Ferryman (10 page)

Mortified, she writhed in the chair, but that wasn’t enough. She was still trapped under his gaze like an ant under a magnifying glass. She exploded out of her seat and her momentum carried her forward a few steps until she was facing the window Tristan had been looking through just a few moments before. She approached it, purposely avoiding catching his reflection, and pressed her forehead to the frigid glass, trying to cool the
red-hot
embarrassment that had painted her cheeks red.

W
hen they emerged from the cottage, the wraiths were nowhere to be seen. Dylan looked around her, eyes wide and frightened, and then sighed with relief. There was still the valley to travel through, though, she thought.

It was a gloomy morning. The sun was shining brightly, but its rays were unable to break through the thick, swirling mist that coated the landscape. Tristan took a long, measured look around and then glanced back at Dylan, smiling sympathetically.

“You’re nervous.” It wasn’t a question.

Dylan gazed at the mist and comprehension dawned. “I made this?”

He nodded. He walked over to her and grasped both of her hands in his. “Look at me,” he commanded. “You don’t have to be afraid. I will protect you. I promise.” He bent his legs a little so that he could look into her eyes. She tried to hold his gaze, and felt a glow tingle into her cheeks.

“You’re cute when you blush,” he said, laughing as his words caused the blush to go into overdrive. “Come on,” he said, letting go of one hand as he turned, but keeping hold of the other and gently tugging her forward.

As Dylan stumbled after him, she was dimly aware of the mist thinning as the sun’s rays finally began to fight their way through. She thought she understood why, and so her blush was slow to fade. Two minutes later she had convinced herself that his words were nothing more than a strategy – to lighten her mood and evaporate the mist, lessening the risk from the demons. Still, his hand remained tightly folded around hers as he led her on.

At the top of the first hill, Tristan paused and surveyed the landscape. He fixed his gaze on something to the left and pointed towards it.

“See those two hills over there?” Dylan nodded. “The valley we have to pass through lies between them.”

“That’s a long way,” Dylan said dubiously. It was already mid-morning, and the hills looked fairly far away. Surely it would already be dusk before they reached them? She certainly didn’t want to be caught down there in the dark.

“Optical illusion, it’s much closer than it looks. We’ll be there in about an hour. We should be fine as long as your good mood holds out.” He smiled down at her and squeezed her hand. Dylan felt as if the sun shone a little brighter. How humiliating, to have your emotions made so obvious, she thought.

A narrow path wound its way down the side of the hill, wide enough for only one of them to negotiate at a time. Tristan led the way, finally letting go of her hand as he picked his way over small stones and clumps of weeds. Dylan walked slowly and cautiously behind him, leaning back slightly to compensate for the slope and taking tiny, shuffling steps as she sought out safe footholds. She held her hands out away from her sides, both to help keep her balance and to save her if she fell.

It took them about half an hour to make their way to the bottom of the hill, and Dylan sighed with relief when the ground evened out beneath her feet and she was able to stretch her legs and take longer, bounding steps. From here, the two hills guarding the valley appeared to tower above her. Tristan had been right, they seemed much closer now. All that stood between them and the hills was a flat expanse of marshland. Large puddles shimmered at intervals, and reed-beds grew in sporadic clusters. Dylan internally cursed, imagining the cold mucky water that would soon be seeping into her socks. She glanced at Tristan.

“I don’t suppose a piggyback is part of your guide duties?” she asked hopefully.

He gave her a withering look and she sighed. Plunging her hands into her pockets, she rocked back on her heels, reluctant to take the first steps forward.

“Maybe we should just take a little rest here?” she suggested, hoping to postpone trudging into the muck.

“That’s a great idea.” He frowned at her, unimpressed. “We can just wait here till mid-afternoon and then hit the valley at nightfall. Live dangerously, why not?”

“Okay, it was just a suggestion,” Dylan grumbled as she took the first step into the marsh. Her trainer squelched ominously. She winced, but her foot stayed warm and dry. Not for long, she thought to herself as she continued to trudge along.

The marsh was not more than a couple of miles across, but carving a path through the large puddles and reeds, and slogging through the mud, that at times sucked her down below her ankles, was hard work and they made slow progress. Tristan seemed to have much less trouble with the mud than Dylan did. His feet were able to find the firm ground more easily, and even when she trod in the same spot as him, she was sure that she sank deeper. It stank as well. It wasn’t like anything she’d ever smelled before. It was a putrid and wafted up with each step.

About halfway across, they hit a patch that was boggier than the rest. Dylan’s foot sank down almost to her knee in the sludge and when she tried to jerk herself free, nothing happened. She rocked backwards and then threw her weight forwards. Still nothing. She tried twice more and then, panting, was forced to admit defeat.

“Tristan!” she yelled, even though he was just a few metres from her.

He turned and looked at her. “What?”

She raised both arms in a gesture of hopelessness. “Stuck.”

A wicked look came across his face. “And what do you want me to do about it?”

“Don’t be funny, get me out!” She put her hands on her hips, a cross look on her face. He grinned and shook his head. Dylan decided to try a different tack. She dropped her arms, hung her head and looked up at him from underneath her lashes, pouting.

“Please?” she whimpered.

He laughed louder, but began to slosh his way over to her. “You’re pathetic,” he joked. He grabbed hold of both of her arms, locked his knees and braced his body, then leaned back and heaved. Dylan heard a sucking, squelching sound but her feet remained firmly stuck.

“Bloody hell,” he panted. “How did you do this?”

“I stepped,” she snapped, slightly peeved at his mocking attitude.

Tristan dropped his grip on her arms and took a step forward. He wound his arms around her waist, hugging her tightly, their full bodies touching. Dylan froze a little at the close contact, her pulse racing. She hoped he couldn’t hear it. Squeezing her hard, he pulled backwards. Dylan felt the mud start to loosen its grip on her legs. With a disgusting, plopping sound, the bog finally released her. Without the marsh to hold her, Tristan’s pulling launched her forward. She let out a sound that was a cross between a yelp and a cackle as he staggered backwards, trying to keep his balance. Splodges of muddy water splashed up and spattered their faces and hair.

Tristan’s arms tightened around her as he tried to stop the two of them from falling into the marsh. Taking a couple of awkward steps backwards, he finally managed to steady them. Looking down, he saw Dylan’s mud-freckled face staring up at him and he was caught for a second in the dazzling green of her eyes as she laughed.

Held tight in Tristan’s embrace, Dylan swayed, not yet sure of her feet and still a little giddy. She grinned up at him, momentarily losing her shyness. He was staring right back at her. The moment deepened and the laughter died in Dylan’s throat. Suddenly it was hard to breathe. She drew in shallow gasps and her lips parted slightly.

The next instant, he had released her. He stepped away and looked off towards the hills. Dylan stared at him, confused. What had that been? She had thought he’d wanted to kiss her, but now he didn’t even seem to want to look at her. It was very puzzling, and not a little embarrassing. Had she just made a fool of herself? She wasn’t even sure. She stared at the only safe place: the ground.

“We should get going,” he said, his voice oddly rough.

“Right,” Dylan mumbled, still slightly dazed. He turned and splodged on, and she traipsed after him.

Tristan waded ahead through the bog, trying to put a little distance between them to give him time to think. He was perplexed. For decades, maybe even centuries – it was hard to accurately count the passage of time in the wasteland – he had protected and guided souls as they made their journey. In the beginning he had taken the role to heart in a way that had proved impossible to sustain. He had cared for each one, listened to their stories and tried to comfort them over the loss of their lives and futures and, of course, the pain of leaving those they loved behind. Each soul that waved goodbye at the end of the journey had taken a small piece of him with them, torn off a tiny piece of his heart. After a while, he had hardened. He no longer reached out to them, and so they could not get inside him. In the past few years, guiding souls had been little more than a chore. He had spoken as little as possible, and attempted to hide the truth for as long as possible. He had been a cold machine. A sat nav for the dead.

This girl had somehow managed to cause his old self to resurface. She had uncovered the truth at an astonishingly early stage, and had accepted it with more maturity than many who had spent a full life on Earth. She treated him like a person. Here in the wasteland that was a rare thing. Souls were too wrapped up in their own demise to even entertain the thought that their guide was some
one
. She was a soul worth protecting. A soul worth caring about. A soul that he wanted to give a piece of himself to.

But there was something more than that. He couldn’t define the feeling. Holding her in his arms had caused something inside him to stir. Odd feelings, feelings that had him thinking about her instead of watching the sun lowering dangerously in the sky. He felt almost… human. That couldn’t be right, but Tristan had no other word for it. Human.

But he wasn’t. He shook himself awake with a jolt. Feelings like this were dangerous; they could cause him to lose his focus. They put Dylan at risk; they needed to be smothered.

“Tristan.” Dylan’s voice broke through his reverie. “Tristan, it’s getting dark. Maybe we should wait and go through the valley tomorrow?”

He shook his head and kept on walking. “Can’t,” he replied. “There’s no safe house this side of the valley. We’ve got to make it through tonight. We’ll just have to go as fast as we can.”

Dylan heard the repressed panic in his voice and felt a tight knot it the pit of her stomach. She knew her fear would not help the matter – in fact, it had the capability to make the situation far worse, but she couldn’t smother the emotion.

Ten minutes more of trudging and the ground started to firm up beneath their feet. The grass held her weight when she stepped on it. She tried to scrape off some of the mud that now coated her trainers and jeans by trailing her feet and rubbing them against the tough stems. She didn’t dare stop to do the job properly; she could feel Tristan’s impatience to move faster. At last the puddles became less frequent and Dylan was astounded to see, when she looked up, that they were in the shadow of the two hills. Before her was the valley Tristan seemed so concerned about.

It looked unremarkable. A fairly wide path wound through it, and the sides sloped gently upward. Dylan had expected a narrow crevice, claustrophobic and tight. She felt relieved, but a glance at Tristan’s tense posture had her stomach somersaulting again. She reminded herself that he was a much better judge of where the danger lay. Grimacing, she tried to shuffle faster, closing the distance between them.

Dylan was anxious to begin, wanting to dash through as quickly as possible, but Tristan paused on the threshold to the valley. He seemed to be bracing himself. Dylan eyed him surreptitiously. Was he thinking about the other souls he’d taken through this place, some that he’d lost? How many had walked this path with Tristan and not made it to the other side? Feeling nervous, Dylan stretched out her fingers and curled them around his left hand. She smiled timidly up at him and squeezed. He returned the smile tightly and then gazed back down the valley, looking almost defiant.

“Almost there,” he muttered, so low that Dylan wondered if she’d even been meant to hear it.

I
t should have been a fairly pleasant walk through the valley. The path was flat and wide, made of little pebbles that made Dylan think of country walks down long abandoned railway lines. It wound its way gracefully down the trough between the two hills. The sides did not feel confined or restricted, but gently undulated upward, covered with short grass and wild flowers. It was picture perfect. Or would have been if it wasn’t for the sheer cliff walls that erupted from the grassy slopes. The cliffs curved inwards as they rose up and pinched the sky until it was little more than a narrow slit of light that wasn’t quite bright enough to banish the shadows that pooled across the ground. Darkness enveloped this place. Dylan shivered as the cold shade embraced her.

Beside her, Tristan remained silent and tense, moving quickly and glancing constantly around. His stress triggered her own. She didn’t dare look at her surroundings, but stared straight ahead and willed them to pass through without incident. In her peripheral vision she could just make out the swooping blur of bats. No, not bats, she realised. Wraiths. They scythed down the rocky face then circled low overhead. Dylan gripped Tristan’s fingers tightly, trying not to look at them.

But she couldn’t ignore them. She found herself listening for the familiar but haunting howling that she now associated with the demons, but there was no high-pitched wailing echoing in the air. There were, however, other noises.

“Can you hear that?” she asked tersely.

Tristan nodded his head, his expression grim.

It sounded like the gentle rumbling of a thousand whispers. Although there were no distinct words, the sound was nonetheless menacing.

“What is it?” she warbled. Her head jerked about as she scanned the sky, the cliffs, hunting for the source of the noise.

“Not from above,” Tristan told her. “It’s beneath us. Listen to the ground.”

It seemed a strange request to Dylan, but she tried to concentrate on sounds that might be coming from underneath her feet. At first the only sound she could hear was the crunching of their feet disturbing the gravel and small pebbles that littered the trail, but now that she was listening for it, she realised the eerie hissing was, in fact, coming from beneath them.

“Tristan what’s happening?” she asked, her voice almost inaudible even to herself.

“The demons. They’re gathering beneath us. As soon as they spot an opportunity to attack, they’ll rise up in a mass. It’s what they do here. Always.”

“Why?” Dylan whispered.

“We’re in the heart of the wasteland,” Tristan explained. “This is where they lurk, thousands of them. The shadows almost never die here. They know they’ll get their chance.”

“What sort of opportunity do they need?” she choked out.

“As soon as we’re deep enough in shadow, they’ll strike. They don’t need night, not here.” His voice was matter-of-fact, but there was a note of panic there that frightened Dylan more than the words he was speaking.

“What can we do?”

He barked a humourless laugh. “Nothing.”

“Shouldn’t we run?” Dylan was not a strong runner. Though thin, she was not fit. Exercise had never been part of her daily routine, and enforced PE lessons had been torture. She had always insisted that she would only run if she were being chased. This situation seemed to qualify, she thought ruefully.

“Not till we have to. Save your energy for when you really need it,” he said, smiling slightly. The smile didn’t last long.

“Hold on to me, Dylan. Don’t let go. And when I tell you to run – run. You follow the path, and when you’re through the valley there’s another cottage. You run towards it and you don’t look back. Once you’re through the door, you’re safe.”

“Where will you be?” she whispered anxiously.

“Right beside you,” he said grimly.

Dylan’s eyes were wide with panic. She tried to focus them on the path in front of her. Her hand was wrapped so tightly around Tristan’s that her fingers were throbbing. The rumbling seemed to grow louder, and it appeared as if the ground was bubbling, melting to let the demons through. It took a moment for her eyes to make sense of the pattern on the ground, then she realised that it was shadows. Dark shadows. Her breathing began to come in shallow, ragged gasps as she saw that the valley was darkening around them, the cliffs pressing in more tightly. They were deep within the heart of it. How long before the demons broke free?

The air seemed to chill instantly. A gust of wind drove up the valley and lifted Dylan’s hair around her face. The breeze whispered in her ears, echoing the noise from the ground, and she picked out the distinct howling of other demons, keening somewhere above them. They were gathering on all sides.

For a heartbeat she felt as if time had stopped, suspended on the brink of chaos. Every nerve in her body was stretched tight, adrenaline pumped through her veins. Her muscles seemed to tingle, ready to respond to her commands. She took a long, deep breath, and the air rushing into her lungs thundered in her ears.

Before she could exhale, before she could blink, time sprang back into being and everything seemed to happen at once. The ground smoked as countless demons erupted through the surface like black, wispy snakes, twisting and writhing in the air and hissing threateningly. The howling from above descended from the sky, diving and weaving around her. Hundreds of them. Thousands. The air was black with wraiths, blinding her. Dylan simply gaped; this was nothing like she’d seen before. Her heart turned to ice as one demon glided straight through her chest, snatching inside her before breaking out of her back. Faceless things caught in her hair and tugged and pulled at her, causing needle-like pains in her scalp. Claws grasped at her shoulders and arms, wrenching and hauling at her.

“Dylan, run!” Tristan’s voice broke through the confusion of sound and movement, straight to the centre of her brain.

Run, she repeated to herself. Run! But she couldn’t move. Her legs were frozen, as if they had forgotten how to function. She had always laughed scornfully at the victims in horror movies who were paralysed by fright and fell foul of the crazed axe-murdering villain, but here she was, indisputably immobilised by fear.

A yank on her hand made her stumble into motion, jerking her legs into action. They caught up with her before she fell, and began to pump her forward. Run, run, run, she thought, tearing as fast as she could down the path, one hand glued to Tristan’s. The screaming demons still swirled around her, but they appeared unable to get a firm grasp.

The path laid out the route in front of her, and although she couldn’t see the cottage, she knew it couldn’t be too far. It had to be close now. She was running at full tilt and knew that she couldn’t keep up the pace for long. Her legs were already burning, protesting now at every step. Each time she lifted a foot it felt heavier and heavier. Her breathing came raggedly and unevenly, each intake causing cold, stabbing pains to rip across her chest. Her arms pumped rhythmically, valiantly trying to keep her going, but she was slowing with every stride. The clawing demons were beginning to find purchase, pulling backwards and slowing her further. She knew she would not be able to hold out unless the cottage was very close.

Something pulled on her hand hard enough to almost topple her backwards. Dylan yelped as her shoulder was wrenched in its socket, then, a heartbeat later, realised what had happened. Both her hands were clenched into fists. Empty fists.

“Tristan! Tristan, help!” She coughed feebly between breaths.

“Dylan, run!” She heard him holler. He was no longer beside her. Where had he gone? She didn’t dare turn round to search for him in case she fell. Instead she concentrated on doing what he’d told her: running. Running as hard and as fast as she could.

What was that? Directly in front of her, about four hundred metres away, was a murky square shape. It had to be the cottage. She sobbed in relief and tried to galvanise her exhausted muscles into one last effort.

“Come on, come on, come on, come ON!” she muttered under her breath, ordering her body to keep going. Ignoring the pain, she moved her legs even faster, forcing them to sprint the remaining metres. The door was already open, inviting her in.

“Tristan, I can see it! Tristan!” But that final thought choked in her throat as several demons dived at her at once and ripped their way into her body. They seemed to have no substance, yet she could feel them grab at her heart. She stuttered and stumbled, finding it hard to control her limbs.

“No,” she gasped. “No, no, please. I’m there! I’m there!”

It was impossible to move. Cold hands gripped her insides and twisted, chilling her to the bone and taking her breath away. Every inch of her longed to stop. To lay down on the ground and have the demons pull her gently downward to where it would be dark and she could sleep. A place where she could cease struggling and be at peace.

Suddenly Tristan’s words burst into her head. “
You run towards it and you don’t look back. Once you’re through the door, you’re safe.
” With it came an image of his face, speaking to her earnestly.

Sheer will drove her forward, step by step, towards the open door. Every movement was agony, every breath stabbing pain. Her body screamed at her to stop, to give in, but she determinedly and doggedly pushed on. As she inched closer, the screaming, howling and hissing intensified. The demons doubled their attack, pulling and ripping and scratching at her. They swirled around her face and attempted to blind her eyes. Just a few metres away she fell to her knees, exhausted. Screwing her eyes shut tight, she forced her aching lungs to breathe and began to crawl. The ground was cold under her hands, small stones scraping at her palms and digging into her knees. Move, she thought desperately. Just move.

She knew instantly when she had crossed over the threshold. The noise died away immediately and the cold chill inside her dissolved into a numb ache. Spent, she collapsed onto the floor, breathing hard.

“Tristan, we made it,” she croaked, unable to lift her head from the floor.

He did not answer. And there was no sound of breathing behind her, no movement in the cottage. The ice in her heart returned, multiplied tenfold. She was afraid to turn around.

“Tristan?” she whispered.

Dylan rolled over onto her back. She lay there for a moment, too scared to open her eyes, afraid of what she might see. Her need to know won out. She forced her eyelids open and surveyed the scene before her.

No.

Unable to speak, she let out a pitiful whimper. The doorway was empty, the night outside black.

Tristan hadn’t made it.