by Tim Lebbon
The sun had just begun to bleed into the east. This had once been Blane’s favourite part of the day: dawn, when there was a great changeover in nature as humankind woke to see what the dark had left in its wake. The night animals crept warily back into their holes or nests, cautious of the sun and distrustful of humans through experience or race memory. They left behind signs of their activities: blood-spattered plants where a kill had been made; the tattered remains of dead prey; flattened grass or broken stems where rough mating had taken place. They left also the memory of their existence to those who had not seen them but heard them, or heard of them. As well as screams in the night, startling people awake from troubled dreams, there was the frequent image of a darting creature paralysed between twin headlights. And occasionally, the grim memory of the sound of wheels passing over that creature.
Every morning, country roads shone pink with the smear of fresh roadkill, tyre splashes receding beyond the mess in a barcode of death.
But not this morning.
This morning, the roads were clear. There were some squashed animals but they were dried out, flattened, victims of days ago rather than mere hours. And the sun rose on a very different day.
Blane’s distraction was allied to a growing sense of predestiny; the conviction that he had to be in a certain place at a particular time. As yet he did not know where that place was and, notwithstanding what he had arranged with Paul about where and when to meet, when that time was. But there was a sense of purpose about him now, smoothing out but not erasing the knots of confusion he had carried for years.
On leaving the farm, he had begun to realise how much more nature had been bent out of shape overnight. It terrified him.
The hedges bordering the road hid much of the landscape from view, but even they were twisted, distorted parodies of their former selves. Leaves, newly sprouted and shiny green two days ago, were now a thousand shades of autumn, cracked and split where their veins had dried, decorating the ground in an unseasonable display of passing on. Berries had grown and popped, hanging on their stems like tiny destroyed heads atop wounded necks. The bushes and shrubs making up the hedge had sprouted spiny tendrils which crept out across the lane, burrowing through compacted stone and sending up weird, pale-looking shoots. So as death struck the plants above, pulling them through half a cycle of seasons over the space of twenty four hours, down below life clung tenaciously on. It was not the natural life of the plants, but bastardised, as though the DNA had been nudged into some parasitic, prehistoric sequence by the dark.
In wheel ruts, puddles glinted from a midnight shower. They were stirred up and muddy, as though a car had already passed this way today. Blane soon saw why. As he passed one puddle, something slithered from it. He stopped and watched the tentacle-thing twist its way onto the dry ground. It was bright red, the thickness of his little finger, small filaments growing from its head and blowing mucus bubbles as they breathed. Its body was ribbed, about six inches long, and on some of the segments suckers puckered and kissed. Blane grimaced, but in fear. This thing should not be. There was nothing like it. It was a travesty.
He thought it might be a huge, fat earth-worm. Mutated, somehow. Changed. Ruined.
He raised his foot.
Then lowered it. He had not knowingly killed anything in his life. This thing, horrible though it was, was. It existed. Something had allowed it to become, no matter how altered that something was. He had no right to arbitrarily condemn it to death. If anything he should protect it, because if this type of extreme mutation was occurring everywhere, there was a good chance that this creature was one of a kind.
He turned and walked away.
He was shocked numb. If a mere worm could have changed that much, he thought, what else was there? What other bizarre freaks awaited him in this disturbed countryside? As the hedges opened up on both sides and Blane approached a junction with a B-road, his fears were answered.
A badger, normally a creature of the night, appeared at the end of the lane. It was twenty paces from him, sniffing at the ground, its rough tongue licking at the pale pink splash of an old kill.
Blane halted. He raised the shotgun and clamped his hand around the stock, just behind the trigger. He had never used a gun – he found them repulsive – but his instincts cried out at him to shoot.
The creature was misshapen far worse than the worm. It had three black horns growing from its head, one from just below each ear and another from its forehead, curving inward so that they almost met before its nose. Where they sprouted from the skull the dirty white fur was raised and parted, revealing the raw pink of damaged flesh beneath. Further along its back, slicing through the black and white speckled fur like a shark’s fin in the sea, rose a sharp bony ridge. The badger’s paws had changed into rough claws, cutting scrapes into the tarmac as it worried at the corpse. Its rump had shed most of its fur. In its place, skin was rupturing into hard shiny scales.
As Blane stared, open mouthed, the animal looked up.
Then it ran at him.
Badgers were not as fierce as their reputation held them to be, he knew. Rather they were shy creatures, always eager to avoid contact, undertaking most of their business at night. Their cousin, the weasel, was the fighter. Usually.
Blane raised the gun, aimed and pulled the trigger. He gasped with shock – both at what he was doing, and the anticipation of the explosion – but there was no recoil or explosion. Still the beast ran, its claws tapping a tattoo of promised pain on the ground. Blane realised that he had been carrying the gun unloaded, patted his pocket for the shells and knew he would not have time. He turned the gun and held the barrel in both hands, preparing to use the stock as a club.
The badger stopped. It was no more than four feet away, snarling at him past its wickedly pointed horns, scraping one claw on the ground like a bull aching to charge. Then it turned and trundled away, sniffing along the hedge until it found an opening to slip its malformed body through.
Blane did not pause to wonder at the sudden change in attitude. He ran past the gap in the hedge, watching warily in case the animal had gained slyness as well as a more ferocious body, and was planning an ambush. When he reached the road he broke the gun, loaded it and snapped it shut. He walked quickly, pleased for once to feel the smooth artificiality of a road beneath his feet.
Today, he thought, he did not much fancy walking in the fields.
The sun bit his neck as he walked. It was already unusually hot and sheets of steam rose from the fields, hiding whatever mutations crawled or slithered therein. Blane despised the weight of the gun on his shoulder … and yet welcomed it. It was a device specifically built for killing things, taking away that one true miracle which science, theology and logic had always failed to find the real answer to, no matter how much they claimed to be the true voice. Its gruesome barrels were constructed to minuscule tolerances, designed to guide a hail of deadly lead to the target, to rip it to shreds, tear through flesh and seek internal organs vital for sustaining life. On silent nights in the woods, Blane had often mused upon the mystery of existence: what it was; where it was; why it was. For him it was something both incredibly strong, and pathetically weak. Strong, because not only was it the driving force of the universe, but also the means by which progression would take place. Evolution rode on the back of life, and progression – towards whatever final aim nature deigned – tagged along behind. Weak, too, because the focus of life itself depended upon the pitiful constructs of biology to support it. There was, Blane believed, something total about existence, and after death the individual passed on to that totality. But for the years that individual existed, and took part in the great play of nature, there was merely flesh and blood keeping it alive. And as he had seen only too well over the last two days, the flesh was weak. Life could not be sustained in bad flesh.
The gun was hated, then. Reviled and despised. But today of all days, Blane felt a comfort in its weight. Minutes before he had actually attempted to kill w
ith it, blast the badger into a messy shadow of its old self. Only the fact that he had failed to load the gun had saved the creature’s life. The thought of killing made him shiver and feel sick, and he was glad he had failed to do so. But what if the badger had not stopped in its attack? He could have been injured, gashed, killed. And more than anything this morning, Blane felt that he had a purpose to fulfil. He was being drawn by some strange instinct, much like a swallow will follow lines of magnetic attraction in its long trips to the warmth each year. The import of this attraction felt massive, and that is why he had left the others. To find what was calling him.
To find the woman with the chains and the secret, and discover what that secret was.
As Blane approached a bend in the road he heard the sound of a car engine. He was instantly on edge, and it was much more than his usual uneasiness at meeting or being around other people. This was a fear of the unknown.
Take away three square meals and you have anarchy. Civilisation treads a knife-edge, and sometimes it slips. Order is just one particular form of chaos.
Sometimes, disorder is much more likely.
The car came around the bend and dipped its nose as the driver stamped on the brakes. It was a powerful, souped-up Escort, engine growling and shaking to be released from its confinement. Blane stepped onto the verge, lowered the gun and smiled. He saw movement in the car, heads turning and shaking in animated discussion. He tried to stand as casually as possible, attempted to imagine that the gun was not with him, but he could not forget it. Perhaps he should not.
He would never shoot anyone. If the car pulled up and someone jumped out shouting and screaming and pointed a gun at him, he could not shoot them. It was not in his make up. The instinct to survive was there, but the thought of murder was reprehensible. He was, he suddenly realised, at the mercy of people he did not know.
The car crept forward, a lion stalking its prey. Blane smiled, waved. With a roar, the engine powered the car along the road towards Blane … and past him. Frightened faces stared through grubby windows, two kids holding dolls and a woman with an arm around each child. The driver sat staring grimly ahead, face pinched in anticipation of the shotgun blast. He accelerated the car down the road, past the lane entrance and around another corner.
Blane listened to the sound of the receding engine, feeling helplessly ashamed. The looks on the kid’s faces had tugged at his heart. The glance the woman had afforded him – the way she had looked down fearfully at the gun – made him see himself from their eyes: a man on his own in a world gone mad. A gun at his side. His strained face, his sad eyes, reflecting whatever terrible sins the casual observer would care to see in them.
He sat on the verge and dropped the gun, not caring about the damp grass. He could still hear the faint sound of the car in the distance, such was the silence pervading the landscape today. He wondered where that engine would stop for the last time, and how the occupants would move on from there. Today more than yesterday, Blane knew that an irrevocable change had been wrought across the land, affecting not only the wildlife and landscape but, more intensely, the people who lived there. He was walking through a country full of dead people, lying in state in their beds where they had died two nights ago. There were those who had survived, as he had seen, but the finality of everything, even the marked difference in the sunrise this morning, only helped confirm that normality had changed during the past thirty-six hours. Now, the old times were no longer the norm. Everything had changed.
As if to illustrate, the land around him burst into strange life. From the field opposite a flush of ducks rose noisily into the air. They swooped and dipped in flight like swallows, their calls sounding more like the screeching of crows. They changed their direction of flight suddenly and headed over the road, dipping down and passing only a few feet above Blane. One of them shit on him dismissively. He went to grab the gun, terrible images of yesterday sending his heart into overdrive, but the birds darted away across the fields.
As he stood, Blane glanced down at where he had been sitting. If he’d remained there for a few more seconds a line of yellow ants would have reached him. The leading insects were huge, at least the length of his little finger nail, and as he stood they paused, as if watching. Blane smiled ruefully and shook his head, but the idea of them observing him was sustained when they all turned, as one, and filed away.
Surely they had not been coming to attack him? Ants?
Surely not.
Blane moved on. The hedgerows to either side whispered with life, occasionally disgorging something for him to see: a rabbit with huge pustules in place of its ripped-out ears; a hedgehog with several fat beetles impaled on its thickened, lengthened spines; a murmuration of starlings, living up to their collective name as they chattered like old men, strutting along the grass verge, heads jerking their way forward. All following Blane, or leading him, or dancing around him.
In a field, two horses stood touched muzzles. They seemed not to notice him, involved as they were in each other. He smiled, imagining that they were kissing, enjoying the spectacle even though he felt something of an intruder. Then one of the horses reared up, emitting a terrible sound and striking at the other with its front legs. A hoof caught the second horse in the mouth and sent it cantering away in a wild panic. The aggressor stood still. Breath puffed from its nose. Around its mouth, foam bubbled and dripped.
Two sides to everything, Blane thought. Good and bad. Malignant and benevolent. Maybe, he realised, there were even two aspects to what had happened over the past couple of days. Maybe somewhere in this mess there was something to be grateful for. His job, he knew, was to find it.
He had no idea which direction to take, so he let fate decide. At the next road junction he walked on without thinking. Secret sounds continued around him but did not change tone, so he thought he may have gone the right way.
It was not until late morning that he had the sudden certainty he was being followed. The feeling may have been there forever, but once realised it stayed with him overtly, a million pin-pricks on his back and scalp, impact points of a malevolent gaze. He did not try to spot the pursuer, but he guessed it to be the woman. He listened for the tinkle of fine chains, but nature conspired to hide the noise with bird calls and other, stranger sounds from hidden fields.
When he stopped for food at midday nature paused with him. He had the overwhelming sensation of being at the centre of things, and that something was holding its breath while he sat on the verge and ate the sandwiches Gerald had made for him. In the distance birds dipped and dived in the soft breeze, but all tended towards him. Somewhere behind him, perhaps where he had been walking not ten minutes before, something else waited, like his disassociated shadow. A shadow with sharp teeth and a cruel, hated and hating laugh.
Lunch eaten, Blane headed off once more. Everything followed him.
Late in the afternoon he found the village. And he realised, at last, how quickly and irrevocably everything was falling apart.
Now that Blane was on his own Fay had an unbearable urge to confront him, finally and completely. Rip out the chains. Show him what was inside her. But her plan held sway and kept her on her secret trail behind him, constantly changing and refining itself even as she followed.
Fay was tired. Enlivened by the change around her, but tired to the pit of her stomach. The thing in there moved with every step, aching to be released, and if crying had been possible she would have wept at the pain. But she had lived ten years of agony, and a tad while more would make little difference. Except, perhaps, to give her some sort of respite in the pain of others.
Sometimes she would approach close enough to see him walking along the road, though she always kept herself well hidden. She knew that he knew, but it was all a part of the pretence. Part of the game.
Soon, it would be time to show more of her hand.
She grinned. Her poker face began to bleed from the strain of the unfamiliar expression.
25. The Hea
rt of the Beast
On the farm all was quiet; but tensions were at boiling point.
For a while after Blane left them, Mary was distant and melancholy. She had moped without moving, bemoaned her loss without talking. But it did not take very long for her mood to change
Now she was as intimidating as ever, frowning as she sat next to the waning fire with the ever-present Spike. She petted the dog, though Peer reckoned he was as far removed from a pet as any hound she’d ever laid eyes upon. He was about as tame as a wolf could be, or a tiger, or a komodo dragon. He allowed himself to be touched and stroked because it suited his needs, and this made the intelligence in his obsidian eyes all the more disturbing.
“Any chance of helping us?” Peer asked once again.
Mary smiled sweetly up at her. “What would you like me to do?”
Paul took over, for which Peer was glad. “We need some eggs,” he said, “and some milk.”
“I thought Farmer Giles had shot all his cows.”. Gerald winced visibly, and Mary seemed to take pleasure from this. “Anyway, as I said before: who put you in charge?” She was mocking, not asking.
“I’m not asking you to milk a cow. There may be some milk left in the tank from yesterday, it should be all right. If it isn’t, we’ll have to leave it. Gerald will go with you and show you how to work the valve.”
“So why can’t he do it?”
Paul glanced around the room. “Safety in numbers.” The phrase hung heavy, but contained little comfort for any of them.
“Well,” Mary said, “I think I’m just as happy staying here, in this cosy room. Here. I’ll butter some bread.” She stood and walked to the table, Spike tagging along at her heels, and sat down next to Holly. There was a fresh loaf and a sharp knife, and Mary set about slicing it with blatant relish. She grinned as it crumbed to pieces before her. Peer wondered whose neck she was superimposing over the loaf.