by Tim Lebbon
And now, where you sit, where you read … do you call it civilized? Do you glance around without a second thought to the swamps and the deserts lying below, and far behind you in time? Of course you do, because change is the way of things.
A place can die and be born again as something totally different, many times. A place is not eternal, because evolution does not allow that.
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Nature moves on. Without advancing, changing, it will grow stagnant.
Love, however, is immortal And eternal.
If place comes before professed love, then it is a love that never was.
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Chapter Two
From the moment she woke, Megan felt unsettled and agitated. She reacted like this whenever she dreamed of the attack. Time had made those dreams few and far between, and when they did come they were nowhere near as bad as they once were, suggestions rather than graphic replays of the terrible nightmare she had survived. But she had not dreamed of the attack last night. She was certain of that. Her face did not ache from the bastard’s fists.
Her dreams last night had been of dark places splashed with isolated patches of light, and pounding from light to dark and back again had been something invisible, something running and crunching ice underfoot, cracking it and sending shards into the air to glisten or melt away. And sometimes the footsteps sounded
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dark, although dark only had a sound inside dreams. Less often it sounded light, it smelled good, it tasted as if it belonged… but even these positive elements were a deceit. She knew that, even as she remembered those spidery feelings of unease. The thing in her dream had been cunning and clever. A pretender.
She lay in bed for a few minutes, staring at the ceiling and the peculiarly even light reflected there from the snow outside. Birds twittered in the trees around the house and further away in the woods, perhaps in awe of this new landscape, the total whiteout that awaited them this morning. Or maybe they were already mourning their own demise. There would be little food for them today.
Megan would feed them. The family had been away for three days, the bird feeders must surely be empty by now. Dreams forgotten for a moment-shoved to one side, at least-Megan stood, slipped on her dressing gown and wandered downstairs. Dan was already awake and she could hear him in the kitchen, the smell of bagels and bacon and strong coffee luring her down. The flagstone floor was cold and she went on tiptoe. She didn’t mind; it made it easier to kiss him good morning.
“Sleep well?” he asked.
“Hmmm.” She still felt distracted and upset. If she could recall her dream fully maybe she could dispel the mood, but it only existed in flashes, strange, elusive ones at that.
“Is that a good ‘Hmmm or a bad one?”
She kissed Dan again and sat down at the
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breakfast bar. “Sorry. Weird dreams.”
Dan did not turn around but she saw his shoulders tense, his turning of the frying bacon slow down.
“Not that,” she said. “Don’t know what, exactly, but not that dream. It’s just left me feeling … weird.”
“Bacon bagel coming right up, ready to scare away all nasty dream thingies!” Dan took a bagel from the oven and threw in two rashers of bacon, a fried egg and a thick slice of cheese.
“That,” said Megan, “is about as unhealthy as you can get.”
“Strong creamy sweetened caffinated coffee?”
“Of course.”
He poured, she bit into the bagel.
“It’s lovely outside this morning. I think we should take a walk. Wake Nikki and see if she’ll come along, too.”
Megan shook her head and tried to mutter something, chewing into the hot mouthful before she could speak. “Nope. I’m feeding the birds, then I’ve got to sort out the stuff we brought back. Do some washing. Back to work tomorrow.”
Dan came over and kissed the top of her head, kneading her shoulders. “Yes, but last day of the holiday today!” His hands moved down over her breasts and he squeezed lightly.
Megan closed her eyes and the pounding of heavy footsteps cracking through a frozen crust of snow came back to her, along with the uneasy sense of the footsteps sounding dark. She shrugged his hands away and finished her bagel.
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Nikki surprised them both by rising before ten o’clock. As she zombied into the kitchen Megan went outside to fill the bird feeders.
Stepping into the garden was like slipping through to a slightly altered reality. The sounds were different, for a start. It was as if the snow had cleaned the air; the chirping of birds and the drip of water from gutters was as crisp and clear as the snow itself. As Megan walked across the frozen garden her footsteps sounded incredibly loud, like shed leaves being crunched and rustled right beside her ears. The sensation was incredible: her foot pressed down, passed through the first skein of resistance, sank lower, met more resistance, lower still. Each step consisted of a dozen movements. It took her a long time to reach the dead apple tree.
Dan had wanted to cut the tree down as soon as they moved in, but Megan had fought to keep it. She loved dead trees. She liked living ones more because they were God’s work, and there was nothing more glorious than that, but dead trees looked … timeless. And besides, it was out at the edge of their garden. Hardly in the way at all.
There were eight feeders hanging around the tree in various states of disrepair; the squirrels had a lot of answer for. Megan began filling them from the bag of seed she’d brought, conscious of the excited twitter of birds sitting along the fence. Some of the braver ones hung around the upper branches, ready to hop down to one feeder the moment she moved onto the next. She looked up. Blue tits, siskins, marsh tits … she’d even
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seen a woodpecker in the garden once or twice, and she hoped it would come across from the woods today for some food.
She moved around the tree, and it was only when she reached the branches furthest from the house that she saw the marks in the snow. She stopped. They could have been anything: holes where birds had dived in; prints she’d left herself just now; a curious melting effect. But the ice crust on the snow’s surface was too thick for small birds to penetrate, she had not started this far around, and icicles hung from the apple tree’s branches, solid, not dripping. There was no thaw and nothing to cause these holes, nothing at all.
And then she saw that they led away left and right, staggered like footprints but too widely spaced to be her own. Whatever had made these had been running, loping across the virgin surface. The holes were the wrong shape for human feet. Instead of long and thin they were round, as if whatever made them had been walking on fisted hands. They reached the fence and continued on the other side, heading across the meadow toward the trees. Snow was still mounded on the fence panels, undisturbed; whatever made the prints had hurdled the four-foot fence.
Must have been a deer, Megan thought. They wandered down from the wooded hillsides sometimes, and once or twice she and Dan had found evidence that they’d vaulted the fence in the night and wandered around the garden. Now, in this awful weather, perhaps they were becoming
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more daring or desperate. She decided to follow the trail to see what damage had been done to their plants. Dan was the real gardener, he put in all the hours digging and tending and nurturing, but she appreciated its beauty as much as he. She’d hate to see all his hard work trampled or eaten.
Megan followed the prints away from the fence, walking alongside so that they remained undisturbed. Why she wanted to preserve them she did not know. For Dan? Perhaps. But she knew it would feel wrong to follow in these footsteps. And not only wrong … unsafe, as well. As if whatever had made them was still here, possessing the space above them, and to step into that space would be to know what had been there before.
Pounding, crunching, running footsteps, all tasting wrong …
The trail curved across the lawn towards the house, and as Megan struggled throu
gh the footdeep snow alongside, the sounds and sights and smells changed around her. She glanced up quickly, thinking for a moment that it was a literal change, but then she realized what was different. She no longer felt alone out here. She was walking almost in the footsteps of something; perhaps these were her dreams senses she was still using. She felt as though she was being watched.
Megan looked back over her shoulder at the woods, and just as she did so a tree shed its frozen weight. It hit the ground and snow puffed into the air, drifting back into the trees and out
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of sight. It was still dark in there. Light out here now that the sun was up, but the woods were darker than ever, the canopy thickened by snow clinging to bare branches, blocking out the sun.
Megan hated dark places, had done ever since she was a little girl. Her mother had been unreasonably afraid of the cellar in their house, and that fear had translated to Megan as an undefined horror of the dark. Until she became an adult. Now she knew exactly what scared her: the Devil could be in there, watching and waiting, ready to tempt her God-fearing soul into depraved acts-She shook her head and turned around, and Dan was right behind her.
“Jesus!” she screamed. Her cry shocked Dan-his eyes widened and his jaw actually dropped, she’d never seen that happen before-and he almost fell backwards into the snow. She laughed, shocked into a giggling fit.
“Megan, what the bloody hell!”
He’d almost shouted. That proved that she’d really startled him. She tried not to laugh again but failed miserably. What had she heard? People laugh when they’re scared? And he’d scared the hell out of her, as well. With these prints, strange and regular and apparently with purpose, and that darkness huddled beneath the trees … she realised she was spooked and the thought upset her. Spooked in her own garden by nothing worth being afraid of, and finally by her own husband. She offered up a little prayer to God and felt slightly better. There is nothing covered, that
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shall not be revealed, and hid, that shall not be known.
“I thought you were filling the feeders,” Dan said. “Then I saw you from the kitchen window following something in the snow-“
“These,” she said, pointing down between them.
He looked and glanced back up. “Footprints.”
“Well, yes. But what made them? That’s all I was wondering.”
The back door opened and Nikki peered out, biting a thick slice of toast. “What’s wrong?” she called, crumbing the snow before her.
“Nothing, honey,” Dan shouted back. “Just scaring your mum.”
“He is!” Megan called.
Nikki rolled her eyes and closed the door. Megan and Dan smiled, both knowing what their daughter was probably thinking: Parents!
There was a commotion in the dead apple tree, birds fighting over the fresh food Megan had just put out for them. So much like us humans, she thought, fighting amongst themselves when sharing would work just as well. Really, we’re not as bad as all that.
Dan knelt in the snow and put his hand into one of the holes. He leaned to one side so that he could see how far down it went. “It’s deep,” he muttered. “I can see grass down there. Went all the way through the snow. Strange.”
“Why strange?” Megan said. “A deer has long legs, if it was running it could have sunk straight down. It was still pretty powdery in the night, it probably froze early this morning.”
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“Hmm.” Dan pushed his hand in deeper, up to his elbow. “Yes, but you’d expect some snow to be compacted at the bottom of the hole.” He shook his head. “Definitely grass …”
“Oh, so you’re Dan Walking Tall now, are you? Great Mohawk tracker?”
Her husband smiled and stood up, flicking snow at her. “You going to finish those feeders or stand around gassing?”
Megan grinned, glanced over his shoulder and stopped smiling. She moved to one side to see better, though she thought even then that maybe she did not want to. Not at all. Some things, frightening or important, are best left unseen. Best left covered, she thought.
… A moment of your time …
The words came unbidden but remained there, like a hated song repeating itself again and again in her mind.
“Dan, the prints stop at the house.” She looked up. What was she thinking? No, stupid, impossible … but there they were again, depressions in the snow on the roof, the slates visible in places where whatever had made the prints-whatever had run across their garden and over their house-had displaced it. “Dan …”
As he turned around the back door opened again. “Mum! Dad! You’ve got to hear this! They said on the radio the Devil was running around in the snow last night. And they’ve even found a load of footprints!”
Something grabbed Megan inside, an ice-cold stone in her chest, and it felt for all the world like a fist closing around her heart, squeezing
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until the blood ran cold, froze, broke down. She closed her eyes and a disgusting stench made her retch, but when she snapped them open the smell had gone. Like her dream, it smelled all wrong. “Dear God,” she began. But she had no idea what else to say.
Just stupid, obviously. Dan quite liked silly news stories like this-in his book collection there were a dozen volumes dedicated to just this sort of hoax, from Charles Fort to Arthur C. Clarke-even though he knew that they were make-up covering all the terrible things going on in the world. He wondered how many murders, car crashes, drunken fights or abductions there had been in the country last night, and which the news this morning chose to gloss over with a fanciful story of devilish footprints.
It had always been this way. Whenever it snowed, humanity seemed to rediscover its childish sense of wonder. It never lasted for long.
Nikki was unfazed by the news item, munching steadily through a second bowl of cereal without once glancing up. And Megan … Dan knew how she would react, and he hated it.
His wife stared wide-eyed at the radio, sitting up straighter whenever news updates came along, holding her breath when the local radio station newscaster told of the trail of prints found across the countryside that morning. The reason the subject was considered so newsworthy was twofold. Firstly, many of the prints had been found in odd places: stamped into windswept snow stuck to the sides of barns; scurrying
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back and forth across the thin ice of a barely frozen pond; passing easily beneath low hedges and bushes; halting at the edge of a doctor’s surgery and commencing again on the other side. And yes, across the roof as well.
The second reason was that it had all happened before. February 9, 1855, so they said. Devilish hoofprints trailed along the south coast of Devon. The newscaster had an amused lilt to her voice whenever she moved onto this story from something more serious.
“More tea?” Dan asked. Nikki shook her head without looking up from her depleted bowl. Megan did not respond.
Damn it, he hated it when she was like this. Religion was supposed to be a balm, a healer, surely? But since they’d moved out to the country, it was the one thing still able to drive an invisible, yet hefty barrier between them. Sometimes he could not talk to her at all.
“Megan? Tea?” He spoke louder than he should have, he supposed, but he wanted to stir her from this reverie. If he turned the radio off she’d only switch it on again, but at least he could try to distract her from whatever spiralling course her thoughts were taking.
Her eyes were wide and moist, he could see that now as she looked straight at him. She was truly terrified. He felt ashamed for thinking so badly of her, and angry that she could think herself into such a state. “Right across our roof,” she said. “He walked … he walked right across our roof!”
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“Huh?” Nikki looked up, interested in something at last.
Dan shook his head. “Megan, honey, it was a bird or something, you know-“
“Those prints were not made by a bird! They were … they were huge. And unnatu
ral.”
“A fox-“
“Over that distance?”
“How do you know how far a fox travels at night?” His voice was harsher than he’d intended. He turned away and closed his eyes briefly, desperately seeking something to grab on to, something to steer Megan away from this. The last bloody day of our holiday, he thought, and something like this has to happen. She’d obsess upon this for days. He knew that already, but it did not stop him from trying.
“Footprints!” he said suddenly, remembering something he’d once read in The Unexplained magazine. “Small prints in the snow can melt out into larger shapes as it thaws. The prints distort, too …”
Megan looked away from him, dismissing him completely.
“Right across the house?” Nikki asked.
Dan shook his head at her, sending her a warning glare, but she was caught. She scraped her chair back and hurried to the door. “It went right across our house, huh?”
Megan watched her leave. For a moment Dan thought she was going to call their daughter back, tell her to beware, tell her that Satan was out there and that he’d scoop her up with a ton of snow and melt them both together into a
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some pink mess. But she let Nikki go.
The back door closed.
“Megan,” he said.
She was tapping her fingers on the table, beating a tuneless tattoo with bitten fingernails. Her nails were always bitten. And she drank too much sometimes, and her occasional cigarettes were becoming more than occasional. He would ask her what was wrong, but she never gave him a straight answer. Was it the attack? So long ago now, but still there, still echoing in her mind and dreams. Was it this place they had moved to, its sedate pace driving her to distraction?