The Twilight Lands

Extract One:


The moon hangs, low, heavy and sinister, above the moors. Lingering like some suspended doom. It is all I can see in the orange sky, and somehow it makes me shiver though I was not born to fear these shadows. There is little time now until the moon is full. A few days a most. And then the Subs will be their strongest.

The Magi tell us that a festival draws close with this moon, that it is almost upon them. The world is shifting, and old nights seem to have more power than they did once before. The Subs become more feral as the wild moon madness grows.

The moors are dangerous. Haunted. Even when the world was fresh and green, in halcyon days before the plague, the moor had a reputation for the night. The wildness inside the garden, the land where wild weeds still grew. That no amount of cultivation could transform. And something strange hangs in the air tonight. This place is too quiet, even for the uninhabited moorlands. There are no birds about this night.

The stillness hangs, cold around my car. I try to ignore my unease. I am strong and my car is marked, so that it sings with power on the wind. Few would dare attack alone, even when the moon was full. But, even so...

The sky darkens away from Oxford, thinning the glow to gauze of rust. My heating is on, but the car is still cold. I can taste winter in the air. Winter, and something else. A beginning. If I concentrate, I can taste anticipation, suspense, fear. And blood. Fresh blood, at once obvious and overpowering and filling the car with its pungent aroma. It is so immediate that, for a moment, I wonder if the blood is my own. But no. Instead, it seems as though the night is magnifying suggestions. As though it is dragging some twisted animal instinct out from my stomach. The thought makes me ill. And still the suspense lingers in the stillness as the engine sounds fade to the quick, rhythmic thump of my heartbeat.
I can see stars now, through the orange gauze. Orion's belt. Somehow I am so cold I begin to shake.
Then a figure steps from the shadows into the road before me.

My first thought is to keep driving, to avoid it or to plough it down. I know better than to expect any innocent motive from a stranger on the moors. But the smell of blood grows stronger still. The figure has been tracking me. If I listen, hard, I can hear the blood seeping from its body. It is determined, then. This means a message.
I hear no sounds in my ears now but my heartbeat, terse with fear, and the heavy shiver-shake of my breath. It takes me a moment to even realise that I have stopped the car. Then the figure steps into the faint glow of the headlights.
Luke.

For a second my heart stops, but then it syncopates, stretching into a more immediate tattoo. Now, though, it is fuelled by anger. I should have known better than to take the word of a Sub. Particularly one of Lucia's lieutenants. But I was deceived. This is personal now, as well as business.
I wind down the window and he walks, very deliberately, towards me. The night is still cold, but now the tension is concentrated, fixed upon the diminishing space between us. We are the knife-point of the night. I glare at him, but he does not wither.
'What is your message?' I ask.
He shakes his head. Once. I see the blood pooling in the crevice of his collarbone, oozing from a wound beside his ear. I wonder how easy it really is to kill a wolf.
'What do you want?'
My demand again. My impatience is legitimate. Something else is gathering in the air about us now. Something fiercer than the Subs, fiercer than the Eclipse movement. I feel fear vibrate through every molecule of water in the air. Luke merely stares at me. I thrum with the desire to make him hurt. My mouth opens, but no words escape. I hear the horn first.

It floods the sky from a distance, roaring through the silent night like a desperate death scream. Stranger, wilder, than our own war. Entirely inhuman and terrifying. My blood slows to a crawl, sick with sticky dread, and I feel terror racing through me in its place. But now our positions are reversed. Luke leans forward, danger glittering in his eyes.
'Get out of here little girl. Unless you're looking for your death.'
'What about you?'
The question is instinctive. I never meant those words to leave my mouth. For a moment, he looks as shocked as I feel. The horn sounds again, growing closer, and I lick my lips. My breathing quickens. The sky is darker than it was before. The stars are watching, uncaring. And the wild terror is growing. I feel it spreading, a tingling chill, through each fickle finger and toe, creeping, seeping up and through my skin. The air is humid with the taste of blood, the scent of fear and war and death. And, all about, the night is filled with ice. Cold, deadly and dreadful. Before I realise what I have done I have unlocked the car, Luke is inside, and we are speeding, flying, escaping through the night.

It is a wild and fear-filled drive. Darkness presses about us - real darkness, not the sickly security of the city-lit night – and every inch of the bruised sky resonates with menace. The familiar shapes of natural landmarks twist into unknown threats, until shadowy shapes seem to be moving all about us. Following the car, pressing close. In the silence of the car I hear my heart beat out a terror-fuelled tattoo.

Then the horn sounds again. Far away at first, but soon echoing across the night. Resonating with a fierce, feral intensity. My blood freezes in my veins. The sound grows louder until it fills the air around us. My knuckles stand out, white on the steering wheel. The hair stands on the back on my neck. We cannot outrun the sound.
Luke has not moved since he climbed into the car.

And then we hear the howl. Mad dogs, wild geese, the cries of the damned themselves. The horror fills the night. The suggested shapes of shadows begin to separate around the car, chasing us through the darkness. Great, terrible hounds pursuing their prey. Closing in. my heart-beat is deafening. I hear every blood cell as it is pumped. My hands are sticky, slippery with slick sweat on the steering wheel. The air begins to taste of death. Death and blood and winter and fear and... something else. Something impossible to name.

The world is changed, unfamiliar, and I no longer no where we are. Around me, all things have been transformed. I wonder if it matters.
This is older than our war. Older and darker. There will be no trouble from Subs tonight.

The howling comes again and I can hardly breathe. The sound makes my neck hurt. From nowhere a wind rises, swooping about us and joining the chase, buffeting us back into the midst of the hunt. I think that I hear laughter; maniacal and dangerous. And my heartbeat. And the howling. Always the terrible howling. Our pursuers must surround us now, although they make no move to destroy us. Yet. Instead they play like a cat with a mouse. Delaying the final moment of our death. I feel every bloodcell squeezing through my artesties. Every breath tears my throat apart in its desperate panic. I see, touch, smell, taste, hear everything sharper. This is death, and it has come for me.

The horn sounds again and the silhouette of some great thing – half man and half beast, obscures the waxing moon. My breath catches as I taste my death.
The pause.
The break.
Then that terrible, cruel laughter fills the night, shaking through every molecule, and... our hunters are gone.

Somehow we make it back to my island. I think the car does all the work. Luke is hunched up in the back-seat, shaking. I have trouble enough breathing.

We do not speak until we are inside. Somehow his entrance is undisputed. I long to bar the door, to raise the bridge and shut out the night. But I know this will not help. Bolts are bars matter little against pursuers like those.

I stand in my hallway and listen to the river flowing. The water runs fast but easy below my feet. Natural. Calming. I close my eyes and let myself slip inside it. Gradually, I remember how to breathe. If I did not have a Sub in my house I would let my mind ebb away into it. Now I use it to rebuild my mind.

At length Luke speaks. His voice is still cracked from fear. Still shaking.
'My whole body is thrumming.'
The words are wary. This is a warning.
'It screams all over. Every millimetre. I might not be safe.'
'You never will be safe.'
Blunt and to the point. There is no cause for tact or discretion. Even if he did save my life once.
'You're Subhuman.' I tell him..'You should go.'
'I should.'

The gaps between the words feel strained. Awkward. It dawns on me that his whole body is shaking.

'What was that?'
The words leave my mouth before I can stop them. For a moment I think he will not answer. But my fears are unfounded. For once.
'The wild hunt. The hunter... or Horned God... and his minions.'
Luke swallows painfully.
'Its old. Old and wild and dangerous. The land is waking up. And that is not necessarily a good thing.'
For either side. The implications hang, unsaid, in the air between us. I wonder if he knows why this is happening. I wonder how he always knows so much. If he stayed tonight I could ask him. But I know that this is self-deception. It is not his knowledge that I long to understand.

***

I submitted an extract from this as my first piece of creative writing across the course. I was quite happy, but when copying it up just now I noticed an editorial error (two the's where I'd cut & pasted) and my confidence...waned...rather. So I thought I'd throw it into the vast excesses of internet life instead.

xxx