The Magic Lands (31 page)

No more tears he instructed his
heart. Tears were for children and he did not feel like a child
anymore. His childhood was over, a fading memory of something long
ago.

A few clouds were the only
intruders in the dazzling blue sky, transient ships carried on the
wind, their sails billowing.

Tom had somehow managed to
escape from the house, discovering beyond an extended garden of
flowers a small gateway in the outer wall that was thankfully
unlocked, leading him out into the freedom of the surrounding
meadows and woodland. He ran on toward a copse of dense trees,
anxious to find cover and once beneath them, he slowed a little,
his mind in turmoil.

What about Jack? And Mo?

He came to a breathless
halt beside the thick trunk of an old tree and rested against
it.
They let me escape.
The
more he thought about it the more certain he became. He had been
allowed to run from the house. But why?

There's no hunt without a
chase.

He faltered, unsure of
what to do.
Jack could be
dead
, a callous voice whispered in his head but he
refused to listen, striking the bark with the palm of his
hand.

In some heavy undergrowth just
to his left a sound disturbed him and he crouched down, eyeing the
vegetation warily. "Is someone there?" he spoke quietly, afraid
that an enemy might have found him already. His words met with
silence. "I know someone's there," he said in a louder voice,
peering into the leaves and branches.

A small chuckle from bushes to
his right made him spin quickly around, but whatever was watching
him was well hidden and he saw nothing.

"Stop playing games," Tom said
angrily.

"Who are you, foolish boy?" a
deep voice abruptly boomed out from somewhere behind him and Tom
almost fell over trying to turn around, but all he saw was more
foliage.

"Why don't you show yourself?"
he demanded, although he was very afraid now. There was the sound
of gentle laughter and Tom wondered if this was some cruel,
taunting part of the hunt.

"What might be your name, boy?"
enquired the voice, somewhere to his left.

"My name's Tom, but I'm sure
you already know that," he countered, turning in a slow circle,
trying to pin-point where the voice was coming from.

"Ah," was the only comment, a
murmur of breath among the leaves.

"Who are you?" Tom asked, not
really expecting an answer, but after a short pause the disembodied
voice spoke again.

"I am called Elrin Jinn and
you’ll be needing my help very soon."

Tom didn't know how to proceed.
Surely this was just another deception. "Why should I trust
you?"

"If I were you, master, I would
trust no-one," came the quick response, "but it may go some way
toward reassuring you if I say that we have a mutual friend. One
who goes by the name of Mo."

Hearing the badger's name, Tom
so much wanted to believe that he had found an ally out here in the
middle of nowhere, but he wasn't stupid or gullible and he knew
full well that any one of the Wolf's minions could have knowledge
of Mo, at least enough to make a pretence of friendship. "Why don't
you come out into the open?" he said, watching the undergrowth
carefully and even before he finished speaking, the leaves of a
small bush in front of him began to rustle and as Tom looked on
with widening eyes, an extraordinary thing happened.

A man appeared. And yet this
was no ordinary man.

No bigger than Tom's hand, he
wore tightly fitting garments all coloured emerald green, his eyes
a vivid blue, sharp with intelligence and cunning. The tiny figure
bowed cordially and Tom merely stared down dumbly at him, shaking
his head.

"The redcoats are coming," the
little man announced, his manner relaxed and in the distance, Tom
heard the ominous clamour of baying hounds, coming closer with
every second. "Shall we go?" Elrin Jinn queried and Tom hesitated,
the sight of the man throwing him further off balance. "Do you want
to die?" Jinn barked at him, but still Tom did not move.

"Can you help me?" Tom managed,
wanting to believe that he could.

"Follow me."

Tom gave a feeble smile. "I'd
lose you before we had even gone ten feet."

The man chuckled, clearly
amused. "Perhaps I can remedy that."

Glancing once to his left and
then to his right, the diminutive figure began to shake, at first
as if he were merely cold and trembling for warmth, but then more
violently, almost as if he were having a seizure of some kind. Tom
looked on, utterly speechless. He had seen a great many bizarre
things since finding himself in this world, but this was by far the
strangest. Right there before his eyes the little man had started
to grow, slowly to begin with but then with increasing speed as his
entire form changed. The process became a blur, his body growing
larger and larger, rising up above Tom until the boy had to tilt
his neck backward to see the man's face and within a matter of
seconds, a figure of well above six feet stood before him.

Elrin Jinn loomed over Tom and
held out his hand with a flourish, demanding attention. "Do you
think you'll be able to see me now?" he queried with a wry smile
and the boy just nodded by way of reply, unable to say anything.
"Let us move on then," prompted the man, "for the hunters are
abroad and they are wanting your blood."

Beneath a great sycamore tree,
a woman dressed all in white, her long dark hair brushed by a light
wind, stood waiting. Memories, distant, played through her mind,
times that had been, times that would come. The woman laughed, the
sound musical yet strident, her eyes cold.

The clamour of many people
approached her place of refuge, excitement and impatience in their
voices as they came across the greensward and massing around her, a
silence fell among them as they waited expectantly for the woman to
speak.

"Come one, come all," she
welcomed them, "the chase is on and the prey is quick."

A murmur went through the
gathering, every face turned toward her. All were dressed in

red tunics, some leading
horses, while others held large hounds on a short leash, the
powerful dogs pulling hard to be set free, eager to sniff out their
quarry. At the head of the group, the tall guardian of the doors
whom Tom had encountered watched the woman intently, his gleaming
white teeth forming an exultant smile.

"Ready yourselves," she
instructed them, pointing across the fields, "and make it a fine
hunt."

The crowd roared their approval
and raising his hand aloft, the tall man paused, looking to the
woman, awaiting her sign.

She smiled, a salacious longing
in her eyes that appeared obscene on such a beautiful face and the
man brought his hand down abruptly setting the hounds loose, their
muscular legs pushing violently into the earth as they bounded away
into the fields.

The woman eyed the man with a
strange mixture of tenderness and contempt. “Go, Jagaren, join
them.“

With astonishing grace and
speed the tall man made off after them, his long limbs carrying him
over the uneven terrain as if he were gliding, and as swift as the
dogs were he was soon beside them, running with the pack.

When he was gone, the others
mounted their horses and looked to the woman, savage anticipation
contorting their features. She did not keep them waiting for long,
the slightest nod of her head sending them on their way, the horses
crashing off along a muddy track, on toward the forest beyond,
their hoofs thundering, a horn blown to herald their coming.

The woman in white stood alone,
the sounds of the hunters dying quickly and all was as it

had been, tranquil, her white
robe appearing to gleam as if she were a living torch, a sentinel
beneath the tree.

Jack sat slumped against a
wall. He was finished with remorse. There was nothing left inside
him, not now that Tom and Mo were dead. He had tried to understand
his feelings, but an awful, black shadow seemed to move through
him, impalpable and yet malignant.

Maybe the creature had lied he
had considered, while he still clung on to hope, trying to find a
way to believe that it might be so. But the thing had intended to
kill him and why would it have lied to him when it thought he was
about to die? He remembered with alarming clarity the moment when
the door had shut on Tom, trapping his friend within. What had been
in there waiting for him? Jack didn't want to think about it
anymore.

So it was, that in his grief
and anger, he had done the terrible thing that was about to destroy
the house and all of the evil that dwelt within it. Close by, the
generator had begun to throb with power, now building upon itself,
rising and multiplying and Jack knew what soon must happen. Even
though he had no knowledge of such machines, it had not taken a
genius to read the word DANGER written on a small meter that showed
numerals that ascended higher and higher until they reached a zone
marked in red. It had also not been too difficult to turn every
dial he could find to its maximum point causing the needle to begin
to move slowly but steadily up toward that red area. Jack welcomed
the coming destruction, longing for an end to what he had come to
believe was a pitiful existence.

"I hope the whole damned
house goes up," he said sourly and of course, he knew that he would
be the first to die. He found that he really didn't care about
anything now. He didn't even care about the other people in the
house.
They deserve to die.

"They deserve to die!" he
screamed aloud, his voice echoing futilely from the grey brick
walls. "They're all murderers…just like me."

Beside him the generator had
begun to gently shake, a humming sound growing persistently louder.
Jack grinned, his face a mask of weary disgust. "I'm going out with
a bang," he mumbled and he began to laugh quietly, fresh tears
forming in his eyes. Electricity seemed to be running through his
body. He could feel it in the air, crackling, throbbing toward the
brink of annihilation.

But what
about the girl?
his brain suddenly demanded of him, a
pocket of reason amid his utter despair.

"What girl?" he asked himself,
disoriented, rubbing at his temples with a trembling hand.

Lisa.

Jack opened his mouth silently
in dismay as he remembered that Lisa was somewhere inside the
house. He had forgotten all about her. "She's one of them!" he
shouted at the top of his voice.

But she saved Tom.

He glanced at the machine and
saw that the tiny needle of death had touched the red and was
continuing to rise. "It's too late," he whispered, looking around
blindly. "Too late."

Glancing distractedly at
the creature he had killed, he studied its broken, lifeless
carcass.
I'll be joining you soon,
he thought and covered his face with his hands, not able to
bear looking at the corpse any longer.

"I'm going to be a mass
murderer now," he told himself calmly, although he grimaced as he
spoke. The innocent and the guilty. "There's nothing I can do," he
called out, guilt and despair piercing his heart.

The door to the room crashed
open and a figure beckoned urgently to him. "Quickly," said a man's
voice, "now whilst there is still time!"

And Jack went, willingly,
crawling away from the machine that was about to rip itself apart,
his blurry eyes trying to see who was leading him away from death,
but all he saw was the glint of a silver sword hung at the man's
side. He felt numb, the fact that he may yet still live hardly
registering. He was just so utterly relieved to have someone else
take control, his mind completely exhausted, that he would have
done anything, gone anywhere that he was told to. "We have to save
the girl," he muttered, "we have to save Lisa."

But the man did not reply, only
moving on swiftly through the corridors of a house that was soon to
be no more.

Passed down through countless
years there was an old parable, said to be true. Few had understood
it.

There was an ancient tree that
had been severely burnt in a mysterious fire, tales of fireballs
sent from the heavens that moved as if controlled by some unseen
hand, uttered in frightened voices when wine had loosened usually
silent tongues. And because of superstition and curiosity, people
came to look upon the charred tree, some travelling great
distances. But there were others who came for another purpose,
intent on felling what most local people had branded as an unholy
abomination, now black in spirit as well as hue.

The first who had tried, a
simple farmer wanting nothing more than to clear the ugly thing
from the land, had been afflicted by a paralysis the instant he had
swung his axe and though he had recovered once away from the tree,
the story had spread swiftly and soon others came, an unspoken
challenge having been set.

The legend of the Black Tree,
for so it was named, grew quickly, as one after another, each who
attempted to cut it down were smitten as if by some invisible
guardian. But not all suffered the same fate however. Some were
struck blind, whilst others were driven instantly insane. In one
unfortunate case, a young adventurer, on a wager from wild and
reckless companions, fell into a deep unconsciousness as he stood
before the tree and to those who cared for him thereafter, his
sleep appeared to be plagued by the darkest of nightmares. He never
woke, living the remainder of his life as a prisoner of those
terrible dreams.

In time, the tree became a
forbidden, accursed place, no-one willing to venture near, until on
one particularly bitter winter's eve, a warrior came upon a
shepherd boy who tended his flock. "Do you not fear for your
animals?" the stranger had asked of the shepherd, gesturing toward
the sheep as they strayed close to the scorched remains of the
tree.