“Crop circles! Bloody crop circles! I ask you, who cares about that rubbish any more? Well, all right, somebody must, or the publishers wouldn’t be paying me good money to write the bloody thing. It’s a part-work; twenty-four monthly issues guaranteed to build up into an unsightly mess in your living room, until you’re so far behind you give up and throw the lot out.”
“So why are you doing it?” said Malcolm Cragg, an artist who specialised in portraits of people’s pets, constructed from pressed flower petals.
“They found my weak spot,” Grant said glumly. “They offered me money.”
“The unfeeling bastards!”
“Right. So: it’s put a bag over its head and do it for the money, one more time. Write interesting comments to accompany the hundreds of glossy colour photos that are the real selling point. I mean, there just aren’t that many ways to say We don’t know what it is either, or what might be causing it, but isn’t it pretty? And/or impressive? Heaven forfend we might even hint that we wouldn’t be at all surprised if it turned out to be nothing more than half a dozen pissheads with planks on their feet, shuffling about in the corn in the early hours of the morning, going, Hee hee, I’m a Martian. God, The X-Files has a lot to answer for …”
“Oh, I like that Gillian Anderson,” said Cragg immediately. “You’ve got to admire a woman who can spout reams of scientific dialogue every week, and still make it sound as though she’s talking dirty.”
“True,” said Grant. “And it has to be said, if it wasn’t for unauthorised X-Files tie-ins, I wouldn’t be able to pay the rent some months. But crop circles have to be a new low, even for me. You can’t just say, Look at the pretty pictures, you have to talk knowledgeably about UFO landings and wind vortices, and how there are always these strange molecular changes in the flattened corn … I swear, much more of this and my brains are going to start dribbling out of my ears …”
“It’s your own fault,” Cragg said unfeelingly. “They only hire you because you can make it sound convincing, no matter what crap you’re writing about this week. Do you believe any of it?”
“Hell no! I might be an old hippy, but the only time I ever saw a UFO was when I scored some dodgy blotting paper in London, back in the seventies. There are no UFOs, no ghosts and no secret conspiracies. And I should know because I’ve written about all of them, at one time or another.” He smiled suddenly, and brightened up a little. “Hey; I had a great idea for a new Crow film the other day! Princess Diana comes back from the dead, with an Uzi in each hand, and hunts down French paparazzi! Easy enough to find a good lookalike and put her in The Crow make-up … You’re looking at me strangely again.”
The arty set started talking determinedly about the hippy commune that’d recently taken over the old Manor Farm on the edge of town. There were supposed to be a dozen of them, six men and six women, but so far they’d outraged local gossip by keeping themselves strictly to themselves. They’d come down from some dark corner of London, according to a girl who worked at the estate agents’ who handled the sale, looking for peace and quiet and inner calm. Leo quietly wished them the best of luck in a town like Bradford-on-Avon, where the barriers between fact and fantasy had been rubbed a little thinner than most people were comfortable with.
What made the hippies so fascinating was that all details of the purchase of Manor Farm had been handled strictly by post. Not even a telephone call had been made. The commune had arrived en masse one morning, rumbling through the town in a converted double-decker London bus, and had settled into their new home without any help from anyone. And no one had seen hide nor hair of them since. The few things they needed were ordered by mail, and delivered by curious locals who found the money waiting for them on the doorstep. All the farmhouse’s windows had been boarded over, and there was neither sight nor sound anywhere of the new occupants. There were rumours of drugs and orgies and dancing naked in the moonlight, but no one knew anything for sure.
“Hippies should have stayed in the sixties, where they belonged,” said Grant, pushing his empty coffee cup forward, in the hope that some kind soul might offer to refill it for him. “Back with Love and Peace and Flower Power. It all seemed to make some kind of sense at the time. These days we’re all too cynical to believe in Brotherhood and ‘make love, not war’. Great music, though. There’s never been any really good music since the Beatles split up.”
“Oh come on,” Leo said automatically. “There’s more kinds of popular music now than there’s ever been. Something for everybody.”
“Rubbish,” said Grant. “It’s all white kids getting off on pretending to be gangstas, and girl groups so young they’re probably still doing homework. And most rap should have the letter C in front of it … Oh God, listen to me. I sound so old. I hate kids’ music and I can’t stand the fashions. I have become my parents.”
“Everybody does,” said Cragg. “But the Manor Farm bunch do worry me. What have they got to hide? What are they afraid of our finding out? Nothing good will come of this, mark my words.”
“You always say that,” said Grant.
“And I’m usually right. Another coffee?”
Everyone immediately pushed their empty cups at him, and he went over to the bar to order more industrial-strength caffeine.
Grant scowled after him. “He may be a gloomy bastard, but he has a point. I just hope they don’t turn out to be another of those bloody doomsday cults. End up drinking poisoned cider and burying themselves in the back garden. Before you know it, the whole town will be crawling with TV documentary crews, making programmes called Town of Terror, or The Hippies from Hell. And I’ll get called on to do another bloody part-work on them …”
Leo was looking at the dead man again. He’d been hoping against hope that his old friend Reed might have gone away by now, or at least had the good manners to be just an illusion, but no; it was looking more and more like Leo was going to have to Do Something. Reed had made his slow way over to the long wooden bar, and was staring uncertainly at the rows of spirits on the wall behind, as though sure they’d once meant something to him. People walked by him unconcernedly, and even pushed past him to give their orders, but so far no one had recognised him for who and what he was. On the rare occasions when the unnatural insisted on pushing its way into the real world, people mostly tended to ignore it for as long as possible. Leo sighed heavily and put down his glass. He wasn’t thirsty any more.
The dead shouldn’t be able to walk in Veritie. It took a lot of magical power to raise the dead from their graves, and even more to keep control of them once they were up and about. And there was no magic in the real world: that was the point. Leo, however, being a hybrid derived from both worlds, could see more than most. In particular, he could see the magical field currently surrounding the dead man, containing him like a soap bubble, insulating what he was from the implacable laws of physics in the real world. Leo didn’t even want to think about how much power such a field would take up. Reality was not easily defied, and even then not without terrible cost, for somebody. Leo knew most of the heavy-duty movers and shakers in the magical world, but unfortunately far too many of them knew him. And they certainly wouldn’t take kindly to him pushing his nose in where it wasn’t wanted.
Leo grinned suddenly. It was a wide, unpleasant, distinctly wolfish smile, and the people sitting around him shrank back in their seats a little, giving him more room, in case he decided to do something unpleasant. Leo tried to be a nice guy, but he wasn’t at all averse to being a complete bastard when necessary. This wasn’t just any dead man. This was his friend, Reed. Leo had many acquaintances, but few friends; even he knew that when someone drags your friend up out of his grave, you’re supposed to do something about it. Leo felt like doing something very nasty. The more he considered the matter, the less he liked it. He didn’t know a lot about zombies, apart from what he’d seen in bad Italian horror movies, but he knew they tended to come in two basic versions. One was just an empty shell, an unt
enanted body being operated at some remove by someone else. Which was disrespectful, if nothing else. Leo felt he could give someone a serious slapping for that. But there was an even worse alternative. Reed’s soul could still be trapped inside his decaying body, a helpless victim under someone else’s control. Endlessly suffering, denied his rightful rest, just because some heartless bastard had a use for him. Leo’s mouth widened, his lips thinning as his smile became a snarl. Around him the arty set began getting to their feet and making noises like Well, look at the time, and I really must be going. Leo didn’t notice. His anger had escalated from hot to boiling to ice cold in just a few seconds. Someone was going to pay for what had been done to Reed. No one messed with a friend of Leo Morn and lived to boast of it.
Reed used to drink here, at the Dandy Lion. If he stood around long enough, people would be forced to notice him. And some might even recognise him, and that was when the screaming would start. Real people might like to titillate themselves with ghost stories and crop circles and the like, but when faced with the unreal thing, they couldn’t cope at all. It destroyed their ideas about how the universe worked.
Leo decided it was time he talked with his Brother Under The Hill.
“Brother,” he said, in his mind. “I have a problem. The shit is in the air, and it’s right on course for the fan.”
It’s your own fault, said the other voice in his mind. I told you she was never sixteen. Tell me you used a condom at least.
“Get your mind out of the gutter. I’m sitting in the Dandy Lion …”
Now there’s a surprise.
“Looking at a dead man walking.”
All right, you’ve got my attention. Go to Red Alert and buckle yourself in. What the hell is a dead man doing in Veritie?
“I was going to ask you that.”
What’s it doing, right now?
“For the moment, just standing around, looking confused.”
Oh good. For one horrible moment I thought you’d wandered into a Lucio Fulci movie.
“Zombie Flesh-Eaters is a classic of the genre, and I won’t hear a word said against it. Any ideas as to what I should do next?”
Leo had no idea who or what his Brother actually was. He admitted to being extremely old and not entirely human, and lived, if that was the right word, buried deep under one of the hills surrounding the town. The last time he saw light, the Roman Empire was busy declining and falling. Leo inherited his Brother Under The Hill on his father’s demise, and from that moment on he and the Brother could talk to each other, mind to mind, no matter how great the distance separating them. Whoever or whatever the Brother was, he’d been doing it for centuries. He liked to say he was raising Morns, and would keep at it till he got it right. The Brother saw, heard and knew everything that happened in the town below him, in Veritie and Mysterie, although he only existed now in the magical world. The Morns were his only means of communicating with the two worlds. Leo was the first Morn who had chosen to live in the real world, which had been the cause of a certain amount of friction between them.
But Leo was determined to be nothing like his father.
Keeping a dead man up and walking in the real world isn’t something your average necromancer or dabbler in the dark arts could manage, mused the Brother. This has to be the work of one of the major players.
“I had managed to work that out for myself,” said Leo, just a little testily. “I’ve been running through the usual suspects, but Jackie Schadenfreude is out of town at the moment, the Lord of Thorns is still sulking in his tent after getting his fingers burned in the Cup of Tears fiasco, and Jessica Sorrow the Unbeliever wouldn’t bother herself with anything this trivial. Damn, that woman scares me.”
I told you not to sleep with her.
“She didn’t exactly give me a choice. Look, what do you think we should do about my dead friend?”
I love the ‘we’ bit. Stuck as I am beneath this bloody hill, it’s up to you to do something. And do it pretty damned quickly, before the mortals are forced to notice what’s come visiting their fragile little world. The last thing we need is a panic in the town and intrusive media people.
“Can’t you see who’s behind this? I thought you were supposed to be all-knowing.”
Normally I am; but whoever did this is hidden from me. Which is worrying.
“Wonderful,” said Leo. “Don’t you have any suggestions? If I try to drag Reed out of here, that’s going to attract the very attention we’re trying to avoid. And I really don’t see him listening to reason—oh shit …”
What? What?
“The Waking Beauty is glaring at me from her corner. If she’s manifesting in the real world, the situation must be even worse than we thought. From the way she’s looking at me, it’s clear she expects me to do something pretty sharpish. Interfering old biddy. You are sure she can’t hear us?”
Only you can hear me, Leo. Only you.
“Yeah, but this is the Waking Beauty we’re talking about.”
True. She’s the only creature in this town who’s older than I am.
I wish you were just a voice in my head. Life would be so much simpler if I was just crazy. Hold everything: what was that?”
A communication had come and gone so quickly Leo couldn’t overhear or track it, but the dead man had heard and understood. He turned and walked unhurriedly out of the pub. People got out of his way without knowing why. Leo scrambled up from behind his table, realised for the first time that the arty set were all long gone, shrugged and set off after the departing dead man. The mind voice hadn’t lasted long, but it had still made one hell of an impression, scoring through Leo’s mind like a length of barbed wire.
Major player.
Leo emerged blinking into the bright sunshine outside the Dandy Lion and hurried after the dead man, at what he hoped was a discreet distance. Reed strode firmly off down the hill, people parting on either side to let him pass without seeing him. Leo tried hard to keep thinking of his quarry as the dead man, an object rather than a person, but it wasn’t easy. Reed had been one of his few real friends. He’d gone to Reed’s funeral, tried to say the right things to the grieving relatives, had stood at the graveside and made his goodbyes; and now Reed was up and about again, a pawn in someone else’s dirty game. Leo’s hands clenched into fists at his sides. Someone was going to pay for this, and pay in blood. Leo’s wolfish smile flashed again as he considered the awful mess he was going to make of whoever had been foolish enough to raise his anger. He didn’t care how big or powerful or influential the bastard might turn out to be. He never did. He was Leo Morn, and no one messed with him and his. His mind filled with happy thoughts of broken bones and torn flesh and spurting blood, and people moved aside to let him pass too.
The Brother Under The Hill maintained a neutral silence.
Leo followed the dead man through the centre of the town, and across the old bridge over the River Avon. Green reeds poked up through the dark waters, while crowds of ducks competed noisily for breadcrumbs thrown by tourists. A pair of pure white swans watched disdainfully from a distance. The dead man passed the Chapel on the Bridge, a solid square of ancient stonework jutting out over the river. It had been there so long no one now remembered who built it, or why. Some said it had been a private chapel, others that it had been an overnight lock-up for local drunks. There was one door, always locked, and small barred windows. Even in Veritie, it was a squat, brooding presence. As the dead man passed the Chapel, the Howling Thing stirred ominously.
Although it was a part of the magical world, for ever separated from reality, the Howling Thing was still a powerful enough presence that its rage caused ripples in both worlds. People passing the Chapel often crossed themselves, even if they didn’t know why. The Howling Thing reacted to the necromantic energies surrounding the dead man, and hurled itself furiously at the locked door. It raged and beat against the four confining walls, old stone sealed and consecrated by ancient sorceries, and fought to be free. I
ts awful voice rose and fell, never-ending, promising revenge and retribution. It never stopped, never rested, but still its cage held it, as it had for centuries past and would do so for centuries yet to come.
There were those who said the Howling Thing founded Bradford-on-Avon, long, long ago. Others said it tried to destroy the town. And some claimed it was the town’s spirit, and that if it ever escaped or was released, the town would come to an end. The truth was, no one knew anything for sure any more. But absolutely no one was prepared to risk setting the Thing free, even if they knew how.
Leo padded on after the dead man, all through the town and out the other side. As buildings gave way more and more to open countryside, Leo began to get a really bad feeling about where they were going. And soon enough, all too soon, the open fields butted up against the silent, dead trees of Blackacre. Reed walked unhesitatingly into the dead thickets, but Leo paused for a moment, wondering if he really was that determined to avenge his friend. Nothing good ever came out of Blackacre.
Even Leo Morn had enough sense to be scared of Blackacre.
But in the end, he plunged on into the thicket of dark, lifeless trees, if only because he didn’t want to. Leo had his pride. As he entered the woods he dropped suddenly out of the real and into Mysterie, with a sharp shock that for a moment took his breath away. He’d never known a place so strongly magical as to rip him out of one world and into the next, against his will. His senses became sharper, more focused, as using his father’s legacy he adapted to the magical world, and with a slow sense of horror he realised that Blackacre no longer existed in the real world. Only its shell remained in Veritie, an empty vision of what had once been as real as earth and rock. Something, or more likely someone, had torn the guts out of Blackacre and pinned them firmly in Mysterie. Blackacre was a wholly magical place now, where dark, bad, magical things could be done.
Leo’s pace slowed, almost despite himself. As his father’s son, he was a powerful presence himself in Mysterie; but he’d never cared for that. Legacies and destinies were for other people. He preferred the simpler, subtler, more real pleasures of being just a man.