The night didn’t get any better for Julie Gennaro and his new partner.
After the stress of crowd control and the reality that they were first responders at what had become a double murder, they still had four hours of what felt like an endless shift to survive. Dispatch put through a call that on any other day would have been routine, but today felt like another strand in the elaborate cosmic joke history was happily repeating for Julie: a suspected breaking and entering over on Holly Lane. Another burglary, another repetition. He took the call.
They pulled up outside the house. A high wall with thick climbing vegetation and a wooden gate hid it away from the rest of world. The lights were on upstairs. He radioed through to dispatch, letting them know they were at the scene, then got out of the car, Ellie a couple of steps behind him as he pushed open the wooden gate, not sure what waited on the other side for him. This was always the worst part of the job, those few seconds of knowing something was wrong but not knowing what, or how bad it might well turn out to be. He unclipped the baton from his hip and extended it as he walked along the garden path.
Crossing the threshold, he heard music.
He called out.
No one answered.
Lights were on in every room.
He gestured for Ellie to check out the downstairs while he followed the music. She nodded.
He walked slowly up the stairs. The tension had his muscles taut. Halfway up, the music stopped. “This is the police,” Julie called out. “Make yourself known.” The silence was broken by the crackle of the record starting up again. Still no one answered him.
On the landing, he was confronted by a number of doors, only one of them open, so he went inside.
The room was filled with the bric-a-brac of life, but none of that was what had him shouting for Ellie to get up there and join him. Julie stared at the mummified corpse fused to the armchair. Julie thumbed down his radio and called through to dispatch, “We’re going to need an ambulance to pick up a body,” he said without preamble.
“Another murder? What the hell’s in the water?”
“I don’t think so,” he explained. Checking the date on the newspaper on the table, he said, “Looks like he died a year ago.”
“And no one’s missed him?”
“Old guy, living alone, shit happens.”
“Okay, the owner is listed as one Robert Viridius, aged ninety-two last birthday.”
“We’ll need the coroner, but I can’t see any obvious reason to suspect foul play. Looks like the old guy just died in his chair.”
“Okay, you guys sit tight, we’ll get someone out to you to collect the body, and have forensics check the place out just to be sure.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” Julie said, sitting in the chair opposite the dead man as the music started another rotation, the needle dropping into the groove and crackling away.
Ellie joined him.
“This place gives me the creeps,” she said, looking at the oppressive oil painting dominating the only wall not lined with books. The small brass plate on the frame named it: The Oak King and the Holly King. With time to kill, she started checking out the titles, reading them off one by one. They all appeared to be about the mythology of the Isles. Maybe the dead man had been a scholar, Julie reasoned. It would explain plenty.
Death rooms were unique and yet perversely the same; maybe it was something to do with the presence of the departed, some lingering trace of the restless dead, or maybe it was in his head?
“I don’t know about you,” Ellie said, turning her back on the daunting painting, “but there’s only so many times I can stand listening to the same song. You mind?”
There was a gilt-painted glass on the table beside the dead man. The pattern was some kind of elaborate crown of autumnal foliage with three crimson dots of berries within the golden leaves. There was a finger of Scotch left at the bottom of the glass. The old guy had died without finishing his last drink.
“Knock yourself out.”
Ellie crossed the rug to the old turntable. She thumbed down the STOP button and a moment later the arm rose, lifting the needle from the well-worn grooves.
A moment later the turntable stopped its endless revolutions and the armature nestled back into the cradle. The silence was anything but absolute. The single-glazed sash windows let more than just the draft in.
That was when he noticed the peculiar smell; it took him a moment to place it because it wasn’t rot or decay or anything else he would have associated with the musty locked-in quality of a house that had served as a coffin for a year. It was absolutely, incredibly, natural: freshly mown grass.
He kept that to himself, fearing a stroke or some kind of brain hemorrhage. That could cause sensory hallucinations, couldn’t it?
“Okay, that’s weird,” Ellie said. It took him a moment to realize what she was referring to. He’d mistakenly assumed the old guy’s skin was leathery with the mummification process, but it wasn’t leather at all. The deep grooves and hollows were more like the carapace of a wooden cocoon.
She couldn’t stop herself from reaching forward to touch the dead man’s cheek.
The bark—because that’s what it was—flaked off in her fingers. More crumbled to dust as she brushed it aside. The skin exposed beneath was surprisingly youthful and unblemished, as though the bark hadn’t merely protected it from the process of decomposition, but was instead revitalizing it. She quickly peeled away the rest of the death mask and stepped back to look at the man’s plain but handsome face.
Julie saw something protruding through his blue lips. The tip of a leaf? He gripped the man’s jaw and prized it open.
“Should you be doing that?”
“No,” Julie said, but that didn’t stop him from reaching in with a couple of fingers to tease the leaves out of the dead man’s mouth. It wasn’t just one or two that had been crammed in there, he realized, as more and more leaves spewed out and it became obvious someone had shoved a sapling down the man’s throat, suffocating him. The sapling was the length of Julie’s arm by the time the last of it cleared the dead man’s teeth. He put it down on the coffee table. Bile clung to the still-supple wood.
“Gangland killing?”
Before he could answer, the dead man’s eyes opened and his entire body arched against the back of the armchair. Airways clear, he drew in a deep hitching breath, nearly choking on the first air his body had tasted in seasons. More of the shroud of bark broke away as his body bucked in the seat. Life wasn’t returning easily. Fingers curled around the armrests, digging deep into the fabric of the chair as the man writhed in obvious agony.
“Jesus Christ,” Ellie said, behind him. She repeated the name over and over, like it somehow had the power to weave a holy barrier around her that would protect her from the dead man.
The dead man’s hazel eyes fixed on Julie as he reached out with a hand still encased in bark to take Julie’s hand. Julie pulled back, but only for those impossibly strong fingers to close around his wrist. Nails of bark sink into his skin. Julie felt a surge of electricity so strong the shock was enough to make him flinch back, recoiling forcefully enough to wrench his arm free of the dead man’s grasp. Tears ran down Robert Viridius’s too young, too smooth cheeks. More of the peculiar wooden carapace flaked away from his neck, revealing the raw pink hollow of his throat and still more fell away as he contorted in the seat.
“The dimgate is open,” Viridius rasped. Every word visibly hurt him, but he refused to be silenced.
Julie couldn’t look away.
“We have to close the way before he can return.”
The smell of freshly cut grass was overwhelming. It was so real he could have sworn he could make out the tang of morning dew.
“Who? I don’t understand. How are you even…? You can’t be…” Which really meant: I don’t want to understand. I don’t want to be part of this. I don’t want to still be trapped in a world I don’t understand.
“My father,” Viridius said. “We have sacrificed too much of ourselves to ensure his banishment, and lost too much of who we were in the process. Look at me, I have become undone,” he held up his hands, offering the brittle remains of the cocoon flaking away from his rejuvenated skin as evidence of just how much he had given. “He cannot be allowed to return. We are not strong enough to fight him again, not now, not here, like this. Every brick diminishes us, every road, every factory and shopping center, they strip away what little magic remains in the land and leave us husks of who we had been.” There was a tear glistening on his cheek as he said, “Mother is lost. My brother does not know himself. I am like a child. This place has forgotten everything. The old ways are no more. There is no time for wonder. You know this broken country with its philosophy of me, me, me, look out of the window and tell me how can we ever find a belief in each other that is strong enough to stand in his way?”
He tried to stand on atrophied legs and stumbled forward into Julie’s arms.
“Let me help you,” Julie said, taking his weight as best he could. The old man was surprisingly heavy given the withered state of his limbs.
“No,” the other man said, pushing himself away from Julie’s embrace.
“At least let us take you to the hospital, get you checked out.”
Viridius shook his head. “They could not help me, even if they wanted to. I am running out of time,” but the way he slumped again into Julie’s arms belied the words. “What month is it?”
“April,” Ellie said, behind him.
The old man nodded. “So little time. The solstice approaches, and with it a shift in the balance of nature.”
“I don’t even know what to say to that,” Julie said, struggling with the idea that somehow living long enough to see the sun rise on some arbitrary day could somehow heal anyone. It was patently absurd.
Like banishing Seth Lockwood into some mirror world within a mausoleum.
“Then don’t say anything,” the man said. “Actions make the man; words, like prayers, are useless. Help me,” he didn’t mean to stand, that much was obvious.
“What can I do?”
“The dimgate is open, the way is clear. We haven’t faced this threat in three hundred years, since the last of the dimgates were closed. For it to stand open now is no accident. The world is changing. We stand on a tipping point. Things cannot remain as they are. Either the last of the old earth magic dies out forever, leaving our home a husk,” he shook off more flakes of bark, emphasizing his point. Several pieces appeared to skitter across the rug like beetles. “Or somehow we return to how it was before, raw elemental energy surging along the ancient leys and spreading out through leaf and tree into every home and hearth, tearing down the walls that separate us from the land so that we might once more be one with our surroundings.”
“And that’s what will happen if the gate remains open?”
“It will be the end of this place,” Viridius said patiently. “Everything that has been gained will be lost. The progress of generations will be undone as we step back into the Dark Ages. He must be stopped.”
Again, all Julie could ask was, “Who?”
“He has many names, but only the single nature. He is King Stag; he is Lord of the Wild Things; he is the antlered man; he is the Lord of the Underworld; to some he is Cernunnos, to others he is Kernunno; He is the Horned God. He is Arawn, Lord of the Annwyn, but to me he will always be Father,” the old man said. Julie’s mind immediately flashed back to the sight of the antlered man on his knees inside the full beam of his headlights. “This place has forgotten him. But it will not be allowed to forget forever,” Viridius said, ignoring his question. “He will force it to remember. I cannot allow that to happen. But this is not your fight. You should go. Perhaps he will spare you.”
“I have seen him,” Julie said.
“Then he has marked you.”
“What does that mean?”
“That you are part of this,” Viridius said. “You cannot walk away.”
Behind him, Ellie made a cuckoo sign with her right hand, and interceded. “We really should get you to the hospital,” Ellie said, proving the point as she put herself between the two men. “Get you thoroughly checked out; just to be on the safe side.” Which of course meant he became someone else’s problem, and no need to think about the miraculous resurrection they’d witnessed. She hadn’t seen the antlered man as he somehow transformed into a white stag and bounded away into the forest, or any of the other wonders and horrors he’d witnessed since he’d answered that call to Albion Close with Taff six months ago. So, for her this was just the first weirdness; something she could shuck off onto someone else’s desk and be done with it.
Gently, she steered the old man toward the stairs and the waiting car outside.
Julie took another couple of seconds before he followed, looking at the painting of the Oak King and the Holly King over the fire grate. It took him a moment to realize he could only make out a single leaf-cloaked shadowy figure in the painting no matter how much he stared at it. It was as though the man was supposed to represent the duality of Nature and was both the Oak King and the Holly King depending upon the viewer’s perspective. He wondered which aspect he saw in the heavy oils, and what that said about him.