Wickerman Cove

Part 21: Aftermath

Maksym fell forward.

He caught himself on one hand, barely strong enough to keep from face-planting in the wet earth. The sound he made was somewhere between a wheeze and a cough. He searched his pockets with a fading sense of urgency.

A strangeness had gripped the world. It wouldn't have been right to call it a feeling of unreality. Things were just... different. Serpentine shapes slithered between shadows – sliding into one and emerging from another. Their eyeless heads moved slowly, this way and that, before forging into the dark of the undergrowth.

Sound, a distorted, underwater drawl, faded to the edge of Steph's hearing – the startled birds, the sound of her own yelling at Mansfield for following them. The sheriff stared through her.

Past her.

At Penny.

Penny and Renard were things again. Penny towered, more than a head and shoulders taller than Steph, with that horned skull for a head, and wicked hooked teeth. Renard, his head an eyeless, four horned skull, stared at her with empty orbits, tilting this way and that. Penny did the same thing.

"Is that it?" Mansfield asked. Her voice cut through the drawl, the only clear sound in the world. "Is that really her?"

Steph could still feel air going in and out of her lungs, vibrating in her throat and coming out of her mouth. Dimly, she knew she had to be yelling. Making noise.

The weird, underwater silence pressed in.

What the fuck was going on?

"Is that it? Is it done?" Mansfield asked.

There was something else: the feeling of a rotten tooth. The world seemed to bend away as it moved. The forest itself warped and pulled back, wearing thin and then breaking so that there was nothing but darkness.

Somewhere, on another planet, Steph's heart picked up speed. It raced like she was running in full battle gear. Like they were outnumbered and taking heavy fire. The adrenaline screamed through her system, but it wasn't much more than a voice on a damaged phone line, or a telegram from another world, where they had things like hearts, lungs and blood.

If she looked past Mansfield, she could almost see something.

The world was pulling her two ways. She could almost feel the way back to reality. Where Maksym was lying face down, gasping, with no wound in his back. Where there was no sheriff and the birds were going crazy. Penny was five foot five and had curly black hair.

In both worlds, Renard strained to rush forward, stopped only by Penny hooking her fingers in his collar. It was a longer way down now she was huge and had a skull for a head. The sound he made echoed through the forest, something between a bark and an air raid siren. It reverberated impossibly, like when they'd cleaned out an old missile silo and yelled to hear the echo.

Mansfield raised the gun again.

It wasn't a gun though. Not really. It was something else – not a wand exactly, but long, thin and made of metal. She looked between Steph and Penny.

"Yeah," she said, answering someone out of sight. "They're both here. Shall I—"

There was something just beyond her. Not behind her in the physical sense, but... beyond, on the other side of a link that was a place and a relationship at the same time. One mental push into the future. The foreground kept threatening to take its shape: a hat with a wide brim, a scarf across the face. Skin as dry and dead as autumn leaves. Things that moved under the surface and puppeted its twig-dry bones.

In another place, Steph heard herself make a sound. It was impossible not to see it once she'd made the connection. It generated an almost electrical spark between them – mortal and monster. Hanging leaves became a red, brimmed hat. The shape of some light between the trees became a reddish-purple scarf.

The thing that had stalked her through her dreams.

Uncontrolled fear broke against the levies built by years of military training. It wasn't about not being afraid. Nobody could ever control that. Routine and muscle memory got her to concentrate on what she could do – drop back into a defensive stance, search the area for weapons.

Everywhere the creature stood, reality just seemed to scorch into darkness. It stood just behind Mansfield, a paper dry hand on her shoulder. The forest warped. Every colour, even the light itself, turned grey, then black.

Then blacker than black. A darkness so profound it was more frightening than the creature itself.

Whatever the dark was made of, it rippled. As Steph uselessly tried to form herself into a defensive stance, it flowed and shifted, chiming discords. Mansfield flinched. A feeling of arctic cold started at Steph's fingertips and seeped as far down as her knuckles.

In her breast pocket, the tooth – that weird keepsake her grandfather had given her – burned against her chest. For a moment it was the only warm thing, as the cold tried to drive its way up her fingers and into her hands.

The thing with the red hat finally turned to her. The details of its face swam in and out of view, like a clay thing being shaped, crushed and remade.

Darkness rolled in around her, until the only familiar thing was the creature looking at her. The only other element in all creation was the tooth, burning in her pocket. If not for that, there would have been no Stephanie Joan Zoubareya. Nothing more than a ghost.

And suddenly, in another world, Maksym forced himself back up to his knees. He held up the same symbol as at the house. The darkness boiled away from it, a hissing, living thing leaving a bubble of almost-normality. His voice boomed from all directions, filling the darkness with slow, Russian intonation. Steph forced herself to look at the thing with the scarf for every minute she could. It might be useful. It might be critical that she knew what it looked like.

Maybe she was just trying to prove that she wasn't scared.

The same feeling bubbled up as it had in the house back in Mali. Not just unreality, but a feeling of something coming from herself. It felt different this time. The ice cold of the darkness bit through her skin. It went through everything down to her bones, as if she'd walked out into the desert night with nothing but a shirt. The chill went through her like a knife until the only warmth was the damned tooth, burning hot enough to warm the blood as it went through her heart.

On the other hand, she could move.

Sound rushed into the darkness too – she could still hear Maksym, but there were other noises: a distorted howl that rolled around the emptiness; a gasp of pressure as the eyeless serpents went from one shadow to the other; the creak and rustle of the hat man's desiccated body as he stepped back.

He didn't look so special anymore. His features stayed where they were: he was dead, of course, which was freaky, but otherwise he could have been any other guy with patrician cheekbones, a wattle chin and a Roman nose. Maybe an undead Republican Congressman. A Fortune 500 CEO who'd decided never to retire.

His attention rolled off her. The look of surprise was gratifying.

She drew her weapon, aimed it at his chest, and repeatedly pulled the trigger until the slide snapped back.

His face became a mask of undead shock.

Everything vanished.