Amidst trees he can barely see, Tom crouches, his feet lost in the oblivion of a wood abandoned by the sun.
The distant outline of the Moots’ shuttered house looms ahead. The barrel of the shotgun rests against his shoulder. A torch bulges from a thigh pocket. His rucksack clings to his back.
He’s been squatting in the undergrowth at the top of the Moots’ garden for two hours, shifting about to improve the circulation in his legs and to prevent his feet going numb. Sitting down has wicked the evening’s moisture through the seat of his jeans, which has seeped an ache into his lower back. Despite such discomforts, he has remained in place within the peaty darkness in which three owls have periodically added shrieks to a symphony of rustlings. Grief, fear, regret and horror have only worsened the tense monotony and nervy apprehension of his vigil.
Tom peers behind himself and into darkness, before looking again at the glow of his phone-screen, under-lighting his face. In the old picture he gazes into, Fiona and Gracey are laughing. But these photos of his wife and daughter are little more than frail matches lit in a black, cold world. He looks at them to remember what must be done. But the sight of Gracey’s perfect face mostly just glazes her father’s with tears.
His best guess is that the Moots will come for him at home, tonight. As an enticement, he’s left all of the indoor lights on and parked his car on the drive.
One, or even both of them, must have changed form to destroy poor Blackwood. Over four hours have passed since he found the remains of the magical practitioner. He can only assume that by this time his neighbours will have been compelled to return to their ordinary guises and are now at home, recovering. To deal with him, they will once again need to adopt new forms. But he knows his best guess is just that: a guess. An assumption. A hope. A gamble.
But as Blackwood suggested, it’s most likely that the rite to curate their grotesque refashioning of flesh and bone will be performed at the barrow in the grove. From what he understands of the neighbours’ tracks and previous routes that they’d taken to terrorise him and Gracey, the Moots have first emerged from the wood and entered the far end of his garden. If the tactic continues, then the cunning folk will leave their house from the rear to journey to the place among the trees that is so diabolically sacred to them, to transform again. They will need to pass by here first to reach the glade. And right here is where he hopes to take them.
If they remain transformed and are somewhere inside this wood, the odds of him surviving out here tonight are not so good. But if they are indoors and now returned to human form, as he so dearly hopes they are, he will wait here, even until the following day if necessary, until they venture out that back door. Or he busts it down and disables them where they sleep.
* * *
Between two and three in the morning, a distant click of a door brings an abrupt halt to Tom’s preoccupations. He douses the phone and drops to his knees within the unruly verdure encroaching the Moots’ garden gate.
He brings the gun about and his panicky breath mists the stock. For a few moments, he’s concussed by his own nerves and too dizzy to see straight. He gulps at the air. And an instinct, competing with his terror, screams out the instruction that he must immobilise them. He needs to think clearly. You cannot panic.
Low light from the Moots’ kitchen bronzes a few metres of patio and lawn. Through the smear of light, he catches a glimpse of chalky limbs and two dark, bulky heads. They emerge onto the path at the end of his vision. The two ghostly figures then wander up the Stygian garden towards his position.
As they draw nearer, the bestial boar and hare headpieces gain gradual definition, as do the hare’s pallid arms and chest, still mired black from its work this night. Blood drying on ash.
Here goes. Now. Now!
Tom can barely feel his legs as he rises. Panting like a thirsty dog and sickened white to his marrow, he raises the shotgun, a weapon that grows heavier and more ungainly within his untrained hands as each taut moment drags and passes. He gets behind the stock until the gun sights cover the narrow path where it winds between two rockery features. When his neighbours reach the imp, he needs to issue a challenge, then shoot if there is resistance.
The spectral forms continue to glide towards him soundlessly between night-doused shrubs, in single file and mercifully returned to human form.
Until Magi the hare stops moving, just short of the imp sculpture, and raises its muzzle as if to sniff at the night air. The permanently cocked ears suggest these extremities are now alert to a predator.
Medea’s silent passage also halts. Her distant pig face surveys the woods.
Muffled words pass between his neighbours but Tom can’t hear what is said. They can’t have seen him but who knows what finely attuned senses these people command?
The hare turns and retreats towards the house. The boar casts a final glance at the treeline before also turning on its heel.
‘Fuck.’
Tom breaks cover noisily. Wades from the undergrowth, pulls his legs high and clear as if wading through the sea. Feet heavy, limbs lose and shaky, he then runs at the gate. And kicks the barrier hard with the sole of his paint-spattered boot.
Wood splinters. The gate blows open.
The boar looks back. She sees him and starts running. And to Tom’s immense disappointment, as he flies through their gate and into the top tier of their garden, he spots the hare almost at the back door.
He throws himself down the path in pursuit, the shotgun out in front, the stock nestled into his shoulder. ‘Bastards!’ His breath is near asthmatic, desperate, and fills the night. Inside his shaking vision, the garden’s features and contours are blurred shapes, whizzing past him as he charges. Free of the wood, the arch of the Moots’ roof better defines itself against the paler night sky. He has more light here, more space in which to commit an atrocity.
A feminine squeal escapes the pig mask. He’s gaining on Medea and she knows it. The pig totters a mere ten feet away now, slowed by its heavy head and old legs.
Noises of the back door being yanked open by the hare bring Tom to a stop. He swings the gun about and aims low, at the pig’s legs. Braces himself.
Then hesitates, swamped by a fear of being blinded or deafened by the old gun. He cannot squeeze the trigger.
Now she’s ten, eleven … fourteen, at least fifteen strides further away from him again. And getting away!
BIT-THROUGH . The blast roars these almost-words inside his ears that immediately whine to a whistle and flood with an icy pain.
The torn air sucks up the silence of night for miles around. Sleeping flowers and lumpen bushes, drowsing ferns and pale boughs, the black pond, the back of each house, are all lit up as if by lightning.
A brief sound of grit scattering fast through leaves and the pig is felled. Blown flat, Medea goes straight onto her face. A wet mist hovers about the back of her scrawny legs and withered buttocks.
Elation mixing with the cold horror at what he’s done, Tom keeps going. With his ears ringing and eyes smarting from an acrid smoke, an inner compulsion assumes control of his legs and he charges. Without thinking much at all, he runs across the boar and pushes the black head down, into the grass.
A whimper rises from below the sole of his boot.
Springing off the pig, Tom lands near the patio at the same time the hare slams the back door behind itself. A click of a key swiftly follows and a loathsome face is soon glaring through the window at him. Magi the hare then turns away and the kitchen lights douse.
At the door, Tom yanks the handle. It doesn’t budge inside the frame.
Standing back and clear, he aims the gun at the lock.
BIT-THROUGH .
Wood splinters. Glass blows inside the house, a silvery rain swept horizontal.
He empties the gun’s breech. His hand withdraws from his pocket clutching two brass-bottomed shells with red plastic sheathes. He slides them inside twin barrels leaking exhaust, repeating the action he practised endlessly in the bedroom that evening. Cordite smoke spirals, stings his face. His excited breathing sucks in the fumes and they burn caustic and peppery like cigar smoke taken deep. Memories of bonfire nights from childhood flash like fireworks and extinguish in a moment.
Snap of the breech closing.
Inside the kitchen, his double barrels sweep left and right. He spots a light switch and he reaches out sideways, engages it.
Light glows in the greenhouse of a kitchen. Behind him in the garden rise the piteous cries of an old woman in terrific pain.
A noise ahead, in a room on the right. Their temple. Magi has retreated there as if to a castle keep, or a repository for weapons.
Has the hare scampered inside there to secure some aid or protection that might be invisible to him? Will he channel the god? How would he ever know until it was too late? He needs to act fast and disable the other neighbour as Blackwood instructed. It was the last thing the magical practitioner ever told him.
Hinges whine as Tom pushes the door inwards with the toe of his boot.
Book-lined walls in darkness.
Tom goes in. Flicks on the ceiling light. His eyes and the gun sights track everywhere, across pedestal and grimoire, the desk cluttered with charms, the pigeon holes filled with scrolls.
On his left is the cupboard where he hid and the door is ajar. The black slit beckons. His brow sweats beads. His beanie hat sags and itches like a wet rag.
He wonders if it’s necessary to shoot Magi. Could the man be coerced to kneel and surrender his wrists to masking tape and to offer his chalky face to a pillow case? Tom thinks of the gun’s roar. He’s half deaf and the volume of a firearm indoors will surely deaden what remains of his hearing. Maybe, if he just positions himself before the door and issues a challenge, then –
A scuffle from behind.
As Tom turns, his mind is obliterated by a whiteout of sickening pain. Beneath the roar of this sudden agony whisks a tiny noise of ripping cloth and an earthy thud as sharp metal is driven into meat. His meat. A cold object, one foreign and thick, has entered his shoulder.
The blow knocks him forward. He staggers and twists about-face. The rotation of his body rips the weapon from his assailant’s hand.
Inside his vision a blurred, white figure silently steps away. The assassin has delivered the blade and is now in retreat to the door that’s swung snug within the frame. Magi had been concealed against the wall, behind the door, waiting.
Tom’s vision clears. His back is wet inside his shirt, his skin tacky as if drizzled with honey. He moves the arm and pain blanches him from scalp to sole.
A glance over his shoulder and he nearly throws up. The ancient sickle hangs from his shoulder. It’s gone deep enough to self-support like a horrible bracket.
Before him, the hare’s black ears are cocked forward. The toothy muzzle grins as the naked form tiptoes away like an obscene dancer. As if to push him away, it raises front paws.
Tom aims low. ‘It’s that time.’
BIT-THROUGH .
The hare is blown off its feet.
Walls fall and shatter, then right themselves after the cacophony. Tom’s ears produce a howl of static, then whine with tone. Blue smoke reeks of a thousand struck matches.
Before silence absorbs the house.
With so much pain screaming inside his injured shoulder, Tom sinks to one knee and casts away the gun.
Before him, a childlike whimpering issues at floor-level.
Tom shakes sweat from his cold face. Reaches behind himself and clasps his fingers about the curved blade. Then cries out in pain and brings that hand before his sweat-stung eyes. His fingers are wet with blood. He roars, reaches again and grips the scythe. Eases it backwards and free.
The tool clatters against the floor.
He stays on his knees with his eyes closed and waits for the world to right itself. For a moment there, he might have been drawing the very life and soul from his body.
He tries to remember why he’s here and what is supposed to happen next.
The plan.
He shot them both. Got them both, did them both, put them both down. They could die from shock, from their wounds, from blood loss. It’s everywhere beneath Magi.
Dear Christ. Did I do that?
One hand moving fast, the second slow and dripping blood from his shiny fingertips, Tom watches himself unclip the rucksack. Then he’s taking out tape, scissors, the pillowcases.
He shuffles to the leaking hare. Unmasks Magi’s terrified, tear-strewn face, the ashy makeup running into a blood-soaked beard. Frightened eyes beseech his own. Tom tugs a pillowcase over Magi’s head, then lets it thump against the floor.
A shriek of masking tape. A snip of scissors. A length of sticky tape held out before noosing the cotton tight round Magi’s throat. There is no resistance. Magi can only clutch at his torn legs that Tom will not look at.
Shuddering like a carthorse, Tom staggers through the hallway and kitchen.
Outside, the pig is crawling towards the end of the garden. A white form inching with great difficulty across the grass. Its legs are strewn behind, lifeless like a shredded tail. From the concealed head sobs seep, interspersed with grunts.
Tom jogs to the figure. Moving is good and switches his thoughts from the bleeding gash in his shoulder. Running keeps the rest of his blood pumping and chases away the woozy idea that he’s fainting and that his limbs are fragile sticks.
Seizing a pair of bony ankles, he raises Medea’s ripped legs from the grass. The boar shrieks from a mind-swelling agony.
Tom drags her back to the house.
* * *
On the floor of their temple and sanctum, shivering and shocked from blood loss, two ashen figures lie before him: his neighbours, the mighty Moots. But now so reduced, with their heads taped inside floral pillow cases, their spindly wrists bound behind their backs and their withered legs blackened by blood.
Tom swigs from a bottle of water and gasps. ‘It’s under that mound. In the circle.’
Each faceless form appears to stiffen and their shakes subside to tremors. During the silence that ensues, Tom’s hearing ebbs back a little and he becomes aware of their rasping breath, condensing inside the makeshift hoods.
Medea eventually gathers herself and claws back enough strength to speak. ‘Don’t. For your own sake.’
This encourages Magi. ‘It’ll destroy you.’
‘You already did that.’
Even with her old legs reduced to strips of wet jerky, Medea retains enough vigour to shriek. ‘Bloody idiot! It’ll kill us all!’
Magi speaks from one side of his mouth, around pained gasps, and Tom worries the old boy might be succumbing to a stroke. ‘It must stay in the ground. It’s using you. To free itself.’
An unwelcome moment of doubt shadows his purpose, then passes. ‘You’ll say anything. I’m breaking the seals. Blackwood told me what to do before you murdered him. I’m breaking the chain and I am healing my daughter. You cursed her. You condemned a little girl. You’re worse than the manure you toss round your roses. And if my girl doesn’t survive this night, I’ll behead you both, with this fucking gun.’
Medea’s head rears from the floor, gasps, then drops. ‘Don’t break the seals. Blackwood was wrong. She used him too! She reaches… She plants visions.’
Magi writhes, cramps sideways in pain. ‘You mustn’t let her out!’
Tom spits on the floor, their floor, to clear his mouth. ‘That poor bastard who lived in our house before us, you drove him to suicide. You murdered the couple before him. Blackwood now. And how many others, over the years? Anyone who displeased you, you wretched pricks. You’ve profited from that thing you keep up there and you have destroyed innocent lives. We were next. My daughter! You did this! You made me do this.’
Medea’s muffled voice pierces her hood again. ‘Fool! You should have left. We only tried to frighten you. Protect you! From her. We protect the world from what cannot be banished. You think we wanted this? This life? Here?’
Magi quickly offers his mistress some wheedling support. Until the last, he still peers from behind her skirts. ‘A curse! We were born into this. Never wanted it! We’ve spent our lifetimes containing her . It’s our role. Our inheritance. She cannot be dispelled or destroyed. Don’t you think we’ve tried, you bloody idiot!’
Tom shakes his head, takes a step forward and kicks Magi’s feet, producing a shriek from the defrocked hare. ‘Tell you what. I’ll help you. Bind your legs and give you a chance. Just tell me how I do it. How I lift the curse you put on my girl. Then this can stop. I have bandages.’ He doesn’t but finds that he guiltily enjoys the idea that he can say anything to them now. He wonders if he’s always had this sadistic potential.
Medea’s head rises again, like a horrible white serpent with its head and fangs in a bag. ‘Never! Her blood is on your hands!’
The very sound of Medea’s spite-filled voice assists Tom’s recall and once again he sees the look in her eyes, the night she gloated about blinding a four-year-old girl.
Tom uses all of his remaining will to not blast apart Medea’s writhing head. ‘I’m going to dig it up. Set it free. Then whatever will be, will be, bitch.’ He turns and leaves the room.
Medea’s voice ascends to a thin wail. ‘Don’t! For the sake of all that you love, don’t let her out!’
Magi’s phlegm-choked voice follows him through the kitchen. ‘We beg you! No! No! No!’
The black night draws Tom to the back door and into itself.