Forever Autumn

by Mark Morris

  The boys thanked him. ‘Is it OK if we have a look round before we come back, Dad, see how things are shaping up?’ Rick asked.

  ‘Yeah, we need to pace ourselves, Mr Pirelli,’ said Scott, palming sweat from his shiny red face, ‘otherwise we’ll be beat by lunchtime.’

  Tony Pirelli grinned. ‘Sure, guys. Take a break. Come back when you’re ready. This isn’t an obligation, you know. Any help you give will be gratefully received.’

  ‘Oh, we’ll be back, Dad. We like helping, don’t we, guys? It’s all part of the fun.’

  Scott and Thad both nodded.

  ‘I wish your brother felt the same way,’ Mr Pirelli said with a frown.

  ‘Maybe Chris’ll be along later,’ said Rick.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Mr Pirelli flatly, ‘maybe.’

  The boys wandered back through the mist-shrouded park, eager to check out how the other preparations were coming along. The red and white striped marquee had been erected a couple of days previously, as had the Halloween Carnival banner over the park entrance.

  The rides were being set up over on the football field, but most of the current action was focused on the stalls radiating out from the central marquee. Each stall fell roughly into one of three categories – games, food and stuff to buy. The games were fun but simple affairs – coconut shy, tombola, hook-a-duck; the food comprised everything from hot dogs and fries to candy and cakes; and the stuff to buy was mainly second-hand or home-made: jewellery, books, T-shirts, and little knick-knacks that you’d pick up because they were cute, then throw in the trash a week later.

  Every year since they had been old enough to help – and Rick’s dad, who was on the town’s Activities Committee had first brought Rick and his friends along to the showground when they were six or seven years old – the boys had ‘walked the walk’ on the morning before the Carnival itself, drinking in the atmosphere, revelling in the anticipation of what was to come.

  This year, though, was kind of different. Maybe it was the mist, but there was a flatness in the air, a sense of… not doom exactly, but foreboding. People seemed edgy, preoccupied. There was none of the usual laughing and joking and good-hearted banter.

  ‘Do you think it’s true what that Doctor guy said?’ Scott asked cautiously.

  Rick and Thad both looked at him. This was the first time any of them had referred to the events of yesterday afternoon, when the weird guy who’d turned up in Harry Ho’s had accompanied them to Rick’s house, only to find the book had gone missing from under Rick’s bed. It wasn’t, Rick told himself, because they’d been avoiding talking about it, it was just that they hadn’t had the chance.

  Now, though, he found his stomach tightening and his shoulders hunching, almost as if he was drawing in his defences. ‘About what?’ he all but snapped.

  Scott glanced around. He lowered his voice as if afraid of being overheard. ‘About the mist? About how it’s our fault?’

  ‘I don’t see how it can be,’ said Thad a little whinily.

  ‘He said it came up out of the hole we dug,’ said Scott, ‘like poisonous gas or something.’

  ‘Who says it’s poisonous?’ said Rick quickly.

  ‘Well, OK, not poisonous then, but… I dunno. It’s not natural, is it?’

  Rick scowled. ‘Yeah, well… what makes this Doctor guy such an expert? I mean, we don’t know anything about him. He seemed pretty crazy to me.’

  ‘I thought he was kind of cool,’ said Thad quietly.

  Rick made an exasperated sound. ‘You think Einstein’s cool.’

  ‘Well, he is,’ said Thad.

  Scott shook his head sadly, as if there was no hope.

  ‘Look,’ said Rick, ‘the guy wanted the book and the book wasn’t there, which pretty much means that this whole situation is out of our hands now, right?’

  He thought briefly about his nightmare (which had somehow seemed more than a nightmare) last night, in which the eyes of his Halloween costume had seemed to glow. But he quickly clamped down on the memory.

  Scott looked as if he wanted to say something more, but was reluctant to do so. Rick wasn’t about to encourage him, but then Thad said, ‘What’s wrong, Scott? You look as though you need the toilet real bad.’

  ‘I heard some weird stuff happened last night,’ Scott blurted.

  ‘Like what?’ said Thad.

  ‘Something happened to Dr Clayton. He had some kind of accident. Something no one seems to want to talk about.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ said Rick. ‘And who told you this?’

  ‘I heard my mom talking to Mrs Fisher on the phone. And she heard it from Mrs Walsh. Apparently, Mrs Walsh says that whatever happened to old man Clayton, she’d never seen anything like it.’

  ‘Is he dead?’ Thad asked, eyes wide behind his spectacles.

  ‘No, he’s in hospital. But no one’s allowed to visit him.’

  ‘Aw, he probably just got drunk and fell over and cracked his stupid head open,’ Rick said, then immediately regretted his use of the word ‘stupid’. Dr Clayton wasn’t stupid, he was just sad. Tragic even.

  ‘From what my mom was saying, it was freakier than that,’ said Scott.

  ‘Yeah? Well, sometimes dumb rumours get spread around that aren’t true. Come on, guys, let’s get that soda.’

  The boys trooped past the stalls to the park entrance, each of them silent now. Rick was scowling, out of sorts. Not even the thought of the fun they’d be having that evening could cheer him up. In fact, there was a part of him that wished the Halloween Carnival wasn’t happening at all, a part of him that would be glad when it was over. They passed beneath the banner at the entrance. A voice hailed them as they did so: ‘Hey, you guys, how’s it going?’

  Rick jumped, at first unable to identify the source of the voice. Then he realised it was coming from above his head and looked up. One of his neighbours, Mr Everson, was at the top of a tall ladder, fixing some coloured lights to one of the wooden stanchions, across which the banner had been hung. Mr Everson was a big, bearded guy with long straggly hair, which flowed from beneath the brim of his Boston Red Sox cap. He had a hammer in his right hand and a bunch of six-inch nails sticking out of the breast pocket of his green and black lumberjack shirt.

  ‘Hey, Mr Everson,’ Rick shouted. ‘We’re just going for a soda. You want one?’

  ‘Mighty kind of you, Rick, but I got myself a flask of coffee right there in my bag. So, you boys going trick-or-treating tonight?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Scott.

  ‘I guess,’ said Rick with rather less enthusiasm.

  ‘Well, you have a good time, y’hear?’

  ‘Yes, sir, we will,’ said Rick. ‘See you later, Mr Everson.’

  The boys turned out of the gate and set off up the road towards old Mr Mackeson’s corner store. Mr Mackeson had a dog that used to scare them with its barking when they were younger, but which was a blind, mangy old thing now, barely able to raise a growl.

  They had gone no more than twenty metres when they heard a cry from behind them, abruptly cut off, and then the clatter of something falling to the ground. The three of them glanced at each other in alarm.

  ‘That’s Mr Everson,’ said Rick.

  They ran back in the direction they had come. Although they had only walked a little way up the road, the park entrance had already been swallowed by mist. After a few seconds, however, it came into sight, and Rick scanned the ground, expecting to see his neighbour lying injured or unconscious, having fallen off his ladder.

  But there was no sign of him. Rick looked up. He wasn’t at the top of his ladder either.

  ‘Where’s he gone?’ asked Scott pointlessly.

  ‘Dunno, but his hammer’s there,’ said Thad, pointing. ‘That must have been what we heard hitting the ground.’

  Rick approached the hammer, mystified. Questions ran through his mind. If Mr Everson had fallen, why wasn’t he here? If it was only his hammer he’d dropped, where was he now? Why hadn’t he picked it up
? Even more disturbingly, why had he cried out? And why had the cry been suddenly cut off?

  He bent and reached for the hammer – and suddenly, as though alerted by his proximity, spidery threads of green light began to flicker around it, to dance up and down its handle and its metal head. Rick snatched his hand back, alarmed.

  ‘Whoa!’ cried Thad. ‘Did you see that?’

  Scott’s eyes were wide with fear. ‘Where is Mr Everson? What’s happened to him?’

  ‘I think he’s been taken,’ said Rick.

  ‘Taken? Taken where?’ bleated Scott.

  But Rick could only look at him with eyes as fearful as Scott’s own and shake his head.

  The Hervoken that had disappeared was gone for maybe thirty seconds. When it returned, unfolding from a bilious mass of glowing energy which formed in the air, it was not alone. It was accompanied by a bearded man in a baseball cap and lumberjack shirt, whose mouth was open in shock. The man staggered forward, as if shoved from behind, his head turning rapidly from left to right as he looked around him. He spotted Martha, and goggled at her in bewilderment. She was only sorry she couldn’t smile or wave or offer him any words of encouragement. Then the man seemed to register his surroundings and Martha saw the shock turn to fear on his face. It was several seconds, however, as though his mind could only handle one thing at a time, before he seemed to notice the Hervoken themselves.

  As soon as he did he yelled out in panic and broke into a stumbling run. He clearly wasn’t running with any particular goal in mind, but merely following his instincts and trying to get as far away as possible from the creatures around him. He had taken only a few steps when the Hervoken leader reached out a hand and sketched an intricate shape in the air. Instantly the man froze in mid-step, held immobile. Martha saw the utter panic on his face and tried to convey calmness to him with her eyes, but he didn’t even look at her.

  The Hervoken leader then drew a circular shape in the air before quickly spreading its taloned fingers in what Martha thought of as the kind of gesture that might be used to describe an explosion. Instantly, threads of green energy looped around the man like shimmering coils of rope and propelled him towards the wall of writhing black roots. To Martha’s horror, the wall suddenly opened up like a huge, toothless mouth and the man disappeared, screaming, inside. The hole closed behind him, like that of a massive predator closing on its prey, and his scream was abruptly cut off. A moment later Martha heard another sound, a sound that – though she remained upright – turned her legs to jelly.

  It was the splintering crunch of bones.

  IT WASN’T LONG before the tunnel widened out, enabling the Doctor to stand up. He brushed off the knees of his suit, stretched, and spat out the torch, which he caught neatly in his right hand. He was intrigued to see that, beyond the spot where the rotting timber cladding petered out, the walls, floor and ceiling appeared to be moving. He shone his torch on them and strolled over. Thick, black vines, knobbly and glistening, were writhing over and around and in between one another, thousands and thousands of them.

  He poked one and it did two things: it flashed briefly with green light and it gave him a mild electric shock.

  ‘Ow,’ he said, and waggled his fingers in the air to get the tingly numbness out of them. He put on his black-rimmed spectacles and examined the vines more closely.

  ‘Kinetic binary fusion,’ he murmured with a soppy grin. ‘That’s beautiful. In an icky, slimy, creepy sort of way.’

  He was about to move on when something happened. First the vines clenched; then they shuddered; then they began to move more quickly. At the same time a renewed surge of green light rippled through them, bathing the tunnel in a virescent shimmer.

  At first the Doctor thought an alarm had been triggered by his prodding the vine. Then he realised what it really was.

  ‘Someone’s happy,’ he said. ‘Had a little feed, have you? A little power boost?’

  The Doctor’s face was grim. Although he had never personally encountered the Hervoken before, he knew exactly what sort of power they used.

  He pressed on, and eventually the tunnel branched out into two tunnels, then three, and then into chambers which sometimes contained as many as six burrow-like exits. He marvelled at the whole tentacular, subterranean system, imagined it stretching the length and breadth of Blackwood Falls, with all the townspeople living on top of it, like tiny parasites on the back of a giant crab. The deeper he went, the less featureless the tunnels became. Nodular growths bulged in greater profusion from the walls and floors, some of which looked like boulders, whilst others resembled twisted columns or lightning-blasted trees.

  Green light was bubbling and burping and flickering all around him now, though even with the boost it had just received the Doctor could tell that the system was barely ticking over. Although he didn’t know his way about, he was following his nose, or rather his tingling skin and itchy teeth, to what he guessed would be the control centre. Etta’s house might be drenched in residual energy because it was bang on top of the bit of Hervoken technology closest to the surface, but the real power, the real heart of the place, lay much deeper.

  It didn’t surprise him that he didn’t encounter any Hervoken on his journey. Theirs was a species based more on the cerebral than the physical. Unlike humans, they didn’t need to scurry about from one place to another; they didn’t need to see and smell and touch and taste and feel everything they came into contact with. They were not an emotionless race, but they were a profoundly insular one, and therefore callous, oblivious to the desires and feelings of others. If they needed to do something that was necessary to their well-being, then they’d do it, no matter who or what might suffer in the process. Even in ancient times, before they were banished, the Hervoken had lived in a different realm, with different values and concerns to most of the rest of the universe.

  It took the Doctor about fifteen minutes to reach the central chamber. As soon as he felt he was getting close, he switched off his torch and put it in his pocket. His teeth were itching unbearably now and he was trying to ignore them. His hair was standing straight up on his head and his skin was sensitive to the touch. The tunnel he was currently walking along was bathed in light that pulsed greener and brighter than anything he had encountered so far. The light came from a vast arched opening at the far end. He crept up to the arch and peeked around the corner.

  He saw a huge space, not quite cathedral-like, but not far off. There was lots of ‘equipment’ in here, though dominant among it was a central dais, attached to the walls on either side by loops of sinewy black vine, and topped by a kind of claw-like tangle of roots. In the middle of the roots nestled what the Doctor guessed was the book that Rick and his friends had dug out from the earth at the base of the tree. Over on the right, standing so motionless that he knew she’d been immobilised, was Martha, looking a bit stressed, but not too worse for wear.

  He took a few moments to observe and admire the Hervoken, drifting dreamily about the place like vast, spindly wraiths. They were magnificent creatures, he thought. Striking and enigmatic.

  Crouching low, he slipped into the chamber and behind a big bulbous black thing growing out of the floor. Although the black thing looked like nothing but a whacking great pile of congealed dung, the Doctor knew it was actually a very sensitive piece of equipment, and he was careful not to touch it. He waited patiently for his moment, then slipped from the ‘dung heap’ across to another black thing that looked like a sort of half-melted bouncy castle. From here he was directly opposite where Martha was standing. He waited until all the Hervoken were facing away from him and then he rose up from behind his hiding place and gave her a little wave.

  She spotted him immediately and he saw her eyes widen a fraction. He guessed she couldn’t react any more than that, which was probably a good thing. It would pretty much have ruined his element of surprise if the Hervoken had caught her gawping at him.

  He grinned and winked, then ducked back out of sigh
t again. He sat for perhaps thirty seconds, thinking hard, and then, as he always did, he came up with an idea. Thinking how glad he was to be an ideas man, even if occasionally they turned out to be rubbish, he rooted in his pockets. Thinking also how glad he was to be a man with well-filled pockets, he eventually found what he was looking for, and held it up with a silent voila!

  It was a safety pin, one of the big old-fashioned kind. The Doctor unfastened it and, without hesitation, jammed the point into the ball of his thumb. Instantly a thick dark bead of blood welled from his punctured skin. Glancing quickly around, the Doctor scuttled from his hiding place over to the wall and smeared the blood onto the nearest writhing vine. He watched in fascination as the vine glowed green and his blood was absorbed. Then he crawled back to his hiding place and started counting.

  He had reached eight when the vine convulsed. The convulsion set off a chain reaction, which radiated outwards in all directions, like ripples on a pond. Within seconds, the entire intricate complex of roots and vines was out of control, thrashing in apparent distress.

  And, as the Doctor had guessed (or at least hoped) they would be, the Hervoken were affected too. They were clutching their heads and weaving from side to side, a mournful crooning emanating from their beanpole bodies.

  The Doctor scrambled to his feet and peered over the top of the bouncy castle thing. On the other side of the chamber, Martha had realised that the Hervoken influence over her had been broken and that she could move again. She stretched and stamped her feet, then took a hesitant step forward. The Doctor ran across the chamber, dodging in and out of the beleaguered Hervoken, and grabbed her hand.

  ‘What did you do?’ she shouted.

  ‘I’ve given the system a touch of indigestion. My blood’s a bit rich for its palate.’

  ‘How long will it last?’

  ‘Not long. We should be making tracks.’

  Hand in hand they ran back across the chamber.

  ‘Like the hair by the way,’ Martha said. ‘Very Sonic the Hedgehog.’