Black Feathers (24 page)

Gordon ran too, his booted feet finding easy purchase in the lumpy field and striking the earth surely every time. Without really trying he was running faster than he ever had in his life. And though he began far behind John Palmer, he could already see what the older man had seen.

There were figures moving amid the trees that hid their camp. Gordon drew level with John Palmer and overtook him. He heard the shouts of men. Something zipped past the right side of his head. A figure in the beech wood stopped and reached towards its neck as if stung. The figure took its hand away and Gordon saw a red palm and a red throat. The man – Gordon could see his beard now – fell to his knees, one hand picking frantically at the wound under his chin. Blood came fast and pressurised beneath trembling, slippery fingers. It must have been John Palmer’s finest shot. For once, John Palmer’s instincts were correct. Gordon could sense the malevolence emanating from the men in the trees, men who now retreated farther into the wood.

The wounded man’s neck pumped arterial blood in comical arcs, as though from a water pistol loaded with cheap wine. The portion of his face not covered by hair drained pale as he plucked at the entry wound for the tiny lead pellet that had already ended his life.

Another shot passed beside Gordon, and he heard a man groan in immediate response. As he cleared the tree line and plunged into the woods, he saw more and more of what lay before them. There were several men in the camp, six more at least, and they had already begun to destroy it. At first he couldn’t see Brooke, but that was because he was looking for a blond girl dressed in sturdy outdoor gear. There was no evidence of that there.

Gordon dodged to his left on a sudden impulse as something in the camp exploded in his direction. He side-stepped again, instinct guiding him as he reached for his father’s lock knife and unclasped it. A second explosion erased a low branch beside him. One of the men had fired a shotgun at him and was now slipping two more cartridges into the still-smoking weapon with calm, sure fingers. Gordon came at him as the man locked the gun shut and raised it.

He dived low as both barrels discharged right over his head. His momentum folded the man in half, causing him to sit down. Gordon punched the knife blade upwards into the man’s stomach. He had no idea what he was aiming for; he merely wanted the blade to enter as deeply as possible. He was aware of the man drawing a sudden in-breath and stiffening. He withdrew the knife and rolled away. The man sighed with the exiting of the steel and sat staring straight ahead.

There wasn’t time for Gordon to wipe the blood from his clenched fist or from his red-greased blade. Another of the men ran at him, a dirty machete raised high over his head. He too was bearded, his hair thin and grimy, his furious eyes wide and glaring. The pellet which obliterated one of them did not stop the man immediately, but it gave Gordon the opportunity to rise to his feet and skitter from his path. By the time the pellet had entered the man’s frontal lobe, he’d stopped and stood, blinking, arms still held high, the machete poised to fall. Ruined ocular mucus, the mess of one angry eye, leaked from his left orbit with each confused blink.

“You’re lovely,” the man said, and sounded surprised by the utterance. “You’re so beautiful.” He sat down with the machete still wavering on high. “Yes, that’s it. I hadn’t realised before. I want to love you. It hurts so much and I want to be with you and I forgive you because you are so lovely. So lovely.”

Blood followed the dregs of the deflated eyeball, the flow of it increasing until one side of the man’s face was streaked with it. Gordon stood, expecting him to attack at any moment. The deranged man muttered about beauty and peace and love, all the while his weapon pointing upwards like an antenna receiving divine transmissions.

Four other men, equally shabby and wild, all of them so thin their clothes flapped around their limbs, had grouped by a tree. They had knives. One carried a small hatchet, another a bloodstained hammer. A pellet slapped the tree by which they stood, and their group became a huddle on the far side of its trunk. Their anger and confidence were gone. They seemed ready to scatter. One of them called out.

“We know you, John Palmer. We know what you did. You can’t run from the past, man.”

John Palmer entered the clearing, his gun barrel preceding him. His voice quavered.

“I was protecting my own. That’s any man’s right, and you know it.”

“You’re a murderer, John Palmer. A child-killer. I hope you die of shame and burn in hell.”

Gordon looked across at Brooke’s father. Eventually John Palmer said, “I probably will.”

It was so quiet, Gordon doubted any of the men could hear.

“We’re even now, John Palmer,” said the speaker from behind the tree. “All debts cancelled. All bets off.”

“What do you mean?” shouted John Palmer.

“You’ll see.”

As soon as John Palmer turned away, the men raced into the woods. In seconds they were out of sight. Gordon considered pursuing them, but there was blood cooling and coagulating on his hand and already the fire of conflict was going out of him. Whatever had happened between these men and John Palmer was not his business, except in as much as he owed John Palmer his life.

The man with the shotgun was on his back, his weapon tight in the grip of his dead fingers. He still stared but straight up now, through the leafless canopy and into the featureless grey sky. Gordon sensed rather than saw the circling crows up there, and for the first time in his life he recognised the feeling this gave him. It was as though he had not only been watched over, but studied by something both distant and close by, something unseen high above and also invisibly at his side.

The machete man had stopped speaking of love. He sat with his mouth open. His hands had finally sunk to rest between his legs, the edge of the blackened machete blade biting through the leaf mulch into the earth. From his sightless eye he had seen something wonderful before he died, but Gordon knew it was no more than brain-damaged hallucination.

The noise John Palmer made was a howl of ultimate disappointment.

Gordon turned now, walked a few paces and saw why.

Brooke was hanging outstretched, with her face to the bark of a large beech. At first he thought they’d tied her to the tree because her feet weren’t touching the ground. But the blood that ran in such plenty, down from her upstretched arms, over her bare shoulders and down her naked back and flanks, told a different story.

They had stripped her and, judging by the welts and raised areas of redness on her skin, they had beaten her. Her head hung back, no strength in her neck. Her eyes stared up. Her hair hung, streaked red and brown. It was clear that they had done the things that, under very different circumstances, men were created to do to women, but they had done this, and worse, to a girl. The order of these acts was unclear, but the worst of them was the nailing of her hands and wrists to the grey body of the beech tree. The nails had been hammered in carelessly, and there were several. In their haste to complete the act they’d mis-hit some of the nails, bending them over before they were fully home. This had not stopped the hammering. Most of Brooke’s fingers were pulped and broken, her left ring finger hanging by torn skin against the back of her hand. Four nails had flattened each of her palms to the bark, and the natural shape of her hands, the hands that had washed and tended him with such delicate surety, were destroyed. Two nails penetrated the backs of each wrist, and it was from these wounds that most of her wasted blood originated. From these twelve nails, Brooke was suspended, her unclothed body pale and elongated like an animal hanging in the slaughterhouse.

Gordon was almost too frightened to approach. Then he saw that her whole body was vibrating. Brooke was shivering.

She was alive.

John Palmer was on his knees, staring up at his daughter’s ruin as though the pain was all his. Gordon was disgusted.

“We have to get her down,” he said.

John Palmer didn’t move. Gordon walked over, placed his boot on the man’s shoulder and sent him sprawling.

“Now!”

John Palmer looked up, crying as though Gordon’s shove was the most painful incident of the day.

“Find something,” said Gordon. “Quickly. Help me get her down.”

John Palmer stood up, dazed. Gordon took his shoulders, pleaded to his face.

“Tools. A crowbar. Anything.”

John Palmer ran into the tiny clearing and upended a small leather bag. He returned with a pair of yellow-handled pliers between his quivering fingers. Their eyes met. Gordon took the implement, his own hand showing no trace of a tremor.

They buried Brooke beside the tree.

The removal of the nails reopened her ruptured arteries. The blood leaked in meandering pulses as Gordon lay her on the earth.

She spoke for several minutes to both of them before falling silent.

“The pain isn’t so bad now.”

She was shaking so hard, every word came out juddered. Gordon wept because he knew how much pain he’d caused in trying to release her. The renewed bleeding was his fault too, but there’d been no choice – they couldn’t have left her hanging.

“It’s just the cold,” she said. “I can’t bear the cold.”

They’d placed a foam camping mat under her and two sleeping bags on top, tucking them tightly around her, leaving her arms untouched. Her blood leaked straight onto the leaves and into the earth. John Palmer ran to fetch the last sleeping bag. Gordon wanted to hold her hand. Instead he placed the palm of his hand over her heart and tried to send warmth and comfort into her body. Her shaking seemed to settle.

She looked at him, and he could tell Brooke knew she was dying. Something held the terror of that approaching darkness off, some strength she had that her father did not possess.

“I wish we’d had a little more time together, Gordon.”

“I wish we’d had a lot.”

She smiled.

“You’re a good person. Don’t ever think you’re not.” She was nodding, more to herself than him it seemed. “I know you’ll find him.” Her eyes closed for a moment. “Yes, you’ll find the Crowman. And he’s for the good, Gordon. I’m sure of it now.”

John Palmer returned with the blanket and rested it over her. She smiled at him, but he couldn’t look at her face.

“So cold,” she whispered.

John Palmer’s face creased further into grief.

“Hold her,” said Gordon.

John Palmer didn’t move.

Very gently, Gordon took the man’s hand and placed it on Brooke’s forehead.

“Just touch her,” he breathed.

John Palmer shuffled closer and placed his face beside Brooke’s. He cradled her head. Gordon watched the smile this elicited slipping from her face. And then it was peaceful. Gordon stood and left the man with his murdered child.

It was more than an hour later that John Palmer walked the few yards back into camp, his face pale and his hands still dirty with Brooke’s dried blood. It took Gordon a long time to convince him that they needed to bury her and even longer to persuade him that the tree she died beside should be her final resting place. Eventually, John Palmer gave in.

But Gordon was sincere in what he told the man:

Brooke needed to return to the land that had birthed her. Now that her spirit was flying and had no use for her body, it should be left to nourish the tree.

The burial took until dusk. By the failing light the blood on the beech tree’s bark became charcoal on grey. They didn’t try to remove it. John Palmer muttered some half-remembered Christian solemnities and fell once again to his knees beside the freshly-turned earth.

Gordon whispered:

“The crows will carry you home, Brooke.”

He felt stupid saying it, but on a level he couldn’t consciously access, he believed it.

Whatever had held John Palmer together since he’d lost his home and sent his wife away was now unravelling. What he’d run away from had caught up with him. It looked as though, at any moment, he might claw away the earth from his daughter’s body and try to pull her back from death.

“We’ve got to move the other bodies,” said Gordon.

He stepped away from her graveside towards the clearing, hoping he could draw John Palmer away. The man looked up at him, pale and sickened.

“I’m not burying those
murderers
. Those… raping,
child
-killers.” His words came out clogged with tears and fury. “They’ve taken… everything.”

Gordon stood silent for a few moments.

“I know,” he said. “And I’m sorry. We don’t have to bury them. But we have to move them. How far is the tunnel from here?”

Gordon hadn’t been back since they found him. John Palmer shrugged.

“Not far.”

“Can we carry them there before it gets dark?”

“We can drag them.”

Gordon didn’t wait for John Palmer or ask again. He walked to the nearest raider, the one with the machete, and grabbed hold of the man’s ankles. The trainers he wore were muddied and the laces had been replaced with garden twine. The soles were almost worn through. The man’s bones weren’t encased in much flesh. The attackers were starving. They may once have been respectable men with jobs and families and hobbies, but they’d become homeless marauders, thieving to stay alive. Gordon wondered how long it had taken for their moral codes to break down. Denied what they wanted or merely angry at their lot, violence would have come next. Perhaps with that violence came a certain reinstating of the illusion of power over otherwise unrelenting circumstances. And then taking not only goods and money but taking more precious things like dignity and chastity. Their own lives annihilated, they had become destroyers of other people’s existences; rapists and murderers, as John Palmer rightly stated. This was one of the ways evil spread, a disease of the will that anyone could contract. Gordon couldn’t condone what the men had done. There was no excuse.

And what of his own guilt? Violence against his family and against Brooke and John Palmer had given birth to violence in him. He had stabbed three men now and one of them lay dead a few paces away. Was there any way back from that? Would he become nothing more than a starving survivalist? He could only console himself with the knowledge that each aggressive act he’d committed had been in defence. Had he not fought with enough conviction, he could easily be dead. Surely he had the right to protect his own life.

All these things he thought as he dragged the machete man over the leafy forest floor. In a few minutes the sun would be beyond the horizon and this job would be impossible. He looked towards the place where John Palmer still knelt beside the grave of his daughter. The man didn’t move.

“Look,” he said. “Just show me where the tunnel is and I’ll move them. I want to get it done before it’s too dark.”

The John Palmer who stood up to help him was an old man, his hair suddenly greyer and thinner, his face slacker, his body weaker. For once, Gordon was glad of the silence that existed between them as they hauled the dead men from their clearing, through the quietly observant beech trees to the darkness in which Gordon himself had almost died.

Gordon moved the third body on his own, leaving John Palmer to sit once again beside Brooke’s grave. Once he’d reached the tunnel mouth he pulled each of the bodies as far inside as he could and laid them beside each other in the darkness. He knelt there with them for several minutes, praying in silence. He prayed that their spirits would travel to somewhere less terrible than the world they’d left behind. He prayed for their families. And he prayed for their forgiveness.