"What were you expecting? A rotting corpse with staring eye sockets? My chin held on with a handkerchief like the ghost of Jacob Marley?"
John thought of his ever-mounting sense of dread since arriving at Sally Cottage.
"Something like that, yes," he said, his voice only cracking a little.
Ash stood up. She was naked, of course. Her breasts were still heavy, her hips rounded, her skin flawlessly creamy. It was a body that belonged to someone in their twenties. John looked at her and said nothing.
"You're middle-aged, John Aviemore," she said. "Not that it makes any difference. Old, young, beautiful, ugly, sick, well, I've had them all. But you were special. You still are."
"I don't think so," said John.
Ash studied him.
"You don't think this is happening, do you? You're too calm, considering the situation. Do you think you're going mad?"
"That's not quite the way I would have put it."
"Not politically correct enough for you?"
He was surprised at the expression. In his mind, Ash was stuck in the mid-nineteen-eighties.
She picked up on his confusion.
"Oh, I may be trapped here, but it doesn't mean I don't know what's happening outside. The cage is flexible, and I've learned when and how to stretch its walls. And there's always television when we're in the right time period."
John was lost by the direction of the conversation, but Ash was still talking.
"It was maddening at first, all that power, so close, I could almost taste it. You were right there, just out of reach. I didn't guess the truth. I thought I had found an Adept, considering the dormant magic I sensed in you. I was prepared for a fight. But when I saw you, that night when you were on my doorstep, I couldn't believe my luck."
If John had expected a coherent chat with a ghost, it was clear he would be disappointed. He could only conclude that he was in shock, as he was responding to her as if this was a normal conversation, instead of evacuating his bowels and jumping through a window.
"You don't know what I'm talking about, do you?" she said. "No matter. Let me ask you this. Did anyone else at that party remember seeing me?"
John had thought his friends were winding him up when they'd claimed he'd left alone that night. He'd put it down to jealousy, considering how far out of his league Ash was. Any healthy heterosexual male would have crawled over a field of broken glass if she'd given so much as an encouraging glance.
He said nothing. Ash smiled.
"Such a display of my power did not go unnoticed. The cage adapted, strengthened itself. But I had you by then. You came to me. And here you are again."
"The letter?" said John. "Stinder Hackleworth? I thought you'd..."
"Died? No. That's not something I'm ever expecting to do."
"What are you?" said John.
Ash laughed.
"You don't even know what you are, John Aviemore. How can you hope to understand what I am?"
He looked at her. Ashleigh Zanash, the first woman he'd had sex with. She was hardly his idea of a god.
"You're wondering if I look like this to everyone, or just you?" Ash phrased it like a question, but it wasn't. Not really. He knew the answer, and she knew he knew it. She was his twenty-year-old self's fantasy made flesh.
Her gaze was direct and as openly sexual as it had always been. There was nothing feigned about Ash's libido. She would take him now if he let her.
John cleared his throat and looked into her eyes. He acknowledged the invitation but ignored it.
"I was a virgin," he said.
"I know," she replied. "Delicious."
"Until I slept with a woman, my mental ideal was all I had."
"Then you met me," said Ash, one hand coming up to cup a breast in a gesture which looked entirely unconscious. Except nothing Ash did was ever unconscious.
"No," said John. "I said a real woman."
He was prepared for some anger at that, but Ash smiled, her thumb still tracing the underside of her breast.
"Hmm. That's fair. And how did a real woman compare?"
John wasn't sure what game they were playing here, but he was convinced his sanity was at stake. How he dealt with this conversation would have repercussions. He thought of Sarah, and of Harry. He thought of his granddaughter, Evie. John chose honesty.
"A real woman?" he said, shaking his head. "After you? It was a disappointment, but you know that already, don't you?"
"Yes. How could it be otherwise? You must have spent your life dreaming of the nights we spent together."
"You didn't let me finish," said John. Ash sat on the bed, then lay back, propping herself up on the pillows. She looked up at him. If any Renaissance painter had captured even a hint of the invitation in her face and body, they would have been denounced as a devil and burned at the stake.
"I'm listening," she said.
"I had a couple of relationships after you." It had been almost two years after, but he wasn't about to mention his breakdown and the hospital. "The first was a disaster. I wanted something she couldn't give me, but I couldn't even tell her what that was."
Ash nodded.
"I tried harder the next time. But whenever we went to bed, I could only think about you."
There was a kind of relief in admitting it, saying it out loud for the first time. "We broke up. I was better off on my own."
"I understand." There was no pride in her voice. John thought about the wicked queen in Snow White. The magic mirror reassured her she was the most beautiful woman in the land. Ash had no such insecurities. She knew she was the most beautiful. She definitely wouldn't like what was coming next.
"Then I met Sarah. We were married six months later. She died three years ago. Once I'd met her, I forgot about you. And, on the rare occasions I did think about you, I found you'd lost your power over me."
Now he had riled her. The amused, aroused, expression on Ash's face barely altered, but John knew he hadn't imagined the flash of anger on her perfect features.
"Tell me about her," was all she said.
John thought of Sarah, of her grin when she'd got down on one knee in a pool of spilt beer to propose to him, and of that same grin the night before those eyes closed for the last time. He took a step into the bedroom, fighting his fear. Ash, and Gai had both spoken of his power. Time to act as if he had some.
"No," he said.
"No?" Ash was comically shocked. John speculated it might be the first time someone had ever refused her.
"You're lying," she said. "Your marriage was a sham. I was there in your mind, and in your bed, every time. You never 'made love' to your wife. It was me. It was always me."
Perhaps the cliché that some people look beautiful when angry has a basis in fact, but it wasn't true of Ashleigh Zanash. John remembered seeing this expression on her face moments before he ran from the woods, his mind already slipping its moorings as he sprinted away. The bland mask of seductive, available sexuality was gone, and behind it was frustration, rage, and hatred. It was a more honest glimpse of who he was dealing with.
She stood up and took a pace towards him. John held his ground.
"I'm not lying," he said. "You know I'm not. You might not understand it, but Sarah was all I ever wanted. And the longer we were together, the better it was. You mean nothing to me."
Ash made a noise unlike anything John had ever heard. Somewhere in the vicinity of a grunt, or a growl, but louder and stranger than either. More disturbing, and threatening, too.
As he looked at her, Ash changed. John flinched and stepped backwards, tripping, falling, and knocking the back of his head against the door frame. By the time the pain of the blow registered, it was over.
Ash was taller, shorter, fatter, thinner. Her skin was milk-white, clay-red, night-black, sea-green, rusted brown, translucent grey, tanned leather, shining pearl. Her eyes rolled through every colour John could name, and some he could not. Like riffling a deck of cards, her features flicked t
hrough a hundred changes.
Treacle-thick time slowed, the air becoming cloying and dense. John's mind unpicked the awful noise she was making and heard it not as one sound but as hundreds of different words. Ash spoke all the words simultaneously, but not in the same language, and not even in the same voice.
She was naming herself. Hundreds of words were crammed into one dense sound.
"PRENDE ASTGHIK RATI FREYA SUADELA KUNI TIACAPAN XOCOTZIN QUETESH ÁINE TURAN ŽIVA BASTET ASTARTE ISHTAR RĀGARĀJA ASHTORETH."
The impact of the doorframe on the back of John's head was harder than he had expected. There was a crack, and—for a few seconds—he saw, or heard, nothing. Then his vision cleared. He was looking at the bare floorboards of the cottage bedroom. He could smell fresh paint.
Ash had disappeared. The bed was bare, the mattress and sheets gone. The walls, lit by the single bare bulb hanging above, were back to their inoffensive magnolia.
John scrambled backwards out of the bedroom and crawled into the bathroom, his head throbbing. He threw up, flushed it away, then carefully pulled himself upright. He touched the back of his head and examined his fingers. No blood, and the lump he'd traced on his skull was smaller than he'd expected.
He bent forward and examined his face in the shaving mirror. Unshaven, red-eyed, he looked like he hadn't slept for a week. His hair stood up in clumps, and his lips were dry and cracked.
"Hi, handsome," John whispered, but he couldn't stop the final name he had heard sounding again and again in his mind.
"ASHTORETH."
Twenty-Nine
"Protective charms," said Gai the following day, sipping from the bottle of mead. John had noticed that, no matter how much they drank, the bottle never emptied. He had once invented a trick that appeared to produce the same effect, but it was an illusion. This was not.
"Protective charms," repeated John, as if saying the words out loud would make the concept less ridiculous. It didn't work. He felt the rear of his head, which should have had a lump the size of an egg on it after the impact with the doorframe. It was unmarked. It didn't even hurt when he rapped his knuckles against it.
"Yes. Ever break a bone? Or have any serious physical injury?"
John thought about it. "No,"
"Protective charms. I have them too. Physical damage hurts, but permanent injury is prevented."
"Protective charms," said John, again. Nope, it still sounded crazy.
"Not your own work, so someone else." Gai was mumbling to himself. "Who? A noone? Unlikely." he turned his attention to John. "Someone protected you, and they did it well. Any strong women in your family?"
"Maybe. Why?"
Gai seemed not to have heard. "Interesting. But if Ashtoreth wants something from you, you will need more than protective charms to stop her. Tell me again about last night."
John told him while the noone listened intently.
"She revealed herself to you," said Gai when he had finished.
"She definitely did that," said John, remembering the many versions of Ash that had come and gone in that terrifying second as he'd stumbled backwards in the bedroom.
John accepted the mead from Gai and took a long swallow. He trusted this creature, and he wasn't sure why. There was something reassuringly familiar about him. He had only his instinct and the evidence of his senses to go on, but they all agreed. Gai was on his side. If he existed, if any of this was real. John was now behaving as if it was. But even if Gai, Ash, Sally Cottage and all of Leigh Woods turned out to be a hallucination, it wouldn't matter if he could get away.
"I'm a human," John said. "You're a,"—Gai's face darkened—"a noone. You tell me Ash—Ashtoreth—is a god. What chance do we have against a god?"
Gai snorted. "Gods are just beings from the older realms," he said. "When Earth first became accessible through the Blurred Lands, it attracted visitors from as far as Nysa. Most did just that—visit—but some were seduced by the flow of magic in your realm, by its purity and availability. They stayed."
"Don't these other... realms have magic too?"
"Yes. Old magic, evolved magic, richer, but far less plentiful. All intelligent species can use magic in the other realms. There, they are nothing special. But when, thousands of years ago, they came to your realm, beings like Ashtoreth wielded Earth's raw magic much more effectively than humans. Their abilities were so far beyond yours, it was as if they were... well, gods."
"You said 'they' stayed. There were more of them?"
"Your planets still bear the names of some of them. Neptune. Jupiter. You tell their stories and call them myths. You even name your days after them: Odin - Wednesday, Thor - Thursday."
"But they're myths."
Gai laughed. "Want to know the difference between a fact and a myth? About three thousand years."
"So where are they now?"
Gai was pacing up and down. Now he stopped and sighed. "All right. A quick explanation, then we'll get to work."
"Do I get to ask questions?"
"No interruptions. You struggled with that yesterday. Think you can manage it now?"
John nodded, and Gai started talking.
"There was a war. The war of the gods. It raged for generations on Earth. By the time the gods took the alliance between Earth and Da Luan seriously, it was too late. When the gods were defeated, they were banned from using magic again. They are long-lived, but not immortal. They died, eventually, of old age."
"Not all of them. There's one in that cottage back there. How were they defeated if their magical abilities are so far beyond that of humans?"
Gai glared at him. "Sorry," said John.
"I said their abilities were more powerful," said Gai. "But it was a human who led the revolution that defeated them."
And John listened as the noone gave him a history lesson that would have been laughed out of any school curriculum.
"Astarte is from Tartarus. All the realms have names that echo through human legends and myths. Earth, Da Luan—my realm—Erebus, Tartarus, Nysa, Mu and Shambhala.
"Erebus and Tartarus gave us most of the creatures that went power-crazy in the magic-rich atmosphere of Earth. Centaurs, gorgons, sphinxes, griffins, winged horses, unicorns, shapeshifters, vampires, and the rest. The most powerful of all were treated as gods.
"Astarte started the gods' war. She called herself Queen of the gods. She was already known as the god of fertility and war, with many also calling her the god of love. Her lust for power spilled over to her followers, and she drew on their magic to supplement her own. For a while, she was unstoppable, and Earth's continents ran red with blood.
"Eve, the human who stopped her, was the first Adept. She had turned away from the gods as a child, feeling no respect for these violent and destructive entities. By the time she parleyed with the noones, she could sing words of power.
"She proposed an alliance. Her time in the Between had shown her a way to separate the realms. The noones agreed to help.
"The myth tells of Eve entering a wooded grove, digging at the roots of an ancient tree, her fingers intertwining with its roots. She sang her words, and the noones sang with her. Across the world, there were cries of fear from the gods as their realms moved away from ours. Faced with the choice, most returned to their homes as they separated from Earth.
"When it was over, only a few of the creatures and gods remained. Their exile in your realm was permanent. They agreed to live peacefully. Some resisted, but Eve and her followers subdued them. Over time—many hundreds of years—even the most long-lived of them died.
"Astarte refused to accept the agreement forged by Eve and the noones, which became known as the Accord. The god of love wanted to rule your realm. She still does. Astarte is not insane. Neither is she evil. She believes Earth would be a better place if she ruled it. The fact that you'd all be rutting like animals or killing each other would, in her eyes, be a restoration of the natural order.
The last days of the war were costly. When it
was over, thousands were dead or injured. The god was defeated. Eve refused to kill her. The noones carried her to the Blurred Lands, and—using the Between—the most powerful magicians constructed the time cage.
"On the first anniversary of the end of the war, the Accord was strengthened by the formation of the Three. Three human women, of whom Eve was the first, to protect Earth and keep the peace. Da Luan agreed to supply Wardens, one for each of the Three. The Wardens live in your realm as voluntary exiles."
Gai stopped talking. "Questions?"
John didn't know where to start. "Why don't humans use magic anymore?"
"They do. But the Accord restricts its use. If not, Earth, so rich with magic, might become too much of a threat to the other realms. Magic is kept secret for good reason, John. Not that it should concern you. According to everything we know, you are incapable of using it."
"Oh?" John remembered the look of shock and delight on Gai's face when John had retaliated the previous day. "Why?"
"Because you're the wrong sex. Guess how many men have wielded magic in your realm during the last five thousand years?"
John knew a rhetorical question when he heard one. Sure enough, Gai didn't wait for an answer.
"None. But here you are. No more questions. You need to visit the Between. It usually takes two or three moons to become competent, but you have serious disadvantages. You're not only human, you're male. And we only have days. Maybe less. Let's get started, shall we?"
"Shit."
"Pardon me?"
Gai's voice was faint. The light had changed in seconds, dusk falling without warning.
John looked at Gai. The noone was fading, and something else was taking his place. Within seconds, the clearing had gone, Gai with it. John was looking at the front door of Sally Cottage.
"Looks like we'll have to start tomorrow." he said.
Thirty
Whether he could truly call his dreams by that name any more, or whether some other word would have to take its place, John wasn't sure. He was also unsure whether he was dreading or looking forward to what memories might resurface when he went to sleep. He only knew the lines between waking and sleeping were blurring, and what he experienced during periods of unconsciousness were as real to him as his daytime experiences. Given that his days now involved talking to a magical fairy in a world where Clifton Suspension Bridge and Bristol didn't exist, it was no wonder the whole situation was confusing.
The Blurred Lands Page 13
