Wind tugged at Hannah’s hair and slapped her face cold.
She concentrated on placing one foot in front of the other, not knowing if she was heading the right way. . yet strangely certain that she was.
She crawled blindly over roots and under branches, hurting everywhere, guided by sound. Between gusts and the timpani rush of black leaves, she heard snatches of a woman’s voice, a sad and lilting speech to someone or no one, carried away covetously by the fast air. She blundered between the dark trees, arms outstretched, falling and rising, ignoring the nauseating throb in her leg. This was right. This all was meant to be.
She was nearly there, perhaps fifty metres from the cottage. Nicholas was still alive — Hannah felt it in her heart — but things were about to turn.
Just then, the wind grew.
The clouds rolling high above the unhappy trees thinned.
The woman’s voice skipped on the air like a black pebble on silver water.
The moon peeked out of hiding and the trees seemed to spring from darkness.
Hannah stopped.
The ground around her seemed to shimmer. But not just the ground: the trunks of trees, the hanging leaves on hanging vines, the mossed fur of logs, all crept and trembled.
Hannah felt her heart gulp blood. Was it. .?
As the clouds parted further, cold silver dropped down between the leaves, lighting everything in front of her — and her breath caught in her throat.
A million spiders watched her. Small and squat, large and bristled: all took a sly, feline step towards her on their alien, skeletal legs. The moonlight winked off their eight million eyes, an evil forest sprinkled with pernicious diamonds. She felt their stare. She felt their surprise at finding her. She felt the tiny sparks flying through their tiny brains, taking her picture, tasting it, conferring.
It’s her. She watched a hungry shimmer run through them. It’s her.
The edges of her eyes prickled brightly, and her head felt like an emptying balloon. Her body seemed to know that she would be better unconscious for the horrible fate that came next. Her legs started to fold.
NO! she yelled in her head. Don’t faint! She pricked the point of the paring knife into her thigh and brilliant new pain chased away the swoon. What good would one knife do against a sea of needle-sharp fangs?
Hannah felt them watch her, see her, know her. The forest seemed to shift as the carpet of spiders, with its spiny, bristled legs and wicked little fangs and clusters of cold black pebble eyes, crouched.
She turned and ran.
And got one step before her right foot caught on a root.
She fell.
An instant later, the wave of spiders swept over her.
Hannah curled into a shrieking ball, waiting for the pain of a million stings. .
But it didn’t come.
The spiders seemed frozen. Their hooked feet grew rigid, snipping gently into her skin, her lips, her ears. All of them — large as breakfast bowls, small as match heads — were motionless. Listening.
Then they fell away.
They dropped off her and began scuttling over one another. Some wandered in confused circles. Some burrowed for cover. Some sprang away into the darkness. Some hunkered down stupidly to hide in her hair.
She sat up and brushed the few remainders away. Whatever had been guiding them was gone. The spell was broken.
And Hannah heard a splintering crash from the direction of the cottage.
She got to her feet and ran towards the sound.
Nicholas was on his back. The cage had rolled as it fell, and had struck the firm, wet ground with a sharp crack. He had instinctively tried to shield his head from the hard branch and bone and so had left his torso exposed; when the cage crunched into the ground, knurled branches and knobbled bones thudded into his exposed kidneys and ribcage. He was winded. Of all the fights he’d lost in high school, the worst was to a Scottish boy named Murray who had hammered his freckled fist deep into Nicholas’s solar plexus, not only knocking every scrap of air out of him, but seeming to switch off his lungs so they wouldn’t draw back in. Nicholas was left humiliated, gasping, desperate for air. This was worse — he was drowning in pain.
He curled on his side, mouth wide, frantically willing a scrap of air to draw into his burning lungs. His diaphragm finally jittered alive and he sucked in a throaty gasp.
His eyes rolled, hunting for Quill.
The old woman was on the ground. She had clung to the cage as it fell, but it had rolled as it collapsed; only one leg had been caught beneath it, and now she strained to pull it from the splintery grid of spiny wood.
‘Feck ya!’ she hissed, but Nicholas didn’t know if she was cursing him, herself, or someone else. Her hands patted the earth, crawling like grey crabs, hunting.
For the knife, he thought. Where is it?
‘Where is it?’ she whispered, echoing him.
Nicholas in the cage, Quill on the wet, sandy ground. Both rolled to their knees. Both scoured with eyes and fingers for the knife.
‘You fucking bitch,’ whispered Nicholas.
‘Feck you,’ she hissed again, this time surely to him.
‘You cut their throats!’ he spat, fingers crawling under the hard, gnarled branches and into the damp soil.
‘For Him!’
‘For yourself, you greedy whore!’
‘Feck you,’ she repeated quietly. ‘Where is it?!’
Nicholas painfully rocked back on his haunches. His shadow was a black smudge inside the half-collapsed sphere. The cold moonlight made the bones in the cage as white as the ribs of undersea things. A wink of silver! His eyes jerked to the shine off the keen edge of the knife. The weapon lay just outside the bars. Near to him. Far from Quill.
‘Yes,’ he whispered, and reached between the branches.
‘No!’ snapped Quill. She scrambled.
Nicholas grabbed the knife.
And a small figure shrieked from the shadows and drove its own knife down at Quill.
As Hannah crept into the ring of trees, her eyes widened. On the ground was the cage she’d dreamt of, the cage of bone and branch, the round prison where she’d dreamt that spiders had bound her ready to die. It had collapsed on the ground, and Nicholas was inside it, on his back, heaving like a landed fish. An old woman was nearby, clawing at the ground like a blind thing. Hannah didn’t hesitate. She ran.
‘Horrible!’ she yelled as she pounced on the old woman.
But Quill saw Hannah’s shadow before she heard her voice, and rolled aside. Hannah’s paring knife whisked down and through Quill’s cardigan, nicking her withered breast and driving into the sandy dirt.
‘Hannah!’ yelled Nicholas.
‘You little brasser!’ cried Quill, and her voice trembled — not with anger, but with delight.
‘Hannah, run!’ shouted Nicholas. He scrambled backwards for the hatch, but his feet fouled on the branches and his clothes snagged on the snapped bars. ‘Run!!’
Hannah scooted back, eyes locked on her paring knife driven blade-first in the ground.
Quill whirled on her, grinning brightly.
Nicholas fumbled with the cage hatch. But the frame had distorted as the cage landed and the hatch was firmly stuck.
Hannah eyed off the distance to the knife. Quill watched her, and the grey skin around her eyes wrinkled. ‘Are ya quick, girlie?’
Hannah stared. I can make it. I can get it. She’s old. She’s slow.
‘Quicker than ya sister, I hope,’ taunted Quill in a singsong.
Hannah’s jaw clenched.
‘No, Hannah! Get out of here!’ cried Nicholas. He bashed at the hatch. It didn’t move.
Hannah dived.
Fast as a crow beak, Quill swung out. Her arm struck Hannah mid-flight, knocking the girl face first into the dirt. Hannah’s outstretched hand grabbed nothing but wet, dark sand. Quill rolled, snatched up the knife, and drove her free hand down on the back of Hannah’s neck.
Hannah yelped, but the cry was cut short as Quill pushed her face hard into the cold, wet dirt.
‘Get off her!’ yelled Nicholas.
‘He is cruel and kind, isn’t He?’ twittered Quill. ‘Eh, pretty man? Sends her back, whole and ready, out of His woods to me!’ She laughed. Wind tickled the trees, and their leaves whispered approvingly. She straddled Hannah’s back.
Nicholas stopped beating at the hatch. In his left hand was Quill’s wicked little knife, but it was as useless as a burnt match with him trapped inside.
Hannah kicked and struggled, but Quill had her pinned. She tested the paring knife’s blade with her thumb, and nodded. Overhead, the moon sailed high in clearing skies. Pleased, Quill looked over at Nicholas. Her mouth creaked open in a dark smile. ‘Let’s send her on her way, then,’ she whispered, ‘so that you and I can be.’
Hannah tried to scream, but Quill pressed her mouth deeper into the sandy ground.
‘Don’t, Quill. Don’t do it,’ whispered Nicholas.
Quill looked at him, as a mother looks at a child.
‘She’ll not feel much. Blood is the only sacrifice that pleases the Lord.’
Hannah’s one eye above the dirt stared at Nicholas, wide with terror.
The moon rode high and easy overhead.
The sharp paring knife glinted.
And, suddenly, Nicholas knew what to do.
The idea arrived as clear and bright as the moonlight had, casting everything sharp and lucid.
There was a choice. He took it.
‘Rowena,’ he said softly.
She didn’t hear him, and put the knife in her right hand and took a handful of Hannah’s hair.
‘Rowena,’ he repeated. He was surprised at how calm he felt.
Quill looked over.
He lifted her little knife to his wrist.
The old woman’s face fell. ‘No. .’ she whispered.
Nicholas plunged the blade in. The pain was as clean as glass. He dragged the blade through tendons and veins. Blood, dark like syrup, gushed out.
He watched his blood flow between the branch bars onto the sand, soaking away. His calmness felt beautiful. Now, how do I start? he wondered. What do I say?
But the words came of their own accord.
‘With my blood I call on you. I call on the Green Man.’
‘No,’ repeated Quill, more loudly.
Blood pulsed out, slapping delicately into a growing puddle. Nicholas watched it, fascinated.
‘I give you my blood and I ask you-’
‘No!’ Panic.
‘-to remove Rowena Quill from these woods-’
‘NO!’ Her voice was sprung tight with terror.
Nicholas felt his head grow hot, then cold. His vision danced.
‘-forever.’
‘Noooooo!!’ Rowena Quill’s last word became a scream.
Her shriek brought back to Nicholas a memory two decades old. He’d been employed to lay out a brochure for an abattoir in Kent. The manager had given him a courtesy tour, and he’d been shown the killing floor. The sound Quill now made was the exact cry of animal fear the cattle screamed when they rounded the narrow chute and saw ahead the crush and, beyond it, the corpses of their cousins that had gone before. Terror in the face of certain death.
Quill’s eyes were wide and rimmed with white. Her head swivelled as she scanned the trees. She dropped the knife. She scrambled to her feet. And ran.
Nicholas watched the little sharp blade fall from his grasp. He put his right hand over the deep cut in his left wrist. I’m going to faint now.
He looked at Hannah. She lay on the ground, her eyes shut. His vision seemed to blacken at the edges, like paper charring. Not yet! He strained to focus.
He saw Hannah’s back rise and fall so slightly. She was breathing.
He nodded, relieved.
‘Okay,’ he whispered, and his vision silvered. His spine seemed to turn to water and he fell inside the cage.
The wind stopped. The trees grew still.
The world looked far away — even the moonlit cage of bone and branches around him seemed small and distant, like viewing a room through the wrong end of a telescope.
Take off your shirt. Bind your wrist.
But there was so much blood. .
He struggled to remove his jumper, but weariness crept up inside him like the pleasant, drowning waters of Lethe.
I can’t.
Then roll over, he told himself.
With numb fingers, he lifted his jumper and shirt, pressed his pumping wrist against the skin of his belly, and rolled onto it.
Enough, he thought. Sleep now.
He was too weary even to close his eyes, so he stared out at a world far away and ringed with inviting gloom. The woods were eerily quiet. The circle of trees stood silent, their still leaves as green as frozen sea-water in the icy moonlight, black as pitch in shadow. They were hushed. Anticipating. The only movement was the gentle rising and falling of Hannah’s tiny back.
Sleep.
Nicholas closed his eyes, wondered what the wetness on his belly was, then nodded as he remembered. He was dying.
Don’t worry. Sleep now.
Cate would be waiting.
He smiled.
But a smell shivered him awake.
It was a scent as old as the world. It was a hundred aromas of a thousand places. It was the tang of pine needles. It was the musk of sex. It was the muscular rot of mushrooms. It was the spice of oak. The meaty redolence of soil and bark and herb. It was bats and husks and burrows and moss. It was solid and alive — so alive! And it was close.
The vapours invaded Nicholas’s nostrils and his hairs rose on their roots. His eyes were as heavy as manhole covers, but he opened them. Through the dying calm inside him snaked a tremble of fear.
The trees themselves seemed tense, waiting. The moonlight was as hard as shell, sharp and ready to be struck and to ring like steel.
A shadow moved.
It poured like oil from between the tall trees, and flowed across the dark, sandy dirt, lengthening into the middle of the ring. The trees seemed to bend towards it, spellbound. A long, long shadow. .
Then, a hoof. As large as a bucket and dark as stone, grey-splotched with moss; layered and peeling like ancient horn. Above the hoof: a massive leg. Feathered. Or furred. Or dense with leaves. A dark green-grey cast blue as gunmetal by the glacial moonlight. Muscular and long. Its knee bent backwards like a horse’s hind leg’s, but thrice the size and powerful. Another hoof, another enormous leg. A torso dense as an ape’s, but so much larger, as dark as the shadows between the roots of ancient trees. Arms like a man’s: knotted with ropy muscle but thick as tree trunks, their topsides shimmering with fungal grey fur or leaves or vestigial feathers, their undersides creviced as old bark. A bull neck, corded like worn rock. Shoulders, shifting with a frost of green, wide as boulders. Antlers like oak branches, webbed with vines and moss, and huge. And a face in shadow.
Nicholas stared. I am dreaming. I am dead.
The creature’s head turned to him. Its face was rimmed with skin like leaves, or made of leaves. The jaw was massive and oxlike, dripping with tendrils like curling roots. Great tusks the shape of oak leaves thrust from the corners of its wide, leathery lips. Huge nostrils flared. And eyes as dark as wells of deep, distant water reflected the moonlight; eyes at once human and yet so inhuman — inscrutable as winter sky, hungry as an eagle’s. And old. So old.
It was the face he’d seen in Walpole Park. The face he’d seen carved in wood and stone in Bretherton’s church.
The Green Man.
Nicholas’s body was rigid with electric panic, white terror, delirium. . His flesh knew what the creature before him was; it knew at some fundamental, cellular level what it smelled and faced, and would have begun digging through the ground itself to hide were it not locked tight in bright horror.
The Green Man stopped halfway between Nicholas and Hannah. He was taller than the trees. He lifted his head and his nostrils splayed. The air shifted. The trees shimmered with pleasure, opening their moist leaves with dark delight. Then the Green Man’s head turned in the direction that Quill had fled. . towards her cottage.
A tiny sound. Hannah groaned softly.
She rolled. Her eyes flickered open and found Nicholas.
He opened his mouth to speak, but only a hiss of air escaped his lips.
Hannah looked up.
The Green Man loomed over her, dwarfing her small as a kitten. He shifted his hoofs, and snorted a blast of warm air as pungent as the forest floor.
Hannah smiled, and her eyes closed.
The Green Man stooped and picked her up.
‘Hannah. .’ whispered Nicholas.
The Green Man turned at the sound. In an instant he stamped towards the cage, three enormous steps, a colossal wave about to crash, his wide, dark face right before Nicholas’s.
His scent was overwhelming: erotic and wildly horrible; hunger and rot and age and lust. His green leafy lips parted, showing teeth as large as bricks and hard as ivory, goatlike and sharp.
Nicholas stared into the eyes. Eyes as large as saucers, without whites: huge dark stones that glittered with intelligence and violence.
And the Green Man chuckled.
The warm, foetid air from his mouth washed over Nicholas, strong and whipping as a storm wind through ripe brambles.
Nicholas’s eyes rolled back in his head, and the night world became as black as the centre of the earth.