Coldfall Wood Read online

  He followed it as it moved away from the path, taking a winding route up to the top of Cane Hill and down the other side. The forest was alive with all of the sounds of its nocturnal wildlife, the scuttle of squirrels moving from branch to skeletal branch, the shuffle of hedgehogs in the undergrowth, rats and field mice, badgers, voles, and foxes. There was never a single moment of absolute stillness. The place was alive.

  “What do you want from me?” Jam asked the shadows, not expecting an answer. He didn’t understand what was happening here. His first instinct was to run, but stronger was the urge to obey the voice, to deliver himself up to the speaker.

  The Horned God emerged from the trees up ahead of him, raising its right hand, commanding him to stop. He had no choice but to. His legs refused to obey him now that his mind screamed flee.

  The undergrowth around him rustled. At first insubstantial, a whisper of sound that gathered substance fast, becoming the rush of footsteps, and beyond that more noises joined with it, creaks and groans followed by the harsh splintering of dry wood. Jam saw more movement in the shadows.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  The only answer was the sharp crack of twigs breaking beneath unseen footsteps.

  His skin crawled. Despite the chill, sweat trickled down the nape of his neck. Jam felt the creep of an insect working its way around his neck. Unable to look away from the Horned God he reached back to slap it to death as it fed on him.

  The slap of his hand was met by an almighty tearing as the roots of one of the mighty oaks ripped out of the ground, the huge tree toppling, almost as though the Horned God was punishing him for the murder of one of its creatures. He wanted to laugh at the absurdity of that thought, even as he stumbled back a couple of panicked steps. Then he did laugh as he tripped on one of the bloated white roots and couldn’t stop himself from falling. The play of light fooled him into thinking the roots writhed in response to the antlered man’s hand as though the Horned God conducted the roots, making them dance to his primordial lament.

  The laughter died on Jam’s lips as the ground rippled around him. Dirt spilled away from more roots as they broke the surface. He hadn’t realized how much deadfall there was here. Every inch of dirt seemed to be covered with twisted spars and broken branches, and thicker pieces of bark that had stripped from the ancient boles like snakes shedding skin. Leaves mulched beneath the scattered wood. He pushed himself back up to his feet and carried on walking, deeper into Coldfall Wood. Every footstep threatened to turn his ankle or trip him. The ancient forest was carpeted in year-upon-years’ worth of deadfall. Huge trunks of old timber were opened up, rot and woodworm devouring them from the inside out.

  Another tree fell, this one tearing a path through the canopy of leaves and opening a wound all the way through to the sky.

  He saw the moon, and across it the silhouette of wings.

  He had no idea where he was in relation to the outside world. He could so easily have stepped back fifteen hundred years in time across the last fifteen hundred yards of his journey.

  “What do you want from me?” Jam called out to the distant figure.

  His question was greeted by silence.

  He didn’t repeat it.

  The Horned God took a step toward him, then another.

  The moonlight transformed its skin to a sickly green pallor, making it impossible to tell where his beard ended and his cloak of leaves and moss began. Even at this distance he cut an imposing figure, broad, powerful shoulders, the leaf cloak draped over corded muscles.

  Jam reached out, looking for something to defend himself against the antlered man. His left hand closed around a piece of deadfall. He pushed himself to his feet, the weight of the wooden branch in his hand giving him the lie of confidence. He could do this, just like he’d done Ollie Underwood.

  He was not the weak one here. “You don’t want to fuck with me,” he said.

  The mocking whisper of the woodland answered him.

  The entire forest appeared to move in the moonlight as the breeze stirred the branches.

  Jam shifted his weight from his front to back foot and moved to transfer the makeshift weapon to his right hand, but he couldn’t let go of it.

  He swung it wildly in front of him, slashing uselessly at the air. “I’ll fucking have you,” he growled, slashing again. He sounded like the child he was.

  Áríseaþ!

  Rise up! The command reverberated through the plates of his skull.

  The blood pounded through his temples, the pressure building up inside his head, excruciating.

  Áríseaþ!

  The wind answered his call, churning through the trees. All around him nature keened.

  Jam slashed at the air again and again, blinded by the black agony raging inside his head.

  He fell to his knees, one hand clutching at his head, the other unable to relinquish its grip on the wood. He swayed in place, the world constantly in motion around him. He struggled to focus on the antlered figure as its cloak billowed in the wind. He needed both hands to brace himself as he toppled forward onto his hands and knees. His right hand closed around a piece of wood that felt as though nature had shaped it purely for that purpose.

  Again, he couldn’t let go of it.

  Twigs and leaves blew across the ground, piling slowly up around his knees as looked desperately around.

  The wind howled through the treetops.

  Bark skittered across the ground. Leaves swirled. All around him the wind rose.

  He was at the eye of the storm.

  The cold wind howled. The deadfall whipped up, churning around him, more and more of the forest’s decayed heart battered his body.

  He felt every blow.

  He felt the splintered edges dig into his skin where he raised his hands to protect his face.

  He felt the jagged barbs tear into his jeans, through his shirt, into his flesh.

  He wanted to scream, but as he opened his mouth a sodden mulch of ripening leaves hit his face and stuck to his skin, swarming to fill his mouth so that he couldn’t breathe.

  More leaves plugged his nose and covered his eyes.

  He was going to die here.

  Or maybe he had already died and this was just his descent?

  He deserved to be in Hell.

  The deadfall continued to batter his body, clinging to him like a second skin, forming something so much bigger than Jamshid Kirmani had ever been in life. Pulp of every shade from the blackest rot to brittle white dust clung to his face. His body formed the bridge of the great beast’s snout. He wanted so desperately to scream as the Horned God clad his corpse in more and more of the forest’s debris until it was impossible to see him inside the carapace of wood as he became a great elemental beast, fashioned from the stuff of the ancient forest itself. The old wood reshaped itself, alive. It glistened with dew. It formed the curves of an enormous rib cage and the grand sweeping lines of the beast’s huge wooden skull. By root and branch it grew until it could grow no more.

  Jam was in there somewhere, his mind lost to the ancient anger of the old wood.

  “I will rise!” he said; the voice nothing like his own. It echoed in the deep woods. It resounded through the rotten pulp of the fallen trees. It rustled through the canopy of leaves that sheltered the creatures of the forest in its shade. It sang in the blood of the land.

  He had become a creature of legend.

  An avatar of the Horned God.

  He had become the Knucker.

  The Knucker flexed its new limbs, clawing the air with those massive timbers as it rose onto its hind legs.

  The wood groaned, taking the strain as his driftwood body rose, the gyring winds not faltering as they churned up more and more deadfall to flesh out the creature’s impossible body.

  The leaves parted around the mighty wooden warrior as he answered the Horned God’s call.

  13

  The night didn’t get any better for Julie Gennaro and his new partner.

&n
bsp; After the stress of crowd control and the reality that they were first responders at what had become a double murder, they still had four hours of what felt like an endless shift to survive. Dispatch put through a call that on any other day would have been routine, but today felt like another strand in the elaborate cosmic joke history was happily repeating for Julie: a suspected breaking and entering over on Holly Lane. Another burglary, another repetition. He took the call.

  They pulled up outside the house. A high wall with thick climbing vegetation and a wooden gate hid it away from the rest of world. The lights were on upstairs. He radioed through to dispatch, letting them know they were at the scene, then got out of the car, Ellie a couple of steps behind him as he pushed open the wooden gate, not sure what waited on the other side for him. This was always the worst part of the job, those few seconds of knowing something was wrong but not knowing what, or how bad it might well turn out to be. He unclipped the baton from his hip and extended it as he walked along the garden path.

  Crossing the threshold, he heard music.

  He called out.

  No one answered.

  Lights were on in every room.

  He gestured for Ellie to check out the downstairs while he followed the music. She nodded.

  He walked slowly up the stairs. The tension had his muscles taut. Halfway up, the music stopped. “This is the police,” Julie called out. “Make yourself known.” The silence was broken by the crackle of the record starting up again. Still no one answered him.

  On the landing, he was confronted by a number of doors, only one of them open, so he went inside.

  The room was filled with the bric-a-brac of life, but none of that was what had him shouting for Ellie to get up there and join him. Julie stared at the mummified corpse fused to the armchair. Julie thumbed down his radio and called through to dispatch, “We’re going to need an ambulance to pick up a body,” he said without preamble.

  “Another murder? What the hell’s in the water?”

  “I don’t think so,” he explained. Checking the date on the newspaper on the table, he said, “Looks like he died a year ago.”

  “And no one’s missed him?”

  “Old guy, living alone, shit happens.”

  “Okay, the owner is listed as one Robert Viridius, aged ninety-two last birthday.”

  “We’ll need the coroner, but I can’t see any obvious reason to suspect foul play. Looks like the old guy just died in his chair.”

  “Okay, you guys sit tight, we’ll get someone out to you to collect the body, and have forensics check the place out just to be sure.”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Julie said, sitting in the chair opposite the dead man as the music started another rotation, the needle dropping into the groove and crackling away.

  Ellie joined him.

  “This place gives me the creeps,” she said, looking at the oppressive oil painting dominating the only wall not lined with books. The small brass plate on the frame named it: The Oak King and the Holly King. With time to kill, she started checking out the titles, reading them off one by one. They all appeared to be about the mythology of the Isles. Maybe the dead man had been a scholar, Julie reasoned. It would explain plenty.

  Death rooms were unique and yet perversely the same; maybe it was something to do with the presence of the departed, some lingering trace of the restless dead, or maybe it was in his head?

  “I don’t know about you,” Ellie said, turning her back on the daunting painting, “but there’s only so many times I can stand listening to the same song. You mind?”

  There was a gilt-painted glass on the table beside the dead man. The pattern was some kind of elaborate crown of autumnal foliage with three crimson dots of berries within the golden leaves. There was a finger of Scotch left at the bottom of the glass. The old guy had died without finishing his last drink.

  “Knock yourself out.”

  Ellie crossed the rug to the old turntable. She thumbed down the STOP button and a moment later the arm rose, lifting the needle from the well-worn grooves.

  A moment later the turntable stopped its endless revolutions and the armature nestled back into the cradle. The silence was anything but absolute. The single-glazed sash windows let more than just the draft in.

  That was when he noticed the peculiar smell; it took him a moment to place it because it wasn’t rot or decay or anything else he would have associated with the musty locked-in quality of a house that had served as a coffin for a year. It was absolutely, incredibly, natural: freshly mown grass.

  He kept that to himself, fearing a stroke or some kind of brain hemorrhage. That could cause sensory hallucinations, couldn’t it?

  “Okay, that’s weird,” Ellie said. It took him a moment to realize what she was referring to. He’d mistakenly assumed the old guy’s skin was leathery with the mummification process, but it wasn’t leather at all. The deep grooves and hollows were more like the carapace of a wooden cocoon.

  She couldn’t stop herself from reaching forward to touch the dead man’s cheek.

  The bark—because that’s what it was—flaked off in her fingers. More crumbled to dust as she brushed it aside. The skin exposed beneath was surprisingly youthful and unblemished, as though the bark hadn’t merely protected it from the process of decomposition, but was instead revitalizing it. She quickly peeled away the rest of the death mask and stepped back to look at the man’s plain but handsome face.

  Julie saw something protruding through his blue lips. The tip of a leaf? He gripped the man’s jaw and prized it open.

  “Should you be doing that?”

  “No,” Julie said, but that didn’t stop him from reaching in with a couple of fingers to tease the leaves out of the dead man’s mouth. It wasn’t just one or two that had been crammed in there, he realized, as more and more leaves spewed out and it became obvious someone had shoved a sapling down the man’s throat, suffocating him. The sapling was the length of Julie’s arm by the time the last of it cleared the dead man’s teeth. He put it down on the coffee table. Bile clung to the still-supple wood.

  “Gangland killing?”

  Before he could answer, the dead man’s eyes opened and his entire body arched against the back of the armchair. Airways clear, he drew in a deep hitching breath, nearly choking on the first air his body had tasted in seasons. More of the shroud of bark broke away as his body bucked in the seat. Life wasn’t returning easily. Fingers curled around the armrests, digging deep into the fabric of the chair as the man writhed in obvious agony.

  “Jesus Christ,” Ellie said, behind him. She repeated the name over and over, like it somehow had the power to weave a holy barrier around her that would protect her from the dead man.

  The dead man’s hazel eyes fixed on Julie as he reached out with a hand still encased in bark to take Julie’s hand. Julie pulled back, but only for those impossibly strong fingers to close around his wrist. Nails of bark sink into his skin. Julie felt a surge of electricity so strong the shock was enough to make him flinch back, recoiling forcefully enough to wrench his arm free of the dead man’s grasp. Tears ran down Robert Viridius’s too young, too smooth cheeks. More of the peculiar wooden carapace flaked away from his neck, revealing the raw pink hollow of his throat and still more fell away as he contorted in the seat.

  “The dimgate is open,” Viridius rasped. Every word visibly hurt him, but he refused to be silenced.

  Julie couldn’t look away.

  “We have to close the way before he can return.”

  The smell of freshly cut grass was overwhelming. It was so real he could have sworn he could make out the tang of morning dew.

  “Who? I don’t understand. How are you even…? You can’t be…” Which really meant: I don’t want to understand. I don’t want to be part of this. I don’t want to still be trapped in a world I don’t understand.

  “My father,” Viridius said. “We have sacrificed too much of ourselves to ensure his banishment, and lost too
much of who we were in the process. Look at me, I have become undone,” he held up his hands, offering the brittle remains of the cocoon flaking away from his rejuvenated skin as evidence of just how much he had given. “He cannot be allowed to return. We are not strong enough to fight him again, not now, not here, like this. Every brick diminishes us, every road, every factory and shopping center, they strip away what little magic remains in the land and leave us husks of who we had been.” There was a tear glistening on his cheek as he said, “Mother is lost. My brother does not know himself. I am like a child. This place has forgotten everything. The old ways are no more. There is no time for wonder. You know this broken country with its philosophy of me, me, me, look out of the window and tell me how can we ever find a belief in each other that is strong enough to stand in his way?”

  He tried to stand on atrophied legs and stumbled forward into Julie’s arms.

  “Let me help you,” Julie said, taking his weight as best he could. The old man was surprisingly heavy given the withered state of his limbs.

  “No,” the other man said, pushing himself away from Julie’s embrace.

  “At least let us take you to the hospital, get you checked out.”

  Viridius shook his head. “They could not help me, even if they wanted to. I am running out of time,” but the way he slumped again into Julie’s arms belied the words. “What month is it?”

  “April,” Ellie said, behind him.

  The old man nodded. “So little time. The solstice approaches, and with it a shift in the balance of nature.”

  “I don’t even know what to say to that,” Julie said, struggling with the idea that somehow living long enough to see the sun rise on some arbitrary day could somehow heal anyone. It was patently absurd.

  Like banishing Seth Lockwood into some mirror world within a mausoleum.

  “Then don’t say anything,” the man said. “Actions make the man; words, like prayers, are useless. Help me,” he didn’t mean to stand, that much was obvious.

  “What can I do?”

  “The dimgate is open, the way is clear. We haven’t faced this threat in three hundred years, since the last of the dimgates were closed. For it to stand open now is no accident. The world is changing. We stand on a tipping point. Things cannot remain as they are. Either the last of the old earth magic dies out forever, leaving our home a husk,” he shook off more flakes of bark, emphasizing his point. Several pieces appeared to skitter across the rug like beetles. “Or somehow we return to how it was before, raw elemental energy surging along the ancient leys and spreading out through leaf and tree into every home and hearth, tearing down the walls that separate us from the land so that we might once more be one with our surroundings.”