The Nature of Balance

by Tim Lebbon

  Mary wished she were like Helen. She would have taken a different path, because with the girl’s intelligence and erstwhile vivacity, dropping out should have been such a great adventure, not a descent into the blankness they now inhabited. “I love this life,” Helen would say. But she rarely smiled any more. Her eyes were hard, her voice roughened by cigarettes and bitterness. She knew the truth, and the truth hurt.

  They were travelling too fast. The clanking of metal came from the boot as they skidded around a corner in the lane, reminding them all of what they were about to do.

  “And now, I blood myself once more,” Rupert said solemnly.

  “You’re a complete fucking arsehole!” Roger shouted, struggling with the steering wheel as the offside tyres clipped the grass verge.

  “Drink?” Rupert held out the bottle to Roger. “Nearly there, everyone.”

  “Whose are we doing?” Jams asked, glancing up from his exploration of Helen’s secrets.

  “Some prig’s,” Rupert replied, snatching the bottle back from Roger. “Rich bastards, hunting at the weekend, a bit of inter-family fucking at Christmas, lunch with the local MP, ohh, marm, you do look delightful tonight, may I bribe one into letting one’s son off one of those awwwful little charges?”

  “It’s not the animal’s fault,” Mary said quietly, but if anyone heard they did not even bother to reply. She was as good as a ghost.

  “Wait ‘til you see those things scream and holler! God, they’ll cry and screech and go crazy-ape shit!” Roger was slowing the car now, looking in the dark for the gateway. The one working headlamp passed across hedgerows like a searchlight, seeking out new victims for the gang’s crazed habits. The inside of the car stank of apathy and sweat and sex, and Mary lowered the window, breathing in grateful gulps of fresh air to clear her sinuses. She almost felt like crying but tears would not come, and what was the point of crying if there was no-one to see or care? If I cry, Mary thought, and nobody sees, does that mean I don’t really cry?

  “Rabbit!” Rupert yelled.

  “Woah, hold still you little shit!” The creature was briefly illuminated by the car’s headlight, frozen in the middle of the lane like a misplaced garden ornament.

  “Funny how they seem to welcome death,” Helen said mildly.

  Roger adjusted the wheel slightly and the car jumped. There was a sound like a plastic bag of jelly and biscuits being popped, and Mary banged her head on the window frame, yelping in pain.

  “The gate’s back there.” Rupert was straining in his seat, even though there was only darkness and a dead rabbit behind them. “I’m sure.”

  Roger slammed on the brakes and the three back-seat passengers sprang forward. Helen cried out and pushed herself back, driving an elbow into Jams’s chest.

  “Not my fault,” he whined insolently, reclaiming his hand and holding it to him as if afraid she would cut it off.

  “That hurt, you stupid shit.”

  “Not my fault.”

  “Well, it hurt.”

  Roger turned and stared through the back window, slipping the gearstick into reverse and flooring the accelerator. Mary tried to catch his eye – to smile, blow him a kiss, raise an eyebrow, confirm her own existence by eliciting some sort of response from him – but he did not see her.

  Mary had started to shake. She knew what was about to come, how gruesome the next hour was going to be, and she hated herself even more for feeling a rush of adrenaline which she could not kid herself into believing was purely down to fear. It was excitement, the sort of anticipation felt before watching a graphic horror film, only this was real. Stinkingly, retchingly, bloodily real.

  Rupert was first from the car. He derided Helen when she talked of dropping out, insisting that he was different, he had moved on. His, he said, was the greater challenge: to forget a previous life and concentrate on a new, living death, like Helen, took little more than a realisation that humanity provided all the artificial rules; to do what he had done, shun all the trappings of money and wealth, to form his own art, took genius.

  Mary thought he was a pretentious wanker, and the drugs he took merely reduced him to a pathetic, philosophising fool. But she could never tell him that to his face. Not that he would really listen to her thoughts or opinions, or put any value in them if he did. He may simply choose to hit her for thinking.

  She liked to pretend that she was the only one here through necessity and fate. While the others were all manufactured failures, she was one of life’s genuine runts.

  She opened her door and fell out into the cool, fresh dark, standing still for a moment so that her night vision could adjust. The glare from the headlight made the night even more impenetrable, and the moon and stars were hidden from view by low, dense clouds. Just as well, she thought. They wouldn’t want to see what we’re about to do.

  “I want the chain this time,” Jams said. “You’ve had it the last two times.”

  “Pussy!” Rupert mocked. “You’re just scared of getting too near. Frightened of smelling the fear as the knife goes in.” He hefted something from the boot, an old broom handle on the end of which was strapped a thick, long kitchen knife. He reached back in and grabbed something else, standing and throwing it to Jams in one fluid movement.

  “Watch it!” Jams leapt back as the chain rattled to the ground in front of him. He bent down and picked it up almost reverently, careful only to touch the long handle, not the metal links themselves. There were a dozen sharpened blades welded onto the chain along its length, curved and barbed for added ripping effect. The whole thing was rusted blood-red apart from the blades’ cutting edges, which were silver and razor sharp.

  “Roger, hit the lights.” Rupert stepped to the gate in the overgrown hedge, stared out into the field, across to where a dark building huddled in the shadows at the far side. “You’re sure they’re still in there?”

  “‘Course I am. I was out here yesterday, watching that sweet little tart stroke them and comb them. Looked like she was enjoying it, too. Looked like she couldn’t wait to get them back into the stable.” For Roger, this was sex, this was filth. Mary knew that later he would want her, soothing her and whispering sweet nothings beforehand. Sex was a duty for Mary. One that made her feel important, if only for the few seconds when Roger screwed up his eyes and muttered some name, even if it were not hers. Those few seconds were important enough.

  “Sick bastard,” Jams said, but he was giggling.

  Roger leaned into the car and flicked off the light, plunging them into utter darkness. He hurried from the car and strained at the gate, waiting for Rupert to give the signal to head off across the field. “Here, horsey,” he said, then mused: “Wonder if she has ever fucked them.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Roger,” Helen said, but she did not really mean it. She liked to listen, stand back in the field and hear the noises from inside. Mary suspected that she would just as gladly listen if there were two girls in the stable instead of two horses. It would appeal to her rebellious side. Law was for the masses, Helen would say. Morals are human conceits. Fuck morals. Fuck humans.

  “Let’s go,” Rupert said. “Got the torch?” It took several seconds of silence for Mary to realise that he was talking to her, and she sensed a sudden wave of hostility directed her way. Sometimes she railed under this, other times she lapped it up. They thought she was nothing because she had no reason for being here. They thought that by creating their own petty, pathetic myths, they made themselves special. There was nothing special about being nothing. At least Mary could admit it to herself.

  “It’s in the boot,” she said.

  “Hurry up,” a voice growled, and in the darkness it was androgynous. It could have been any one of them hating her.

  Across the field, kicking up diamonds of dew, and to the stables. Rupert snipped the padlock with a pair of bolt croppers. Helen stood back a few paces and Mary could see her eyes wide and glinting in the night. Jams swung the chain at his side, giggling and breath
ing heavily. Rupert looked around, nudged Mary none too lightly and indicated that she should enter first. Jams turned and gave Helen a goodbye kiss, as if he was going to work for the day. She ignored him.

  Inside, it stank of horses. Mary turned on the heavy torch, splashing the walls with a dirty yellow light. The two animals stomped in their stalls, snorted, staring at her with only a vague interest. She stepped forward to try to pat one of the long snouts, but the horse turned and casually plucked a mouthful of hay from a hanging feeder.

  “Ignore me, will you?” she said quietly.

  “They there?” Rupert stuck his head around the door and grimaced when Mary shone the light into his eyes.

  “Yes. Both of them.” Rupert, Jams and Roger filed into the stable. Roger motioned Mary back against the wall, arranging her like a mannequin so that the light pointed at the right place. Not once did he speak to her.

  But later, after the blooding and the taking of trophies, he would. He would whisper and cajole as she did what he asked of her. He would talk of the night, excite himself again with visions of grandeur. Mary knew this, and from it she took the only comfort she could find in her meaningless life.

  Roger coughed in his sleep, mumbled something incoherent and full of malice. Mary stared at the back of his head, thinking how amusing it would be to stick the stiffening horse’s tail there while he was sleeping. Would he be disgusted when he woke up? Disturbed? Probably neither. Probably just angry that she had touched his trophy and ruined it by clotting the hairs with sticky tape.

  His back was broad, muscled, shadowed with old tattoos. Aching to be split with a knife.

  Mary closed her eyes. She was still propped up on one elbow, so she knew she would not fall asleep. But within minutes, the despised room had receded and been replaced with a wide-open space, a field in summer, a harvest of rape spraying a bright, dazzling yellow far out towards the horizon, like a field of butter.

  There is a horse in this field, a huge stallion, blazing white and regal. It is undoubtedly the King of the horses, the fittest, the fastest, the model for all horses, the mould from which their imperfect shapes are cast. It is waiting for Mary to mount it. She jumps up easily, though there is no saddle.

  At the edges of the field dead trees stand in misery, holding out jealous arms to where the more fertile ground supports the harvest. The horse walks slowly at first, gauging the weight on its back, allowing Mary to become accustomed to its natural rhythms. She moves with the horse as if they have been together forever. The animal turns its head, looks at her with one of its huge, bottomless eyes. Then it breaks into a canter.

  The rape flows by like a golden sea in a gentle breeze. The horse’s hooves swish through the crop, throwing hazy clouds of dried stalks and stems into the air behind it, leaving a smoking trail across the field.

  It looks back again, sees that Mary has fallen easily into the rhythm, and suddenly begins to gallop at the horizon. The end of the field remains a lifetime away, the dead trees rushing by on both sides. Mary looks up at the sky and shouts with joy, sure that the sparse cirrus clouds can hear her, certain that within its boiling heart the sun has a place for her for all eternity.

  The horse looks back one last time. Its eye has changed from watery to dry, wide to narrow. It turns and points its head at the trees. From this distance they look thin and fragile, but as they rapidly approach Mary can see that their dead branches are dried into ripping, grabbing, slicing fingers.

  She cries out. What? What’s happening? She should be foolish to expect an answer, but nevertheless one is forthcoming, silent but sure: she is urged by some inner sense to look back over her own shoulder. She does so, and immediately becomes unbalanced. The horse picks up speed, dodging great swathes of rotten rape until there is more dead than living, upon which it begins to dodge the living.

  The horse has no tail. There is a gaping wound where the proud white tail should be, had been, as if it has been gouged out with a blunt knife.

  Mary looks back towards the trees. They are much closer than they should be, but woman and horse now seem to be taking an age to reach them. The animal is frothing at the muzzle, puffing splatters of blood-flecked saliva from its nose and mouth and letting them splash back into Mary’s face and body. There is a rending, tearing sound, and a gash opens in the animal’s back. Blood gushes through the tear in the beautiful coat, turning the glorious white to an instant, grotesque red. Another rip open in the skin, curving jaggedly down towards the creature’s belly. Mary feels herself slipping in blood; she tries to grab onto the horse’s mane but finds it pulls through her hands and slices them open. The hair at the mane is hot and sharp, like cheese-wire.

  She slips some more. She if falling, the sensation is inescapable, and inexplicable because she is still holding onto the animal’s flanks. Its hooves pound the dry earth into showers of dead and rotting rape, pummelling both itself and Mary relentlessly towards the scabrous line of trees.

  More slashes appear in its body, coils of innards peering through as if seeking their own freedom. Mary lets go. It is the only thing to do.

  She falls. Air rushes past her ears and twists her hair into swishing shapes, but still she is attached to the horse. She sees that her thighs and knees are sinking into the animal, being eaten up and frozen in place in the gashes now appearing all across its body.

  Wake up!

  The trees are closer now. The animal has stopped running, as if the pretence is no longer required, yet still it speeds towards the woods. Perspective and distance are fluid, and Mary is sure that across to the trees is actually down.

  Wake up, you stupid bitch. Wake up, whore.

  The voice comes from nowhere, but still seems more real than what she is seeing and sensing here.

  Wake up, I need you, Mary. You can help me, Mary. You have skills. You have … passion.

  A snicker, half hidden in the sudden sound of clashing branches and clattering twigs. The horse opens its mouth and bellows, pain and triumph combined.

  Mary’s head jerked forward and hit the pillow. Her eyes snapped open. For an instant the cruel giggle was still there, hanging in the air like an echo of an echo. Then, silence.

  Roger jerked in his sleep. It was a movement more violent than mere muscles would cause. Then there was a loud, reverberating thud, like a bag of potatoes striking concrete. Roger was flung onto his back, his left arm and leg twisting around his body and snapping with the machine-gun rapidity of Chinese crackers. The side of his head bent inwards, squashed by an invisible force, and then burst.

  “Oh.” Mary could not talk, move, breathe or believe. A flash of memory hit her, the horse’s splitting skin from her dream. Roger’s chest now looked the same. Blood was welling in the wound, glistening in the tentative starlight peering in between the ill-fitting curtains. It overflowed and darkened the sheets, spreading slowly across the bed towards her like some living, malevolent thing.

  There was a sound from next door, two thuds, almost instantaneous. Then a slow, wet slithering as something dropped onto the floor. Jams’ and Helen’s room.

  Mary pushed herself from the mess that had been Roger, scrabbling in the sheets with feet and hands until she became truly entangled and pulled the sheets onto the floor with her. She cracked her head on the bedside table and her teeth clanged painfully, forcing a bright agony through her gums and into her temples.

  Her hands smarted. When she looked she saw thin red lines seeping blood.

  Is it going to happen to me?

  “Oh God, no, God, no, God, I’m sorry,” she ranted, but even Mary knew how pathetic it all sounded now. The horses had come to get them, all of them, and now they were kicking in their heads while they slept, cracking skulls open like coconuts and letting the juices inside seep away to waste. Roger was steaming.

  Mary huddled back against the wall. She would have pulled the sheet up over her head, if she had not noticed the spray of blood fanned across its surface. She shoved it from her, pushing it
as far away as she could with her feet, tears blurring her vision and making Roger’s shattered corpse move fluidly, as if he was coming for her as well.

  There was a noise from the hallway. Footsteps, running. Or hooves.

  “No!” Mary shouted, hurting her throat and doing it again. The pain seemed right, somehow, told her she really was awake. She checked the bed to see whether she’d had some dreadful nightmare brought on by last night. Roger’s head had slowly drooped to one side, and now his remaining eye glared balefully at her. It was filling with blood.

  The hooves were right outside the door. They began pounding.

  “I’m so sorry!” she shouted, nails raking at her throat to drag out more apologies. “I’ll never do it again, I only held the light, I’m so so so so- so-sorry!”

  The door swung open. A shape stood there. It clucked, imitating again the sound of horse’s hooves.

  “Don’t be sorry,” the shadow said. “Be glad.”

  6. Death by Design

  They lay Slates on the grass, next to the drowned woman whom they had already pulled from the pond. Blane took off his pullover and draped it gently over the boy’s ruined head. The stench of blood was everywhere; he did not need to see it as well.

  He and Holly had gone back to the bandstand, but there was too little left of Saint to make it worthwhile attempting to move him. It would have taken them several trips. As for the car, it was still smouldering, and the blackened shape in the driver’s seat looked ready to disintegrate at the slightest touch. They left him, or her, to cool down on their own.

  Holly had barely spoken since Slates had died. She cupped her elbows in her hands, hugging herself, keeping noticeably close to Blane, smoking an occasional cigarette. Two hours had passed since she had rung for the police and ambulance service, and further attempts by others encountered constant engaged tones, whether they tried local or emergency numbers.