They helped Munro and Mal prepare for the mission. The Home Office still wasn’t sure what was going on, and didn’t want to waste more resources on it, but they finally relented on sending MI5 agents and the use of a tactical surveillance van with a host of various drones. If that didn’t work, they were going to get as close as they could to the situation and conduct a foot reconnaissance. Preacher’s Daughter wished she could go with the pair. As much as she liked the ‘brain stuff,’ as the Scotsman put it, she also appreciated the physical. Taking down a few bad guys was better than any gym workout. It was like two leg days and a chest day all in one without the next day pain.
But she was an intel gal at heart and knew where her expertise lay. She’d interrogated the worst of them, from suspected child molesters to terrorists and everyone in between. Sloath had come along with them of his own free will, but he and his fellow Knockers had also arranged for the kidnapping of one of the Black Dragoons. Hanging onto Sheriff was supposed to guarantee Sloath’s life. She just hoped that the Knockers were respecting Sheriff as much as the Black Dragoons were respecting their hostage Knocker.
She’d interrogate him, but she wouldn’t touch him. No stress positions. Nothing of the sort. Just a few questions, a conversation, and then she’d see where it went. He insisted on staying in the darkness in the basement. He couldn’t stand man-made light, so it was a candle on an old wooden table that separated him from them.
The unseelie still smelled like old cheese and stone.
They’d set him up in a section of the basement that was unfinished. The floor was composed of dirt worn into a flat sheen from five hundred years of footsteps. The walls were stone upon stone, probably laid by hand as part of the original foundation when the castle was first built. The age of things in England was continually startling her. That the building she was in was twice the age of America really spoke to the youthful exuberance of her nation.
She’d pre-arranged with Donkey Kong how she wanted the session to work. They’d begin with her and her alone. She didn’t want any comments from him whatsoever. She wanted to ascertain how Sloath was going to react to being interrogated by a woman. There were men who couldn’t deal with it, usually those who thought themselves the most masculine. Then again, Sloath was no man. He wasn’t even human. She was just shooting in the dark.
Sloath sat in a corner, the table pulled close enough that running away would be difficult.
She sat in a wooden chair on the left facing him.
Donkey Kong sat on the right in a wooden chair, facing her.
She’d brought along an old school legal pad and a pen. File and dossier approach normally would get the average human used to the idea that providing information was just a matter of fact.
“Before we start, Mr. Sloath, I need some biographical data. Just the normal things. Name, date of birth, place of birth, et cetera. We’ll begin with the name. What is your name, Mr. Sloath?”
He stared at her, face wrinkled, teeth overlapping in a mouth too small for all the teeth. His nose was more that of a bat’s, barely more than two slits. His skin was gray with green splotches and wrinkled like a Sharpe dog’s. Double-sized black eyes stared unblinking. Pointed ears poked from beneath a leather skull cap. He sat completely unmoving with his hands at his sides.
“Mr. Sloath, can you please state your full name.”
A moment passed, then the Knocker said, “Sloath.”
“Right, got that.” She said, smiling, then returning her gaze to her paper. “I meant your full name. What is it your parents called you? Your elders?”
Another moment then he said, “Sloath,” but this was followed by aspirated coughing.
She nodded again. “Got it. Sloath,” then she tried to mimic his aspirated coughing.
Did she note a twitch on the Knocker’s face? Was it anger? Humor?
“And what is your birthdate, Sloath?”
“Hole in the world,” he said, no inflection, just a cavalcade of consonants.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Hole in the world.”
She scribbled the words across the page.
“What does that mean, Sloath? What is a ‘hole in the world?’”
His eyes blinked in such a way she was reminded of a frog. “Hole in world. Fae,” aspirated coughing, “Fae.”
“Are you saying the Fae are making a hole in the world?”
“Warn Not Fae. We knock. We warn.”
She’d lost full on and complete control of the interrogation. He wasn’t answering questions but following his own agenda. Still, he was here of his own free will. Perhaps this was reason all along. What was it about the Knockers and the Cornish miners? They helped them find new veins and kept miners from dying in cave ins.
“Why do you warn us? Er—why do you warn Not Fae?”
“Hole in world. Destroy. Hole in world. Kill Not Fae.”
“Let me jump in a moment, PD,” Donkey Kong said.
She leaned back, hugging the paper to her chest, nodding.
“Sloath. Where is hole in the world?” he asked, speaking like he might to a child.
“Hole in the world here,” Sloath said, for the first time, moving, his right hand now on his chest. “Hole in the world hurts.”
“There’s a hole in you?” he glanced at Preacher’s Daughter. “Does it hurt, Sloath?”
“Sloath always hurt. Knockers always hurt. We take hurt.” His eyes narrowed. “We not Not Fae.”
“Why does it hurt, Sloath? Why are the Fae making you hurt?”
“Hole in the world. Must escape. Something comes.”
Preacher’s Daughter exchanged a worried glance with Donkey Kong.
Something comes was never a good thing to hear.
“What’s coming?” she asked. “What’s chasing the Fae into the hole in the world?”
Sloath pinned her with his wide eyes. “Formori. Formori come to eat Fae. Hole in the world. Escape.” He placed both hand on the table. “Hole in the world escape.”
Her mind swirled with the history of the world’s religions and mythology, the two often dovetailing into each other. What she knew of the Formori, if they were the same as the Formorians, was that they were a race of giants who preceded the Tuatha Dé Danann of Ireland. There’d been centuries long arguments whether the fairies or Sidhe of Ireland were different from England with not many prevailing resolutions, but from a scholarly perspective, they probably had all of the same fairies just known by different names. The Formori, like the Jotun of Norse mythology, were believed to be larger than life, hostile, and ugly, but that point of view was presented by those who had conquered them—the Tuatha.
“What of the fairy upstairs, Sloath? Can you feel it?”
“Fae. I feel. Not Fae. I feel.”
“Does the fairy upstairs know about the hole in the world?”
“All Fae know. It draws. Want hole. Takes them new place. No Formori.”
“So your sylph has known all along,” she said to Donkey Kong. “How is it you communicate with it?”
He blushed and looked at the floor. “Let’s talk about that later, please.”
She gave him a long wondering look, trying not to imagine what sort of Fae-human interaction would make him blush, then returned her attention to Sloath.
“Back to something you said before. You said, hole in the world, kill Not Fae.”
“Fae live beside. Beside. Sloath live beside. Sloath not live with. Formori want live with.”
Beside? Like some sort of slipstream pocket universe? She’d heard fairy mounds being referred to as pocket universes in fiction and folklore, so why couldn’t that be the truth? And if the Formori wanted to live with—she tried to imagine a race of hideous giants living among the men and women of a Midlands village and could only imagine the carnage that might create.
The unseelie suddenly stood.
“Sloath go now.”
“Wait,” Donkey Kong said, standing as well.
Preacher’s Daughter joined them. What was the Knocker thinking? He couldn’t leave. He was part of a hostage exchange.
She asked. “Where are you going, Sloath?”
“Back. Back in urth.”
“Uh, Sloath, we can’t let you go,” she said.
“Sloath go,” he said, blinking wide eyes, mouth opening revealing his oddly-shaped sharpened teeth.
Donkey Kong pulled back his shoulders. “Sorry, Mr. Sloath. We thank you for the warning, but you can’t leave until you return our man to us. That was the agreement.”
Sloath turned to him, eyes blinking again in that contemplative froggy way. “Hole in the world come. Hole in the world kill. Must stop.”
He pushed the chair into the table and backed into the corner. He began to be lost in a shadow that she could have sworn hadn’t been there before. As the shadow deepened, Sloath lessened.
Donkey Kong grabbed the table and shoved it aside. He lunged to grab the Knocker, but he was too late. His hands disappeared in shadow up to the elbows. He jerked them back, gasping, and stared at them, moving his fingers back and forth. “The pain.” He inhaled. “I thought I’d lost them.”
Sloath was gone, absorbed into the stone, like he’d never even been there in the first place.
Donkey Kong turned to Preacher’s Daughter, frustration on his face, eyes wide, shaking his head.
Then she saw it.
“Wait. Look.” She rushed around the other side of the table. As the darkness began to dissipate, a figure began to appear. Knees to his chest, arms around his knees, short black afro. Sheriff. They’d given him back.
He still wore his gear. His weapon was slung across his back.
When she touched him, he opened his eyes and said, “’ole in the world.” His breathing got shallow as if he were finding it hard to breathe. Then his eyes widened until they seemed as if they might pop out of his skull.
“It comes,” he said.
Then he fell over, unconscious, eyes rolling back inside his head.