Julie found the old man exactly where he’d last left him, sitting on the bench outside Ravenshill Cemetery. It was easy to imagine that Damiola had been in the same spot for six months without fail—sunrise to sunset, sunset to sunrise, and all the times between—because he wasn’t a normal man.
Julie walked toward the wrought-iron gates with their rusted raven’s wings. He’d been thinking about what he was going to say all the way here, and still didn’t know how he was supposed to ask for help, never mind the kind of reception he’d get from the old man.
Damiola dipped grubby fingers into the newspaper wrapper to pluck out a cold chip and stuffed it into his mouth. To anyone who happened to walk down this narrow street in this quiet part of the city he would have looked like any of the city’s eight thousand homeless people with his fingerless gloves and layer upon layer of torn and frayed coats swaddling his skeletal frame. Damiola’s unkempt beard offered a home to remnants of dinners scavenged and consumed and his body odor was fierce enough to put up a physical barrier between him and the rest of the world. But looks could be deceiving and that was the essential misdirection of the magician’s art.
Julie nodded in greeting as the old man recognized him. He didn’t move to make room on the bench, forcing Julie to remain standing.
“I didn’t expect to see you again,” Cadmus Damiola said.
“I could say the same,” Julie agreed.
He noticed a telltale flicker of movement in his eyes, an involuntary twitch that had him look toward the cemetery.
“Whatever it is you think I can help you with, Officer Gennaro, I can’t. Whatever it is you think you want to know, you don’t. Believe me, the world is better that way. You shouldn’t be here.” His voice, speech patterns, and comportment made a lie of his derelict frame. “It would be better for both of us if you just moved along and left me here to rot, if I even can.”
“It would be,” Julie agreed. “But we both know that’s not going to happen.”
“We can dream,” the old man said, almost wistfully.
Julie laughed; he couldn’t help himself. “I could say I’d missed you, old man, but that’d make a liar out of me.”
“And given you’ve come cap in hand, that’s not a good thing.”
“One question, then I’ll go.”
“One answer is all you’ll get.”
“Sounds fair to me. So, my question: Does the phrase ‘The Horned God is awake’ mean anything to you?”
“Should it?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Did they teach you nothing at school?”
“For argument’s sake let’s say they didn’t.”
“Cernunnos. Kernunno. Karnayna. Janicot. The antlered man. Herne the Hunter. Lord of the Wild Things. He has many names, but a singular nature. Potent. Virile. The Horned God is born in winter, impregnates the Earth Mother during the heady months of spring, is Lord of the Summer, then dies during the autumn and winter months only to be reborn, birthed by the goddess at Yule, completing the cycle. His aspects can be divided into different deities at different times of the year, including the Oak King and the Holly King, among others. He is among the eldest of the gods still worshiped in some form today, known to his adherents as the Lord of Death. He rules the Summerland where souls reside as they await rebirth. In the old faith that place was sometimes known as the Annwyn, and its master was given the name Arawn. He is the Lord of the Wild Hunt, and his horns may well be where we draw our Christian impressions of the devil from. Consider that today’s lesson, and your one answer.”
“The devil?”
“The devil,” the old man repeated, picking at a bit of gristle that had stuck between his teeth.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that.”
“Why do anything?”
“Because five kids have been mumbling that phrase over and over since dusk yesterday. An old woman woke up in a hospital bed after years in a coma, offering the same portentous warning; an old man with his throat full of tree came back to life in front of my own eyes; and I hit a naked man with antlers in my car last night. That’s why.”
“One answer, Officer Gennaro. Now one piece of advice, given freely: walk away. This is not your fight.”
“Five kids,” Julie repeated, because that had to mean something, even to an old man like Damiola. “They’re locked inside themselves; they can’t express anything beyond the warning that the Horned God is awake. If you know anything that might help us, you’ve got to share it. You bent time, for fuck’s sake. You made a prison out of a tomb and locked Lockwood out of time. I can’t think of another person better placed to understand what is going on here.”
The old man inclined his head slightly, tilting it to the right as he studied Julie. “It wasn’t that simple,” he said, which wasn’t an answer to the question Julie had posed—but then he’d only promised one answer, hadn’t he? “I didn’t bend time. No one has that kind of power. And Lockwood isn’t out of time, that’s just a convenient way of thinking about what happened.”
“Okay, and this is relevant to the Horned God how?”
“The Underworld. The Annwyn. Glass Town. They’re aspects of the same thing.”
“Are you trying to tell me you trapped Seth Lockwood in Hell?”
“If you believe in Hell.”
“Who—or what—the hell are you? Jesus Christ, you talk about this stuff like it’s normal.”
This time it was the old man’s turn to chuckle, but he didn’t answer, at least not directly. “Perhaps it is normal where I come from,” he offered, as Julie realized what he’d said.
“So, what are we talking about really, if not Hell and Heaven. Parallel worlds? Is that it?”
“It’s not as simple as that, at least not in my case. It’s not worlds, just world, singular. The Annwyn. Though it has many other names, the Underworld, the Otherworld, the Summerland, the Netherworld, Tartarus, limbo, purgatory, the Inferno, the Kingdom of the Dead. And like its master, it has a singular nature. Do you understand the concept of Newton’s Laws?”
“You mean gravity and stuff?”
“Action and reaction,” the old man said.
“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,” Julie said, remembering the phrase without remembering where he’d first heard it.
“Think of it in terms of our world and the Annwyn, and the nature of contact interactions. Whenever these two worlds interact with each other they exert forces on each other—in Newtonian terms, action and reaction. When I sit on this bench I exert a downward force upon it, but simultaneously it’s exerting an upward force on my backside. It’s all about pairs. Two objects interact, two forces act. Take that bird,” he pointed at the starling walking along the iron railing beside them. “Its wings push the air downward, but because of mutual interaction, the air is pushing the bird upward, making it possible to fly.”
“Okay,” Julie said. The concept wasn’t a complicated one, but the implications were. “So, what you are saying is we did this? By opening a doorway into the other world to banish Lockwood we opened a door out of there, too?”
“And the Horned God stepped through. One for one. Equal and opposite.”
Julie remembered where he’d seen the words one for one before. They were burned into the floorboards of Josh’s flat in Rotherhithe, the place Josh had inherited from his grandfather with its walls of crazy, including one dedicated to the old ways, an incredible tree that he’d seen echoed on the door of Damiola’s workshop. One for one. Boone had worked it out. He knew what it meant, and the implications of what they’d done.
“You said five children have taken up the chant?”
“Yes.”
“Then he is looking to bring through five of his champions. Equal and opposite. Five souls find themselves drawn into the Annwyn so that five others may leave. As foretold, at the time of the land’s greatest need he will return. Arawn is here. That is what it means. The Horned God is awake. And it is all my fault.”
“How do we fight him?”
“We don’t.”
“There has to be something we can do. We can’t just sit here and watch the world burn. Equal and opposite, right? What if we free Lockwood?”
“Arawn is already here. It would do no good. The interaction has already happened, the forces played out. We can’t just take it back. I never should have indulged Joshua in his vengeance. It was stupid. And now look where it has led us.” He seemed to think of something then. “You are right, equal and opposite,” the old man said, as though it explained everything. “As long as Lockwood is alive in there—or whatever passes for life in the Underworld—there is a link between the pair. That is the only answer you need to take from this meeting, Officer Gennaro. Equal and opposite. Five for five. While the champions live, the children are lost to that other place. To bring them back, the link has to be broken.”
“The champions must die?”
“Or if you look at it from the other side of the Newtonian equation, for the champions to live here in our world without fear of being dragged back to the Annwyn the children must die,” Cadmus Damiola said. “They are in grave danger.”
Julie finally understood the lesson the old man had been trying to teach him. “How do you know this stuff?”
“It is why I am still here,” he said, again, not offering much in the way of an answer. Did he mean why he was here, outside the cemetery, watching, or why he was here in London, now, waiting? He was too intimately familiar with this stuff not to be a part of it, somehow. But before Julie could press him, the old man said, “Now, tell me about this resurrected man?”
Julie told him all there was to tell, about the call out and the weird carapace of bark that seemed to be some sort of cocoon around the dead man’s body, and how when Ellie had accidentally touched it the bark had begun to flake away, exposing far-too-young skin for a man who was supposed to be in his nineties. How he’d found the leaf between his lips and pulled the sapling out of his throat, allowing the man to breathe again. He repeated as much of the man’s words as he could remember, though to be honest he was vague on most of them, and fixated on the threat that the returning deity had marked him and just what that might mean. “We took Viridius to the hospital to get him checked out. Ellie insisted on a full psychiatric work up. I didn’t have the heart to tell her the old guy was sane; it is the world that’s fucked up,” Julie said, earning a chuckle from the old magician.
“His name was Viridius? Who else but the god of spring should be born again by pulling a branch in bloom from his throat?”
“A god?”
“Well, he was worshiped once, so what would you call him?”
Julie shook his head.
“And he is returned?”
Julie nodded.
“Well, that is something, at least. Perhaps we have an ally in this?”
“If they let him out of the psychiatric ward.”
“I warned young Joshua that there would be consequences,” Damiola said. “Now we must face them.”