6
THE CLEARING
THE PATH LEVELLED AND WIDENED OUT INTO A clearing dominated by the ruins of a large stone column in the centre that had fallen and broken into chunks. On one of them, Becky and Alice sat huddled close together, watched over by another woman – or something that looked a bit a like a woman, anyway – but David was paying no attention to the details because he was running towards them, blinded by tears.
Or at least he tried to. He fetched up against Matt’s outstretched palm and it was like running into a wooden beam end-on.
‘Not so fast there, chum.’
‘Daddy!’ screamed Alice, and when he looked the female creature had a knife to her throat and Becky was being held by something with preternaturally long arms and a leering porcine face low down between its shoulders. Then from the trees around the clearing emerged a crowd of squat, loping shapes, and Mark Turner shouted: ‘What the fuck are those things?’ Prav was yelling something and the dogs were barking furiously and straining at their leashes.
‘Everyone just cool your shit!’ bellowed Matt into the noise, which abated slightly. He had his fist curled over the front edge of David’s stab vest, holding him. Once he had their attention he added, with less volume, ‘There is no need for this to get stupid! This is a parley! You get violent, we get violent, everybody loses. Now calm the fuck down!’
David didn’t know how he was supposed to calm down when his daughter was sobbing in the grip of something that held a knife to her throat with fingers that weren’t entirely human, and his wife was pleading at him silently with confused terror, but somehow he managed it.
‘You have guns and dogs,’ said Matt. ‘We have numbers. I kind of think it’d be fun if we all just got into it but my lord doesn’t wish his children to be harmed, which I’m sure you can understand, so we parley, get it?’
‘Parley?’ David swallowed thickly. ‘About what?’
From behind the still-standing base of the column emerged a figure that could only have been Moccus. Dennie’s description of the half-resurrected god didn’t do justice to the appalling state of him; surely such a thing couldn’t live – or if so, it was only by sheer brute force of will. He would have been tall if he hadn’t been stooped over a great cavity in one side of his torso. He would have been human if one side of his face hadn’t been a denuded boar’s skull. He was holding a tattered coat close around himself as if trying to ward off a chill, despite the heat.
‘Colin Neary,’ breathed Dennie. She was leaning on Prav. ‘Dear lord, what happened to you?’
Moccus fixed her with a glaring amber eye. ‘I rather think you know what. You helped, after all.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Prav in disbelief, ‘Colin what-now?’
‘It’s a long story,’ said Moccus. ‘Thank you, David, for bringing this old witch to me. I won’t waste your time; my terms are very simple. Dennie Keeling comes with me, and you get your wife and child back.’ He shuffled towards Becky and Alice, supporting himself on the broken stone as he went.
David wasn’t sure that he’d heard right. ‘Dennie? Why do you want her? She’s not one of your chosen.’
‘No, but she interferes,’ Moccus growled. ‘She pokes her nose in where it shouldn’t go. She sees things she shouldn’t be able to see.’
‘He doesn’t like that I can find him,’ said Dennie, and uttered a laugh so dry it sounded like a cough. ‘As if it isn’t actually killing me, anyway.’
‘You didn’t poke it in far enough, though, did you?’ he sneered. ‘You never actually went so far as to call the police when you knew that Colin was beating Sarah. You just made useless comforting noises and cups of tea while he did it again, and again, until it was too late. And why?’
‘Shut up, you foul creature.’
Moccus laughed. It sounded like something being drowned. ‘Why? Because if Sarah had actually done something about it then you would have had nobody to comfort, would you? Rattling around the empty old family home with just that desperate waste of a husband who you never really had anything in common with except the children, at least until he had the decency to drop dead in his own driveway…’
‘Shut up.’
‘… and the doors that you close because you can’t bear the echoes of your children’s absence.’
Dennie gasped.
‘Oh yes, I see things too. You needed Sarah to fill those echoes, and you let Colin beat her because it drove her closer to you.’
‘That’s not true! Don’t you dare put that on me! You beat her! You’re the monster!’
‘We’re all monsters, my dear. It’s just a matter of degree.’
By now Moccus had reached his wife and daughter. ‘David, you would never have come if it weren’t to save your loved ones and you would never have found me without her, and once I have her nobody ever will. Possibly you’re thinking that this is all a trick and that when you hand her over I’ll just take these two anyway. Well, just to prove that I am a…’ he paused, considering, ‘man of my word I will remove the first flesh from your loved ones and renounce my claim on them. Since they will be of no use to me there will be no reason for me not to return them to you. Don’t worry,’ he added, seeing David struggle afresh against Matt’s grip. ‘It won’t kill them. The hurts that have been healed will stay healed; only illness and age cannot.’ A smile twisted the ruin of his mouth. ‘But it won’t be pretty.’
‘David?’ cried Becky. ‘David, what’s going on? What’s he going to do?’
‘Daddy! Don’t let him touch me!’ screamed Alice.
But Moccus had laid his hands on them.
Immediately they fell to the ground, writhing and spasming, vomiting up gouts of bloody bile –
