'We come with the night,' it said in a voice like iron on gravel. Mallory started in shock.
Its red eyes looked as big as saucers. Sophie surfaced from her daze, gripping Mallory's arm tightly.
'What you seek lies beyond,' the dog continued. 'Follow the path. Do not turn from it, whatever you might see.' The dog rose up and began to leave, pausing halfway to turn its head back to them. 'Nothing is as it seems. Ever,' it said. It lost itself beyond the riders.
'I can't see a path,' Sophie whispered.
As Mallory scanned the tree line on the other side of the clearing, the moonlight illuminated the standing stone at just the right angle and a trail of energy ran out from the base of it into the forest. It was undoubtedly of the same essence as the Blue Fire, but this had a milky luminescence, like the moon on waves.
Sophie's eyes were wide and distant. 'I suppose we should go,' she said.
When they passed the standing stone it felt as though they were moving through a gauzy veil. Briefly, they appeared to lose touch with each other, although they had been holding hands, and were again shordy after. And then they were across the clearing and plunging into the dark beneath the branches.
A night wind slipped amongst the trees like a spirit, bringing with it aromas of pine and grass and sleeping flowers. Mallory was filled with something close to peace.
This is the end, he thought dreamily. We're going to see the Devil.
As they followed the shimmering white path, they became aware of movement amongst the trees: shapes drifted by, as insubstantial as mist, some human in form, some animals, some a combination of the two.
'What are they?' Sophie asked.
Before he could answer, they were both overwhelmed with a tremendous sense of presence, as if the ground on which they walked and the trees and vegetation were all one being. They gripped each other, rooted to the spot, Existence spinning all around them. Their own thoughts and emotions were intermingled with something from outside, so far beyond them in every aspect they couldn't begin to comprehend it.
Eventually, they found the strength to progress in faltering steps, unable to speak.
They were suddenly aware that they didn't know how long they had been there; it could have been years, or just a second. Their own sense of personality appeared to be dissipating too, or at least growing weaker, merging with what was around them.
At the point where they felt they were about to cease to be, the path wound down a bank and into a dense mass of vegetation. They tried to pause before it, not seeing how they could pass, but some force pulled them in, the leaves and creepers, brambles and ivy parting and then enveloping them so hard that the mass pressed against their faces, chests, backs.
Mallory could no longer see Sophie. Desperately, he called out her name.
'I'm here!' she said. Her fingers fumbled for his and locked on; not there, but there, always.
They continued that way for a while, drifting in a world of green. But then the vegetation became more hard-packed. Leaves pushed into Mallory's mouth, pressed against his eyes. He lost touch with Sophie's hand, fought for it but couldn't find it anywhere. And when he tried to call her name, the leaves and creepers forced further into his mouth, pressing against the rim of his throat, making him gag. The prick of thorns was sharp against his wrists, growing sharper still until he would have yelled out if he had been able. With a sickening realisation, he knew the brambles were breaking into his veins, forcing their way along them. Yet the veins weren't being torn apart, in the same way that he wasn't choking as the creepers found their way down his throat — though he gagged and gagged — and continued on into his stomach. The vegetation was consuming him from the inside out. Soon there wouldn't be any him at all; just green.
Before he lost consciousness, a voice echoed around him, repeating the words he had heard before. 'There are worlds within worlds. None are real.'
'The Devil… the Devil
The car sped away. Blood trickled over his knuckles, splashed on the steering wheel. In the rear-view mirror, he saw his face… saw into himself… Horrible… horrible…
He could feel it looming ahead of him, a shadow so big it threatened to block out the moon and stars and all of Existence. He could feel subtle fingers reaching into his brain, twisting the very essence of him, tweaking memories and half-thoughts. There was a darkness like that experienced only in the thickest forests where human feet never trod. It was coming, across space, across the worlds, through the trees, towards him, daring him to scream, entreating him to break apart in fear.
Mallory fell from here to there and back again, falling still.
It was coming…
'You have the smell of my enemies on you.' The voice sounded like branches swaying in the wind, yet strangely like his own voice reflected back at him.
Mallory stood in another clearing, much smaller than the last. Before him sat a man composed of leaves and branches instead of flesh and bones, clear eyes staring beneath a brow of fronds. Ander horns protruded from his head. He lounged on a throne made of living willow, oak, rowan and ivy, appeared to be part of it, and both of them part of the surrounding flora, which was as dense as a wall on every side. Mallory recognised echoes of Green Man carvings he had seen in ancient churches, hints of Robin Hood in the way the vegetation arranged itself like clothes; here was Pan, the living mind of nature. Or the Devil, depending on your point of view.
Through the hazy dream-atmosphere that swathed everything, Mallory felt his thoughts stir with anxiety, laden with the burden of propaganda subtly insinuated from the moment he had set foot in the cathedral; from the moment his education began. He recalled that same profile looming, ghostly, above the city, considered every picture he'd seen of Satan — it was all here in the figure before him.
'I have been with your world since the earliest times,' the Green Man said, as if he could read Mallory's thoughts.
The sense of presence was so powerful — much, much bigger than the figure before him, bigger than the world — that Mallory could barely speak. His mind couldn't cope with what it was perceiving, his thoughts like quicksilver, slipping away from him before he could get a hold on them, the gaps in his consciousness filled with visual and aural hallucinations so that he couldn't tell what was experience and what was imagination.
Panic, he thought, grasping at reason. The dread of the beating heart of nature, of Pan, the mind that lay behind it all.
He was dwarfed by everything, expecting to be destroyed at any moment, eradicated by a thought or a whispered word.
And then, in some strange way, he was standing on the downs with the warm summer wind at his back and the moon beaming down on the circle of standing stones, the atmosphere heavy with mystical possibilities. Below him, men wearing the antlers of their totem spirit moved on two legs, then on four, howling at the moon and the stones in a dance that was ancient even then. The Neolithic world called out to him, not with the brutality of a mean existence, but with spirituality and a sense of something greater.
'Here.' The disembodied voice sent tingles up his spine.
The world fell away and he was in the sacred grove where the sickle cut the mistletoe, and gathered around were naked men prepared for battle, their hair bleached and matted with lime so that it stuck out in nail-like spikes. The wise men who kept the oak-knowledge, the great knowledge, whispered and moaned and felt the universe move through him, and all those assembled sighed with wonder.
'And here.'
And he was in the golden fields where the workers made the corn dollies and left them in the silence of the harvest night. And then in the greenwood where the villagers crawled through and under the crushing yoke of the rich and powerful, impeaching the trees for aid to bring back the wealth to the poor. And he heard the answering call of the hunting horn and glimpsed the movement of a green-clad hero in the emerald depths. In the thundering, sulphurous heat of the iron foundry as the Workshop of the World made cities and empires, he heard the apprentice knock on wood. The rural churches where the vegetative face stared out from pew and column, the other churches where the horned faces had been disfigured, made into a grinning devil, a feeble attempt at supplantation that would never, ever work.
'Here, here, here.'
Then, like some god, he was above it all, with a vista over all time, all place, hearing the whispered names — Cernunnos, Puck, Jack o' the Green — seeing how they were stitched into the fabric of everything, from the very beginning to the very end.
