conflagration engulfed it, the thing still tried to get through the door, still fought wildly, wouldn't lie down and die as she'd hoped. With a sinking feeling, Mary realised she couldn't wait any longer. She turned and hurried back along the main street, glancing behind only once with a quiet, desperate hope that she had done enough.
Chapter Eight
'Why was I always suffering, always browbeaten, always accused, forever condemned?'
The dark wood loomed before them, vast and low, breathing the slow, measured breath of the predatory animal. Beneath the thick canopy, only shadows lay; sometimes they moved of their own accord. Nettles, brambles and emerald ferns clustered around the forest's edge, the only easy access along the thin path that wound into the heart of it.
Midges danced in the uncomfortably hot morning sun while birds fluttered here and there, but never appeared to enter the trees.
Caitlin wiped a thin slick of sweat from her forehead and thought of the book she had been reading to Liam. The echoes still reverberated through her mind and she mulled over Crowther's suggestion that the impression of this world was created by the people who viewed it. Was she plucking this wood from her memory? Was she remaking the entire place as fractured and desperate as her own deep subconscious? If that was the case, what chance did they have? 'This place has haunted us since we crawled out of caves.' Crowther was at her side, drawn and weary, but at least he was finally talking to her again. Unsettlingly, he appeared to be reading her mind, or perhaps the troubled expression she wore whenever she glanced at the deep dark forest. 'It's the Wildwood,' he continued, 'the primeval forest of our deepest, darkest memory, where all the real terrors lay. This Otherworld is a land of archetypes, and the wood is one of the most affecting. Do you feel it?'
She nodded, thinking oddly of The Wind in the Willows, of Robin Hood and his green men, of the place where Laurence Talbot loped amongst the trees. 'Have you forgiven me?'
There was a long pause before he replied, 'No. I'm simply good at making accommodations with life — always have been.'
Matt came up, swatting away the flies that buzzed around him. 'Better get a move on,' he said cheerily. 'With the Whisperers on our trail, we can't be sitting around.'
'Has anyone told you that your continually perky and upbeat attitude is monumentally irritating?' Crowther said sourly before stalking away.
'You'd think he'd take off his hat and overcoat in this heat,' Caitlin said.
'He thinks it makes him look like Gandalf,' Matt replied caustically, 'when actually it makes him look like a fat old git in a hat and an overcoat.'
She laughed. 'You can be very unkind.'
Caitlin was aware of Matt standing so close that their shoulders almost brushed. It gave her a strange flush of excitement, and that made her unconscionably guilty; how could she even begin to have such thoughts so soon after Grant's death?
'I'm sorry we haven't had time to search for your daughter,' she said, bringing the conversation firmly back to family.
'There'll be time. I didn't bring it up because I didn't want you clubbing me round the head and dragging me off.'
'The professor was different-' she began to protest until she saw that he was joking. His teasing grin brought another unnecessary flush of something.
'I think about Rosetta all the time,' he said, 'but I understand our responsibilities to the people back home. If we don't find a cure for the plague, there won't be any human race left for me to take Rosetta back to.'
'I promise you, once we've delivered the cure, I'll come back here to help you search… however long it takes.'
'I appreciate that.'
A moment of mutual support and tenderness swelled between them. Matt saw her dismayed confusion and moved to ease it. 'This place looks like it might be dangerous. We need to have somebody at the front and back on guard, and I think weapons should be drawn until we're sure of how it's going to play out.'
Her mood changed as she turned to practical matters. She organised the others into a group at the entrance to the wood, despite disruption from Mahalia, who had plainly taken it on herself to challenge Caitlin's authority at every turn.
'Keep Carlton at the centre of the group,' Caitlin said. 'We have to protect him at all costs.'
Though she undoubtedly agreed with the sentiment, this comment appeared to annoy Mahalia immensely, for her knuckles grew white around the Fomorii sword. After the blazing heat of the day, the air was cool and sweet beneath the thick canopy of leaves that cast the world in emerald and grey. Where the branches were at their thickest, the forest floor was almost bare, but in the areas where the sun came through in gleaming shards, thick vegetation rising high above them reduced the path to a ribbon so narrow that they could only walk single file. At those points where visibility was limited, they most feared an attack. Constant movement in the undergrowth kept them permanently on edge. They broke for food after a couple of hours' hard trekking. Matt had brought some of the food regularly left for them in their chambers at the Court of Soul's Ease — fruit, dry bread, cured meat. They refreshed themselves with rainwater collected in the cups of exotic blooms that occasionally spread across their way; it tasted sweeter than any water they had drunk before, and its effect was potent: weariness was flushed from their limbs.
'Look at this,' Jack said curiously. He cupped in his pale palm the head of one of the flowers. The petals were black and withered, dripping the liquid of rot.
Mahalia made a disgusted face. 'You're getting it all over you. Put it down!'
He tossed it away, flashed her a smile. Her response, blunt and challenging but secretly teasing, was lost beneath a low rumble that rose to a high-pitched shriek, somewhere deep in the woods. It was clearly a large animal, though it was impossible to tell if it was hunting or in pain.
They all jumped to their feet. The cry affected them on some primeval level, where the race memories of prehistory were fossilised.
'What the hell was that?' Matt said.
Crowther remained rigid. 'What would be here, in the Forest of the Night?' he mused to himself. 'That wasn't the Wild Hunt. What other dark myths, what other archetypes…?' His words turned to muttering and retreated inside him.
'Let's move,' Caitlin said.
They set off quickly, the animal call still echoing in their heads.
'Could any of you estimate the size of the forest from the view we had when we were wrapped up in the mask?' Matt called.
'Vast.' Crowther wheezed as he levered himself along on his staff. 'But that doesn't matter in a place where time and space are meaningless. We might be through it this afternoon or a hundred years hence.'
'Thanks for the boost,' Matt said.
'We'll be all right as long as we don't stray from the path.'
Mahalia tried to read Crowther's face, saw his subtle mischief and couldn't resist a smile. He was surprised how warm the connection made him feel, and he responded with a smile of his own. Strangely, she didn't scowl or glare, but held his expression briefly. Not even the jagged rocks could keep out the brutal winds of the Ice-Field. Caitlin huddled in a nook, watching the others. Brigid sat cross-legged, cackling to herself like some caricature of a witch from a child's fairy story, while Briony paced back and forth, chain-smoking and bitching to herself. Amy
