Always Forever (45 page)

Then the dry-wood fingers of the dead were in his clothes, pulling him forward. He had no strength to resist. They bundled him into the box, which was
just big enough for him, and then the lid swung shut with a bang. That jarred
his mind into life: with a surge of panic he realised what they were planning.

"No!" In the dark again. He punched the lid with his remaining hand; the
splintered wood grated into his knuckles.

The box was lifted into the air. Yelling his protests, he threw himself from
side to side, but it didn't overbalance. A brief moment of weightlessness, then a
crash that jarred his head so sharply he lost consciousness again.

The next thing he heard was a rattling on the wood. Smell pebbles. The
slush of gritty soil falling on the lid, kicked or thrown in. Then the occasional
slumps turning into an insistent fall. He screamed and shouted, hammered on
the lid and box walls, but there was no room to get any purchase, barely any air
to breathe. The stones and earth fell faster, but grew more and more distant.

Finally he couldn't hear anything at all, apart from the sound of his own
hoarse voice, growing weaker by the moment.

With the dead gripping him tight, Shavi watched Veitch buried alive. His
empathy made him feel acutely the choking claustrophobia and rising hysteria;
horror, almost as much as he could bear. As soon as the hole was filled in, he was
released, but the dead formed an impenetrable wall between him and the grave;
they were not going to allow him to save his friend.

"This is not fair!" he raged to the shadows at the back of the mausoleum,
but although they pulsed slightly, there was no reply.

Flailing around, Shavi wandered out into the thin grey light. The area that
Veitch had seen as a graveyard, but which he saw as a battlefield spanning the
entire history of human existence-trenches and barbed wire, iron age earth
defences and mediaeval fields of sucking mud-was deserted. With retribution
achieved, the army of the dead had returned to wherever their homes lay.

He couldn't leave Veitch, but what could he do? Sacrifice himself to save his
friend? Perhaps that was what the dead truly wanted: a neverending cycle of sacrifice and suffering, the best punishment of all for being alive.

As he paced back and forth in distress, he noticed a figure about fifty feet
away, almost hidden in the cotton-wool mists. A chill ran through him as he
instantly recognised the body language: Lee, back to haunt him.

His first thought was to ignore the spirit of his dead boyfriend; at that
moment it was too much to bear. But then he changed his mind and hurried
over until he was a few feet away. The mists folded around Lee, providing only
the briefest glimpses of him.

"I need you now," Shavi said. The words hung in the damp, misty air. "I
have paid my dues to the dead of Mary King's Close." He caught his breath. "I
carried a burden of guilt for what happened to you, Lee ... that I could have
done more to save your life. But the truth is, I could not do anything. I
remember you in life. I loved you, I think. I loved your values, your beliefs, your
gentleness. You were never a man who would want to see anyone suffer." He let
the words flow from his heart without any interference from his mind. "The pain
you caused me over the last few weeks, I think ... I am sure ... that was not
through any desire of your own. It might have been the Edinburgh dead, but I
believe it was probably me, punishing myself. Whatever the cause, that lies
behind us now. Now I want your help."

The coffin had grown unbearably hot from Witch's rising body temperature. It
was also becoming increasingly harder to breathe. His chest felt like rocks had
been placed upon it, and there was a prickling sensation in his arms, regularly
obscured by waves of pain washing up from his missing hand. He tried to suck
in some of the air tainted with the odour of rock dust and soil, but there wasn't
enough to fill his throat.

After the swinging emotions that surrounded his sacrifice, the adrenalin had
died down and panic had started to set in. He recalled how terrible it had been
trapped in the tiny tunnel beneath Edinburgh Castle, and knew that if he gave
in he would go crazy, tearing futilely at the wooden lid until his fingernails were
broken and bloody.

He rolled round as much as he could to test the lid with his shoulder. It wouldn't budge. Trapped; powerless. Another wave of panic. His throat almost
closed up. Flashes of light crossed his eyes.

Dying.

Trust in the others. He tried to focus on something Church had told him. Have
faith. It's out of your hands now.

The dark closed in around him and the panic rushed up through his chest
into his head and then he was yelling until his throat was raw.

The blood trickled from Tom's nose into the corner of his mouth. The ritual
had been an awful strain; he felt as if his life had been sucked out of him, and
part of it probably had, but he felt good about himself, for the first time in a
long while.

Robertson had fled back into the house and buried himself beneath a pile of
furniture once he saw what was happening. The stable block door had been torn
from its hinges. Intermittent smoking pitholes marked a trail across the courtyard to the sweeping lawns, where another route of churned mud continued to
the dew pond.

Tom hoped he had done enough. More, he prayed he had not made things
worse.

The stillness was like the moment after the final exhalation of breath. Shavi
thought that place had been that way for as long as time, and would probably
remain in that state of suspension until the end of existence. So when the ground
shook and the sky cracked with thunder, it really did feel like everything was
coming to an end.

Shavi spun round, his heart pounding. The thunder was tearing towards him
through the thickening mist. The vibrations drove nails into the soles of his feet.

Was it some kin to the thing that lurked in the mausoleum, sucking up the
despair of the dead? The notion chilled him.

He knew there was no point in running. As he waited for it to present itself
to him, he became aware of a prickling on the back of his neck, a familiar sign
of warning from his supercharged subconscious. When he turned, the sight was
so shocking he couldn't help an exclamation. From nowhere the dead had
appeared in force, a silent army of thousands forming a grey barrier around the
mausoleum. All their eerily staring eyes were turned towards the direction from
which the thunderous noise was approaching.

The vibrations were now so powerful the nails had reached Shavi's knees.
There was a rhythm to it; not thunder at all. The sound of hoofbeats. All other
thoughts were lost as he turned to stare alongside the dead.

The mist usually drifted with a life of its own, but now it was sweeping
away rapidly. Unconsciously he cupped his hands over his ears against the deafening noise. The dead remained impassive.

Shavi was buffeted with a warm wind filled with the stink of stables and the
musk of sweating, over-worked horses. When the intruder appeared, he was
instantly overcome with the swirling destabilisation of perception that always
accompanied the most powerful of the Tuatha De Danann. This was worse than
anything he had experienced before; his mind revolted at the image his eyes
were attempting to present to it. After a few seconds, the sensation eased
slightly, to be replaced by a succession of rapidly changing forms: a beast that
looked more serpent than animal with gleaming black scales and a pointed,
lashing tail, a voluptuous woman oozing sexuality, a pregnant mother, blissful
in her fertility.

The uneasy flickering eventually settled on one form that his mind found
acceptable. A woman, naked apart from a silver breastplate and a short skirt of
leather thongs, long, chestnut hair flowing in the wind behind her, riding a stallion of inordinate vitality. Her beautiful face was filled with pride and joy, power
and defiance. In her raised right hand she carried a wooden spear tipped with a
silver head, while in her other hand she held aloft a gleaming silver shield. Shavi
thought of Boudicca, of the power of womanhood, strength and sexuality so
potent he could almost taste it.

"Epona," he said beneath his breath.

Her terrible gaze snapped towards him as if she had heard him, and the
sheer force of what he saw there made him look away. Here was a power he had
never experienced before, one of the oldest gods, the most primal and powerful,
not far removed from the archetypes. Her form had resonated in the belief
system of mankind from the earliest time.

The horse reared up before the ranks of the dead, its hooves striking the air.
She let that withering gaze move slowly across the army of the dead. It was
apparent they were not going to allow her through.

From the way she was directing herself towards the mausoleum, Shavi
guessed she was there for Veitch, although he had no idea why. She took her
charger back and forth across the frontline of the dead in search of access.

At one point she paused to address the dead in a language Shavi had never
heard: wild shrieks that disappeared off the register, interspersed with the snortings of horses. Whatever she suggested, it had no effect.

Why can she not force her way through them? Shavi wondered. But from what he
remembered from the stories Tom had told him of the Tuatha lle Danann, one of
her obligations had been the Grim Lands, or at least where it bordered with the world of the living. Perhaps she served them as much as she dominated them, in
the way that Cernunnos had a similar dual relationship with the Fragile Creatures?

The delay cranked up his anxiety. How long could Veitch survive in the
shallow grave with the air running out? What terrible things would be going
through his mind?

No air was left in the coffin. Veitch wheezed like an asthmatic old man. The
weight on his chest was crushing him. There was blood under his fingernails and
his head swam with shifting lights and the sensation of tumbling down a neverending well. No one was coming for him. It was the end; life was being sucked
out of him, one breath at a time.

"Lee! I need you! You must help me!" Shavi turned towards the spirit of his
boyfriend once again, but the place where Lee had stood was empty, and in the
vast crowd of the dead there was no hope of finding him.

Perhaps he could force a way through so Epona could follow. He started to
push through the stiff, unmoving bodies towards the frontline, but before he
was halfway there he noticed movement not far from Epona. The army of the
dead was parting like grey waters before the power of God.

Shavi used his elbows to drive his way towards the path. Epona had already
started to trot down it towards the mausoleum. He slipped in behind her before
the dead closed ranks.

As Epona moved before the mausoleum door, Shavi caught sight of the
reason for the dead's change of heart. Lee waited in the shadow of the stone
building, and for the first time that day Shavi saw his face. It was not terrible
and frightening and filled with the horrors of death as it had been during the
long days and nights following his return in Edinburgh. It was the Lee he
remembered: gentle, thoughtful, smiling. For one fleeting moment, things
passed between them: acknowledgement, gratitude, friendship, love. And then
Lee was moving away towards the grey horizon; not walking, but simply
appearing further and further back, as if there were shifts in Shavi's perception.
For one instant he appeared to glow like a star, and then he was gone.

Shavi's eyes filled with tears. Lee had achieved his own salvation; he would
never have to walk in the Grim Lands again.

He barely had time to think what that meant before he was jolted by a
resounding crash as the flinty hooves of Epona's mount broke down the mausoleum door. Although she had appeared too tall to pass through the doorway,
a second later she was inside. Shavi ran in behind her.

Close to Epona he felt faintly queasy, his teeth on edge as if he were standing in an electrical field. The goddess moved beyond the rough grave and faced the
shadows that still pulsed at the rear of the chamber. From the outside, the Mausoleum appeared twenty feet long, but peering into the gloom, Shavi had the
unnerving feeling that it continued forever.

He didn't wait to see what the goddess was doing. Throwing himself on top
of the grave, he tore at the shards of rock, the pebbles and soil, with his bare
hands. Within seconds the blood streamed down his fingers until his palms were
covered with a brown sludge of rock dust and grue.

"Ryan!" he yelled. "Hold on!"

From the corner of his eye, he could see movement in the shadows. Epona's
horse reared up to face it; the goddess issued a warning in that half-shrieking,
half-equine cry.

The response was not in that deathly voice Shavi had heard before, but an
incomprehensible bass rumble filling him with dread. It was followed by the
dragging sound of the huge bulk moving across the stone floor. The shadows
swelled forward.

Shavi threw the contents of the grave wildly in all directions. It was loosely
packed and easy to move, but it was still taking too long.

"Ryan!" he shouted again. "Ryan!"

This time he heard a muffled response that spurred him on.

On the edges of his vision he realised Epona was glowing with a faint blue
light that lit up their end of the mausoleum, but made no inroads into the
advancing shadow. The rumbling sound emanated once again from the dark.
This time Epona altered in shape, becoming almost opaque, then something
that Shavi didn't recognise. Crackling blue energy washed off her up the mausoleum walls. The shadow stopped sharply before responding with what at first
appeared to be a black lightning bolt, or could have been an arm, or a tentacle,
lashing out furiously. Epona fended it off with the silver shield, but the force of
it drove her back a pace.