Peter Beagle - Tamsin

I’ve never gone back to the Alpine Meadow since that night. I do dream about it once in a while: me scrabbling along out there in the storm, with the rain bouncing off me like hail and the Wild Hunt on my track—sometimes they’re right on top of me, sometimes not—and it’s so dark that all I can see is those two lights fluttering just ahead. Tamsin and Edric, twinkling away like Tinker Bell, for God’s sake. My legs are unbelievably painful, and I can’t get my breath at all—it’s like my lungs are full of broken glass— but Tamsin won’t let me give up, so Edric won’t either, even though there’s no point, no hope, no damn reason . I’d rather breathe, I’d rather breathe than anything in the world, and those damn ghosts won’t let me. In the dream I’m always angrier at them than I am at the Wild Hunt and Judge Jeffreys.

The Huntsmen’s horses were still having trouble with the mud and gaining only slowly, if they were gaining at all. But Judge Jeffreys was on us all the way, swooping and howling, popping out of the dark so close to my face that I’d jump back and fall, and then slashing in at Tamsin or Edric when they came to me. And he was hurting them, though I couldn’t see how. I don’t know what ghosts can actually do to other ghosts, but when the light that pulsed around him even came near them, their own light would go dim for a few seconds, or whip around and flicker as though the storm wind was almost blowing them out. I was really scared to see that, really frightened that they would go out and leave me alone; but they always came back, bright as before. It just seemed to take a little longer each time.

The next-to-last time I fell, I tripped over one rock and turned my ankle, and my chin hit another one, or something that hard, and I didn’t know where I was, or who, until I heard Tamsin saying my name. “Jenny, you must get up, Jenny, please ,” over and over, like Sally trying to rouse me for the school bus.

“Can’t,” I mumbled. “You go. Catch me anyway.”

The Horsemen were coming on, still not making a sound themselves, but I could feel their beasts’ hoofbeats, lying there. Beside me, Tamsin said, “ No . No, they will not catch us, Jenny—not if you can only make one more effort. Only one more, Jenny.” I didn’t move. Tamsin said, “Jenny, please—I promise thee. One more.”

It was the “thee” that did it, of course. She’d never called me that before. I got up with my ankle hurting and my head swimming worse than the one time Marta and Jake and I got stupid drunk on Jake’s mother’s Courvoisier. Tamsin was on one side of me, saying, “Oh, brave, my Jenny—only a little now,” and Edric on the other. He still wasn’t a bit happy about my entire existence, but he was practically polite when he growled into my ear, “Girl, for her sake.” And I put my weight on that bad ankle, and I started on.

The one thing the storm hadn’t had much of up to now was lightning and thunder. That all hit about the time the ground leveled off and the Wild Hunt really began gaining on us. Tamsin told me not to turn, but I twisted my head around once, and saw them in the flash, as though someone in heaven was taking pictures. The lightning made them look motionless, frozen in the moment, like the dead cherry trees, or the shrubby thicket coming up just ahead. Not Judge Jeffreys, though. He was divebombing us worse than ever, and he was screeching continually now. I couldn’t make out all the words, but most of it was Jesus and God and the King, and Welsh traitors a stink in the nostrils of the Almighty. And Tamsin belonging to him through eternity—that one I got, I heard him right through the thunder. And all the while he kept smothering Tamsin and Edric’s ghost-lights with his own, and every time they’d be slower coming back. Dimmer, too, now.

“Jenny, my Jenny—canst run only a little faster?” I didn’t even have the breath to answer Tamsin, but I think I maybe got an extra RPM or two out of my legs. I like to think so, but probably not.

But it wasn’t any good. The wind had switched around so it was blowing straight in my face, and between that and my ankle buckling with each step, we weren’t even going to make that thicket before the Wild Hunt caught up with us—as though we could have hidden there for one minute. The Huntsmen had started baying at us again the moment the wind changed, which makes me think maybe they actually hunted by smell, not that it matters. They sounded different than they did in the sky: not as loud, not whooping maniacally, but precise now, united, calling to each other. Like the West Dorset Hounds blowing their dumb horns when the poor fox is in full sight and they’re closing in.

And I couldn’t run anymore. The last time I went down, it wasn’t a question of getting me back on my feet, and Tamsin didn’t ask me again. All she said was “Here,” to Edric; and to give him credit, he didn’t ever suggest that they drop me and head for the border. At least I didn’t hear him say anything like that, because things were starting to slide away from me now, leaving me peaceful and sleepy, with my ankle hardly hurting at all. I did hear Tamsin say, “Twas this place, this , exactly this. I am sure to my soul of it, Edric.”

And Edric, with a sudden laugh that sounded very young, considering he can’t have done that for three hundred years: “Well, dear one, you are my soul, so there’s naught for me to do but bide with you.” Miss Sophia Brown sat calmly down beside me, looked in my face and said “Prrp?” just like Mister Cat, only small and faraway. Edric was saying, “—there’s no knowing or compounding her, nor there never was. She might as easily—”

Thunder and the wail of the Wild Hunt drowned the rest of it, just as Judge Jeffreys’s last gobbling squall of triumph seemed to drown Edric and Tamsin’s lights together. Far away as I was, numb as I was, I could feel them going out this time, as though a phone line between us had been cut. It hurt terribly—it hurt a lot more than my ankle—and I think I called for them. I know I tried to get up—or anyway I wanted to, but that line was down, too, and the Wild Hunt was on us. On me , their beasts rearing right over me on their spider legs, monkey legs, goats’ hooves, hawks’ claws… and the weird thing was that I didn’t care one damn bit. Tamsin was gone, Tamsin and her Edric, and I didn’t care what the hell happened to me now.

That was when I heard Mrs. Fallowfield.

Heard , not saw , because I was lying the wrong way, and I couldn’t even raise my head, but I knew it was her. She was speaking in a slow, buzzing language that sounded like Old Dorset, but I couldn’t separate any of the words from each other; and I hardly recognized her voice, the way it rang on the syllables like a hammer on a horseshoe. All around me the Huntsmen’s beasts dropped down to all fours—or all eights, or whatever—and the Huntsmen got really quiet, a different quiet from the way they’d first been with Tamsin. Then they’d been puzzled, uncertain, practically embarrassed—now they were scared. Even in the state I was in, I could tell the difference.

There was another sound under Mrs. Fallowfield’s voice, and it wasn’t any of the Huntsmen. Or Judge Jeffreys, either—he was watching silently from one of the dead trees, wedged in the branches, a snagged kite now. The growl was so low it seemed to be coming out of the ground, and it was so cold and evil that the thunder just stopped, and the lightning shrank away, and the whole storm sort of sidled off, scuffing its feet, pretending it hadn’t been doing anything. I got my elbows under me, and I dragged myself around to look at Mrs. Fallowfield.