‘Don’t die, my darling,’ Henry whispered. ‘My love, please don’t die. Oh, Blue…’ There were tears streaming down his cheeks. He cradled her head in his lap and stroked the long red hair. ‘Don’t leave me, Blue – I can’t live without you.’
He was seated on a rocky apron that formed part of an outcrop rising up out of the Wildmoor Broads like the prow of some tall ship. Blue’s body lay sprawled like one who had fallen from the clifftop. (Fallen and died, his mind kept insisting.) They were surrounded by a sea of prickleweed that seethed and writhed and reached in their direction, but did not – apparently could not – intrude on the rock.
There was blood by Henry’s feet, quite a lot of it. The blood was Henry’s own: a strip of flesh was missing from his forearm and there were lesions on his face, legs and hands. Blue exhibited scarcely a scratch, yet Blue was the one who was dead. ‘You mustn’t,’ Henry said emphatically. ‘Your subjects need you. I need you. You must not be dead.’ Her eyes were open, but blank, staring upwards at a distant sky. There was no gentle rise and fall of her chest, no whisper of breath from her mouth. There was no heartbeat, no pulse.
Henry’s mind kept replaying what happened. It was at once so bizarre and so ordinary and, to start with, so triumphant. The fence-shields had worked. They had worked brilliantly. Chalkhill must have paid for some super-strong spell coating, because the weed could not touch them. It knew Blue and Henry were there. It reached towards them eagerly. But then it recoiled violently while it was still a foot or two away. That was distance magic, the costly kind. At the time, Henry thought it was their passport home.
He should have known better. The Broads had claimed hundreds of lives. If the trick to crossing them was that easy, somebody would have discovered it years ago.
But he hadn’t known better and now Blue was dead. He couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe how sudden it had been, how simple it had been. When he saw how the plants were reacting, he’d turned to smile at Blue. He actually remembered saying, ‘This is so easy. Now all we need to do is find a road.’ And then Blue said, ‘I think I’ve scratched my hand on something.’
He was stupid, stupid, stupid! He could hardly see the scratch on the back of her hand, it was so tiny. He almost told her not to make a fuss, but then, without warning, she fell. It was a dreadful, spine-chilling fall. Not a trip or a stumble, but a total collapse. Her eyes rolled backwards in her head so that she looked, for just the barest moment, like one of Madame Cardui’s zombies, then her knees buckled and she sank in on herself like a squashed paper bag.
Her shield of fencing fell from her hand.
The weed was on her at once. Her back remained protected, but fronds whipped out viciously towards the front of her body and her face and there was not the slightest flicker of expression when they struck her. She must have been dead already, Henry thought. But at the time, Henry thought nothing, simply acted. He hurled himself forward with a roar, slashing blindly with his knife. Leaves and stalks flew and the weed, sensing attack, turned in his direction. He could feel the hundred tiny stings as it began to flay skin from his arms and legs. Something gouged his arm and blood began to flow, but he ignored it. Using his shield, he transposed himself between the writhing prickleweed and Blue, then grabbed her arm and heaved her up.
Something in him hoped she might be able to stand, perhaps even walk if he supported her, but she was deadweight. ‘Arrrrgh!’ Henry screamed and slashed out with his knife again. The creeping weed fell back a little, but then – he could scarcely believe it – circled slowly around them like an animal searching for a weak point to attack. Henry swung Blue’s body across his shoulders in a fireman’s lift, staggered a little, then planted both feet firmly. His shield protected her legs, the fencing tied to her back protected the rest of her body. He threw himself forward, desperate to get clear of the weed, desperate to find somewhere safe, even temporarily, where he could revive Blue.
After that, it was all a half-remembered nightmare, an ocean of prickleweed, a high forest of prickleweed, moving, scratching, slashing, driven on by desperation, half mad with grief and fear until, abruptly, he emerged by sheer luck on to the rocky apron.
He laid her down gently and stood for a moment, panting. He was aware of his own blood on his face, legs and body. Compared to himself, Blue looked completely uninjured. There was no blood, no swelling, no rash, no discoloration. If he closed her eyes, she would have looked almost peaceful. But he didn’t want to close her eyes, because that would mean admitting she was really dead.
‘Oh, Blue…’ he moaned.
There was a sound behind him. Henry twisted, saw nothing, then quickly laid Blue’s head gently on the ground and climbed to his feet. For a second he thought the prickleweed might be encroaching on the rock, but while it still surrounded him, it kept its distance. He could see nothing to explain the sound. His guess was a displaced pebble. But what had displaced it? In a less hostile environment he would have assumed a small animal – a rabbit or rat – but no animals survived on the Broads, not in the areas infested by the weed. Any that ventured into prickleweed territory were eaten.
He was about to return to Blue – to Blue’s body his mind told him savagely: he had to face facts if he was to survive, and he had to survive for Mella’s sake – when a movement on the cliff face attracted his attention. Something was crawling out of a dark opening about twenty feet above him. It emerged to cling to the cliff itself, then began slowly to edge its way downwards.
Henry watched, fascinated. The creature had the shape of a man, but was much, much smaller; scarcely larger than a cat, in fact. The thought that it was a monkey passed through his mind, but he dismissed it: he was in the Faerie Realm and there were no monkeys in the Faerie Realm. As it drew closer, he realised that the humanoid appearance was, in any case, quite superficial. The little ‘man’ had no features: no mouth, no nose, no eyes or ears, simply a bulbous ball of a head. The body was incomplete as well. Although there were rudimentary feet and hands, there were no toes or fingers. It was as if somebody had started to carve a human figure from a piece of wood, then left it unfinished. But the figure, a greyish black in colour, could move. And move swiftly. It had already reached the rocky apron and was heading towards him.
It never occurred to Henry he might be in any danger. The creature was too small to do him any harm. But when it headed towards Blue – towards Blue’s body – he stepped forward quickly and placed himself directly in its path. The creature stopped. He was not at all clear on how it sensed his presence, but it did. It stood for a moment, head tilted back as if looking up at him with invisible eyes, then moved a cautious pace or two to its right, as if preparing to circle around him. When he moved to block it, the creature scampered left again, then stopped as Henry moved. It was like a child’s game. It might even have looked cute if it were not so obviously determined to reach the body of his dead wife.
Henry decided to end the game and made a little dash towards it, hoping to frighten it away. The creature’s head exploded.
A choking cloud of spores struck Henry’s face, temporarily blinding him and sending him into a paroxysm of coughing. The spores were in his nose, in his mouth, in his eyes, in his ears. For a moment he could do no more than choke and retch, then his vision began to clear. The spores stung sharply where his skin was broken, but as he began to brush them off, he noticed that the gash on his arm was no longer bleeding. He blinked his eyes clear and caught sight of the little creature, headless now, climbing back up the cliff face towards its cave. As his gaze followed it, Henry noticed the sky had turned a luminous green. A nauseous, luminous green. He felt, quite suddenly, like throwing up. Then the wave of sickness died down and the inside of his mouth turned icy cold.
Henry felt dizzy. The rock on which he stood was no longer firm, but undulated like the back of a great beast, throwing him off balance. For a moment it seemed it really was a great beast, but then he was on solid ground again.
The air began to sing. Henry’s brother-in-law Pyrgus had once taken him to a simbala parlour and it was a little like that, except that then the music had flowed through the insides of his body while now it surrounded him in an expanding panorama that stretched out to distant horizons. He could see the music as well as hear it, smell it as well as see it. If he had reached out his hand, he might have touched it.
Blue moved.
Henry swung towards her, but she had not woken up, not returned from the dead. Her body was simply floating, drifting a little on the tonal currents of a sea of music. The music clung to her in a black lament.
There were giant birds. At first they were far away, gliding lazily in the distant sky, but soon they circled closer and he saw they were vultures come to feed on Blue. Henry waved his arms and shouted, but one of the birds kept coming, growing larger and larger until it hid the sun, then blacked out the entire sky above his head. He could smell the foetid stench of its breath, the sickly stench of death and decay, as it settled beside Blue, poor Blue.
Then it opened its stomach to lay a great, pale egg. As he stared, the egg emitted a tapping noise, cracked, then shattered. Out of it strode the Road Runner.