I opened my eyes to find myself groggy, aching, and weak. An iron collar was around my neck. Though it wasn’t fastened, I was too weak to pull it off. As things began to shift into focus, I recognized Sarah’s voice, arguing with Alan and Barbara.
“This was not part of the plan,” she said angrily.
“You said you wanted to help us, and help us you have,” Barbara said.
“Not like this. I didn’t agree to this. I thought we would just take him to the barrows!”
“Don’t blame us for your own mistaken assumption.” Alan growled.
I lay on cold, damp grass, but at my back I felt heat. A lot of heat. It took me a great deal of effort but I managed to roll over to my side to see the source. A giant bonfire, stacked high with logs and scrap wooden pallets, raged before me. My shirt had been removed.
“We were only supposed to bring him to the fae!” Sarah cried. “Not kill him!”
Oh great, I thought miserably.
“This is what is required,” Barbara said coldly. “For all your charitable overtures, for all the sympathy and free goods from your shop, you’ll never be one of us. You’ll never understand what it’s like, to scrape by day by day, to lose the only man you ever loved to …to them! Life is unfair. It’s unfair for us and it’s unfair for him too!” She gestured towards me.
“You weren’t there, Sarah,” Alan said. “You didn’t have to see your child, dead, hanging on a rope from the rafters, face distorted, eyes bulging.”
“And that’s why I wanted to help you,” Sarah said. “I want you all to be free. You said returning him to the fae would break the curse. But I won’t let you kill him.”
I felt her hands at my neck. She tossed the collar to the ground and I felt my strength returning.
“I hope you kept the turtleneck, Sarah. It’s Loro Piana,” I said weakly, just managing a wink. My senses sharpening, I realized that we were not alone with Alan and Barbara. A crowd of villagers stood with them, and they glared at us with hatred. Sarah helped me to my feet.
“Shut up and start running!” she shouted.
I would have, but my legs still felt like lead. I staggered forward, almost falling. Alan grabbed my arm before I could flee, and another burly man grabbed my other arm, roughly pushing Sarah aside. Barbara restrained her.
An elderly woman, who I recognized from town, stepped forward with a bowl of a blue substance that appeared to be woad. Her face was emotionless as she dipped a gnarled hand into the woad and traced a few lines on my chest. The fire cracked and hissed before me, bright flames whipping upwards, contrasting with the overcast grey sky. Several crows were perched in the trees surrounding us, waiting for the aftermath of this dark ceremony.
The men brought me closer and closer to the blaze. More people stepped forward, lifting my legs, until I was facing the fire head first. My eyes stung, my face felt unbearably hot, as though I was being thrust into an oven. So this is how it ends. Fire. Of all things, it had to be fire. I wouldn’t even have the dignity of dying by smoke inhalation first. The fire roared and crackled, ready to consume me. Amid the din, I could hear Sarah screaming and I almost felt smug that at least she would have to live with the guilt of what she had abetted.
The men swung my body and released. For a moment, I felt nothing. I was consumed by a great bright light. And then the pain began, erupting on every inch of my skin. I heard the sound of my own voice, releasing a terrible sound, like no scream I’d ever uttered.
But then, something within me surged, a great force bubbling inside. I leapt and was carried above the fire, into the smoke. I coughed and sputtered and felt myself falling. I tried to raise my arms to brace myself, but I was too late. I crashed through the top of a tree, branches and leaves breaking my fall, albeit painfully.
I groaned, but gratefully gulped down the fresh air. I ran my hands over my face, my hair and then held them out to examine. My skin was untouched. Beyond the smoke that scorched my throat and the branches poking my back, I was miraculously unscathed. I breathed a ragged sigh of relief, filled with the wonder of my escape. Was that…me? Did I do that?
I was cradled between two large branches of a great oak tree. From my vantage point, I gazed down to see the now familiar indented circle in the soil. I noticed for the first time that the ground in the center was not even, but rather dotted with mounds, not so large as to be immediately noticeable, but gently outlined by the shadows of the grass. Barrows, perhaps. Sarah had mentioned barrows.
I searched around me for evidence of the bonfire, but all I could see was a thin plume of smoke some large distance away. The forest was silent. I carefully crept downward, aware of every snap and rustle as I descended. A mist lay over the ground, comforting after the searing heat of the fire.
On the other side of the clearing, I could just glimpse the outline of a pair of antlers. The stag came into focus as I approached and the mist receded. He watched me passively. I stepped over the indentation that traced the circle in the ground. I could see the eyes of the creature more clearly, the color was an unnatural blue, bright and disconcerting. Like mine.
“You,” I said, my voice stopping short of a shout. The stag reared on its hind legs, kicked in the air, and sped off. I ran after it, but I only made it a few steps before my foot sank into the soft ground of the barrow, which began to collapse rapidly around me, sending me into the darkness below.
I fell against what sounded like pottery as it fractured underneath me. It was pitch black—I could not see any hole above me indicating how far I had fallen. I stretched out a hand and felt hard packed dirt less than a foot away from my face. A sweaty claustrophobic anxiety settled over me. I picked up what seemed like a rounded piece of ceramic laying beside me and froze in shock. This was no piece of pottery. It had two rounded eye holes. There were teeth.
Bones. They were bones. Everywhere. I was laying on top of an ossuary. Alan’s words came back to me: They ruled over the humans here as cruel gods, empowered by no less a sacrifice than human lives. Were these the discarded remains of those unfortunates brought to the bloody altar? I thought of my dream, how magnificent it felt to bring that knife down on my victim’s neck. Maybe this is where I belong.
The bones were shifting beneath me, rumbling and giving way. I was sinking into them, they were closing in on my face. I flailed, trying to push them aside, but there were too many. I pushed away the panic enclosing around me. Keep moving, I told myself. Finally, after batting a leg bone, I could see a pale sliver of light. I barreled towards it as though swimming in a macabre sea. I pulled my body through, bringing a pile of bones with me. I brushed myself off and stood.
It was an earthen tunnel, lit only by a few torches in the wall, emitting pale, cold flame. Muffled moaning emanated from the walls, as though echoing from a distance. At the end was a massive wooden door, intricately carved with scrollwork that upon a closer look were vines and leaves adorned with acorns, berries, and other natural motifs. It was old, perhaps even medieval. It opened with ease.
Before me was a vast hall of sorts—iif something without a roof could be considered a hall—filled with different groupings of people, clearly unaware of each other. Instead of a ceiling were churning black clouds, likely an illusion for all I could tell. To my left, the walls were finely upholstered with blue damask hangings and gilded wood. The floors were an elaborate parquet. A couple, attired like aristocrats of the 18th century played a spirited game of whist at a table, a bucket of champagne at their side, with small cakes and pastries scattered about. The woman laughed and laughed as she put her cards down, her eyes vacant. She absently reached for a cake. Her companion was a handsome man, blonde hair tied back in that century’s fashion, his eyes burning, smirking at the woman with a sinister air.
To my right, big band music blared from an area arrayed like a World War II era canteen. A pair of soldiers in uniform euphorically danced with women, blonde hair permed into curls, the mark of the fae also in their eyes. A tray of tea sandwiches sat on a counter.
The humans paid me no heed, it was as though they were totally engrossed by their revelries. The fae, however, met my gaze and grinned in a way that chilled me to my core.
It was so disconcerting that I almost ran into a man about my age awkwardly dancing to Oasis with a neon-colored cocktail in his hand. He chuckled and slapped me on the back with his free hand.
“Sorry,” I muttered.
“No worries, mate,” he said, his speech slurred. “Hey, why don’t you grab yourself a drink? Let loose a bit!”
“What is this place?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” He said with a goofy smile. “It’s a party! Look around!” The “bar” in which I encountered the man looked suspiciously like it could have been a set in the Spice Girls movie. A fae woman with a Victoria Beckham bob filled a line of glasses with the same unappetizing drink mix. She winked at me.
“What year is it?”
The man looked at me like I was crazy.
“Did you hit your head or something? It’s 1998!” I noticed the man had a wedding band on. Barbara’s husband went missing in the forest twenty-five years ago. I grabbed his shoulders, taking the drink out of his hand and setting it on the bar counter. The fae bartender smirked.
“It’s not 1998. It’s 2023!” The man laughed, but I could see a sign of panic in his eyes.
“Nonsense. I’ve only been here an hour or so.”
“Is your wife’s name Barbara? From Druwich?”
His eyes widened. He stopped smiling.
“Wha…yes, yes. I just went for a stroll. Couldn’t have been more than an hour or so,” he repeated incredulously.
“That was twenty-five years ago,” I said slowly. The man blinked a couple times. His chest heaved as though his heart rate were rising precipitously. His eyes widened and his face contorted hideously. He opened his mouth to issue what should have been a scream, but instead he laughed, a wretched laugh, loud and painful, more akin to choking than an expression of joy.
The fae bartender put a drink back into his hand and whispered something in his ear. Barbara’s husband stopped laughing, but his face remained stricken with terror. Tears ran silently down his widened eyes.
I backed away from him and moved on, passing an Elizabethan man reciting poetry to a bored looking fae woman in a farthingale, pausing every few lines to drink a hearty draught of wine. A group of Victorian men boxed while others cheered, all laughing in that same frantic, frenzied way. The male fae taking their bets nodded at me. His thralls distracted, he grabbed one of their bowler hats, and flourished it at me with an obsequious bow.
“Welcome, welcome,” he said. I opened my mouth to speak but he raised a finger to his lips.
“You must proceed,” he said, hardly able to stifle his laughter. “The best part is yet to come.”
Another massive, intricately carved wooden door appeared before me and opened to another room, this time a dark earthen chamber with low ceilings, only illuminated by the same sort of pale torches I had seen before. Every few feet, a small path deviated into even smaller chambers, from which emanated sounds of low moaning. I decided, perhaps against my better judgment, to investigate.
Inside one of the rooms, a man lay on the ground, surrounded by oil lamps. A fae man bent over him. With a small, sharp knife, the fae was removing the skin from the man’s hand, as precisely as removing the rind from an orange. The man moaned with a terrible smile on his face, his eyes glassy. They rolled around his head listlessly and the memory of the flayed man on the road thrust itself into my brain. What the fuck. I took a step backwards. The fae looked up at me and waved with a bloody hand.
I staggered and ran back to the main chamber, stumbling into the wall, which to my great astonishment, began to cough. I stood and examined what I had bumped into. It was a great mass of vine growing out of the dirt wall, blood red with leaves of green and purple. But this was no ordinary plant growth. For one, it had shoes, dusty leather things that once had likely been quite fine. The vines wrapped around a part of rotting legs, little more than bones. They snaked their way through a rib cage adorned with scraps of flesh and fabric. Skeletal arms were spread out at its sides, buds bloomed at the fingertips.
The source of the cough was the head. I could recognize that it was the face of a man, though the skin was sallow and studded with plant growth. The man’s eyes had been plucked out, replaced by the leaves of the vine. His only discerning features were his voluminous mustache and a grinning mouth, still full of teeth.
“Hello, William,” it rasped. “Don’t you recognize your old great-grandad, Richard?”