Cunning Folk

by Adam L.G. Nevill

Their posture is awkward and unnatural as if they are four-legged animals trained to stand upon their hind legs to mimic people.

His hands seem to belong to someone else. Disembodied, they jerk as if operating seconds before his mind can understand their difficulty in securing the windows and doors.

His wife’s lovely eyes search his but there is no warmth in her expression, which somehow increases her attractiveness to him, as if he is losing her and only now realising just how special she is.

A knowing, spiteful expression twists his bearded face as he turns and confronts the window that Tom peers through.

Thoughts pour slow as treacle before running fast as rain-bloated rivers, overrunning reason but drowning a motivation to do anything but remain motionless and agape.

Carpets come and go inside the magical practitioner’s home, patterns changing, patterns fading.

‘Your neighbours are cunning folk,’ Blackwood intones, as if the weighty revelation should be immediately acknowledged by his guest. But the remark simply hangs in the gloom until it too becomes as absurd as the speaker.

‘That a New Age definition of cunts?’

His paranoia is baffling, embarrassing. He’s not tuned into the present enough to address what lies before them. Her struggle for comprehension is becoming a failure of recognition.

Entranced, little Gracey pads to Daddy’s side of the bed and peers at a moon washed in blood. Where the clouds part, the sky is carmine and the stars are twinkling rubies. Down below, the wood is clotted with shadow, the earth blackened as if there’s been a big fire.

Her wide eyes dry out, right under the eyelids. She doesn’t want to look up but does because she realises that nothing she wants to happen, or not happen, makes any difference at all.

It might be the result of his shock but the floor seems to shift beneath his feet. It’s as if he’s now aboard a small boat, abandoned in some foul estuary with the captain hanging from a bulkhead.

Tom hears a sob and the pitiful sound of anguish his wife unleashes bruises his heart.

Too tired to be insulted, Tom resigns himself to a weary nod of acknowledgement. ‘I find myself believing a lot I didn’t a few days ago. And if it’ll stop them getting in, I’ll try anything.’

Fiona can’t remember placing her hands upon her cheeks either, her fingers fanned. A pose reserved for troubled times. She briefly thinks of her own mother, who positioned her hands on her face when shocked by something on the news. A staple gesture of her childhood. A habit passed on as effortlessly as the colour of her eyes.

he directs light through the Hades that exists beneath their feet.

The fragile screen between himself and catastrophe ceased to exist; the division between safety and disaster ever a flimsy partition.

Around the dusty abyss, the dry petals of his daughter’s blood lie scattered.

To the surface of sleep Tom rises, desperate to gulp a breath.

A step he can never retrace on a path that will soon be lost far behind his heels.

But the old magician was also sure the process was dangerous and unstable and only to be called upon sparingly. The toll upon the body and mind of a sorcerer was withering, debilitating.

Frightened eyes beseech his own.

Medea’s muffled voice pierces her hood again. ‘Fool! You should have left. We only tried to frighten you. Protect you! From her. We protect the world from what cannot be banished. You think we wanted this? This life? Here?’

An atom of mind persists inside a roaring freeze that extends too far to be understood. His last spark rotates counter-clockwise, building to an impossible speed… All of me gone.

‘She’s wonderful. And terrible. Be grateful you are in her good graces.’