The Blurred Lands

by Ian W. Sainsbury

  One god remains, but she is imprisoned. Her name is Astarte. Even caged, she is dangerous. Stay away from her, Evie. I underestimated her once. Do not make the same mistake.

  One last revelation for now, one that shocked and thrilled me back in the nineteen-fifties. If feminism was even a word back then, I hadn't heard it. When my mother told me that, behind all the posturing, noise, and self-importance of the men whom I assumed to be in control of everything, it was women who held it all together, I laughed in disbelief. Maybe it won't be as shocking to you. I hope not. It seems that society is finally moving towards parity between the sexes.

  Until then, remember this. Only women can access magic, only women can use Earth's true power. It's a dark, fierce, raw natural magic that keeps a balance between the realms, and there's not a man on this planet who can touch it.

  Eighteen

  By the time John looked at his watch, it was already mid-afternoon. He picked up the dirty brushes before giving the bedroom an appraising look.

  The first coat had covered the dark pink, but the result was a colour that even the posh paint companies had yet to name - a kind of sickly, fleshy hue.

  "Slapped Arse," said John aloud, trying to think of a name for the unattractive shade he had created. It would need another coat. He tried to think of other names, partly to take his mind off the way the room had changed in ways that had nothing to do with his decorating.

  The atmosphere had thickened as it had the previous night. There was a smell, foul and sweet at the same time. His skin was crawling again.

  "Untreated Rash," he said, as if coming up with daft paint colour names would dispel his gathering unease. "Fetid Blancmange. Pink Porridge."

  It worked. The goosebumps disappeared, the room was just a room again.

  "Shaved Ball Sack," he said, and went downstairs.

  John cleaned the brushes in the sink and put them on the back doorstep to dry. He had planned to break for lunch, but it was now past three o'clock, and he wanted to get out of the cottage, and breathe fresh air.

  He made himself a sandwich and filled up a water bottle. The phone had no signal, no messages. The battery, despite being plugged in for hours, was back at eighteen percent. He swore at it and stuffed it into his pocket. He should get some reception at the edge of the woods.

  From inside the cottage, it had looked like a beautiful spring day, but the atmosphere in the woods was that of a baking hot afternoon. Everything was still, with not a breath of wind to stir the air. The only sound, as he trudged between the trees, was his own chewing as he ate the sandwich.

  After walking for minutes, he stopped. Something wasn't right. He had looked up Leigh Woods online before making the trip from London. It was a well-maintained National Trust site. He should have found the footpath running east to west through the woods by now. The river Avon was his destination. Not only to get mobile phone reception, but, according to the website, a great view of Clifton Suspension Bridge to the south, perhaps the most iconic landmark in Bristol.

  He took a swig of water, then checked the compass on his phone. Turning northeast, John set off again. There was no way he could miss the river. Once he reached it, he'd find the path. There would be signs and, probably, other walkers.

  That was odd, John admitted. Not only had he not seen another person, he was yet to find any evidence of their presence. No rubbish, for a start. Although Sally Cottage was the only dwelling inside the woods' perimeter, the affluent, unimaginatively named village of Leigh Woods lay less than half a mile to the south. Posh houses meant posh teenagers, and teenagers should have meant condoms, drug paraphernalia, and empty vodka bottles in the woods. But there was nothing. Not even the only fruit found in all seasons - a hanging bag of dog shit.

  As he walked, John found a path of sorts, although he doubted it was the one the National Trust had shown on its map. There should be a broad avenue with benches at regular intervals. This was a rough, narrow track, which never took a straightforward route towards the river when there was an opportunity for it to dart off to one side, loop between some trees and a bramble patch, then head off back towards the river.

  John heard the Avon before he saw it, the tranquil dull rumble of a wide river. He quickened his pace at the sound. The water was a rich green-brown—Deep Snot, John christened it, still thinking of paint colours. The river was fast flowing, heading for the Bristol Channel and the Celtic Sea.

  After the preternatural stillness of Leigh Woods, John was glad to be in the open. He took out his phone to check for messages. The battery was dead.

  "Bugger it." He looked to the south and frowned. Where the hell was the bridge?

  It was three-forty-five. John guessed he had been walking for just over half an hour. It had taken him longer than he thought to reach the river, but he couldn't believe he had strayed so far that he was out of sight of the famous landmark.

  He put the water on his left and started walking. The river curved to the east ahead of him. With every step he took, he expected to see the bridge come into view, but it didn't happen. He kept his eyes fixed ahead and tried not to panic. He was walking along the bank of the Avon river, which was spanned by a large suspension bridge. Hard to miss. Any time now, it would come into view. Any time.

  After twenty minutes, he stopped again, took a long drink from his water bottle, and looked at the woods on his right. Leigh Woods' longest edge ran along the river, but it was less than a mile long. Even if he had got so lost as to exit the woods at their northernmost tip, he should still have passed the bridge, or at least seen it within ten minutes. The entire woods were only about three-quarters of a mile square, so how he had spent nearly an hour in there was also a mystery.

  So. No bridge. There was no avoiding it now. If this was connected to John's mental health, he had never heard of a condition that removed famous landmarks from the minds of those who suffered from it.

  There was another, bigger, problem John had been trying to avoid acknowledging.

  Reluctantly, he turned, putting the woods at his back. He looked across the water to the ridge beyond and up to what lay beyond it.

  Or, rather, what didn't lay beyond it.

  Bristol had disappeared.

  Nineteen

  As he headed back to the cottage, John compared his state of mind with what he remembered from the time of his illness. If Helen's advice was sound, it was important not to allow events to overwhelm him, however bizarre they might be.

  He was following a different path back to the cottage, but it was as twisting and narrow as the one he had found earlier. When he came to a small clearing, he sat down with his back against an old oak. He was breathing faster than normal, but his hands were steady. His thoughts, as he examined them, were disturbed but not panicked.

  He remembered little of that night out here in the woods, but he had a clear memory of his own mental chaos. It wasn't a memory he cared to evoke.

  He considered the situation logically. Either a city of nearly half a million people had vanished, or his mind was not accurately interpreting reality.

  John sighed. Bridges and cities were not in the habit of disappearing. However, psychosis sufferers sometimes reported hearing voices or experiencing hallucinations. Therefore, he had not seen what he thought he had seen. Clifton Suspension Bridge still spanned the Avon Gorge, and Bristol still existed beyond it.

  The lack of other people was a more difficult conundrum, but if he could accept that his mind had erased a bridge and a city, John would have to accept it could erase any human beings he had encountered.

  His conclusions were bleak, and frightening, but there was one crucial difference between the experience of the younger John and what was happening now. Despite the fact that he was displaying symptoms of mental stress, John's moment-to-moment experience of his own mind was calm and rational. From the morning spent painting, to his over-long walk this afternoon, there were no gaps in his memory. He was dealing with the situation in a way that sug
gested no loss of control. This was very different to the behaviour he had exhibited as a student.

  He thought back to that last night with Ash, approaching the memory with all the caution he might need if he were defusing a bomb. There were large gaps in his memory from that period. What remained were isolated moments that surfaced from time to time, particularly after waking from bad dreams.

  For the first time since he had left hospital as a damaged twenty-year-old, he allowed some of the scattered images and sensations from that night to arise, and—as dispassionately as possible—he examined them for similarities with what was happening to him now.

  He had been running for what seemed like hours. His lungs burned with every desperate breath he drew, propelling his exhausted body forwards. Fog had drifted in from the Bristol Channel, and he couldn't see more than a few yards in any direction. He looked down at his bare feet. They were filthy, swollen, and bleeding. He slowed, then dropped to his knees on the hard pavement. How far from the woods was he? Far enough? How could he ever be far enough to escape what was coming after him?

  He whimpered, a pathetic, thin, desperate sound like a dying animal. His elbows scraped along the tarmac as he crawled forwards, the skin a mixture of tiny stones and his own bloodied, torn flesh.

  A shape loomed out of the fog, towering over him. He tried to scream, but wheezed instead, tasting his own blood in his mouth. He spat it out and fell onto his side as another shape loomed into view, followed by a third.

  "Son? Son? Can you hear me?"

  The words meant nothing. He tried to raise his hands in defence, but his body didn't respond. He was twitching like a landed fish, terrified of the attack he thought was coming.

  "What a mess." A different voice. "Stark bloody naked. Look at the bloody state of him. See his eyes? He's on something. Bloody students."

  "Have a heart, Graham, look at the poor bastard. We need to get him to a hospital. 'Ere, Benny, fetch me jacket from the cab. Graham, go and knock on the nearest door. Call an ambulance, will you?"

  Two of the shapes vanished, but the third came closer. John tried to scramble away, but only managed to take the skin off his palms pushing backwards in panic.

  "Settle down, son, settle down. No one's gonna hurt you. You'll be all right. My name's Rob."

  Something in those words made sense, and, for a moment, he dared to hope he might have put enough distance between him and the horror behind him. His eyes flicked to the shape now squatting beside him. A beard. Black hair. Human.

  "You're in Clifton. The hospital's not far away. I'll stay with you until the ambulance gets here. Oh, cheers, Benny."

  He had began to hope that he might, for the time being, be safe, when the bearded man took something from the other shape that came out of the fog.

  "Just going to cover you up, son. You're shivering."

  Out of the sky, an evil, dark creature unfolded its wings and dived, blotting out what little light there was as it dropped towards its victim.

  John tried again to scream, but he had no strength left. He passed out.

  That had been the only memory John had allowed himself to revisit for more than a few seconds in the thirty years since the Clifton bin men had found him, naked, covered in mud, grass and twigs, his body bruised and bloodied, his mind already shutting down.

  The other memories were far worse. Knowing they were the memories of a broken mind was no help when they arose in the grey half-dawn, when John would wake, sweating and gasping, next to Sarah. He didn't lie to his wife, but he could never bring himself to describe the monsters his diseased brain had conjured to haunt him. Instead, he told her they were dreams about the hospital. Mental health care was less enlightened in the mid-eighties. Sarah had no difficulty in believing the experience would still give him nightmares.

  Helen had encouraged him to face his fears. These were among the worst. He had never allowed himself to dwell on the shadowy images that had given him decades of nightmares.

  Now, with his back pressed up against the reassuringly solid tree trunk, he did just that. He thought back to the last night he'd spent with Ash. It had begun, as usual, with sex. Every night he'd spent with her had been a combination of sex, fitful sleep, and short conversations that led to more sex. That final night, he had been determined to talk to her, rather than give in to their usual overpowering lust. Right up to the moment he saw her, he was unaware he was deceiving himself.

  They'd ended up in the woods that night. It was the only time they'd left the cottage together. Closing the back gate behind him was John's last clear memory of that night. The rest came in disjointed images.

  There'd been a fire burning in a clearing and, by its flickering light, he and Ash had screwed like animals, tearing each other's clothes off without even a semblance of foreplay. He had seen movement in the trees once, as if they were being watched, but Ash had pulled him back towards her.

  Then...

  He woke. It was much later. He had done what he had come to do - spoken to Ash. Told her he was leaving. He didn't ask her to go with him. He knew, without knowing how, that it was impossible. And he promised himself he would never come back. If he did so, he feared he would be lost, consumed, his last shred of self-will taken from him. He needed to prove he could walk away from this. Whatever was happening between him and Ash wasn't healthy. Although he couldn't have explained why, he had been afraid to tell her, scared of how she might react. To his great relief, she had taken the news calmly, asked him to hold her one last time. They had fallen asleep on the soft earth.

  Now the moon was higher. The fire was still burning, and in the yellow and reds of its light, John saw Ash, kneeling, her back towards him. Both of her hands were in the fire itself, the flames going up to her elbows. She didn't flinch, and her skin wasn't burning. He tried to get up, but his head and limbs were heavy. He told himself he was dreaming, but knew he was not. Ash was speaking or chanting. Her voice thickened the air, each word adding weight to the one before. This strange song was not without purpose, he realised. She was making something.

  That was the first image John could bring to mind from that night. He was both pleased and scared by how much detail he could evoke. Pleased because he was still rational. Scared because he didn't want to recall the horrors that had triggered his illness.

  John stood up, brushing soil from the back of his trousers. He scanned the clearing, then froze. The west gable of the cottage was visible through the trees. He was only yards away. Yet he was sure the cottage hadn't been there when he had first sat down.

  He set off towards it. When a suspension bridge and an entire city had vanished, the appearance of a small stone cottage was no big deal.

  The evening was already darkening when John opened the back door. He looked at his watch. Eight o'clock He had been out all day. He checked his phone. No signal, battery at eighteen percent again. He made a mental note to buy a new handset.

  He left by the front door, heading for the layby and the wisp of phone signal it offered. There would be voicemails, particularly the one from the manager at Fir Trees. Like many children of those in the final stages of dementia, John had long since said goodbye to his mother. The occasional moments of lucidity these days were illusory. She wasn't responding to him, she was playing back a memory, like a needle falling at random on the vinyl beneath. Had he been a religious man, he would have prayed for her death. It wasn't that she was suffering - she was no longer there to suffer. It was John who suffered, holding the hand of a ghost who could never say the words he wanted to hear.

  He thought of his dream the night before. He couldn't recall many details, but he remembered his mother speaking to him. It had been an important conversation, and an intimate one, the sort of chat they had never had in reality. Mae was of the generation that had seen child-rearing as a subject for which there were rules. She had treated cooking the same way, boiling vegetables until they drooped from the fork, and looking askance at suspicious foreign innovations such
as garlic. She didn't mistreat her son, but, as he grew up, he suspected his birth had come as a disappointment. He had been shocked one long Sunday afternoon when, aged seven, he had overheard his mother crying. Standing outside her bedroom door, he listened to his father's murmurs of awkward consolation as she wept, raging at her inability to produce another child.

  Why? thought John. She struggled to show him much affection. Why would she want another child?

  Something in his dream had suggested an answer, or at least the beginnings of one, but John couldn't bring to mind anything helpful. All he remembered was that she had been warning him.

  When, after three hundred yards, he still couldn't hear traffic, or see the streetlights through the trees, he stopped.

  He pulled his phone out of his pocket. No signal.

  It was getting darker more quickly than he expected. The sun wasn't due to set for another forty-five minutes.

  It was 8:40pm, but he was sure he hadn't been walking for even five minutes. His phone showed the same time. How had he lost over half an hour?

  John looked over his shoulder, and his mouth went dry. He couldn't be seeing what he thought he was seeing. He turned, slowly. Three feet away, there was a wooden stake with a metal postbox on top.

  Sally Cottage. No junk mail, no free newspapers, no unsolicited callers.

  Next to the stake, the high iron gate. Just behind it, the cottage. But he had been walking away from it towards the road.

  He turned and ran.

  His breath quickly became hard to regulate, and his legs complained at being asked to do anything more strenuous than jogging. The last time he had run through these woods, John had been twenty. He felt every one of those thirty-one extra years as he gasped his way along the path.