The Unlucky Man (21 page)

A path ran through the sucking water, and not a man-made path either, a natural formation of rock led, winding and unnatural, pitilessly into the heart of the mountain fen. We were being led where we were expected to go.

We followed the path, treading carefully as some instinct told us it would not do to disturb the greasy grey waters and whatever might lie beneath them. Flies, bloated and ugly, buzzed continuously over the surface of the pools, their nasal songs the only sounds to be heard on air thick with the decaying wetland miasma.

Clouds of gas and mist were rising off the surface of the water, thick and hazy, distorting our view and confusing the senses. The afternoon seemed dark now, the sun lost behind a veil of choking gas.

Up ahead, for a brief moment, I thought I saw a flame flare up, an orange beacon in the mist. It was fleeting, but I had the impression, just for a few moments, of a great bonfire, deep within the shifting currents of the marsh, and against it the silhouetted figures of men, dancing and gesturing in the light of the flames.

The light came again. I wasn't sure what I was seeing, if it was the past or glimpses of somewhere else entirely, somewhere that had never been. A carved effigy in red wood stood proudly amid the flames as they licked up all around it. Strange, ugly faces leered along its length, mad eyed human features with lolling tongues and sharp, elongated teeth. A bull's head with a ring through the nose stared balefully next to an eagle with one overgrown eye perched above its beak. Many and more there were along the length of the wood, curving sinuously in the flames until they seemed to be moving and the whole thing looked alive. In the shifting light of the fire the red wood had an almost organic feel. Fish danced with wolves, lions with bears and bats and around all strange shapes and looping patterns told a story I did not have the eyes to read.

With a sudden gout of flame, the figures before the blaze were illuminated for a split second. At their head danced a wizened old man, naked but for some skirts of leathery animal skin. His face and chest were painted with some dried orange clay and adorned with circles and slashes of white paint that glowed in the firelight.

On his face was another white ornament, the full shape of a hand, palm pressed against his left cheek, fingers splaying out across the bridge of a short nose and under his eyes, thumb print stretching down to bisect his lips. His hair was caked with the same white clay and slicked back from his head and so too was the long beard that hung limp from his chin. About his head he wore a crown of antlers and feathers, sewn with wild flowers and vines.

In his hand he held a knife of sharpened bone in the shape of a crescent moon that sparkled and shone in the orange light as he danced before the pyre. His lips were moving as if in song though no sound travelled across the stinking fen to my ears.

With a silent crack, the top of the wooden statue, a great horse's head crowned with curling ram's horns, broke away from the main body of the carving and tumbled into the flames. Immediately the supplicants ceased their dancing as one grabbed another by the hair, forcing his head back and exposing the long line of his neck. That wicked curved blade arched down, cutting through the smoky air and an ardent spray painted the chunk of carved burning wood atop the pyre.

The fire died away as suddenly it had sprung into life.

Then it came again, another flash of light, and now the figures were still, fixed unmoving against the rolling fire and, though distorted and far away and glimpsed only for a second, I was left with the distinct impression that they were watching, waiting. I heard a sharp intake of breath from behind me and knew that the others had seen them too.

"What are they?" Loess whispered and, in the confines of the stinking, otherworldly place, the question "what" and not "who" didn’t seem inappropriate.

"Don"t worry," I said in answer, "They’re not-" I paused, uncertain of how to finish the statement. It wasn't that they weren't real, for they were, I felt sure of it, but rather that they existed in another place and time, that we were seeing them through the skin of the world to where they truly were, somewhere older and stranger by far, a place just below this one, perhaps, but close enough to be almost touching, almost becoming one.

Amid the waters another scene was playing itself out as a procession of funeral marchers made their slow and sombre way through the mire. They were big men and tall, proud women. Long braided hair hung down past their shoulders and the men's beards were blond and knotted. All wore armour of some description, ringed mail in the main and heavy boots, leathered shields hung at their backs.

They marched in a proud solemn line and at their head four men held aloft a craft of reeds on their shoulders, within which rested the body of one of their fallen. Gold glinted at neck and knuckle where his pale hands rested atop a short sword, the pommel carved into the shape of twin crows in flight.

Gently they lowered the boat into the water, casting it off among the reeds and watching in grim silence as it floated off, carried on the current. It bobbed for a long time, edging further and further away from shore until, at length, the small craft was lost to view. Only when it was fully gone did the mourners turn and walk away, in a long line, into the swirling mists. Their shapes distorted, becoming grey shadows amongst the waters before, at last, they disappeared into the smoke.

"They're not really there," I said, "Not exactly. They can't touch us, I think." And I hoped I was right.

Confused and oppressed by the clinging fog, the stink of the brackish and rotten water, the glimpses of figures half seen and half real, we continued on, following the path to its eventual conclusion, until, at last, in the bowl between two mountains we reached a point where the world dropped down into a deep yet narrow chasm. The water flowed all around us in a slow waterfall, down over the edges of the pit, disappearing into the darkness below, consumed by it.

We stared down into the shadows. This then was where it all began, the well at the top of the world.

It seemed to swallow the light.

I stared down into the fissure. There was no birdsong, no more insects clicked and crawled and buzzed. All was silence. It was as if the pit was sucking noise as well as light from the world.

Like it sucked the colour from Wychelo's eyes, the thought leapt into my mind unbidden. Now that we were here at last I felt near to something, so near and yet it remained just outside the reach of my consciousness, a half heard melody drifting away on the breeze with my clouding breath.

Perry was dead, I thought. Wychelo was dead. All to reach this place.

Corg was dead too I reminded myself with a pang.

"So what now?" Whimsy asked, breaking the silence. "It’s just a hole."

"No," I said, "It isn’t. You know it isn’t. You can feel it. I know you can." After a minute he nodded unhappily. The air was stiff with anticipation: it felt like the whole world was holding its breath.

"What is it?" Loess murmured. She too, I noticed, seemed transfixed by the pit, her head tilted at a strange angle as if she was listening hard to something only half heard and half understood.

"Everything," I said, "And nothing. Another world, I think, wrapped around something at its centre, like a cocoon. Something conscious, alive."

There was a rusty metal ladder planted into the earth beneath the flowing current at the top of the pit, its rungs leading down to be swallowed by the darkness that lapped at its base. I started to climb down into the fissure. Silently, illogically the other two followed and I knew it was calling to them too.

As we descended, I saw that the shadow wasn’t receding but rather washed at the rock wall below like oil, thick and glutinous and moving, lapping darkly at the corners of the world.

We were about half way down the rock face between the top of the hole and the beginning of the shadow when I heard it. Just above me I saw Whimsy jerk round to stare past me into the depths, stiff with tension – clearly, he heard it too.

It was a sound like a murmur and a scream, a howl and the rhythm of incredible harmony, the wind in the angry confines of a cave, waves crashing against a storm beaten coast, birdsong, the crash of thunder, the roar of a fire. Within the twisting dark lay a whole world of imagined possibility. It started to move. Up, up the rock wall towards us. And as it moved, so too did the shadow in my mind, revealing its secrets, and I remembered.

I was back in the windowless room with Wychelo and Perry. Corg was already floating away on a sea of narcotic waves. But this time I didn’t follow. A part of my mind, the part that wasn’t me, that tiny ember of curling darkness, was untouched by the strains of poison now flowing into my body. Of course it was: it was the poison.

 The door opened and a figure entered. He was neat in appearance, lightly built, greying at the temples with a cruel patrician face and cold, unfeeling eyes. Dressed in a serious, grey military tunic, buttoned to the chin and free of any adornment, he entered the room with a slightly uneven limping gait. On his hands he wore black leather gloves.

"You two can go," he said as he entered, and they obeyed instantly. Then another figure entered, a huge, bulgingly muscular creature, carrying a simple chair which he placed down in front

of me.

The smaller man settled into it, facing me as I sat prone, head to one side, staring without seeing into his face, not more than three feet distant.

"Hello Hesker," he said. "Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Horst."

I had stopped, knuckles white against the cold metal of the ladder.

"What’s happening?" Loess called down to me, her voice tight with suppressed tension, but I couldn’t answer.

"Oh my God," Whimsy groaned, seeing the moving line of darkness for the first time. "Oh God."

It was moving fast now, rushing to claim us.

"We don’t have long before you start to wake up, so I’ll keep this brief," Horst said.

"You are going to do something for me, Mr Hesker, a very great something." He viewed me with cold dispassionate eyes in which I could see no human empathy, no warmth, no compassion. To him, I           felt sure, I was nothing but a tool to be used and then discarded when my job was done. Or perhaps I was worse than that.

"I am going to tell you some things first, however, as I think you will remember them at the last, as the seed of darkness leaves you and I want you to understand," and there was a cold hatred in his face as he looked at me now, "You have not made things easy for me, Mr Hesker, and that is why I am telling you these truths now. You have been a thorn in my side. You have, I think, cost me one of my greatest assets in the shape of Wychelo who’s mind I see unraveling as a result of his hunting of you and who, I feel, I shall now have to allow Rift to try his hand against," behind Horst, I saw the giant – Rift – smile a small, pleased smile of anticipation, "And so you must suffer at the last. You will remember this, at the end and at that end, you will know what you have been responsible for."

He sat back.

"You have been a pawn in a game you do not understand," he told me.

"It was chance that found you, Mr Hesker. That is to say that you were unlucky. An unlucky man. There is a force at work here far older than you or I, a consciousness as old as the world itself, trapped for long ages in a tomb of its own making. And it seeks to be    free, always to be free. This force, this shadow, a god to you, I have been its confidant, its right hand on earth for many years and in that time we have searched for the right mind to set it loose of its shackles. That mind was yours." He had a triumphant, unhinged gleam in his eye now.

"He has been growing stronger in our world, year by year, but he cannot truly be free until our world’s are wedded together once more, until reality of common sense stretches and breaks enough to allow him back through. You’ve seen how the world is changing already, how you are changing things. It is so close .

"Like I say, it was chance that crossed your path with ours but when Wychelo stumbled across you in that train station, the shadow knew, and it whispered to Wychelo what he should do – he even told me later that he didn’t know why he put the pill in your mouth, but I knew, for Wychelo is touched by the same darkness as you and I, although he understands it only a little." Horst’s eyes were shining brightly in the small room and he smiled a terrible smile as he looked down on my inert form.

"The shadow, the beast, gave of himself to me that I might make something of him in the real world, these pills, my new army. And that power is what pulled you back from death, rebuilt your shattered body. You became something of the beast created here and he left in you a small, a tiny, part of himself." Horst was clearly enamoured with the sound of his own voice. The giant was tapping his knuckles on the metal table, creating a disjointed repetitive rhythm.

"He rebuilt you for his own purpose."

"Here is what you will do," Horst said, business like once more, "When you awake, you will leave this place and travel West into the mountains, you will know the way for the shadow is calling to you, I can feel it."

"You will find the well and you will return to it, restoring the part of you that is the shadow to the whole and opening the door between us, a door which at present is only slightly ajar, wide open. No, not just opening it, smashing it to pieces, You will force our reality and what we now think of as the fairytale thinking of a less enlightened age to collide and the results will be catastrophically beautiful. You are the key that will unlock the world."