The Nature of Balance

by Tim Lebbon

  Blane wanted to help her, hand her over to someone who could look after her properly. But she stood, nudged him aside, hurried over to the church door, tried the handle and found it locked.

  “Father!” She banged on the door. “Father!” Another bruising knock. “Father!”

  “Come with me, please, we’ll find-”

  “Father! Father! FATHER!” The woman continued striking the door, her whole body vibrating with each impact.

  There were more sounds of disruption from the village, and a cloud of greasy smoke was forming in the still morning air. Blane stood undecided, wanting to help the woman but also drawn by the sounds of chaos from beyond the line of trees. He had to find someone, tell them about the dead boy. And the animals. And the person he had seen in the graveyard, the murderer––

  ––the laugher.

  He walked to the gate, unable to purge his mind of the sight of the dead boy and animals accompanying each other into stiffness. Nature had no morals, he knew, not of the human kind. The morals it did hold true were way beyond the comprehension of many, inspiring phrases such as ‘nature is cruel’, ‘nature is indifferent’. Blane had seen as much death as life, and knew it to be a balancing force. But he had never known it dealt in such a meaningless and vicious way as this. In nature, death was food for the body, or protection of family. What lay in this sick graveyard was sustenance for a perverted, turned mind.

  He paused at the gate. What he had seen and heard in the graveyard should really have prepared him for the sight confronting him, but shock immobilised him for the few seconds it took to take everything in.

  The village square was no longer quaint. The pond at the far side, beyond which lay the road leading up to his home, seemed to be the focal point for wandering, screaming, crying people. Some of them were hugging, most were sitting alone, one of them was floating dead in the pond. The others appeared unconcerned. None of them noticed Blane, or if they did they failed to acknowledge him. The burning car lay to his left, its front end huddled around a telegraph pole, its insides a mass of voracious flame. Its tyres were melting across the cobbles. He could not tell whether there was anyone still inside. No-one was even trying to douse the flames. In the small bandstand on the green, where the village tramp Saint often spent warmer nights sleeping and plotting his next day’s odd-jobbing, there was something huddled in the corner. It looked like a pile of rags that had been dipped in red paint, then flung carelessly across the timber floor of the small building. Two dogs, animals Blane recognised as pets from the village, were fighting over whatever the rags contained.

  He could see no other dead bodies. But death itself hung heavy over the village.

  “Mr Blane.” The voice was quiet, fragile, full of a restrained emotion which constantly threatened to flood through. It belonged to one of the kids from the village; he was standing half-hidden beneath the church conifers. “What’s happened, Mr Blane?”

  “I don’t know. You’re Slates, aren’t you?”

  The boy nodded. “That’s what my friends call me. Mum and Dad … Mum and Dad don’t…” He trailed off and stared through Blane, lost somewhere in a horrible memory.

  “What happened here, Slates?”

  The boy started, focussing once again on Blane’s face. “Mum and Dad are dead. I was reading under my duvet, you know, secretly …” He trailed off again, looked across at the pond and the body marring its surface. “That’s Mrs Greenwood from the village store. I nicked a Mars Bar once and she didn’t tell Mum and Dad. She said one little misdemeanour shouldn’t scar a life for life, but more than one would destroy it. I didn’t nick again. Stupid. Stupid old woman.” Slates’s face, strained like a taut drumskin while he had been talking, changed shape. His cheeks rose, mouth tensed, eyes wrinkled almost shut. His long hair, hooked behind protruding ears, shimmered as he tried to hold back the tears. He shouted out once, loud and incoherent, as if a pressure valve of emotion had snapped open. Then he began to cry.

  “Slates, come on, come with me.” Blane held out his hand and gently touched the lad on the shoulder. He was hot through his T-shirt, too hot. Burning up with terror.

  “Mum and Dad are dead,” Slates said, and it was as if stating the fact again had opened the floodgates. The boy began to talk, drowning his tears with words. “I was reading under the covers, couldn’t sleep, then I heard a noise from across the street in Mr Simpkins’ house, like a sort of crash, or a bang, or something. I looked out the window, but couldn’t see anything. It was dark.”

  Blane walked alongside the boy, hand on his shoulder, listening and looking around at the same time. He steered towards the people by the pond who, although in a group, did not seem to be together. He wondered whom he could tell about the dead boy, wondered also whether any of them would even listen. This morning, it seemed, grief was endemic.

  “So I got back under the covers, but the book began to scare me after I’d heard the sounds. I thought there was something in the room with me, waiting to make the same noises. I’m not usually afraid, you know, but last night seemed … pregnant with danger.”

  Pregnant with danger, thought Blane, the lad should have been a poet.

  “That’s from the book I was reading,” the boy said, with an oddly flat pride. “Mum and Dad were both snoring in the next room. They always did, Mum said it’s how they stayed together so long, not being able to hear everything they both said in their sleep. She was only joking.”

  Slates was panting now, almost spitting the words out, forcing his fears into the open, perhaps thinking that if he kept talking he could keep the reality of what had happened at bay.

  As they approached the pond some of the milling people noticed them. They looked up with red-rimmed eyes, stared straight through the man and boy, looked down again at their hands or the mess of blood on their clothes. One of them, a middle-aged man, was lying with his face pressed into the grass, mouth opening and closing, chewing the turf like a dog trying to make itself sick.

  “So when I heard the bang from next door, I really jumped, threw back the covers. I went into Mum and Dad’s room, because I thought one of them had fallen out of bed, or something. But when I saw them … when I saw them …”

  Blane and the boy stopped beside the pond. Reeds reached for their knees. Ducks paddled in quiet disregard of the human tragedy unfolding around them.

  “There was blood. And bits. Other bits. And Dad’s face was …” Slates could not finish. He fell to his knees, shuffled across the damp grass to the nearest person and flung himself into her lap. She did not seem to notice. She began absently stroking the back of his head, murmuring, rocking back and forth, her eyes seeing something far different from this early morning scene.

  The sun had risen behind the church and now sprayed golden dawn across the village, shimmering separately in a billion drops of dew and a thousand shed tears. The sky turned red. Shepherd’s warning.

  “There’s a dead boy in the churchyard,” Blane said quietly.

  “Everyone’s dead, why should he be different?” The man who had been chewing the grass turned and sat up, chin and teeth stained green and brown by the sod. “My Janice … she’s gone. Dead. I don’t know … her back’s broken.” He frowned in amazement.

  “Has anyone phoned for ambulances? Police?”

  “I have,” a woman said from across the pond. She was standing near the water’s edge, letting soft black mud ooze up between her bare toes. “I heard a noise from next door, where Mr and Mrs James live. I knocked, but there was nothing. So I rang for the police and an ambulance. They’re quite old, you know.” She looked at the people gathered around the pond, frowning as if she did not recognise any of them. “Then I saw everyone out here … the car, burning … blood. And I came out. What the hell is going on?”

  “There are dead people everywhere,” Blane said. He was going to mention the shape he had seen in the churchyard, but the memory felt suddenly personal, like an undisclosed sin. The laughter and singing bir
ds made it so, perhaps. His own unknown memory.

  “Dead how?” the woman asked, taking a long drag on a cigarette. She had cropped ginger hair, dangling earrings, adult echoes of a teenaged punk. The short hair revealed ears large enough to attract a second glance, and it seemed that the haircut and earrings dared anyone mention them. Her eyes held a sparkling intelligence, where once there may only have been rebellion. Her pale expression seemed soft and vulnerable, even though her voice held a certain note of control. Nobody answered her question, so she asked again: “How? What happened? It’ll help when the ambulances get here, you know, if the paramedics have some kind of idea what they’re having to deal with.” She stared at Blane, meeting his gaze. He did not recognise her as a villager. Perhaps that was why she treated him as an equal rather than an oddball.

  “How did the boy in the graveyard die?” Her voice demanded an answer.

  Blane thought it unwise to supply it. “The same way as everyone else, I guess.” He did not mention the bite marks in the flesh. Nor did he hint at the dead animals, arranged around the body of the boy like ancient spiritual guides into the next world.

  “Which still tells us nothing.” The girl squatted on her haunches and flicked a fly from her sweatshirt. She glanced around at the others sitting or standing around the pool, examining each of them closely, eyes finally coming to rest back on Blane. Another pull on the cigarette. “Who are you?” she asked.

  “My name’s Blane. I live out on Pond Road.” He casually indicated the direction, waiting for the snide remarks, giving her ample opportunity to realise who he was, if she hadn’t already.

  “In the prefab?”

  Blane nodded.

  “You’re like me, then. Alone. I’ve only lost friends, today.” With that the woman stood, slipped on a pair of cheap trainers which had been dangling from her hand by their laces and walked around the pond. She threw her dog-end into the water as she went.

  Blane had a chance to observe without being observed. The woman was tall, at least three inches taller than him, probably nudging six feet. Her baggy clothes held a bulky body, but she was heavy boned rather than overweight. She walked with a steady grace, a confident step, arms swinging as if they were constantly seeking something to do.

  Blane glanced over at Slates, who was still being absently cuddled by the woman. Neither seemed to be aware of the other’s presence, but there was definitely a joint sharing of comfort that he was loathe to disturb. Instead, he moved off quietly to meet the woman.

  “Talk with you?” the woman said as they drew together. She indicated the bandstand with a nod of her head and the two of them moved away from the pond.

  Blane looked down at his feet as he walked, imagining that he was still in the woods. There were clearings in there where the grass grew up through last year’s blown leaves, and snowdrops and daffodils had already shown their tentative faces. Sprays of dew erupted from around his shoes, turning the light leather dark. If he concentrated – ignored the shadow of the woman where it clung to his feet; tried to forget the terrible sight of the dead boy surrounded by the mutilated creatures; thrust the fleeting, haunting shape in the churchyard from his mind – he could imagine himself safe within the secret arms of nature. Comforted. Protected. Shielded from petty human delusions of grandeur and the childish squabbles of politics and nations.

  A growl came from ahead, low and throaty. He looked up quickly, reminded of the sound he’d heard in the woods after the deer with the crushed neck had died before him. Another growl, then a flurry of barks and yaps from the bandstand as the two stray dogs fought. Between the slats in the side of the wooden structure Blane could see that they had something in their mouths, and were performing a canine tug of war.

  “Maybe this is far enough,” the woman said. “Shoo! Psshhhh! Out of it, go on!” She clapped her hands and stomped several paces towards the bandstand, until she was staring in through the slats. She paused, her big shoulders slumping slightly. “Oh Christ.” The dogs threw her a desultory stare and trotted slowly down the steps and away. They had stopped fighting; whatever had been the cause of their argument had apparently ripped in two.

  “Blane, there’s a dead person in there.”

  Blane nodded. “I think maybe it’s Saint.”

  “Saint?”

  “He lives around the village.”

  “I know Saint.” The woman walked back to Blane and stopped, staring down at the ground between them. “The dogs were eating him.”

  Blane said nothing. There was nothing to say. The dogs were strays. They were opportunists, but he knew this was not the best wisdom to come out with right now.

  “Just what the fuck happened when the lights went out last night?” For the first time since he had seen her, the woman seemed touched by the circumstances. She did not appear as big as she had, grief and fear moulding her body into their own withering shapes. Her face had paled, and her fists were opening and closing at her side, trying to grab onto something solid to explain the tragedy they had all woken to.

  “I have no idea,” Blane began. “I was in the woods for most of the night.”

  She gave him a strange look, but said nothing.

  “I spend a lot of time in there. Living with nature. Keeping away from … human trivialities.”

  “This isn’t trivial. Have you noticed? No sirens yet. I rang over an hour ago.” She hugged herself, clasping her upper arms as if holding onto whatever sanity remained. “Maybe I should try again?”

  “Maybe they’re busy. What’s your name?”

  “Holly.”

  Together, Blane and Holly turned to look back at the people gathered around the pond. Blane glanced sadly at Slates.

  The boy’s body jerked once, hard, as if struck by a massive invisible weight. An arc of blood powered from his nose and mouth, soaking the woman who had been stroking his hair. He twitched briefly, limbs thumping a tattoo on the damp earth, forcing his head from the woman’s lap.

  Then he was still. Dead.

  5. Blood Red

  Mary hated the people she chose to be with. But then she lived a life she didn’t want, so the hatred went both ways. She had once been an attractive young girl with ambitions and prospects, but a combination of drugs, cynicism and feuding between heart and mind had reduced her to a shadow of her former self, a void, a nothing. Her personality bounced around inside, lost. She tried to fill this emptiness with the notion that Roger really needed her and loved her. Even when he loved her with curses and fists, this premise persisted.

  Inside, Mary knew that she had died years ago. But she had long chosen to ignore her inner voice; it told the painful truth, and truth was as wanting as hope.

  The bedroom walls hung with tattered posters from a decade ago, so familiar that they went unnoticed. Painted faces stared from them, pouting arrogance into the staid atmosphere of the room, vacuous expressions promising equally inane music. There were other things on the walls, but Mary did not like to look at them. Not unless she had to, not unless Roger or Jams made her. Then she tried to shut the photographs from her mind, but eyes were thoughtless things, and they transmitted all the terrible truths straight to the essence of her quailing soul. The floor was scattered with gruesome mementos of the gang’s work. Some of them stank. The latest one, from earlier that night, hung from a nail on the back of the bedroom door. It was drying, but it shed a dark dribble which had almost reached the floor before hardening into a crust.

  The room was filthy. It bore testament to a monstrous fascination, a perversion enjoyed by Roger and Jams and the others, but only indulged by Mary because she so wanted to belong. The room had no morals. It was a bad room.

  Mary was like this room, where she was supposed to be sleeping but could not. Memories of the previous night held her far from the land of dreams, stirring her with stabs of guilt and a sour, blood-red taste of self-loathing. Yes, she was like this place, where she cried so often, in the dark: hollow; superficial; abandoned.

&nbs
p; Roger lay beside her, snoring quietly from within his own dark dreams, a potential of hard love and violence and wickedness rolled up in one abused and abusive body. Mary raised herself on one elbow and stared at the man who purported to be her lover. There was a sheen of sweat on his skin, catching a ghostly green light from the stereo display which picked out his angles and curves. She imagined a knife put to his skin, parting flesh from bone, wondered how he would like it. She could see his penis in the half light, nestled within tufts of dark hair, and meditated on whether he thought of his own whilst mutilating others. If she were strong, she could ask him. Hold one of his filthy knives there, wake him up, ask him.

  But she was not strong, she was weak. She was a wagon and Roger the engine, guiding her easily and mindlessly to whatever future awaited her. Occasionally, very occasionally, she thought of her family. Her mother tired and limp, offering a vague grimace through cigarette smoke and apathy. Her father huge and drunk, not really bad, just indifferent. She realised not for the first time that whatever warning her childhood had sent her had not been heeded. And the feeling upon that realisation was always the same; anger at herself. A dilute anger, because Mary rarely felt anything to the extreme.

  She closed her eyes and remembered the horses from last night.

  Roger had driven. Jams sat in the back between Helen and Mary, and in the front passenger seat Rupert rolled joints and took swigs from a bottle of cheap whiskey. Jams had his hand down the front of Helen’s knickers, and Mary stared from the window in discomfort. But it was dark outside and all she could see was the reflection of her own sad face, and Jams gnawing Helen’s neck.

  Helen seemed unperturbed by the rough attention. She had told Mary her story once, years ago, and for a while it had seemed that she regretted the terrible things she had done. Now, sitting in the back of a stolen Escort, happily being fingered by the sort of person her parents were regularly being paid by the state to give legal advice to, the girl seemed beyond help. Her soul had become ugly.