by Ellen Datlow
Terri couldn’t suppress a yelp. Instinctively, she started to back away. The figure continued to advance toward her along the corridor of trees. It was coming quickly, relentlessly. At first it was twenty yards away, now fifteen, now twelve. She continued her backwards retreat, knowing only that it wasn’t the same one she’d seen before.
This one appeared to have been assembled from bin liners stuffed with straw, and bound into a human form with ropes, belts, and harnesses, many of the latter studded with iron spikes. Over that it wore a top hat and a tailcoat, both of which had seen better days. From each of its sleeves protruded a three-pronged steel claw, all the prongs purposely curved and sharpened. Terri saw that this object, too, was gliding rather than walking. Its feet wore black, high-heeled shoes, but they were mounted on a metal plate that seemed to skate along the woodland floor. Even though she retreated steadily, the thing was near enough for her to identify the white-on-black image plastered to the front of its straw-stuffed dummy head.
It was a human face.
Quite unmistakably, it was her human face.
Terri’s breath caught in her throat. She muttered some nonsense about being mistaken, about hallucinating, but though that face was cast in photographic negative, the closer it got, the clearer it became.
And if that wasn’t appalling enough, what passed for the thing’s hands now visibly rotated. Its arms flexed at the elbows, then bent upwards. The forearms rose and spread themselves out. It was a greeting, she realized with numbing horror. Her demonic twin wanted to embrace her.
With a shriek, Terri turned and fled.
She weaved blindly away through the trees, slashing herself across the face and body, but stumbling on headlong. Sheer terror gave her heels wings, but she felt certain that she was being pursued. Was that the rasping of breath in her throat, or the thrash of foliage as her sisterly stalker gained ground? She could outrun it, she told herself; she was fit. She could easily outrun it. And then she tripped.
She tumbled forward and felt her ankle twist. Something snapped.
Terri wanted to scream, the agony was so intense. But fear of what followed her prevented this. She scrambled along on all fours, panting like a dog, clawing her way through the needles. After a dozen yards she tried to stand again, but that was a mistake. White fire shot up her leg. Reeling sideways and then falling against a trunk, the wind was knocked out of her. She rolled on damp earth, gasping for breath, her eyes filled with hot tears, and as a result, she didn’t at first notice the figure that appeared to one side of her and now stood there in contemplative silence. She only realized it was there at all when it reached down and gripped her by the shoulder.
Mark thought he’d worked out how the figures moved.
He’d now seen several of them in the wood, all following their own mysterious paths. Having shadowed one for several yards, he’d finally realized that it wasn’t sliding along a runner as he’d first thought, but was actually part of a huge chain-and-pulley system. Once the figure passed out of sight, he kicked aside the debris of the woodland floor and discovered a narrow, shallow trench, lined with greased enamel and with soft rubber flaps fixed over the top, one to either side, to prevent materials falling in and clogging it up. A chain, thick with oil, was moving steadily along inside it. Evidently, the pegs on which the figures were mounted were located at regular intervals on this chain, which probably meandered back and forth all over the estate. Likely, it was operated by a central mechanism, an engine of some sort, probably fitted with a wheel, the teeth of which caught the chain’s links as it revolved. If that was correct, so long as the power was switched on, these odd beings would trawl spookily around Bethany’s Wood until the cows came home. Weirder still, Mark also suspected that some of them had additional but independent power-sources: they looked to have been constructed on steel skeletons, which apparently had moving parts. As he’d spied on them, he’d noticed occasional animatronic hand and arm movements, which invested the figures with an eerie lifelike quality.
His objective now, however, was not to discover what purpose this immense, mobile grid-pattern served—though he’d be fascinated to know—it was to find out if, as he suspected, its focal point was the house where Ariadne Jones lived. The spider frequently sat at the center of its web, he told himself. Following one of the figures and seeing where it took him thus seemed the best option. The one he locked onto was broad across the shoulders and wore a shabby coat with its sleeves removed. This revealed that it had coiled springs for arms and shovel-blades for hands, which bounced up and down continuously as it rolled forward. A garish, carroty-red wig hung down its back. This doubtless signified something, but Mark didn’t waste time trying to work out what, because he’d no sooner started to track the figure than a house came into view ahead. One glance told him it was the house. But it wasn’t what he’d expected.
It was not well kept. The building was clearly old and grand, but was a dim shade of what it must have been in former times. It was a well-proportioned two-story affair, built from mellow, pinkish brick, with tall Georgian windows all along the front and a castellated porch tower. Many sections of its roof were visibly rotted or covered in fungus, however, while lichen grew in green streaks down its walls. The window boxes were full of unsightly weeds, and some of the windows themselves were cracked and papered over on the inside.
Mark emerged from the trees onto a pebble drive. He stared at the house, perplexed. His mother had always been an accomplished homemaker. The vicarage where he’d spent his childhood had never been less than pristine, either inside or out. Even when she’d begun to write seriously, she’d always found time to expertly housekeep. The sculpture he’d followed, meanwhile, was now halfway across the drive. The runnel—for that was how Mark had come to think of the channel containing the chain—led diagonally toward the west wing of the building. The figure entered the wing through a narrow archway that seemed to have rectangular strips of opaque plastic hanging from it. Whether this was an entrance to the building proper or just a shortcut through one of its annexes to the other side, Mark wasn’t sure.
He looked the house over, then the drive: to the right it became a small path that circled around the corner of the building, and to the left it curved out of sight, presumably back toward the front gate. There was no sign that anybody was here: no one was visible through the windows, and there were no vehicles in sight. He walked furtively across the drive, trying not to crunch the gravel too loudly, and approached the plastic-covered entrance, which he pushed through without hindrance. Beyond that, he found himself in an arched passage that had a dank, fetid aura. Mold grew thick and scabrous on its whitewashed walls, though the floor was concrete and looked like it had been swept recently. The runnel led directly up it for ten yards, then passed through what looked like a pair of pink curtains. Mark strolled down toward them, and when he got there, saw that they were made from vinyl and had a slick, slippery texture.
He paused, listening. There was a low reverberation; the sound a machine might make, and, for some reason, that set him on edge. For the first time, Mark had the feeling that if he went any farther now, if he pushed through these curtains uninvited, he would at last be committing a crime, would finally be violating the privacy of this house. He pondered. He wasn’t a criminal by nature. It went against all the modes of common decency that his father had drilled into him over the years, but he’d come this far. He was inches from answering a question that had tortured him for a decade.
“Fuck it!” he said, and he went through the curtains fist-first.
The room on the other side might once have been a garage: the floor was still concrete and the walls whitewashed, while the ceiling consisted of old planks. But if housing vehicles had once been the room’s purpose, things had changed. There was a curious scent in the air—it was pungent, sickly sweet—and a reddish, low-key light emanated from niches in the walls where candle flames burned. On the opposite side of the room, a grill glowed orange in an oil black, furnaceli
ke structure. The illumination this gave was so poor, however, that Mark stood there for several seconds before his eyes attuned. When they did, he saw that the runnel veered slightly to the left, then proceeded across the room, bypassing an oblong flagstone that had been set into the floor close to the left-hand wall, and from the side of which a coaxial cable snaked away and vanished through a socket in the skirting board. This flagstone seemed to be the source of the low hum that Mark had heard outside, and he deduced that the wheel mechanism was probably located beneath it. Doubtless the wheel itself lay horizontal so that it could manipulate the chain without interfering with the figures as they glided by overhead. It was clever, he admitted to himself. This whole thing was clever, if a trifle pointless.
He started across the room. There were two open doorways, one to either side of the furnace. The runnel led out through the left one. Mark peeked after it, and saw a passage that ran fifteen yards to the other side of the building, then exited through an outer arch. The shovel-handed figure was now framed in the middle of this as it trundled off toward a second wall of fir trees. He watched it until it disappeared, then turned back to the vinyl curtains. He didn’t suppose it would be long before another one came rolling in. He didn’t know how many there were traveling on this circuit, but he’d already spotted several different ones. Then he noticed something else; another kind of sculpture, though this one was unlikely to move because of its ungainly shape and position. Whereas the others were upright and basically humanoid, this one was totally impressionistic. It might, in the wildest flight of someone’s imagination, have represented a person, but if so, its legs were fat stumps, its belly huge, its shoulders ridiculously narrow and its head the size of an orange. The whole thing had then been smoothed off and rounded, and, at the lower portion of its middle, now possessed a curved, worm-like object, which initially Mark thought was a phallic symbol. He then realized it was supposed to be a serpent, winding its way up the statue’s globular belly from a hidden area between its legs. The entire thing was about the size of a large child, and it sat on top of the furnace on a timber platform; Mark hadn’t noticed it before because the glare from the furnace grate had shielded it. Even now it looked colorless, probably having been molded from basic clay, though he noticed that silver candleholders were placed reverentially to either side of it. It was evidently an idol of some sort.
As he considered this, he heard the sound of someone approaching. He scrambled into the passage that led back to the outside, and waited there. A second passed, then footsteps entered. Mark risked a glance. A woman came through the door on the other side. She was short and stocky with severely cut dark hair, and wore sandals, baggy trousers, and a paint-stained smock. She was carrying three bowls, which she now laid in front of the idol. He was just close enough to see that the first contained nuts, the second apples and pears, and the third what looked like a piece of overcooked steak. The woman whispered something barely audible, possibly an incantation of some sort. Then she crouched in front of the furnace grate, opened it, placed the blackened meat on an iron skillet, and pushed it into the flames. After this, she turned and left by the door she’d come in.
Mark emerged from his hiding place and gazed at the idol. He couldn’t imagine what it represented, if it represented anything at all. But the loathing he suddenly felt for it was corrosive. Then he sensed a new presence in the room. He spun around, panicking—only to relax again.
Another automated figure had slipped in through the pink vinyl curtains and was now gliding forward. This one was scarecrowlike: a thin crucifix of steel rods, with what resembled a black cassock trailing from it. Its head was a punctured football, so scrunched and weathered that the photograph-face attached to it was unrecognizable. Mark felt a twinge of revulsion as it slowly crossed the room toward him, only at the last minute to swerve left and go out toward the exit door. He watched it recede down the passage and saw additional movements. The steel-rod arms started to swivel, then to abruptly hinge at mid-length, one upwards, one down. The steel shaft that served as its neck was also jointed, for the head cocked first to the right, then to the left, in jerky, doll-like motions.
It was this that finally decided Mark he’d had enough. In truth, he’d already had enough when he’d seen the woman go through her clichéd, pseudo-Pagan routine. He had no doubt that it was Zoe. He hadn’t seen her face, and she’d clearly put weight on over the last decade, but her stance and gait were the same, and anyway, who else would indulge in such juvenile New Age fantasies?
He strutted across the room, stopping once to hawk up some phlegm and spit it at the idol. Then he went out through the door the woman had taken. It connected with a passage that seemed to run into the main body of the house. Very soon, Mark saw that the interior of the building was as poorly maintained as the exterior. The walls were bare plaster, and though many of them had been illustrated with interwoven patterns of flowers, trees, and other pastoral imagery, they were now flaking and cracked. The main hall was lofty and oak-paneled. It might once have been imposing, but the woodwork had lost its luster, the carpets were worn, and there was a smell of damp. Its few items of furniture were shoddy and ill-matched, and thrust carelessly to one side. Here and there, Mark could identify faded patches on the walls where pictures might once have hung. Then he heard movement close by. He spied a pair of open double doors, and looking through them saw a large parlor or lounge area—though it appeared to have been converted into a multipurpose living and working environment. In one part of it, a sofa and coffee table sat in front of a beaten-up television set, and beside that, a once grand hearth, now with a portable electric fire placed inside it. More centrally, there were two big desks, both arrayed with office equipment and computer gear, but also strewn with discarded paperwork, as was the extensive floor. One entire wall was filled with shelves clumsily fitted, with no apparent care for appearance, and crammed with dog-eared books. Books were also jammed three-deep along the windowsills, blocking out a significant amount of daylight. In every corner, it seemed, there were piles of boxes, or bundles of string-tied newspapers and periodicals. Though it should have been a huge, spacious chamber, it felt cramped and squalid. As before, a smell of damp pervaded.
The woman was in there, sorting through a heap of documents on the right-hand desk. She clearly was Zoe. He could see that now. There was no mistaking her small round face, which, though it had grown pale and pudgy over the years, was as bland and uninteresting as it had ever been.
“So now you’re Mum’s secretary as well,” he said aloud.
The woman started violently, then stared up at him, shocked and at the same time frightened. “Who are you?” she shouted. “How’d you get in here?”
Mark entered the room. “Don’t recognize the thirteen-year-old whose life you screwed up?”
Several heartbeats passed, during which time she seemed too dumbstruck to speak. She stared at him, stunned. Then, abruptly, her head dropped forward onto her pigeon-chest, and she shook it, and Mark saw to his astonishment that she seemed almost relieved.
“I’m … I’m sorry, Mark,” she finally stammered. “I thought …”
“You thought I was a burglar? A rapist maybe?” He snorted scornfully. “Don’t flatter yourself, Zoe. I wouldn’t touch your cunt with a cattle prod.”
At which she looked quickly up at him again. Her mouth fell open. Evidently, the innocent, gawky young teen who’d always been quiet and obedient around his parents, and so polite to guests, had come a long way in the last ten years.
“Get out of here,” she said. “Get out or I’ll call the police.”
“Please do,” Mark replied. “Faking death to collect on insurance is a criminal offense.”
“It was nothing to do with collecting insurance!”
“You think the cops’ll believe that? Mind you,” he added, glancing distastefully around. “Maybe they will. This place is a fucking shit-hole.”
He began to circle the room, picking things up, exa
mining them, discarding them. Some items he only poked at gingerly, as though afraid they’d infect him with something.
“What were you expecting?” she asked nervously. “A palace?”
“Yes, I was. Always thought houses like this were full of antiques and artworks. Real artworks by the way. Not those lumps of crapola you’ve got walking round outside.”
“They’re crude effigies, that’s all.”
“That’s the very most they are. Jesus, I can’t believe she gave us up for this.”
“She wanted a new path.”
“Yeah, straight between your legs.”
“Is that so wrong?”
“Well it isn’t right,” he said.
“Why, because it’s against the Ten Commandments?” Now it was Zoe’s turn to sound scornful. “Don’t tell me you believe in the Ten Commandments, Mark. The Anglican Communion doesn’t even believe in the Ten Commandments. The slightest pressure from modernists, and they’re ready to change everything.”
“It was wrong for someone like my mother to do it,” he retorted. “She used to be devoted to the Church until she met you. You must have brainwashed her in some way.”
“I never did any such thing!”
Zoe was following Mark around as he navigated the room, still picking things up and dropping them. She didn’t seem keen to get close though. He knew he was scaring her—by his tone, by his deep, angry breathing, none of which was a put-on. As a youth, she’d never known him to be capable of violence. But of course people change.
“I suppose to you the Christian Church is just another tyrannical patriarchy,” he said, “obsessed with keeping women subservient.”
“And you don’t think it is?”
He rounded on her so quickly that she backed up a few paces. “I don’t give a shit whether it is or isn’t!” he barked. “But I know it’s been around two thousand years and you and your crystal-worshiping lunatic fringe aren’t going to replace it anytime soon.”
