NaNoWriMo - Cymru 11

This excerpt is very similar to the last one, methinks, but that's because the rest of this chapter is otherwise all plot-based fun and games, and I'm trying not to go giving too much plot away, especially for things I've not posted the set-up for. Anyway, though. Have some more of the same.


DYLAN

Night was fast approaching as Dylan finally made his way into Glyncorrwg, the river beside the road unusually swollen for this time of year with the meltwater coming down from the Bannau. It was the last outpost before the Bannau, really; the village itself was elegantly huddled into the foothills, a network of houses, taverns, schools and temple sites threaded through with roads that led between the mountains, following the valley floors. Lone farmhouses stood on the hills, and if Dylan squinted against the dusk he could just about make out a few hafod buildings up on the mountains themselves. The wind was blowing the wrong way, he realised as he passed the first few houses. It should have been blowing up the valley from Cymer and beyond, towards the Bannau; instead it blew down from the mountains to the north-east, random gusts that froze and blew the drooping leaves on the trees into a brief, ecstatic frenzy. Shutters on windows were all bolted shut here, and what could well have been every branch of every hawthorn tree had been nailed over every door and window. As Dylan passed Glyncorrwg's Twmpath Chwarae he glanced at the maypole and stopped dead, staring at it. The ribbons hung from it in tatters, blowing in the irregular gusts of wind like broken fingers, reaching desperately for something that wasn't there.

Glyncorrwg was wrong. Not in such an unyieldingly broken way as Llangors, maybe, but in a way that was almost worse, a deeply horrifying edge to everything. Dylan could almost taste the presence of something underlying the world, but he resisted the urge to try and feel for it. The way things were going at the moment it would be just his luck to make things worse than they already were, and every time he tried to use the pendant he seemed to do just that. It gave him a headache and left him with his vision swimming. He needed more information.

Inns, Dylan was quickly coming to learn, were really the central hub of any community for news, so he made a beeline for the first one he saw, a rough-hewn stone building with an ominously creaking sign over the door that screamed in the wind. Cautiously he tried the door handle. It was locked.

He was going to write it off and move on to the next one, but there was the sudden sound of a key being hastily scraped in a keyhole and then Dylan was, for the second time in his life, nose-to-tip with a crossbow bolt. This one was held by a man who could have been in his fifties but looked older, his eyes wide and staring and three days of stubble covering his chin, clothes stained and filthy. He was shaking, Dylan noted absently in the part of his brain still capable of absorbing details from the outside world. The crossbow was waving in front of Dylan's face wildly, swinging back and forth. The man's breathing was laboured, breath catching in his throat on every exhalation. He was crying, Dylan's brain saw. Well, that was fair. If he didn't lower that crossbow Dylan would be in a minute, too.

"Not..." the man said, staring. "You're not... you're..."

"I'm here to help," Dylan said, his voice sounding remarkably calm to the functioning part of his brain. "My name is Dylan; I'm a druid. I've been sent to find out what's going on, and help if I can."

Why wasn't he this eloquent the rest of the time? Although Dylan supposed he shouldn't complain. Staring death in the face was a superb situation to find hitherto unknown prolixity.

"To help," the man repeated. The crossbow waivered, lowering to the area of Dylan's stomach and groin. It wasn't much better. "You've come... to help..."

"Then get him in!" A voice snarled tightly from inside the building, and a grey-haired woman with grey eyes and a grey, faded dress shoved the man aside. "He mustn't stay out! In, Derwydd, quickly! The night is coming!"

And Dylan was hauled into the building, the door slammed and bolted behind him against the gathering winds. The inside was blazingly bright, and it took him a few seconds of rapid blinking to accustom his eyes to the light before he realised why.

About twenty people were crammed into the inn, on chairs, wooden crates and, in a few cases, the floor. Candles covered every other available space, transforming the tavern into a glittering jewel of light from every angle that illuminated every surface until there were no shadows left in there. The fire roared fiercely, but no one sat beside it; in fact the fire guard had been erected a good two metres away, and no one crossed the barrier. More hawthorn was attached to the chimney, petals wilting in the heat. Twenty pairs of eyes were staring at him.

Dylan turned back to the woman who'd pulled him in, now gently taking the crossbow from the man's hands.

"My name's Dylan," he said, hoping to set off a helpful chain reaction of introductions. Mercifully, it worked; she nodded at him, and put the crossbow aside.

"Alis," she said tightly, pushing the man onto a tall stool by the bar. "This is my son, Ianto. We run this inn."

"I know this isn't going to be easy to answer," Dylan said awkwardly, "but I need to ask -"

"What's happened to us?" Alis broke in. She walked around the bar and poured out a tankard of mead, sliding it across the bartop to him. "Aye. I'll tell you Derwydd. Sit yourself down first."

"Thank you," he said quietly. Apparently he was still the most interesting thing in the room because twenty pairs of eyes still watched him, but the novelty had already worn off for the more desperate people present if the quiet whimpering from the corner was anything to go by. Carefully he pulled out a spare stool from the bar and settled, sipping the mead. It tasted wrong.

"Where to start?" Alis murmured as she busied herself behind the bar. "Well, it was Noson Calan Mai, I suppose. We saw the ceremony in Port Talbot, Derwydd. No dead came through. Very strange. And that weather! Snow up on the Bannau. We had to bring the sheep down."

Dylan said nothing. It seemed Alis just needed to talk, so he forebore trying to steer her. And any detail could be important, of course.

"Calan Mai itself, we danced around the maypole and sang as usual except Dai and Bryn went up the hafod to bring the sheep down." Alis had found a bowl and a bread roll, and seemed to be ladling stew into it for him. "Bryn came back down. Dai didn't, and Bryn hasn't spoken since."

She put the bowl in front of him, not hearing his thanks.

"That was the start, I think. I think it was, even though it was day. And then the night came, and the shadows."

The wind howled at the shutters, making the candles flicker. A woman in the corner quietly put her hands over her ears and rocked on her chair, humming to herself. Others looked nervously at the windows.

"The shadows move now," Alis said, fixing him unnervingly with her grey gaze. "They dance by themselves, and they do things. They steal food from the kitchens, and kill the livestock and break things. Did you see the maypole, Derwydd? It was like that by the morning. They hide in the shadows, so you can't always see them. Only in bright moonlight, and the half-light between dusk and dawn."

"Tell him the rest," Inato said dully. "Tell him all of it. Tell him about Betsan, last night."

"Betsan was my grand daughter," Alis said, busy again as she tried to clean the already clean tankards and things. "She was twenty years old last night, and in labour with her first child. I was going to be a great-grandmother. It would have been such an honour..."

"What happened?" Dylan asked, horror rising in his throat. Belatedly he remembered the woman in Cymer, screaming about the children as the innkeeper had forced the flagon between her lips. In the name of the gods, what were these things doing?

"She's gone," Ianto said, his throat tight with barely-controlled hysteria. "She's gone, Derwydd, snatched by them, child and all. We'd gone out to give her rest and suddenly she was screaming, and we ran back in and Betsan wasn't Betsan anymore."

"She wasn't - ?" Dylan tried to grasp the meaning behind that. "What do you mean?"

"There was a thing in the bed instead of her," Ianto said, tears starting down his cheeks. "A thing made of flesh with her clothes, but it wasn't her. Its face was wrong, like it had been drawn on in charcoal, and it laughed and laughed and laughed - "