Darkhenge

I was with my king

in Heaven’s battle,

when Lucifer plunged

to the depths of Hell.

THE BOOK OF TALIESIN

He climbed grimly, the bag hanging off his shoulder.

The wall was utterly smooth, so there were only the slithering bines to grip onto, and they were weak, soft, green growths. But they matted quickly, growing behind him and twisting in rapid corkscrew movements up his legs, so that every step was a dragging of his weight out of their clutches.

He risked a glance down and saw nothing but leaves; above, stars burned in the sky over the black parapet. He had to lean his head right back to see it, and that made him giddy and terrified, so he gripped more tightly and scrambled faster. Under the frantic sweating of his hands the new leaves were slippery, icy with frost. They tore, gave way, came off the black stone in great swathes of stems.

Gabbling prayers under his breath, his hair in his eyes, Rob climbed. He knew he was climbing for his life, that if he stopped, his weight would drag the whole slithering mass away. And the bag was heavy. He hadn’t known that—Vetch carried it so easily—but it hung from his back as if the forest of the Unworld drew it down, called it, pulled at it.

He stopped and slung it up, one knee chest high, the other foot wedged in a clot of branches.

Talons swooped at him.

With a yell he grabbed tight.

A scream rang in his ear.

The bird was huge, an eagle, or some sort of hawk. He only saw its tail, a flash of one yellow eye, but the gust of it knocked him against the wall with a bruising smash.

Red bean flowers fell in showers on his face. He clutched, screamed, “No!”

It had to be Clare. She had transformed herself into it, a cruel hooked beak that came back again and swooped, so that he cowered and banged his arm; the bag fell off his shoulder and slid to his wrist, a bone-breaking weight. “Vetch!” he screamed. And then, “Chloe! Help me!”

Nothing.

From the corner of his eye he saw the bird circle, come again. He turned his head, flattening his cheek against the wall, took a breath, let the strap slip, grabbed it, dropped it, grabbed it, and hugged it to his chest, just as the hooked beak dived, the talons flashed.

Pain raked down one wrist in a red slash.

One-handed, he clung to the wall.

If she came again she would knock him off. He would fall. Plummet, far down.

“Rob!”

The voice was just above him. A shape hung out, then an arm, a hand, beckoning and groping. Without hesitation he flung himself up at it, the bines snapping under his weight, hauling himself into the grip that caught his collar, his sleeve, that heaved him head first over the frosted black basalt of the parapet onto a slippery floor of marble.

He rolled, lay gasping.

“Inside!” The King knelt over him, looking anxiously at the sky. “Quickly, before the bird comes back!”

They were on a vast shiny balcony. Behind it a doorway rose, made of three black sarsens, one across the top of the others. They were carved with jagged spirals, and above them the inky wall went on upward, as if it reared through the clouds right into the real world again.

Painfully Rob threw the bag through the dark doorway and scrabbled after it. Like a shadow the King dived after him, rolling inside just before the hawk swooped, screeched, and came to rest on the black stone balustrade.

She sat there

The raging wind flattened her feathers and lifted them and flattened them again. Her eyes were remorseless circles of yellow wrath, and she stared unblinking at Rob. He couldn’t move.

If it was really Clare she could change again, become some other creature, leap at him.

Why didn’t she finish it?

Then, with a suddenness that made him jump, he saw one of the tall shapes on the parapet he had thought were gargoyles move. It turned its head.

One on each side, two cranes stood still, looking at Clare. Their eyes were narrow and slitted, their thin legs scaled. The third alighted with a great flutter, landing on the black marble floor in front of Rob, folding its wide wings. For a moment it looked at him, its graceful neck bending. As tall as he was, it turned to the hawk. It was as if the three cranes were protecting him.

The hawk eyed them coldly. Then it was gone, winging out into the dark, the cranes soaring after it.

Rob breathed out, got up on hands and knees. His wrist throbbed and dripped blood. He felt stretched, all his muscles knots of strain.

Pulling the crane-skin bag toward him, he slid the strap hastily over his head.

The King crouched, watching. In the darkness of the black doorway the wind made an eerie whisper, and it lifted the King’s dark hair. He was still wearing the holly mask, but now, as he saw Rob looking, he put his hands up and carefully took it off. Underneath was what Rob had expected, the fifth mask, this time the spiny twigs of blackthorn; the dark eyes looked calmly through the narrow eyeholes.

In his hand, a sharp knife glimmered.

Seeing Rob glance at it, he slid it into his belt. Then he said, “I was going to cut you down.”

Rob coughed. Dust clogged his throat. He had to swallow before he could say, “But you didn’t.”

“I didn’t because this is all my fault. You see, I brought her here in the first place. At least, she called me and I came. She was riding the white horse and I drove my carriage right into her world. That’s how it should be, how it is in all the tales. Ask Vetch. But she … she’s taken over. She’s so determined, so bitter, that I’m worried now.” He shook his head, rueful. “No, not worried. I’m scared. I want you to take her back. I want to help you.”

He knelt on one knee under the low passage roof, his velvet clothes stained and worn. “We need to hurry. Where’s Vetch?”

Rob bit his lip. “He fell. He may be dead. I don’t know.”

The King looked dismayed. “We need him! Chloe told Clare to deal with him—probably her plan was to steal the bag that you have. It holds treasures and mysteries; perhaps she believes it holds the lost wisdom he stole from her in the three splashes of the Cauldron. You have it, so she’ll pursue you now.”

Rob’s hand tightened on it. “How do I know I can trust you?”

The King shrugged. “Only you can decide.”

That was obvious. But what choice did he have? There was no going back for Vetch. Rob pushed the hair from his eyes. “Take me to Chloe,” he whispered.

It was obvious why they called it the Castle of Gloom.

Chloe was on hands and knees now, because the passage—and there was only one—seemed to get narrower and smaller the farther she went. She had the ridiculous feeling that she was getting small along with it, shrinking like something from Alice, crawling along veins and threads of space. And now, when a hole had worn in the red dress and her hands were sore, something was changing. The darkness. She could make out the black stone of the walls, because there was a bend ahead and around the bend came light, a pale glimmer. She hurried, feeling the grit under her palms.

At the bend of the passage she paused, then peered around and stared in astonishment. The tunnel became a corridor, the antiseptic white corridor of some hospital, smelling of disinfectant and floor polish. It was totally real, but still so tiny that the flat fluorescent ceiling lights scraped her back, the second one along sparking and fluttering, as if the strip was going. She didn’t feel small now; she felt enormous, as if she had grown to clog the corridor, as if she would be wedged in it, and as she crawled on, she saw tiny doors on each side, and in one of them Mac was speaking, not to her but to some nurse, urgently. Gently, she blew the door shut.

She didn’t want him to see her like this.

Just when the corridor seemed to be too small to squeeze through, it turned left, and crawling around she found herself in the hallway of a Victorian house, paneled with oak and hung with portraits, as if she had crawled into an illustration from one of her old books.

Chloe scowled. She was sick of this.

If this was the Unworld, her world, she ought to be able to make it as she wanted. Larger, for instance.

She stopped, closed her eyes. She wished hard, like she wished at Christmastime, or when the exam results were coming out, or when Tom Whelan had talked to her that time in the school cafeteria.

And the hallway moved back.

It swelled up, stood aside. She opened her eyes and found she was sitting on its worn carpet. That her size was normal and she could stand.

There was a table lamp plugged into the wall; she lifted it up and found it was marble and heavy and trembled in her hand, but she could drag it high enough to see the nearest painting. When the light glimmered on the canvas, she laughed sourly at first. And then she stopped laughing.

Clare waited.

It had taken time to escape from the cranes, and she had changed shape more than once. Now, knowing Vetch would survive, would come, she perched high in the branches of the oak. Her eyes were huge, her gaze hungry, her head swiveling in its silent feathers whenever a mouse raced across the forest floor, or a moth gusted in the wind.

When he emerged, her owl sight was ready.

He had chosen well, as he always did. A bat is small and swift, its flight difficult to see, its barely heard echo a squeaky sounding of the forest. She let him fly up, watching him rise from the pit and ascend the black wall, resting sometimes in the withering stalks, then darting out again and circling higher, zigzagging with wild energy across the stars.

When she moved, it was silent. She spread her wings and was gone, and as the bat’s weak eyes sensed her, its panic was soundless too, a blundering into the balustrade, a flap between pillars.

She swooped, her vision a wide ring of stark silhouette, her senses full of the stink of the wood, every squirm of her prey, his wriggle and dart, lowering her claws for him, plunging down into the darkness of the castle.

Then suddenly the night rose up and closed around her like an eruption; she gave one squawk of fear, flapped, tore, struggled.

The dark coat was right over her head.

“Goddess, I think we should make a truce,” Vetch said quietly.

Rob recognized the corridor. It was the one in the nursing home, the one leading to Chloe’s room. He was desperate to know what was happening there, how long in the world’s time he had been gone, but though he could hear Mac talking, he couldn’t see him, and all the doors had been locked.

Now there was this.

It seemed like the hallway of some Victorian house; he knew it, and it took him a while to remember from where, but then it came, and he said, “Chloe’s book!”

“You never read it,” the King remarked.

“Not the one she wrote! She has a kid’s storybook. Fairy tales. This is from Beauty and the Beast. This corridor.”

The King nodded. “It would be,” he said sadly. He wandered on into the dimness, to the lamp that stood on the table. Looking up, he lifted it. “Rob,” he said, “look at this.”

Coming up behind, Rob turned cold.

It was one of his paintings. The one of the downs from Windmill Hill, which he had painted in the spring, while Chloe had lain in the grass and sunbathed. Or had she? Hadn’t she been writing something … hadn’t she gone on about it, and he had muttered yes and no and mixed his colors and not listened?

Because now, right across the landscape of sap green and Prussian blue, right down the Chinese white scumbling of the clouds, was a deep gash, a dark, vengeful opening like the one that had swallowed Vetch.

She had slashed the painting into pieces.

With a murmur of pain he ran to the next one, and the next. They were all his work; everything he’d done that was any good, and each had been mutilated, torn, clawed so that the canvas and paper hung down in shreds.

He was so appalled he felt as if it was his own self she had broken open.

The King said, “If we don’t get her back, this is how she will be.”

Rob turned. His face was white, drained of color. His whole soul was drained of color. He rubbed his dry face, his cracked lips. “What?”

“Trapped here. She’ll forget your parents. Her friends. All she will remember is her bitterness....” The King’s hands shook as he lowered the lamp. His mask turned, the eyes wet. “I blame myself, Rob. It’s my fault.”

Rob was silent. He couldn’t answer, so he turned and marched on.

The corridor ended abruptly, becoming a place of slabbed stone. The stones were sarsen and they were cold. They made a rough roof, just high enough for him to stand, and led into dimness; on each side, low openings yawned. The ground was uneven with chalk. His breath smoked; the air was chillingly damp, the stones glistening with faint moisture.

As soon as he saw it, he recognized it.

It was the passage of the long barrow at West Kennet, barely a mile from Darkhenge. For a moment he thought with joy he was out, that he was back in the world, but when he turned he saw the King crouched there, and behind him the paneled corridor with its ruined paintings.

Ducking into the first side chamber, Rob saw bones. They lay in a heap, and he knew this must have been how it was before the tomb was excavated, how the remains of its builders had lain here for millennia, sealed in the earth, because he’d read it umpteen times on the notice outside. Skulls and long bones, sorted neatly in piles.

He and Chloe had played in here. Hide and seek. Jumping out and scaring each other.

He drew back, walked on. Two chambers on each side, and then the last, a corbeled roof, the huge slabs of the rounded sides.

He crept into the burial chamber, alert for her yell in his ear, her weight on his back.

It was empty.

And there was no way out.

“Why should I make a truce with you?” Clare stepped back.

Vetch came up to her and held her arms. “Because if we don’t, they’ll become as we are. Hating, loving, never forgiving. I know how he’ll feel, all his life, if she dies. There will be no way he can make it up to her, the neglect, the way he let his art swallow up his life. I know how that feels.”

She went to pull back but his grip was firm. “So you should,” she whispered.

He smiled. “‘A hen devoured me. I rested nine nights in her womb, a child. I have been dead. I have been alive. I am Taliesin.’”

Clare looked away. Then, barely heard, she breathed, “For the girl’s sake then.”

Chloe had dissolved the wall of the burial chamber and made the slabs slide into place behind her. Now she was deep in the forest; it was dark all around her, and she was getting tired of the dark. So she made the moon rise. It came up like a wobbling silver globe behind the trees. That was good.

And she was tired of walking too. The sixth caer might be miles away. So she whistled.

Through the rustling forest a soft clinking answered, and a thud, deep in leaf drift. A white shape detached itself from darkness, vanished, then reappeared between the tree trunks.

Chloe laughed and ducked under the branches, running down a thread of path out into a clearing, where a white horse looked up from grazing, whinnied, and shook its mane.

She gave a great, screeching whoop of joy.

“Callie! Callie, it’s you!”

The King said, “We’re trapped.”

“You’re a great help.” Rob turned. He looked back up the corridor past the paintings. Then he yelled, “Mac!”

Something rattled and slid.

“MAC! CAN YOU HEAR ME?”

If he could, there was no answer. Only a whine. At first it came from the roof, then it grew louder, emanating from the walls, a deafeningly horrible monotone, a grinding flat line of sound that made Rob clamp his hands over his ears in agony. “What is that? What is that?”

The King looked around in despair. “A machine. An alarm.”

Rob stared at him in disbelief. “Chloe’s monitors! Oh my God! She’s making them think she’s dying!”