heel of his boot until he’d exposed enough of the cover’s wooden rim to give him sufficient purchase.
Would the thorny creation lurking in the shaft remember him? Would its horny protrusions flay him alive in revenge? He thought the threat at least as plausible as it was ridiculous. Nothing seemed fanciful anymore in this fog, in this place. It was its own universe of weirdness and perversity. Logic never prevailed. Reason had been exiled. He had been concealed beneath a protective suit and mask when he’d attacked it. Anyway, he didn’t have a choice.
‘Help me,’ he said to Carrington.
‘Look over there,’ Fran said, her voice struggling not to shake.
Both men looked to where she pointed. Two young children stood hand in hand about twenty feet away, staring at them incuriously. They were girls wearing white nightgowns of the sort used in the days when people lit their path up the stairs to bed with a candle. They turned in the direction of the maze and walked away, the fog swallowing them.
The cover was heavy. Crawley had described himself as strong, but hadn’t had to lift the circle of oak encumbered under its weighty concealment of soil and sods of grass. He’d laid the turf only before his final departure. They lifted it to forty-five degrees and then walked carefully to either side of it and swung it back where it landed with a mist-dulled thud before stepping away carefully from the black maw of the shaft.
For a moment, nothing happened. Curtis thought barbed limbs might dance and skitter up the shaft attracted by the light. But the bush moved slyly, didn’t it? The animal quality its clever creator had endowed it with, of all animal attributes, most resembled cunning. So it was cautious. It was careful. Given its maker’s sombre mood of grief when he’d brought it into being, it might even possess a lethal sort of patience. Victorian grief was persistent. The anguish was endured over a long period of mourning.
Fingers of growth probed carefully into view. They snaked over the lip of the shaft and caressed the grass and trembled, testing the air. Perhaps because there were seven of eight of them, they reminded Curtis a little of octopus arms. But then the bush became bolder or more curious and they extended and thickened. There were black protrusions glistening sharply from sinewy white limbs and he was looking at a monster of an altogether greater magnitude.
It retreated. It gathered or recoiled and they could see nothing of it from their cautious distance a dozen feet away. Curtis swallowed fear and walked to the edge of the shaft and looked down upon the antagonist he thought he’d burned into extinction.
It rested there, a few feet from the surface, massive and poised, the barbed violence of its thorns a malevolent promise it waited to fulfil, biding its time, perhaps testing the space and the novelty of light or just relishing the prospect of further provocation in its fortress home. It writhed down as far as the eye could determine any detail, a far greater complication in the complexity of its vicious coils than it had ever been at Gibbet Mourning.
He turned around. All three of them did. The air had tainted suddenly and assumed a darker caste. She was there. So were her guardians, but they were not so close as to be visible. She was slight and serene-looking and quite beautiful. She was bare-headed and she had on a purple cloak clasped ornately in silver and ermine trimmed.
‘You’re wearing what belongs to me,’ she said to Fran. ‘You’ll suffer for that. Your father’s recent death was mercifully quick. Yours won’t be.’
‘My God,’ Carrington said. ‘You’re real.’
She smiled. ‘The meddler from the south,’ she said. ‘You’ll watch the wench perish and in so doing witness your own fate.’
‘You’re lying about my father.’
She reached inside the cloak. Her hand reappeared holding the strap of Saul’s steampunk goggles. One of the lenses was smashed. Both were spattered with blood. She dropped them disdainfully on to the toadstools carpeting the ground at her feet.
‘Do it, Fran,’ Curtis said.
Fran took off the pendant and amulet. She slipped the chain from the pendant before tossing both artefacts lightly into the well. They heard the precious items clatter and fade to silence as they slipped and tumbled the length of the shaft. She’d taken off the chain so the pendant wouldn’t snag on a thorn within easy reach. They’d discussed the need for this during their approach, but it was still impressive, Curtis thought, that she’d possessed the cool deliberation to remember to do it.
To Curtis, Amelia said, ‘Your death will follow theirs. You’re as comely as your ancestor. I hope his ghost is here to hear you scream.’
‘He beat you.’
She laughed. ‘He tempted my followers to feast on pigs the tinkerer he served had fed a sleeping draft. He slaughtered them while they slumbered helplessly. He seduced me – the only man to do so. Gregory sowed his seed in me and while I slept, stole my things like a base thief. It was trickery, not valour.’
‘Fascinating,’ Carrington said.
There was a blur of movement then, a sudden rising bloat in the air of decay and the professor was hauled abruptly into the mist by something huge and moist and barnacled in the brief monstrous vision they had of it. They heard his screams. Fran covered her ears, but could still hear them until they abruptly ceased.
‘It wasn’t fascinating,’ Amelia said. ‘It was low and unjust. Like the low trick of coming here, all three of you, bearing some affliction.’ She grinned and gestured in the direction Carrington had just been dragged. ‘I’ve cured you. Congratulations, you’re all healed and whole.’
‘You were going to kill me first,’ Fran said.
‘I changed my mind. I believe it’s a woman’s privilege.’
‘You’re not a woman.’
‘What I am matters little to you.’
She walked to the edge of the well. She looked down the way a skilled mountaineer might, studying a tricky descent. She slipped out of her cloak and draped it on the ground. She said, ‘I bleed, but not easily. I’m more agile a creature than you people could imagine and stronger, of course. This won’t take long. You can try and escape if you wish. You’ll just perish in the same manner, but sooner. I don’t really care either way.’
She looked grimly at Fran, dead-eyed and hollow-cheeked, the age of her dismayingly apparent suddenly in her pallor and the savagery of her spite. ‘You’ll pay dearly for this impertinence,’ she said.
She dropped deftly down on to the topmost limbs of the bush. She began to weave a nimble path through them. In the silence, as they watched her, Curtis heard the sobbing of infant girls away in the maze through the mist. Lost, he thought. They all were. Amelia twisted and contorted down the depths of the well. She became obscured to sight from above.
They would join other ghosts. They would join Dora and Pete and Saul, who had tried and failed to live forever. There would be troubled Sam Freemantle. There would be Andrew Carrington, who had least of all deserved his ghastly fate. Older than all of them would be Gregory, who had been neither as brave nor as noble as his enduring legend insisted. Together they would people this ancient land. They would add to its spectral, sinister atmosphere. They would be exiled in the Forest of Mourning to grieve forever for their own perished lives.
Amelia was deep into her descent before the bush finally reacted to her presence. It shivered and emitted a gasp that sounded exultant and then with a spasm of swift movement it scraped down the shaft in on itself, its thorny mandibles contracting and becoming denser as it wove a sinewy prison for its precious captive that was too intricately complex to escape.
It writhed and shrank back and the spaces between its fibrous tangles became small and suffocating. The rising aroma of sap filled the air above the well as Crawley’s bush cut and wounded itself in its eagerness to complete the task for which it had been born. It had waited a long time. It had endured a vigil of a century and a half, hungering all the while for this destiny. The wounds would heal. Curtis thought, in the circumstances, you could forgive the bush its zeal.
It thrummed and shivered. It creaked and moaned like the hemp rigging of a vast ship under full sail in a storm. It fought her. Curtis thought her true voice would rise coarsely upward in a foul eruption of ancient oaths. But that didn’t happen. She struggled silently within the barbed bonds of her confinement. An odour rose fungal and corrupt and he thought about what she’d said about not bleeding easily and knew that she was bleeding now.
He waited with dread for her to escape it. He waited for the smirk of triumph on her pale oval face as it emerged from between the sharp, shackling tentacles so tightly binding her. He waited while a minute became two and then while five took an endless time to double into ten. But she didn’t emerge. She didn’t come up. She had boasted that she was strong. The thing now confining her was evidently stronger.
‘The girls have stopped crying,’ Fran Abercrombie said, eventually.
They both looked towards the maze. They could see it more clearly, he realized, as though the mist had lost some density. He walked up to the wall of privet and then walked back and said, ‘You can no longer hear it grow.’
‘That stink has gone. I think she might have lost her followers. Do you think she’s dead?’
‘No, she’ll never be dead. But for now she’s powerless. She didn’t retrieve her treasures. She’s trapped down there and the well is deep.’