Marc Chadbourn - The Queen of sinister

The community had managed to survive another winter of long shadows and harshness. But then the plague had come with the spring. Existence certainly had a taste for irony. Where would it all end?

Arthur Lee bounded in from the kitchen with an urgency that shook her from her dismal thoughts. He was unsettled. With his fur bristling, he tried to bury himself in her calf muscles, body rigid, and he was not a cat prone to fear; indeed, being more than cat, he existed in a state of contempt for everything. Mary's spine prickled in response.

This is a warning, Mary thought.

A quick slug of whiskey fired her, and then she moved from window to window, searching the countryside now bathed in early-morning light. Trees and shrubs were budding; she could smell the season changing. Nothing disturbed the peaceful scene; no figures moving, no shift of vegetation in opposition to the wind. She let her senses envelop her, but all she could feel was that constant background unease.

'What's frighted you, then?' She dropped to her knees to look into the cat's gleaming eyes, but he was too anxious to stay still long enough for her to see. A drop of moisture splashed on to her cheek. Puzzled, she glanced up at the ceiling to search for the source. Absently, she wiped the droplet away, but then grew still when she glimpsed her fingertips: the stain was dark.

In the mirror, she saw a thin scarlet trickle running from each ear.

Thoughts of disease and death flashed across her mind, but she barely had time to consider them, for at that moment the phone began to ring; and it had been dead, like all phones, from the time of the Fall. Her heart began to pound.

Everything shifted at once; shadows in the room altered their position slightly, the light became strangely harsh, the barely perceptible sound of her feet on the carpet now buzzed loudly in her head; heightened sensations were twisted into something a step aside from reality. With a queasy sense of dislocation, Mary approached the phone.

She hesitated, rigid with apprehension, and then plucked up the handset. 'Hello?'

There was a moment of fizzing static and then a hollow emptiness that reminded her of space. Out of it came a questioning voice that was faintly mechanical. '… Sshhh… hsss… Are you there? Can you hear me?… hssss… over. Do you hear?… sshhh… not over. It is not over. You have to-'

Mary threw the phone across the room. After a moment, fighting an irrational dread, she marched across the room and picked up the receiver: the phone was dead once more. She stared at it for a second or two while Arthur Lee flattened himself under the coffee table, and then a hammering at the door jolted her alert.

Don't answer it, a shrill voice said at the back of her head. And she had every intention of obeying it, but then her hand was mysteriously on the handle, pressing it, pulling it. Her breath caught in her throat.

A large dark figure stood on the threshold. Oddly, she couldn't make out the face that terrified her so much; it was filled with shadows that moved like smoke. The figure entered and she seemed to float back before it.

Finally, she saw that it was a man, but that provided little comfort. His face had an odd plasticity that hinted at a mask, made worse by the burning, dreadful eyes stretched wide and staring through that masquerade. Yet everything else about him was thoroughly ordinary: his appearance resembled that of someone who had spent a long time on the road; mud-spattered jeans, faded T-shirt, worn jacket, long, greasy hair tied in a ponytail.

'Mary Holden.' The voice appeared to come from some other part of the room; a disturbing ventriloquism, a party trick with added menace.

'Who are you?'

'I come from a place of quicksilver and lightning.' He stood stock still, arms at his sides, and the light and shadows circled him, or seemed to, from her perspective.

The dread in Mary's heart twisted until she thought she would be sick. 'What do you want with me?'

'It is not over.'

For some reason, the words terrified her.

'You shall not walk away.' The eyes peering through the mask burned into her head. 'The girl will need you.'

'Caitlin?'

'Something has woken on the edge of Existence. It has seen you, and everything you are, and everything you will be, and it is moving even now to prevent your awakening.'

Mary's thoughts were cotton wool, swaddling his words so that the sharp meaning could not be felt. But she struggled with them until some semblance of understanding emerged. We're in danger?'

'A time of frost and fire approaches.'

'Why do you care?' She jerked, not meaning for her words to sound so emboldened. When he didn't answer, she said, 'What do you expect me to do?' though she feared the answer.

'Nothing is as it appears. You will need new eyes.' He reached out, and his arm appeared to stretch like melting rubber. Fingers that were not fingers scratched the centre of her forehead and Mary's vision fragmented in jewelled images and starbursts. When she could finally see again, the stranger had raised his arm and was pointing out of the door. 'Go. See.' She found herself at the village hall without any memory of how she had got there from her cottage. She still had on her slippers, but didn't have a coat, and she shivered in the early-morning cold. Dreamily, she made her way into the hall.

Her hand flew to her mouth at the choking stench. Gideon, the chairman of the parish council, and some teenage boy whose name she didn't recall, dozed in chairs, worn out by futile caring. She tried not to pay any attention to two unmoved bodies that lay blackened by the plague in the centre of the room, and instead made her way to the side room where lay those still clinging on to thin life. But the instant she stepped across the threshold she was shocked rigid.

Tiny figures as insubstantial as smoke danced and twisted above the heads of the woman and young boy lying on the tables. Black-skinned, with a mix of human and lizard qualities, their twirling tails and curved horns reminded Mary of nothing more than medieval illustrations of devils. A malignant glee filled every movement as they soared and ducked, pinching and stabbing their unfortunate hosts. And where they touched the woman and boy, blackness flowed from them into the strange meridians the plague left on the bodies of its victims.

As Mary clutched the door jamb in disorientation, the devils appeared shocked that she could see them. Their malignancy returned quickly, though, and they silently jeered and mocked her with offensive gestures, knowing she could do nothing to stop them.

Mary grabbed a yard brush from the wall and swung it to swat them away, but it passed straight through them; they weren't there, not in any sense she understood.

Staggering back into the main hall, understanding swept through her. Now she knew why the medication didn't work, why the plague was like none seen before; it wasn't of the world at all. And after that, other thoughts surfaced in a mad rush of release, but the most important was this: Caitlin had gone in search of a cure without realising the plague's true nature. She may well have been sent to her death.

The Oxfordshire countryside was coming alive. Buds were bursting on all the branches and overgrown hedgerows, and burgeoning wildlife scurried everywhere Caitlin looked. The already crumbling roads were camouflaged with thistle and yellow grass. Caitlin fought back a wave of grief at the realisation that Grant and Liam weren't there to experience it with her. Sometimes the despair came from nowhere, like a storm at sea, and she had to battle to keep in control. Other times she was simply numb.