by Tim Lebbon
Dan closed his eyes and kept on hitting until the walking stick broke in half.
He turned to his family, slipping down next to the bed. Megan held on to him, both of them holding Nikki, touching her abused body, trying to comfort her while they wondered just what the hell they were supposed to do now.
That was when Megan noticed that it had stopped snowing.
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Chapter Seventeen
The phone was working again. Megan called the police and an ambulance, and then she went outside to see for herself.
She called to God for help and tried to feel Him with her. And even though her beautiful baby was lying on a bed of her own blood upstairs, Megan thought she felt Him there, just a little.
The footprints marked the roof in a random, frantic pattern. She circled the house and saw that they were everywhere. Some slates were smashed, leaving gaping black holes in the roof where the snow had showered down into the attic. The holes were like Brand’s eyes: empty; lifeless. Pulped now, but no more lifeless because of that.
There were other blots on the roof and it took
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Megan a while to figure out what they were: dead birds. A magpie, distorted in death where its white blended with the background. A sparrow, several starlings, a few small specks that may have been wrens. Feet clasped at the sky. She could hear birdsong in the woods, even from trees and bushes nearby, but nothing from the house and garden. All the animals here were dead.
Maybe soon, Megan thought, they can come back in peace.
And then, across the lawn and leading over the fence by the dead apple tree, she saw another trail.
Please God it leads to the house, not from it … But it did lead away.
It started on the roof and led away.
Megan looked around at the white landscape feeling the dread of a few days ago once more, the sense that something great was building steadily against her and even God’s presence in her heart would offer no protection. Guide her, perhaps. Save her if the threat of death turned into a promise. But not protect her in the here and now. That was not the way He worked.
She went in and checked on Dan and Nikki. Her daughter was still crying, but the wounds in her stomach and side had stopped bleeding. Megan didn’t know whether that was a good or a bad sign. “I’m going to the end of the drive to make sure they don’t miss the turning,” she told Dan, and he merely nodded weakly and tried to smile at her. His face was swollen, his left leg had seized up entirely and his broken fingers had
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turned an awful shade of purple. I want to go home to the city, she thought of saying, but she realized just how unfair that would be right now.
She stepped over Brand’s body when she left the room, trying not to see the mess that had been his head. She preferred his expression now to any time she had seen him alive.
Outside, Megan made sure the hammer was secure in her belt and the broken walking stick tightly gripped in her hand. Then she set out to follow the footprints.
They were the same as before. She climbed the fence and tracked them across the field towards the Wilkinsons’ house. Before reaching it they veered sharply to the left, crossed the meadow and entered the woods. She only hesitated for a few moments. It would be growing dark soon, and although the snow had suddenly stopped the sky promised more to come.
But somehow things felt quiet. Calm. Finished. So she pursued the prints beneath the trees, trying not to imagine what would happen if she met whatever had made them.
Fifteen minutes later she heard the sirens, and she realized that she had left her family in their moment of greatest need. They could be dead back there. Nikki… her daughter, that bloodied, crying thing that had been ripped from her body seventeen years before, bloodied again now … could be dead.
She looked down and the footprints had vanished. They did not fade away or disappear to the left or right … they simply stopped.
Megan dropped the hammer and the broken
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stick, took one more look around at the woods and then ran all the way home.
Dan was sitting in the hallway when she opened the front door. People bustled about him, policemen panicking at the mess they’d found in their leafy, lovely village, paramedics rushing up and down the stairs with bags of equipment, studiously ignoring Megan and Dan.
In his lap he had a book. “I found this,” he said. “In the study. On my desk. I’ve never seen it before. It…”
Megan saw the look on his face and did not want to know. She went to him and hugged him because there was one thing she did want to know, the only thing in the world she needed to know right then. It was life or death, this thing, sanity or madness. Hope or dread. She asked.
Dan held her tight and whispered in her ear. “She’s alive.”
They brought Nikki down ten minutes later. They carried her in their padded tubular chair, her worst wounds patched, blood still speckling her skin and dripping wild patterns onto the blanket gathered around her. One of the paramedics held a drip that fed into her arm. Another one clasped her hand.
She was looking up at the ceiling, her head in constant motion as if following an invisible shadow or silent footsteps. Her eyes were wide and one of them was filled with blood.
“I’m alive,” she said. A smile prompted fresh bleeding from a gash on her cheek, one which the paramedics must have missed. “I’m alive.”
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The Book of Lies
You never win, because everything is a lie.
Winning is a human conceit. Defeating the bad guy, coming through, emerging victorious in the end … who’s to say? Who can truly believe that any of this means anything? Everything is a lie.
She may be alive. They may be alive. And you may be alive. But alive is merely a state of mind, as is dead, and sometimes the two can be so confused.
Because death is a lie, and life is its greatest untruth.
Believe me. Would I lie to you?
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The Nature of Balance
tim lebbon
One morning, the world does not wake up. People lie dead in their beds, killed by their own nightmares. They’re lucky. For the few remaining survivors, the new world is a confusing, terrifying place. The balance of nature has shifted. Mankind is no longer the dominant species-it is an intruder, something to be removed, destroyed by an Earth bent on vengeance.
Blane is a man on his own in this world gone mad. He has no distant memories, only the vague certainty that something momentous has happened in his past. Fay is enigmatic, dangerous, a dark witch and a player of gruesome games. What roles will they play in nature’s new era? And will they be able to survive long enough to find out? Will anyone survive?
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Photo by Tracey Lebbon
TIM LEBBON
Tim Lebbon’s books include The Nature of Balance, Face, Mesmer, White, Until She Sleeps, Hush (with Gavin Williams), As the Sun Goes Down and White and Other Tales of Ruin. He has been published widely in the British and American indie press, and he has won the Bram Stoker Award and two British Fantasy Awards. He has also had hundreds of short stories published in anthologies and magazines, with many more stories and novellas forthcoming.
He has served as Vice President of the Horror Writers Association and is a member of the British Fantasy Society. He lives in a little village in Monmouthshire with his wife Tracey and daughter Ellie. You can visit his website at www.timlebbon.net.