Moonlands

by Steven Savile

  She didn't need to turn the light on; the rising moon did a good job of banishing the shadows around the snooker table, though the landscape of the room was all knuckles and ridges and dark corners. Some boxes were stacked against the wall, still unpacked. The eerie blue light of the clock on the cd player blinked 3am. It wasn't 3am. Her dad never got around to setting the time on the clocks. The one in the bathroom was about four hours off, while the one in his study three hours the other way. It was as though the house on Curzon Street existed in multiple time zones. Actually, in his study, Daniel Hawthorne had one of those dual-time clocks that showed the time in Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York, London, Sao Paulo and Moscow. Only the time for Sao Paulo was wrong. The others were right down to the second, but the Brazilian clock seemed to be set to a time zone all of its own.

  Ashley crept over to the window.

  The latch was the same as the one in her bedroom, but before she unscrewed the little brass knob to unlock it, she lifted the goggles from around her neck and scanned the moonlit rooftops. Twice she caught a glimpse of what might have been man-shaped shadows seeming to move towards her, but studying them more closely revealed them as no more than tricks of the light and odd chimney-shapes. Satisfied none of the Coribrae had taken up perches to watch this side of the house, she worked the latch and opened the window. Ashley winced at the sound the wood made grating in the frame. Surely it was loud enough to be heard downstairs?

  She held her breath and waited, but no one came running.

  Leaving the window open on the cold was more likely to give her away.

  She clambered through the open window onto the fire escape, then did her best to close it behind her again, knowing there'd be a tell-tale gap, but there was nothing she could do about it. She clattered down the iron stairs taking them two and three at a time as she rushed towards the ground. The rain made them treacherous. She slipped twice but didn't slow down.

  At the bottom Ashley looked left and right, then sprinted across the inner courtyard to the back gate. The rain was that heavy that halfway across the courtyard her hair was matted flat to her head. There were a dozen windows overlooking the courtyard, some from the apartments that had once been the servant's quarters, others from the main house itself. Lights were on in several of them. She could see people moving about inside, but was counting on the reflections on the inside of the windows to keep her invisible long enough to get out of the gate and away.

  As she wrestled with the bolt Ashley saw her mother through the window. Meghan was bustling around the kitchen, making a pot of tea. That was so her, Ashley thought, grinning, and so typically English. When everything started to go wrong, keep calm and carry on. A nice cup of tea cured everything. She stood by the gate watching Meghan for a full minute, realising that this might be the last time she ever saw her mum again—and no matter what they said, she was her mum in every way that counted.

  With a lump in her throat Ashley closed the gate behind her.

  She ran down the alleyway onto the road that looped around the Market Mews onto Hyde Park. Rush hour had long gone, but that didn't stop Park Lane from being hideously congested all the way from Marble Arch down to Hyde Park Corner. A parade of cars that would have shamed an episode of Top Gear drove by. The Curzon Gate wouldn't close until midnight which was still hours away, but the park beyond it was in pitch darkness. She never liked cutting through the park at night, despite the fact that there were usually plenty of people in there, joggers, people walking their dogs, people heading over to the cinema or coming the other way towards Knightsbridge.

  The traffic lights were blinking; broken.

  No one wanted to slow down to let her cross, so Ashley gave up and took the underpass. She looked over her shoulder twice to be sure no one was back there.

  She was alone as she walked down the ramp into the tunnel.

  It stank of urine and sweat. It wasn't a good combination.

  The sound of cars echoed over her head, then disappeared as she entered the underpass, replaced by music.

  There was a homeless man hunched up against one of the walls, a dog curled up at his feet. He played something on the harmonica that Ashley almost recognised; she'd certainly heard it before, but she couldn't place it. The dog watched her curiously as she walked by. Ashley dug around in her bag for a couple of coins and dropped them into his hat.

  "Bless you, love," the harmonica player said, offering her a brown broken-toothed smile.

  "You're really good," Ashley said.

  She had the niggling feeling that she'd seen him before, but couldn't be sure she wasn't just making connections and jumping at shadows because she expected to meet more of those strange visitors Ratko had said were outside.

  She walked on.

  Ashley emerged from the tunnel into fresh air that had never tasted so sweet, which, given the sheer amount of pollutants in it was ironic. Ashley looked behind her to make sure she wasn't being followed, then walked quickly into the park.

  It didn't take long for the traffic sounds to fade away to nothing.

  To the left the lights lit the pathway around The Serpentine, to the right they lit a walkway over the hill to Speaker's Corner and the crush of humanity that still filled Oxford Street. Straight ahead Rotten Row led to the stables and eventually to Albion Gate and Mel's house on the other side.

  Ashley walked into the rain.

  She loved the feel of it on her face.

  For a few minutes, at least, she was able to forget the reason she was out in it and, as she approached the bandstand, simply enjoyed it, dancing a few steps and pretending to be Ginger Rogers in Top Hat. She whistled the melody of Isn't This A Lovely Day.

  Up ahead, she saw a small light flickering in the trees.

  Behind her she heard the muffled the sound of footsteps.

  And she knew immediately that that wasn't Fred Astaire come to dance with her.

  A cold feeling of dread swept over Ashley then, hope slowly leeching out of her.

  FIFTEEN

  Mirror Mirror

  The mirror cracked.

  It was a single sharp sound in the otherwise silent backroom.

  It was a room like no other in the city, a room where the senses did not prevail, where you could not trust your eyes or your nose or ears, a room where touch yielded no sense of feeling, where no meal eaten had ever tasted of anything. It wasn't the room itself that robbed a visitor of their senses, there was nothing remotely remarkable about it; it was its inhabitant. The Nightgaunt. He was the remarkable one.

  The creature worked tirelessly, polishing the brass fittings of each and every gaslight in the old bookstore, working its way down the line one after the other. It dusted the spines of the ancient books it had accumulated in its trove over the years, and took care of the hundreds of artefacts it had hoarded, oiling the mechanisms on the devices and returning them to their places.

  The sound, like a gunshot in a world without sound, demanded its attention. The Nightgaunt looked up, seemingly to sniff the air as though it were the only thing in this world that could smell anything, and glided slowly between the tables to the back of the store. Something was wrong, it knew. Something fundamental. It could taste it in the air. The veil had been drawn back on the Moonlands. It knew who it would find waiting in the mirror when it swept aside the red velvet curtain.

  Its meal was still on the plate, untouched. It couldn't recall the last time it had fed. A year ago? Perhaps. Perhaps longer. It meant so little now. Other things sustained it. Food was an affectation. Part of the pretence at normality, but it was anything but normal.

  It existed in a world where there was nothing, and yet it experienced everything with such stark clarity it would have driven a lesser being mad. Every sensation it absorbed it felt. It saw. It heard with deafening clarity. It tasted fear and need and hunger and desire and everything else that drove the city on. And as its nostrils flared wide, opening dark black holes in the flat oleaginous plane of its face, the Nightg
aunt smelled every foul stink of the world beyond the arcade. Even the most beautiful odours became sickly when you drowned in them. And the Nightgaunt was drowning all the time, every minute of every hour of every day. That was why it hid away in the dark of the bookstore at the farthest part of a quiet shopping arcade where no one ventured anymore. This was where it hid away from both the sun and the moon and closed itself off from the world.

  This was its haven.

  This was its prison.

  This, for so very, very long, had been the entirety of its world.

  There were different kinds of madness, of course. There was the madness of the asylum, of self-harm and the voices of torment inside the head, but there were other more insidious madness's that crept into the brain and body and wormed away at both until there was nothing left that could be trusted, but by then, of course, the afflicted were beyond help.

  Smoke swirled in the flat plane of the mirror. Inside it the Nightgaunt saw the feral snout of the Occulator, Redhart Jax, beginning to take shape. The mirror itself was a spider-web of cracks, the worst of which was a deep fissure running from one corner of the gilt frame to the other. On either side of the crack the Wolfen's eyes were bloodshot, his fangs dripping with the juices of a fresh kill. The string of meat caught between incisors could just as easily have been lamb or boy, it couldn't tell.

  The Nightgaunt said nothing.

  It simply waited, pressing the flat of its hand against the glass to make the connection. Oil dripped slowly down the mirror's surface.

  The Occulator would reveal his need eventually.

  The white curls of smoke began to form the grizzled white muzzle around the Wolfen's jowls.

  "Blackwater Blaze's mission must be considered a failure, I fear," Redhart Jax said, seeing the Nightgaunt in his own mirror. "I do not enjoy failure. Our plans are most delicate. At this stage, one single flaw, one piece that fails to fall into place, could undo years of careful preparation. It pains me, but the balance is precarious and becoming more so as time gets away from us. I am nothing if not fair, but against my better judgment, because of friendship, pack loyalty, I allowed Blackwater Blaze the chance to make amends for his failure and prove his commitment to our cause. After the failure of his pack I should have known he had turned against us. A pack like his does not fail without reason, and though I knew in my heart what that meant I did not want to believe it. Yes," Jax sighed theatrically. "My old friend, the Alpha has been taken in by the girl. He has been turned."

  The Nightgaunt offered a low throaty growl of disbelief.

  "I know. I know. I would never have believed him capable of such infidelity, but I have seen it in every variant of tomorrow that the glass has shown me. He is always there at the side of the bitch. In every tomorrow he stands in our way. I have been too kind. It will not happen again."

  The Nightgaunt issued a low ululating howl from the tear in its face.

  "No. I never imagined it would have to come to this. He was always the best of us; the fiercest, the most loyal. But now that it has, we have no choice, we must act. There can be no room for sentimentality or old friendships. The girl must die, that has not changed. She poses a threat to everything we have worked for. But now that the truth has been revealed to me, I see that the Alpha must die with her. It is regrettable, but then every death should be regrettable, shouldn't it?"

  The Nightgaunt moaned.

  "I couldn't have said it better myself. I need someone that I can trust to finish this. Someone who will not deviate from the task or be dissuaded and succumb to sentiment. Someone who will do what needs to be done. That task falls to you, my old friend. Perhaps then, with the pair of them gone you shall finally know peace? Wouldn't that be something?"

  The Nightgaunt issued another baleful sound, not a whimper, not a scream. It was more tortured than both. It was a lament. It knew that the Occulator harboured no such hope for it. There would be no peace. Not while the Nightgaunt still had its uses. And it was not naïve enough to believe there would ever be a time when there were no more enemies its particular skills would be needed to deal with. That was the nature of its existence, and the reason for it. But what his masters did not understand was the pain that went along with it. How could they? They had never absorbed the hurts of the world in the way it had. They had never experienced the sheer unrelenting weight of grief that sustained the Nightgaunt. Again, how could they? It was unique in its nature. Where they felt only loss, it felt everything. And the first thing it felt, knowing what it had to do, was dread.

  "I trust you will not fail me. To that end, anticipating your success, I shall, with regret, inform Sabras that his Alpha has turned lone wolf and broken the Concord, and that in your role as protector, you were forced to intervene. Yes. Yes." The Nightgaunt could see the malice of Redhart Jax's thoughts burning feverishly behind his eyes. The spider's web of cracks in the mirror broke him into a thousand pieces. Each one of them was filled with hate. "This can still work to our advantage. There will no doubt be much wailing and gnashing of teeth from Sabras. The Wolfen King ever was a sentimental fool, believing in the sanctity of the pack above all else. Blaze's betrayal will hit him hard, both personally and in his standing with the King Under the Moon. Both good things. Yes. But first, the girl must die. I'm giving you the order, cutting you loose. Go out into the world once more. Find her. Kill her."

  The Nightgaunt howled.

  It knew what it must do.

  It had known from the minute Blackwater Blaze had walked into its shop.

  If there was one thing it knew, it was death.

  SIXTEEN

  Lights Out

  Ashley didn't like the dark.

  It wasn't that she was afraid of it, she just didn't like it. It was the curse of an active imagination—or an over-active one, to be more precise. She could imagine all sorts of things lurking just out of sight, in those patches where it was just a little bit darker. And in the dark sounds changed. It was as though the darkness did something to them. Somehow they became unrecognisable for what they were.

  The rain didn't help.

  It wormed down the back of her neck and made her squirm as she hurried through the park.

  Ashley was soaked to the skin.

  She hadn't picked the best night to run away.

  She stuffed her hands in the pockets of her duffel coat and put her head down, trying to hide in the thick hood. The fur tickled her cheeks.

  For a few minutes the muffled sound of the rain was all she could hear.

  Up ahead the small yellow light continued to dance and flicker through the trees. It didn't seem to be getting any closer and the rain showed no sign of easing off.

  The bridle path was muddy beneath her feet now.

  Ashley turned to look behind her, but the hood stopped her from seeing anything because it didn't turn with her.

  She walked a little faster.

  It wasn't as though she'd been cutting through the park all of her life. If she had, that wouldn't have been so bad. She'd have grown used to the sounds of the place. Back at the old house she'd had to walk past a graveyard every night on the way home from school, the old dry stone wall all that separated her from the land of the living and the land of the dead. The first few times she'd run the three hundred metre length of the wall, heart hammering in her chest, breathing hard, fists clenched and eyes almost closed, praying that nothing would rise up out of the graves alongside the wall. And then one night a gravedigger preparing a fresh one for the next day had poked his head up out of the open hole and nearly scared the life out of her. Instead of traumatising Ashley, the shock had made her laugh and cured her of one more fear.

  But Hyde Park was different tonight.

  She couldn't put her finger on what had changed, but something had.

  Ashley hadn't been BFFs with Mel forever, even if it felt like that sometimes. They'd only known each other since the beginning of term, with Mel taking pity on the new girl.

  The first time s
he'd walked along the bridle path at night she'd jumped at every shadow and caught herself turning around at every sound.

  That was the thing; even at night there were so many sounds.

  Ashley watched a young man playing with his dog on the grass, oblivious to the rain. He had a nice smile and lots of band badges on his green parka jacket. He was probably homeless. There was something about him that was mussed and crumpled and worn, but it was the way he played with his dog, a small Yorkshire Terrier, that gave it away. When you had so little, you loved the little you had all the more. The city was filled with homeless people. Some were lucky and spent the nights in Centre Point, others weren't. The dog jumped up and down, barking happily.

  But…

  It wasn't…

  It was yapping away, but she couldn't hear a sound.

  The man slapped at his thighs and grinned, encouraging the dog to jump up again. Ashley assumed he was just too far away for the happy yips to carry to her over the rain. But it made her think, and she realised she couldn't hear the ever-present rumble of traffic outside the park, the engines or that unique sound that their tyres made on the road, either.

  She couldn't hear anything.

  Not people in front of her talking or behind her.

  Not the honking of horns.

  Not the in-and-out in-and-out breathing of the city itself, coming alive at night.

  Not so much as a single breath of her own.

  Not her footsteps.

  Not the wind rustling through the overhanging branches.

  Not the ripples on the surface of the Serpentine when the rain splashed.

  Not even the rain.

  Nothing.

  Ashley stopped then, halfway between streetlights, as far from the light as she could possibly be on this stretch of path.

  She couldn't feel the rain on her upturned face.

  A coldness crept into her bones—now that she could feel.

  Up ahead that faint yellow light bobbed and weaved in the air.