Jack of Ravens

8

It was a perfect summer night, bright and balmy from the heat of the day, with a million stars glittering overhead and the moon as bright as a lantern. A soft breeze occasionally brought scents of the cooling countryside.

Carn Euny had been transformed. Torches blazed along the main thoroughfare, the flickering shadows making the village hazy and unreal. Church stood with the community silent at his back. The atmosphere was pregnant with anticipation.

Finally Conoran emerged from a nearby house where he had been performing his ritual of preparation. With a flamboyant gesture, he tossed a handful of leaves and twigs onto a small fire that blazed at the head of the street. There was a brief flash accompanied by a murmur of awe from the crowd, and then a heavy aroma filled the air. It reminded Church of incense.

‘Are you prepared for the journey into the world beyond?’ Conoran asked Church solemnly.

Church nodded. When he had agreed to the ritual he had expected it to be a diverting piece of entertainment, but he was surprised by how affecting it truly was. Every nerve in his body felt electrified.

Conoran held his hand out, palm upwards. On it lay a small pile of dried mushrooms. Church knew that many ancient cultures used some kind of hallucinogen to enhance the religious experience — even the early Christian sects were supposed to have used psychedelic mushrooms in their rituals — but he was apprehensive about their effect.

‘Take them,’ Conoran urged, with a flinty tone that suggested there could be no refusal.

Church reticently popped the mushrooms into his mouth and swallowed. At his back, someone began to bang a drum of animal hide, then another, and another. The sharp notes of a bone flute rose up.

As the rhythmic music built, Conoran led the procession through the settlement, Church close behind him. It ended at the entrance to a mysterious tunnel that Church had inspected earlier. It was a fogou, a feature of several Cornish Iron Age settlements; archaeological debate about their use ranged from a grain store or shelter from marauding enemies to some ritual purpose. Church now knew it was the latter.

Conoran motioned to the dark hole. ‘Enter now, and be prepared to be born into a new world and a new life.’

Church felt a flicker of anxiety as the first flush of the mushrooms hit his system. Lying on his belly, he slithered like a snake into the dark.

The tunnel opened into a larger space, but not high enough to stand upright. The darkness was so intense it had a palpable quality; Church felt as if he was floating in space. He became acutely aware of the beat of his heart and the rush of blood through his arteries and veins.

‘Move along the tunnel.’ Conoran’s disembodied voice floated eerily around.

Church edged forward, one hand outstretched in front of him, the other dragging along the cold stone corbels of the wall for guidance. He worried that there might be some secret pit ahead, that the whole ritual was an elaborate trap to rid the community of the dangerous stranger in their midst.

The tunnel turned this way and that, or appeared to in the dark, so that Church could no longer recall the way out. Eventually he came to a place where the roof and floor came together to form a funnel.

‘Crawl into the gap.’

Church jumped. Conoran was right behind him.

Church crawled until he was wedged in a foetal position inside a tiny chamber, and there he realised the significance of Conoran’s words about being born into a new world. The tunnel acted symbolically like the birth channel. After the ritual he would emerge into the light, to start a new life after the mind-altering experience.

The drums throbbed distantly like the slow beat of an enormous heart. The sound of the bone flute ebbed and flowed like the thrum of a vascular system.

‘Jack, Giantkiller, known as Church. Let me tell you about Existence,’ Conoran began in measured tones. ‘There is one rule in our secret studies, and it is this: no here or there exists, no in or out. There is only us. Everything you see in the world around, every rock and tree and blade of grass, is fluid. The world is only the way you perceive it because that is how we need it to be, at this moment. We make our own world.’

‘You’re saying this is all just a dream,’ Church said languorously. He felt strangely like laughing. ‘We dream the world this way.’

‘All living things are a part of Existence. The Blue Fire burns in everything, roaring through like life’s-blood.’

Church had a strange vision: standing on a balmy night, looking over the rolling countryside as streams of Blue Fire raced across the grass in lines, interlinking, forming a huge grid that echoed inside him as much as without.

‘The Fiery Network,’ he muttered.

Was it a dream, or had he truly experienced this, the memory now lost to the abyss in his head?

‘You know of this,’ Conoran said, pleased. ‘I knew that would be the case. It is secret knowledge, passed down only through the Culture, yet you know. The lines of power run through the earth, from stone circle to cromlech, from sacred spring to hilltop. And the lines run through us, too. They are the source of all magic. They are our inspiration, and our defence against the forces that would destroy us.’

‘Ley lines,’ Church muttered. He was starting to drift.

Conoran continued with renewed vigour. ‘Then know this: Existence has another side, as dark as the Blue Fire is bright, as filled with despair and dread as we are filled with hope. From this darkness spring forth the Formorii, the shape-shifting monstrous enemy of the golden-skinned Tuatha De Danann. And the black spider, even now crawling from your arm into your very soul, is from that darkness, too.’

Church felt a chill run deep into his heart, though he didn’t fully understand Conoran’s words. The spider in his arm squirmed sickeningly.

‘Why is it attacking me?’ Church said. He grew nauseous at the insistent wriggling in his flesh. The spider was becoming more active, as though it sensed a threat. Church’s thoughts fragmented, his memory grew dim around the edges, and the abiding cold consumed everything.

Suddenly Conoran’s voice boomed, then receded as if he had radically shifted to another place, distant yet simultaneously near at hand. ‘You came to us with the sword of a god. Now you must fight to free yourself from the corrupting touch or be lost for all time.’

Church was shocked to realise he could no longer feel the corbels at his back. He was standing in the dark, possibly in the approach tunnel, though he had no sense of having moved. ‘Conoran?’ he called into the echoing gloom. There was no response.

Two other sensations hit Church sharply: he was now holding his sword, the blue glow providing a dim light by which he could see; and he could no longer feel the spider burrowing into his arm.

Cautiously, he reached out to touch the cold wall stones. The drum heartbeat and the whispering echoes of the bone flute were gone, too. A deep silence lay over everything.

Church took a hesitant step forward. If he could find the exit, he could discover where everyone had gone and what odd game Conoran was playing. His thoughts were interrupted by a rapid scuttling motion in the gloom ahead. He had a horrible feeling that he knew what was in the tunnel with him. His breath was taken away by the size of it, bigger even than him. He gripped the sword with both hands, the pounding of his heart filling his head.

More scurrying, the click-click-click of legs rattling on stone, oddly metallic. Church sensed the attack before he saw it. The spider launched from the dark, and he dropped to his knees, swinging the sword, cutting air. The spider swept over him, the size of a car, and disappeared into the shadows as quickly as it had come.

Church moved through the fogou trying to get his bearings, but it appeared to be much larger than he had imagined, with side tunnels branching into a labyrinthine network. Soon he couldn’t tell where the spider was, or whether he was hunting it, or it him. Long periods of silence were punctuated by the rattling of legs that sounded close at hand one moment, then far away a second later.

He rounded a bend and the light of his sword revealed it, gleaming with a black sheen, eyes turned on him, dark and maleficent. Its maw was open, toxins sizzling at the tips of razor-sharp fangs.

The spider struck with devastating speed, moving from floor to wall to ceiling, knocking Church to his knees with its bulk. The serrated edge on one of its legs tore through his shoulder and he cried out as the pain burned deep into him. When he swung the sword up sharply, the spider was already gone. The blade raised a shower of sparks as it clanged against the corbels.

For minutes that felt like hours, Church dived out of the creature’s way, tearing open knees and elbows on the stones, striking as fast as he could, but never fast enough. Occasionally he would nick its steely flesh, raising a venomous cry deep in his own head; and once he struck quickly and strongly enough to hack off a length of leg that twitched with a life of its own on the floor.

He hoped to carry on whittling the thing down, but as he ducked an attack, he turned his ankle and fell to the floor, his sword skidding out of his hand. The spider was on him in an instant, its bulk pinning him down so that he couldn’t reach the sword, its legs skewering his flesh. Its eyes hovered over his face. A thousand tiny Churches were reflected back.

It struck rapidly, driving its fangs into Church’s arm. The agony was excruciating as his flesh ruptured and the poison rapidly flooded his system. On his pale flesh, the thin blue veins began to turn black as the toxins moved inexorably towards his heart and head. A jarring whispering echoed deep in his skull. The words were alien and came and went like a badly tuned radio, but they carried with them images that threatened to overwhelm him with dread and despair. The spider’s consciousness had invaded his system along with the poison, a viral intelligence within the very molecular make-up of the toxin.

After a sickening, hanging moment, a black wave sucked Church along in its wake. The language infiltrating his skull was emotional, speaking of the end of everything, of a vast hole in Existence that pulled in all light, all matter, all hopes and dreams. Church found himself walking across a blasted landscape where ghost-images hovered before winking out. Church saw modern cities fallen into shadow, and Ruth filled with a crushing grief. There were other men and women he felt he should know but didn’t.

It would have been easy to give in to the deluge of hopelessness, but instead Church became more aware of qualities that had shaped him. He recalled his despair at the death of his girlfriend Marianne, and how he had overcome that to find some hope for the future. He uncovered a strength forged by hardship. And in that instant he felt the sword in his hand.

He didn’t know whether he had found it in the throes of his delirium, or if it had magically appeared there, but he acted instantly, thrusting upward where he remembered the spider being.

An echoing shriek filled his head and the black wave receded. When his mind cleared, Church lay with the spider’s body across his legs, ichor leaking all over him. But that impression faded just as quickly, and once more he was in the tiny nook at the end of the fogou with the heartbeat drums echoing through the ground. A dream within a dream within a dream.

And he was still dying.