Invocations by David Annandale

Author:David Annandale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2019-08-15T10:29:00+00:00

FADING

He could hear Johann running around to the other side of the cottage, pounding over the hard-packed ground.

‘He’s gone that way!’ Johann shouted. ‘Past the shed and onto the lower field!’

Fletch paused, his chest heaving. Beside him, Peer held up his warding stick. He could hear the boy’s breath coming heavily through the canvas mask. He was scared. Fletch didn’t blame him.

‘Cut him off!’ he shouted back. He heard Johann pivot and scramble across the barren field, heading for the murky shadows at the bottom of the slope. It was dark, and curfew was two hours old. A truculent vapour had clung to the ground all day, and now, as the night folded itself across the valley, the mist seemed to billow and rise like a foul breath exhaled from the very earth. Behind his mask, which was soaked in tinctures and herbal ointments, Fletch’s face felt cold. He looked back at the cottage, the broken door yawning from the hinge.

‘Stay here,’ he said to his son. Peer nodded, knuckles white against his warding stick. ‘You’ll be fine. All you need to do is shout if anyone comes out of the cottage and I’ll come straight back. Can you do that?’

‘Yes, father,’ he trembled.

‘Good lad.’

‘W-what if he comes back?’

‘He won’t,’ Fletch reassured him. ‘But if he does, then… just run. And don’t let him touch you.’

Johann was calling again. Fletch set off at a jog down the central track. He hated leaving Peer in such danger, but the boy was tough and he was old enough now to look after himself. He had to be. If the nightmare of the last three months had taught him anything, it was that even children weren’t safe from this disease, or from what the disease did to the people it ensnared. Nothing was.

The dead fields stank around him as he ran. Limp grass slobbered on the verge. The mist broke apart and closed behind him, and in the distance it thickened from the smoke of the burning pit, where all the valley’s dead were cremated.

He had lost track of Johann’s position and called his name, his voice muffled by the flat, dead air. After a moment came a distant, ‘Aye, this way!’

‘Any sign?’

‘No, nothing. I’m at the culvert past the paddock, but I can’t see him.’

Fletch stopped at the point where the track veered off to the right, towards the Karlsson farm. The chill air was in his bones. He rubbed his hands together, leaning his warding stick against his shoulder – six feet of polished hazel, blunt at both ends. Johann had crafted them for each of the patrols.

He tried to listen, but all he could hear was the faint whisper of a sudden breeze that drifted through the windbreak at the field’s southern border. The mist, agitated by his passing, settled again into the dips and hollows of the track. Further down, a mile or two distant, he saw the swinging glow of a storm lamp – one of the other patrols, cutting by the crossroads.

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