Coldfall Wood Read online

  “And that’s what will happen if the gate remains open?”

  “It will be the end of this place,” Viridius said patiently. “Everything that has been gained will be lost. The progress of generations will be undone as we step back into the Dark Ages. He must be stopped.”

  Again, all Julie could ask was, “Who?”

  “He has many names, but only the single nature. He is King Stag; he is Lord of the Wild Things; he is the antlered man; he is the Lord of the Underworld; to some he is Cernunnos, to others he is Kernunno; He is the Horned God. He is Arawn, Lord of the Annwyn, but to me he will always be Father,” the old man said. Julie’s mind immediately flashed back to the sight of the antlered man on his knees inside the full beam of his headlights. “This place has forgotten him. But it will not be allowed to forget forever,” Viridius said, ignoring his question. “He will force it to remember. I cannot allow that to happen. But this is not your fight. You should go. Perhaps he will spare you.”

  “I have seen him,” Julie said.

  “Then he has marked you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That you are part of this,” Viridius said. “You cannot walk away.”

  Behind him, Ellie made a cuckoo sign with her right hand, and interceded. “We really should get you to the hospital,” Ellie said, proving the point as she put herself between the two men. “Get you thoroughly checked out; just to be on the safe side.” Which of course meant he became someone else’s problem, and no need to think about the miraculous resurrection they’d witnessed. She hadn’t seen the antlered man as he somehow transformed into a white stag and bounded away into the forest, or any of the other wonders and horrors he’d witnessed since he’d answered that call to Albion Close with Taff six months ago. So, for her this was just the first weirdness; something she could shuck off onto someone else’s desk and be done with it.

  Gently, she steered the old man toward the stairs and the waiting car outside.

  Julie took another couple of seconds before he followed, looking at the painting of the Oak King and the Holly King over the fire grate. It took him a moment to realize he could only make out a single leaf-cloaked shadowy figure in the painting no matter how much he stared at it. It was as though the man was supposed to represent the duality of Nature and was both the Oak King and the Holly King depending upon the viewer’s perspective. He wondered which aspect he saw in the heavy oils, and what that said about him.

  14

  Julie and Ellie took the old man to the emergency room, and while he sat with Viridius watching the walking wounded come and go, she made her excuses and went over to the nurses’ station to explain that the old guy needed a psych evaluation. She nodded a couple of times as the ward sister gesticulated her own kind of semaphore. He wondered for a moment if she’d confess to his miraculous resurrection, but the ward sister didn’t appear to be summoning down the men with the white jackets for Ellie, so probably not.

  Nurses came and went, numbers were called, treatments dispensed, until eventually it was their turn. He rose to follow the old man toward the curtained-off bed waiting for him down the corridor, but the nurse promised him, “We’ve got it from here, Officer.”

  Julie nodded his thanks.

  Looking at the clock on the wall, Ellie said, “You get yourself home, I’ll keep an eye on things here.”

  He wasn’t about to argue. He was bone tired, but that wasn’t why. After everything that had happened he wanted to see Alex. He’d promised to tell her everything at the wake, but with Banks, Sykes, and Tenaka there they could hardly have the kind of conversation they needed to have. She was about fifty yards above his head, give or take a concrete floor or two so he decided to swing by the ward, and if she had a few minutes to spare, put that right. That was one thing about being in a committed relationship that would take a bit of getting used to. In the past it had been all about him, about his needs, and when it came right down to it, his gain. But now his first instinct was to run to Alex. That was new. He smiled to himself as he walked the familiar corridors up to her domain.

  The hand sanitizer on the wall outside the ward was empty. He nodded to a couple of the nurses at the station who recognized him, “She’s in with Sleeping Beauty,” one offered as he approached the desk. He nodded a thanks and followed the labyrinthine corridors toward Emmaline Barnes’s private room. She had a view of the river. There were three people around the old woman’s bed. Alex was one of them, Rosenberg another. He didn’t recognize the third.

  He knocked softly on the door. Alex saw him and smiled. She said something to the others then came over to the door. He realized why she was smiling. The old woman was awake. He couldn’t help but smile right back. He knew how important she was to Alex.

  “Hey, you,” she said, opening the door.

  “Hey, you back,” he said, smooth. “I was just downstairs, had to bring an old guy in who wasn’t doing too good, so I figured I’d see if you were busy.”

  “We’re always busy,” she said with an affectionate smile.

  Alex checked with the others. Rosenberg promised to page her if there were any changes with Emmaline. A couple of minutes later they were sharing pod coffees and gazing out over the cityscape. There was an easy companionship that came with familiarity, knowing each other’s silences. “I assume this is the bit where you confess the terrible things you and my brother got up to last summer?” Alex asked, still half a cup of froth left in her cup.

  Looking at her slight smile, he realized this was neither the time nor the place for this conversation. He shook his head. “Not yet. But I will. I promise.”

  “So, what’s on your mind? You look like you’re carrying the woes of the world on your shoulders.”

  “It’s been a bad night.”

  “Does it have anything to do with that naked man we hit in the car?”

  He shook his head again, opting to unburden himself of the more mundane tragedies of the night. “A kid was killed on the High Street tonight. Stabbed. Some sort of honor killing.”

  “Oh, Jesus, that’s awful.”

  “It gets worse. Before we could stop him, the boyfriend ran into the Rothery, found his girlfriend working out, and slashed her throat.”

  “What the fuck is wrong with people?”

  He didn’t have an answer for that. “I just wanted to see you,” he shrugged. “You know, a little bit of normality in an otherwise mad world. Let’s talk about something more cheerful. Emmaline. I take it she’s awake?”

  Alex took another sip and nodded around the steam. “Yep. I’d given up hope, to be honest. Then, no warning, she just opens her eyes. You want to talk about weird, we’ve been trying to communicate with her all night, but the only thing she’s said makes absolutely no sense.”

  “Try me,” Julie said, “I’m good with things that don’t make sense. It’s my superpower.”

  “You’ll love this. So, she’s said the same five words over and over again. The Horned God is awake.”

  The words hit him like a brick to the side of the face. They were so close to Viridius’s message it couldn’t be coincidence. One thing meeting Josh and the old magician Damiola had taught him was that there was no such thing.

  “And that’s not the weirdest part of it. Maybe an hour ago a kid comes in: unresponsive, no obvious trauma. She flatlines. Rosenberg pronounces time of death.”

  “Ah, shit, sorry.”

  “She was dead. And then she wasn’t. She wakes up mumbling—”

  “The Horned God is awake,” Julie finished for her.

  “Spooky, it’s almost as though you were there. It freaked Rosenberg out. He came straight back up to Emmaline’s room to confirm he wasn’t losing his mind.”

  “Which he wasn’t.”

  “Which he wasn’t,” she echoed. “And we’re still not at the weirdest part of it.”

  “I dread to ask?”

  “Not long before you guys showed up Rosenberg took a call from the hub. So, g
et this, they’ve had five identical calls tonight; girls brought in unconscious, no obvious cause, flatlining, failing to be resuscitated despite everyone’s best efforts only to come back five or six minutes later, after the doctors have called time of death. They’re not really back, not properly. They’re all locked-in, though they all said the same thing about the Horned God before falling silent. It’s creepy as fuck.”

  It was exactly that. First the antlered man trapped in their headlights, then Viridius’s uncomfortably weird rambling about the horned gods of the Underworld, and now this. He crossed to the window, not that he could see out through the glass because of the glaring reflection of the fluorescent striplights, which created an identical break room inside the window, complete with mirror images of him and Alex. “I don’t know what the hell is going on, Alex. I’m lost. After Taff … Josh … everything,” he didn’t finish that sentence. She didn’t know the half of what he’d been through, but everything that had happened with Josh and the Lockwoods had fundamentally changed the way he looked at the world. For one thing, he was a lot less eager to brand something as impossible now, even this. Especially this. Antlered men and mythical forest gods waking up? Men transforming into stags? Why not? That made as much sense as a prison trapped one hundred years out of time, and he’d seen that happen firsthand, so the world as most people saw it wasn’t anything he was about to take for granted.

  Part of Julie wanted to focus on the case at hand—and honor killings were much more his remit than ancient gods—but the bigger part of him knew that he couldn’t just walk away. Maybe once upon a time, but now that he was in the kingdom of second chances, he wasn’t about to screw his up. So, he told her about Viridius and what had happened at the house on Holly Lane, but left out the part about pulling a huge sapling out of the dead man’s mouth and him somehow, miraculously, coming back to life. The rest of the truth was hard enough to swallow without that.

  She listened.

  She didn’t interrupt him once.

  He could see her trying to piece it together with what had happened in the hospital, and as he told her about the old man’s promise that they were marked because the antlered man had seen them, he could see the fear take shape behind her eyes. He wanted to reassure her, to say that just because the old guy said it didn’t make it real, but the risk in playing it down was that she’d let her guard down and walk into whatever trouble was waiting outside. Better to be frightened and because of it cautious than to live in ignorance and die the same way, he thought, remembering all too brutally Taff’s final few minutes of rapture in the old Latimer Road cinema as the succubus consumed him.

  Long before he was finished, Julie realized there was only one person who might have an inkling as to the true nature of the resurrected man, how a naked man could transform into a stag, and locked-in girls could leave messages of Horned Gods, but even that was a stretch.

  He hadn’t talked to the old magician in six months, and if he was being honest with himself, he would have happily go another six without seeking him out, and another six after that, but there was no escaping the fact that when the world went weird he was the closest thing they had to an expert. After all, he’d made a prison out of mirrors in an abandoned mausoleum, and banished Seth Lockwood to a time out of time. If anyone had a hope of understanding Viridius’s ramblings and everything else that had happened, it was Cadmus Damiola.

  15

  Ru Brooke stood at the top of Cane Hill and looked down upon the whole of creation, at least it felt that way to him with the winds whipping up a storm.

  Rain might be the only thing that could prevent the inevitable, but that was far from a given. He could feel the pent-up violence simmering on those streets down there. Everywhere he looked, they were coming out, first in twos and threes and then in real numbers, looking for justice for Ollie Underwood and Aisha Kahn, for retribution. It was going to get ugly. Once upon a time it might have taken a day, two, for the outrage to spiral; now it could spike in a matter of minutes as social media spread the anger.

  Stephen Blackmoore was on his hands and knees behind him, digging in the dirt.

  They stood in the middle of one of the chalk men’s penis. The fertility symbols were among the oldest in the country, unlike the Cerne Abbas Giant, which could only legitimately trace its existence back to the seventeenth century, the Cane Hill Men dated all the way back to the Doomsday Book. From above, they looked curiously deformed, as though their duty as guardian of this great city weighed down on their shoulders so heavily their spines had buckled beneath the strain. The locals called the Cane Hill Men “Gogmagot the Albion” and “Corenius the Britain.” The giants were the Guardians of London. Even now they were on the banners carried during the Lord Mayor’s yearly march, along with wicker mascots carried by the revelers. Over the years people had come to confuse their origins, because there were two figures in the chalk, and because of Gogmagot’s name, with Gog and Magog, the biblical characters that would rise up in the battle for humanity at the end-times.

  Blackmoore scooped up a handful of chalk and smeared it across his cheeks. “Come on, get over here,” he said, urging Ru to hunker down so that he could daub his face with the same white stripes of battle like they were party to some ancient ritual. “No fucking about, Bro. We’re in this together. You and me. Brothers.”

  He nodded.

  “Always, man. Always.”

  Ru knelt down beside him, feeling like a fool as Blackmoore painted his face with the chalk of the giant. Two fingers, two stripes on each cheek, one slash across his forehead.

  He didn’t know what he was doing here.

  He’d heard the voice, and knew he had to answer the call. He’d known he had to come here, to Gogmagot and Corenius, but beyond that he was lost.

  He’d begged Blackmoore to just go, leave the dead man’s house empty-handed, but Blackmoore was adamant he wasn’t leaving without getting what he’d come for.

  In just a few minutes his life had gone to Hell.

  He didn’t know what he was going to do—for one thing their prints were all over that house. It was supposed to be an easy job, in and out, grab a few easily sellable pieces: pocket watches, chains, nothing fancy. And they had that, and more. Blackmoore had filled his pockets. But a dead body changed everything. Someone would find the old man. That would bring the police to secure the scene and relatives to pick over the corpse. They’d realize things were missing when they started arguing over their inheritances and that would bring questions—and enough scrutiny to screw with them once forensics started checking the place for prints. He wanted to believe they weren’t deep enough in the shit for words like murder to be bandied about in the interrogation room but Blackmoore wasn’t exactly a stranger to the cops. There were enough bent bastards out there no matter how clean the Met liked to pretend it was, someone on the take could see them as the ideal opportunity to help out some shithead looking to make a name for themselves. The Lockwoods might be gone, but the city would never be free of their kind. They were like those mythical snakes; chop their heads off, they went and grew another one.

  The wind carried the faint strains of music with it.

  He recognized it without ever having heard it before. The Song of Albion.

  It sang through his flesh. It fired his blood.

  Down in the forest below he saw a stirring, a rustle in the canopy of leaves that spread out from a single point—where two trees fell one after the other. The song rose in the air. He turned and turned about, tears streaming down his cheeks. Blackmoore was lost in his own rapture. He gripped both hands together in prayer, doubling up as though punched in the gut, and rocking back and forth. If he was praying, it was to no deity Ru had ever heard named. Agitated ripples rolled out through the treetops, churning the leaves up like a roiling sea of green. Something was happening down there. In the sixty seconds he stared down at Coldfall Wood the ripples became ever more violent, the trees shaking like their roots were trying to tear fre
e of the ground. The fallen trees stood at the epicenter of the gathering storm.

  From within that dark eye, a huge ungainly shape began to move through the trees. At first it looked as though the forest itself was rising up in answer to the Horned God’s call, but as the wooden warrior surged through the trees from glade to grove toward the fairy ring, more and more of its grotesque form became visible. Ru’s mind wrestled with what he was seeing, trying to make sense of the impossible. He watched as the Knucker breached the tree line. Its massive body defied everything natural. The huge living champion of Coldfall Wood, an elemental warrior of the wood itself, surged on through the trees, pushing branches and thicker limbs aside. Blackmoore’s mumbled prayer provided an uncanny backdrop. It was incredible to behold. And terrifying.

  The song soared as the Knucker pushed its way up the rise toward them, the forest rippling against its presence. The song flourished as the great wooden warrior climbed the hill, looking down over the city.

  “Can you see that thing?” Ru let out a breath he had no idea he’d been holding, the words whispering out of his mouth in an awed rush.

  Blackmoore didn’t answer him.

  Ru saw why immediately. He had fallen forward, onto his hands and knees. Or more accurately elbows and knees—his hands had sunk into the chalky outline of Corenius’s manhood, and he was still sinking, being drawn down inch by inch into the chalk hill. In a matter of moments his chin was pressed against the chalky soil. He was smiling. Like he wanted it. He didn’t struggle against it; Cane Hill had him. Blackmoore looked up at him then, wild-eyed but not frightened. A rabid hunger for what was to come burned in his eyes. “This is why it wanted us to come here. This is what it was all about, being here, now, ready.” His smile was full of religious fervor. Blackmoore welcomed it, throwing back his head, even as the ground beneath him lost any semblance of solidity. The chalky white mud welcomed his body.