Black Feathers (28 page)

It was difficult enough being a stranger, but to be a boy among unknown men, on their turf and therefore bound by their rules, put a strain on Gordon which he hoped did not show on his face.

There was, of course, no way to check this, and so he settled for an expression somewhere between friendliness, which he hoped would not make him seem weak, and a scowl, which he hoped would not mark him out as looking for trouble. If his father had been here, he would have told a joke or two. He would have known just how to lend a hand and to whom without getting in the way. Louis Black had always been a man among men, though Gordon had only seen it on rare occasions. And if his father had been here now, Gordon would have watched him for cues at the same time as hiding behind the rock of his confidence and strength.

But there was no hiding now, other than behind a feigned maturity which Gordon knew was fooling none of the men in the camp. The first thing Dave had said on entering the camp was:

“Everyone, this is Louis Palmer. He’s just passing through.”

Dave’s gloved hand had clapped him on the shoulder. Unexpected as it was, the blow sent him off balance. This had elicited a show of teeth from Grimwold. A frown from Cooky’s watery eyes. Gordon sensed enemies and allies shifting on the chessboard of his life.

As they sat eating, Grimwold had glanced at him from time to time, a viscosity to his gaze that made Gordon’s fist tighten around the fork they’d given him. He hoped for silence because he didn’t want to answer their questions. He hoped for talk because the silence knotted his gut. He felt responsible for every sly look, every notch on the measuring post of hush. In the cold air, his cheeks glowed, revealing him. He hated himself, all the while knowing such feelings made him even weaker. One thing he’d learned early at school was how the jagged flints of bullies gravitated towards the weak. At school he’d always got away with it because he was cheerful and friendly. Even if he could regain that demeanour now, he wasn’t sure how effective it would be against someone determined. Against a determined
man
.

And then came the questions.

“So, where you from, Louis?” asked Dave. It was a friendly enough question. A fair one, given the circumstances.

“Near Monmouth. In the hills.”

His voice sounded weak and scratchy in his throat. His embarrassment spun out of control, making him dizzy, wrecking the experience of eating the freshly grilled deer meat and warm bread.

“Monmouth?” said Beck. “That’s a fair stretch. Must be, what, seventy, eighty miles?”

Gordon shrugged:

“Dunno.”

He really didn’t.

“You walk all that way?” asked Dave.

Gordon, who’d filled his mouth with meat and bread so that he wouldn’t have to speak, nodded.

“How long?” asked Beck.

Gordon swallowed a bolus of half-chewed food. It took its time going down. When the blockage finally cleared, his eyes were watering.

“Three days,” he said in the end.

Across their circle of five sitting figures, Gordon noticed Dave and Beck exchanging a glance he couldn’t read. A little respect at last? He could dream, couldn’t he? More than likely it was suspicion. Anyone covering that distance in that time was in a hurry. Why? That’s what they were wondering – and not just Dave and Beck; all of them.

“So, uh…” began Grimwold. Gordon hated his voice long before he finished his question. It sounded like someone had put gravel in a blender and switched it on somewhere far away. In a basement somewhere. “Where you, uh, passing through… to?”

Cooky caught Gordon’s eye, and must have read so clearly his discomfort that he broke in.

“Gents, the boy’s been here less than five minutes. Let him get some grub down his neck before you give him the third degree, eh?”

Gordon noticed how Cooky didn’t level the criticism directly at Grimwold.

“Hey, Cooky, he’s resting his arse in our camp, eating our rations. The least he can do is give account of himself.” The gravel spun in the drain of Grimwold’s throat. “He could slit our throats in the night and take all we’ve got.”

“He’s just a lad, Grimwold,” said Cooky, his hands held up, placatory. “You know as well as I do how tough it can be on the road. Give him a moment to settle, will you?”

Grimwold hadn’t finished.

“He could have mates out there, just waiting until dark. Waiting to come in here and… and–”

Dave held up his hand. In command, this time.

“That’ll do, Grim. Cooky’s dead right. Give the boy a chance.”

Gordon looked from face to face. Wouldn’t it be easier just to stand up, his meal half-finished, and say thank you? Stand up and walk away before they all came to hate and mistrust him? He thought about it and he almost did it. What stopped him was the depth of his loneliness. Without someone else to look at, without someone there to talk to, even just a few words of purposeless exchange, he would surely implode into the vacuum growing within himself. And a circle was a circle, was it not? If he didn’t hold with these men, if he couldn’t be a part of this group, it meant there would be nothing for him but the crows and rooks and magpies. The earth and the trees and the streams. The rocks that poked like broken black bones from the flesh of the mountains. He wasn’t ready to be that displaced yet, didn’t have the strength to be that alone, that insane.

His voice surprised him. It was clear and strong, if quiet.

“I’m on my own. I’m not here to hurt anyone or take what belongs to you. I’m grateful for the food you’ve given me. But I’ll go if you don’t want me here.”

He put his plate down, the meat and bread still steaming in the chill pine air. Looking from face to face, he saw mild shock on all but Grimwold’s. Grimwold was leaking disdain.

“Finish your food,” said Dave. “And help yourself to more until you’re full. We’re not short of supplies. All I ask is that you make a contribution to the camp while you’re here. Is that fair?”

It was more than fair, and it embarrassed Gordon further to have to answer such a question.

“Course,” he said. “I won’t stay long.”

“Stay as long as you want.”

He filled himself until he could eat no more of their food, and still there was meat left over. Erecting his own tent gave Gordon a skin of protection from the scrutiny. Once he’d crawled inside and zipped the outer flap shut, his stuffed belly sapped his energy. Though he felt nourished, he was tired too. He wanted to sleep and shut out the stares and questions just for a while.

He lay on his back with his laced fingers cradling his head. Heaviness spread from his turgid gut into every limb. His eyes closed and he drifted. As though his mind were snared on a fishhook, something reeled him back to consciousness again and again. Sleep, tantalising and a mere threshold away, would not come. After a time the fullness in his middle began to ease and the sluggishness went from his thinking.

He sat up, slipped the black diary from its Ziploc bag and began to write.

October (I think) ’14

My eyes only

Realised just now that I’m probably fourteen. Totally lost track of time, though. I’ll have to ask what day it is. That’ll be awkward.

I’m a long way from home. Men I neither know nor trust have fed me and let me stay in their camp. They’re eating meat – I never knew deer would taste so good – and bread made in tins right in their fire. They seem well organised. Their gear looks like army surplus – maybe they were all soldiers. Perhaps they still are. I haven’t found out anything about them yet. They know a lot more about me but it’s obvious they’re suspicious. Especially Grimwold. But Grimwold would be suspicious of an egg in a bird’s nest. I don’t like him.

Cooky’s older and less intense. Maybe I can ask him where they came from and why they’re here. Or maybe I’ll be moving on before I have that chance. Beck and Dave seem hard somehow, hard on the inside. Can I trust any of them? I don’t think it even matters. If all I do here is eat, rest and move on, I’ll be happy.

Happy.

That’s such a lie. I have to find a way of staying strong.

I was about to write that I feel like the whole world is against me, but that would be wrong. The world, the actual physical land and all the animals in it and the feelings I get from them all, that world is like a friend to me. A friend that never asks for anything but always gives something.

No. It’s time that’s against me. And people.

The Ward are hunting me. Brooke’s father didn’t trust me, didn’t like me, probably only saved me because Brooke insisted. The men who raided their camp would have killed me, and they didn’t even know me. Every time I think of the one I killed, I remember the feeling of the blade in his stomach. I had no choice. It was him or me. He deserved what he got. They all did. But that feeling of metal through flesh, the warmth of his blood all over my hand, how it went tacky, all of that, it makes me sick to think of it. Sick with guilt. Sick at the violence of it. Sick that there has to be so much loss. Three raiders dead. Brooke and her father dead. And now these four men. Dave, Beck, Cooky and Grimwold. They don’t trust me either.

I’ll give it another day. See what I can discover. See if they’ll chill out.

But I’ve got my knife beside me just in case.

And Mum, Dad, Jude and Angela, I’m praying for you all. Praying to the land and the life in everything that you’re OK. I’ll find the Crowman, just like you asked me. I’ll find him and I’ll bring him back.

When the tunnel search yielded nothing but a dead end in the form of an impenetrable pile of rubble, a strange sound escaped Skelton’s lips: a mewl of frustration, a manic whimper. Knowles caught a glimpse of Skelton’s puffy, pale face in the yellow torchlight. The look he saw there terrified him. Skelton was looking right at him.

Knowles knew he had to get away, far away. Now. He’d rather take his chances on the run than in an interview room with Skelton and his bolt-together sidekick, Pike. More than any sheriffs he’d ever met – and there’d been plenty, and all of them were freaky – Skelton and Pike scared him the most.

If he could make it back out of the tunnel, he could run for it – be the first back to the cars and take one. He had to make his break soon.

Skelton’s effete voice intruded again:

“Is there any chance the boy might have got through?”

Knowles decided not to have an opinion. Jones, the freshest Wardsman among them and with plenty to prove, scaled the hill of rubble until he was lying on his stomach at the top of the pile, inspecting the hardcore with a torch.

Jones had opinion enough for everyone.

“It’s completely blocked, sir. No one could get through here without some decent equipment. A brick hammer and a crowbar, for starters. I can’t see through to the other side. A couple of JCBs would need a week to go through this lot.” Jones looked back down at Skelton and the rest of them – to see if he was making an impression. “Young boy like that – what is he? Fourteen? – he’d have no chance.”

Knowles grinned in spite of his own panic. Jones himself was only seventeen, a recruit straight from school.

“Thank you, Jones,” said Skelton. “You can come down now.” He turned to Pike in the gloom. “I want you to look. I need to be certain.”

Pike lumbered through the darkness and mounted the incline of debris. Knowles watched his strange, clunky way of moving. With his huge hands, Pike could have been some kind of earth-moving machine. A nervous smile visited Knowles’s lips in the darkness. Jones’s agony at having his opinion ignored was plain even in the torchlight. Pike’s injury hampered his progress. He looked like a broken robot, his muttering and grumbling the sound of its noisy, misfiring motors.

When a pair of arms took hold of each of Knowles’s elbows, he jumped. Pike, on his mission, did not look back. Jones watched in puzzlement, out of the loop of secrecy. Knowles glanced at the faces of the men who held him. These were his peers from school. The men he drank with in the pub before he joined the Ward. Now he drank with them in the substation rec room. They were his colleagues. His friends. Their eyes, once the affable, trustworthy eyes of comrades, were closed to him now. He was the enemy they’d all worked so hard to root out and destroy. Suddenly he was just another day at the office for them.

Skelton moved in front of him, appraising him with his good eye the way a butcher sizes up a fresh carcass. How long had Skelton known? What exactly
did
Skelton know? These were questions to which he might never find an answer. Skelton, on the other hand, would soon have Knowles regurgitating knowledge and facts as though he were reciting well-loved poetry.

“We haven’t really had the opportunity to talk much, Wardsman Knowles,” said Skelton. “And I regret that. I regret it deeply. I like to get to know the men… under me. It makes working with them more fulfilling somehow.”

Every word slipping from the Sheriff’s delicate lips was both a death sentence and an intimate caress. Knowles shuddered at the thought of such a man touching him. Skelton took a step closer and Knowles flinched. The grip on his arms tightened and he felt a gun muzzle caress the skin of his neck. Gooseflesh rose in a wave from his scalp to his toes. Skelton was shorter than him, and the soft-faced slug of a man now looked up at him as though he might go on tiptoe for a kiss. The Sheriff’s cold, fat fingers took hold of Knowles’s hand, making him recoil again. The fingers tested his skin the way a librarian might explore the covers of an old and valuable book. Knowles’s stomach tightened at this exploratory, almost reverent touch.

“I’m going to get to know you… Knowles,” said Skelton, almost giggling over the similarity of the word and the name. “I’m going to get to know you very well.”

In the silence that followed, Knowles heard Pike scrambling back down the rubble pile. Skelton turned to watch his partner. At the bottom of the slope, Pike stood and limped back.

“There’s no way through,” he said, towering over all of them in the yellow torchlight. “He must have gone another way.”

Knowles noticed how deathly Pike looked. The man always looked sick, but the shadows and bad light in the tunnel made it worse. He was a risen ghoul, animated bone-machinery. Behind him, Jones looked relieved that his assessment had been validated. All eyes now turned to Knowles, most particularly the one Skelton still possessed. The eye bulged, toadlike and manic, already seeing too far inside, already unearthing his betrayal for all to witness.

“That leaves us with just one lead to investigate,” Skelton said. “We must concentrate on it with diligence.”

He nodded, and Knowles was about-faced in a heartbeat. They let go of his arms and marched him ahead of them. Knowles could sense the pistols aimed at his back and he did not have the courage to run before them. They wouldn’t kill him anyway. They’d merely shoot his legs out from under him and carry him back, keeping him alive for Skelton.

He wanted to put off that moment for as long as he was able.