Lonik Weather

Pint please landlord. You having one? Good. Make that two.

Cheers, Pal. So, I have a field note, I'm not going to pretend I haven't. Van dictated it to me on a Toid'y morning in early Windstrom, and I wrote it into my notes, and I read it back to him and he said nothing, which is Van saying yes, that's right, file that, and I did. It is on page forty-three of the second notebook, and it reads, in my own handwriting: The sound of soft chewing in the Wisewood is not a comfort. Follow it at murkrise if you must. Do not follow it after murkfall.

I knew about this note when I made the decision. I'm not going to say I'd forgotten it. I have known things, in this world, and I have continued anyway, and I'm not sure that makes me stupid so much as it makes me optimistic in short, low-light intervals.

The Lonik, for those of you who haven't had the pleasure, is the only creature in the Wisewood that is categorically not trying to kill you. This sounds like good news. It is not, quite. The Wisewood is not made safer by the presence of something harmless. What it is made, by the presence of something harmless, is stranger. The Lonik is hare-sized, herbivorous, and apparently incapable of threatening anything more significant than a bramble shoot. Van once picked up a dead one on the path between the second and third marker stones and turned it over with the mild professional interest you might bring to an interesting stone. I took notes. Mostly what I wrote was: pelt shifts with the season. Eyes with no whites. Narrow snout. Moves without moving.

That last part. You follow it a bit and then you turn around quickly and there's nothing there, but when you stand still for a moment, something resumes. It's doing something and then it's not doing something and then it is. The Wisewood allows this. The Wisewood actively cooperates with it. This is the hazard, and the hazard is not in the Lonik — the Lonik is genuinely harmless — but in the Wisewood's willingness to rearrange itself around anything that is keeping your attention pointed in one direction.

I know you understand what I'm saying. I can tell you do. Good.

The reason I was in the upper Loxley valley at all that afternoon was legitimate. Van had sent me to check a marker stone above Malin Bridge — the one on the east bank, set back from the river about thirty metres, half-buried, which Van uses as a register of sorts for measuring how fast the organic network is moving through that part of the valley. I was supposed to record the lichen growth on the north face, make a note of whether the ground within the marker circle had disturbed, and come back. Forty minutes, Van said, possibly fifty. Be back before murkfall.

The lichen was fine. The ground was slightly disturbed but not in a way that worried me once I'd looked at it carefully — some onetoe had been through in the last day or so, following the wild clovenfoot path that cuts down from the Wisewood edge toward the river. I took my notes, I had a brief disagreement with my own boots about the state of the bank mud, and by the time I was back on the path it was maybe twenty minutes before murkfall.

Which was when I heard it.

The soft chewing. Behind me, and then not behind me, and then off to the left, in the strip of Wisewood margin where the old beech roots come out of the bank above the path. The murk was already thickening in the lower parts of the valley, collecting in the hollows and around the root systems of anything the organic network was using as a relay point, which in this stretch of the upper Loxley is most of the root systems. The light was that quality of Hellsborough pre-murkfall where everything looks like something you've half-remembered, with all the original detail removed.

I stopped walking.

The chewing continued.

Here is the mental process that followed, because I think it matters: there was a Lonik in the Wisewood margin, close enough to hear, and the Lonik, as established, is harmless, and the Wisewood margin here was a strip maybe forty metres wide between the river path and the open fell above, so how lost could I realistically get? And I had a lamp. And I knew this valley reasonably well. And it was only twenty minutes before murkfall, so really I would have the murkneet ahead of me regardless at this point, field note or not.

You have to understand that all of this is perfectly true and also completely wrong.

I stepped off the path.

The chewing continued ahead of me, soft and patient, and I followed it into the beech roots and the thickening murk, and for the first three minutes I was entirely aware of where I was and where the river was and where the path was. I could hear the Loxley below me to my right. The path was a darker line behind me in the murk. Completely fine.

Then I turned around and the path wasn't there in the way I expected it to be. Not gone — I could still see a gap in the vegetation that was probably it — but not where I'd last checked. Moved, or I had moved. The river sound was still to my right but the angle had changed slightly, which meant I had changed slightly, and I hadn't noticed.

The Lonik was still ahead of me.

I am not proud of the next ten minutes. They consisted of me following the chewing further into the margin while also, at intervals, convincing myself I had reoriented toward the path, and then discovering I had not done this in any verifiable way. The Wisewood margin in the upper Loxley valley is not large. I can tell you that with great confidence, because I came out of it on the wrong side — the river side — at the base of a stone weir that I did not recognise, about half a kilometre below where I should have been.

The weir is old. Older than most of the built infrastructure in the valley — you can tell by the quality of the stone and the way the mortar has been replaced several times over, each generation of repair now itself eroded. It's perhaps four metres high at the main face, with a curved apron at the base where the river pools before running on, and the face itself is green-black with the moss that grows in Hellsborough waterways, the kind with the slight bioluminescent quality at the edges that I've learned not to find reassuring. It was dimmer than it should have been, which I noticed and then decided not to think about.

The fallclimbers were on the face.

I want to be careful here about how I describe this. There were six of them — maybe seven, it was hard to count because they move in a way that makes you uncertain whether you're counting the same individual twice. They are, as Van has noted in his laconic way, like salmon. But they're not salmon. The body shape is right — elongated, tapered, built for moving through current — but the surface is plated, overlapping segments like a woodlouse or a large crustacean, and the fin arrangements are wrong in a way that becomes more wrong the longer you look at them. What you take for fins at first glance are actually limbs, jointed, ending in hook-tips that they work into the cracks between the weir stones with a precision that looked, from where I was standing, entirely deliberate.

They were ascending. All of them, ascending. Not in a line — at intervals, each one working independently, pausing where they found a hold, moving when they didn't. They weren't interested in me, but they were aware of me — the nearest one, about a metre up the face, turned its head briefly in my direction and I saw its eyes - the colour of deep water, with no obvious pupils — but it turned back to the weir and continued. I was irrelevant. The weir was what mattered.

I stood at the bottom of the apron and watched them for longer than was strictly necessary because watching them was oddly calming, and calm was not a commodity I had in surplus at that moment. They were just ascending. The weir was just a weir. Nothing about this was immediately dangerous.

Then one of them reached the lip at the top of the weir and went over, and I heard — briefly, above the river noise — the sound of the soft chewing, again, from the Wisewood above.

I decided it was time to go back downstream.

The path along the lower Loxley is easier going than the upper valley — cleared, mostly, by the amount of foot traffic between Malin Bridge and Hellsborough Corner, and the murk sits higher there because you're down in the valley proper rather than on the fell margin. I walked it in about twenty-five minutes, which is fine, which is the length of time it takes. The river was on my left. The gas lamps that start around the first curve of the Corner were visible ahead. Completely manageable.

Hellsborough Corner is where the crossroads and the river and the old stone bridge all exist in the same space, and if you have been in Hellsborough for any amount of time, you know what that means in terms of dark matter density. It is not a place you are supposed to spend time standing around. You cross the bridge and you go to the Mason's Arms and you put something warm in yourself and you consider your decisions, and that is the appropriate use of Hellsborough Corner.

I was crossing the bridge.

About halfway across, I became aware of a warmth behind my eyes. Not pain — warmth. Like the onset of something comfortable that you didn't ask for and hadn't noticed starting. And with the warmth, a gentle suggestion — I'm not going to call it a voice, it wasn't a voice, it was more like a gradient, a lean in one direction — that the oilcloth bundle I'd seen at the Hole last month must still be there. That the water below the bridge was actually not as cold as it looked. That looking over the parapet to check wouldn't take a moment.

I have been in this world long enough to know what that feeling is.

I moved faster.

The warmth intensified briefly, the suggestion sharpened slightly, and then the bridge parapet to my left buckled — not much, not dramatically, just a single stone shifted inward by something exerting pressure from below — and a length of something pale and muscular came over the edge and lay across the bridge surface with the easy patience of something that has all murkneet and isn't invested in the outcome.

I ran.

I'm not embarrassed about this. Running was the correct response. The correct response to the Loxley Kraken is always to run, and I would say I have been insufficiently clear about this in previous accounts. The Loxley Kraken does not surface unless it believes the meal is already secured, and the fact that it surfaced at all means it thought it had me, and the best thing I can say about myself that murkneet is that it was wrong.

The tentacle — and it was enormous, pale and barnacled in the lamplight, each sucker the size of a saucer — withdrew from the bridge in the way that large things withdraw from places: slowly, with dignity. It weren't in any rush, that's for sure.

I did not look back until I was in the Mason's Arms with the door shut behind me.

Pal was at the bar. He looked at me the way he looks at people who've crossed the Corner bridge at low murk and come back breathing, which is to say: not surprised, and slightly concerned about property damage.

I had a drink. I had several drinks, in fact, which is not something I normally endorse as a response to situations, but the situation had been fairly substantial.

The thing is — and this is the part you should probably know — on the walk back from the Corner to the Mason's Arms, in that gap of maybe four minutes, I heard it again. Faint. Behind me and then not behind me. The soft chewing.

The Lonik. Still somewhere nearby. Still entirely harmless.

I wrote a note when I got back. Page forty-four, directly under the original field note. It reads: The field note on page 43 is correct. Do not under any circumstances annotate it with exceptions.

Fancy another?

— Pip Rippon, the Mason's Arms, Walkley Lane.

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