by Tim Lebbon
Vince had lost count of how many times he’d attempted this, but he had to try again. Trying was what kept him moving, and alive. Not trying would be to give up.
Turning his back on the valley, he walked across the exposed hilltop and then started down with the breeze in his face, moving away from the Fold and the wide basin. He had never done this in this exact place, although he recognised some of his surroundings from previous attempts. Maybe this is the time I find the chink in the Fold, he thought, and despite his failure every previous time, his heart beat a little faster at the possibility. The landscape was vast and stretched for miles into the distance, with no visible barrier and no indication that his whole world now consisted of one large valley that it took a day to circumnavigate. He saw hills and rivers and lakes, all of them beyond, and he was careful not to take his eye off them.
I’ve seen them all before, I know they’re not in the Fold.
There was no point at which he sensed a change. One moment he was descending a steep slope towards a landscape he did not know, the next he was heading back down into the Fold. He could see the river following its familiar twisting route, the rocky terrain where his cave waited for him, the woodlands in the north. He did not feel his direction alter, nor his perception of where he was heading. It would almost have been better if he had felt a dizziness, and a sense that his reality was being changed and distorted. Better than this. Better than knowing for sure there was no escape.
It wasn’t at all like being turned around or misled. It was simply as if this was the whole world, and there was nowhere else to go.
* * *
Disappointed once again, he walked back down into the valley. It was there that his day changed. It had been some time since he’d witnessed Grace hunting, but now he saw the results of one of her attacks.
The Kin was cowering beneath a tree at the edge of a small pool in the woods. Vince had chosen to walk back towards his cave through the woods because he wanted to collect some berries, and to see if any of the small snares he’d set had caught something more substantial he might cook. The valley was home to rabbits and voles, as well as a species of flightless bird he had not been able to identify. So far it was only rabbits he had been able to catch. The other creatures seemed aware of him and his intentions, and he was worried that the rabbits would eventually grow more cautious too. There was fruit and some nuts, and a few of the roots he’d dug up were palatable, if not pleasant to eat. But he must already have lost thirty pounds since he’d become trapped in the Fold. If he started losing out on an occasional meat meal, he feared he would waste away.
He wasn’t sure what the Kin was that sat hunkered and moaning beneath the tree. He thought he’d seen it before from a distance, although most of those in the Fold kept themselves to themselves. He sometimes spoke to a few, but never to this one. It was small, slight, and it might have been graceful if it wasn’t twisted by pain. It was holding onto its shoulder and keening, rocking back and forth and pressing its hand to a terrible wound.
It would heal. They all healed, in time for Grace to make a meal of them again.
Vince moved out of the trees and started walking around the pond. The ground was marshy and his boots sank in, stinking water seeping inside. He kept his eye on the Kin, watching to check its reaction, ready to turn and run the other way if it seemed at all threatening. He didn’t think it was. After a long time living in the Fold, he had only had cause to fear the Kin a couple of times, and he believed that both times were his fault.
Vince wasn’t sure just how long he had been shut away in this place. No two days felt the same length, and there was little other way of marking the passage of time. His phone had ceased working a day after he was trapped here, and his watch followed thirty hours later, battery bleeding dry. He’d started trying to track the passing days by scratching marks on the cave wall, but he’d forgotten a day or two, then forgotten that he’d forgotten, and then one day had felt like six. After that he saw little point.
Months, for sure. Probably a year or two. Every single day of his confinement—a natural day or one extended by the Fold’s strange physics—he thought of Angela, and he mourned for her because he was becoming more certain day by day that he would never see her again. The Fold was somewhere else.
All of which made trying to find his way back the only thing that kept him alive. He’d come to believe that communicating with the Kin might be the only chance he had.
As he approached the wounded creature he started whispering, as if talking in subdued tones to a wounded animal. “There, don’t worry, I won’t hurt you, just coming close to see if I can—”
The Kin hissed. Vince froze, still ten metres away, ready to turn and run. He thought it was female, her body wiry and strong. And covered in scars. He wondered how many times Grace had hunted her and taken her down, biting a chunk of meat from her body before letting her limp or crawl away. What would that do to a mind?
“I only want to help,” he said, holding his hands out.
“Fuck off, human.” Her voice was deeper than he’d anticipated, a heavy growl rattling like stones in a tin. “Why can’t she eat you? Huh? You got some sort of agreement with her? Some arrangement?”
Vince shook his head. No agreement, no arrangement, he thought, but he had often wondered the same thing. Why didn’t Grace bite chunks out of him?
The only reason he could think of was that he would not heal.
“Let me have a look at—”
“Fuck off, human!” This time the Kin moved, shifting from vulnerable and wounded to vicious in the blink of an eye. She crouched on all fours and faced up to him like a wild dog, ready to leap and take a chunk out of him. The wound on her shoulder and upper arm was red-raw, still bleeding and horribly deep. Perhaps the wounds, old and new, had driven her mad.
Vince turned and ran away from the pond, into the woods and onto a path he had wandered before. Panting hard, running fast, he didn’t look back until he burst from the forest and out onto the grassland across the valley floor. With the river to his left he glanced back and slowed to a jog. The Kin was not following him. He suspected she was still at the pond, content to see him gone and now nursing her wounds once more, keening in pain and grief at what the great fairy had done.
He looked around at the stunning landscape as his heart settled and perspiration cooled on his skin. Grace had certainly ensured that her eternal home was a beautiful one. He wished the injured Kin had allowed him closer. Few of those lured here by Grace ever did, as if the only human here was in part responsible for their predicament. Trying everything he could to escape, gathering as much information as possible, he thought it was only through them that he would finally make his way back to the world.
Lonely, craving company, Vince found himself heading towards the only Kin that he knew for sure would talk to him.
* * *
“She doesn’t eat you because human flesh tastes like shit.” It sounded like Mallian knew what he was talking about, but Vince chose not to pursue that line of conversation. He had merely mentioned the wounded Kin, and the Nephilim’s comment made him suspect he could read his mind. After everything that had happened, something so mundane would not surprise him.
“Sometimes I’m not even sure she knows I’m here,” Vince said.
“Of course she knows. She just wouldn’t demean herself by acknowledging you.”
“You do.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers.”
“She hasn’t bitten chunks out of you, either.”
“She wouldn’t dare,” Mallian muttered.
“Really? You’re not saying that very loud. Afraid she might hear?”
“Huh.”
“Maybe she’s waiting for you to mature.”
They sat in silence for a while, Vince looking down towards the river, Mallian staring up at the sky. It was what the Kin did most days and nights. He had not been able to move since those first few moments in the Fold, when he’d tried
casting the glamour that would take the fairy under his control, and she had turned it around and pinned him to the ground. Vince was responsible for that. He had stolen away one of the relics that Gregor, the old relic hunter, had taken half a lifetime to find, and which Mallian had needed for the spell to work.
The Nephilim didn’t seem to blame Vince for what he had done. After the Fold closed, it had taken Vince a long time to approach the prone figure, and many days more until they had exchanged their first words. Vince took some comfort from their strained, strange conversations. He suspected that Mallian did too, though he would never admit it.
Lately, Vince had started to wonder how long their talks might continue.
Mallian could not move. His arms and legs were pressed down into the ground. At several places along each splayed arm and leg his patterned, leathery skin was compressed as if by an invisible binding. Vince had watched him attempting to move from a distance, and sometimes when they were talking or simply sharing company the Nephilim writhed and twisted against his unseen, unknowable constraints.
Over time, he was starting to wither away.
“I’ve got some berries for you,” Vince said.
“Oh, wonderful. More berries. Can’t you get me a rabbit?”
“None in the snares today.”
“None that you’re telling me about.”
Vince stood and leaned over Mallian, dropping berries into his open mouth from high up. He never went too close. He didn’t like the look of those teeth. Mallian always wanted meat, and Vince didn’t for a second believe that he would not rip his arm off and chew flesh from bone, given the opportunity.
Mallian munched and swallowed. A quick glance at Vince as he did so was his only sign of gratitude.
“Never thought I’d become vegetarian.”
“Lots has changed,” Vince said.
“And yet everything remains the same.”
Vince frowned and moved away to sit down. It wasn’t the first time Mallian had made such a comment, and it troubled Vince. Perhaps it was the nature of the Fold, but he sometimes had a disquieting sense that time was motionless here, not moving on. The Kin lived, moved, ate, slept, and were hunted and feasted upon by Grace. Trees and grasses grew, small mammals, birds and insects lived and died. The river flowed, entering and leaving the Fold in ways he did not understand. Yet there was a stillness to the land. A stagnation, like a held breath or the space between heartbeats.
“I see her, sometimes...” he said, trailing off.
“I see her too.”
“No, I mean I see her standing still. In a forest, or along the riverbank, or up on the hillsides. She has her head tilted, as if she’s listening or sniffing for something.”
“Looking for something else to eat,” Mallian said.
“You really think she has to hunt for her meals?” Vince asked. “She reaches out and takes what she wants, when she wants.”
“It’s this place she’s created,” Mallian said. “There’s no forward motion, no change. Nothing degenerates, but nothing grows different, either. Maybe she’s searching for change she’ll never find.”
“You’re changing,” Vince said.
“I’m dying,” Mallian said. The words hung in the air, heavy and loaded, ringing in the sudden silence. The Nephilim snorted and looked away, trying to distance himself from what he’d said.
Vince also looked away, but he wasn’t sure why. He had never heard Mallian sound so vulnerable or defeated. He was embarrassed for the Kin, as well as feeling a surprising surge of pity. For a creature so strong and proud, being trapped here like this must be the ultimate nightmare. Vince couldn’t kid himself into thinking that he was helping keep Mallian alive. The berries he dropped into his mouth, the occasional chunk of raw meat he caught and fed him, were nothing compared to the fuel he should be imbibing. It had been months or years, and the Nephilim was still alive.
If he was dying, it was because he was losing the will to live.
“Ascent seemed to work really well for you.”
“Fuck off, human.”
“I’m hearing that a lot today.” Vince stood and smiled in Mallian’s direction. He didn’t expect a smile in return, and he didn’t get one, but something about Mallian’s expression had softened.
I have to remember who he is.
Vince remembered Mallian crushing people’s heads in Mary Rock’s house in London.
He wants to expose the Kin to the world.
He was the reason he and Angela were a universe apart.
And in doing so he’s happy to risk war.
He might be trapped and withered, defeated and dying, but the Nephilim was still a monster.
“I’ll bring meat next time.”
“I’ll be here.”
Vince smiled again and walked away.
* * *
Sunset came late that day. The sun hung above the western hills for what seemed like hours, and Vince sat by the small stream just downhill from his cave to watch. He leaned against a fallen tree and dropped off a couple of times, startled awake by a fly landing on his nose, and a loud exuberant call from some indefinable distance. At least not every Kin here is in pain, he thought, but he wasn’t sure how long that would last. He didn’t think that every Kin had fallen prey to Grace yet, but most had. They carried the scars to prove it.
He still felt threatened almost every moment he was awake, and when he slept the dreams were often bad, haunting. In some ways he had learnt to live with the danger. The same had been the case in London when he was collecting relics for Fat Frederick Meloy, until danger had come looking for him. Here in the Fold it was part of every day, and as familiar as the air he breathed.
That didn’t mean he did not try to avoid danger. It simply meant that he built his life around it.
As the sun finally touched the hills he contemplated the view for the hundredth time. For some reason the Fold enjoyed gorgeous sunsets most days, and Vince saw every one of them. They were all different. They were all impossible. The world beyond the ridge line around the valley did not exist. There were no distant lands being touched by this same sun. There was no dark and light in the Fold, only dark or light. It was as perplexing as trying to consider where the river began and ended.
Eyelids drooping again, Vince vowed to one day drop a stick into the river close to where it entered the Fold, then wait to see if it was swept out the other side and in again where he sat.
But what about the air? he thought. What about the sky, if I were able to jump up and fly like a couple of the Kin? What about the ground if I decided to start digging down like Dastion the tunnelling dwarf?
His new home was as enigmatic as infinity.
With dusk falling at last he retreated to his cave and lit the fires. He had become adept at surviving in the wild, and it only took him a couple of minutes to spark an ember alight and coax it into flame. Every time he did so he experienced a thrill, because fire meant warmth and safety. It meant that he was surviving.
With the fires lit, he retreated into his small cave. It was cool in there, the heavy air always hidden from the sun and daylight. It smelled like air never stirred by life, and never felt against skin. He had found places like this in London, deep below ground or in buildings abandoned for years or decades. Back there, he’d always found a way home.
Near the rear of the cave he knelt down and uncovered the rucksack. It had travelled far in its lifetime, tracking back and forth across the globe on the shoulders of the Kin-killer Gregor. He in turn had been killed by Mallian, the master he had served. A fitting, gruesome end.
Sometimes when Vince looked through the contents of the rucksack, he wondered if he had saved the world.
Some of the items were recognisable, most were not. Some obviously belonged inside a body, not without. Whereas before he would have been excited about such a haul, now they chilled him to the core. Along with the relic he had stolen away and left back in the world, these were the items that had so nearl
y given Mallian control over the fairy Grace.
Things would have been very different if that had happened.
I might still be with Angela, he thought, but he might also be in a world where humans and Kin were facing up to each other. He knew Mallian as well as any human being, perhaps as well as some Kin. The Nephilim would have never backed down from a fight.
He still could not quite work out why the fairy had allowed him to retain the relics. Perhaps she had been mixed up and confused by Mallian’s attempts at control. Or maybe once the Fold had closed for good, she realised that she had won.
Mallian certainly seemed to accept that he had lost.
“I might have saved the world,” Vince muttered as he looked down at the relics, and the whole idea felt ridiculous. He was so far away from the world that he would never know.
5
After almost half a century alive, Bone was presented with an opportunity he’d thought he would never have. He’d have to do his best to not fuck it up.
He found it whilst performing a regular search online. He made the search so often that he tapped in the name and hit the necessary links almost without thinking. Foo Fighters were playing through his speaker, he was into his second glass of wine of the evening, and within the next hour a woman called Jayne would arrive. They had been messaging each other for a few days, and the previous day it was her who’d cut out the bullshit and posed the question: So shall we meet for some fun?
It was the sort of interaction Bone liked. Some text flirting, a few photos, then meeting for a fuck. If it went well and they liked each other he might suggest another meeting or two, but then he’d cut it off. He didn’t want a relationship. He’d been there and done that, and falling in love with someone hadn’t suited him. Ten years ago he’d had his heart broken, and like any scar tissue, when it mended it was knotted and raw.
