Roads ran through the forest, and there were clearings hacked and burnt along their length, clusters of buildings usurping the hegemony of the trees and woodsmoke rising in the moonlight. They huddled together as if fearful of the dank woods, fenced off by palisades, guarded by crucifixes. In the midst of every hamlet the steeple of a church sprang up like a spike. But no men were abroad in this wide land, this moonlit kingdom. They locked their doors against the night, and in the darkness the beasts roamed unafraid, peering at the light behind windows, ruling the depths of the forests.
Michael lay naked with the girl in his arms. The fire was dead, one solitary glede mocking him like a red unwinking eye. She was asleep, but he lay listening to the night sounds. Pheasant, with its harsh whirr, and the keewick of a hunting owl. Other, distant sounds he could not name. And once the deep, full-throated growl of some huge beast. The wood was alive with sound, a plethora of rustlings and shufflings. He thought if he lay still enough he would hear the very beat of this land's heart; enormous, bestial. Some night creature snuffled at the base of a tree yards away, invisible, and then padded off into the depths of the forest.
'Cat.' Soft as a summer zephyr. 'Cat, wake up.'
She stirred. He saw the dark eyes open.
'You made it happen, didn't you? You did it. We're there again.'
She sat up, pushing him aside. He thought her nose was sniffing the air. How far was he from home? How many miles or years or worlds away. He shook her roughly. 'Cat!'
'Ssh!' Her fingers bit into his arm. Their lower bodies were entangled. His penis lolled like a severed umbilical across his thigh and he could feel the cold air bite into the sweat that still marked him.
'Jesus, Cat, what have you done?'
'Be quiet!' As sharp as a slap, but low, afraid of being heard.
He could see nothing beyond their livid limbs. Their clothes were beneath them but the shotgun was invisible, off among the leaves somewhere. Fear shrunk his belly. He felt like a cave man at the world's dawning. Cro-Magnon man shivering in the prehistoric dark.
'Get dressed.' Her voice was a hiss.
They sorted out their clothes, fumbling and stumbling. He had even taken off his boots. There were dead twigs in them and leaves and old bark stuck to his coat like burrs. In silence, by touch, they dressed. He explored the leaf litter until his fingers struck the chill iron of the gun barrel. At once, he felt safer.
'Davy bloody Crockett,' he muttered.
They stood for a moment, listening. It seemed reckless to speak aloud, to make any noise. Cat bruised his lips with a kiss and then pulled him along by the hand. 'Come.'
She can see in the dark, he thought. Those eyes. A cat, indeed. He stumbled in her wake as they left the hut behind.
A few yards in the impenetrable gloom, and he had forgotten where the hut had even been. His hand tightened on Cat's fingers. If he got lost here, that would be him lost for ever. Disappeared. His family would never know where he had gone.
How did it happen? How was it done? One moment he was a quarter of a mile from the walls of his home, the next he was in some primeval wilderness. A dark fairyland, complete with wolves. The magnitude of the puzzle kept him silent as he shuffled along after Cat.
There was something behind him.
He knew it as surely as a blind man knows the direction of the sun. It was big—he thought he heard it expelling quiet breaths far above his head—and almost entirely noiseless. Like a horror film, the ones in the pictures where the hero is grabbed from behind.
He let the weight of the shotgun ooze through his grip until his fingers were curled around the trigger guard.
Crackling footsteps in time with his own. He tried to say something to Cat but she seemed intent on the way ahead, wherever that was. And his throat had seized up and puckered.
He would turn around and give it both barrels like Audie Murphy, as Mullan had done with the werewolf in the back yard. Except that the werewolf had escaped unscathed.
Magic or no magic, two shotgun rounds at pointblank range would settle anything's hash.
He tore his hand loose from Cat's, pointed the gun and fired. The recoil threw him back into her and they both fell. He was deafened, blinded, bruised. Got you, you sneaking hairy bastard, he thought gleefully, but all that came out was a strangled wail.
For a second he saw a massive torso lit up by the flash, man-like but not human, and what might have been a face above it, brutish, hulking. Then utter dark took him. He lay not replying to Cat's cries, her searching hands. Something crashed away through the trees in a chaos of breaking branches, but there was no other sound—unless it might be a cavernous muttering, bad-tempered thunder.
'What did you do? What did you do?' Cat's fingers pried into his painful shoulder.
'Ow, let go. It was a monster. I shot it.'