The Nature of Balance

by Tim Lebbon

  “What happened to you?” Mary asked, with a reverence that felt entirely natural. “What are those chains?”

  “These?” The woman tugged at one of the chains, jerking her head and encouraging a teardrop of blood from the old wound. It trickled down the chain and hung suspended by her cheek. She seemed unconcerned. “These are a secret.”

  “Why do you want me?” Mary had started to feel good. Not just well, or less fearful, but good inside. A feeling she could not remember experiencing for years, a sensation showing its tentative face from within the folds of her darkened soul.

  “Mary, how can you say that? Surely you can see how useful you are. How special.” She frowned. “Do you mock me by asking why I would want you?”

  “No, no, I don’t mock you, I …” She was not sure what she was going to say, but it felt vaguely daring.

  “You what, Mary?” The woman leaned forward some more, and Mary realised now that she was foolish to have ever doubted her gender. Not only was she confident and sure, she was also quite beautiful. Her eyes were green, the colour of life, and though her sallow skin contrasted sharply with this appearance, her breasts hung heavy and full beneath her shirt. Mary had an obscene, tingling image of suckling at them, and the woman’s smile hinted that she knew what Mary was thinking.

  “Well, you’ll be able to say it in time.” She sat upright again, reaching down for the chain at her feet. “Now then-”

  There was a shout. A shape lurched into the doorway and leant against the frame, its moaning accompanied by the uneven patter of escaping blood on the floor. It was Rupert. He looked as if he was trying to talk, but his jaw chewed gore. The side of his head was strangely flat and wet, and his left eye did not move with his right.

  “Sleeping,” he spat, “… hit me.”

  He saw the woman on the bed, Roger dead behind her. “What …?”

  The woman did not even honour him with an answer. She stood and swung the chain. It wrapped itself around Rupert’s throat and he muttered in surprise as the blades bit into his skin. The woman held the handle with both hands and pulled.

  Mary was fascinated. The woman tapped her on the shoulder seconds later, jerking her back to attention. His throat, Mary thought gleefully, just gone.

  “As I was saying,” the woman said, “I need you to do something for me.”

  “What? What?” Right then, Mary would have gladly used the chain on herself. For this woman who made her feel so wanted, she would have flagellated the skin and flesh from her own back and offered her spine for appraisal..

  Mary was handed the chain. “First, I’m sure you’re pretty good with this. Yes?”

  “I’ve never—”

  “Good, I’m sure.” The woman’s voice bore a trace of impatience now, but Mary had to know more.

  “What’s your name?”

  The stranger stared at Mary for a long time, eyes piercing, chain twitching as her scalp flexed in thought. “I suppose it won’t hurt you knowing.”

  What’s in a name? flashed across Mary’s mind.

  “My name’s Fay. I’m here to save you. And this is what I need you to do.”

  9. Arguing with Instinct

  He is cold to the bone. Someone has left the aircraft door open and frosty air spins through the cabin, rattling parachute lines, laden with snow. The sound of the engines, pumping choking fumes into the slipstream and straining against the thin air, drowns everything else.

  He is sitting with his back against the fuselage, hands clasped on his knees. There are others there with him. All wait in the same worshipful attitude. He wants to talk to them but they are bags of bones, flashes of skull showing under spider-webbed hair. They have been waiting forever.

  He goes to cry out in frustration, but then his mother appears from the cockpit. She is dressed as she had been for his wedding. The colours of her exquisite clothing shout out against the dead blandness of the aircraft, melt their way through the assembled army of skeletons and seem to imbue them with a jerking, tentative life. Bony hands lift like a marionette’s, helmeted heads raise and aim empty eye-sockets at him. Impossibly, the skeletons grin.

  The aeroplane banks violently and a storm of snow blasts through the open door, instantly camouflaging the movement of living bones. He tumbles from his seat, cries out as he realises what is happening, claws his hands in the vain hope that he will grasp onto something before the void claims him.

  He is falling.

  He has no parachute, because he does not belong here with the others. Wind freezes his hearing. Above him, through the angry snow, he can see the tail of the aircraft drifting into the distance before it fades away behind a blanket of white, disappearing into nothing.

  He spins, limbs flailing like independent living things. He cannot breathe; air rushing past his face sucks out what breath he has. He wants so much to scream, but his chest is an agony allowing only an unspoken dread. He remembers his mother, not as she had been on the ‘plane but as he had last seen her, waving at the airport, a splash of exuberant colour amongst the burnt pink hides of the tourists.

  His fall levels and now he can see below. A great whiteness is sucking him in, drawing him towards itself as implacably as death follows life. He finds a breath but does not scream; the impulse has left him, replaced with a certainty that there really is nothing too much to be afraid of here. Here he is alone, allowed to reflect upon things at his own pace, using his own thoughts. He can consider his life, and what went wrong. He can see Jenna’s face below the water, eyes nibbled by fish. Here, he is himself. So often he exists purely as others see him.

  A landscape carves itself from the plain whiteness, like a drawing slowly appearing on a blank sheet of paper. Texture first, hills rising slowly to meet him, valleys shying away. Then trees and walls, speckled with the snow yet still distinguishable from this height.

  The last few seconds speed by. The ground rushes up, eager to meet him.

  He strikes. There is no breath to be knocked from him, but still the jarring is massive, the impact on arms, legs and torso driving great spears of pain into his spine. He is instantly enclosed in blackness, wiping out the glaring white as effectively as a funeral shroud hides the dead from the living.

  He thrashes wildly, waving his arms and legs in an effort to shift the snow which has covered him.

  Wake up, son.

  He was still buried beneath the snow. There was a hint of light, but it barely found its way between his sticky eyelids. He shoved at the blanket holding him down and the air hit him, cooling his sweat and bringing him gasping awake.

  Paul sat up, panting at the cold and the shock of the strangely vivid dream. A sudden rush of emotion swept through him, a relief so palpable that he could not believe he had been asleep for the last six hours. The snow had enveloped him, eaten him, cushioning his fall and trying to crush him in the process. But it had also been a shield behind which he could hide and belong to himself. The coolness still lingered on his body, spreading through the fine sheen of sweat and prickling his skin into goosebumps. He thought briefly of Jenna; wondered whether she had been in the dream; said a silent hello to her.

  Paul jumped from the bed and rubbed his arms briskly to restore some warmth. He’d always been a fast waker, either through a love of life or a weariness towards it; often, he could not decide which. His arms and legs ached, his back was sore in several places. He cursed the cheap mattresses they used in these holiday cottages.

  He dressed quickly, vowing to wash later but eager now to simply retain some warmth around his body. As he hurried downstairs, he wished he had saved enough loose change to replace the Calor gas canister in the mobile heater. Switching the kettle on for the first of his several early morning mugs of tea, Paul’s thoughts suddenly snapped back to the strange dream.

  So vivid. His mother, smiling at him in the ‘plane. The strange skeletons, sitting there in eternal readiness for an arrival which would never come. The ground rushing to meet him, snow cushioning h
is fall and spreading the impact throughout his body, into his legs, arms and back, all aching now, all displaying signs of having recently been struck a heavy blow.

  Jenna, giving him a fluid stare through mutilated eyes. He blinked, shook his head, trying to forget. But dislodging the memory of Jenna was like trying to escape his own shadow. All he could do was to keep her in the dark, where she didn’t show so much.

  He pulled up the sleeves on his left arm and twisted in the dawn light. Beneath his smooth brown skin there were several areas where bruising was already forming, swelling and pushing outward from the bone. “Shit.” He must have been thrashing so hard in the bed that he’d struck himself on the frame.

  The kettle boiled and he poured himself a huge mug of tea, two teabags, four sugars. The milk smelled suspicious, but there were no lumps in it as yet, and it was only a day out of date. It was either this or walk down to the village to buy another pint. Besides, he had a cast iron constitution.

  He strolled through to the cluttered living room – his study for the duration of his stay – and opened the curtains. A smile came unbidden at the sight which greeted him, a sense of peace tempering the ache in his muscles. He was still cold, but the tea was melting the dream from his body and warming him to the day.

  The woods began at the far edge of the field in front of the cottage. They rose to the right and rolled gently down to the left, following the line of the valley into Rayburn. In the distance, over the heads of the trees, Paul could see the faint outline of the Cotswolds peering through the early morning mist. The sun shone from behind the house, throwing the untended garden into shadow and lighting only the true wilderness of nature. The field was fallow, left to the whims of nature by a farmer too traditional or too wealthy to bother with an awkward shaped field on sloping ground. Along its side ran the path Paul took every day, lugging his rucksack containing food and drink, a camera slung around his neck, notebooks and pencils folded carefully away in a leather folder strapped to his belt. Already he had worn the grass down to a flattened trail, temporarily rescuing a path back from nature.

  He had been here for just over a month, since the early flowers pushed their way through the frost-hardened soil, to catalogue and observe the profusion of plants and animals inhabiting the woods. They were among the most densely populated in the country, with an even greater span of species than many manufactured wildlife reserves. His colleagues at the Wildlife Heritage Trust seemed to view his excitement as more than a naive enthusiasm for the job, and cracked smart remarks about him having someone on the go in the area. One or two of them had made other veiled comments, painted as humour but instilled with an age-old prejudice. These he had tried to ignore. It was never simple to do so, but when the Trust had approved his four month stay just outside Rayburn Woods it was easier.

  The truth was, Paul was fascinated by nature. The area was intriguing, and it offered him the perfect isolation. There were so many species of bird and small mammal here, that it almost seemed unnatural.

  This morning, however, something was different. Paul frowned through the steam from his tea as he took another mouthful. Things were slightly askew, though he could not discern precisely what. It was as if a familiar landmark had been removed overnight, leaving a glaring gap in the landscape.

  “Now what’s wrong here?” Paul shivered, the last remnant of the dream fleeing his body. Goose on your grave, his mother would have said. He felt disturbed on a level far too remote to name. Everything was normal, he was sure, and yet there was something niggling at the back of his mind, like a name long-forgotten but aching to be recalled. If he went to make more tea – diverted his attention – he may suddenly realise what it was. And yet he was fascinated with this sensation, this feeling that something in the scene was out of kilter. He shook his head, closed his eyes, opened them again. The view was the same, familiar yet lacking. Or, perhaps, there was more than was normal out there.

  “Bruised arms,” he muttered. “What about them? Bruised back, too, by the feel of it.” He placed his fingertips on the window and gently tapped the glass, willing the fault to make itself clear, trying not to analyse the details of the scene too hard in case he was missing the big picture.

  It seemed so natural to link the strange dream with what he was sensing now, that he did not question it.

  “Nope.” He turned away, frowning, and stalked slowly back into the kitchen.

  It hit him just as he was filling the kettle for the second time. “Too much,” he said. “Too much going on.” He ran back into the living room and looked through the window again. As was often the case he chatted to himself, as if verbalising everything for posterity. Some would have told him that this was a sign of loneliness.

  The view was wonderful. Beautiful. But flawed.

  “Birds everywhere. All sorts.” They darted across the field, twisting in the air in peculiar flight patterns, diving into the long bracken and emerging with some squirming breakfast morsel. Blue-tits and green-finches twittered and argued along the fence between the garden and the field. A woodpecker leapt around near the garden gate, inspecting the cracks in the concrete path. A pair of buzzards drifted high up, watching the proceedings.

  “They’re hardly singing. And when they do, it’s barely normal. More like shouting. And those rabbits.”

  The family of rabbits sat at the fence, staring in. Staring in, at him.

  There were several magpies in the old apple tree at the corner of the garden. They sat apart, calling to each other intermittently to ensure they had not been abandoned. They were all watching the house. Their heads jerked slightly, as if plucking insects from the air.

  “Seven. Must have a secret.”

  Sometimes a bird would leave its place on the fence and disappear over the top of the house. Another would instantly flutter down to take its place, as if filling the blank spaces in a defensive wall.

  “Weird.” Paul was not especially afraid. He’d been studying nature for a long time, ever since his mother had bought him a subscription to a natural history magazine for his seventh birthday, and he knew that there was a reason behind everything. Apparent randomness was the life-blood of nature; each event went to make up the balanced whole. Many of these designs had yet to be perceived by man, but nature had a way of dealing out what was right. Paul was certain of this, and it had become his faith, in the same way that his mother believed in her benign God who still seemed to take everything personally.

  Order was how nature controlled itself. There was an order to everything, not in some fated way – fate was a human conceit, a fall-guy for good or bad – but in a certainty derived from millions of years of evolution and survival. The things living on Earth now inhabited branches on the tree of nature, and when the boughs became too heavy and began to break there would be a disease, or an asteroid, to balance the trunk once more. It was an analogy he liked, because it seemed to fit circumstance so well. Humanity had a branch at the top: thin, new, still bending in the wind, still moulding itself to its final shape. Paul only hoped that it did not become to large and bring stress to the tree. A stress that would demand action.

  Though in many ways, this was already happening.

  “Weird,” Paul said once more. “Damn weird. Hello birdies. What are you up to today, huh? And you, Mrs rabbit. Shouldn’t you be back inside now, dodging us ghastly humans?” Now that he had realised what was amiss, or rather different, he could perceive it more and more. The birds on the fence, the magpies, the rabbits; even a cete of badgers sitting at the base of the old oak out near the woods, staring up the field. All of them, staring at the house.

  “Fucking weird.” A coolness had settled over Paul’s skin again, as if he was still buried in the snowdrift of his dreams. He’d heard about that once, someone falling from a plane but landing in snow and surviving with cuts and bruises.

  Bruises. His arms were swelling, tender to the touch. He flexed his shoulders, and felt a nest of pain settled in between his shoulderb
lades.

  “Breakfast can wait.” He put his mug down by the sink, adding to the steadily expanding chaos of unwashed crockery, and hurried upstairs for his jacket. He pulled on another pair of socks while he was there and stuffed some gloves into his pocket.

  But when he arrived outside, he found that most of the coolness had been within. The sun had just tipped its head over the cottage and down into the garden, and as he stepped from the shadows he felt the still heat wash over him. He undid the jacket, keeping his eyes on the retreating flurry of animals, noticing that several of the birds remained on the fence not ten steps away. They were often more trusting in the country, he found, but not this tame. The only time he had ever had a bird feeding from his hand was in the bad winter several years ago. And that memory recalled the white dream once again, and aggravated the pain.

  There was a definite change in the atmosphere. The air felt altered, wilder, and even though he often shirked the company of others, he decided that a trip to the village would be beneficial. Besides, he tried to convince himself, he needed some bread and milk, and he could have a fried breakfast in the pub.

  And those birds were still acting strangely.

  Paul looked back, expecting to see a line of rooks sitting patiently along the cottage ridge-line, seagulls swarming overhead, circling as if he was one of many ants in a huge nest. There were none, however, and silently and gratefully he cursed Hitchcock.

  For the first time in his life he felt unsettled by nature. He was often in awe, a sensation he believed was not experienced enough by people in these modern days. Now, awe was reserved for the cinema or computer, not out in the open where it should be felt, allowed to grow and expand organically with the wonders of the world that inspired it. He had been frightened too, several times, a healthy fright that he attributed to his more natural, instinctive side than his educated humanity. Once, he had faced a wild cat in Scotland, a big old tom with scars decorating his snout like some mysterious hieroglyphic. Paul had wanted to run, but instinct told him to stay. The cat had hissed, darted at him, veered off and disappeared into the woods. He had been both terrified, and ecstatic.