by D K Girl
‘Where are you going?’ Silas cried.
‘Did you not see the scattering of birds?’ Pitch slid between two saplings, using the very tips of his fingers to hold a slender branch at bay so he might pass without contact. ‘They fled from something in this direction. And I suspect that it is the something we seek. Use your brain, man. It’s not difficult.’
‘I’m not sure we should track it down. That sounds like no lost soul I’ve met.’ Silas could barely set one foot in front of the other for the tremble that gripped him. The tingling upon his fingers was more akin to the prick of pins.
‘Let us be honest, Sickle, you are hardly an expert on lost souls at this point.’
Scowling, Silas hurried after him, the mud and debris sucking at his feet, fallen branches cracking with his weight. Pitch released a branch he’d pushed aside, and it swung back at Silas, scraping his neck and sending cold droplets beneath the collar of his shirt.
‘I am right behind you,’ Silas grumbled.
‘Truly? I had no idea. The lumbering through the undergrowth didn’t give it away at all.’ Pitch made light of an enormous fallen tree, a grand old elm, dancing up onto its rotund girth as though he’d grown wings. ‘If you truly have no inkling of this creature, then I shall indulge myself with some bloodletting this afternoon.’ He was like a child at the foot of a Christmas tree, brilliant green eyes bright with anticipation. ‘Are you certain your hackles are not raised?’
Silas’s body shook as though gripped by a fever. It pained him to bend his fingers, he might as well have been an old man run rife with arthritis. It was the chill of a lost soul for sure, but of a magnitude Silas had not yet encountered. ‘My hackles are well and truly raised, but it is with far more violence than I’ve known before.’
Pitch snorted his displeasure, his hopes of bloodletting apparently dashed, and again in a light, and controlled way stepped from the log and drifted to the ground on the other side. Silas surveyed the fallen tree with concern. He did not trust his trousers to withstand the strain of such a leg lift, they were burdened enough as it was around his muscled thighs. He made his way around the root system which had been torn completely from the dampness of rotted leaves and soaked soil. The tangle of roots had spread wide when the elm lived, and now rose higher than Silas’s head, frozen in death. When he emerged from behind their dirt clogged shield, Silas found himself alone.
‘Pitch?’ There could not have been time for him to go far. Likely he had chosen this terrible moment to toy with Silas. Hiding in the undergrowth nearby. ‘Come, this is no time for stupidity. I know you watch me.’
For someone did. Silas felt it as certainly as the ache in his knuckles.
‘Mr Astaroth, enough.’ Silas was pleased with how firm he sounded considering his stomach had tied itself into rather a knot. ‘It was you, was it not, that wished this to be done with sooner rather than later?’ His voice appeared to echo back at him, bouncing off the canopy. Silas kept close to the bulk of the fallen tree, there was a strange comfort in the solidness of it.
The splintering of wood came from somewhere up ahead. Perhaps Pitch did not hide after all, perhaps he was so eager to be done with this adventure that he’d run off ahead. The man had certainly kept a clipping pace so far, and appeared to find no part of the scenery an obstacle. Silas pressed away from the fallen tree, with not a small amount of anxiety. He was under someone, or something’s, watchful gaze. How had he ever thought it a bright idea to enter these woods? But he had his answer already. Tangled in the knot in his belly. It was the drive to set foot here, the pull of the place like a rope tied around his innards, dragging him deeper.
Silas had grown so cold there did not seem a bath that could ever be hot enough to warm him, and his fingers curled with the pain at his joints. Silas stomped through the undergrowth, attempting to appear in utter control of his faculties, while his pulse thundered, and his ribs held so tight he could barely draw a breath. With his head lowered, Silas stole furtive glances at his surrounds. Eyes were upon him, their weight pushed the goosebumps on his skin higher. But who? And where? He cursed Pitch with every step. The foliage took on a life and their soul purpose seemed to be to snag upon him. Pulling at his hair, snatching at his coat, wrapping around his legs. Silas was certain he made a far too calamitous path through the forest. That even if he were not so certain he had been spotted already, whatever had emitted that god awful sound would not need to hunt him, it could simply listen for his approach.
Silas froze. A wretched scent engulfed him, one of meat beyond rotting. He pressed a balled up fist to his mouth, gagging at the ferocity of the odour.
‘Oh my god,’ he whispered. But opening his mouth allowed the putrid air to cling to his tongue. Silas gagged, his throat constricting and his stomach contents warning of their impending ejection. He crouched low behind an elm tree, his aching knee joints protesting the movement. The elm was young, and barely wide enough to conceal his frame but Silas desired protection of any kind. All his natural alarm bells rang as though played by someone quite deranged. Danger, they declared. There is danger here. The very air in this place, foul as it was, tore at him. Seeped into his pores and made its way through his blood with intent to harm. Silas shook, not with cold alone, though that was piercing enough, but with the biting clutch of panic. What lurked in these woods was monstrous. A teratism. And neither Silas nor Pitch could defeat it. Mr Ahari had told them so. Now that Silas’s body told him the truth of what lay here, they must leave this place. Cursing Pitch anew for his abandonment, Silas searched for sign of the road but the woods were thick about him.
The soul-searing scream rang out yet again. Silas leapt to his feet and plunged headlong into a crazed run. He ran with a heart set on breaking his ribs, and lungs that could not gulp enough air to keep him from dizziness. Around him it appeared all the plants had fangs, tiny tearing teeth that took hold of his clothing, ripping at the fabric. The sleeve of his coat tore open on his left arm, the thorns of some green fiend digging into his flesh. If he did not find the outer reaches of these blasted woods soon, he might well find himself fleeing naked. Yet another horror of this place to contemplate. His eyes watered with the wretched odour that permeated the air. It was the sewers on a heated day, mixed with the discarded entrails of a day old kill. The scent alone threatened to bring him to his knees.
‘Pitch!’ he roared.
But he did so at the same moment the scream tore the air anew, that horrendous sound swallowing his own whole. This time the wail of utter despair was joined by something new. A grating, rasping cacophony, that reminded him of a metal shovel finding rock, magnified ten-fold. Where was the creature whose call sent shockwaves through the woods? Surely it was enormous, and should be shattering its way through the foliage?
‘Damn you, Pitch! Where are you?’
A sudden, terrifying thought gripped him. Perhaps Tobias Asteroth had fallen, and the coarse grinding was a herald of his demise. Dear god, if this creature could fell a daemon, what hope did Silas have of escape?
‘Take hold of yourself.’ He pressed his wayward thoughts back where all logic lay cowering in fear at the back of his mind. ‘Move. Move. Move.’
The mantra aided Silas in setting one foot in front of the other, forcing back the panic that threatened to paralyze all movement. The coarse grind of metal upon stone erupted yet again, though it was with a modicum of relief that Silas recognised its change of position. Further away. Silas ran, a great crashing oaf indeed, and he did not care one iota. Arms flailing to make a pathway for himself, coat flying out behind him to be torn to ribbons by nature. On Silas ran. Headlong into a thick scrub of dogwood. His shins met with something solid, and with a curse flying from his lips Silas tumbled forward. His landing was devoid of all grace, baring down all fours in a sludgy concoction of mud and debris. His fingers sank through grit and sharp things, and with wide-eyed alarm Silas realised his downward motion had not stopped entirely, his weight pressing him into the great pu
ddle of mud. Wrenching his hands free of the dark soil, Silas sought out an anchor. The mud sucked at him, drawing his lower legs into its embrace entirely. Nothing solid met his feet. Silas was set to drown in a vile muddy grave if he did not find a way to free himself. The length of his coat vanished beneath the surface, the material hard against his shoulders as the quickmud fed upon it. Struggling, Silas barely took note of the sudden heat against his side. He was vaguely aware of the soft note of the bandalore in his ears, but the mud presented a more immediate issue. One of survival. Silas heaved himself this way and that, grabbing great fistfuls of gritty mud in the paltry hope that perhaps a tree root lay beneath, anything that might secure him to the land. Silas continued his slow descent into the quagmire. The notes of the bandalore steadily rising. Their song of warning growing richer, until he could deny them no more. Silas gave up his struggle, and at last saw where it was he had landed. A rocky clearing in the thickness of scrub.
‘Good lord,’ he whispered. Without a fight, his slow descent grew slower.
Opposite him, an enormous oak perched atop a low, narrow outcrop of rock. Hanging from several of its boughs were small dirty brown shirts, swinging with a wind that did not touch Silas. The thread of the oak’s exposed roots wound through the crevices in the jagged rocks, and curved their way around the entrance to a crude cave below. The opening was not considerable, Silas doubted he could right himself fully if he were to enter. Rubble lay at the cave’s entrance, as though the hollow itself had only been created in the recent past. Silas’s gaze fell upon one of the greater pieces of broken rock at the entrance. Nightmares would plague him from that day on. The body of a child lay there, as broken as the crude altar it rested upon. Crimson blood stained the rock and the ground around it. All but the crown of the child’s head had been flayed. A rise of bile burned it way up Silas’s throat. He understood now what it was he saw hanging from the boughs. Not dirty shirts at all. Silas retched, coughing yellow stains upon the dark mud as it continued to entomb him. The dead and mutilated child upon the rock had long knotted brown hair and the wind played at it, giving the awful impression that the child yet lived.
The tales told were dreadfully true.
Silas had found Black Annis’s bower.
Chapter 20
Silas had nothing left in his stomach but that did not matter to his body, which heaved his innards in clenching waves, trying to dislodge the horror of the sight. The god-forsaken stench suckled at his nostrils, and drained him of all strength to fight the mud as it sank him ever downwards.
Let it do so. Let him leave this life. Dear god, Silas groaned, let him leave this life. For he had no wish to live in such a world as this. An image of Clarence came to him, the poor, unwitting man pacing beside the carriage. Desperate for word of the child that had been lost. Was that Bethany’s skin swaying in the branches? Was it her blood that formed a dark curtain around the stone where the ruined body lay?
Silas’s very bones rattled, come loose beneath his flesh with the shock of what he had stumbled upon. It was no monster or teratism here, but the very devil himself who held sway in this clearing. Children’s flesh upon his tongue.
The mud crept to the top of his thighs, and rose up his arms, almost to his elbows, yet still Silas found no urge to shift. The intolerable cold and the pain in his joints was a distant thing to him now, vague sensations barely a part of him. All the while the bandalore hummed, its notes ripe with urging. He should move, if he was ever to do so again. Yet Silas could not stir. It were as though his limbs had forgotten how to move themselves, the darting message from his brain unable to command his hands to lift, nor his feet to press and find purchase in the quagmire. He was frozen in a state of disbelief.
But not so the wind. A breeze caught at the skins hung like discarded linen in the branches. The fluttering ribbons of moist, heavy flesh swished back and forth, back and forth, a grotesque metronome. Silas stared, transfixed, by the macabre display.
And still the bandalore sung to him.
Move. Move. Move.
The very same mantra he had used upon himself earlier. His own advice played back at him, from somewhere far, far away. But his own sensibilities might as well have been touched by the Blight itself, for Silas could find no resolve to do what a sensible man might. Fight. Struggle.
Hush. Hush. The very fabric of the child swung back and forth, skin stained dull brown by the loss of its own blood.
Hush. Hush.
Silas bowed his head, and a sound rose from him, from the very pit of his gut, clawing its way through his chest, and splitting his throat wide open. He wailed. Keened as the very best of the banshee might do. He was sorrow, he was despair. Splintering him into pieces as it furrowed through him, water carving its way through rock. And still the interminable wind would not let the child rest. His cry reached its peak, and a thunderous crash came from a place behind him. Loud enough that he coughed down on his cry, biting into the grief that had taken a hold of him, grabbing a hold of its bridle before it got away from him entirely.
‘Get up, you fucking fool.’
Pitch came hurtling out of the forest, barrelling down on Silas. To say he was wild eyed would be to vastly understate the situation. Pitch’s emerald eyes were wide as half-pennies, and his body glowed with an internal light that pushed free of his skin, of his clothing, and shone like a halo around him. Just as it had done in the cemetery.
‘I said get off your fucking knees, ankou.’ Pitch threw himself at Silas. He landed with the force of a steam train moving downhill, propelling Silas from the grip of his muddy cocoon. Silas screamed at the pop that came from his shoulder under the tremendous force.
‘My arm!’ he cried, as they landed in a tangled heap.
Pitch grabbed a hold of the limb that Silas nursed, and threw his weight against it. Bone crunched as the shoulder slipped back into place, and white spots filled Silas’s vision. ‘Bloody hell—’
‘On your feet,’ Pitch shouted. ‘She’s coming.’ He was framed by light, a sheen that clung to his form, as radiant as the very angels he had dismissed.
‘Then dispatch her, Tobias,’ Silas shouted right back.
Another great crash and crack of trees came from the woods. And the return of something far worse. That unholy screech, despair and hatred and ferocity rolled into one great terrible sound. Silas pressed hands gloved with mud to his ears.
‘Not I, Silas. My part is done.’ Pitch grabbed hold of Silas’s lapel and dragged him to his muddied feet, having no issue despite their contrasting size. Silas’s trousers were weighed down with the thickness of what still clung to him, and one of his shoes had not made the escape. Silas stood dripping with mud, one foot bare.
‘Your part?’ he spat. ‘What are you talking about?’
Wood snapped, not a mere stick or twig, but a great towering tree that must have brought down a dozen others with it, such was the calamity of the crash.
‘You were to face Black Annis by which ever means I saw fit, your spectral friend has my thanks for seeing you here sooner than I hoped.’ Pitch swept a hand through his hair, as though now were the time to attend to such things. ‘You are the servant of death, and that,’ he jabbed a finger in the direction of the shattered woods, ‘that is a dead thing. Now see that you rid this place of her, Silas.’
Mouth agape, Silas swayed on his feet, overcome by the stench, the pain, the sheer madness of it all. ‘Are you mad? I cannot face a teratism. Mr Ahari—’
‘Mr Ahari desired this meeting, Sickle,’ Pitch shouted against his ear, his spit warm against Silas’s chilled skin, his light bright enough to cause Silas to squint. ‘This encounter is no accident. Now play their bloody game, and win. Use the scythe.’
No accident? The Order knew of this horror and did nothing, save for sending a man who was little more than a newborn himself to dispatch such a monstrosity? Fresh, heated blood rose through Silas’s veins, his anger chasing back the interminable cold. He slapped his hands to h
is pockets. Searching the folds with mud-caked fingers.
‘Where is it?’ he hissed.
Beyond the clearing it sounded as though the entire world was collapsing upon itself. And the cries, the terrible cries, continued. Silas dug now his trouser pockets. Dismay blanketed him, adding to the weight of the mud.
‘It’s not here,’ he cried. ‘It’s not here…the mud…the mud…’
‘Are you out of your mind? You lost it?’ Pitch actually stamped his foot, his eyes blazing at their centre with a bright orange flame. ‘You have one task, idiot, one.’
He spoke with such derision, such utter contempt that Silas’s temper caught and flared. ‘Then why don’t you do it, daemon. Why are you hiding behind my skirts? What kind of hell creature has so few balls?’
A growl, an actual growl came from Pitch. The flecks of orange in his eyes devoured the emerald until no trace remained, each pupil now entirely on fire. Never more was Silas aware of Tobias Astaroth’s lack of humanity.
The ground shuddered.
Pitch cursed ferociously under his breath. Silas took a staggered step backwards, arms at the ready to brace should the reckless movement of the ground strengthen. Black Annis was desperately near, and Silas, fool he was, had lost the bandalore’s song.
‘Find the scythe, Silas,’ Pitch spoke too low, and far too calmly, a pot at the ready to boil over.
He dropped to his knees, a torrent of curses suitable for the worst of the alehouses flowing from him, as he dove his hands into the mud. Silas followed suite, not bothering to try and save his own shirt sleeves which were a certified ruin.
‘Can you not sense it?’ Pitch demanded, the glow from his body dissapating.
‘No,’ Silas snapped.
The cold, the stench, his pained body, all taxed him. If the bandalore called to him through that noise, Silas did not hear it. Certainly not over the destruction coming from the woods, and Black Annis’s screams which flew at them from differing angles, as though a horde lay in wait and not a solitary monster. What did she wait for? He ignored the small voice that said perhaps she had no need to hurry at all. Her insects were already caught in her web.
