Last Stand in Lychford

by Paul Cornell

  “You see if you can get through too,” said Mum to Nate.

  Nate nodded and stepped gingerly forward. He reached out a finger toward the barrier.

  “Come on, you great tosser,” said Jake. He grabbed Nate and hauled him through.

  Nate screamed. That was all Jake was aware of in that second. A second later he was coughing, retching, stumbling, waving his arms blindly through a mass of burning debris that was all over him. He could hear his mother screaming too.

  And as Jake slowly realised what had happened, he couldn’t help but begin to cry out with her, to cry out in horror and despair, a sound he’d never heard himself make before.

  The disintegrating mass of charred meat that was falling apart around him had, a moment ago, been his brother.

  * * *

  Zoya didn’t like the way that the reverend was looking. Lizzie had stopped in the street and was staring at the messages she was getting on her phone. “Some people are getting through the wall and some . . . aren’t. Some . . . some really aren’t. Oh my God.”

  Zoya looked over her shoulder and saw a photo she didn’t want Jas to see. “It’s sorting us. Into what? Is it an ethnic thing?”

  “One of two brothers . . . one of them . . . he . . .”

  “Keep it together, Reverend. We need you to—”

  “Call me Lizzie. Why can’t you call me Lizzie?”

  “It’s a sign of respect.”

  “But you don’t feel that respect. You just think you should. And that’s not the sort of respect I want, and you’re obviously going to be someone important in all this and you were able to thump David Cummings. So. Call me Lizzie.”

  She’d only looked at her for the last part of that. Zoya realised that here was someone who’d also had to deal with quite some shit. And who had a shitload more on her shoulders right now. And who had a vibe about her that said there was something going on with her that she was still keeping inside. “Sorry,” she said. “Call me Zoya.”

  “Like the Sorting Hat,” said Jas.

  “Yes, like that,” said Zoya, looking to her. She looked back to Lizzie. “Only more dangerous.”

  “Well, the Sorting Hat was dangerous, sociologically—”

  Luke loudly cleared his throat. “Is it time for that, do you reckon?”

  Lizzie seemed to realise what she was saying and that her next words probably should be “in this essay I will” and visibly shut that shit down. “Sorry. Yes. It can’t be genetic if it’s one of two brothers. It must be something about the people. Something about their minds.”

  * * *

  Autumn was digging deep. Literally and metaphorically at the same time. She was working the spade down through top soil, then through packed, dense earth, then into hardened tree roots. She kept going, though she could feel the sound of crashing trees getting nearer and nearer.

  How would she know when she’d gone deep enough? Oh God, she wouldn’t. The effect of the wall seemed physical. It couldn’t be heaving soil and bedrock along down there, but it was definitely shoving small plants along in front of it, disintegrating them too. So it was being somehow selective. Maybe interrogating living things like plants as it went and easing its way through soil and stone. Like the arrows through the walls had been selective about the kinds of materials they could pass through. God, she was finding technological similarities in what the fairies would call “magic.” Even if the laws of physics differed across the various lands next door to Lychford, she was still assuming that scientific principles, different versions of science, but still all based in rationality, applied throughout. That was what they’d found so far. Lizzie liked to say that Autumn had faith in the scientific method, but Autumn felt that if she encountered proof that this wasn’t the case, some completely mixed-up world where no laws at all applied, or they varied moment to moment . . . anyway, Autumn knew she’d change her opinion when she encountered the evidence. To believe in and reach for the beyond was Lizzie’s thing, and it suited her and was beautiful for her, an opinion of Autumn’s which she didn’t think Lizzie had ever quite believed she held. To ask the beyond some serious questions was Autumn’s thing.

  She was still digging while she was thinking, and she realised she’d got distracted. The sound and the feeling were looming above her now. The wall was right beside the hole. She still had a moment in which she could scramble out and run.

  No. She had to go for it. Or she’d just have to dig another hole. She was pretty sure this one was deep enough. Pretty sure.

  She flung herself flat, then spun, to be face up, because if she was going to get squashed, she didn’t want it to happen arse-first. For some reason.

  Then it was too late. She felt the great presence of the wall slide . . . oh God, it was touching her brow. She hadn’t dug down far enough. She frantically tried to push herself back down into the soil as she felt something like a solid edge start to push into her scalp. Before she knew it it was past her eyeline. Sitting up now wouldn’t be possible. And the back of her skull was flat against solid ground. But her nose was in the way of this thing. She couldn’t turn sideways. The wall was shoved down too tight against her scalp. She couldn’t help but reflexively try to scrabble and squeeze like a trapped animal to try to get out from under it, as it pushed hard at the bridge of her nose. There was a fizzing sense to it, an ozone hiss in her extra senses, as the wall seemed to make awful decisions about every particle of matter it encountered, and she was one of those particles, a small animal before this alien science that thought of itself as ancient and magical and important.

  Oh God, the pressure was increasing. Was she going to lose her nose? She tried to get herself under control. Then she’d just have to take the pain. There wouldn’t be too much blood, would there? Were there major arteries there? She hoped this thing would push down her breasts or she could squeeze under it or something.

  She realised, as the pressure continued, that actually . . . was it . . . inside her nose now?

  Yeah. The fizzing was inside her nose. She really wanted to sneeze. She held it in.

  It was passing through her nose, harmlessly. And what was this feeling that went with it, something she’d actually felt from a few feet away from the thing, but hadn’t interrogated at the time, the sensation that . . . it welcomed her? Approved of her, even? What the hell was that? A second later, it was out the other side of her nose. She panted with relief. She felt the wall slide past her chin and raised her head a little. She gritted her teeth and let it slide through her boobs, very much not appreciating the feeling of being judged at the molecular level, thank you, even if—no, especially if—the verdict were positive. Then she had the muscles of her shoulders free to work with and started slowly to pull herself back. And as it moved on, she could pull herself up, and finally out.

  Autumn stood at the side of the hole she’d dug, gasping, on the other side of the wall. That thing had allowed her through. What was that about? She had no idea, and no time to interrogate the concepts. She looked back for only a moment more, then turned and started up the hill toward the land of fairy.

  4

  LIZZIE, IN HER URGENT series of phone calls, had told everyone to come to the marketplace, which was just down from the church, and so still pretty central. She’d told those she called to spread the word. Luke and Zoya had joined in by alerting all their contacts too. She was startled, however, when they turned the corner out of the lane, to see how many had got here. The area just south of the church was filling up with desperate-looking people, a lot of them with young families. And yet, given how big Lychford really was, with all the new builds and everything . . . oh God, had they really lost that many? There weren’t many of those she’d met through her adventures with Autumn either. A couple from the Festival committee, a reasonable number from the W.I. Not so many from the pubs.

  The crowd were by no means happy. There were loud voices and arguments, and when she’d appeared, she was sure she’d heard some ironic applause and eve
n some boos. They’d gotten to that now? What, did they think this was her fault?

  “A lot of noisy people,” said Zoya, picking Jas up.

  Lizzie saw Sue, her elderly church warden, making her way through the masses toward her. “Loads of people are getting through the wall,” said Sue when she got to Lizzie. “My grandson Max saw one of his mates fall through it, and he was okay, and so he went through too. They’re all texting their friends before they go through, saying who’s gone before they did, because they know they won’t be able to after. And once they’re through, they can’t get back in, it’s just like a real wall from the other side. Except still invisible, you know what I mean. If you go up to the wall carefully, they’re saying you get a sort of feeling about whether it’s dangerous or not, but they’ve . . .” Lizzie realised the woman was trying not to cry. “A few of them have thought they’d be fine and . . .”

  “So most people get through?” said Luke.

  “Don’t you start thinking like that,” blurted out Sue. “Even if most do, there’s a lot who don’t, a lot!”

  “It’s okay,” said Lizzie. “We’re not going to try. It just explains why we’re not packed in here.”

  “And,” said Sue, “it’s because the wall has stopped moving.”

  “What? Why would it do that?”

  “You’re the expert,” said Sue. And Lizzie felt the slight criticism in her tone. “Are you going to hold some sort of service?”

  “I . . . I don’t think that’s appropriate,” said Lizzie, looking out at the crowd. Lots of her flock were indeed here, but this lot also included not just a large number of people she never saw in church, but also people of other faiths, like Sunil Mehra and that young woman with the market stall who’d once told Lizzie she was a chaos magician and seemed to want to start a fight every time she saw her. Lizzie hadn’t actually encountered her since the realities of magic had been revealed to the whole community, and she’d had fantasies about trying not to be smug in her presence, but seeing her over there now, her mascara running from sobbing, felt specifically hard to bear. Which was surely a little note from God about that proposed smugness on her own part. She was really doing pretty badly right now in terms of honesty and not being angry and all the other things she was supposed to try harder with. Things were coming at her so fast . . . but no, she had to do better, that was all there was to it. If she dealt with her own failings, then other people’s attitude toward her might get better too. Maybe. “I could do some sort of multifaith thing, but I think just all staying together and sharing what’s happening would be more comfortable.”

  “Phew,” said Zoya.

  “Don’t be mean, Mummy,” said Jas.

  “I like you,” said Lizzie to the child, getting just a stoic nod in return. She turned back to Sue. “Okay, let’s find some way we can address this crowd. And find out why this lot don’t think they’d make it through the wall.”

  * * *

  Autumn had found the gateway to fairy, and it was in a sorry state. It stood past the point she’d come to regard as the edge of fairy territory, a little way in from the edge of the feeling of being off the beaten track and in someone else’s property. She’d passed the ancient sign that indicated that roads other than those that appeared on maps were available. She could feel the well in the woods somewhere behind her.

  The gateway was a series of strings of flowers that garlanded two trees, an oak and an ash. They hung between the branches to provide a rough entranceway. Autumn had worried about this place as a strategic point, that it’d be guarded, but she couldn’t see any sign of that. The sense of the place was that it had been left to decay, the flowers now dry and lifeless, the strings thin. Maybe it was more of a custom to pass through here than a matter of geography. If she’d walked past rather than through, she felt she’d still get to fairy.

  When she’d come through here as a young woman, she’d been blissed out of her mind. She’d been holding Finn’s hand. She’d been full of illusions. And other stuff. In all sorts of ways she’d believed in magic. The fear she’d started to feel on the other side, the sense of being lost, the terror at seeing Finn’s father . . . that was where her doubt had started. She’d kept the good part of that doubt, made it her strength, even after she’d realised the experience had been utterly real.

  She was a different person now. She could do this.

  She didn’t pause, didn’t mark the moment, just started walking, and went straight through the gateway.

  * * *

  Lizzie had decided to get onto the steps of the war memorial. She managed to get a reasonable amount of quiet, and she’d been trained in projecting her voice, but she could have done with a megaphone, or even her church’s old P.A. system for what was looking like it could be a moment straight out of Life of Brian. “Okay,” she called, “how many of you have approached the wall and felt you couldn’t get through it?”

  Loads of hands went up. Most of them.

  “I think those who haven’t had a go should try,” said Lizzie. There was a buzz of consternation. “I don’t mean you should take any risks. If you don’t feel anything from the wall, then don’t approach it.” There was a lot of shouting in response. Lizzie managed to gather from people yelling over each other that several townsfolk had thought they got the feeling from the wall that they could pass through and paid for it. “Okay, so . . . so . . .” She looked over to where Zoya was holding Jas. The young woman had an expression on her face like she didn’t know why Lizzie was even trying to talk to them. Luke was looking worried, like he thought this might all kick off in a second. She looked back to the crowd.

  “All I’m saying is we should get as many people out as possible. Okay?” She was pleased to see a few of them heading off, acting on the advice she’d just given, advice she wasn’t even sure of. The ones departing seemed generally more . . . youthful, more the age group you’d see working in the supermarket or standing in the shelter by the skate ramp in the park. Though, amongst them, she’d seen, to her surprise, Sunil moving at quite some speed. Those left here, those who’d come here, a lot of them were . . . the old and the very young. That demographic was so familiar to Lizzie that it had taken her until now to realise that it was odd that they were the ones gathered here. These people fit the categories of those more likely to be churchgoers. And as she’d noticed, most of the actual churchgoers were indeed here.

  So, reaching out with her extra senses now, concentrating on the difference in emotional texture between those leaving and those staying . . . and being aware all the while that they were waiting for her to say something instead of staring at them in weird silence . . .

  Oh.

  “Hands up,” she said, loudly now, a lot more confident, “if you strongly believe in something. A religion, a political party . . .‘chaos magic,’ anything beyond your friends and family.”

  Nearly all the hands went up. The members of the crowd looked at each other, now with a new worry to contend with but, thankfully, slightly more impressed with her.

  “It’s believers,” said Zoya, having moved close enough to be heard from near the foot of the war memorial. “They’ve trapped all the believers. But didn’t that rain make believers of you all?”

  “Not so much. Autumn still thinks it’s all about science we don’t understand yet. Which . . . shit, if she tried, she’ll have got through the wall.” And this, she realised, was why they’d been allowed to keep their mobile phone signals. They’d needed to be able to talk to each other to gather like this.

  “Reverend!”

  Lizzie realised that was about her swearing. Which . . . okay, there was a child present. “Sorry. But shut up. Listen, now we know that, you should get out. Get away from here.”

  “Not without Jas,” Zoya said calmly.

  “Does she—?”

  “Who’s coming to visit at Christmas?” Zoya asked her daughter.

  “Father Christmas,” said the little girl.

  “And who
comes when you lose a tooth?”

  “The Tooth Fairy.”

  Lizzie looked back to see all the other small children still in the crowd and nearly swore out loud.

  * * *

  The land of fairy had changed a lot. Autumn took one slow step after another, feeling as if every single thing might hurt her. There was a startling sense of unreality about the woods that, from what she recalled of her first time here, hadn’t been a feature before. Sure, that experience had been dreamlike, but it had felt sensual, like the land had reached out and connected with her. It had been a bit like how her extra senses functioned now. But at the same time it had been its own thing. Now, though . . . this felt more like . . . a computer game. A violent, churning computer game where the landscape was rushing and reforming around her, threatening to break down completely at any moment. This felt dangerously close to being that cosmos she’d worried about where physical laws were unreliable. Behind her she could still see trees, but they were stretched, distorted. Ahead, the trees became like something in an impressionist painting. She got the feeling that soon they’d be just colours. The air seemed to be howling in her ears, without there being any wind, and the timbre of that howling changed depending on which way she turned. And the smell now, it wasn’t more woodland than woodland, as she remembered from last time, it was more like . . . fire, industrial smoke . . . brimstone. That was surely not about hellfire, but more about . . . decay, maybe? Like rust? Was she smelling the decay of an entire reality? It was like Trill had said about belief underpinning these other realities, of something to do with minds being the machine code of other universes. Maybe not her own? Well, some of the discoveries of quantum physics, about how perception seemed to be important to reality—

  She realised she was breathing too fast, that her mind had shied away into speculation because she was fundamentally not dealing with what was in front of her. Okay, okay, what could she rely on? She looked at her watch and watched seconds go past and timed her own heartbeat, which helped to calm her too. Right. Time seemed to be flowing at the same rate here as it did in her own world. Expectations to the contrary, that had always been the case for fairy. Individual fairies talked about time passing fast in the human world, but that was maybe more about their perceptions than about physics. Or if that was a change, it was one that would suit the enemy, because having time flow at the same speed everywhere was probably necessary if you were planning to mount an assault on several different planes of existence at once.