The Bone Forest (27 page)

A second shadow followed the first, this one smaller, and with its darkness and its chill came the sound of keening, like a child's crying. It was distant, though, and uncertain. As Ginny watched, it took its shadowy form beyond the Scarrows and into the village.

As each of them had passed over, so the Scarrowmen closed ranks again, but distantly, close to the fire in the square, an unearthly howling, a nightmare wind, seemed to greet each new arrival. What happened to the spirits then, Ginny couldn't tell, or care.

Her mother's hand touched her face, then her shoulder, forced her around again to watch the iron gate. The Mother whispered, "Those two were his kin. They too died for our village a long time ago. But Cyric is coming now…"

The shadow that moved beyond the gate was like nothing Ginny could ever have imagined. She couldn't tell whether it was animal or man. It was immense. It swayed as it moved, and it seemed to approach through the darkness in a ponderous, dragging way. Its outlines were blurred, shadow against darkness, void against the glimmering light among the trees. It seemed to have branches and tendrils reaching from its head. It made a sound that was like the rumble of water in a hidden well.

It seemed to fill her vision. It occupied all of space. Its breath stank. Its single eye gleamed with firelight.

One was blind… one was grim…

It seemed to be laughing at her as it peered down from beyond the trees and the earth walls that surrounded the church.

It pushed something forward, a shadow, a man, nudged it through the iron gate. Ginny wanted to scream as she caught glimpses, within that shadow, of the dislocated jaw, the empty sockets, the crawling flesh. The ragged thing limped toward her, hands raised, bony fingers stretched out, skull face open and inviting… inviting the kiss that Ginny knew, now, would end her life.

"No!" she shouted, and struggled frantically in the Mother's grip. The Mother seemed angry. "Even now it mocks us!" she said, then shouted, "Give the Life for the Death. Give it now!"

Behind Ginny, Kevin suddenly screamed. Then he was running toward the iron gate, sobbing and shouting, drawn by invisible hands.

"Don't let him take me! Don't let him take me!" he cried.

He passed the hideous figure and entered the world beyond the gate. He was snatched into the air, blown into darkness like a leaf whipped by a storm wind. He had vanished in an instant.

The great shadow turned away into the night and began to seep back toward the circle of elms. The Mother's hands on Ginny's shoulders pushed her forward, toward the ghastly embrace.

The shadow corpse stopped moving. Its arms dropped. The gaping eyes watched nothing and nowhere. A sound issued from its bones. "Is she the one? Is she my kin?"

Mother's voice answered loudly that she was indeed the one. She was indeed Cyric's kin.

The shadow seemed to turn its head to watch Ginny. It looked down at her, then reached up and pulled the tatters of a hood about its head. The hood hid the features. The whole creature seemed to melt, to descend, to shrink. Ginny heard the Mother say, "Fifteen hundred years in the dark. Your life saved our village. Our pledge to bring you back is honored. Welcome, Cyric."

Something wriggled below the tatters of the hood. The Mother said, "Go forward, child. Take the hare.
Take him
!"

Ginny hesitated. She glanced around. The Scarrows seemed to be smiling behind their masks. Two other children, both girls, stood there. Each was holding a struggling hare. Her Mother made frantic motions to her. "Come on, Ginny. The fear is ended, now. The day of denial is over. Only you can touch the hare. You're the kin. Cyric has chosen you. Take it quickly. Bring him over. Bring him back."

Ginny stumbled forward, reached below the stinking rags and found the terrified animal. As she raised the brown hare to her breast she felt the flow of the past, the voice, the wisdom, the spirit of the man who had passed back over, the promise to him kept, fifteen hundred years after he had lain down his life for the safety of
Scarugfell
, also known as the
Place of the Mother
.

Cyric was home. The great hunter was home. Ginny had him, now, and
he
had her, and she would become great and wise, and Cyric would speak the wisdom of the Dark through her lips. The hare would die in time, but Cyric and Ginny would share a human life until the human body itself passed away.

And Ginny felt a great glow of joy as the images of that ancient land, its forts, its hills, its tracks, its forest shrines, flooded into her mind. She heard the hounds, the horses, the larks, she felt the cold wind, smelled the great woods.

Yes. Yes. She had been born for this. Her parents had been sacrificed to free her and the Mother had kept her ready for the moment. The nightmare had been Cyric making contact as the Father had brought him to the edge of the dark world.

The Father! The Father had watched over her, as all in the village had often said he would. It had been the Father she had seen, a rare glimpse of the Lord who always brought the returning Dead to the place of the Lord's Eve.

Cyric had come a long, long way home. It had taken time to make the Lord release him and allow Cyric's knowledge of the dark world back to the village, to help Scarrowfell, and the villages like it keep the eyes and minds of the invader muddled and confused. And then Cyric, too, had waited… until Ginny was of age. His kin. His chosen vehicle.

Ginny, his new protector, cradled the animal. The hare twitched in her grasp. Its eyes were full of rejoicing.

She felt a moment's sadness, then, for poor, betrayed Kevin, but it passed. And as she left the place of the gate she joined willingly in reciting the Lord's prayer, her voice high, enthusiastic among the rumble of the crowd.

Our Father, who art in the Forest

Horned One is Thy name.

Thy Kingdom is the Wood, Thy Will is the Blood

In the Glade, as it is in the Village.

Give us this day our Kiss of Earth

And forgive us our Malefactions.

Destroy those who Malefact against us

And lead us to the Otherworld.

For Thine is the Kingdom of the Shadow, Thine is the

Power and the Glory. Thou art the Stag which ruts

with us, and We are the Earth beneath thy feet.

Drocha Nemeton

The Time Beyond Age

The day before the experiment was scheduled to commence, Martin and Yvonne, our two MAA-grown subjects, were allowed into the observation laboratory for the last time.

As usual they caused chaos, thundering around the small room, arms flying, bodies taking unexpected turns until every technician in the place was clinging to his or her equipment for dear life. As Martin, a small figure clad all in white, raced past me I made a grab for him and sat him firmly upon the desk by my keyboard. Yvonne squealed (brake-like) and stopped behind me before deciding which way she would jump onto my lap. She chose to arrive from the left; I had been expecting her from the right and her arrival was painful!

Through her visor she watched me typing. Martin, sitting remarkably still, studied the posters and pictures all around the walls, twisting his protective helmet so that he could see further to each side. I told him not to do that, since the seal would loosen if the helmet were twisted through more than one hundred and eighty degrees.

I was typing a pre-experimental report for
Nature
, and was trying to get a decent title. Yvonne watched my fingers at work, every so often adding a letter of her own. Thus I typed:

NEWZ STU DTITES ON THE AC£CELERAT'1/3ION

OFXLIFE BY CHEMBIC AL MEANS%

"What does that say?" she asked, pointing to the line.

"A little more than I intended," I replied.
Chembical
I quite liked. I read the proper title to her and Martin launched himself from the bench, made a motorcycle-like noise, with appropriate hand gestures, and accelerated around the laboratory again. He was stopped by a middle-aged nurse (whose eyes popped open with hilarious effect when the human motorcycle collided with her) who picked him up and carried him, complaining, into the small decontamination cubicle. Coming outside she waited for the air inside to sterilize then snapped instructions to him to disrobe. He complained again, but stripped off his protective suit and the nurse placed her arms into the arm-gloves that reached into the chamber and reduced Martin to hysterics as she tried to administer the various prophylactics with which our two subjects were pumped every day.

The following morning the experiment began.

The first stages, of course, were the familiarization procedures, and our two subjects were introduced to the closed environment that was to be their home for the rest of their natural and unnatural lives. There was something almost depressing in watching the children, conceived, grown and matured to the age of six in a Morris Artificial Amnion, now facing an incarceration in a second womb, this time for good.

The environment itself was an enclosed area nearly a quarter of a mile wide and exactly a quarter of a mile deep. In the middle, directly outside our laboratory, was a park ground, equipped with trees, benches and bushes. This was the environmental focus and the area within which Martin and Yvonne would be conditioned to spend most of their time. Outside the park was a mock city, houses and offices, detailed on the exterior but empty within. Only ten buildings were complete— the parental homes of our two subjects, their subsequent married homes (two, one far larger than the other) and the offices where they would work during their lives.

Into this environment they were led and left alone, under a light hypnosis necessary to guard their awareness from the falsity of the city.

Martin, to our surprise, reacted against the environment in a difficult and worrying way. He lost his sense of security in the open space of the park—it didn't frighten him, but it made him unhappy and this was something we had not expected to happen.

I watched him carefully during this acquaintance phase. At first he walked among the trees very slowly, seeming very dubious that anything so irregular could be at all efficient. His examination of the town was almost perfunctory, an acknowledgment of its existence. He returned to the park and I watched him chip bark from the bigger of the two oaks we had grown in the environment. He spent a long time scrutinizing the carefully selected microfauna that seethed beneath the fragment. He had no conception, of course, of the essential artificiality of the ecology, although it was plain to him—and we did not hide the fact, save as regarded the town itself—that the environment was contrived. The extent of our contrivance it was not necessary for him to know for the familiarization to have its effect.

Yvonne, by contrast with her chosen mate, wanned immediately to the environment and it was all we could do to get her to return to the laboratory. It became a game—three or four sterile-suited technicians chasing one sterile-suited girl in and out of the shells that comprised the town. In conversation with her later in the evening, as I implanted one more of the interminable number of monitoring devices she would carry to her death, she told me how wonderfully free she had felt sitting on actual grass, picking flowers that were actually growing. It was an unpleasant thought to me that the young girl, knowing only sterility and starkness in the complex prior to this time, was now finding in an equivalent piece of unreality all the reality she would ever need. She had yearned to see the outside world, longed for nature and pined, perhaps, for the instinctively realized sensation of wind and rain on her face. Now she was content with a park that encapsulated all her dreams. And she sat in the middle of a construct, half knowing the fact, but finding it completely adequate.

Yvonne was a very chubby child, round faced and pretty. She had dark brown eyes and she chose to wear her hair in an elaborate display of curls, but had been complaining, as she matured these last months, that her hair was getting greasy. By the time we closed her off in the artificial world beyond our laboratory, she had begun to wear her hair straight, in a style that didn't suit her. She was growing quite fat, nothing that wouldn't soon vanish as she grew to adulthood, and it didn't seem to bother her, whereas Martin was naturally, and almost pathologically, ashamed of his protruding ribs.

It was May of '94, a feverish summer forcing itself upon us. The environment looked inviting and in the final weeks when children and technical staff both were in frantic final preparation for Closing Off Day, it was regarded as almost criminal that the cool parklands should be a prohibited area. After all, the disease-free status of the ecology was secured every day, now that Martin and Yvonne were spending time inside without their protective suiting.

In time, toward August, the atmosphere in the laboratory became almost unbearable as our two subjects underwent full acclimatization. We watched as they played and explored their new territory, Martin gradually coming to terms with the area, but obviously still unhappy; and as we watched we sweltered and wondered who the true masters of the situation might have been.