The Lights Go Out in Lychford

by Paul Cornell

  “Angus, what is this?”

  “Please could you just forgive me and let me get on? I’ve got to do this for everyone in Lychford.” He indicated behind him to where Julia, poking her head out of her door, could now see several other elderly councillors, all standing on doorsteps. “We all have.”

  * * *

  Luke, at the agricultural college, was listening to one of his fellow lecturers, who had burst into his office and was urgently pointing to his own eyes. “You don’t understand,” he was saying. “I can see supermarkets paying farmers decent prices for their produce.”

  “Well, that’s . . . good?” said Luke, not getting it at all.

  “That’s all I can see. Everywhere I go. I . . . maybe I went on a bit about this? Does someone think I deserve this?”

  * * *

  Arthur Russell stepped gingerly out onto the narrow balcony in front of the town hall clock. He looked down at the marketplace far below and wished he hadn’t. He turned quickly back to look at the enormous clock face. He had in his hand a sponge, and at his feet he’d very carefully placed a bucket of soapy water. He was terrified. He didn’t even feel brave. This was so unlike him. All he’d wanted was for someone to do something to clean this thing up. He hadn’t imagined that he’d suddenly decide that he should be that someone. That was even more unlike him.

  He realised he’d seen something strange when he’d looked down at the marketplace, and risked another look. Down there were people he vaguely knew, people like him, old people, who were urgently scrubbing at graffiti and futilely trying to push cars off the pavement.

  It seemed that everyone who wanted someone to do something was doing it. And it was horrible.

  * * *

  Harry Staunton thought he knew why this had been done to him, though he couldn’t imagine how the young bastards had done it. He’d woken up with a searing pain in his chest and had almost fallen out of bed. He’d found it then, under his pyjama jacket: a red paper poppy with a plastic centre and stem, the ones that were given out for Remembrance Day, to honour those fallen defending their country. He’d said something on the computer about people being made to wear these all damned year long. Because they were forgetting, damn it, they were turning away from wearing them for fear of offending the people who always got offended.

  And so someone had found him and had done this awful thing to him. He was looking at it in the mirror now. The poppy had been fastened to his flesh. The pin went straight through the skin of his chest. It was still hurting like hell. He grabbed one end of it and tried to pull it out. But it wouldn’t come. The more he pulled, the more it hurt. He pulled so hard he nearly blacked out. He staggered and fell.

  They, whoever they were, couldn’t do this to him. They couldn’t keep doing this to him. He was going to get it out even if it killed him.

  * * *

  Sheila Coleshill went under a different name on Facebook. She took care not to reveal where she lived or anything about her family. So she could say what she liked. She’d been saying things about the family next door. About how she thought they were travellers who’d been put on the estate by the council. About how she didn’t understand some of what they said to each other. About how they played their music too late at night and how their dogs kept barking, and how they seemed to have people around all the time and sat out in their garden and kept looking at her property.

  She’d said in that thread that got so many responses that she’d like to see them go to hell.

  Now she was standing at her garden fence, still in her dressing gown, weeping. Seeing the adults being dragged into that hole that had opened up, that hadn’t been so hard. But seeing what was waiting there for them, through the hole, a vision that had gone beyond anything she had ever imagined in a lifetime of imagining bad things . . . that had been hard. Seeing the kids run and the things burst out of the hole after them and carry them back, gently, like they were prized catches, that had been hard.

  Hearing them plead to her for help, finding herself calling to them that she couldn’t do anything, that she couldn’t move, that all she could do was watch, that had been hard.

  The hole had closed. She had thought for some reason that then she might be able to move. But then the hole had opened again, and her neighbours had fled screaming out of it, and through the hole this time she’d seen another hell that went beyond what she’d imagined in an entirely different way, and entirely different things had burst from it and had grabbed the family, and had started to pull them back into the depths of it again.

  It was going to keep on going. She knew it was.

  It felt like she was the one in hell. It felt like she always had been. And perhaps everyone in Lychford, Sheila realised, alone with their friends in all their different bubbles, had been in it with her. Perhaps hell wasn’t other people. Perhaps it was a lack of them.

  5

  LIZZIE SENSED THE POWER building in the piles of posters in the shopping bags and those concealed somewhere in the house in front of them. She also felt it prickling her from all around, a general sense of it growing, like electricity in the air. It was coming from every poster, she supposed, still attached to every site they hadn’t found, all across the town. She looked to Autumn and saw she was feeling it too.

  Shaun was helping Carrie to her feet. “I’m not going to be much help,” he said. “In a sec they’ll send me off to one of these multiple situations.” Lizzie had heard from his radio the reports of bizarre things happening all over town.

  Autumn had got to her feet but was swaying, exhausted. She’d got out her “detector.” “Maybe I can’t do anything,” she said, “but my tools still can.” She let it out of her grasp, still holding the chain, and it sprung out like an arrow, pointing away from the town. “Picton could hide from us while she was in stealth mode,” said Autumn, “but now she’s summoning all this power to her, now she’s about to make her move, her own power is shining like a lighthouse.”

  “So. We don’t have much choice, do we?” said Lizzie. Leaving Shaun and Carrie calling after them, they set off at a run.

  * * *

  Autumn could feel the horror all around her as she ran, and she could feel the horror inside her rising to match it. It didn’t feel like they were going to get there in time. And she had no power to do anything even if they did. The power was rising and rising, climbing in pitch. The people they ran past were reeling, some of them beset by whatever awful wish they’d been granted, some of them just staggering with magical potential even the uninitiated could feel. The enormous, concentrated negative emotion was a nonconsensual sacrifice, the power source for whatever vast alteration of reality Picton was about to attempt. Autumn had been right about ironic wish fulfilment being a part of what she was planning. But she hadn’t realised that wasn’t the end of it.

  Now the pendulum of her detector was leading them at a run down to the river, and it was pointing to the wooded hills beyond. Of course. Picton had her engine roaring up to power in the town, and she was going to use it on the borders, right at the point where she could haul on the cords of the bag that was their world, their universe, and pull it inside out, making it into a part of her own. It was an enormous feat of magic. Picton was indeed a professional. She’d anticipated everything they’d done, even that they’d save Carrie before following her.

  But she hadn’t expected them to survive her trap. She was fallible. She could be outsmarted. Autumn had no idea if or how they could do it again, but they were going to have to try. Together, she and her best friend ran down the path by the river, desperately hoping they were going to be in time to save the world.

  * * *

  “Maitland Picton” stood beside Judith’s grave, feeling the force gathering in the town below. The sun here, symbol of the ridiculous enormity of the universe beyond, shone irritatingly on her through the trees. So much wasted space. There might even be, in this universe the humans had, whole other nonhuman civilisations out there, whole other contex
ts. And for what? The worlds of magic were otherwise small, otherwise beautiful and original, a cluster of brilliant ideas, inhabited by the creatures of ideas.

  Those creatures had regarded this physical Earth—when it had suddenly erupted, with the expanse of its universe, from out of their own worlds—as a primitive accident. It was surely a side effect of the great transgression, the fall of he who now lay under everything. But it was an offshoot that was interesting enough, that could be colonised. And so the ancestors of those that had made her and others like them had explored here and been seduced, had, as their natures dictated, found themselves attached to the meanings they found here. They had become beings that cared about the moon and the stars and forests and animals, that had ended up continually referring to the minds of the evolving intelligent beings here for reference. The fairies had taken that way too far and gone native, their decadent and corrupt society becoming, well, a commentary on human need and nothing more. But when the beings of the original worlds had blinked, time had sped on, and suddenly human minds were a sprawling, threatening, connected, blaspheming, intervening threat.

  A disease.

  All of the great powers had decided to act, one way or another, even a faction of the fairies. But by then knowledgeable ones had arisen even among the humans, and they had put up borders that used the tremendous incline in energies between their sprawling universe and the original ones to keep out the primal owners of everything. Hence generations of anger in the original worlds. But the leadership of the fairies had shrugged and found ways to hop over the borders and wrote themselves back into human whimsy.

  That was what had led to her being assigned here. That was what had led to those like her sneaking their way into the ever-pliable court of fairy and creating a new faction of radicals who longed to be strong like the other original worlds were strong. She’d been told the start of the fairy civil war would be the signal for her to make her way over the borders herself, to begin her mission to end this universe. But she’d shown initiative. She’d felt the borders vanish, rushed to them, seen them resurrected as a shadow of what they had been, and had pushed her way through them.

  She stood now waiting for the power to be enough. She would know when, she had been told. It would be like gaining a sense, a limb. It still felt muted, like everything in this world, but the feeling was getting sharper every second.

  But now there were shadows moving through the trees toward her. What? They had actually found her. The two remaining guardians, the acolyte who was still trying to grasp the basics and the follower of one solitary path. Well, that was twice they’d surprised her. But now they weren’t facing anything that had to hide. She’d brought with her enough power to do this, power made from the willing positive sacrifice of hundreds of minds back in her home, minds that would be unrecognisable to these wretches. She was about to combine that with its opposite—the unwilling negative sacrifice of the hundreds she’d tricked here. Put them together, as she was about to, and she would wield, for one act only, the power of a god.

  “Stop!” shouted one of the figures.

  “No,” said “Maitland Picton.”

  * * *

  “I’m scared,” Judith said to her mummy. But then she realised Mummy wasn’t here. And so she got even more scared. Her sister Doreen was somewhere around, but she wasn’t sure where. Judith realised she was holding a book. There was something specific that was making her scared, a rising tide of . . . Oh God, what was this pain she could feel in her chest and shoulder and arm? It hurt like nothing she’d felt before. What was it that she’d said, that she’d wished? For her suffering to be at an end. And thus, it soon would be.

  She felt her stomach lurch at the thought of it. And with that lurch came wisdom. Into her head, from where it was being preserved in her gut by the fungus she’d eaten, came the few sentences she’d written into the memory of that fungus. She was once again aware, albeit fleetingly, of everything that was going on. She looked again at her book, illuminated by the light of Doreen’s pathway, as she’d known it would be. The book had been hidden in the box, and it had kept that spell of hiding on it while it was in her pocket. As she’d known it would. In it, Judith had written everything she had to do and say.

  Maitland Picton had taken advantage of her, had got into her and made her work against her friends. But Judith had prepared a backup. What she was reading now, though, scared her even more. She read that Picton had put her in the ground to be the centrepiece of the sacrifice she’d prepared, to be the sacrifice that set the whole thing off. And this increasing pain meant she was on her way to that, soon.

  But sacrifices can work both ways.

  * * *

  Autumn felt the detector make a sudden heave forward, and knew they were close. They rushed into a clearing in the woods, and found Picton standing there, her arms raised, her fingers poised, as if she was about to rip down a curtain. She barely acknowledged their arrival.

  Autumn dropped the detector, pulled out the knife, and ran at her.

  She hit something in midair that was as hard as a wall and crashed to the ground. She realised, as she hauled herself to her feet, that her nose was bleeding. The side of her face felt badly bruised. Beside her, Lizzie was bellowing prayers, casting out evil. Maitland Picton was laughing at her.

  “Just one thing I don’t get,” Autumn called to the creature, hoping she would, again, want to gloat, that it might buy them some time while she tried to think of something, “why didn’t you want Judith to go into Ashdown House? You could have got her out whenever you needed her, couldn’t you?”

  “What are you even talking about?” The look on Picton’s face was one of sighing bemusement that Autumn was still nowhere near being on top of her plan.

  But that reaction made Autumn suddenly realise that someone else might be. “Where’s Judith?” she said.

  Picton took a slight step sideways. Autumn looked past her, and both saw and felt a shape in the soil. She reached out her senses toward it and felt an answering familiarity. Oh God. Oh God. The bitch had buried her. Judith was alive, but she would never recover from this. Autumn made herself ignore that.

  She had one tiny hope burning in her now, and that hope was Judith. If it hadn’t been part of Picton’s plan, why had she used some of her declining power to trick them into not admitting her into Ashdown House? Why had she needed that freedom, that access to her tools, if not to work something? So now Autumn wanted desperately to send some of her own power to help Judith with whatever she was doing. Except she had nothing left to give. Blood was for small tasks. All that she had left in her body wouldn’t be enough to contribute much in the face of the power that was building up around Picton.

  But . . . there was something she could sacrifice. Something that was valuable enough to her, that was a major enough change to the world, that was close enough to her heart to make a difference. She found the place in her mind that she associated with the points of the compass and the powers that sat outside the circle, beyond the horizon, at those points. She called to them all that she was about to make a sacrifice. “I call to mind my future love, the name of that love is Luke—”

  “Autumn, no!” That was Lizzie.

  Autumn ignored her. She reached out to the mass of disturbed soil to establish a pathway for the power that would come with sacrifice.

  The consciousness in the ground slapped her aside, the pathway broke. There was such familiarity to that feeling. The gesture was so Judith. Autumn started to cry. “You stupid old woman!” she yelled. “Let me help!”

  “We only have a few moments left now,” said Picton. “You’d best arrange your afterlives. Although eventually I should think we’ll pursue you there too. Ah. Here it comes.” And she reached up and grabbed the edge of reality.

  * * *

  Judith felt the pain become terminal. Which was a sensation she’d never experienced and knew now only because it was beyond anything she’d known. So she read the words from her bo
ok. The words that turned everything she was from a sacrifice someone else was making into a sacrifice she was making deliberately. She sent a quick call of meaning and farewell along the echoes left by the pathway Autumn had opened, that she’d broken, because the girl had been about to throw away her future like Judith had once thrown away hers.

  Clever girl. She’d be fine. Everyone was going to be okay, once Judith had made herself do this one little remaining thing. She saw—in her mind’s eye, the eye of the wise woman, of the hedge witch—the shape of the worlds, of how the borders to them had been thrown down together at Lychford by accident, to talk, not to fight. The fairies understood that. Well, most of them did. Nobody else bloody had. Well, maybe Autumn. But that was not for her to say now.

  In the mental space shared by those who were part of the magic that was happening above her, on the surface, Judith saw the stick figure, the thin twist of information that was Maitland Picton, grabbing at the hem of this world, gathering it into her hands, about to heave on it. She saw hundreds of posters, an explosion of energy, blooming at the heart of Lychford and at dozens of points all around it. The energy rolled toward Picton like a wave, a wave she was about to surf.

  Judith mentally moved to be right in front of her. A presence that was suddenly in all Picton’s senses. She could sense her apprentice and the cleric as ghosts nearby. They’d barely be aware of what she was doing. Her body was still in the grave. She looked into Picton’s stick face, and it was somehow, satisfyingly, startled. Judith grabbed Picton’s hands with her own. The weight of what Picton had prepared was falling on them. It had to go somewhere now. It was too huge not to. So, what to do with it? The only move Judith could make would bugger everything up. Would change Lychford forever. But maybe that were for the best. Judith committed herself to the sacrifice. She looked right at Picton and saw the being was scared, saw that she’d thrown everything at what she thought had been the perfect plan, and hadn’t seen that she’d overlooked and underestimated an old woman.