The Nature of Balance

by Tim Lebbon

  And if Blane did meet this mystery woman whom he thought had some hand in what was happening to them all, what then?

  He leant his forehead against the fridge door, breathing in the chilled air to calm his feverish thoughts. Over the last hour he had made love, faced death and seen a mad woman kidnapping someone he felt partly responsible for. At least if he did only have hours to live, he was making the most of them.

  He giggled, surprised and perturbed at the same time.

  “What?” Holly said.

  Paul shook his head. “This is all mad,” he said, summing everything up in one word and seeing Holly’s understanding. She shrugged, nodded and continued to pack food.

  “What are we doing?” Gerald asked.

  “Following them.”

  “But the cows need milking. They’re late already, poor beggars must be hurting. And the fence in the east field has been broken, been telling Patty I’ll fix it for ages. Years.”

  Paul went to Gerald and put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “We’ve got to leave the farm. To help Peer, if we can, and to meet Blane. Every second that passes, Mary’s taken her further away.”

  “But the cows,” Gerald said. “I didn’t shoot them all, you know.”

  “I’m sure they wouldn’t let you milk them if you wanted to,” Paul said. Gerald glared at him, looking ready to launch a fist, but he started to cry instead. The tears looked out of place on his old face. He turned and stalked back upstairs.

  “You don’t really think we can catch them, do you?” Holly asked.

  “We owe it to Peer to try.”

  “She’s weird, anyway. She was with Mary when we met her, why not let them go off together?”

  “I don’t think Peer had really decided to go off with her, do you?”

  Holly did not answer.

  Soon, they had three bags filled with food. Still keeping one eye on the birds they backed out of the kitchen and shut the door. They were in the hallway, the stairs behind them and a closed door on their left. To their right, another door leading outside. They would have to walk around the side of the house and across the yard to get to the car, a trip neither of them was relishing. As Gerald said, he had not shot all of the cows. Sometimes, they could still hear furtive movements from the milking shed.

  “I’ll get Gerald,” Paul said.

  “No. I’ll go. I think you just offended him.”

  Paul smiled at Holly and pecked her on the cheek. They hugged in the hallway for a while, both taking immense comfort from the contact and the knowledge that they were helping each other.

  “Why couldn’t I have found you years ago,” Holly said. She expected no answer, and received none.

  She hurried upstairs, softly calling to Gerald until she heard him moving around in his room. She tapped on the door and waited until she heard his grumbled reply before going in.

  He was sitting on his bed, his head in his hands. On the table next to the bed stood a photo of a grey-haired, smiling woman. Patty.

  “Are you coming with us, Gerald?” Holly said. “We want you to. We can all help each other.”

  “You expect me to, don’t you?” he said. He looked up at Holly, determined but not unkind. “Why would I ever want to leave this place? Patty and I ran this farm for over forty years, you know. Never made much of a profit, but we made a living, a life for ourselves. We were more than happy with that. Today, I killed my animals. I destroyed my life. To help you. No, I don’t think I’m going with you.”

  “You know you can’t sleep-”

  “I can do what I damned well want in my own house,” he said. He rubbed callused hands across his face, and Holly heard the rasping of dry skin.

  “Are you sure, Gerald?” Holly asked, but she already knew that they had lost him.

  He looked up at her again, his expression softer now. “Just go,” he said. “Please. I’m an old man.” As if that explained everything.

  “Thank you, Gerald. Take care.”

  Downstairs, Holly shook her head at Paul. He went to go up himself, but she held his arm. “We’ve got to go if you want to catch up with them,” she said. “They’ve been gone five minutes already. We’ve probably lost them as it is.”

  Outside the air was warm and dry as the sun began its long journey earthward. The farmyard was silent. It only took them a minute to reach the car, but it seemed longer. Breath held, eyes wide, they expected an attack at any second. Fear stretches time.

  As the Mondeo engine came to life a flock of birds appeared from behind the barn and swooped low across the sky, alighting on the farmhouse roof. They could see Gerald’s face in the upstairs window, and he raise a hand as they pulled away. Holly was crying. Paul was silent. The land watched them leave.

  Paul motored along the farm lane, confident that they would not meet any traffic coming from the opposite direction, taking blind corners at a suicidal speed. The puddles were still cloudy from the disturbance of the Mini’s wheels. Holly held onto the hand grip above the door and pressed herself back into the seat, gritting her teeth as the car hopped and jumped from one pothole to the next. The car’s suspension rattled and screamed. The exhaust screeched painfully as it struck the ground.

  Around the final corner before the main road there were several rabbits standing in the lane. Their ears drooped arrogantly. Their eyelids were half shut as if regarding the world for the first time with an uncanny, unnatural intelligence. One of them was gnawing at a mess in the mud, something still oozing blood. They stared at the car but did not move, obviously expecting it to stop for them.

  “Paul,” Holly said, but she knew he was not stopping. She did not look in the mirror once they had passed.

  At the junction Paul instinctively braked with the car pointing left. He looked at Holly and shrugged. She opened the door and jumped from the car.

  “Holly!”

  “Hang on.” She ran along the verge for a few feet, bent at the waist, examining the tarmac. Then she turned and ran back, leapt into the car and pointed left.

  Paul gunned the engine and winced as the tyres howled before gripping the road and launching them forward. “What was on the road? Blood?”

  Holly nodded. “Rabbit stew.”

  They were travelling through a foreign country. They had been in the farmhouse for less than a day, but in that time things had been changing. Not only did the landscape itself feel loaded with antagonism, but it was promoting change in the creatures living upon it. Hillsides seemed rougher, ridges sharper, hedgerows and clumps of trees larger and able to hide more. But nothing was hidden because now, with humankind undergoing its own struggle, there was no longer anything to hide from.

  A heron flew majestically across the road ahead of them, carrying a small black lamb in massive, incongruous claws. The lamb struggled, but to no avail. The heron seemed unperturbed by the extra weight. Paul wondered whether it even recognised the change it had gone through.

  “We’re being watched,” Holly said, summing up the feeling perfectly. Paul knew that even if the heron was not overtly aware of its change, its behaviour had altered in accordance with the atmosphere of everything around it. Humankind had been excluded. For Paul, the countryside no longer felt like home. He was an invader, an alien in a foreign land where he did not know the customs, the laws and least of all, the dialect.

  Over the years he had discerned a language of the land. Simple things like whether cows faced in the same direction, the patterns a flock of sheep would make in a field – spread out or clustered together – were often omens for other things, like weather or behaviour. People would have mocked him, he knew, but he was certain that he had begun to perceive a pattern in things. He was still an amateur, and he knew that it would take a dozen lifetimes to become fluent.

  Now, he was strictly no comprendez once more. And he had the horrible feeling that he was being talked about in ways he could never understand.

  “Paul, you’re doing ninety,” Holly said.

  Paul
glanced at the speedo and eased his foot back slightly. It was a snaking road, and while he hardly expected to meet anything coming from the opposite direction, there were still unknown bends and trees which could be their undoing.

  “What do we do when we catch up with them?” Holly asked, verbalising something which had been at the back of Paul’s mind ever since they left the farmyard.

  “Decide when we do?” he said lamely.

  They passed a small turning and Paul braked, slewing the car across the road. “Have a quick look,” he said.

  Holly ran back to the junction, bent low and looked at a puddle at the head of the narrow road. Then she jumped back in surprise, ran to the car and slammed the door, breathing heavily.

  “What?”

  “They didn’t go that way.”

  Paul drove onward. “What was in the puddle?”

  “Water.”

  He glanced at Holly with a smile ready, but she was staring straight ahead, ashen-faced and moist-eyed. “Holly?”

  She shook her head.

  They drove that way for twenty minutes, stopping occasionally at side-roads to see whether there were any clues as to which direction Mary and Peer had taken. It was mostly Paul who checked. Holly was quiet and contemplative, but kept telling Paul there was nothing wrong.

  At a junction with a dual carriageway, Paul turned left. Holly did not argue, though she had a feeling he was right. A feeling she did not like, because it was verging on a certainty, and there was no way she could know. Was there?

  She had seen her reflection in the puddle. It was her, but it was someone else as well. Like a face from the history books, she recognised her own features as those of someone important. It was not ego, not personal. She had stared into the eyes of someone destined for greatness. In a way, she felt she had glimpsed herself weeks or months in the future. And it terrified her.

  In truth, she felt different anyway. Altered, added to. She sensed a responsibility dawning that she could not put a name to, but which felt spectacularly important to her and those around her. It was a niggle in her chest, but she was not sure whether it was physical. A screen in her mind, drawn back to reveal something she still could not properly discern, but she was unsure as to its reality. Perhaps she really did not want to believe.

  For want of a better name, she called it mother’s intuition.

  30. The Next Catastrophe

  “Remember when we used to run through the woods?” Fay said. “Swim in the oceans? Sprint across the savannah?” She sighed. “They were good times. Then you left me.”

  “No,” Blane said, “I don’t.” But he did. Not whole memories, but fragments: the feel of rough grass underfoot, but no sight or smells associated with it; the tang of salt water on his tongue, but no recollection of movement or pressure. Her laughter, too, bright and carefree; but he could not correlate it with this thing before him. This thing with leathery skin, protruding bones, razor teeth and slashed lips.

  “I planned so much for today,” Fay said. “I was going to tell you everything, in such a wonderful way. Call it revenge, or spite. Or unrequited love. You were going to suffer. You still will, maybe, but it will be your own suffering. Not that visited upon you by me. I think, maybe, I’m too far gone for that.”

  “You’re dying.”

  Fay laughed, an echo of the noise he had heard whilst holding the dead deer in his arms. “I’ve been dying for decades,” she said. “Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember telling me, all those times, that I had to do something about it?”

  “No,” Blane said, “I don’t.” But again there was something there, a third-hand memory of what she was alluding to, like vague impressions of pages read years ago and long since forgotten; a feeling, rather than a memory. And perhaps it was best left that way. If remembering would make him like Fay …

  Fay let go of the chains and slid slowly down the wall. Now that he was here before her, confused but slowly recalling his past, she had become so tired. Not only tired but useless, shallow. Ashamed. A century ago she could have pitied herself for what she was doing. Now there was no pity left, only hate. But she had suffered. All these years, shunned by nature, welcomed only by the mistakes inherent therein … she was a mistake. A blot on the landscape. The runt of the litter. Destined, she knew, to survive no longer. Her resilience had been through anger, not strength, and that anger was fast waning.

  Now, with Blane here, she was his little sister once more.

  “Why did you do this?” he asked. “How did you do this? How many people are dead?”

  “You’re blaming me? You haven’t remembered as much as I thought.” She rested her hands on her knees and her head against the wall, closed her eyes. How easy to slip away now, to let the world finally have its way. But then she would be wronged, and the last ten years had been about righting that wrong. It would take minutes to finish it, and she would only be cheating herself by ghosting away now.

  “Leave,” she said to Gabrielle. The mutilated woman turned and slid the door shut behind her. They were alone in the slaughterhouse, Fay and Blane.

  Blane was confused. Not only by what was happening now, but by what had happened in the past. Memories swirled in his head like jigsaw pieces in a hurricane, and he strove to grasp them, piece by piece. But at the moment the winds were too strong, the forces set against him too powerful. Fay, it seemed, still held his history in her grasp.

  “Fay,” he said, “tell me.”

  She opened her eyes. “Oh, Blane,” she said, “you really don’t want to know.”

  He sat opposite her, crossing his legs, keeping eye contact. Everything felt replayed, life on a continuous loop.

  “How often have we sat like this?” she said.

  “Often?” Blane said, a question and a statement.

  “There was one time,” Fay mused, casting her gaze at the corrugated ceiling, “in Austria, in the mountains. Before the tourists had found the place – before people set their scars on the land – when we ran for days. The snows melted in our wake, because we willed it so. The lakes filled and splashed with the jumping of mating fish. Hillsides were awash with flowers, like colours splashed from an artist’s brush. Do you remember, brother?”

  Blane shook his head, but felt the cool kiss of snow on his heels, saw the staggered teeth of mountains bringing the horizon in close.

  “There were goats and birds, and nature ran wild. We ran wild.” She closed her eyes and sighed, and for the first time in years she thought of these times without bitterness. She was excluded, but she had lived them, she had been there. They were her memories as much as his, however much she had changed. “We followed a stream down into a valley, came across a herd of deer and let them run with us. They left us soon after, because they could smell what we could smell. Sulphur in the air. Blood. Violence, not overt, but inherent in the senses of nature.”

  With each description, Blane felt some of what Fay was saying. He wondered whether she was mesmerising him, but the memories must have been his; they were so personal, so pure.

  “They were mining,” she said. “We sat and watched them for days, tunnelling into the ground, ripping out the Earth’s innards, dumping them on the surface like useless organs. We both knew what it meant, because we had been seeing it for ages. It was a foretaste of what was to come, the raping of the world. You shrugged and said it was progress, humankind were destined to do so, nature would make allowances. I hated it, even then. Hate tears you apart, brother.

  “We watched for a while, then left. But it stayed with me for years, that image. It was only on a small scale, but to nature scale is nothing. Intent and progress are more important, not incidental moments in history. From that moment on, I think I was doomed to this. And so were you, because you’re my brother.”

  “I don’t remember parents,” Blane said. “I don’t remember childhood. I don’t remember … learning.”

  Fay smiled. “We’re always learning.”

  “When I saw you
days ago, you’d killed. As a message to me, you’d killed people. Why? Why do all this?”

  Fay glanced away, her gaze alighting on dangling chains, once used to hold cattle while their brains were pulped or their throats slit, their meat ground down and fed to the masses while their hides were cured and worn as status symbols and fashion. “Everyone is dying anyway,” she said, “and I’m jealous. I’m a cruel and jealous God.”

  “You’re no God,” Blane said.

  Fay shrugged her bony shoulders. “No, of course not. If I were, I would have done all this ages ago. And I would have left no chance.”

  “I still don’t understand,” Blane said. “These things you’re talking about … some of them I think I have memories of. But I don’t trust them, because I don’t trust myself. I have no memory, as far as I can make out. No past. I just sit in a wood, watching things. I don’t know why you’re doing this. I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “But you think maybe you should, don’t you?”

  Blane nodded. “I came to find you, because I felt I had to. I thought you’d know what was happening.”

  The evil glint returned to Fay’s sad eyes. “Irony fucks us in the arse once again,” she said. “I know everything that’s going on, because I’m no longer part of it. You … you’re stuck in the middle, and you know nothing. Sweet irony. Who said God hasn’t got a sense of humour?”

  “I don’t believe in God,” Blane said.

  Fay laughed. A giggle at first, then racking coughs which seemed to cause her pain. “Blane,” she said, “brother, how I love you and hate you so. You have to believe in God. You’re part of It.”

  She continued laughing, and Blane leant back on his arms and stared at the ceiling. He closed his eyes. He wanted to sleep.

  “What’s you secret?” he said, nodding at the chains disappearing into her mouth.

  Fay’s expression turned sour. “Proof,” she said. “Something to make you believe. But not yet. I promised myself I’d take great pleasure in telling you all this, seeing your reaction. Your horror. Now, I’m not so sure.”