The Alchemy Press Book of Urban Mythic 2 Read online

  Moments passed before their eyes adjusted to the gloom.

  There was a faint intimation of power here for those with a sense for it. Not the real power of unsullied forest, but a tiny charge from butchered nature in the heart of concrete and tarmac. They would be able to draw strength from it.

  It would aid the Vättar too.

  The Vättar were already in place and waiting at the centre of a large grassy area surrounded by trees. There was litter everywhere: bottles, glass shards and beer cans, fast food wrappers, disposable barbecues and discarded needles. The trees sagged as if their spirits were broken. They were scarred, trunks carved and cut. Some had been artlessly sprayed with paint. Others burnt. But they lived still and beneath the filth there was earth. Real earth.

  Råhanna felt a tremor through the soles of her feet.

  Real earth.

  The Vättar stood in line, six to her six; a row of little grey men with features like weathered stone in the near dark. She sensed movement at the edges of the grass and caught her breath. There were shadows flitting among the trees.

  Her old heart was beating hard against her ribs as she met Grandfather Vätte’s gaze. Their eyes locked and he nodded to her. She nodded back a tacit understanding between them.

  ‘Nikki,’ she breathed. ‘Begin.’

  Nikki took up his violin and began to play. The sense of power in the park intensified, thickening on the air. Just briefly Råhanna thought she caught a snigger from the direction of the trees but it was quickly stifled.

  As Nikki’s eerie tune rose into the night the trees seemed to recover their posture, snapping to attention. The grass, so trampled and worn unfolded again, blades stretching upwards, growing and gaining in emerald lustre.

  Her aches were all gone, her stooped back straight. Even the Vättar were growing in stature. She sought out Grandfather Vätte’s eyes again as he began to speak:

  ‘Vättar. It is time to pay debts and honour agreements,’ he commanded, his voice carrying far on night air now humming with magic.

  At once they began to fade from sight.

  ‘My friends,’ Råhanna called. While the Vättar vanished Råhanna and her posse turned together in the direction of the trees at the far side of the grass. Then they began marching toward the unseen watchers, spreading out. The huldra sang to Nikki’s tune and everything seemed to both slow and speed up at the same time. With a low growl the troll broke into a lumbering jog, a great stone club appearing in his hand.

  ‘Now is the reckoning!’ Råhanna called out onto the night air, her voice resonant and strong.

  Despite their stature Vättar move quickly, especially when invisible. The screams began before Råhanna even reached the edge of the grass. Human screams.

  They continued long after.

  The following morning former friendships had been renewed and old solidarities restored. For the residents of Paradise Walk, the city had become a slightly better and cleaner place.

  Death and the Weaver

  By Lou Morgan

  The map was lying. There was no other explanation for it. She had definitely taken the third exit at the Quimper roundabout and, frankly, there was nowhere else she could have gone wrong. Sarah spread the creases of the map as flat as she could across the steering wheel and hunched forward, peering into the gloom. She should have listened to the lawyer.

  It wasn’t like she was lost. You couldn’t get lost when you were going back to somewhere, could you? Especially if it was somewhere you’d spent every summer when you were a child.

  Even if you hadn’t actually been back there in more years than you wanted to remember, and it looked like there wasn’t just a new road, but an entire new town in between you and where you were trying to go.

  Sarah pulled the car over to the side of the road and rumpled the map into a ball, tossing it into the passenger seat with the empty sandwich packet and the folder of paperwork the lawyer had handed her – right before he suggested she might want to check into a hotel for the night rather than make the drive up to Locronan tonight.

  ‘The weather changes fast up there in the autumn – perhaps you aren’t familiar with it if you know it in the summer. You will remember the weather, yes?’

  She hadn’t. The weather, much like the road, was something she’d managed to forget in the years between visits. How the cloud swept down from nowhere, wrapping around the hills and smothering the little town in a clammy grey blanket. How the rain could manage to be horizontal, and somehow wetter than rain anywhere else. And now she was sitting in the middle of it. In the dark. With a map that was printed in 1985, which had what looked like a smear of mustard across one of the major roads. Now it was going dark and of course there were no streetlights.

  She smacked both her hands on the steering wheel in frustration.

  She should definitely have listened to the lawyer.

  *

  The letter had come out of the blue. It had taken seven phone calls and most of a bottle of wine to work out that following the sudden death of some particularly obscure relative, she was now the proud owner of a slightly dilapidated house in Cornouaille. She’d sat back in her chair and emptied the rest of the bottle of wine into her glass.

  ‘Tell me what I should do,’ she’d asked the empty room. It didn’t answer.

  In the end, it was her agent’s idea that she move out to the house for a while. She could hear him rolling his eyes on the other end of the phone. ‘You’re behind with your pieces, and the gallery’s fine for now. Maybe the change of scene will do you good. New air. New colours. New … something?’

  ‘Hint taken.’

  ‘I’m just saying.’

  ‘You’re saying the gallery’s pissed off.’

  ‘You’ve asked them to push back the show, Sarah. Twice. They don’t like that.’

  ‘You mean you don’t like it.’

  ‘I mean if you don’t show, none of us get paid. So, no. I don’t like it.’

  ‘Fine.’ She sounded more petulant than she’d meant to.

  ‘You’re going to give me the ‘blocked’ speech again, aren’t you?’

  ‘And you’re going to give me the ‘weavers don’t get blocked’ speech again in return, aren’t you?’

  ‘So we’ve shorthanded it. Wonderful. Look, I’ve got to run to a meeting. You know: with one of my clients who actually pays my bills?’

  ‘You’re a bottomless well of sympathy.’

  ‘Why I’m an agent and not an artist, petal,’ he said with a laugh and hung up. Sarah smiled and dropped her phone back onto the table, flipping through the photos the lawyer had sent. She remembered the house, dimly. It stood on the edge of the square in the oldest part of town, tall and narrow and with moss growing out of the cracks in the granite blocks. In her memory of it, the windows were open to the sunshine. Cheerful blue-painted window boxes were stuffed with yellow flowers, and an old-fashioned glass and wrought iron lantern (the closest thing the square had to streetlights) swung from the end of an arm bolted to the stone. It had cast flickering shadows on the walls of the bedroom she slept in whenever they stayed there, as they had for weeks every summer. At the time, she had never really thought of the house they spent all that time in as belonging to someone, being something anybody could own. All that mattered was that it meant ‘family’. Or it had, anyway. Now it belonged to her. Just her. The name in the lawyer’s letter was unfamiliar: a cousin of some kind, and it was jarring, somehow, to think that time had moved on there just as it had everywhere else.

  She would sell the house. It was the sensible thing to do, looking at the photos. It was damp. Old. Not the kind of place she had the time – or energy for. And then she saw the loom. It was standing in the middle of the single room that made up the ground floor of the house, shrouded in cobwebs. No-one had touched it for years, by the look of it. No-one, not since her father, who had taught her how to weave on it the summer it had rained.

  So there she was, leaning over her steering whe
el and swearing at the rain, with a hired car full of boxes and a tatty little transit van containing the rest of her worldly goods following a day behind. She should have remembered the rain. ‘Well, fine,’ she said to the empty sandwich packet and the crumpled map … and the scattering of apple cores, crisp packets and biscuit wrappers that littered the footwell next to her. ‘Fine, fine, fine.’ She started the engine again.

  She was almost sure she was back on the right track (and almost as sure that one of the headlights was about to give up the ghost) when she heard the sound of another engine coming up fast behind her. Well. Fast-ish. It had sounded like it was coming up quickly but there was no sign of anything in the rear-view mirror. No headlights, at least – nothing. Not until there was a sudden whoosh of water into the side of her car, rocking it gently as a small, battered van belted past her and disappeared off up the road.

  Without stopping to think about it, Sarah put her foot down and shot off into the darkness after the rapidly fading rear lights.

  *

  She lost the van pretty quickly: whoever the driver was, it was clear that he or she was, amongst other things, certifiable, throwing the van into corners and waiting until the very last possible second to brake. However hard she tried to keep up, hoping it would lead her to somewhere she recognised (or could at least find on the map), she never seemed to get any closer, and after a little while even the glow of the rear lights was lost to the darkness. Not that it mattered, because as the last glimmer of red faded into nothing, a white sign appeared at the side of the road.

  Bienvenue à Locronan.

  The little car park was nothing more than a cleared field, more mud than it was grass. Another thing she’d forgotten: no cars in the square. It would make unloading the van fun. It hadn’t been important when she was a kid. When they arrived at the start of the summer, she had always run on ahead past the hotels and the restaurants and the tourist shops, down the road all the way to the town square; leaving her father to trail behind with the bags. The square had opened up before her, with its cobbles and its church and its wishing well and the rickety wooden stage where the artists sold portraits; just as it did now, in the rain. And there, almost directly across from her and next to the church, was the house.

  The smell wrapped around her when she opened the door. Old stone and dust and pockets of damp. And wood and wool, because there was the loom, waiting for her. The light from the streetlamp outside, the only light, poured in through the open door and cast long shadows behind the wooden beams of the frame. There was still cloth on it, still thread in the shuttle which rested on the side as though it had only been set down for a moment. Her fingers left clean stripes in the velvety dust that had settled on the wood.

  There was a candle half-melted onto the granite of the windowsill. Next to it was a box of matches. The cardboard felt slightly damp to the touch, but the first match that Sarah struck caught and the little candle at least gave her enough light to close the door, find a chair and collapse into it a little after midnight.

  *

  ‘Bernez? It would be nice if I still had a bedroom floor left by the time you’re done.’ Sarah leaned round the top of the tightly spiralled stone stairs and handed a mug of coffee to her neighbour, who was busy yanking handfuls of wiring out from under the boards on the first floor. He shook his head at her as he took the mug.

  ‘A few holes in the floor, or electricity? It’s up to you, of course.’

  ‘You win.’ She gave him her best smile, and he grunted back at her. It was as good a response as she was likely to get. The two months since she’d moved in had taught her as much. Bernez, a heavily-built man in his late fifties, lived in one of the houses behind the square and thought of himself as a jack-of-all-trades. Builder, electrician, plumber, decorator; expert on politics, economics and anything else which happened to catch his eye. He was, however, kind and friendly and had gone out of his way to look after her since she’d arrived. It was Bernez who had got the ancient gas cooker in the kitchen working, Bernez who had checked the chimneys and shown her how to build and light a fire that stayed lit and didn’t smoke her out of the house; Bernez who had evicted the family of rats from the bathroom and who had tracked down a shower which fitted in the impossibly small space for it and which actually ran hot. All she had to do in return was keep the coffee coming and ignore the fact that everything she owned smelled like an ashtray.

  She was settling in better than she’d expected to. It had only taken a day or two to arrange her belongings in the house, and Bernez had turned up on her doorstep the morning after she’d arrived, toolbag in his hand, to offer his services. It made him feel useful, he said. Bad health had forced him to retire, selling his business in the process. ‘The stress. My heart,’ he’d said, gesturing to his chest with a hand like a bear’s paw. Sarah had managed not to comment on the cigarette between his fingers at the time, but only just. She liked Bernez. She still hadn’t quite forgiven him for the hangover from the terrifyingly strong drink he called ‘flip’, and which he’d given her at the welcome party he’d thrown for her, but she liked him.

  While Bernez worked on the electrics, the plumbing and the everything-else, she’d worked on the loom. It wasn’t in too bad a state, considering, and a couple of days’ attention with a hammer, a screwdriver and some sandpaper put it in pretty good shape. When she blew the dust off the cloth, it was a shock to see the familiar pattern in front of her. The same one she’d learned with her father. It was the same cloth. No-one had ever finished it. They had simply left it, waiting for her to come back. And now she had.

  When her agent Jonny finally managed to get hold of her, he thought finishing it for the show was the best idea she’d ever had. Another thing Sarah had discovered on her first day in the house was that the thick stone walls made it almost impossible to get a mobile signal – in fact, to get one she had to walk back through the square and up the hill to the row of little cottages perched like rotten teeth at the top. And even then, it wasn’t reliable.

  The place was perfect.

  She was closing the shutters one evening when she heard the engine again. That same noise: halfway between an angry hairdryer and a very, very, small chainsaw. Pulled up on the other side of the square was a battered little 2CV van, its engine hiccupping in the dusk. There was the sound of hammering, and a pair of legs appeared from underneath it as its owner rolled himself out across the cobbles. He stood up, trying to wipe the oil off his hands on his jeans. ‘Like that’s going to work,’ Sarah said to herself, and picked up the old cloth she’d been using to clean the window earlier.

  The car’s owner obviously didn’t hear her coming. When she tapped him on the shoulder, he visibly twitched as he turned round. ‘Here,’ Sarah handed him the cloth. ‘I saw you from my window over there. I thought maybe you needed a hand?’

  He looked her up and down, hesitated, then took the cloth with a smile. The corners of his eyes wrinkled as he nodded his thanks. He was about her age, she realised, with a band of freckles that ran straight across the bridge of his nose. He looked … familiar, somehow. Like a face in the crowd she’d passed once and couldn’t quite place.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, wiping his hands on the towel. ‘I didn’t realise I had an audience.’

  ‘I wasn’t watching you,’ she said, too quickly. ‘I just heard the engine.’

  ‘It’s loud, I know. I’m sorry. I’m working and it just … fffft.’ He threw up his hands with an exasperated sound.

  ‘How did you even get it up here? The roads are all blocked to cars, aren’t they?’

  ‘Most of them. I grew up here. There’s a back way into the square. Shhh.’ He winked conspiratorially at her.

  ‘You’re from here?’ Maybe that’s why he looked so familiar – maybe they’d met one summer. She thought back through years of old memories, searching for a face that might fit.

  ‘My whole life, I’ve been right here. It’s not so good a story, is it? Not like yours.�
� With a smile, he handed the towel back. ‘She’s running again – for now. I have to go … but thank you.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll see you round? I live there, on the corner. I’ve not been here that long: I don’t really know many people…’ Sarah tailed off. Why had she said that? And why had she said it to a complete stranger? What was she doing? She folded her arms across her chest, still holding the towel.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘You know me, Sarah.’

  It was only as she watched the rear lights of the van bouncing off across the square that she realised she hadn’t told him her name.

  *

  The knock on the door in the morning was a surprise. Bernez didn’t usually knock: he usually just shouted a greeting as he let himself in, and if she wasn’t there he made himself a cup of coffee and got on with whatever it was he was doing. Sarah didn’t like unexpected knocks at the door. In her experience, they weren’t usually the good kind.

  A young woman stood on the doorstep, her eyes red and her skin pale. She was twisting a handkerchief round and around in her fist, and Sarah didn’t even need to meet her eyes to know what had happened. Bernez’s heart, it seemed, had finally given out on him in the night. His daughter knew they’d been ‘close’ (and Sarah didn’t like the emphasis she put on the word, but she let it pass) and had wanted to give her the news.

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ Sarah asked, knowing what the answer would be. Her visitor simply shook her head and walked away, leaving Sarah to close the door and step back into a house that felt that little bit less complete.

  There were other electricians, other plumbers, other builders … but none of them were Bernez. They were fine. They were bland and boring and beige, and they wouldn’t dream of sitting in her favourite chair, smoking furiously, and telling her stories about the town. Bland. Boring. Beige. They were stories that she remembered in a part of her brain that itched from time to time: stories she knew she’d heard in the summers she had spent in Locronan. They were more than just stories: in some parts of Brittany, Bernez said, people still believed in them. The korrigans hiding in the hills and the devils who were waiting to trick unwary travellers out of their souls, or the kannerezed noz, who washed the clothes of the dead in the rivers and who, if seen, would demand that unfortunate passers-by helped to wring out the cloth. But nowhere civilised believed in them anymore, Bernez would add, not in Cournouialle at least – before going on, always, to shrug and say that it might be different in Penthièvre…