The Nature of Balance

by Tim Lebbon

  Mary became a sculpture of living things, a work of terrible art. Her sounds of distress combined with the noises from the animals to form a symphony of death – gurgles, grunts, howls, the snapping of teeth, the subtle ripping of flesh and, eventually, the crackling of bones. She reached the door and moved outside, allowing larger animals to join in the fray. A cow sauntered over, its udder hideously swollen and split, knocking Mary to the ground with one nod of its head. It walked across her, crushing whatever lay beneath its hooves. Birds swooped down from out of nowhere. Rabbits and hedgehogs zeroed in on the struggling mass. Some mink waved across the yard and became blurs of teeth.

  Peer watched from the doorway, unafraid. Holly stared through an unbroken window. Blane stirred on the floor and managed to sit up, though he could surely see nothing through so much blood.

  The chaos in the yard eventually died down. Animals left to be replaced by others, darting in to snap up any of the spoils. Birds took off with scraps in their beaks, to feed whatever strange brood they had. The fox sat by the cow shed, panting, muzzle black with blood. It stared disinterestedly at the observers in the farm.

  “Poor Mary,” Peer said.

  Holly went to Blane and helped him into a chair. Her mouth hung open. His weight was unreal in her arms. She did not say anything, because she felt no pity for Mary. If Peer wished to mourn her loss, she could do so on her own. There were too many dead people and someone who wished only to add to the list deserved whatever came for them.

  And what had come for Mary? What precisely had happened these last couple of minutes? She felt a sting in her stomach like an answer, but that was no reply. Not yet, not here. Surely that was no solution. A new life for old, she thought, but felt uncomfortable swapping Mary for whatever may lay within her. Paul’s final gift to a lover he had barely known. A miracle gift to a barren womb.

  Blane was not badly injured. He bled a lot, but most of the cuts were superficial. Bruises measled his face and neck where the spent pellets had struck. His wounds were already drying when Holly helped him up, and by the time Peer turned away from the yard Blane seemed himself again.

  Another strangeness for Holly to ponder.

  “I’m special,” Blane said to her unstated query, with no arrogance at all. “So are you. And Peer. We’re all special now.”

  They buried Paul behind the farmhouse. Gerald must have tried doing the decent thing for his livestock, but most of them lay half burnt in a shallow ditch. Slowly rotting away.

  “Should we say a prayer?” Holly asked.

  Blane said nothing. Peer shrugged. Holly stepped uncomfortably from foot to foot, conscious that she was more than just one person now. Now, she had someone else to think about.

  “In the short time I knew Paul …” she began, but she did not finish the sentence. After a long silence: “Look after him, wherever he is. He’s the father of the future.”

  Blane smiled at this, put his arm around Holly’s shoulders and hugged her. His bruises had vanished like dark snow. He looked a hundred years old, but the cuts on his face were now little more than pink smears. Special, he had called himself. All of them.

  Holly felt more than special. She felt important. They were two different things.

  “You already know who you are, Peer,” Blane said, a statement rather than a question. He thought she had probably known since the shockwave of Fay’s death.

  He could see the settled, comfortable look in Peer’s eyes which he recognised from his new-found memories of Fay, countless years before. Indeed, there was much about Peer that was now familiar: her calmness at things; a vibrancy, shaking the air around her with almost physical waves; the impression that she was aglow. The sheer absurdity of the idea that she could ever, ever die. He had thought that about Fay once, when everything was good and the rot was not even a cloud of smog on the horizon.

  Blane realised now how utterly relieved he was that Peer was still with them, because without her, he had no idea what would happen.

  As for him … he was failing. He would not be around for much longer.

  “And you, Holly. Your baby is going to be someone very special.”

  Not around much longer; but perhaps long enough to bring up someone to replace him at Peer’s side.

  “He already is,” Holly said, hand flat on her flat stomach. “He’s Paul’s.”

  35. The Open Door

  Blane and Holly left the farm in the Mondeo. Peer remained in the farmhouse, because she could not be with them. She had much to do, she said. A whole world to discover. And today it was a new world, moved on by a giant kick rather than the smooth glide of evolution, forced into mutation and change by the trauma which had changed it forever.

  Peer was a changed woman too. Now, she was a part of everything: the land; the sea; the animals. She was the earth, the wind, the fire, the water. She was special.

  Holly drove quietly, with Blane slumped in the seat beside her. They did not talk much on the journey; Blane had told her there would be plenty of time for that later. They would see Peer again, she knew. When her son was old enough to join her, Peer would come to them. There was a satisfying balance in the outcome of things. A rightness.

  They passed several cars going in the opposite direction. Two of them flashed for them to stop, but Holly kept going. They were too special to risk confrontation; she would not endanger her unborn child.

  They reached Rayburn in the early evening. It was much as they had left it. They passed the tractor and trailer containing Henry’s body, used now by the animals. Blane glanced from the window as he remembered meeting Fay here; only days ago, but it felt like decades. The first time he had ever seen her, he had thought then. If only he had recalled the truth instantly, instead of letting her play awful games with his mind. How much of this could have been stopped? But already, by then, most of the damage had already been done.

  Holly parked in the village square next to the burnt out car. There were no bodies, and no one came out to greet them. Rayburn was a ghost town, haunted by the memories of better times. Or perhaps just different times. Definitions had changed radically, and who was to say what was for better or worse? A breeze blew gently across the village, sweeping up the ghosts and depositing them in memory and legend.

  “Let’s go to the forest,” Blane said. “I want to show you something.”

  Together they walked through the churchyard. Holly glanced at the gravestones and saw them as remnants of another era. When they had buried Paul, he’d gone into a new earth, governed by new rules. These old graves were already monuments to lost times. They had left Paul’s grave unmarked.

  The sun sank ahead of them and they strolled across the field as if trying to catch it. Peace surrounded them in the smells of the plants, and the sounds of animals in the nearby woods perhaps watching their approach. Holly looked down expecting to see a well-worn path, but the field was virgin. She glanced at her stomach and wondered what he was thinking, how different he would be. But Blane was as human as anyone – more human than everyone – and she harboured no fears for her child. He would be good. He would be strong. He would be a fitting student for Blane.

  “Here,” Blane said. He did not pause at the forest’s edge, but plunged straight in. There was no halt to the bird song, though much of it was strange. The rustlings in the bushes continued, evidence of new things finding their feet. He and Holly were a part of nature now, not excluded from it; here to be welcomed, not feared. “Let me show you.”

  The old oak stood wide and gnarled and diffident. It was home to a multitude, a small eco-system in its own right, from the smallest insect to a family of albino rooks nested in its highest branches.

  “I used to sit here for hours on end,” Blane said, “before I knew who I was. Even then I knew I was a part of nature, much nearer to it than most. I revelled in it. I tasted it, listened, felt it wash over me.” He closed his eyes and stuck his tongue out, the tastes both familiar and strange. “Lots has changed,” he said.
“That’s good. That’s how we advance.”

  Holly sat on an old fallen tree, leant back and looked up into the branches above her. They spread out to fill her entire field of vision, and for a moment the tree was the whole world. “It’s lovely,” she said.

  “Four hundred years old,” Blane mused. “At least. And this year, the most important ring ever will be added to its trunk. I’m so damn old, Holly. I know a lot more than this tree.” He sounded exhausted.

  They sat silently for a while, letting the darkness creep out from permanent shadows deeper in the woods. Holly moved next to Blane sidled up against him, sharing warmth. She went to ask when they were going home. But then she realised with a pleasing jolt that they were already there.

  There was no door in the field, but still she recognised the scene.

  She stood naked on the slope and stared across the strange, wonderful countryside. Already the roads were becoming clogged and overgrown by plants excluded from them for so long, and the houses spotting the landscape would soon be subsumed beneath the rapid sprouting of this new spring. A spring of rebirth and regrowth, more so than any other.

  The sinking sun bathed the hillside in golden light. The hedgerows were spilling across the fields, exploding into flower and bloom. A family of rabbits scampered at the bottom edge of the field, their fur spotted with splashes of yellow, some of them with four ears. Peer turned slowly, tracking the stream tumbling from beneath a folly higher up, and then she saw the stag.

  It stared at her through doleful eyes. It was larger than any she had ever seen, but it was in place; it was right. Peer put her hands on her hips and smiled. The deer turned and wandered away.

  Nature did not skirt around Peer; it flowed through her. She had much to do, a whole world to learn about and introduce herself to, and for the first ten years she would be without help. But then she would visit Holly, and meet her and Paul’s son, and she would have company forever.

  Two halves of the same whole. Twins in nature, if not in the flesh. Where she was now, ten years was barely the blink of an eye.

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