‘I said I was going to do magic,’ I said.
‘But . . .’ Dominic floundered around for a bit before pointing at me accusingly. ‘You said that there’s weird shit, but it normally turns out to have a rational explanation.’
‘It does,’ said Beverley. ‘The explanation is a wizard did it.’
‘That’s my line,’ I said, and Beverley shrugged.
‘You didn’t say anything about spells!’ said Dominic.
‘It’s just a werelight,’ I said.
It was like having our own personal streetlight, but beyond that bright circle the woods were a jumble of angular shadows – shifting uneasily as the yellow werelight bobbed and wavered in the breeze.
‘Can we at least start moving in the right direction?’ I said.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Dominic, who was still having trouble. ‘Is there anything else I should know?’
‘We’re looking for an invisible unicorn and Bev here is the goddess of a small river in South London.’
‘It’s quite a big river, actually,’ said Beverley.
‘How do people normally react to this?’ asked Dominic.
‘And most of it’s above ground,’ said Beverley.
‘Usually a bit stunned to start with,’ I said. ‘Then they either get angry, go into denial or just deal with it.’
‘Sounds familiar,’ said Dominic.
‘Unlike some rivers I could mention,’ said Beverley.
‘What else can you do?’ asked Dominic.
‘More importantly,’ said Beverley, ‘what makes you think this is going to work?’
‘Because incorporeal entities need power to interact with the real world. And this,’ I pointed at the werelight above me, ‘is the all-you-can-eat-buffet sign.’
‘You know that sounded completely mad, don’t you?’ asked Dominic.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Professional hazard.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Beverley. ‘Enough distractions. Let’s do it.’
So into the woods we went – it was surprisingly noisy. Especially one loud bird whose chirping sounded far too cheerful for the middle of the night.
‘That’s just a robin,’ said Beverley.
I said I thought they were diurnal.
‘All day, all night,’ she said. ‘They don’t shut up.’
Somewhere deeper into the gloom, amongst the straight trunks of the western hemlocks, something else made a sound like a ZX Spectrum loading a game off a cassette – Beverley said it was a nightjar.
Even without the sun, the air was warm and spiced with resin and the smell of dusty bark.
About fifty metres up the track it separated and we took the right-hand path which, according to my map, led us parallel to the top of the ridge. Because we were supposed to be looking out for anything weird we didn’t talk and in that strange stumbling silence I felt as if my senses had contracted down to the small flickering circle of the werelight.
After a quarter of an hour or so we reached a T-junction where the Mortimer Trail separated from the logging road.
‘I think this might have been a mistake,’ I said.
‘Definitely is,’ said Beverley, pointing to the left which was noticeably darker than the right. ‘Because we are not going up that way.’
‘No,’ I said, blinking to try and get my night vision back. ‘I mean the light – I should have used a darker point source.’ If only lux hadn’t been so reliable as a ghost attractor. I checked the cricket bat and saw that the LED had gone out. When I shook it next to my ear I could hear sand sloshing around inside. I swapped it for the next bat – the LED flickering as soon as I turned it on.
‘Left or right?’ asked Dominic.
I considered it. If the point was to attract things to us, then taking the easier road made sense. I’d have liked to take the right-hand trail to Croft Ambrey, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be stumbling around an Iron Age fort, what with ditches and ramparts and other convenient limb-breaking opportunities, until I’d had a chance to suss it out in daylight.
This, by the way, is what we call in the trade a risk assessment.
‘Allons y,’ I said, and led off down the left-hand track.
We’d gone on another couple of hundred metres, around a turn and past a turn-off that Dominic identified as heading down to Croft Castle, when we heard the hoof beats.
Beverley heard them first, but as soon as she’d pointed them out I heard them as well. Hooves hitting the ground in a fast jaunty rhythm. A slow trot, I learnt later – sometimes known as a jog.
It took a couple of rounds of shushing and craning to establish that it was coming from behind us. I put down the cricket bat to anchor the werelight in place and ‘jogged’ back five metres to see if I could re-establish my night vision. With the light behind me the track became a milky strip, snaking between the vertical shadows of the trees, whose pointed tops marched off like fence spikes. The moon hung full and round and almost perfectly aligned with the track.
If this wasn’t your actual moon path, I thought, it would certainly do for the postcard.
I couldn’t see a horse, but I could hear the hoof beats getting closer – and picking up the pace.
‘Let’s get off the road,’ I said.
Neither Beverley nor Dominic argued, even when we found ourselves pushing through the chest-high bracken that had lain invisible in the darkness until we blundered straight into it. If anything, we were grateful for the additional cover as we crouched down and waited for the hoof beats to get closer.
I glanced up at the werelight obediently hanging directly over the track where I’d left it. The colour was definitely beginning to edge into the red as whatever approached sucked up the magic and lowered the frequency of the emitted light.
The hoof beats slowed to a walk and then a cautious amble. They sounded large, the hoof beats, great big dinner-plate-sized hooves that thumped down onto the dust of the track with authority.
I watched through the gaps in the bracken as the werelight dimmed down to a sullen red and Princess Luna made her appearance. It was transparent but refractive, a statue of living glass, the dying light from the werelight tingeing its shoulders and haunches with red and outlining the long spiralled horn that rose from between its eyes.
Then the werelight popped out and suddenly it was there, huge and real and sweaty and pale in the moonlight, its horn bobbing left and right as it swung its head and sniffed the air.
I resisted the urge to push further back into the bracken.
Then the head snapped back to point down the track, the big muscles in its haunches bunched, flexed and the beast sprang forward, its vast hooves kicking up dust and splinters of rock.
We scrambled out of our hiding place and stumbled out to stare after the unicorn as it vanished around a curve in the track.
‘Okay,’ said Beverley. ‘I really hope one of you is a virgin.’
‘What now?’ asked Dominic.
‘We follow it,’ I said.
Which we did, but incredibly cautiously, all the way down to what Dominic assured me was School Wood – not far from where Stan had had her stash snaffled. I considered launching another werelight, but after a brief discussion with the others we decided to delay that until we were within a comfortable mad panicked rush of where Victor was parked in the Technical.
In fact, I had Dominic turn his phone back on so he could call to make sure that Victor was indeed waiting. You know – just in case.
The track had curved south so that the tall trees cast their moon shadows across the path, making it much harder to continue without lights. The warmth of the day was leaching out of the air and I shivered at a breeze that blew in from the north and riffled the tree tops.
When I figured we’d reached the point where the track started to descend sharply, I decided to give the big werelight another go.
‘And what’s your plan if Princess Luna turns up again?’ asked Beverley.
‘I want you two to hang back,’ I said. ‘Wh
ile I go and try to make friends with it.’
‘And when it inevitably tries to kill you?’ asked Dominic.
‘You rush in and rescue me,’ I said.
Beverley kissed her teeth.
‘We have to at least narrow down where it’s coming from,’ I said. ‘So if it runs, we follow it again. And if it attacks, we see how far it follows us.’
‘Just for the record,’ asked Dominic, ‘what were you expecting to happen when we first met it?’
I told them I had thought our invisible friend would be a bit more insubstantial and a bit less like a carthorse with a lethal spike stuck on its head.
‘The girls are still missing,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to make another attempt.’
‘Fine,’ said Beverley. ‘Just stay out of the way of the horn, right?’
I promised I would.
Then I turned on the last of the cricket bats and put a werelight over our heads, a slightly bigger one than I meant to, one that I learnt later was visible as far away as Wigmore and Mortimer’s Cross.
As soon as it went up I felt Beverley clutch my arm.
There was a chill in the air and a sudden coppery taste in my mouth. A smell like smashed flint and a screech like a blade on a whetstone.
At the far edge of the werelight the shadows amongst the trees began to quiver.
‘I have to get off this ridge,’ said Beverley.
‘Why?’
‘There are some things you don’t do, some places you don’t go, unless you are seriously looking for trouble.’
‘Are we talking postcodes here?’
‘Fuck postcodes,’ said Beverley. ‘This is a no-fly zone, UN resolution-breaking, war-starting stuff. You know my mum and the Old Man of the River, remember all that aggravation? That’s nothing compared to what’ll happen if we don’t get off this ridge right now.’
‘I get that,’ I said. ‘But who?’
‘I don’t know, Peter,’ said Beverley. ‘And I don’t think it’s a good idea to stick around to find out.’
I heard hoof beats to the north-east, behind us. The fucker must have circled around or just stood invisible in the wings and watched us walk past.
‘Which way?’ I asked.
Beverley hesitated and then thrust out an arm in a vaguely south-westerly direction.
‘That way,’ she said. ‘Towards the river.’
Away from the unicorn – it seemed like a sensible idea.
‘I thought you were going to make friends,’ said Dominic as he headed off at a brisk pace.
I would have explained that operational flexibility is the key to successful policing, but I decided to save my breath. I also left the cricket bat and the werelight behind me in the hope that it might slow down whatever was following us.
‘How far is it to the car?’ I asked.
‘Don’t know,’ said Dominic. ‘Half a mile?’
I stopped and looked back.
A hundred metres behind me the unicorn had stopped beneath my werelight to bask in its glow. As I watched, it reared up on its hind legs, the reddening light gleaming along its horn, and gave a deep rumbling bellow.
Nothing that ate grass, I decided, would make a noise like that and legged it after the others.
Suddenly the forest on our left gave way to a single line of trees reinforced with a barbed-wire fence and, on the other side, open pasture silver in the moonlight. Beverley stopped so fast that I nearly ran into her back.
‘That way,’ she said, pointing at the pasture.
I was about to ask why we couldn’t just keep going when I saw something blocking the track ahead. In the darkness it was an indistinct pattern of shadow, but when it moved my brain had no trouble filling in its outline – another unicorn.
‘Oh, great,’ said Dominic.
I looked back to where the werelight was flickering and our prancing friend came whumping down on its front hooves, head lowered like a bull. I swung back to the fence looking for a stile or a gate, or even a gap that wouldn’t involve ripping myself to bits on the barbed wire.
‘Peter,’ said Beverley – I heard hoof beats from both directions.
‘I know,’ I said trying to clear my mind.
‘Hurry,’ she said.
‘I know,’ I said, summoning up the impello forma in my mind and trying to remember the formae inflectentes that would make it do what I want.
‘I mean it,’ she said, and I let the spell go.
It wasn’t pretty but it got the job done, ripping out a section of the barbed-wire fence and shoving it to the side so that me, Beverley and Dominic could run through the gap.
‘The farmer’s not going to like this,’ yelled Dominic as we ran past the twisted remains of the fence.
‘He can bill me,’ I said.
Even in my PSU boots, running at night over uneven ground was difficult and Beverley soon pulled ahead of me and Dominic. Out in the open pasture I was suddenly aware of the blue-black vastness of the sky and the river of stars arching over my head. At the far side of the field I could see a smudged line of shadow against the midnight blue of the sky – I hoped it was another fence line because if it was a cliff or something we were in deep shit.
I heard the bellow of a unicorn behind me and, without looking back, I put on a spurt of speed, the long grass whipping around my ankles.
‘There’s a fence,’ yelled Beverley from in front of me.
Doing magic on the fly, even something as basic as an impello variant, is incredibly difficult. Nightingale said that when he was training only half his peers could perform while under physical stress. Which is why, in the Folly, boxing practice goes, jab, jab, right, duck, roundhouse, uppercut, lux, jab, jab, impello.
I stripped away the sound of my own breathing and the impact of my feet on the grass so that in my head there was only the pounding of my heart and the right formae – and then I twisted that shape in the Yale lock of the universe.
Ahead of me I saw bits of shadow splinter and fly away to either side. It wasn’t perfect, but I reckoned that even the Russian Olympic judge was going to give me at least eight points for interpretation.
Then I realised that beyond the fence the land fell away in a sixty degree slope, fortunately a wooded one, and I saved myself by deliberately running into a tree and throwing my arms around it.
Beverley screamed my name suddenly and I heard an angry snort from right behind my head and threw myself to the side. There was a horrible crunching sound and a hole the size of a fifty pence bit appeared in the trunk of the tree I’d been holding. Another snort, frantic this time. Bark spooled off from around the hole in the tree and, with a splintering sound, a crack a metre long appeared above.
I smelt it, horse sweat and rough hair, and felt the weight and power of the muscles underneath its invisible skin. And then as if the moon had come out from behind a cloud I saw it, outlined in silver, as big as a carthorse, as shaggy as a pony and as pissed off as a bull in the household goods section of Marks and Spencer. Its mad black eye was fixed on me as it twisted and pulled, trying to get its narwhale horn free of the tree.
‘Peter,’ Beverley’s voice came from a surprisingly long way down the hill. ‘Don’t play with it – run!’
I know good advice when I hear it, and half scrambled and half slid on my bum down the slope, using the trees to keep myself from spilling over and breaking my neck. Above and behind me the unicorn snorted its frustration and stamped the ground. I was fairly certain it wasn’t going to attempt such a steep slope.
This is where the whole ape-descended thing reveals its worth, I thought madly. Sucks to be you, quadruped. Opposable thumbs – don’t leave home without them.
The trees ended suddenly and I joined Beverley and Dominic staring down a steep slope planted with white protective tubes and covered with nodding foxglove. I recognised it at once.
‘Pokehouse Wood,’ I said.
Had the girls been chased down here? Was that why Nicole had left a bloodied strip
of her Capri pants on the barbed-wire fence – no handy fence-clearing magic for her. I wondered if there had been a moment when the unicorn had gone from invisible friend to terrifying predator – the point where the mask came off.
‘The river’s down there,’ said Beverley. ‘We need to get across it.’
What with the thigh-high grass, the nettles, the springy hummocks and inconveniently foot-sized hollows, it was harder work getting down through newly planted saplings than it had been amongst the full-grown trees. We were seriously grateful to reach the logging track that cut diagonally across the slope of the hill. At least, we were until my mental map of the area reminded me that further up the valley the logging track merged with the one in School Wood. A round trip of about a kilometre – or less than ten minutes as the pissed-off unicorn canters.
I pointed this out, and it was when we turned to flee down the track that we saw them ahead of us.
Two figures, child sized, white faces pale ovals in the moonlight, one of them in a green T-shirt, the other in a pink top,
‘Okay,’ said Beverley. ‘That’s strangely convenient.’
I heard hoof beats from up the track, two sets, in what I was to learn later was an aggressive canter – at the time it sounded like a gallop.
‘Not that convenient,’ I said.
Normally, I would have approached a pair of missing kids with tact and care, taking it slow so as not to exacerbate any distress. Then, slowly, I would have established who they were while trying to find out, circumspectly, whether their abductors were still in the vicinity.
However, with a couple of tons of enraged fairy tale on our arses, me and Dominic bore down on the girls and unceremoniously picked them up and threw them over our shoulders – practically without missing a step.
Beverley stayed behind us, a hand on my back in encouragement.
‘Faster,’ she said.
I’m young and I’m fit, but an eleven-year-old is still a weight and even down the slope the best I could manage was a lumbering trot. Dominic was keeping level but I could tell by his gasping breath that it was costing him.
We were getting close to the bottom of the slope, but there the replanted area ran out and plunged into the darkness, cliff face to the left.
Foxglove Summer Page 16
