Читать книгу Slender Man - Anonymous - Страница 12

He had no idea how much time had passed when he saw it.

Time seemed malleable inside the forest, to the point where it had ceased to have any meaning. The rain had stopped briefly, then started again more heavily than ever. In the brief moments when water wasn’t falling from the sky, the air had cleared and felt fresh, before thickening again as the rain returned. It had felt like the first storm had passed, only for a second, stronger one to arrive within minutes. Which was impossible, of course. The storms that battered the valley were huge, vast sheets of dark clouds that blanketed the entire sky. They took hours to move across the sky, and it was unheard of for one to follow another directly.

But that was what had happened. Stephen was sure of it.

The trail was still there, rougher and more overgrown than ever, now boggy with mud and with streams running either side of it, but it was still there. Stephen had considered what he would do if – when – it ended, if he found himself faced with the impenetrable wall of undergrowth and tree trunks that ran along both sides of the trail, but had pushed the thought away. He would deal with that if and when it became necessary to do so, and there was no sense worrying about it until then.

Thunder rolled overhead, a ceaseless drumbeat that shook great quantities of water down from the trees and trembled the trail beneath his feet. He paused, feeling the crackle in the air in his teeth and the bones of his jaw, then flinched as lightning burst across the sky, lighting the entire forest blinding white. A smell of burning filled his nose, the electricity in the air lifted the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck. The thunder rolled again, and this time he braced himself, ready for the flash when it came.

The lightning struck with a noise like the end of the world. It sounded like it was close – too close – and the blaze of light was long and hurt his eyes. In the blue-white seconds before it faded, leaving dancing spots of red and yellow in front of his eyes, he saw the scale of the place he now found himself, saw the trees stretching away in every direction, tall and old and endless. And away to his left, where the trail made a gentle turn to the left, he saw something else.

For a millisecond, he thought it was a tree. It was tall, and spindly, composed of straight lines and edges.

Then it moved …

Stephen allowed reality to come slowly, to wash over him like warm water. For long, stretched-out moments the divide between sleeping and waking was a blur of dark grey, the familiar surroundings of his bedroom bleeding into the equally familiar horror of his nightmares.

They were always the same, and he had accepted that they would never leave him. Not entirely, at least: there were nights, sometimes as many as three or four in a row, when he slept as he had before the war, and he was never less than grateful for such respite. Because he always knew it was only a matter of time before the things he had done invaded his unconscious mind again, and soaked his dreams with blood.

He swung his legs out of bed, pulled on his boots, and stood up. He felt the aches in his back, the pull of his shoulders, and grimaced. He had seen his own father stretch and wince in a similar way in the mornings, but that had been because he had been an old man. Stephen was barely thirty, although he could no longer claim with a straight face that he felt his age. He felt tired, and worn out.

He felt used up.

The physical hardships of the war had been severe, but he understood instinctively that this was something deeper. He had no learning of medicines and ailments, but he felt that a malaise had settled into his bones during his time in the west. Perhaps the old men and women of the village had been right when they proclaimed that there was a price to be paid for taking a life. If so, Stephen owed the kind of debt that would give even a king pause for thought.

He slid the bolt on his door – there had been much scoffing when he had hammered the metal plates into place, but then the farmers and blacksmiths and tailors who called the village home had never hacked a foreign king’s nephew’s head from his neck while his limbs still twitched and his body was still warm – and stepped out of his house.

Spread out ahead of him to the east were the fields that he had worked as a boy, first for his father and then under the unfailingly critical eye of his mother. The small stone church, abandoned since the dawn of the Age of Reason, stood at the north-west corner of the largest field. For three winters now the villagers had waited for its roof to fall in, but still it held.

To the north, the valley sloped down to the river and the rich lands beyond. It would never cease to feel strange to Stephen that when he looked in these two directions, everything he could see now belonged to him. He had protested the King’s decision to make him the Lord of these lands, but only once: the King appreciated humility but did not appreciate argument, especially if the topic under discussion was a gift that was – by anyone’s standards – extremely generous.

Perhaps gift was the wrong word. The lands that had always been known as Wrong Side were a reward, earned a thousand times over on the battlefield in the protection of the Realm. And had they been any other parcel of lands of equal size and value, Stephen would not have protested even once. He knew what he had done, and what it was worth. It was only the men and women who lived on and worked these lands that had given him reason to be uneasy. He had grown up amongst them, a boy no better than any other, and now he was their Lord, by order of the King.

It was fair to say that there had been varied reactions to the news.

The small village square was busy, as it almost always was.

A small queue had formed in front of the well; the hard women who worked the land with a stubborn determination that was at least the equal of their husbands, waited patiently with wooden buckets in their hands. He could not hear their voices across the distance between them and him, but Stephen was extremely confident that gossip would be flowing between them as rapidly as the water being drawn from the cool rocks below.

Down by the river, he could see clothes being washed and children playing happily along the water’s edge. Arthur Allen, who would turn fifteen in a month’s time and was making the most of his last summer as a boy before the duties and responsibilities of adulthood made themselves known to him, was leading a group of smaller boys and girls in a circle along the riverbanks, orchestrating a game the rules of which Stephen could not even begin to fathom. There were sticks involved, and the covering of one eye with a hand, and an intricate series of loops and whirls had been scratched into the dust. It was beyond his understanding, but the children appeared to have no such problem.

Watching the game from a tree stump at the edge of the clearing was Mary Cooper. She was already fifteen, and was now usually to be found in the Cooper fields up near the edge of the forest, turning out plough-splitting rocks and dragging twisting vine-weed up by the roots. Hard work, as Stephen knew as well as anyone. The kind of work that aged you, that added lines to the face and a stoop to the back. He was sure that would eventually be Mary Cooper’s fate, unless a gentleman from the castle happened to ride down into the valley and sweep her up onto his horse and take her away to be his wife.

Mary Cooper was by no means fully grown – even though he disagreed with it, Stephen was not minded to challenge the village’s assumption that fifteen was the threshold between childhood and adulthood, not when there were other matters more pressing that would cause less consternation amongst his neighbors – but the beauty she would become was already extremely apparent. Mary Cooper was a good girl, kind and decent and hardworking. Her father had died when she was young, and she and her mother lived together in a small cottage at the point where their two small fields met. She was a quiet girl, although Stephen suspected there was a hard streak in her that she could draw upon when needed: she was no fool, and she did not appreciate being taken for one, although exactly that assumption is often made about girls as beautiful as Mary Cooper.

Her hair was the color of a wheat field in afternoon sun, the lines of her face soft and pleasing to the eye, the curves beneath her dress long and smooth. Stephen had noticed the village men allowing their gaze to linger on her longer than was necessary, an occurrence that was becoming regular enough that he feared the time would come when he would no longer be able to hold his tongue.

But whereas they tried – half-heartedly in some cases – to disguise their lechery, Arthur Allen looked at Mary with the open adoration of the young, his eyes wide, his mouth almost always hanging slightly open, as though he could not truly believe the vision before him. His very open infatuation was the subject of gossip around the village, and some mocking. It was mostly gentle though, for, despite all their hard edges, the men and women of Wrong Side could – mostly – still remember what it was to be young and in love.

As he led the children in their game, Stephen saw Arthur cast stolen glances in Mary Cooper’s direction. She gave no indication that she noticed – her gaze remained fixed on the slowly running river – but there was the faintest curve at the corners of her mouth, the tiniest hint of something that might – with appropriate encouragement – turn into a smile, that made him think that not only did she notice Arthur looking at her, but was content for him to do so.

Stephen watched for a little while longer, savouring the quiet contentment that had settled momentarily over the village. It wouldn’t last, he knew. It never did. By mid-afternoon, when the temperature rose and so did tempers, there would be arguments that needed settling, disputes that needed resolving, and the good mood that was currently filling him would be a distant memory.

But in this moment, Stephen was content. In this moment, a thought – one that was exceptionally rare – occurred to him. He considered it, and allowed it to lodge in his mind, warming him from the inside.

This is why we went to the Borderlands, and why we waded through blood to come home.

This is what we fought for.

Stephen’s first instinct, as always, was to reach for his sword.

The banging was loud, and insistent, and coming from somewhere close by. His eyes flew open, and he instantly registered that it was still dark. Not the deep night – the shutters that sealed the windows were edged in deep, velvet purple rather than rendered invisible by black – but still some hours before anyone ought to be knocking on his door.

He swung his legs out of bed and picked up his sword. It never lay out of reach, even when he was asleep, and he felt the familiar sadness at how neatly the weapon’s handle fit into his hand. It had been rewrapped in leather half a dozen times, but within a few days it had always taken on some essential shape that was now part of the weapon itself. His fingers fit into faint grooves, his thumb rested against a worn blister of leather. It was an extension of himself, and even now – many months since he had last swung it in anger – he felt incomplete without it in his hand.

He crossed the small room of his dwelling in his night-shirt, his bare feet padding silently across the rolled earth. Some of the village houses had floorboards, and the grand homes that surrounded the castle had intricate tiles and even marble as floors. Stephen could have afforded the same, but such things were not in his nature. He liked the hard earth beneath his feet. He had fought for this land, killed and maimed for it, and he liked to feel connected to it.

The banging came again, long and loud. Stephen paused three yards from the door, beyond the range of any spear that might be thrust through the gap between it and the wall.

“Who goes there?” he shouted.

The reply was instant. “Sarah Cooper, my Lord.”

Stephen grimaced in the darkness. The title still didn’t sit well with him, and he was starting to doubt whether it ever would.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It’s Mary.”

“Is she hurt?”

“I don’t know, my Lord,” said Sarah. “I can’t find her.”

Stephen frowned. Then he reached out, unbolted the door, and swung it open. Sarah Cooper stood outside, her shawl pulled tightly around herself. It got cold at night in Wrong Side, even in the summer. The wind blew all the way down from the mountain, welcome during the day but capable of slicing you to the bone once the sun had set.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “When did you last see her?”

Sarah shuffled her feet against the cold. “After supper,” she said. “She went out for a walk before the sun went down. Said she had thinking to do. I told her not to be more than a half hour, and she promised me she wouldn’t be. That was getting on for six hours ago.”

Stephen looked past Sarah to the dark silhouettes of the village. The first fingers of dawn were threatening to rise above the eastern horizon, but it would not be light for another hour, at least.

“I should have come sooner,” said Sarah. “I didn’t like to think bad of her, though. I know the Allen boy’s been coming around, and I know they go walking some when she thinks I’m sleeping. She thinks I don’t know, but I know. Ain’t nothing wrong with it.”

“Nothing at all,” said Stephen, because he knew that was what she wanted to hear. But his attention was no longer on the frightened woman standing at his door. He was thinking about the Cooper farm, and the forest that lay just beyond its borders.

Wild things lived amongst the thick tangle of trees, things that could bite and claw. The men of Wrong Side had hunted the wolves that slid silently through the darkness almost to the point of extinction, but their howls could still sometimes be heard on the stillest nights. It was rare for them to emerge from the forest and threaten a human being, but it was not unheard of. When an animal was sick, or starving, Stephen had learnt that there was little they would not do, given the right circumstances.

There were bears in the deep forest, towering brown creatures that reared up on their hind legs and blotted out the sun. There were wildcats, barely larger than dogs but with mouths full of razor-sharp teeth and claws that could disembowel. There were snakes that spat and hissed and spiders that crawled silently over your skin, their shiny abdomens swollen with poison.

And some said there were other things too, things from before the Age of Reason that waited in the deepest dark, patient and hungry. Children told tales of such things around campfires, scaring each other silly while their parents watched on disapprovingly. There were places inside the forest – Stephen had seen them with his own eyes – where the blood in your veins ran cold and the hair on your arms stood up, even though the sun was warm overhead. Old places.

Bad places.

He was getting ahead of himself, he realized. There was more than enough bad and wicked in the world without worrying about monsters and demons. People did terrible things to other people every day, for no better reason than greed, or jealousy, or a short temper. The obvious had to be dealt with first.

“My Lord?” asked Sarah Cooper.

He looked at her. “Wake Simon Hester,” he said. “Tell him I said he’s to ride to the castle right away and fetch the King’s Master at Arms. Tell him I said to take his fastest horse.”

Sarah nodded. Her face, which had been as pale as a ghost’s when Stephen opened his door, now flushed with determined color. He knew, from long experience of commanding soldiers, that people usually felt better when they had something to do, a task to focus on.

“I’ll go right now,” she said. “What are you going to do?”

Stephen gestured at the long night-shirt he was wearing. “I’m going to put some clothes on,” he said. “And then I’m going to talk to Arthur Allen.”