Spectred Isle (Green Men Book 1)

by K.J. Charles

discern a crude carving in one of the oak supports. The light, Randolph calculated, would never fall directly on it. It was a rough shape in which at first one could only see deep bores for eyes, and a gaping square-edged pillarbox mouth from which tendrils curled.

Ivy. Randolph could taste it in his own mouth, feel the push of roots and branches, the spring of leaves. The face in the forest, the watcher in the woods. The Green Man.

Someone coming to pray, he hoped; he could use a bit of honest faith.

the wood polished by years of reverent bottoms.

Beautiful, wanting, and in the wrong bloody place again.

wanton

“In the sense that either I’m going mad or the world is.”

“Wodewoses.” Randolph indicated the shaggy semi-human figures carved on the arch above them, lines blunted by the centuries. “Wild men of the woods, although that’s in areas with more trees. They call them fen-grendels here.”

I expect they’d be more...fenny, wouldn’t they. Bedraggled fur. Wet and reedy and stinking.”

“Something odd happened last night. I don’t know what it was, but it was damned odd, and since damned oddness seems to be associated with you—”

“You sat in the dark, afraid to move, with something gibbering in the room and the hand of terror on you. Believe me, I know how that feels. And then you rose and found the matches, against every instinct. What helped you there? What determination, or prayer? It may be important.”

Randolph had been hoping for almost anything else.

“You thought of Camlet Moat, and you could act.” “If you must know, I pretended I was there. I shut my eyes and imagined it. Have you ever been in a bad situation and you needed to be in a better place, in your head?” “Often and often.” “It’s a habit I have, I’ve always done it. Especially in—well, in bad times. I imagined I was at Camlet Moat and it helped, that’s all. But I can’t see any way in which that could be relevant.”

“You can’t think of any connection at all?” “Nothing. Unless one considers that the lights went out when our host told the story of Geoffrey de Mandeville, and Camlet Moat was Geoffrey de Mandeville’s house, and you baptised me from his well—” “And we’re a brief stroll from the ruins of the castle where he received his mortal wound. Aside from that, no connection at all.”

Raw, sullied soul.

“You were. If you want the truth, I suspect you saved four lives, or at least four minds, by lighting that candle. No, I am quite serious. If you had not resisted, if you hadn’t brought back the light—”

“Saul, the character in the Bible. Wasn’t he unenlightened?” “Well, he was a pagan,”

HE WAS NOT A PAGAN HE WAS JEWISH HE WAS A PHARISEE HE WAS NOT PAGAN

You doubtless won’t believe me, and if you do, you won’t like it.”

Randolph felt intensely visible, as though he could be seen for miles. As though Saul could see everything of him.

“This is not a terribly pleasant business.” “It’s been a long time since things were terribly pleasant. I want to know what’s going on.”

My duty is to England. I am answerable to the King and my conscience.”

“That there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in your philosophy. Intelligences other than human, and places other than this. I’m not trying to be cryptic: these things are complicated and best not spoken of, as you discovered last night.”

“Last night, a man told us a story,” Saul said. “A legend, a folktale. Geoffrey de Mandeville was a twelfth-century thug, not a devil in human form. Walls did not bleed as he passed, because walls don’t bleed.”

but belief works in strange ways.

used ritual phrasing.”

“He recited a set form of words and summoned something.

If something terrifying turned up right behind you giggling in your ear every time you told the bloody thing, people wouldn’t tell it!”

you clearly underestimate the sheer amount of amnesia people can conjure

expect people have been telling the story harmlessly, or almost harmlessly, for centuries. Letting the repository of belief build up, creating the shape of a tale, bleeding it into other forces, growing like ivy round oak. That’s how it works, how it’s always worked. Only, you see, things have changed recently.

Casebooks of Simon Feximal?”

Very well: you should know that Simon Feximal was a real man, and Robert Caldwell wrote those stories as accurately as he could within the limits of what’s safe to tell.”

“I am an occultist. I am a protector of the realm under the King’s seal. I am the twenty-third Glyde to carry out an extremely ancient duty, and I am also, faute de mieux, carrying out someone else’s extremely ancient duty because there’s nobody else to do it. Before the War, I was a wealthy and privileged scion of one of the great and ancient families. Now I’m half a ghost-hunter and half I don’t know what, with my world hanging in shreds around me, staring into a pit most people don’t even see, but it’s there. It’s bloody there.”

he couldn’t bear to be the Heir of Glyde now. Not with this vulnerable, frightened man in this inhumanly empty place.

“There are other worlds, other places, beyond or behind, outside or under our own, a breath away. Sometimes people summon the denizens of those places to ours. Sometimes they try to get in all by themselves.”

“It was outside and it was in the room, both at once.

Don’t expect them to play by the rules, including geometry. There are no rules.”

NON-EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY, YO

“The other worlds have always been with us, and so have people like myself. Occultists like my family maintained the health of the land,

Towards the end of the last century, though, things began to change. Warfare was becoming more mechanised, more industrial in scope and nature. A big war was coming, as any fool could see, and governments were casting round for new and larger weapons. Machine-guns. Dreadnoughts. Mustard gas. Us.”

“Of course they used it. All that power, that potential for destruction? They all did, as though they’d just been waiting for a chance. The Germans, the Belgians, the French, the British. There was a war going on beneath yours—that’s what we call it, the War Beneath—and you probably even heard about it.

Angel of Mons?”

those weren’t angels. That was the first Great Summoning. We started it there, the British. We—arcanists who ought to have known better, under direction of generals who ought to have been shot—we summoned things that should never have been, in unimaginable quantities . And we ripped the veil to shreds.”

Randolph wasn’t sure how he’d gone from the lofty keeper of knowledge to a blubbering penitent pouring out his shame, but if he had to do this, it was a relief to have an intelligent confessor.

“It’s an imperfect metaphor for an intangible thing. A veil or a curtain, a barrier of sorts between our world and what’s outside. The act of summoning tears a hole in the veil and invites the outside in. It’s an act of supreme stupidity, and we summoned, and summoned, and summoned. Before the War Beneath, perhaps Abchurch’s story was just a folktale. Now it’s a calling. He called, something came.”

“Something eight hundred years dead in the fens,” Randolph said. “Something that want...

“What happened on Cock Lane?” “Something came through. It’s a place of belief, and that seems to have weakened the veil.”

“Certain words, a protection. Old and deep. It’s my duty to keep the words, and speak them when needed.”

The Glyde family has provided the Keeper of the Words and the Walker of the Moat for twenty-three generations. I’m the Keeper; my cousin Theresa was the Walker. She studied it for years, taking over from our Uncle Archibald. She’d have known what medieval noblemen have to do with it all, and what Camlet Moat wanted with you. I don’t.”

There were seven of us at the Second Great Summoning, and I was the only one who walked away.

thoughts only for Randolph’s loss in the middle of his own hellish mess.

He began to walk again rather than receive sympathy he didn’t deserve, let alone do anything damned stupid such as falling into Saul’s arms on a public road just because he had a childish need for comfort.

“There are a number of us. Arcanists and academics and ghost-hunters, religious men, highly irreligious women. All of us with an urgent interest in making sure the veil tears no further than it has.” “A secret society?” “An informal association.”

“Not at all, no,” Randolph said. “It’s a power grab. Most of the country’s leading arcanists died in the War; those who remain are young, old, or cowards. Whitehall saw an extraordinary opportunity to seize control of an area that has hitherto eluded government grasp. That is beneficial to them, and appealing to people who are frightened of hard truths. The Shadow Ministry offers us all a structure on which to rely and an authority in whom to place one’s faith. Unfortunately, doing so rather depends on not acknowledging that these are the blundering fools who caused the current situation.”