Coldfall Wood Page 5

  The old woman’s eyelids fluttered closed and open again.

  “That’s fantastic, Emmaline. Believe me. That’s brilliant.”

  To check that it wasn’t a fluke, Alex asked a couple of simple yes/no questions. One blink for yes, two for no. “Are you thirsty?” One blink: yes. She filled a plastic cup with water from the jug on the bedside cabinet, and held it to Emmaline’s lips, but the old woman couldn’t open her mouth to swallow. “Okay, give me a second,” Alex said. She stuck her head through the doorway, calling to reception for a pack of the little pieces of blue foam they usually used to keep cancer patients’ lips moist in their final hours, and a moment later was dabbing the swab across the old woman’s parched lips. “That better?” One blink. Yes. “Do you know where you are, Emmaline?” Two blinks: no. “Okay. You’re in hospital. You’ve been here a long time. I don’t want you to be scared when you see yourself in a mirror. You’ve been asleep for a very, very long time. It’s going to be hard when you see yourself. Do you remember what happened to you?” Two blinks again: no. “You were in an accident. I don’t know what happened. It was before my time. I didn’t think you were going to come back to us, Emmaline. It’s so good to talk to you.” And so it went, simple questions, one-blink, two-blink answers for the best part of ten minutes before they were interrupted by a knock at the door.

  Rosenberg opened it.

  Alex didn’t recognize the nurse, but she knew what she was carrying: a communication board. They were set up fairly simply: look up, yes; look down, no; right, I don’t understand; left, please repeat. This one was fairly simple: an alphabet in the middle with those four options on the compass points. Along with flashcards they were used to communicate with locked-in patients like Emmaline.

  Locked in. It was a horrible phrase.

  “Hi, Emmaline, I’m Nana,” the newcomer introduced herself. “It’s Greek. It means grace,” she offered a slight smile. There was a hint of silver at her temples and the occasional strand of gray. Alex appreciated the fact Nana Katsani was growing old as gracefully as her name deserved. No cheap dyes, nips, or tucks. Just the gray hairs and laughter lines of a life well lived. “My job here at the hospital is to help people who can’t express themselves for one reason or another. I’ve got some things here that should make it easier for you to talk to people.” She sat down on the edge of the bed. “First, we’ve got these,” she showed the old woman a set of cards specifically tailored to her needs. “All you have to do is blink when you see one you want. Let’s try, shall we?” She held up one that showed a glass of water and another that showed a hamburger. She flipped through the cards slowly so that Emmaline could become familiar with them. She blinked as the picture of a toilet came up. “That’s good, that’s really good, Emmaline.”

  “You don’t need to hold it in,” Alex said from behind her. “You’ve got a tube in so you just relax and let it go.”

  The old woman’s expression didn’t change, but Alex fancied she saw a flicker of distaste in her eyes as she used the catheter.

  Nana gave her a moment before she held up the communication board. The letters were grouped in clusters in each corner: six in the top corners, six in the bottom right, eight in the bottom left. “Now, how this works is you spell out the words you want to say one letter at a time, so if you want to say hello, you’ll look up and to your right, that’s where the H is, and then you blink twice because it’s the second letter in that cluster. Then you look to the top left where the E is and blink five times because it is the fifth letter in the cluster, and so on. Look up for a new word, look down if I get the wrong letter. Do you understand?”

  Emmaline blinked once.

  “Great. Okay, let’s start with something simple: How are you feeling?”

  The woman’s eyes darted to the bottom right corner with the STUV-WXYZ cluster. She blinked twice. T. Top right, two blinks. H. Top left, five slow blinks. THE. She looked up.

  Nana wrote each letter down carefully in a journal.

  Alex read over her shoulder as the sentence slowly took form.

  The Horned God is awake.

  The old woman repeated the same sentence again and again, blinking out each letter painstakingly slowly. The pattern never changed. The Horned God is awake.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” the speech therapist asked.

  Alex had no idea.

  9

  Erin Chiedozie saw patterns where no one else did. She was the only person in the country in a position to see this particular pattern take shape. The emergency services dispatcher saw a statistical improbability that verged on impossibility: in the last eleven minutes their department had logged four calls for teenagers in distress, all unresponsive, exhibiting comalike symptoms. Four. At any given time there were no more than 100 coma patients in the entire country, out of a population of 64 million people, and those spanned all age ranges and walks of life. Four kids, the youngest thirteen, the eldest fifteen, all in the Greater London area, all at the same time. There were only 3.5 million kids in that age band, a little over 1.75 million girls. Four girls, all basically the same age, all within a couple of miles radius of each other went beyond statistical anomaly.

  She pushed back her chair and rubbed at the base of her neck. She needed to wash her hair. The control room was an airless, soulless concrete bunker filled with the heat of hundreds of servers, screens, and machines that was in a constant battle with the cooling units. The lack of windows and natural light played havoc with her circadian rhythms. The wall above her was filled with giant screens that tracked every single emergency services vehicle across the entire 607 square miles of Greater London, covering ten ambulance trusts, A&E support ambulances, fast response cars, motorcycle response units, cycle response units, Helicopter Emergency Medical Services, trauma response cars, and physician response units, and in extreme situations, Hazardous Area Response Teams and Specialist Operations. This was the hub for 4,500 staff, 900 ambulances, 100 rapid response units, another 195 patient transfer units, all of them highlighted by different color codes on the huge interactive map of the city.

  It was never still.

  Erin could watch it for hours. It was like a virus under a microscope constantly replicating, growing, shifting, and in it a whole world of Rorschach blots took shape and dissolved, their meaning very much dependent upon the mood of the streets.

  The dispatcher in the chair beside her was working a call, she put a hand over the mouthpiece of the microphone, and she mouthed, “Number five,” entering the details into the central computer.

  All of the calls were recorded, all of them scarily similar. She’d listened back to three of them after she’d sat in on the fourth, and there was no getting around the similarities. They were linked. She didn’t know how, but they were.

  “Maybe there’s something in the water,” she muttered to herself, trying to focus on the protocols that would guide her through this.

  They were going to have to turn this over to the police with as much information as possible, so first they were going to have to contact the five admitting hospitals and talk to the medical staff who worked on the girls, comparing the cases. Any similarities, no matter how seemingly insignificant, any of them could be important. The police would work with eyewitnesses and parents, gathering the rest of the picture. If, worst case, they were looking at some sort of mass poisoning they were going to need to be on top of the investigation right from patient zero.

  Erin ran a batch process on the day’s emergency calls, narrowing the search by various parameters to hone in on patient names, addresses, where the calls had originated, and the hospitals they were taken to. She printed out everything they had on the five identical cases and downloaded digital versions of the calls. Then, because once you broke the barrier of statistical anomaly anything was possible, ran a second process to sweep up any similar cases that had been reported anywhere across the country in the last forty-eight hours.

  The computer-aide
d dispatch system was more than just a log. It was a diagnostic tool, too, allowing the ambulance crews to arrive on the scene with a proper understanding of what was waiting for them, even a mapping tool that plotted a route from their current location to the patient and on to the nearest facilities, taking into account traffic reports, roadworks, congestion, and such. It was as close to a god hiding away inside the machine as possible, considering those seconds shaved off by automated processes were the difference between life and death dozens of times a week. The CAD system was networked with every other dispatch office in the UK, offering up a wealth of information, but stopped short of allowing access to patient records.

  “Have you ever seen anything like this?” Erin asked, gathering the printouts from the printer tray.

  Headshakes all around the room.

  “Which means it has to be something, doesn’t it? We’re not just jumping at shadows?”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  There were five of them on duty, due for a shift change in an hour. If this had happened even half an hour earlier, the calls would have been split across two shifts and the chances of anyone noticing would have been greatly reduced.

  “Okay, let’s make the calls. Clockwise around the room, starting with me: I’ll take number one on the list; you take the second name,” she inclined her head toward the woman at the adjacent desk, “and so on. Rachel, monitor dispatch. If it gets busy, pull one of us off this.” The dispatcher nodded. “We’re looking for points of similarity, symptoms, anything we can give to the police when we hand it over.”

  She sat down at her own desk to make the first call.

  The name on the sheet was Kate Jenkins. Admitting doctor, Aaron Rosenberg.

  She made the call.

  It took her five minutes to get through to the right department, where she was put on hold and made to sit through another fifteen minutes of bland Muzak that wouldn’t have been out of place on a 1980s computer game. Finally, he came on the line. “Rosenberg.”

  “This is Erin over at the hub, I need to ask you a couple of questions about a patient that was brought in today.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Kate Jenkins, aged fourteen, admitted this evening in a nonresponsive state.”

  “Yes,” he sounded cagey, like he didn’t really want to discuss this particular patient anymore.

  “This is going to sound a little peculiar,” Erin said, working her way toward the more off-the-wall questions she had in mind. “But did you notice anything odd about her condition?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “We’ve had six identical calls so far tonight, all girls, all unresponsive, no physical trauma to account for the coma symptoms. Six girls in an hour. I don’t need to tell you the statistical improbability of that.”

  “No,” Rosenberg said.

  “Anything you can tell us that might help other doctors looking at a similar situation? Any test results that might suggest some sort of environmental poisoning? Anything at all, really?”

  “She said something,” he said.

  “You mean she woke up?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Parasomnia?”

  “She died—”

  “Shit,” Erin said, biting her tongue.

  Rosenberg carried on talking despite her interruption. “—for almost six minutes. I pronounced time of death and left the nurses to clean her up. Somehow she came back. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. But I’m not in the habit of turning my nose up to a miracle.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “She hasn’t regained consciousness, but when she revived she said one thing, just mumbled it over and over again until it lost all meaning.”

  “Could you make out what she was saying?”

  “Yes, but don’t expect it to make any sense.”

  “Try me.”

  “The Horned God is awake.”

  She wrote the line out on the scratch pad in front of her. “Are you sure?”

  “Believe me, it’s not a line I’d forget in a hurry.” Before she could ask why, Rosenberg went on, “Another one of my patients, a lock-in, communicated with us for the first time in years today. She spelled out the same message with a communication board. The Horned God is awake.”

  “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with that, to be honest.”

  “Well, you did ask,” Rosenberg said.

  “That I did. Nothing else?”

  “I think that’s more than enough, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. Hard to argue with that, Doc.”

  Across the room Allie Roberts held up a piece of paper. She’d written the words THE HORNED GOD IS AWAKE on it in thick black marker pen. She saw Poppy Leeworthy staring at the message obviously struggling to understand how Allie had plucked those very words out of her mind. She held up her own notepad. The same five words were the only thing written on it.

  “So, what would you say if I told you two other patients had said the exact same thing?”

  “Three,” Lacey Crooke said from across the room, holding up the same sentence scrawled across a sheet of yellow paper.

  “Three,” Erin amended.

  “I’d hang up and pretend you’d never called,” Rosenberg said.

  The line went dead before she could answer.

  “Seriously? You just hung up on me?”

  “Four,” Margot said, making it a clean sweep. Four calls, four identical messages. They’d have to confirm with the last one, but Erin knew exactly what they’d say.

  The Horned God is awake.

  The odds were way past the improbable—but what the hell was she supposed to tell the police when she turned the files over? Five teenage girls have simultaneously fallen into a comatose state, and they’re all sleep-talking the same crazy chant about gods waking up? Yeah, that’d go down like a lead balloon.

  10

  It was the Time Between Times as the lost tribes of Albion used to call the hours between dusk and dawn. Charlie struggled to keep up with Penny as she chased the insubstantial figure up the steep incline of Cane Hill. The animal had led them a merry dance through the streets of the Rothery, moving unerringly toward the distant woods. Charlie’s lungs burned from a short lifetime of nicotine and smoke abuse. After five minutes he was doubled over, hands on his knees, gasping. He looked up to see the girl racing away from him. He couldn’t see the white stag anymore. The shadowy shape had passed into illusion, melding with the outlines of the trees and hanging branches it rushed toward.

  Charlie forced himself to run on.

  His legs were leaden, his lungs shriveled to the size of his clenched fist, but he wasn’t letting the stag get away from him. He couldn’t. He needed to be there. He needed to follow. The imperative burned bright in his mind, every bit as hungry as the flames that had consumed the lightning-struck tree.

  He’d known these streets all of his life. He’d grown up around the desperation of those old red bricks and the shopping trolleys rusting in the stream, garbage clinging to their frames like seaweed. There was nothing romantic about the place, but unlike the concrete, glass, and steel of the high-rises across the river it still had a soul. He felt like he was seeing the place through new eyes.

  Charlie’s last glimpse of the white stag as it disappeared into the old woodland was another trick of the light as the creature rose up onto its hind legs, seeming to shift into the silhouette of a naked man. The leaves coalesced to form a cloak around his shoulders.

  And then he was gone, at one with the forest.

  Charlie felt the wrench in his heart as he lost sight of the Horned God.

  The loss of separation was as powerful as any grief he’d ever experienced. He needed to catch up, to walk in the Lord of the Forest’s shadow.

  Ahead of him, faster and fitter, Penny plunged into the woods, pushing brambles and scrub aside as she followed the antlered man into the forest.

  Penny was fifty yards ahead of Charlie, moving so much
easier than he was as he labored to catch up.

  A well-worn footpath carved a route through the great wood, rising up the steep rise of Cane Hill ahead of him, the barbed wire limits of the old cemetery on the left, a steep chalk cliff waiting straight ahead, but Penny had strayed from those well-walked routes, trampling down thick tangles of thorns to follow a greener path of moss and lichen that clung to the dirt and stones. After a dozen paces, he felt a change in the ground beneath his feet, as the hard-packed earth was replaced by an ancient causeway of neatly laid cobbles leading deeper into the heart of the wood.

  In all the years he’d played around these woods he’d never noticed the stone path.

  A shadow ghosted through the trees beside him, but as he turned to try and see who was there, it disappeared beyond the periphery of his vision into the nowhere hidden behind the undergrowth.

  Penny ran ahead, darting between the trees as they wove a path he struggled to follow.

  Around him, the old trees were rotten through to the core, their trunks split, splinters of black wood clawing their way out. Deadfall gathered on the ground. Towering trees lay uprooted, the dirt clinging to the bulb of their root system where it had been torn free of the earth. All manner of fungi grew on the rotting bark. The hollowed-out husks of last year’s wasp’s nests formed ladders up the trunks of the silver birches lining the causeway.

  He’d never noticed it before, but the old wood was sick.

  The undergrowth rustled around him approvingly.

  He could sense eyes watching him, but wherever he looked he couldn’t see anyone.

  Charlie slowed to a walk, listening to the woodland around him. He heard the chatter of birds. The rustle of the leaves gave the wind a voice.

  Penny disappeared from view, the trees closing around her.

  Moonlight scattered like silver coins across the path ahead. The darkness was oppressive. Claustrophobic. Without the streetlights of the city to offer warmth everything felt so cold. The landscape became one of shades of gray and eventually black until the trees opened again, letting the moonlight stream in through the canopy of leaves up above.