Last Stand in Lychford

by Paul Cornell

  She knew what it had to be. She slid quickly across the floor again, got to the counter, and pulled out a drawer from underneath, brought it to the ground as silently as she could, because the noises of impact had ceased from the other room and the assassins must be trying to work out where she was.

  Why hadn’t they come straight in through the door?

  Because they were being cautious. They must think she had some way of hurting them. Well, she wished she knew what they were worried about. But in the meantime . . . her hands found the emergency tea bags.

  She ripped them open, threw the leaves onto the floor, and made them into a protective pattern that matched the intensity of her emotion and the flavour of the being she’d called up, this gorgeous Judith who had none of the awkward side to her that . . .

  No.

  Autumn made a tiny adjustment to her pattern, to her thoughts, and to the words she’d started whispering again. There couldn’t be any lies in this fond device. “Judith, you tough old bat, bring protection to us now. You never really told us, but I know you loved us, and we love you now. By the power of all you were to us, Judith—”

  She heard the door open. She could feel who it was without having to chance looking. Killers. Intent and calm. They were taking a risk now. Or maybe wondering if they’d brought their prey down. They felt like something out of a story, in a way which she’d never felt about Finn. There was something . . . dreamlike about them. But also they were death that would be upon her in a second.

  If she wasn’t a badass witch. “Get out of my house!” she bellowed. And she completed the pattern in shape and sound and thought as she did so.

  The door slammed shut, and she felt two beings go flying. They landed too far away for her to sense. Maybe all the way out of this world. Maybe not.

  Autumn leapt to her feet, made herself take a moment to thank Judith, then went straight to Lizzie and started to make her comfortable. There wasn’t much point in dialing 999. The paramedics wouldn’t get through the wall. And even if the local first responders got here, there wouldn’t be much they could do for Lizzie. No, that was going to be down to Autumn, and whatever she could find out about the blue stuff in that arrow.

  * * *

  Lizzie woke up.

  She wasn’t in Autumn’s shop anymore. Oh God. She had opened her eyes and she was somewhere completely different. She had woken up from her life. Did that mean she was dead?

  She sat up and looked around. She was in an oddly simple space, a black void that had . . . angular areas, places of light and shade, as if she was in a dense forest of shapes that went not up and down like trees, but in all directions.

  She got to her feet and found that gravity wasn’t exactly where she expected it to be. She stumbled, nearly fell, managed to right herself at what felt like a new angle from where she’d been lying. Her eyes were adjusting now. The shapes around her were getting better defined. She reached out and touched one of them. The black surface stretched high off above her, lost in darkness, and also somehow below her as well. It fell like there were precipices all around.

  Shit. What was this place?

  She took some hesitant steps forward, wary of falling, but found, somehow, a surface all around her. What were her extra senses saying? That they couldn’t offer her any more help than her regular ones could. This place felt very dull to them, very empty. Oh. If hell was being kept from the presence of God . . . no, she mustn’t think like that. If this was hell, it was at least at body temperature, she wasn’t in pain, she could breathe, and the air smelled like . . . no, she had no point of reference for whatever that smell was. That frightened her in a way she’d never experienced before. So there were even new experiences to be had.

  There was a vague light ahead. She came to some sort of gap and realised she was looking at something she recognised.

  She was looking down on Lychford. It was night down there. No, it was something like night. None of the buildings had lights on. However, something dark and oppressive lay on the town, something unnatural. This was the other sort of darkness. The sort she’d always denied the existence of, as a vicar, and didn’t quite believe the hype of now. The darkness that gave the word “dark” a bad name. Because all sorts of things that were dark, including the night, including people, were natural and good.

  “Good afternoon,” said David Cummings, stepping out of nowhere to stand beside her.

  * * *

  Zoya Boyko lived at 19 John Whittingham Road, which landlord Mitch said he’d got cheap, because of the address. Zoya shared his pain. She was sure she only got half of her mail. She was always missing official letters about Jas. She’d only learned about this problem from the neighbours after she’d moved in. John Whittingham Road had been named after a beloved town mayor. Except the county council had got his name wrong. It was actually “Wittingham” without the first “h.” But by the time John Wittingham himself had noticed and complained, the signs had gone up, the budget spent. So John Whittingham Road, spelled wrong, had become a thing. But the county council had then felt that this might be a bad look for them come election time, or that was how the neighbours had put it, so when the next phase of building had started, a few months later, the council had had another ceremony, in an entirely different location, and had unveiled John Wittingham Road, correctly spelled. John Wittingham Road was placed on the other side of town from John Whittingham Road, which the county council had probably thought would help avoid confusion, but that meant in practice that visitors who’d picked the wrong one still had quite a walk ahead of them and that post office and delivery people didn’t hedge their bets and try both addresses. The post office in the marketplace had special pigeonholes set aside for all those affected, including one for Zoya and one for those who lived at the other address. Zoya was always saying she should go and talk to whoever that was, but had never had the time to do so. To add insult to injury, even the postcodes were only one digit apart.

  This was where Zoya had found herself in England, in a deluded town in a flat she couldn’t afford in a street named after nobody. Now she went quickly inside, changed out of her work uniform, and left again in the direction of the school. The streets were still remarkably deserted. She’d taken a look on her phone at the town’s Facebook group. Everyone was so scared of “them” who were “coming.” Just the same as always, then, for English people. This lot must think all their worst tabloid fears were coming true.

  As she passed one house, she saw a curtain twitching violently. The old lady inside was gesturing at her to get indoors.

  Zoya waved back. “Hello, mad granny!” She wanted to call something rather ruder, but this had been a nice impulse on the part of the lady, deluded as she was. However, Zoya was not going to be lured into shared cuckoo land. She was going to get her daughter, thank you very much.

  What did her mother’s books say about situations like this? They were odd books, full of wisdom, a sort of philosophical system that Zoya hadn’t even begun to categorise. Ah yes. “You will see the line to your objective. You will read the map when others are lost in it. You will end up where you need to be.”

  Well, that sort of applied. So many things in those books sort of applied. Lychford had, just sometimes, when she’d had a few moments to go and walk in the woods, felt like where she was supposed to be. Then the love she’d felt so distantly seemed to make sense. The trouble was, it had this awkward, conflicted, angular modern British town on top of it, getting in the way.

  Zoya saw several other curtains twitching as she marched past. She ignored them as she always had.

  * * *

  Lizzie had managed to control her breathing and had turned to look at David Cummings. This “man” was a supernatural being of some kind, who she’d initially encountered when she’d first got involved with Autumn’s shop. He’d been posing then as the representative of a supermarket chain. He still wore the same business suit. Back then, Lizzie had denied him his victory and exiled him from
her church by burning an enormous sum of money, something that, now the whole town knew about magic, Lizzie had been absurdly worried about her treasurer discovering.

  “I’ve got nothing to say to you,” she said. She was sure he was here, wherever this was, to interrogate her. Or if this was hell, then he was here as the thing she least wanted to meet. If he did ask questions, she decided, she wasn’t going to answer with anything useful. That attitude might give her a shot at not quite revealing how terrified she was of him.

  “I’m quite surprised to see you up and about,” he said. Which not only ignored what she’d said but made no sense. “Why are you awake?”

  “Am I . . . not meant to be?” And now she’d engaged with him, damn it.

  “I suppose you’re the first human we’ve tried this on.” He took a few steps nearer to the vision of Lychford and seemed to peer down into it. “Wow. You’re out cold down there instead. Not what we expected at all. Still, this is fine. We’ve got you here, at least.”

  “Where is this?”

  “Do you like it?” Cummings gestured around him. “All my own work. They say the sign of something is the thing itself. But that’s a human idea that’s crept into magic. A lot of the people on my side don’t credit stuff like that. They don’t like to think we’ve been polluted by you. But we have been. That will all be over soon, though, of course.”

  “Not going to happen.” Could she feel her usual sense of the presence of God in the world, even here? She wasn’t sure. It was the most subtle of flavours at the best of times.

  “I mention that because this place is definitely the sign of something. But it’s easy to see that it isn’t a thing itself. I made it to look like nothing much at all. Deliberately. Because fuck all these worlds of yours with all their fucking clutter.”

  “Charming as ever. You still talk like you own the place.”

  “In this case, I really do.”

  “But I always had the feeling you were the monkey, not the organ grinder.”

  “Oh, I’ve ground a few organs. Nothing? Not even a little smile? Come on, it wouldn’t kill you, would it?”

  “You tell me.” She had the wonderful feeling she was actually getting under his skin, by the simple method of treating everything he said like a trap. Or was that sense of power on her part the actual trap? Was he hoping that she’d get overconfident and start talking? What did she even have to reveal?

  He stepped closer to her and reached out to put his hand on her face. She did her best not to flinch. It felt exactly like a human hand. “Disruption is the most important thing. You take the rules, and you rip them up, and in ripping them up, you show everyone that the so-called rules are just polite conventions, just manners. After you rip them up you can create your own manners, your own rules. If you want to.”

  “You really took onboard what you heard at all those human business seminars. What would stop anyone else ripping those new rules up? How is this not just a chain reaction of . . . wrongness?”

  “Oh, you would think it’s wrong. It’s your reality we’re about to rip up.”

  “Nope.”

  “What do you mean ‘nope’?”

  Lizzie had thought of something to say that might get him to reveal even more about what was going on. “I’m safe at home in bed. This isn’t real. It’s just a nightmare.”

  He slapped her across the face.

  The blow was so hard she fell to the ground. Before she could even cry out, he’d stepped forward to stand above her, shouting. “No, you are not fucking dreaming! This is more real than anything you have experienced in your pitiful life, you fucking deluded cow!”

  Lizzie slowly hauled herself back on to her feet. She made herself say words through her bruised lips. “I’m not afraid of you. You can get behind me.”

  “I’m only a representative, not the boss. But my boss isn’t Satan. Or he only is because you all said he was.”

  “Really?” Lizzie tried hard to sound like she didn’t believe him.

  “Millions of years ago, he made a mistake, that’s all. He tried to work with the underpinnings of all existence. And it’s not like there was a higher authority to judge him, as your tales say, because of course you’ve all heard about this and jumped to the wrong conclusions. This was just an accident. But what he did . . . created this extra world—this extra universe, to use your word for it—which you all came to inhabit.”

  Lizzie didn’t, of course, believe the creation stories of the Bible to be the literal truth. She did, however, believe that God had been responsible for the creation of the universe, probably through all the fine detail that Professor Brian Cox liked to describe on TV. “They used to give Lucifer credit for giving humanity knowledge or fire. Now he’s bigged himself up to the point of creating the universe. When what you’re actually talking about is the Fall.”

  “Reality is nothing like your stories.”

  “Would your boss even know, seriously, if there was anyone above him? Or does he know there is, and is still scared of the managing director? Hence all the lies.”

  Cummings seemed to decide to ignore this new tack of hers entirely. Which Lizzie found both indicative and pleasing. “We of all the original worlds, all of whom knew of each other, all of whom had been mucking along together without any big bangs or anything like that, forever, were quite surprised, following the boss’s accident, that now there was an extra world, with a weird new sort of time in it that we couldn’t really get our heads around. But okay, we thought, more stuff, great. However, by the time we started to colonise the place, there you all were, evolving, with your science, and all your other shitty ideas.”

  “Still not nodding along. But do go on.”

  “And by the time we’d got our heads around that, because of this weird time of yours, you were full-on established and had made pets of the fairies, and then you suddenly had nuclear weapons and plagues and stuff and woah, the boss woke up from where he lies underneath all things and started thinking it was time to tidy up this error, to reel it all back into the mainstream. Hence today.”

  “What?”

  “You’re all going to finally meet the big man from head office. And you’ll find he’s terribly persuasive.”

  * * *

  Autumn had decanted the blue liquid from the arrows into several beakers and was now trying to work out what she could do to test it. Damn it, she was only just starting to learn how to apply science to this stuff. This was a poison, right? So it had to be biologically active. So how did you test that? She had no internet to look it up on.

  As she was stirring one of the beakers, trying to think, something also stirred in her coat pocket. Her extra senses were feeling something. She took out the thing wrapped in newspaper that Judith had sent to Sunil. She could see it pulsing. It wasn’t just emanating the potential for life now but also . . . need. She held it closer to the beaker. The need increased. If it could move, it would have moved toward the liquid that had been shot into Lizzie.

  That was weird. Why did this thing want poison? Was it part of some evil creature? Why would Judith have given that to Sunil? Why would she have given anything magical to Sunil, rather than to them?

  She had nothing else to work with. She didn’t want to cut this thing up, in case integrity was important for whatever it did. She took a dripper, sucked up a tiny sample of the liquid, and dripped it on the organ. The flesh visibly grew newer, more like something that should be inside a living body. This . . . poison . . . was feeding whatever this was. Like this was the blood it was used to being supplied with.

  Why would an enemy try to inject them with another creature’s blood?

  Okay, all in or not?

  She decided. She poured the whole beaker over the organ, then grabbed another one. The meat started to pulse with life. She could actually see it growing now. She emptied the next beaker. She only had three left. Should she use them? What was it growing into?

  To her amazement, as she watched, the organ
started to grow vestigial arms . . . and then a head. Oh God, this was all getting a bit John Carpenter.

  Which was when the shop bell rang, urgently, insistently, as if the person ringing it was being chased by something.

  And she’d left Lizzie in the shop, on two chairs shoved together, covered by a blanket.

  She put down the remaining beakers and ran to the door.

  She immediately saw that outside stood Luke. She let him in.

  “What’s going on?” he said. “Are you all right?” Then he looked to where Lizzie lay, and his expression grew even more concerned. “Shit. Is she okay?”

  So she told him the details of what he’d heard already as garbled rumour. As she did so, she became aware of a sound coming from the back room. A sort of . . . mewling. “Oh dear,” she said.

  “You’ve got . . . something in there, right? Again.” He’d put a hand over his crotch, Autumn realised, obviously remembering what had happened last time. He saw her looking and moved it away again. “If so, I’m once again here to put my groin between you and danger.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” said Autumn. She went to the inner door and hesitantly opened it. Luke, even more hesitantly, followed.

  Something was lying on the table, something that looked vaguely like a human body. As Autumn and Luke watched, it reached out a thin, half-formed bundle of spindly fingers, grabbed the next beaker full of blue liquid, and sat up to drink it. Shape and form pulsed into its body as it did so. It was becoming, every moment, more and more of an adult male. It was looking at them curiously. Not, thankfully, with any aggression. It seemed to be thriving on the very stuff that Autumn had been thinking of as a poison.

  Luke put a hand on Autumn’s shoulder. “Did you . . . make him?”

  Before Autumn could answer, the creature raised a thin finger and pointed it, shaking, toward Luke. “Daddy,” it said.