Truth be told, it was Rafela who concerned Silver, not the monster he’d become. Fabian Rafela in life had been an evil man, but he had been a man; nor did Silver think he had ever intended to become merely the crooked mask of an inhuman power. Perhaps he had lost some struggle early on with the demon he’d bargained with. But as Silver wrote up his monograph on the Hallow Wood, and interviewed some more locals about the Wild Man legend for the look of the thing, and ordered books for his library, and kept his lover good company all through the summer, he felt as if he were only going through the motions of what Henry Silver would do. He was something else now, something old, something strange.
It frightened him.
What frightened him more was his suspicion that he would go on growing older and stranger every year that passed. The mask of Henry Silver would fall further and further away with the centuries, and maybe he would forget his beautiful house with its beautiful library and end up wandering enchanted eternally in his wood. Tobias had kept the timelessness of immortality at bay with countless invented chores: with building and maintaining his little cottage, hunting the monsters that Greenhollow bred, preparing grimly year after year for midsummer: and on top of that he’d always kept a cat. He indulged the tabby Pearl still, though she was, as far as Silver could tell, entirely self-sufficient on squirrels and sparrows and had no need whatsoever for Tobias to save her fish from his supper.
Tobias, it had to be admitted, had very little imagination. Silver was unfortunately cursed with a good one.
Immortality stretched bleakly ahead of him, immortality and the Wood. How would it be when his mother was gone, when Tobias was gone—when not only spoilt Pearl but all the lines of her feline descendants had spent themselves? Even dryads, bound to their trees, did not endure forever. Silver looked out on the prospect of millennia and thought: Perhaps the thing that called itself the Lord of Summer started as a mortal man as well.
More than once he thought of bringing the question up with Tobias, but what could Tobias even say? He had given his advice already: he had told Silver to keep a cat, and it would keep him awake. At some point in July, Pearl produced six kittens. Silver liked cats perfectly well, but he could not imagine finding one interesting enough that it would bind him to humanity.
Now
Fairyland was empty.
There was no living thing, nor any sign one had ever been there. There was no bird or bee or crawling insect, no breath of air, not a single weed—not so much as a dandelion. And there were no graceful winged beings dressed in flower petals like the ones Silver had liked in the illustrations from his childhood books of fairy tales, no lords and ladies adorned in dew and starlight: only this flat empty land. In Silver’s perception it clung on to the edges of the drowned Wood like fog clings to earth. Black standing stones were all that relieved the emptiness: dull guardsmen keeping watch over a dead land.
Tobias was stone-faced as ever, but Silver thought he could spot the outlines of I told you so in his expression.
“There must be someone here. Smoke and fire,” said Maud. Her stubborn little mouth was a flat line. “There must be someone.” She looked around as if the fairy she had met long ago might appear suddenly, as if she had expected it to be waiting for her.
There was no one. Black earth and a pink sky; an apple tree all poisonous bright; the stench of rotten meat; and in every direction flat empty land, broken up only by scattered upright stones arranged in discomfiting patterns which almost, almost, suggested a grand design. Silver had a dreadful feeling the monoliths were moving when he was not looking. He had no idea why this should fill him with anxiety, but it did.
“Perhaps we had better explore a little,” he said.
“Better stay away from those things,” Tobias said, nodding to the nearest monolith: a monstrous black heap of rock, twice as tall as he was, alarmingly spindly at the base.
“We are looking for people, Mr Finch,” Silver reminded him. “We are unlikely to find them by heading in the opposite direction from the works of their hands.”
“Hm,” Tobias said, but he did not protest again.
So they walked. And they walked, and they walked, among the black upright stones, under that pinkish sky. The light never changed, though it seemed like they had been at it for hours. They only stopped when Tobias glanced around at the two of them and called a halt. Silver was still exhausted by whatever it was he had done to summon that satyr, and he felt as if his legs had turned to pig iron from all this bold striding across the empty land. Maud looked wilted and miserable, her bright hair coming loose in wisps from its stern coil.
Tobias, of course, looked like he could keep going for another million years, and he was the one carrying Maud’s pack. Silver had never resented his air of solid capability quite so much before.
“Let’s see what we’ve got to go on, then,” Tobias said, and set the pack down.
It turned out that Maud had planned her scientific expedition to Fairyland in much the way Silver would have done in her shoes: allowing of course for the disadvantages she had faced in the form of inconvenient parents and unhelpful tradesmen. She had dried meat in paper packets, and hard dry biscuits, and a good portion of the weight of her pack proved to be bottles of Mr Flower’s Patented Lemon Juice, Healthfulness Guaranteed, which struck Silver as sensible in a mad sort of way. She had her small kettle for boiling water, and she had three changes of men’s clothes, and she had eight blank notebooks, pen and ink aplenty, and an abridged edition of the latest Encyclopaedia in three handsome leather-bound volumes.
“No tent,” said Tobias.
“We’ll find shelter with the inhabitants,” Maud said.
Tobias’s expression didn’t change. Silver winced. He wouldn’t have thought of a tent either.
“I am sure we shall find the locals sooner rather than later,” he said, pretending confidence. The dizzyingly confusing patterns of monoliths had shown no sign of giving way to anything resembling civilisation as he understood it. Worse, the sense of the Wood in the back of Silver’s mind insisted that they had not in fact moved at all from where they started. He had a feeling that if he turned around quickly enough, he would catch the blood-soaked apple tree sidling out of the corner of his vision, when it should have been at least a couple of miles away by now.
There was no water to boil in the little kettle, and no fuel for a fire. The expensive portable paraffin stove was still sitting in the crypt of Rothling Abbey with the cold remnants of their tin mugs of tea around it. They drank Mr Flower’s Patented Lemon Juice. Silver had never tasted anything so sour in his life. Then they ate a hard biscuit apiece.
“No water, nothing to hunt,” Tobias observed when they were done. He did not elaborate on the observation. He did not need to.
Maud only answered, “They’re here. They must be. They must be.”
Silver coughed. “May I suggest,” he said, “a compromise?”
Maud took on the expression of a woman uninterested in compromises. Silver knew it well; it reminded him of his mother.
“I shan’t try to patronise you,” he said. “You are clearly too intelligent and well read to be fooled by flattery.” There, some flattery to help things along. “As Mr Finch points out, however, we are ill supplied for three. It is not merely a question of wishing to find inhabitants; we must find inhabitants, or we shall be in a rather sticky situation before too long. Would you agree?”