by Emily Tesh
“I beg your pardon?”
“I gave you enough to knock me out for an hour,” she said, “since you’re about my size: and I gave him twice as much, since he’s about twice my size.”
Silver stared at her, caught between admiring and appalled. “Young lady—”
She snorted. “Are you my father?”
“Miss Lindhurst—”
“Maud,” said Maud, firmly. “I told you. Well, there he is. I half doubted it would work. Is he even human?”
“Entirely,” said Silver, “I assure you.” This was a strange view, here in this dank crypt surrounded by golden candlesticks and looking down as it seemed into the bowels of the earth where Tobias lay motionless. He had seen Tobias asleep before, of course. He had crept in the early morning from under that massive arm, unable to stop smiling even as spring called him up and away to walk the Wood. Oddly, he felt a fresh stab at the memory: not the self-pity he was so used to, but grief, real grief, for something lost.
The light from the candle Maud held at an angle illuminated the top of Tobias’s head, the outline of his big shoulders in shirtsleeves. He was facedown and still, but he did not look smaller or more vulnerable; he looked fearsomely strong. Silver swallowed. Underground again. “Forgive me,” he said, “but I find I do feel rather light-headed. I must confess I dislike confined spaces. You heard my outburst earlier.”
“Quite natural,” said Maud, but her tone and expression spoke of amusement, and not a little pity. This girl had killed an ancient vampire to steal its crypt and then tested the effects of its powdered corpse on herself. She must have a stomach of steel. A little like Silver’s mother, in fact—except that Silver’s mother never allowed courage to get in the way of good sense.
Silver was counting on the fact that Maud, for all her obvious courage and intelligence, plainly had the common sense of a flea. Even Tobias had not wanted to hunt this vampire alone. The fact that she had succeeded was beside the point: what a lunatic risk to take! “I am sure you are right and he is perfectly well, but would you mind—forgive my nervousness—would you mind just checking his pulse for me? He is a very dear friend.” Silver put all the sincerity at his disposal into his voice. It helped that it was close to the truth. Friend hardly described their connection, now, but if Silver forced a smile—
“If you insist,” said Maud, and passed him the candlestick.
She swung herself down through the trapdoor as handily as any young sailor, plainly very comfortable in her corduroys and shirtsleeves. She crouched and pressed two fingers to Tobias’s pulse for a moment. The candlelight picked out the bright gold of her hair in the gloom. “He’s quite well, as I said,” she said.
“Mr Finch,” said Silver.
He needn’t have spoken. Tobias was already moving, erupting with surprising speed from the huddled pile where he had most certainly not been asleep—didn’t Silver know what he looked like asleep?—facedown, the better to hide the flicker of his eyes. He grabbed Maud by the wrists—she barely had time to shout in surprise—and turned them around, pinning her to the ground with one strong hand, and his other hand went for his belt—
“Tobias, for the love of God!” Silver called out, and Tobias stopped with one of those sharpened stakes held at a professional angle over Maud’s ribcage and looked up.
Silver said, “She’s not our vampire.”
“Was always a chance the beast would turn her,” said Tobias, but he narrowed his eyes, dropped the stake, and put his hand to Maud’s throat: that same careful check for a pulse, with a rather different intent this time. Then he nodded and let the girl go.
“Sorry, miss,” he said. “Better to be safe.”
Maud looked ever so slightly shaken as she scrambled to her feet. “Not as strong a dose as I thought, then.”
* * *
And then they all sat down together in the ancient vampiric crypt, at what by now had to be two in the morning, and drank hot sugary tea out of cheap tin mugs.
Silver had to work to keep from cracking into dreadful laughter at the absurdity of it all. Maud had pointedly picked up a revolver while she was making the tea over the paraffin stove; it was in a pocket of those corduroys now. It was perfectly clear that she did not intend to be returned home by main force. Silver had no idea if the girl was capable of shooting a man and did not relish the prospect of finding out. She was certainly capable of beheading a vampire. He’d spotted the cleaver among her things.
So the three of them were sitting and chatting—well, Silver and Maud were sitting and chatting, and Tobias was sitting and not chatting—as if there were not a nine-hundred-year-old corpse in the next arched chamber. Maud’s eyes kept flicking thoughtfully towards Tobias. He looked grim and troubled still. The prospect of killing a young girl turned vampire had distressed him; had been distressing him from the start, probably. Silver could see that now. He should have thought of it sooner. There had been a time when Tobias’s silence and calm had not deceived him; when he had been able to tell what the big man was thinking. No longer, it seemed.
Maud, it turned out, could be coaxed into explanations. This was not a surprise. It was Silver’s experience that most people could be persuaded to talk about themselves with very little effort. Tobias, with his natural reserve, had been a piquant exception from the first time they’d met. With only a little work on Silver’s part, she was explaining the circumstances in which she’d disappeared from her parents’ home. “I purchased the clothing secondhand, mostly, out of my own money. I said it was for charity.”
“Your own money?”
“A legacy from my great-aunt,” said Maud. “I knew any expedition would have to be well equipped.” There was a bulky canvas backpack propped in a corner, next to the cleaver. “I ordered some things from the capital, and purchased others locally. Then it was a question of a suitable starting point. Do you know, I think it was your article on the Hallow Wood that put me onto it? I forget how you put it exactly, but you argued that any place long inhabited by the supernatural will in due course become supernatural in itself—didn’t you?”
“Roughly,” Silver agreed.
“Which struck me as back to front, rather,” said Maud. “Would it not make just as much sense to say: any place supernatural in itself will in due course become inhabited by the supernatural?”
“The chicken-and-egg problem did occur to me, yes, but these things being so very hard to measure—”
“There being no reliable measurement for the incidence of magic,” Maud agreed. “Or, for that matter, any way of measuring it.”
“Precisely so. How on earth is one to know the, as it were, ambient power of a place without becoming familiar with its inhabitants?”
“Well, that’s why I remembered the old Abbot,” said Maud. “It seemed likely enough that a place where a vampire has lived for a thousand years probably has some magic lying about.”
Silver coughed. For a moment, their dialogue had felt like a type of conversation he hadn’t had in years, since before the Wood and before Tobias, even; the type of conversation one had with fellow learned young enthusiasts.
Which, it became increasingly clear, was what Maud was. She wanted to talk about magic; she wanted to talk about places of power; she wanted to talk about monsters—not what they were, but what they might mean. She was twenty-one years old and quite remarkably clever. She had read almost everything Silver had; God alone knew how she had got her hands on some of the more esoteric stuff. She had read some things Silver hadn’t; he had not been keeping up over the last year or two. She admitted freely to subscribing herself as a young man in letters to certain scholars she admired, the better to get some reasonable correspondence out of them. Silver let the conversation continue along byways marvellous and strange for some time. He found himself enjoying it. A creeping suspicion: had his self-indulgent wallowing at Greenhollow Hall (he could see, now, that it was self-indulgent) been as much boredom and loneliness as genuine misery?
&nbs
p; “As a child, I had those books of fairy tales,” said Maud. “You know the ones—all flowers and dewdrops. But when it becomes real—!” She leaned forward over her mug. Her watery blue eyes took on a surprising intensity; her voice was low and urgent. “Do you know what that’s like—when the impossible becomes true right before your eyes?”
Silver did know, by God; he understood her perfectly. Tobias, as he had been: the Wild Man of Greenhollow, so solid and real that the rest of the world was dim by comparison. He swallowed.
“I remember the first time I understood what Abbot Julius really was,” Maud said. “Oh, it was a little frightening, but how extraordinary, too. Nine centuries lay on his shoulders; sometimes you could see it in his eyes. Can you imagine that? To meet someone who had lived so long, and seen so much, and to know that you stood in the presence of magic—magic!”
“I can imagine,” Silver said.
He knew very well the exact sensation Maud described, the thrill of discovery, the wonder of a living impossibility before one’s eyes. Tobias sat now on what looked like an upturned gravestone, both hands around his mug of tea. He was only an ordinary man. The Hallow Wood had chosen another.
“And yet you killed the marvellous Abbot,” he said.
“Yes; because I needed the crypt,” said Maud. “Though also, he did eat people. If it hadn’t been for that, I don’t think I would have killed him.”
“But, Miss Lindhurst—”
“Maud.”
“—Maud. To bring us back to the point—why exactly did you need a place of supernatural significance to, as you put it, ‘start from’? You mentioned an expedition?”
“Didn’t I say?” said Maud, sounding quite surprised. “I’m going to Fairyland.”
* * *
Fairies.
Silver had been rather disappointed by fairies.
He had loved fairy tales as a boy, and he had read widely as a young man. But fairies were conspicuously missing from the terse accounts, privately circulated, produced by practical folklorists like his mother. Where they appeared in the diaries Silver’s father had kept as fuel for his researches, they were invariably noted with an H for hoax. Local girl in costume. Paper cutouts and lantern. Petitioner deranged.
Silver at fifteen had helped himself to his mother’s keys and gone into the locked chest where she kept her own records of her most serious cases, but there had been no fairies there, either: just one incident of a missing child, where in her concluding notes Mrs Silver had written, murdered undoubtedly, but little for a magistrate to go on; no evidence of fairy abduction as claimed; most likely the mother.
And then he had discovered Tobias and the Wood—a real magical kingdom, a real spirit out of legends! And in the Lord of Summer he had been briefly convinced that he had found a fairy lord out of ancient ballads along with the rest. But there he had erred most seriously. Fabian Rafela, so-called Lord of Summer, had been another type of creature entirely.
There were a few petty-scholars among the hunters who passed their time in orderings and classifications. Silver’s father had been among the best of them. About six months ago—well after Tobias’s departure, this, as Greenhollow Hall began to fall into an ivy-choked ruin—Silver had in a self-immolating mood gone through the lists and tables and concluded that Rafela had belonged among the genii revocati malignantes. He had spent an hour in the library then writing up a case note for the monster, in the style of his father’s diaries: behaviour, intelligence, habitat, and prey.
He had not yet dared to investigate where he himself belonged in his father’s tables. Presumably the Wood’s avatar also came under the heading of spirits of place, the genii locorum.
Fairies had a whole collection of categories to themselves, with supposed classifications tentatively based on fairy tales and ballads. It was all speculation. Increasingly, sorrowfully, Silver had come to suspect they did not exist. But in the golden span of months where matters seemed to have resolved themselves rather well, he had asked Tobias about it. Lounging on Greenhollow’s lawn over the remains of a picnic—Silver with a book, Tobias as ever with some small work of his hands to do, carving perhaps, or sewing, Silver could not recall it now—the question had occurred to him out of nowhere.
And Tobias had said, “Oh, them?”
Under his neatly trimmed beard, the corners of his mouth had turned down.
This was what the former Wild Man of Greenhollow had to say about fairies:
They were real.
They did, indeed, take children—occasionally. They usually forgot to feed them.
He believed they were sensible beings, able to think and plan and converse, though he had never as a matter of fact heard one speak.
They were rare. Very rare. In his four hundred years in the Wood, Tobias had encountered no more than half a dozen for sure; though sometimes he thought they had passed through the Wood and he had not seen them.
“Not seen them?” Silver had asked. “Do you mean you couldn’t find them? Or were they invisible?”
Tobias had thought about it. “Invisible, I’d say, after a fashion. They don’t find it easy, I think, to be here.”
“To be here? So they come from somewhere else?” Silver could not help grinning in his excitement. “From their own kingdom? From Fairyland?”
Tobias shrugged. “Who can say?”
“Surely you can, if anyone can at all.”
“Never saw any sign of Fairyland,” Tobias said. “Not a road, not a path. And as for a kingdom, well, I never saw a lord or a king, as you might call them. No, not a queen either,” before Silver could say it. “Sometimes I’d feel a fairy loose in the Wood, but I couldn’t find it. You know.” Silver did know. The Wood was entirely open to him, and he had learned that he could tell when something uncanny was afoot; could turn to Tobias and say, I believe the barrow on the eastern hill is waking up, so Tobias would nod and in his casual determined way set out by night with pistol and flint knife to quiet a pack of flesh-tearing ghouls.
“What do fairies feel like?” he’d asked. “When you feel them.”
Tobias had thought about it a little while.
“Old,” he’d said at last. “Sad.”
* * *
“Of course it exists,” said Maud Lindhurst. The candlelight flickered on her tightly bound guinea-gold hair: the paraffin stove gave off a faint glow that lit her long face from below, making skull-shadows of her cheeks and brows. “How could it not exist? Consider how many legends of Fairyland there are. No smoke without fire, you know. A lady investigating our country’s folklore may feel as sure of the Kingdom of Fairy as a lady investigating railway tracks may be sure of steam engines.”
“I have thought as much myself,” Silver admitted. By God, how he had hungered for Fairyland once! The Wood had taken up some of that space in his thoughts; but what was the good of it, in the end? He had rejoiced so greatly in his discoveries. Now his house was a ruin; he had no good clothes left; his main social intercourse was with a dryad who plainly thought him an inferior specimen of humanity, though Bramble would probably have regarded kings and emperors as inferior next to Tobias Finch.
Maybe he had forgotten himself, somewhere, between the Wood and Fabian Rafela and Tobias bloody Finch. If it took a girl like this to remind him what it had felt like to have a serious conversation about the supernatural, then it really had been too long. Who was he, if not Henry Silver, gentleman scholar, hunter of secrets, lover of fairy tales?
“God knows it would be a remarkable discovery,” he said. “I don’t deny it. Amazing—marvellous—if it were possible. But no one has ever found Fairyland yet, and you must know you’re not the first to try. What makes you so sure you know where you’re going?”
Maud was grinning. The expression lit up her awkward face. “It’s simple enough. I’ve been there before,” she said.
Through all this Tobias had sat in silence, like a man carved of wood. Silver had almost—almost—let himself ignore the man’s pr
esence. But at that he sucked in a breath.
Maud turned her head and gazed at Tobias in rudely direct curiosity for a long moment.
“It is you,” she said. “I thought so all along. I was only a child, but I don’t forget. Do you remember me? In your wood?”
And as she said it Silver realised with a lurching sensation that he actually had a kind of memory of her, a vision of a silent little yellow-haired scrap of humanity in the arms of a shimmering half-seen figure disappearing among the trees. It was his thought and yet not his thought. It came from the Wood.
“Yes, miss,” said Tobias heavily. “I remember.”
* * *
At the age of six Maud Lindhurst, visiting her aunt near Hallerton, had been kidnapped by a fairy.
She was not able to describe, exactly, what the fairy looked like. Its legs were long, she said. Its eyes were hard to look at.
It had taken her to a strange place along a road made of moonlight. She had been very hungry, but she had not made a sound. Being an intelligent and resourceful six-year-old, she had paid attention to the road; and when her peculiar captor’s attention was distracted on their arrival, she had stood up on her small and sturdy legs and run back along the silver pathway until she found herself among trees, lots of trees.
There the fairy, rushing after her, had caught her again and picked her up in its arms; and she had looked into its disturbing eyes and it had said something, maybe, though Maud could not say what the words were or even if it had been speaking in a language she knew.
“What was it like?” asked Silver, fascinated. The candles on their tall golden candlesticks guttered and flickered, casting dancing shadows over the walls of Abbot Julius’s crypt.
“Sad,” said Maud, her expression very distant. “It was so sad.”
Then, as the human child stared up at its captor and the fairy continued to—speak? To sing?—a big man in big boots had come stomping out of the woods towards them. The fairy had taken fright and tried to run, but the burden of a human child had been too much for it—Maud described it as skinny, spindly even, without strength in its long limbs—and it had carefully set her down on a grassy knoll. The big man had come upon her there, crying furiously, surrounded by a ring of white mushrooms. He had been very fearsome. When he tried to pick her up, Maud screamed and ran away; and strangely enough, the trees had moved around her, so that she found herself stumbling out of the straggling edge of Greenhollow Wood and into the outskirts of Hallerton village, where the aunt she was staying with had not even noticed she was missing.
