'Where to?' she said, confused.
And that was it: he had no idea where they were supposed to be going. 'Just move,' he replied.
The forest was unchanging, never-ending. There was a faint ambient light, enough to guide them, but Mallory couldn't comprehend its source. They ran as fast as they could amongst the trees, occasionally tripping on creepers or ploughing through bushes, jumping gently trickling streams or clambering through boulder-strewn hollows. Most of the time Mallory had to help Sophie along; she was drained of energy, at first a little delirious even, but gradually coming to her senses.
The sounds of pursuit drew closer. He heard the yelp of hounds above the crackle of his footsteps on the dry forest floor, felt the rumble of horses' hooves in the soft leaf-mould, and always the intermittent threatening dissonance of the hunting horn.
'We have to find him,' Sophie gasped, during one of her occasional moments of confusion. 'The ... the Devil.'
'The Devil,' Mallory repeated bitterly. He wondered what hell would look like, recalled the last days of Stefan's rule in the cathedral and thought perhaps that he had seen the start of it.
The first inkling he had that the end was near was the appearance of shapes moving fast amongst the trees on both sides. They bounded low, like ghosts in the gloom. He found it hard to look and run in the obstacle- littered environment, but eventually he realised they were hounds, long, thin and whippetlike, but with an unnatural colouring of red and white.
Running
, he thought with a sick desperation.
He was always running.
A metaphor for his life.
The dogs began to close in with a pincer movement. It was hopeless; it had been hopeless from the moment he had set off from the cathedral, but he had tried his best. He wondered if that was enough.
A storm of hoofbeats filled the air. And still they ran. A laugh escaped his lips. It was crazy. They should just lie down and be trampled or torn apart.
They leaped another stream where white water cascaded over glistening rocks and almost became bogged down in the mud on the other side. A rider jumped it easily. In the thin light, Mallory had an impression of furs and leather, and of a long pole with a sickle attached to the end. The horse, as he glimpsed it, looked like a horse in every way, yet he strangely felt that it was some unrecognisable alien beast. It danced amongst the trees in a way no horse could ever achieve. Mallory sensed more riders at his back, just the slice of a sickle away.
The rider to his left began to close in, raising the weapon to his underarm in a jousting position.
Not long now,
Mallory thought. At his side, Sophie was lost to her running and her thoughts.
The rider drew closer. The sickle glowed silver, cruelly sharp.
Suddenly, Mallory grabbed Sophie's hand and yanked her to a halt. 'What are you doing?' she asked, dazed. He pulled her to him and wrapped his arms around her, a feeble protection and a final act of communion with the woman he loved. He smelled her hair, kissed her gently on the forehead.
The closest rider reined in his horse and came back. The others circled in a wide, lazy arc, the hounds baying and whimpering in the gloom beyond. Mallory held up his head, waiting for the killing stroke, but the huntsman lowered his weapon and waved it curtly to prompt them to move forwards.
They continued that way in silence for ten minutes, Mallory's arm tight around Sophie's shoulders, until they came to a clearing. In a circle of well-worn grass at the centre was a standing stone slouching to one side. Overhead, Mallory could see the stars for the first time, but no constellations that he recognised. The full moon, though, looked down brightiy. There was a cathedral-like stillness and gravity.
The riders brought their horses to a halt around the edge of the clearing and a deep silence descended; even the hounds were quiet.
Not long after, the black dog padded out into the moonlight on the other side of the clearing. When it reached the standing stone, it dropped down to its haunches and stared at Mallory and Sophie in such a human way it made Mallory's flesh prickle.
'We come with the night,' it said in a voice like iron on gravel. Mallory started in shock.
Its red eyes looked as big as saucers. Sophie surfaced from her daze, gripping Mallory's arm tightly.
'What you seek lies beyond,' the dog continued. 'Follow the path. Do not turn from it, whatever you might see.' The dog rose up and began to leave, pausing halfway to turn its head back to them. 'Nothing is as it seems. Ever,' it said. It lost itself beyond the riders.
'I can't see a path,' Sophie whispered.
As Mallory scanned the tree line on the other side of the clearing, the moonlight illuminated the standing stone at just the right angle and a trail of energy ran out from the base of it into the forest. It was undoubtedly of the same essence as the Blue Fire, but this had a milky luminescence, like the moon on waves.
Sophie's eyes were wide and distant. 'I suppose we should go,' she said.
When they passed the standing stone it felt as though they were moving through a gauzy veil. Briefly, they appeared to lose touch with each other, although they had been holding hands, and were again shordy after. And then they were across the clearing and plunging into the dark beneath the branches.
A night wind slipped amongst the trees like a spirit, bringing with it aromas of pine and grass and sleeping flowers. Mallory was filled with something close to peace.
This is the end,
he thought dreamily.
We're going to see the Devil.
As they followed the shimmering white path, they became aware of movement amongst the trees: shapes drifted by, as insubstantial as mist, some human in form, some animals, some a combination of the two.
'What are they?' Sophie asked.
Before he could answer, they were both overwhelmed with a tremendous sense of presence, as if the ground on which they walked and the trees and vegetation were all one being. They gripped each other, rooted to the spot, Existence spinning all around them. Their own thoughts and emotions were intermingled with something from outside, so far beyond them in every aspect they couldn't begin to comprehend it.
Eventually, they found the strength to progress in faltering steps, unable to speak.
They were suddenly aware that they didn't know how long they had been there; it could have been years, or just a second. Their own sense of personality appeared to be dissipating too, or at least growing weaker, merging with what was around them.
At the point where they felt they were about to cease to be, the path wound down a bank and into a dense mass of vegetation. They tried to pause before it, not seeing how they could pass, but some force pulled them in, the leaves and creepers, brambles and ivy parting and then enveloping them so hard that the mass pressed against their faces, chests, backs.
Mallory could no longer see Sophie. Desperately, he called out her name.
'I'm here!' she said. Her fingers fumbled for his and locked on; not there, but there, always.
They continued that way for a while, drifting in a world of green. But then the vegetation became more hard-packed. Leaves pushed into Mallory's mouth, pressed against his eyes. He lost touch with Sophie's hand, fought for it but couldn't find it anywhere. And when he tried to call her name, the leaves and creepers forced further into his mouth, pressing against the rim of his throat, making him gag. The prick of thorns was sharp against his wrists, growing sharper still until he would have yelled out if he had been able. With a sickening realisation, he knew the brambles were breaking into his veins, forcing their way along them. Yet the veins weren't being torn apart, in the same way that he wasn't choking as the creepers found their way down his throat - though he gagged and gagged - and continued on into his stomach. The vegetation was consuming him from the inside out. Soon there wouldn't be any him at all; just green.
Before he lost consciousness, a voice echoed around him, repeating the words he had heard before. 'There are worlds within worlds. None are real.'
'The
Devil ...
the Devil
The car sped away. Blood trickled over his knuckles, splashed on the steering wheel. In the rear-view mirror, he saw his face . . . saw into himself . . . Horrible . . . horrible . . .
He could feel it looming ahead of him, a shadow so big it threatened to block out the moon and stars and all of Existence. He could feel subtle fingers reaching into his brain, twisting the very essence of him, tweaking memories and half-thoughts. There was a darkness like that experienced only in the thickest forests where human feet never trod. It was coming, across space, across the worlds, through the trees, towards him, daring him to scream, entreating him to break apart in fear.
Mallory fell from here to there and back again, falling still.
It was coming . . .
'You have the smell of my enemies on you.' The voice sounded like branches swaying in the wind, yet strangely like his own voice reflected back at him.
Mallory stood in another clearing, much smaller than the last. Before him sat a man composed of leaves and branches instead of flesh and bones, clear eyes staring beneath a brow of fronds. Ander horns protruded from his head. He lounged on a throne made of living willow, oak, rowan and ivy, appeared to be part of it, and both of them part of the surrounding flora, which was as dense as a wall on every side. Mallory recognised echoes of Green Man carvings he had seen in ancient churches, hints of Robin Hood in the way the vegetation arranged itself like clothes; here was Pan, the living mind of nature. Or the Devil, depending on your point of view.
Through the hazy dream-atmosphere that swathed everything, Mallory felt his thoughts stir with anxiety, laden with the burden of propaganda subtly insinuated from the moment he had set foot in the cathedral; from the moment his education began. He recalled that same profile looming, ghostly, above the city, considered every picture he'd seen of Satan - it was all here in the figure before him.
'I have been with your world since the earliest times,' the Green Man said, as if he could read Mallory's thoughts.
The sense of presence was so powerful - much, much bigger than the figure before him, bigger than the world - that Mallory could barely speak. His mind couldn't cope with what it was perceiving, his thoughts like quicksilver, slipping away from him before he could get a hold on them, the gaps in his consciousness filled with visual and aural hallucinations so that he couldn't tell what was experience and what was imagination.
Panic,
he thought, grasping at reason.
The dread of the beating heart of nature, of Pan, the mind that lay behind it all.