And like a coin in one of Jonathan Lorimer’s coin tricks, the storm was gone. The earth stilled, and the eyes of mindless savages cleared to present them with a reality filled with confusion. The Stag and Snake lay in disarray, packed with patrons clutching makeshift weapons. Tables, chairs, and bar stools lay toppled and broken. Glasses and bottles shattered. Cracks in the ancient beams.

  ‘Sharon, what’s going on?’ said Ian Fathering, a twenty something roofer with a thick thatch of chestnut hair that had been stained red with blood, the same as his face and hands.

  The barmaid looked in horror at the sickle clenched in her fist and backed away from Ian, whom everyone knew carried a flame for Sharon. As if it was scolding hot, she dropped the weapon. ‘You were… we were…’ She cast around for support, for someone else to explain the madness.

  The villagers, who’d been losing the battle against the wyrmals, hesitated, exchanging looks. Ma Tunstall lying lifelessly in Judith Sharky’s lap. Across the pub, slumped against the bar, was her dead son. Judith gently placed Ma flat and closed her eyes.

  ‘Put down your weapons.’ Judith stepped over the body of Grundig Fletcher and went to her son. Tenderly, she closed his eyes too. ‘It’s over. There’ll be no more killing today.’ Tears scalded her cheeks, trying to wash away the blood as if it was grief. There were never enough tears for that.

  A little girl in dirty green shorts, Judith thought was called Vicky Wilmot, knelt bawling her eyes out, with the fingers of her gore-encrusted hands splayed rigid. No one had yet gone to her, when at the shattered pub doors appeared Carly Wilmnot. She clutched the frame, a dishevelled and feral eyed banshee which for a moment could have made them all think it wasn’t all over.

  ‘Vicky, oh Vicky!’ Carly Wilmont rushed to her daughter and gathered her in an all-consuming embrace. ‘Mummy’s here. It’s okay, mummy’s here.’

  But of course it wasn’t okay.

  Ian Farthing said, ‘What do we do now?’

  Judith laid her gardening fork to rest next to her son against the bar. ‘We do what we’ve always done. We bury our dead and together we rebuild.’

  They wandered into the street, as if blinking awake into a new world. The detritus of the storm lay everywhere. Pieces of buildings, branches ripped from trees, and of course bodies both alive and dead were scattered amid the drifts of sand. The sky was coloured the clear blue of an early evening in late summer. Birds sang their songs as the westering sun made a sundial of the ruins on Lorimer Hill, casting hands that pointed to the future.

  ###

  Deep in Hernshore wood, Sally Tunstall startled, as if waking from a bizarre dream. She crouched in the clearing of the fairy circle, naked with hands covering her face. When she drew them away, a frightening sense of surprise leapt in her chest at the strangeness of them. Like washing off sand in water, she turned her palms back and forth, until the last vestiges of the dream dissolved, and with it the feeling of strangeness too. Suddenly, her nakedness became all too apparent, and she stood, knees crossed, arms wrapped around her chest, struggling to cover her modesty. Then quickly, Sally found the path home, the one that would lead her out of the woods and into the fields back to Tunstall farm. Back, she hoped, to Gretchen, Toby, and Ma.

  Unless, of course, this was the vexing dream of a snow-white doe, merely dreaming she had a human soul.

  ###

  Something under the jeep cracked when they landed on the soft sand of the beach. They took an extra bounce forward with the grace of a boulder trying to skim across the surface of a lake. The crack became a hideous grinding until the engine backfired and died in a final belch of acrid smoke. Michael slammed on the brakes, skidding them to an abrupt halt that flung them forward.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  They sat in silence. Three sea gulls floated on a thermal out to sea, calling to each other as they drifted their separate ways. Waves caressed the shore with a rhythmic whisper, and a sweet and salty breeze held them in a benign embrace.

  Tink sniffed. ‘We made it.’

  Michael turned to Sam. ‘Are you okay?’ He pulled at him, patted him down, looked for injuries, as if he were the most precious thing in his world.

  ‘Dad, I’m okay.’

  Dad, Michael thought. The word hit him with all the shock of a cold shower. He smiled involuntarily, and the smile turned into a broad grin which he quickly stifled. Sam was already looking embarrassed by the slip of his tongue. No need to make it worse.

  ‘The sea… It’s beautiful,’ Tink said with wonderment, saving the Lorimer men’s blushes.

  Bruised and exhausted, they dismounted the dead jeep. Tink took Sam’s hand, and she dragged him excitedly to the water. Toby put one of his massive arms around Michael’s shoulders as he looked back the way they’d come. The dunes rolled lazily for a few hundred metres. The Lorimer beach house sat to one side of the Woods, Hernshore on the other.

  ‘We got them out, Mikey. Nat would have been proud of that.’ The big man’s words were brittle with the weight of emotion.

  ‘But what happens now? I wasn’t supposed to make it. That storm. Sugnar and Herne. I don’t know what any of it means.’

  ‘Maybe it’s over.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘The pact, the crossing, snakes and stags and sacrifice. Maybe it’s all over.’

  They went to join the kids. Tink had taken her shoes off and was paddling in the shallow water, jumping back from the rushing foam of breaking waves and laughing with delight. Sam saw the two men watching and held up a hand in a small awkward gesture. Michael waved back more enthusiastically, and stopped when an expression came over Sam’s face. It was hard to read. Mortification, maybe. Or shock mixed with sadness. The explanation revealed itself from the corner of Michael’s eye, as a white and tan terrier shot from the dunes. It skidded to a halt and silently barked back at the way it came.

  Pale and translucent, they walked from the dunes, the ghosts of Tara, Michael’s mother and father, other Lorimers of generations past, the lost townsfolk, and Nat. As beautiful as the day they’d met, Tara passed Michael with a smile and a nod. A piece of him yearned for those nights watching movies in her crap flat, drinking cheap wine. Nights that dissolved into an endless kiss of bodies tangled between sheets and the long sigh of young love. And it struck Michael then that all memories are a tangle of moonthread always anchoring the present in the past. For so long, he’d been unmoored: a man with no past and therefore no meaning. Tara was gone, so much was gone, and there was no getting it back.

  A sarcastic squire genuflecting to his Lord, Nat was next, mischievously doffing his imaginary hat. Even in death, he was a total dickhead, and Michael loved him for it. Then there was Michael’s parents, hand in hand. His father’s face said it all, that he was proud of him, and he was sorry, and like all parents in the end, he couldn’t stay. The crowd of ghosts walked onto the beach. Toby and Michael followed in their wake. Tink and Sam ran up to meet them, Sam sprinting ahead to come alongside his mother. The ghosts of the dunes did not speak, though Michael thought he heard a dog barking in the distance. The terrier pricked his eyes and sprinted up the shoreline, fading to nothing as he sped beyond the veil. The rest of the little dog’s companions walked the same way. Sam moved ahead of his mother, holding up his hands for her to stop. One by one, the spirits disappeared, until there was only Tara left, with her son backtracking, pleading for her not to go.

  That distant barking of a dog again, and Tara looked over her son’s shoulder. She managed to stop. Sam held out his arms and wrapped them around her. On tip toes, she kissed him and vanished in his grasp.

  Michael ran to Sam and held him. There wasn’t anything he could say so he let his son weep for his mother. Finally, Sam drew in a huge breath and shuddered. They sat down on the sand and were joined by Toby and Tink. The sea glistened and only a single gull remained, calling far out to sea. A single cloud, barely there at all, dusted the deepening blue expanse of a summer’s evening. It was as peaceful a place as anywhere until about thirty feet from shore, something broke the surface with a clawing gasp and a panicked thrashing of limbs and some of the saltiest language imaginable.

  Michael sprang up. ‘Nush?’

  More swearing between gasps for air.

  ‘It’s Nush.’

  ‘Who?’ Toby said.

  ‘My real estate agent,’ Michael said running to the sea and wading in. He was waist deep by the time Nush had swum in enough to get her feet under herself. They staggered back to dry land, Michael holding her up. The others came to meet them. Hands on knees, looking as bedraggled as them, though infinitely more drowned, Nush got her breath. When she straightened up, she attempted to clear her hair from her face and regain a modicum of composure.

  She took a deep breath. ‘Michael Lorimer…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ve bloody well decided I don’t want to sell your fucking beach house.’

  ‘Right. I understand. I’ve decided I don’t want to sell it.’

  ‘And I… and I…’

  ‘And you what?’

  ‘And I really want to kick you in the balls.’

  Toby burst out laughing. Tink snickered. Even Sam managed a small smile.

  ‘Right, that’s probably understandable,’ Michael conceded.

  ‘Oh, shut up you posh twat,’ she said and kissed him.

  Michael froze in shock before returning the kiss and folding her into his arms. It lasted long enough to embarrass the teenagers.

  ‘Get a room,’ Sam muttered.

  They broke off and Michael said, ‘Nush this is Sam, my son. The one I told you about on the phone.’

  ‘Son? You never told me about a son. You said you were coming to get me in that fucking freaky magical wood.’

  ‘I didn’t. You said you broke down and were back in London.’

  ‘I bloody well didn’t.’

  ‘I think,’ Toby interjected, ‘we might want to get back to the town and compare notes on the way. There’s lots to talk about. Even more to sort out back home, I bet.’

  ‘Fine by me. I’m freezing,’ Nush said. ‘But just to be clear, that is a jeep armed with a bloody massive machine gun, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ Michael said. ‘It’s a bit weird but I can explain.’

  ‘Oh no, that’s the least fucking weird thing about my day so far. I just wanted to check I wasn’t hallucinating.’