Black Feathers (38 page)

Having retrieved and repacked her knapsack, Megan now sits on the low band of stone turning over the object in her hands.

It is a thing of power, ageless and unchanged since it was created. All about it will be destruction and decay and this alone will shine. You will know it by its purity.

A disc of black crystal the size of her palm. The crystal has been intricately carved by an expert, loving hand. The lower half depicts the roots, trunk and branches of a tree. To either side of the trunk sits a crow. One faces east, the other west. The upper half of the of the disc is entirely taken up by a black crow in flight, the underside of its wings presented to the holder of the crystal, its head looking straight up as though it is soaring to the heavens. Its wings form a protective canopy over the tree and the other two crows.

Merely holding it in her hands is a balm to Megan’s tired mind and body. The crystal speaks to her of creation and transformation, of the tendency for spirit to progress upwards. It reinforces her sense of treading the right path.

A voice, clear but distant, startles her:

“It’s time to come back, Megan.”

She looks up from the crystal. The open space here at the centre of the city is silent and deserted. She is so tired and hungry that she knows the voice must be her imagination this time. All she wants now is to be with Mr Keeper, once more under his direction and protection, but she knows she must rest before she sets off again. Heedless of the grime, she slides down until she is lying in the dust with her head on the knapsack. She holds the crystal over her heart and places her hands over it.

Just a quick nap and then–

But she is already asleep.

Gordon walked until dawn but the smell of smoke on the night air never left him. The road he took from the town had suffered some damage but not enough to deny him passage. Clear of the outskirts, he left the tarmac and walked on the grass between the road and the hedges beside it.

Once it was dark, the horizon became a glowing line, the flames themselves invisible but the light they cast illuminating the canopy of cloud, a dusky orange glow rising and falling in waves to every direction. Sometimes he walked through patches of cold smoke, rolling across the land like mist. Other times his way was clear. The Earth itself was calm and quiet, but at the perimeter of his hearing its people wailed laments of injury and loss and death.

Before dawn he heard rumbling again, felt it in the soles of his feet and braced himself for destruction. It didn’t come – at least not in the way he’d expected. The rumbling increased gradually, as did the vibrations in his feet. What approached was not an aftershock but a convoy. His first thought was that help was finally arriving – emergency vehicles, medical supplies and rescue workers. That thought was swiftly overruled; some instinct he couldn’t define made him throw himself to the ground in the drainage ditch beneath the dense hedgerow he was following. There was no time to get through the hedge and even if he’d tried he wasn’t sure he’d have made it through the tangle of thorns.

Immediately soaked by freezing filthy water, he peeped over the lip of the ditch as the convoy passed. Six grey personnel trucks, two grey Land Rovers and three grey armoured cars. Two long haulage vehicles brought up the rear, each carrying three bulldozers and a digger. Every vehicle bore the insignia of the Ward. The armoured cars had heavy machine guns mounted above their cabs.

After they’d passed he crawled out of the ditch, wet and stinking. As soon as he found a break in the hedge – a gate opening into a field in this case – he climbed over and followed the road from behind cover. The Ward had come of age: government, police force and army merged to become a single unstoppable force and, as theirs were the only vehicles on the road, Gordon had to assume they now had control of all the fuel reserves.

When light began to creep over the eastern horizon, Gordon veered away from the road and looked for shelter. Having crossed a couple of fields, he saw the remains of a building frozen corpselike against the lightening sky. Nearing it, he saw it was an old brick outbuilding with a slate roof. One end of it had collapsed in the quake, but most of it still stood. The building was already old and many of the slates were missing at the “good” end. After testing the walls and some of the fallen beams for movement, he found a way in through the broken wall and thrashed his way through the weeds and nettles to the most secure-looking corner of the structure. There was no floor and the whole place smelled faintly of manure, but he could put his tent up inside and it would be out of sight from every direction.

The ground is uneven and uncomfortable. Megan shifts to find a better position and knocks her head against the wall. The wall is ridged and rough; a sharp edge scratches her face as she turns over. Still exhausted, she opens her eyes just for a moment.

There is no wall. There is no dust.

She scrambles to sit up and hits her head again, this time on one of the heavy branches leaning against the trunk of a vast tree. The branch slides off the trunk and her shelter collapses around her. She struggles to free herself from the fine weave of the sheet which presses her against the gnarly bark. Megan springs away from both tree and shelter and turns to face it, backing a few paces towards the clearing. She has one hand on her forehead as she tries to replay what happened after she lay down in the centre of the city to sleep.

There are no memories. She was there and now she is here.

The black crystal!

One thing she remembers very clearly is holding the crystal to her chest as she fell asleep. She no longer holds it in either hand. Near the base of the tree, partially covered by the collapsed shelter, something reflects, concentrating the flat, grey light of the day. As she approaches to retrieve it, a vibration comes up through her feet.

She hesitates, glancing around the clearing. The vast space is deserted and silent. The sky beyond the outer branches of the tree is white with uniform, indistinct cloud. The bright gloom mutes every colour, deadening the land in every direction. Nothing stirs.

She takes another step and the vibration comes again, stronger this time: a tremor rising from far below. Above her, Megan senses movement. She glances up.

The branches of the tree bristle with dark crawling shapes. Some of them detach and glide slowly towards the ground on wet gossamer threads. She stifles a cry with her fist. At the centre of the tree, descending in slow spirals and sinuous meanders, legless, muscular forms approach the glint of the crystal. Every creature means to possess the black light which the engraved stone reflects. Every creature means to prevent her from taking it away. This she cannot allow.

With the ground beginning to rumble and roar, she dives for the crystal and her pack just as the first of the spiders reach the level of her head. The snakes, seeing their prize snatched up, dispense with crawling and now begin to fall from the trunk and inner boughs. By the time Megan is scrambling out towards the clearing, her knapsack hastily shouldered, it is raining serpents and eight-legged nightmares. Their intelligence and determination nauseate her. She crawls because she wants to stay below the falling spiders for as long as possible, but it means she can’t move fast. She hears slithering behind her, fast and loud. Meanwhile, the first heavy-bodied spiders land on her back. She can feel the tongues of a dozen snakes tasting the soles of her boots, preparing to strike.

Megan lurches to her feet, making contact with a hundred more spiders as she rises up. Ahead of her the space beneath the lowest branches of the tree has become a forest of densely populated web. All she can do is flail her arms ahead of her to shake the spiders out of the way. She doesn’t remember her knapsack being this heavy; it’s enough to slow her down until she realises that the spiders on her shoulders, head and back are where the extra weight is coming from. And what’s slowing her is not their weight but the mass of silk threads she is running into.

This knowledge and the touch of many spiny legs on the bare skin of her neck elicit a scream. A few more paces and she’ll be stuck. Risking everything, Megan stops running and shakes her body as hard as she can. With fast fingers, she brushes away as many of the spiders as she is able to reach, careful not to leave her hands near them long enough to let them bite her. Some already have their fangs through the fabric of her clothes and she can feel their venom trickling down the naked skin of her back. She tears off her knapsack, scattering thirty or forty spiders into the arriving cohorts of their kin. Inside the pack is the knife which she unsheathes as she pulls it free. The knapsack is only a hindrance now and she throws it behind her. Thousands of crawlers and slitherers make for the pack, hoping she has relinquished the prize in a bid to escape.

Meanwhile, Megan stops flailing so wildly and begins to sweep the knife through the threads of silk which block her path. Spiders fall to the ground and scrabble towards her legs. Others fall and are caught in their own silk, only to be leapt upon by their brothers and sisters and bitten, paralysed and poisoned. Two snakes have bitten her right boot and one has bitten her left. Their fangs are locked into the leather. As she pulls them with her, other snakes use their bodies as ropes, coiling onto them in an attempt to reach her. Once again, the weight of extra bodies causes Megan’s pace to slow.

She is almost out from under the branches of the tree. If she can make it that far, there will be no more cloying strands of silk to contend with. She turns and slashes down at her feet mid-stride, lifting her right ankle to meet the blade. It severs the head of one snake. As its body falls away, several other snakes are left behind with it. With a cry of determination, Megan pushes the pace. Her arms are sleeved with spiders that have latched on as she cut their drop-lines. She uses the blade to scrape them off, scattering their broken body parts left and right.

She breaks free of the tree and slashes the knife down at her other ankle. This time she misses. It takes three more attempts, each one slowing her almost to a stop before she has rid her left leg of snakes. She breaks across the clearing, making for the exact place where she entered it.

Looking back as she sprints, she sees a black sea of spiders pour out from under the tree. This sea is shot through with green and brown veins – the snakes riding over their backs. Some of the snakes are three times the length of her body. But she is free of them, she is clear of the tree.

Something sidles over her left shoulder, and out of the corner of her eye Megan sees a spider twice the size of her own hand. It lifts its front legs, exposing two gleaming black fangs with red, needle-sharp tips. The fangs unfold forwards and Megan sees the ugly, machinating mouthparts behind them. If she uses the knife now, she’ll stab herself to kill the spider. All she can do is swap the knife into her left hand and reach up with her right. She grabs the spider, trying to keep her fingers away from its fangs, and pulls it off her shoulder. Its grip is terrifyingly strong and the spider loses two legs before she is able to tear it away. She crushes its body in her fist until its insides burst out through its mouth and spinnerets. Disgusted almost to the point of vomiting, she throws its carcass away and wipes the sticky filth of its innards on her leg.

She glances behind.

The tide of spiders and the snakes that ride them is flowing fast, closing the space between them.

The trembling of the earth increases, causing her to stumble. She puts out her hands to save herself from a fall, staggering but managing to keep her balance. The stumble costs her time, though, and her pursuers gain ground. From behind her comes a terrible noise, something like a splintering rip in one moment, in the next, a howl. She hazards a look over her shoulder in time to see the tree being forced open from within. Sparks and prongs of flame dart out of the rend in the tree’s bark. The tear extends down into the earth, which also parts in that instant. A black-winged creature steps forth.

Megan knows she risks a fall by running forwards and looking back but she cannot take her eyes from the dark angel who now stands beneath the tree’s spread of branches. The tearing of its trunk is so severe, the tree has begun to list backwards. There’s a deeper tearing sound now, accompanied by the sound of roots snapping below ground. The tree cants away from her and begins to fall, shattering branches and sending up a spray of earth and splinters. An explosion of burning heartwood bursts from the place where the tree has broken, rebounding harmlessly from the creature’s black feathers but setting alight the scrubby grassland. The Crowman ignores the death of the tree.

He steps away from the destruction and upon his black-taloned feet gives chase.

The shade of the building and the covering of Gordon’s tent weren’t enough to keep out the light of day, and sleep, though he was exhausted, would not come.

He took out the letters from his mother and father and the scrapbook given to him by Knowles. He placed the black notebook in his lap and began to reread everything. The times he’d read the words of his parents had not faded the emotions they brought up for him, but he knew he had to look at them in a different way now, as if they were merely another few pages of the scrapbook. He had to find clues. He had to find names or places. He needed a method, a way of searching for the Crowman that was both safe and efficient.

He read the letters to begin with. They made more sense now. In his bleaker moments, Gordon couldn’t help thinking his parents had shared some kind of delusion. Now he’d experienced for himself some of the things they’d mentioned, he knew they were sane: beautifully, naturally in tune with the land and all its creatures, open to the messages of the Earth and the Great Spirit. It had been Gordon who was deluded. Deluded and ignorant. Now he knew the power they’d talked about. It had flowed through him. And sometimes, when he prayed, those prayers were answered as though the Great Spirit and the Earth Mother were standing right in front of him doing as he asked.

But his power was dark too, and he had used it both to protect himself and to punish. In his heart he knew that to fight evil with evil was wrong, that it didn’t work. Yet his rage, his offended soul, demanded retribution and the ending of evil men.

The Ward were the hands of evil on Earth, controlling people, using up every resource in their pursuit of dominion. They said their mission was to destroy the Crowman and thereby save the world, but all they really wanted to preserve was their hold on everything. They had become the right arm of a vast, globally active corporate mind which saw only profit and loss in all things, which understood and lived only for the sake of self-perpetuation and growth at any and all costs. To serve the self at the expense of the lives of others and the life of the world itself, this was the greatest evil Gordon could imagine. From such thinking was all malevolence born.

To oppose that would take a strength, perhaps unimaginable. Gordon knew he did not possess it. No single creature in existence did. But together, perhaps, united in some way by spirit, the creatures of the land and its people and the very land itself might work against the Ward and remove their grey-gloved fingers from around the world’s throat.

The Ward were an outward manifestation of the greed and terror in every heart. For too long people had been encouraged to care only for themselves and to take what they could whenever they could get it. They had become ignorant and blind. Yet the seed of reversal existed in every heart. This seed was an idea that had to spread, a way of thinking that had always existed within every human but one which had been drowned by the lure of technology. The Green Men understood this and were mounting their resistance.

One thing Gordon knew about the Crowman without having ever met him: he was the figurehead of this seed of reversal, this old idea, he was the symbol by which people would remember what an existence on this Earth, what a simple life played out upon the land, was all about.

The scrapbook was less useful in defining these things.

Too often the Crowman was portrayed as evil or, at the very least, terrifying. Yet the fact that he had visited so many people in dreams and visions was a sign that the ideas he represented, the things he stood for were alive and well all over the country. Gordon was sure this scrapbook was only one of many that the Ward had gathered, stolen or collected along with their owners, people who had died revealing what little they knew about the dark phantom who’d haunted their nightmares and daydreams.

Gordon resolved in that moment that even if the Crowman was nothing more than an idea or a spirit, he would still seek him out and reveal him to the world. It was what his parents wanted him to do. More than that, since the gift of the Black Light he knew beyond any doubt that this was his purpose. He would use his life to make up for all those which had been destroyed by the Ward and everything they represented.

Inspired but no wiser, Gordon scanned the leaves of the scrapbook for signs: any evidence, any kind of pointer that might lead physically and directly to the Crowman. There was passion on every page, so much the book almost hummed with emotion. People had written poetry in rage or fear or fervour. They had told allegorical stories, embellishing their handwriting with scrolls and flowers and animals of the hedgerow like devout monks. These flashes of creativity must have come suddenly and unexpectedly to their seers. They had used whatever was nearby to capture the assault of inspiration upon them. With furious strokes they had inked their visions in biro onto lined A4 paper, pencilled their hallucinations in verse on paper napkins and hotel notepaper. Gordon believed that some of the sketches and lines, a rusty brown in the scrapbook, were written in blood. Until now he’d wondered how or why anyone would choose to record their phantasms in that way. Today it made more sense. What the many creators of the scrapbook were really communicating was that their message was more important than their own lives, that their message must survive even though they might not. The place in each person where such intensity arose was the place where love and death acknowledged each other: in the heart. When everything else was taken away only this remained, the dark fire of the heart, here spilled and thrust onto miscellaneous pages and collected in the scrapbook.

Whether he found in it the directions he so dearly sought had less significance now than preserving the scrapbook’s revelation of what lay at people’s core. The spirit of the Crowman was alive in this book, and Gordon meant to keep it that way.

His skimming and scanning of the pages brought him to an enraged representation of the twisted tree he was so familiar with. At the crest of a windswept, barren-looking hill stood this tree and above it circled a vast black bird – something like a giant raven. Crows sat among the dead branches of the tree, and at the base of the hill, great lines of people passed by looking upwards. What interested Gordon was not so much the subject matter; he’d seen it in his dreams and in the scrapbook more times now than he could count, and he knew beyond doubt it was important. But this particular representation was drawn from a different viewpoint. In the far distance there was a skyline not shown in any other drawing. It showed vast, squat buildings, many of them ruined by some unknown cataclysm but still standing. The structures were industrial, not a container port exactly but something similar. Warehouses? Storage units? Whatever the case, Gordon was pretty certain he could memorise the low, broken form of this skyline and the two enormous wind turbines that marked each end of the buildings. This was more solid intelligence than he’d been able to glean in all the time he’d had the scrapbook. If he came across the location, he was sure he’d be able to recognise it. Delighted, he scanned every sketch, story and poem again and again, searching for common themes.

The Crowman, Black Jack, Scarecrow: these were the names people gave him. Some saw him as supremely evil, others as selflessly good. No one seemed certain if he was a man, or part man and part animal. Like the Ward, many seemed to believe his arrival on Earth would trigger the end of the world. Just as many believed he had come with a message of hope for the future. Gordon wondered if there was a way that both these things could be true. Maybe none of the authors of the scrapbook were completely right, yet perhaps all of them were right in certain aspects.

The sun arced over the half-collapsed barn, brightening the tent, and Gordon put aside his studies for a moment. He needed a break and the touch of the open air. Unzipping the tent, he slipped out and stood in the shelter of the ruined brick walls. He crossed to one glassless window and looked out.

Far across the fields he could see the road along which the Ward had arrived at the ruined town in their military convoy. How long would it be before the people he’d helped told them what he’d done and pointed in the direction he’d taken when he left? Wardsmen might already be coming back up that road by car or on foot to look for him. Something about being pursued in this way was tiring to his very soul. He knew they’d never stop searching; no matter what he did, he would always be on the run.

From the very beginning, a small voice within him had whispered that he should give himself up to the Ward or, at the very least, let them catch him. Then it would be over and he could rest. Stronger by far, however, were the voices that pushed him onwards, those of his mother and father and Judith, the voices of the animals and the call of the land. Most profound, most resonant of all was a voice from within, the source of which he could not define. This was a voice that called him onwards and commanded that he never lose faith. He had come to think of it as the voice of the Crowman. He believed that not only was he destined to find the Crowman, but that the Crowman wanted to be found – specifically by Gordon.

As he looked across the fields, smoke rose from the devastated town and Gordon considered, not for the first time and knowing that it would not be the last, that he might simply be mad. Only an insane person would allow themselves to be led across the country by disembodied voices. Maybe the intervention of the Ward in his life had been too much for his rational mind to bear. Unable to deal with the collection of his family, he had simply created a fantasy in which he could exist, not safely perhaps, but without ever having to face the reality that everyone he cared about and everything he loved might be dead, gone forever without hope of retrieval.

His eyes filled and tears overflowed without a hitch in his breathing. There were no sobs or whimpers. If he could think these things, he knew he could not be insane. This mission of his, this destiny his parents had told him was his to fulfil, it was not something that thrived on being
thought
about or pondered. It was not the conjuration of a sick mind. It was, just like every seemingly mad but incredibly sane piece of art in the scrapbook, the commanding of a true and honest heart that pushed him forwards and kept him moving. This was not some clever idea about the way life should be. It was about the survival of right living, it was about the survival of the spirit in a world where spirit had been superseded by technology and greed.

He collapsed to his knees in the barn and thrust his fingers through the cracks to touch the earth below. Its coolness welcomed his fingertips.

“Give me strength,” he whispered. “Send me every helper you can and all the luck you have. And even if you can’t do that, I swear I’ll give you everything I have. I’ll keep searching. I’ll keep fighting. And I’ll never give up until I find him. If I die trying, I know my life will have been well spent.”

The sky darkened overhead and Gordon smiled, eyes closed, tears coursing down his face and dripping through the barn’s broken floor to touch the cold black earth below. Distant thunder unrolled, approaching across the landscape. The earth shuddered and then all was silent and still.

His very blood alive with energy for the search, he packed everything up. He felt no need for rest. He pulled on his pack and strode from the barn. Outside a gloom had fallen across the land, so deep and sullen it might have been twilight. Gordon thanked the life in everything for these midday shadows, knowing they would conceal him as he continued on his journey.