Coldbrook(84)

Holly knew that she should run but something held her there. A sick fascination at the sight before her. A terror at the old, dry smell released to the moonlight. A sense of unreality at what she saw standing, because now there was more than one. The ivy-clad wall seemed to shiver as the plant stalks were tugged and ripped by many hands, and the shadowy heap along its base resolved itself into terrible shapes. They pushed themselves up through a covering of trailing plants, and their stale stench was mixed with the tang of turned earth. They must have been there for a very long time.

They sense me, Holly thought. And at last that gave her the impetus to run. The old dead town around her rustled as undead things shifted. She clasped the crossbow nervously, conscious that it had only six bolts. Flight, not fight, was her only hope.

As she fled the ruined settlement her lungs burned and her legs ached, but she could never stop running. Every backward glance revealed that she was being followed. She sensed other shadows stirring around her: a wet shape rising from a cold stream here; three small figures crawling from the space beneath a fallen tree there. And while none of them appeared to move quickly, their direction was relentless – up, and towards her.

Holly ran uphill, and as she began to believe that she’d taken entirely the wrong direction and was lost in this place that she had named Gaia she passed a pile of fallen masonry that looked familiar. The first time she’d been here she had been traumatised by her journey through the breach, her senses mangled by memory, the sweat of fear slick on her cool skin and the sight of the blood-drenched Melinda still imprinted on her mind’s eye. Now she looked around and realised the extent of the ruins she had stumbled across. What she had taken to be rock formations were actually leaning walls, clothed in creeping plants, and the stark angles of a bare tree were in fact rusted ribs from a building’s corroded metal roof. Allowing herself a moment’s pause, Holly approached the slumped building where she had rested once before and recognised the place where she had sat. Looking closer at the Exit sign carved in stone, she wondered briefly who had once walked beneath it.

The breach lay downhill from here, in the next valley. The infection was already loose in her Coldbrook, and she had to weigh that knowledge against the risk of leading the pursuing furies through.

In the end, her survival instinct won out.

Down in the valley, the site of the breach was sheltered from the wash of moonlight by the hillside. Yet there was a glow down there, nestled in the shadows like a smudge on her sight. But to the left and right Holly’s night vision picked out a worrying detail – two silhouettes, upright, motionless against the breach’s impossible light.

The idea of being almost home drove her on.

As she made her way down the hillside, she made sure that the crossbow was ready.

Every sense alert, her breath shallow and fast, blood pumping with adrenalin, Holly moved as fast as she dared down to the valley floor. She followed the stream, pausing to glance around after every few steps. I’m going to shoot someone through the head, she thought, but they were no longer ‘someone’. These were little more than remnants, Godless and a travesty against nature. Once they might have had a life, but their stories had come to an end before she was born in a universe far away.

Approaching the breach, she caught a whiff of something terribly familiar. She gasped in surprise, a sense of unreality washing over her yet again. The scent of mulled wine brought a rush of memories. She blinked them away and advanced, the crossbow held ready before her.

The voices were low and relaxed, chatter between people who knew each other well. There were maybe six distinct voices, men and women, and none of them sounded afraid.

Why aren’t they scared? Holly wondered, and the weight of the threat behind her spurred her on. She moved forward, and when she heard the first sign of surprise in their voices she spoke up.

‘I’m no fury!’ she said.

‘Step forward!’ someone responded.

Holly held the crossbow up, swinging it left and right as she moved into the eerie glow. There were still two of them standing in front of the breach, aiming their own weapons towards her, and several more were gathered around a steaming pot to her left.

‘It’s the visitor,’ she heard one of them whisper, and she could not hesitate. She had no idea if this world’s humans could communicate across large distances, if this group knew of her escape, or whether they’d been told to stop her at all costs. She did not know anything, except that her own world was a few small steps away. And she so wanted to be there, even after everything she had been shown in the casting room.

‘Out of my way,’ Holly said, circling around them and approaching the breach.

‘We can’t let you through,’ one of them said. He stood his ground, but she could feel nervousness radiating from him in waves.

‘You’re not “letting” me through,’ Holly said, ‘I’m insisting on it. And there are furies behind me, maybe hundreds of them, and—’

‘Hundreds?’ another of them asked. A woman, she seemed less intimidated by Holly, and more in control. She’d be the one to watch.

‘They rose from the ruins,’ Holly said.

‘You went into the ruins?’ a man gasped.

‘I . . .’ Holly began. But they were whispering, and their fear was palpable. Holly glanced up and back at the hilltop, relieved to see it was still an unmoving silhouette against the strange sky.