Black Feathers (32 page)

Alone again. Walking. But at least he was alive. At least he could still search.

Cooky had pointed him away from the hills towards the midlands. There would be more people and that might mean more danger, but there would also be more clues, more knowledge he could glean. Along the way, he might find allies too. Green Men, people who might help him search.

Gordon walked fast away from the camp. He moved through the pines along a tiny path between the trees, hoping it was a different direction to the one the hunting party had taken. The feeling of vitality in his muscles, his ability to carry a pack and still make good time, had grown. He felt taller, and perhaps he was. He willed strength to the limit of every limb, imagined himself filling out and rising up. To be a man, he needed a man’s stature. It was coming to him. He knew it.

But to be a man he had also to be strong on the inside, and this was where he felt a terrible vacuum. Within himself there was only fear and loss and despair, nipping at every thought, weakening every hope.

About a mile beyond the edge of the pine forest the path angled down a small slope, and he found himself beside the river he’d seen from his rocky, hilltop camp.

“Cross the river. Head east.” That’s what Cooky had said. “You’ll find more of us out that way. And any Green Man you meet will tell you all he knows about the Crowman. It’s him we fight for. But don’t trust anyone just because they say they’re a Green Man. Use your instincts.”

Gordon followed the path down until he was walking beside the river, against its flow. He scanned the banks for boats, bridges or anything else that would afford him passage across.

When the light began to leave the sky Gordon knew he wouldn’t make it across the river before dark unless he swam. That wasn’t an option: his equipment would sink and probably take him with it. There had been places where the river had broadened and the water had become shallower, but not shallow enough for him to wade across. There was still too much rainwater coming down from the hills.

He’d have to try again in the morning. He ground his teeth. It was only twenty or thirty yards across the water, but it was twenty or thirty yards of impossibility. He set his mind to finding somewhere secluded to pitch his tent.

To his left, one field after another sloped upwards towards hedges and lines of small trees. When he saw a thicker stand of hawthorn and a few small birches, he turned up the hill following a hedgerow until he was among them. He wouldn’t be able to see out from where he planned to put the tent, but it seemed safe enough.

He decided not to light a fire. He had water and dried meat. There was no real need for any of it to be hot. He sat watching the river as he chewed deer strips and drank a few sips of water. The moment he finished, he pulled everything inside the tent and zipped himself in.

Darkness came sluggishly, and every few minutes he inspected his hand in front of his face to check if he could still see. Not wanting to make himself visible writing by torchlight, he got into his sleeping bag, made a pillow of some of his clothes and lay back. When sleep did come it was light and restless, ushered in by dream wraiths. As the night progressed the wraiths became more substantial, taking the faces of his enemies and his fears.

Angela came up from the river bottom, her clothes torn and dripping, weeds wrapped around her ankles. They trailed back into the water as she walked up the slope to his tent, a slew of green entrails in her wake. He heard the squelching of her waterlogged shoes and the splash and squirt of fluid leaking from her pores as she walked.

She stopped outside his tent, seeming embarrassed about her condition – most unlike her.

Perhaps it isn’t Angela at all, he thought.

Despite the tent being zipped up and the darkness of the night being complete, he could see very clearly how she looked: bedraggled, hesitant, distracted.

She tried to speak but no sound came at first. Eels as black and oily as tar slithered up from her throat and out of her stretched-open jaws. They passed from her lips in skin-wrenching spasms, dropping to the grass to slither away, silver reflections gleaming off their backs from a moon Gordon couldn’t see.

Finally, the eels were gone from Angela’s stomach and she was able to whisper to him. He didn’t recognise her voice.

“I come with a message of hope for the future. A Bright Day is nigh.”

Even in his sleep, Gordon giggled at her solemnity and the triteness of her speech.

“I wish I could believe you,” he said. “And that’s the truth.”

The old Angela, sarcastic and dismissive, returned.

“OK, you got me. What I came here to say is the end of the world is just around the next bend and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

The end of the world.

No one had ever said it to him like that before. Not even he and Jude had ever spoken of it in quite that way. But wasn’t that what they’d been thinking all along? Wasn’t that what his parents had been preparing for? And wasn’t this the same fear that motivated the Ward?

The end of the world. That was the end of everything, wasn’t it? The end of history, the destruction of every human memory ever made. Not only the end of the Earth but the end of its story, its erasing from the memory of time itself. He imagined this end then as an explosion on a galactic scale, an event that blew the world apart and left nothing but dust to drift in the space the planet had once occupied. But he knew it wasn’t really like that. Really, it was a sickness. If the world were a person, the sickness would resemble leprosy. Superficial initially, now the rot was deepening. Areas on the surface were dying but as the sickness burrowed deeper into the flesh, huge areas of the world’s body would become necrotic.

The end of his life. The end of his family’s lives. The end of everything. He couldn’t make sense of it, couldn’t fit the idea in.

He saw the amused leer on Angela’s water-ruined face.

“You’re lying,” he said.

“I might be. But you’ll never know if I am or not. What would you rather do: spend your last days on the run, or see Mum, Dad and Judith one last time before the end comes? You’re going to die, Gordon. Just because you’re only a boy isn’t going to stop it from happening. Do you want to die alone, or surrounded by the people you love?”

Lies or not, her words were powerful. The one thing he didn’t allow himself to consider in the daytime was never seeing his family again. Separation forever. But here in the privacy of sleep there was no way to escape his feelings. He didn’t want to cry in front of his merciless sister but he couldn’t stop himself.

“Well,” she said. “I guess there’s your answer.”

Gordon snivelled, on the edge of wakefulness now. As Angela retreated back to the river she had one more thing to say:

“Turn yourself in, Gordon. The Ward are everywhere anyway, so you won’t have far to travel when you give yourself up. Or you could just stay here. They’ll catch up with you soon enough.”

Her footsteps on the grass were stealthy and soft. Not the sloshing gait she’d arrived with. They got louder as she backed away. The noise of her re-entering the river was wrong too. It sounded like the opening of a zip. By the time Gordon realised why, he was pinned to the floor of the tent by the weight of a tense body. A hard, sharp point dug into his throat. Hot breath, scented with whisky and cigarette smoke, blew across his face. Tense, excited, aggressive breaths. Laughter, terribly loud in the silence of the night even though the intruder tried to keep it hushed.

Gordon thought of his own knife, only a few inches from his fingers and left locked open for exactly this reason. There was no way he could reach it, though. Not before his own throat was cut. For the moment all he could do was lie still. The body on top of him shifted, tense and edgy. Gordon felt an intimacy to the weight. It made him nauseous but the knife at his neck kept him still.

“Unzip the sleeping bag.”

The whisper was a wheezy rasp. Gordon didn’t recognise the voice. Nor did he move.

“Do it.”

This was a chance.

Given leave to move his hands, he could try for the knife. He might even be able to grab it in one swift move, but would he then be able to turn and use it? He didn’t think so. All the intruder had to do was push his blade upwards and Gordon was finished. The longer he thought about it, the harder his heart beat. Soon it was all he could hear.

Slow enough not to create alarm, Gordon began to unzip the sleeping bag as he’d been asked. The breath of the knife wielder quickened. The knife trembled at his neck.

“All the way down.”

The accent. That was familiar.

Gordon did as he was asked.

The man rolled further onto him and used his free hand to peel away the sleeping bag from his body. Gordon found his voice, not much above a whisper.

“What do you want?”

“Shut up.”

“I’ve got food. Money too. You can have it.”

The harsh breathing became a spasm of giggles. The whisper became speech.

“What I want, I’m going to take.”

A rattle in the throat like pebbles shaken in a glass. The intruder forced his free arm under Gordon’s throat, locking his neck into the crook of the elbow. The force was enough to squeeze his windpipe. Gordon’s voice became a strained wheeze.

“You’re strangling me,” he said, his voice a pressurised gurgle in the darkness.

“No,” said the voice, more confident now and rattling like stones. “No, no, no. If I was strangling you, you’d be dying. It’ll be a while before we get to that.”

The transition from woodland to open grassland is abrupt. The trees stretch out to Megan’s left and right in a long slow curve, meeting on the other side of the clearing, perhaps a mile away. The sudden sense of space is welcome but dizzying. She sets off with renewed speed and a lighter step towards the centre of the clearing where a single tree, impressive even from this distance, rises and spreads in solitude and splendour.

Looking back at where she’s come from, Megan thinks she sees movement among the darkened trees. She stops and turns to look properly. The wood is silent and still. She hurries on her way. The sooner she can reach the tree and make her camp, the better. Every few steps, Megan glances over her shoulder.

Soon, though, the majesty of the tree is enough to take all her attention. How a tree ever grew to this size is a beautiful mystery. She stops, still some distance from the tree, and sees how mightily it fills its space here at the heart of the clearing. Though leafless and ready to sleep for the winter, it is like the ruler of all trees: ancient, strong and wise. A true sense of majesty exudes from the tree. Megan quiets herself and asks permission to approach. She feels an almost jolly acquiescence from the tree and hopes she isn’t misinterpreting it.

Respectfully, she moves closer.

Between the ground and the lower branches there is an almost uniform space making the outline of the tree look like a giant, dark mushroom. These lower branches are twenty feet or more above her head, and once she is under them she feels like she has walked inside some kind of spiritual interior, a place to worship the land and all creation. The air under the branches is charged. This is not her imagination. She feels a kind of vibration on the skin of her face and along every hair on her head. When she holds her hands out, the buzz is in her fingertips.

Astonished by this palpable power, she covers the last few paces to the tree’s trunk. There’s nothing she can compare this to. It is the largest living thing she has ever seen. Still uncertain about touching the tree, she walks the circumference of its trunk, counting her paces. As near as she can get without touching the bark, the tree is twenty-five paces around. She makes the circuit three times: one extra time to be certain and another just to appreciate again its vastness. The smile returns to her face, a smile of awe.

Finally, she allows her fingertips to penetrate the buzzing aura of the tree, which seems somehow thicker the nearer her hand gets. Her fingertips make contact with the hard, gnarled bark and the buzzing stops. She lets her palm sink flat against the surface and what she feels now is no longer a vibration but a flow, a tide beneath her hand. The sap of the tree in motion, like blood, only far more slow-moving and beating a rhythm in time with the heart of the seasons. This flow pulls her into the time of the tree, which is a time existing long before Megan began, long before the coming of the Crowman, a time which will continue in this slow beat long after Megan has gone.

When she finally pulls away from the tree, she finds her initial touch has become an embrace, her whole body pressed against the body of the quiet giant.

Darkness isn’t far away.

Megan is fortunate there is no wind. With no other way to secure her muslin-fine tarpaulin, she makes a simple framework of heavy fallen branches, propping them against the trunk of the tree and wrapping the light sheet over them. What she ends up with is a tiny lean-to. Fallen branches also make the fuel for her fire. While it gives her a sense of security and gives off essential heat, a fire at the centre of a huge clearing like this can be seen from every direction. It is also conspicuous because of its noise. Splits, pops and hisses echo back to her from the distant wall of trees all around. If she had a drum she doubts she could make more noise. She is relieved when the high, bright flames reduce to a glow.

Neither star nor moonlight penetrates the cloud-choked sky. Once the fire burns low, it is a marbled orange eye staring into total darkness, fading, dying. Sitting inside the lean-to, wrapped in the poncho, Megan follows its closing: into sleep, into the night country.

Grimwold. Even in the dark, Gordon was almost certain of it.

The thin man’s knife hand was empty. Gordon knew because Grimwold had used it to find his crotch. The man now squeezed what he found there, hard between his palm and fingers, twisting Gordon’s developing genitals into his fist and making him scream.

Laughter was loud in Gordon’s ear now, the gravel spinning and clattering in Grimwold’s food-processor throat. Now he knew what Grimwold’s gaze had meant, the oily stares and sneering, greasy appraisals: the man despised himself but not enough to change. A man like Grimwold would never change.

The mashing of his penis and testicles worsened. Grimwold put all his hate into it and Gordon, rising out of himself and seeing the whole attack unfolding, knew that it could only get worse. When Grimwold was finished with him, he would kill him.

With calm objectivity, Gordon realised this rising up from his own body was probably due to oxygen starvation. He felt his pain but he saw himself feel it too. He did not have the strength to fight Grimwold off.

His mind screamed: I’m just a boy.

Still a boy after all that he’d witnessed. Still not man enough to save himself, let alone his family. Gordon didn’t believe in God – at least, not the way other people seemed to. He hadn’t prayed much in his life but he prayed now. There were forces greater than himself. That little he was certain of. There were creative powers at work in the world, the intelligence and influence of which he could only guess at. He called upon them then and there:

In the name of all that’s good and right in this world, help me. I’m not meant to die here. There are people depending on me. I must survive. I ask the land. I ask the trees. I ask the sky. Give me strength. Send me your power.

Gordon felt a wind on his face as he dropped back into his body and back into his pain. Grimwold still laughed like a maniac, his saliva dripping onto Gordon’s face. He was shaking his clenched fist now, wrenching Gordon’s genitals, crushing them as though wringing water from a sponge. Agony expanded in every direction from his groin and a sick ache filled his guts. The wind increased and, over Grimwold’s sadistic braying, Gordon heard the whine and swoosh of huge wings.

The darkness turned bright. Gordon’s fear and pain became a white rage. The criminality of his family’s arrest, the shame of his running away, his failure at every turn to fully respond to what was happening, to deal with it, to alter it; all this rose up within him, blinding him with fury.

Enough!

He didn’t know if he screamed the word or merely pronounced it in his head, but Grimwold’s grip loosened for a moment and in that fractured instant, Gordon became an animal. He twisted, bucked and writhed so hard that his neck came free of Grimwold’s headlock. Gordon beat the hand that had tormented him with his own hammer of a fist. The clench withered under his pummelling and Grimwold snatched his hand away. Free now, Gordon sprang to his knees in the dark of the tent and reached for Grimwold’s neck. He screamed in fury, his voice becoming the screech of a thousand crows. It filled the tent and Grimwold stopped fighting.

Suddenly, Gordon could see as though it were noon daylight in the middle of a field. Grimwold lay on his back, his knees drawn up, his hands outstretched blindly against the noise and frenzy. It was obvious he could not see as his eyes flickered, trying to focus on anything at all.

Gordon saw Grimwold’s abandoned blade on the floor beside his sleeping bag and his own knife, its handle peeking from beneath the jumper he’d used as a pillow. He ignored them both and leapt onto Grimwold. It felt as though he flew. He battered the man on both sides of his head. His blows came so quickly they looked like the fluttering of wings. His arms moved like fronds of black silk, whipping Grimwold wherever he was exposed – his upper arms, his ribs, his ears. Very soon the strength went out of Grimwold’s upheld legs and his knees dropped. Gordon now kicked at Grimwold’s legs and groin. Each time Grimwold tried to roll to one side or another, attempting a foetal ball, Gordon flipped him easily onto his back. Soon Grimwold’s arms were held up without any strength and his head lolled to each blow. His heels scrabbled on the floor of the tent but he had no strength left to raise his knees.

Only when Grimwold no longer moved did Gordon cease.