A Long Day in Lychford Read online

  Lizzie got up from the mike and ran for the door as the DJ did also.

  Outside, the crowd were staring at . . . oh, there was a circle of day, bright summer day, blazing into the night of the woods like a searchlight. Lizzie squinted, blinked; she could just about see something in the light. Figures. Oh, and now the light was expanding, as if heaving against something. Great, this must be Finn; they were being rescued!

  Suddenly the light burst through, and the night collapsed around them like a stage curtain, and they and the barn and the generator were all standing not in the woods, but in a bright, open summer meadow in broad daylight, with the most beautiful, invigorating fragrances blasting into their nostrils.

  But Lizzie was now not so reassured. Because they weren’t home. She knew this exaggerated version of her own world from distant sightings. This was the place Autumn had been left so scarred from visiting. This was a meadow in the land of fairy. And standing in it wasn’t, as she’d hoped, a relieved and/or petulant Finn, but a trio of strange, thin beings who seemed to be reflecting the sunlight in mad, angular ways. She could just about perceive that they were wearing armour, an armour of green and gold, and had in their hands swords that were making the air around them sing with their sharpness, that were somehow breaking the very air that drifted across them.

  She saw all of this with the new senses given to her by the well in the woods. She had no idea what the others were seeing, but whatever it was, it was making them huddle together and back away in alarm.

  She took a look behind them. More of the same endless summer meadow, around a circle of mulch from the forest floor. The knot had collapsed, or been forcibly demolished, more like, and they’d been dropped into the middle of fairy.

  The shouting from around her made her turn back. The three figures had stepped forward. Their shadows had suddenly lengthened and fallen over the cowering humans, deliberately, a show of force. Where the hell was Finn? He must work so hard, she thought, must have observed Autumn and the rest of them so closely to even pass as human. Because these fellows of his who weren’t trying . . . they were something completely Other.

  “You!” the lead figure bellowed, the word seeming to twist into a translated version as it got to Lizzie’s ear. “This is our land now! You are inside! We want you out!”

  * * *

  Rory had been gesturing angrily at the sprites. “You send gods home, or gods get angry, gods strike you down, capeesh?”

  Judith had wanted to ask what language, exactly, “capeesh” came from, but she’d suspected he didn’t know. The sprites had been twisting in urgent conference. Rory had kept trying to get through to them on his own, limited, terms.

  She’d been hoping the sprites might offer her some power she could use to get out of here. She’d been putting that off until she absolutely had to do it, because, though the spell she had to cast was clear in her head, she was terribly afraid of how much of her strength it would use. But no, these poor things could barely feed themselves, and no other solution was going to present itself, and she was feeling weaker rather than stronger, so . . .

  What had she been thinking about? She put a hand to her brow.

  Why had she been hoping the . . . whatever they were called . . . why had she been . . . ?

  Oh God. Oh God. What were all these . . . things?! Where was she? Was she having a nightmare? Who was this old man? Where was her family? “Dad?!” she called out. Was this Dad? No, he didn’t look anything like . . . but what did Dad look like? She should be able to remember!

  The old man was looking at her in horror.

  * * *

  Autumn had heaved her way through a glowing web of colour, rushing through it, grab and run, grab and run, one-handed, holding Marcin with the other, pushing all her rage and frustration into just getting past something she could finally connect with, something she could finally . . . rip through!

  And then she was through it.

  She stumbled out onto a . . . grey, empty expanse. She looked around. It wasn’t quite a world. Distant . . . mountains? No, they faded again. They kind of shied away. It was like they were asking if she wanted to have mountains there, and when she’d mentally questioned that, they’d shyly retreated.

  Marcin was gasping. She looked to him. He was looking round in horror. “Work,” he said. “Work, all, nothing else, all life.” She had no idea what his eyes were seeing. The expression on his face was that of someone who was in their own personal . . .

  Suddenly, walls sprang up around them. Bare walls with peeling paintwork, a smell of stale beer that made her once again want to vomit, a bar overflowing with ale pump signs for unreal brands all about bulldogs and Spitfires, and everywhere around her, Union flags and the cross of Saint George, and red, white, and blue bunting and suddenly hemming them in on every side, fat, white men in Union Jack waistcoats, wearing flat caps, laughing their heads off as they chinked their handled beer mugs together, the foam splashing over her in great waves. Their laughter urged her to join in, join in, join in.

  She pulled Marcin, who was looking up and down at where to her there were gaps, seemingly in an entirely different world, to the door. She flung it open, but outside there was just more of the same. A television was on in here, and an ecstatic posh-voiced commentator was shouting, “It’s us against the world now! The sun will never set on the land of hope and glory!”

  Autumn slammed the door. She mustn’t lose control. She had to think. That moment of mountains had been this place sizing her up, testing out her mind before finding out what sort of world she didn’t want to be in and then flinging it at her. This was . . . oh God, this was actually hell, right? For anyone who came here. A hell, anyway. But how could there ever be anything more definitively hellish than torments that immediately suited themselves to you personally?

  She looked back to the exact place they’d been when they entered, and now, to her shock, a new figure was squeezing its way through the laughing men, the thin white shadow that had pursued her earlier. It must have been so close behind them it had come here, too. It was cringing, its fingers clenching and unclenching, staggering, spinning around as if looking for release.

  Oh God. It was suffering in its own private hell too. Whatever surrealism that involved, Autumn couldn’t imagine.

  She gathered all her courage, and heaved Marcin along to stumble toward it. Okay, it was time to make use of the rage she felt at everything that was crowding in around her here. She concentrated again on seeing the threads that underlay everything, while she still could, and sure enough, there they were, and seeing them made her stop in shock for a moment. Here they’d been twisted into a web that looked expertly woven, that wrapped round the heads of all three of them, that looked like they were the captives of some enormous . . .

  She locked away that thought before this world realised how terrifying it was and made the fear real. She grabbed the threads and heaved.

  And heaved . . . and heaved . . . and now she was simply pulling more and more of the stuff out of the air, building it up around her, wrapping it around her, trapping them more and more every second, and now it was billowing out of where she was pulling it, uncontrollably, and she realised that this place had latched on to that part of her fear too.

  * * *

  “Okay!” Lizzie had shouted to the leader of the fairies. “We’re all for that! We want to get out and get back to our world as soon as possible!” Because, after all, this wasn’t usually the problem with humans and fairies. The problem was usually that the fairies wanted the humans to stay. “But how do we do that?”

  The fairies had been silent. Then they’d just taken another threatening step forward. And those shadows had once again lashed out with a sort of internal visual . . . roar.

  “This isn’t happening,” Stewie had whispered beside her. “This is some . . . hallucination!”

  “Then we’re all having it,” the bearded boy had whispered. He’d looked to her. “Who are they? What can we do?
”

  “They won’t even tell us the rules!” the DJ had yelled.

  Because, Lizzie had thought, there was something a bit stagey about all this. Was what happened here going to be related back to Finn’s father, the king, as some sort of border incident, perhaps something Finn, as the go-between, should have prevented? The most worrying possibility was that if they were going to be portrayed as an invading horde, then their deaths might be a useful part of that portrayal. Not that the court were ever going to hear their version. Could this incident be used, even, to start a war? That was something the whole human race was unprepared for, never mind the three of them who supposedly guarded Lychford and now had not much in the way of boundaries to help with that.

  She spoke up, aware that, following the lad’s lead, more and more of these kids were looking to her. “We need to work out how to get out,” she called to them. “How about we start by backing up to the edge of this?” She pointed to the ground where the circle of woodland soil and mulch around the barn, with trees still standing inside it, was a plain indicator of the area that had been in the knot, now not wrapped back around itself, but obvious against the shining green of fairy grassland.

  They ran together, away from the fairies, to the edge of the circle. Lizzie quickly stepped across it. Nothing. There must be a way, a way which would be obvious, probably, from the fairies’ own point of view, because otherwise how could they characterise this as an aggressive action?

  She walked round the boundary, the others following her, hoping clearly that at any moment something magical would happen. Stewie was shaking his head, yelling that whoever had done this to him would pay, but the bouncers who’d come with her had serious looks on their faces. Those guys knew when they were in trouble.

  Lizzie felt a vibration on her wrist. She looked at her exercise monitor. “Congratulations!” a tiny scrolling text read. “You’ve doubled your target!”

  What? But she couldn’t have gone further than . . .

  She quickly stepped back over the same spot. Her wrist vibrated again. This time the device was ecstatic with the news that she’d trebled her target. If she did it again, the thing would probably give her the number of the nearest hospital. Whatever else happened to her today, she could die happy in the knowledge that she’d almost certainly beaten every other vicar in the weekly Diocesan Steps League. “Here,” she said. “There’s something wrong with space just here. I think this is the way out.”

  They all gathered round, eager and hopeful. But, given that she hadn’t immediately vanished home, what could she do with that knowledge?

  * * *

  Judith suddenly realised someone was talking to her, talking to her like she was a bloody idiot. It was Rory Holt. He was staring into her face. “My wife went like this. Couple of years before she passed on. I know there’s no getting through to you, but I have to try. Now’s not the time for you to be away with the fairies.”

  Judith bridled at the expression, grabbed his shoulder, and hauled herself to her feet. It wasn’t his words that had brought her back; her brain chemistry had just happened to sway in the right direction. She fought down a tremendous surge of panic. How much smaller had the bubble become? Oh no. Now it was like standing in a greenhouse. The sprites were clustered near them; soon they’d all be crushed into each other. What was the spell she needed to recite to get them out? She was so stressed she still couldn’t think how it started. She reached into the pocket of her cardigan for some more of that dust that would at least let her see the threads here, but she’d thrown it all at Autumn. “Stupid woman,” she whispered. “I’m so stupid!”

  “It’s not your fault. It’s that girl who sent us here.” The sprites reacted with sudden light as the wall lurched in on them and Rory followed that with the nastiest words about Autumn that Judith could possibly imagine, all about her colour. “All her fault!” he spat again as the sprites rushed in fear around him. Heaven knew what he could see of them. Judith didn’t want to know.

  If it was the end now, Judith realised, she wanted to say summat true. Summat she’d only just started in this moment admitting to herself. “It’s not her fault,” she said, “it’s mine. Mine a long time back. She made one mistake, I did exactly the same, and I was cursed for it, cursed for it so I suffered so long it took its toll on my noggin, and that’s why you’re stuck here, Rory Holt, because I made one mistake, and maybe you made a few too!”

  The sprites cried out in light as the roof of the world fell in on them all.

  * * *

  Autumn had tried to think as the material that made the borders of the worlds . . . what this place was pretending was that material in order to scare her . . . had flooded over her. But she’d quickly become lost under it, her world just chaos, nothing her flailing hands could grab hold of. No baseline to put her feet on, no rules.

  But, she realised, that was what this place was trying to tell her, to scare her with, wasn’t it? There were rules, she just had to dig deep and find them. For the sake not only of herself, but for helpless Marcin, who she could feel as if at a distance, shaking with his own fears. She even had to do it for the sake of that thing that had followed them. She had to do it for the sake of Luke, for everyone who . . . cared about her.

  How could she get past the fear? What was her experience telling her to do?

  Bloody bite it. Chew it. Rip it up.

  She snatched at the material with her teeth, grabbed it and held on, wrenched it from side to side. Was this achieving anything? Only satisfaction, but . . . there was a taste here . . . what was that? Taste, like every other sense she had, had been changed by exposure to the water from the well in the woods, but it wasn’t often she got to make use of it. There was a kind of . . . meaningfulness under the emptiness she had in her mouth, a sense that . . . yeah, put her tongue on it, get more of it . . . a sense that something real was here underneath.

  Okay, what had she got to lose? She grabbed a handful of what was turning into a void of meaninglessness around her and started to gulp it down. Started to take it like it was a drug. Come on, let her body and brain process this stuff, let it poison her, let her actually start to see what was . . .

  She realised she’d started to see the real fibres again. That now they were leading right into her body, that she’d actually managed to randomly pull some of them into her. What if she went beyond being able to pull on them, actually got . . . ? She grabbed a great handful of them and shoved them into her mouth, and into her brain, and it pulled her open, and she pulled them open in turn, and she forced her way inside. She abandoned the idea of her brain making sense of what she was visualising, and went with the impossibility. She reached a hand out of the impossible knot that was impossible to get out of and grabbed Marcin and the white being and hauled them in after her.

  Suddenly all three of them were in a sort of kaleidoscopic rollercoaster, colours rushing past at an impossible speed. Marcin was yelling, his hands trying to find purchase on something, but at least now he was reacting to the same thing she was. The being had just curled in a ball. But she herself . . . she was surfing this now. She had no control, but she could stand, and face forward, and see what was coming, ready to deal . . .

  There was ahead a jumble of infinite threads, all colours, which she couldn’t make sense of. The point where all the boundaries met, where all the borders were pulled tight. This was what someone had made, centuries ago, around Lychford. It connected the worlds as well as holding them apart. It wasn’t a great work of art, it was an organic mess of compromises and solutions and traps.

  Autumn fell into it yelling.

  * * *

  “What the bloody hell,” said Judith, “are you doing in my head?”

  Judith hadn’t actually expected to be alive. She was annoyed to find that she’d grabbed hold of Rory Holt as if to shield him from the collapse, just as he’d grabbed hold of whatever he could see of the sprites. They were all curled together in a tiny preserved bubble of a wo
rld, light flickering around them.

  “Holding the roof up,” said Autumn, from where Judith normally had an internal voice telling her to remember she’d put the kettle on or that Gardeners’ Question Time would be on soon, “and hey, you’re welcome.”

  “Just . . . don’t look around, now you’re in there!”

  “I can’t help it. I can . . . see . . . no, I’m feeling, I’m experiencing, like they’re my memories too . . . oh . . . oh no, oh Judith, I’m so—”

  Judith wouldn’t have been able to stand her pity if they’d been in the same room, never mind when it was coming from between her own ears. “Get out!” she whispered.

  “If I do that, there goes the roof. I didn’t choose to be in here, I just landed in the centre of . . . I think it’s where all the boundaries are attached . . . and I saw you here and I threw my . . . my sort of hand . . . out to save you and here’s where I ended up.”

  “How the hell . . . ? No, never mind that. Can you get us out of here?”

  Judith felt Autumn’s presence sort of . . . shifting in her head, like she was now looking at summat else apart from every intimacy of Judith’s life. The other thing Judith didn’t like was . . . oh, yes, she could feel Autumn’s existence too. There was an outsiderness that Judith recognised, but that with Autumn was both of long standing and recently, sharply, deepened. Judith found they were suddenly thinking a thought in both their inner voices at once. It was that if she wanted to, Judith could move to another town and fit in, while Autumn would always have a certain number of people who stood between her and that release.

  To share a thought . . . when she was younger, that would have been so good. But now it hurt so much. That outsider feeling was something Judith so did not want for Autumn, and she saw with great guilt how she had contributed to it. That guilt was reflected back by Autumn’s thoughts about how she’d treated Judith, given how Judith . . . was now.