Dogfighters: Under the Hill

by Alex Beecroft

  Only then did Ben notice that he was lying among other refuse, empty boxes, twisted metal and creatures, asleep, huddled into foetal balls, rocking. They were all—he too—covered in the dust, grey as the road. That figure over by the wall of the dried-up fountain, he surely must be dead, with half his head and torso missing like that.

  The severed man opened his one remaining eye, looked at Ben without curiosity, closed it again. At this angle, Ben could see the veins pulsing in his open throat. He scrambled to his feet, and as he did so, a change came over the quality of the light—a dark, sweeping shadow ran along the distant boulevard, turning silver pedestrians, silver floating cars the colour of pared lead. Ben looked up as the shade passed over him and a wave of cold made his skin ripple.

  The courtyard in which he’d lain boiled with activity as his fellow dossers scrabbled to their feet, ran for cover.

  Darkness in the shape of spread reptilian wings passed over him, made a fluid black spiral in the air and came rushing back towards him like a hurricane.

  Teeth. Teeth that looked like crystal daggers. Something lapping around its jaws and nostrils—a fume of smoke and the little flickers of violet flame. Shit! It had found him again.

  Ben turned on his heel and ran. Up towards what might have been shops, crystals and spilled fruit skidding and mashing beneath his feet. Above him, windows slammed closed. He heard footsteps, running away, tried doors, but they had no handles, all he did was to make his fingers bleed again scrabbling at the cracks.

  Far up the street, steps went down into darkness. If this had been London, he would have said it was an entrance to the underground tube stations. Here, who knew? Maybe the skyscrapers were only half of it, and the city went as deep down under the earth. At any rate, it was the entrance to a tunnel through which the dragon was too huge to pass. Part of Ben told him, Cover. Run for cover. A stronger part cowered, more afraid of reliving the nightmares down there than it was of the oncoming storm.

  The dragon flapped its huge wings with a sound like the crack of a bullwhip. Ben ran for the tunnel, but it felt like running through treacle, running in a nightmare when one cannot move no matter how hard one tries. He made it to the first downward step and there his limbs refused his will, left him shuddering all over, unable to go any farther, with little pulses of memory throbbing in his mind, presaging a full-scale flashback. Not now. For God’s sake, not now.

  The dragon landed with a rush and a run, its long claws gouging holes in the silver surface of the road, its tail displacing parked vehicles, knocking down the tall, ornately carved lanterns that lined the road, dragging them behind it by the wires, a chain of lights chrysanthemum gold. The pulsing rumble of its breath sounded like laughter.

  It paced slowly closer. He could hear it breathe in, the huge forge-bellows of its lungs inflating with a sound like the tide coming in. Ben took one more step down, but the memory of being pulled under the earth was too fresh and he could not make himself go any farther. In desperation, he stooped to pick up a stone, threw. It bounced off the slickly scaled snout. Fire flickered in the creature’s nostrils and behind the uncomfortably sentient eyes. “Fuck!”

  A sound broke through the battering of his heart. Hoofbeats. The dragon heard it too—it lifted its long neck and looked.

  From the crossroads, out of the haze of gleaming dust and smog, a white shape tore, like clouds, like feathers, like the wings of angels. It came into focus, dazzling like snow under sunshine—a knight on horseback, in armour of silver, with streaming hair of silver-steel. With no time for cynicism, Ben felt a lift of the heart that was pure fairytale at the sight, as though the image had short-circuited a lifetime’s wariness. It didn’t occur to him not to reach up and take the hand offered to him, nor to feel comprehensively rescued.

  He leapt up as the knight pulled, landed gracelessly half on the back of the swan-white creature that was his rescuer’s mount. “Hold on to me,” said a voice he recognised with a thousand stinging thrills, and the horse’s wings snapped out, beat twice, and they were in the air.

  The dragon stood on its tail and breathed out a raging blue inferno of flame that singed the horse’s tail and the fetlocks of its legs. The horse gave a shrill, birdlike whinny and leapt forward. Behind them, Ben could see the dragon pacing across the street, climbing laboriously up the side of one of the buildings—a network of scores and creases in the mirror finish said it had done so many times before—trying to gain height enough to launch out and become airborne once more. But before it could do so, the mist closed behind them, and Ben was alone with his white knight in a sphere of pearl light and feathers and a rushing wind.

  “Erm… Thank you,” he said, breathing hard, this second burst of adrenaline draining faster than the first, leaving his hands shaking, his muscles stretched to the point of tearing, even his hair heavy. The wind against his skin was frigid, and something pricked at his eyes. He loosened a hand from the knight’s slim waist and felt his eyelids—they were crusted with ice.

  “Thank you for saving me, but we’re too—we’re too far up.” Panic came back in a wave. The air scalded him with cold as he breathed it in, but he couldn’t get enough of it to fill his lungs. The blinding, shrill pain of his head returned as if every brain cell was made of broken glass, and when he looked up he could see that the white sky had become indigo. The world was very far beneath him, and still they climbed. “We’re too far up. I can’t breathe!”

  Why had he assumed this was a rescue? Why had he trusted anything in this place? What did he do now?

  He tried to shake the knight, make him listen. “I can’t…” he gasped. Things were fracturing, falling away, he felt his skin pull off with a feeling of relief. Sleep came, numb at first, comforting after.

  He woke up in a palace.

  Red coverlets swaddled him, warm and soft as fur, but interwoven with gold threads that stirred and glittered with every movement. When he sat, he found he had been dressed in clothes of the same material, white trousers, white shirt and a sash of cloth of gold. Reaching up, he examined his head and face with his fingertips, then turned his palms over with surprise. They had been scraped raw, oozing blood. Now they were whole again. He shoved up his sleeves, and his arms moved without pain, despite the wrenching they had had falling through tree branches. Even the muscular aches of unaccustomed frantic flight were gone.

  Trying to sit up in this pool of lapping red material was harder than it seemed. It was slippery as ice, softly entangling. He wasn’t sure he had the energy to fight his way all the way out. So tired, and so warm.

  The roof above him was lapis lazuli blue, shot like the stone full of glints of gold. Three doors led off the round room in which he lay. They were all closed, but sounds of movement came from behind the emerald-painted archway of the nearest, where a vine scroll, painted onto the wood, seemed to move and slowly unwind as he watched.

  It flowered, the door dissolving beneath it, and his rescuer walked through. Out of his armour, he wore a long tunic of dark blue velvet and carried a chalice—still looked like something stepped from a pre-Raphaelite painting. Ben recognised the face at once, though he’d only half-seen it before, outlined in bright strokes against a dim suburban night. There was no forgetting the hawklike beauty, or the hair like strands of platinum, cobweb fine, which rose and floated with his movement as though the air was buoyant as water to him.

  “What happened?” Ben asked, the first and simplest of his many questions.

  “I found you in a dangerous place and brought you away.” The knight’s narrow mouth was a pearly shade of pink, tilted up at the edges into a smile Ben felt bordered too nearly on the smug. “I had forgotten that you were human now and could not bear to go above the clouds unprotected. But no need to fret, we are safely home, as you see.”

  “Home?” Ben asked, and then, “Human now?”

  “I have missed you so grievously, Karshni. And yet it pleases me immensely to think you did not take your father’s part aft
er all. You did not abandon me of your own will. It has been a great comfort to me to know that, though I own it shocks me what he did to you. I never intended this, you must believe me.”

  They must have given him something to heal his wounds, and it had left him groggy, obsessed with the need to sleep to the exclusion of everything else. He tried to wrap his mind around what the creature was saying, abandoned the effort as too hard, and gazed at it without comprehension. It was very pleasant to look at, especially with the expression of hope and fondness and apology that was shading further towards worry the longer he watched.

  “You do remember me?” His rescuer knelt by the bed, putting the cup carefully down on the floor beside him. He was perhaps seven feet tall, slender as a rush and nacreous as pearl. His skin had a sheen on it like the dew on a white grape, and his eyes were indigo and golden as the skyscape above Ben’s head.

  “We haven’t exactly met.”

  At Ben’s blank look, the creature brushed back its hair, tucked it behind a pointed ear. His smile saddened. “But we have, many times. I am Arran. We were something greater than friends, other than brothers.”

  “All I remember is you asking me which eye I saw you with.” Ben tried to swallow, his mouth dry. Arran radiated a kind of static electricity, and the prickle of it beat on Ben’s tongue and the inside of his mouth, making them feel swollen, achy. “I didn’t know what you meant at the time, but I looked it up. If I’d have told you which one, you would have cut it out. Are you going to blind me now?”

  He tried to get his feet under him, but they were buried under too many layers of the slithery bedclothes—he wondered if it was a bed at all and not a trap. Arran put out a long-fingered hand and set it gently on Ben’s hair, rubbing the strands between his fingertips with a look of curiosity. Light flashed in little fireworks as he moved. His nails were covered in diamonds. “That was before I recognised you. I do not look closely at meat. A slight resemblance was not enough to jump to such an outré conclusion.”

  “You don’t look at meat?”

  “Humans.” Arran laughed. “Look not so appalled. You have called them worse in your time.” He picked up the goblet and offered it to Ben. When Ben made no move to take it, he lifted Ben’s hand in his and wrapped the fingers around the stem. It was a tender gesture, and his voice was sorrowful when he concluded. “Truly, you remember nothing at all?”

  “I remember nothing because there’s nothing to remember.” Ben tried to get angry. This was some kind of mind-fuck, softening him up for something. “I am human.”

  Another time there would be all kinds of depths of despair behind that cry, but it was hard to connect with them just now when the fear that had powered him for days had drained away and terror taken all his energy with it. Arran’s touch was soothing, and the smell of the drink was like nutmeg and camphor, like paan. A smell from so long ago he never knew before how much it made him think of home.

  He wondered if it tasted the same, brought it to his lips, Arran helping him to sit up, supporting him. The look on the creature’s face now was kindly, warm as the bedclothes. A little scar on one cheek made Ben feel fondly towards him, though he couldn’t quite place why.

  “Sip,” said Arran. “It’s hot. To get the cold of the high places from your blood.”

  Cinnamon in Ben’s mouth, and something creamy that coated his tongue and his throat and all his insides with slippery, prickly warmth. The room swam out of focus and the stars danced above him. A sane, priggish part of his personality told him, disapprovingly, that he had just been drugged, but he wasn’t listening as he reached up to guide Arran’s smiling mouth to his. Other than brothers, better than friends? Yes, why ever not?

  The kiss was just as he’d imagined—like lightning pouring into him, but he was unravelling and becoming a cloud, and all it did was light him up, every last particle of him. Someone laughed. He thought it was himself, steeped in happy dreams, realised it was his lover just as the flesh under his fingertips became liquid as water and everything changed again.

  Chapter Four

  The police left Chris locked in the interview room for an hour, staring at blank institutional green walls, and a small square of window high up on the northern wall, against which rain slanted with a tick, tick, tick as if to emphasise the fact there was no other clock in the room. No doubt they intended to install a general terror, summon up guilt and nerves and destabilise him. It worked.

  Chris picked at his cuffs, paced to the door and back, tried the handle at least fifteen times and tried not to mutter under his breath. A little black eye in the corner showed a red light, where the camera recorded his every movement. He tried to think back to what he’d been taught about resisting German interrogation, but those lessons seemed terribly long ago, in a remote and vanished world. How much time was passing in Faerie while he cooled his heels in here? How much longer would they be?

  Long after he had abandoned hope, the door opened and two men came through. Not his policemen of earlier, these were higher-ups, plain-clothes. An older man so thin you could have used him for a scythe and a younger, already going slightly to fat, with a plump, pleasant face and a pair of girlish lips that undermined his stern expression. The younger man propped himself by the door, brought out a notepad. The older sat down across the table from Chris and steepled his hands like Mr. Spock from Star Trek.

  “Mr. Gatrell?” He looked at his watch. “Interview begins at 22.21, Monday 17th of August.” He smiled, rather like a cheese wire being drawn through a piece of Stilton. “We have to say that for the tape. All right then.” When he nodded, his silent partner placed the bagged contents of Chris’s pockets on the table and looked at him as though Chris should somehow be shocked.

  “Are these your belongings, Mr. Gatrell?”

  “The wallet and keys are mine. That one’s my phone. That one…” Oh. As he looked at Ben’s phone, covered in soil and blood, found in his pocket, a kind of creeping feeling came over him, like stepping in a pool and feeling, from the slow upwards drench of cold, that there’s a hole in your shoe and the water’s getting in. A chill rose up from his belly and touched his chest and throat. “That one is Ben’s.”

  “That would be Mr. Ben Chaudhry of Castle Road, Bakewell?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you like to explain how you came to be carrying Mr. Chaudhry’s phone? I should tell you that forensics are running a check on the blood as we speak. Yours, is it? Cut yourself shaving?”

  Chris pressed the knuckle of his index finger to his lips to hold in the automatic rude retort. He tried to weigh up how much of the truth he could tell without appearing to be a dangerous madman. Very little, apparently. “I think you should tell me what I’m being accused of.”

  “I think you should stop wasting our time, Mr. Gatrell. Where did you get the phone?”

  He’d played for time, thought of an answer now—the truth, as far as it went. “Ben phoned me up. He seemed very distressed—asking for help, saying someone was trying to abduct him.” Chris folded his hands in his lap.

  “He didn’t tell me where he was. I presume there’ll be records of the conversation stored on the phone? He was in a state and rang off before I could ask him. So I went to his house. I thought I could hear someone in there, but they weren’t answering me. I was concerned for his safety, so I let myself in.”

  “Broke in.”

  “I would have had his permission, if I’d been able to ask. I thought he was being attacked. But yes. Broke in, if you like.”

  “We have that part on camera,” commented the younger man, looking up from his notes. “Mr. Chaudhry was a security-conscious man, wasn’t he? Never seen a bloke with CCTV in his house before.”

  “As I said, he was afraid there was someone out to get him. He installed the cameras quite recently, to protect himself, or to at least catch evidence.”

  “Which they seem to have succeeded in very well.” The older man wore a nametag. DI Carter. His suit was sha
bby Marks and Sparks polyester, gone shiny at the cuffs. His eyes were blue but gave the impression of colourlessness, not giving anything away.

  “You’ll have seen me come in, find out that the noises I thought were conversation were in fact the radio, have a drink and go out again.” The queasy sensation in Chris’s stomach settled a little as he ran through his story and found it good.

  “After that, I called at Stan’s house. Stan Grimshore, that is. He’s a technical wizz-kid—”

  “Aged fifteen.”

  “Yes.” Chris fixed the man with a firm gaze. “Yes, he’s fifteen. He does some after-school work for me, building electronic devices. I thought he might have a way of tracing Ben’s phone.”

  The door opened again, and a woman police constable came in, carrying a tray full of mugs of tea. There was one for him, and he drank it gratefully. Maybe he shouldn’t have been braced for Gestapo-level unpleasantness after all. “And he did. We took the machine, got in the car and tracked Ben’s phone down to the Nine Ladies. There’d been…”

  The tea made a bid to come back up as he remembered the handprint, the tramlines of desperate claw marks in the soil, and the hole in the hillside. “There’d been a struggle of some kind. I found the phone under the hill, put it in my pocket without thinking. Then, because I didn’t know what to do next, I drove home, and your people met me there.”

  “The Nine Ladies?” DI Carter nodded at his assistant. “Better get a team down there. See what you can find.”

  He waited for the door to close, the stale air to settle once more in a room as featureless as limbo, then he clasped his hands together again and leaned forward. “These…people…that Mr. Chaudhry was afraid of? Who were they?”

  Dread welled up once more. Reassuring, surely, to think how quick the police were to come to the point. Or it would be, if he could answer. He weighed the possibility of a breaking-and-entry conviction against the certainty of Air Vice-Marshal Henderson’s wrath, and said, “I couldn’t say, sir. That information is classified.”