Black Feathers (33 page)

He dragged the limp man out into the night, and the darkness filled his spirit like oil in a lamp. It expanded inside him until his body ached with power. He held his hands up into the night, certain that feathers sprouted where his fingers should have been, and he thanked the land and the trees and the sky. As if in answer, a wind came up and bent every tree with its force. Live wood groaned and branches whined for the harsh, dark breeze.

Gordon carried Grimwold to the trees behind his tent.

Gordon sat beside Grimwold until first light. The man still breathed.

When he could see well enough to walk,
G
ordon stripped beside the river and entered its beige currents. The chill tightened his chest and hoisted his shoulders. Just beside the banks the pull of the river was gentle but insistent, and he planted his feet wide on the reedy bottom. As he washed, rusty stains swirled away downstream and in them he saw shapes, perhaps the shapes of the future. For the thing he had been was dying and the thing he wanted to be was being born. Their forms mingled in the gently churning waters. He saw for a moment a small boy drowning, his hand outstretched for help. He saw for a moment the form of a vast black bird taking flight, its wings unfurling in the eddies. He saw armies of ragged men defeated by sleek grey troops. He saw cities crumbling to earth. He saw blinding light and endless darkness. He saw the bodies of a hundred thousand people strewn across the land and left along the highways. He saw a tall, dark man walking the land, and everywhere the man strode was devastation.

With the last of the stains whirling and melting into the brown of the river water, the visions ceased. Behind the hills was the risen sun and for once the day was cloudless. All around him the birds sang as if this were the first day of creation. The first, or perhaps the last. Gordon submerged himself in the river for a moment to wash his face and hair. When he surfaced he pulled his hands back across his head to squeeze away as much water as he could. His fists closed around the thick uncut strands, driving out the water. By the time he’d climbed back onto the bank, all traces of his deeds had been taken away by the movement of the river.

He stood naked in the cool morning light, shivering and waiting for the air to dry him. He dressed slowly and carefully and returned up the gentle slope to break camp. A bloody human form lay under the thorn trees a few paces away, its solar plexus rising and falling only slightly. Gordon felt nothing for it. When his tent and gear were stowed, he hefted his pack, shouldered it and walked away.

He stayed close to the river, enjoying the comfort of its ever-changing nature, knowing that it knew him and carried his message in its waters. But all the while he searched for a bridge that would take him to the Crowman.

Within seconds of being conscious, Grimwold wished he were dead.

It was still night, darker than it had been before he entered the boy’s tent. Every part of his body hurt but his agonies were worst around his temples, eyes and groin. He already had a creeping sense of what the boy had done to him but his mind could only scream denials.

For a while he didn’t move. Dawn’s arrival would make an inspection easier. At least he wouldn’t have to move his hands around and hurt himself in the darkness. But dawn, if it was coming at all, was taking all the time in the world. Suffering took him into other rhythms of existence in which his body’s natural painkillers flowed. Not enough to take the pain away, but enough to let him travel away from it. In this half awareness it was easy to ignore the truth: that he was so badly hurt he could barely move.

The boy had battered so hard on his ears Grimwold didn’t think he could hear any more. The only sound was a continuous metallic whine. Listening to it was another distraction from a pain that engulfed his nerves like flames. He became aware of other noises, timeless beats behind the constant echoing in his head. It took a while to register that these noises were coming from outside of him. He recognised the call of blackbirds, sparrows and tits. They must have been in the hedgerows all around him. It was soothing and diverting to hear them until he realised their deeper significance:

Daybreak had come and still his world was black.

Now he
had
to move, had to explore himself regardless of the pain it caused him. He reached up to his face, new agony awakening along his arms. It felt as though he’d been smashed by a claw hammer, not the fists of a boy. Something was wrong with his hands; his fingers wouldn’t move properly. Still he brought his palms to his face. Before they touched the place where his eyes should have been they met a thin, splintery resistance and the touch sent lances into his head.

Oh no. No, no, no. What has he done?

He tried to touch the things in his eyes with just his fingers but his fingers had grown spines. He brought one hand to his mouth to find it barbed. He began to whimper. Suddenly he needed to do this very quickly and it hurt so very much. Several long straight thorns had been pushed right through every finger. Grimwold had to find the broader end of each one, bite on it and pull his hand away to extract it. None of them came out easily. His palms had also been impaled many times, from front to back and back to front. The effort of turning his smashed arms and wrists first one way and then the other in order to allow extraction of each thorn was almost as bad as each removal. All the while the hedgerow birds trilled their chorus in the black dawn.

When his right hand was free of piercings, he brought it trembling to his face. Again, the sharp, prickly resistance and the skewering pain deep into his eye only confirmed what he’d suspected for a while. The boy had put out his eyes with spikes of hawthorn. Nearby, a murder of crows cawed and cackled before taking off and flying away. The sound drew a rattled gasp of terror from his throat. He heard their laughter fade as they left him. He had a sense they’d been watching.

Grimwold removed both thorns, damaging his eyeballs further. They leaked onto cheeks already wet with tears. He made no attempt to stifle his crying. He doubted he could have stopped himself even if he’d tried. Whimpering and sobbing, he removed the thorns from his left hand and then the ones from his genitals and the soles of his feet.

Ruined, bleeding and exhausted, he slept until the cold woke him. The boy had stripped him to perform his operations and he shivered as he regained consciousness. Grimwold wished for death again, but death did not come and he sensed it would not. He stood up, so much pain in his body it was hard to isolate where it began and ended. He began to stumble, mud pressing into the many wounds in his feet and everything he touched with his outstretched hands sending lightning bolts of agony all the way to his spine. After an hour of faltering reconnaissance, he had a vague idea of where he was in the field where the boy had camped. The tent and the boy were gone but Grimwold’s night persisted.

Through its darkness he tried to find a way home.

Megan is aware of movement in the darkness. Stealthy, cautious creeping. Deliberate, purposeful sliding. The blackness of the night is complete and all-encompassing. Someone or something is close by and they’ve approached this near without waking her. She feels the heat of anger and embarrassment rush to her cheeks. This is the second time in as many days that she has been caught napping. She lies still.

Can they see me?

There’s certainly more than one of them. The sounds come from all around her.

She thinks; tries to control her breathing and quiet her heart.

What can be out here, in a clearing, under a tree in the middle of the night?

Badgers. Foraging badgers.

The thought calms her respiration and eases her fluttering heart. With it come other answers: rabbits grazing. Foxes on the prowl. Mice nosing through stems of grass. Deer moving across the wide open space, safe under cover of the night. Hedgehogs hunting slugs. Moles pushing up the earth. These are the sounds of the animal night country, the natural world she never sees or hears during the hours of light. She has never been this close to them before, never experienced them alone like this.

In her sleep she has slid to her right a little, and now she sits up straight so that she can listen more comfortably to the night symphony of the animal.

Except there’s a problem. In trying to sit straighter, she finds it difficult to move. She knows this feeling, a kind of numbness that comes over her when her mind is awake but her body is still sleeping. Usually it happens around dawn. It used to frighten her until she asked Mr Keeper about it.

“Get control of your breathing first,” he’d said. “When you have that, move a finger. Then the rest of your body will come back into your control and you can wake up properly.”

She does this now and gains swift control of her breath, slowing it down, deepening it. Then she moves the little finger of her right hand. It’s easy. She wiggles all her fingers on both sides. No problem. She goes for the final push, pressing both palms down on the rough ground to right herself.

She can’t move. Something is wrapped around her body, pinning her to the tree. When she tries to push, she feels this thing, like a layer of cheesecloth, resisting her efforts. All she can think is that in her sleep she has knocked the branches of her lean-to and they’ve collapsed, trapping her.

Her rationality vanishes when she feels something curl around her ankle. Something thin and muscular. Something alive and intelligent. Her mouth dries.

She tries to pull her leg up to her chest, but it is stuck to the ground as tightly as her body is stuck to the tree. She moves her other leg, already expecting what she discovers: her whole body is bound fast. Other things touch her body, heavy things with too many legs. They crawl onto her hair. Something prickly touches her cheek and she turns away. Her head is free and she shakes it now with all her strength, tossing her hair from side to side to dislodge whatever is on her.

From above, unseen creatures catch hold of her hair, a few strands at a time, and pull it up. She nods her head now, trying to free it from these tiny thieves, but each time she brings her head up, more strands are taken until she can nod no longer. She feels her hair bound tightly to the tree, and this time, when sharp things touch her face, she is unable to shake them off. Tiny determined limbs take hold of her eyelashes, above and below, and these too are secured somehow, leaving her eyes staring, unblinking and blind into the night.

The thing spiralling her ankle has reached her thigh. Another has begun its upward journey along her left leg. Still more of them entwine around her arms. Another, much thicker tendril insinuates itself around her waist, curling and curling more times than she can count. Megan wants to scream now, louder and harder than ever, the loudest sound she can make. But she dare not open her mouth for fear of what might try to invade it. All over her body, things crawl and slide, exploring her landscape. Making themselves comfortable there.

They settle, become quiescent.

From somewhere, there is light. Out of the corner of her left eye she see this light, the deep orange and white of huge forest fires, spilling from the trunk of the tree. She hears a tearing, the sound of a thousand saplings bent until they snap. Beside her is a bulge in the bark of the trunk. The giant tree rips open. Something steps from the heart of it and Megan feels the bark shudder against her back as the dark form passes into the night. In her head the tree is screaming. Light floods the clearing and something takes its place in front of her. She cannot look away, cannot even close her eyes.

Before her stands Black Jack in all his wicked finery. He raises his hands, and behind her Megan hears the tree tearing open in a dozen other places. Firelight spills forth, igniting the clearing, igniting her vision, and she sees all.

Some days after he crossed the river, it began to rain so hard that nothing could keep him dry.

When night fell there was no point even unpacking the tent. Gordon found himself in rocky sandstone hills somewhere in Shropshire, and often the best he could do was shelter under an overhang hoping he didn’t sicken in the sodden cold. One morning, stiff and sore from lying on bare rock only partially sheltered from the rain, he looked into his rations and discovered what he knew had been coming for several days. He was out of meat.

On this same day, the rain continuous and heavy, he found a track leading into a small sandstone canyon. At the base of the canyon was a flight of carved steps leading up to a round cave entrance. To the right of the steps was a wooden hand rail. Many of the spindles in the rail were rotten, broken or missing. He guessed he’d found some site of historical interest.

He mounted the steps to the cave opening two at a time, only to discover that the hollow in the sandstone was protected by a steel grille. Exhausted and hungry, he squatted in front of the cave mouth, drenched hair hanging in his face, and peered within. It was deep and very sheltered.

Furious, he stood up and kicked at one of the uprights. There was give, where the concrete into which the steel was set met the soft sandstone around it. He kicked it again and red dust sifted down, streaking and darkening in the endless downpour. For a few minutes he set to using the sole of his boot on each of the struts, and soon all of them were loose. He took out his father’s lock knife and, careful not to overstrain the blade, he scraped around the concrete housings of the steel grid. More sandstone dust fell, briefly staining his hands rusty before the rain washed the grit away.

An hour later, every housing was weakened and he began to kick again. This time the grille gave, tilting back at an angle. Spurred by this, he kicked harder, the soles of both feet already bruised and his legs shaky with the effort of it. When the grille came free it collapsed back into the mouth of the cave, all the struts breaking off at the same time. Gordon grinned to himself in the pouring rain.

He crouched and stepped through into the darkness. Even though water was cascading down the sandstone rock face of the canyon, inside the cave was dry. Not even a drop of water had entered. There were pieces of litter which people had thrown through the grille, but apart from that the space was empty. Judging by the faded, crumbly paper and plastic, no one had come here for a long time. By the gloom of rain-clogged daylight he could see the cave was compact. Like the steps carved into the rocks outside, the hole had been excavated by human hands.

The solidity of the cave’s curving walls was a real comfort. It was almost homely.

He dragged his pack into the dry and pressed every damp item flat to the sloping sandstone. Once his clothes and sleeping gear were spread all around the inside of the cave, he stepped back into the rain and descended the stone steps. The base of the canyon was well wooded and there were plenty of fallen boughs. He sought out the lightest, driest twigs first, taking an armful back to the cave before returning for larger branches. Back in the cave he used his knife to cut kindling from the smaller branches. He scraped hair-fine curls from beneath the bark of a log until he had a pile of tinder. Using a spark-maker he lit the tinder. It caught first time and he crouched to blow on the spreading red glow. Smoke rose and tiny flames leapt from the tinder. He placed the cave’s litter over the flames and built up his kindling a piece at a time until he had a reliable fire. The larger branches spat and crackled but they kept the blaze alive.

Whoever had built the cave had thought carefully about staying warm and dry; the smoke rose up to the curved roof and slowly leaked out through the entrance, which was much higher than the lowest point in the floor. Gordon built the fire as large as he could and went out for more branches, piling them just inside the door to dry. The heat became so intense he was able to strip and add his travelling clothes to the ones already adorning the sloping walls.

Naked, warm and dry, Gordon used his knife to cut his fingernails and toenails. He saved the trimmings and put them in a depression in the rock. After he’d rested up, he intended to scatter these tiny pieces of himself outside as an offering to the land. The maker of the cave had scraped several similar receptacles in the inner walls and Gordon was happy to make use of them. By the light of the fire, which was the cheeriest light he’d seen in some time, he inspected as much of his body as he could.

His palms and fingers were callused and there were a few blisters and cracks in the skin. None of them looked serious. His feet, which had blistered so badly at first, had also hardened over, leathery pads of flesh now protecting his heels and soles from the insides of his boots. There were cuts and scrapes on his shins and knees where he had walked through areas of bramble or caught himself on sharp rocks, but he could see no lasting damage. His belly was flat and there was no spare flesh on him anywhere. He pinched the skin of his stomach and pulled. It was tight, only muscle beneath. His groin had sprouted a mass of dark, brittle curls over the last couple of weeks, and there was no question that his penis and testicles had grown. The cut in his thigh had healed into a shiny pink scar, the one across his palm was still livid and tender. His hair was around his collar now, longer than it had ever been. He knew it smelled but there was little he could do about it. His feet and underarms reeked too, but he had become as used to that as he had to squatting in the bushes to shit and wiping his arse with bunches of leaves or moss.

He was growing. Merging with the land.