But still he can’t.
No one’s coming his way now. Everyone’s walking in the other direction. Soon they’re all out of sight, though he can hear a rumble of mixed voices now, a crowd. People are cheering and shouting by the fire. No one cares about him. He could walk out the door and behind the building and down the heath and no one would notice.
Instead, he jogs across the weeds and rubble to the shelter of the next building. He’s breathing so hard it’s like he’s lifting himself off the ground and dropping himself back every time. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He just knows there’ll be another Plan eventually, because there has to be, and anyway, if he runs away now and leaves Soph and maybe Ellie too, then when he got to the sea he’d have to drown himself in it, or use the knife to stab himself on the shore. He waits a long time behind the next building, then scampers over a dead parking lot to the next one around, and goes on like that, working his way along the outer edge of the camp, until he can see the long building with the curvy glass front and the flames of the huge bonfire burning in front of it. The crowd’s assembling there. He’s keeping his distance still but even from here he thinks there must be thirty or forty of them. He can see two men standing on the ramp in front of the glass wall where he and the Riders tied up their horses the day before. They’re addressing the crowd. He can almost hear them sometimes, though there’s a lot of mingled talking, and the dogs are yapping and growling at each other all the time, winding in and out around the gathered men.
He kicks against something hidden in the weeds, sending it rolling across the scarred pavement. It’s his other shoe.
He looks at it in confusion. A flutter of motion distracts him. For an instant he’s afraid someone’s spotted him. Someone has spotted him, but it’s the owl. It’s come to rest on a corner of the sloping roof of the long building.
He picks up the shoe and steers his way behind the cover of a pair of abandoned trucks with telephone company logos until he’s around the back of that building, completely hidden now from the Black Pack and their fire. He squats down, wrings out his sock as best he can, and ties on the shoe. It feels like the beginning of a Plan. He’s not sure yet how one shoe plus an owl, which may or may not actually be an Italian man in disguise, add up to a rescue, but it’s better than nothing. He works his way through the debris behind the building—it’s like the Hotel here, nettles and broken glass and rusting service doors—until he reaches its far corner, where a straggling thicket of gorse has grown in its shelter. Now he’s as close as he can get to whatever’s happening out there. He ducks low and eases himself as close to the gorse as its thorns will let him, peeping through gaps between bare stems.
He can feel the heat of the fire from here. It’s not a huge bonfire but it must have been burning for a while because its heart is deep red. A hideous silhouette is staked in the middle of it, a blackened and distorted mockery of muscle and hide; flames lick all around it, making it spit and pop, stripping oily sparks from it and sending them up to twist in foul smoke. The men are mostly on the far side of the fire from where he is now. They’re facing his way but he’s well hidden, and the air between is swimming, melting. They’re listening to the two men standing up the ramp to Rory’s left. He wiggles around until he can see them very clearly through a slit between the wall of the building and the gorse. There are five other people he didn’t see before because they’re huddled on the ground below the ramp. One’s Soph, sitting with her hands tied up again. Next to her is someone he can’t see because she’s bowed over, but she’s a small woman wearing a long baggy T-shirt which was once more or less white: it’s got to be Ellie. At the base of the ramp on the side beyond the two men are the miserable old couple, huddled close to each other. Between them and the men, a bit farther up the ramp, white as a cloud and plainly terrified, is Amber.
Unseen by anyone but Rory, the owl squats at the end of the roof, watching too.
The two men are still speaking. Not together, nor taking it in turns, just interrupting each other and finishing each other’s sentences. Rory has to hold himself still to hear the words over the noise of the fire and the fretting of the dogs. There’s a lot of umming and errring, and one of the men speaks English with a strong foreign accent, making the words slidy and pointy like he’s permanently sneering. He’s the shorter and slighter of the two. Rory doesn’t like the look of him at all. He has a dangerous face, sharp, weirdly pale, with a fringe of hair so blond it’s virtually white. He’s wearing a cape made of the skins of dead dogs. There’s a flaccid dead-eyed dog’s head staring out from each of his shoulders, and small black claws in a string around his neck. He doesn’t umm and errr as much as the other man, who’s bigger, heavier—almost fat; it’s been so long since Rory’s seen an overweight person he takes a while to remember the word—and messier, with untamed curly reddish hair over most of his face as well as his head. The bigger man has glasses, which he keeps taking off to wipe on the sleeve of his long black leather coat.
He’s also holding Per’s staff.
“So,” he shouts, “anyway. OK. Now, I know you thought we had some entertainment last night.” He pauses as if waiting for a laugh or a cheer. “Ha. Er. But actually we’ve got a bit of a treat for you. Pav and me.”
“Not what you are thinking,” the other man chips in, the blond foreign one. He’s also addressing the crowd by the fire but he doesn’t have to bellow like the big man does. He’s got a clear sharp voice, the kind that makes itself heard without an effort. The listening men seem to have gone a bit quieter already, as if they’re expecting something.
“Oh yeah,” the big man says. “Yeah. We’ll get to the bitches later.”
“All of us?” someone yells from the crowd, and a few people cheer. Some of the dogs join in excitedly. They’re quickly beaten down. The foreign man holds his hands up for quiet.
“You wonder why we brought you to this place,” he says. “It’s not just to break the horse people. Jon, give me that.”
The big man gives him a resentful look, but it’s obvious already that the foreigner’s the more important of the two. He hands over the staff. The foreigner takes it gently, balancing it across his palms. Then he grips it hard in both hands and holds it up over his head. Men and dogs together go very quiet.
“This is an old thing,” he says.
“Yeah,” Jon adds. “Ancient.”
“And full of power.” The foreigner lets go with one hand and draws a wide arc over the heads of the crowd with the other. “This place is full of power. Here, where we used to send messages into space. The gods are close here.”
“That’s right,” Jon says, not wanting to be upstaged.
“There is a god in here.” The foreigner swings the staff in front of him and brandishes it at the crowd.
“In the staff,” Jon says.
“I have called this god to join us. We make him a sacrifice.” With his free hand he gestures at the ground below the ramp, where Soph and Ellie are tied up.
“So if you’re wondering why no one gets to touch the bitches, that’s why, OK? Yeah? All makes sense now, doesn’t it?
“But you know, we have our own god. Our first and greatest. Yes?”
A roar answers him. It’s not like a cheer. There’s not the slightest trace of joy in it. It’s like massed hunger. Rory shrinks himself tighter into the cover of the gorse.
The foreigner waits for the crowd to go quiet again. Then when they’re silent he waits a bit longer, staring out at them, forcing them to hang on his words.
“Which of you,” he cries at last, “wants to hear our god speak?” As he says this he reaches behind his shoulders and lifts something he’s been carrying there high over his head. At first Rory thinks it’s another shriveled dog’s head, but it’s not. It’s solid, black, hard, and the sockets of its eyes are completely empty. It’s a dog’s face carved in wood.
There’s no cheer. The crowd is completely still, all of them, men and animals. It’s as if he’
s cast a spell on them. Even the wind feels like it’s gone quieter.
“Yeah,” Jon the bigger man shouts. “Because we can do that. Like, right here. In front of everyone. You all get to see.”
“Sometimes,” the foreigner says, “perhaps you all ask yourself, Jon and Pav, do they really speak to our god? Today we will show you. In this place.” He’s still holding the dog mask high in the air, turning it slowly from side to side so it looks like it’s watching them. Rory’s very glad he doesn’t turn it around far enough to point towards where he’s hiding, because he’s convinced its empty eyes would be able to see him.
“The thing is, though,” Jon says, “you’ve got to have a special ingredient.”
“Blood,” says the other man, Pav.
“Yeah.” Jon grins. “And not just any old blood. It’s got to be special.” He takes two steps down the ramp and grabs Amber by the wrist. She shuts her eyes and gives a little screech. The old couple start towards her but one look from Jon makes them cringe and retreat. Amber looks pathetically tiny in the big man’s grip.
Some murmuring has started up among the Pack. Pav raises his voice. “Just a cut,” he says. “We don’t hurt her. We are not stupid.”
“Hear that?” Jon’s turned to Amber, but he’s still shouting, so everyone’s obviously supposed to hear. “We’re not going to hurt you.”
“We respect everyone touched by the gods.”
Ellie raises her head for the first time, coughs noisily, and spits. There’s a horribly tense silence.
“Unlike,” Jon says, bubbling up with clumsy anger, “unlike some people. Who should probably shut their mouths. Yeah? Got something to say?”
“They will hear too,” Pav says. “After that they will show more respect.”
“Not going to be much of an ‘after’ for you bitches anyway. Not once you start burning with your fucking horse.”
“Jon,” Pav says, aside. “Now now.”
Rory’s had a glimpse of Soph’s face. She’s so pale under her bruises it’s like she’s already dead. He clutches the knife convulsively. He’s going to have to do something soon, whatever it is. Run out there and cut them free. Something. Anything.
Pav gives the staff back to Jon so he can hold the dog mask up with both hands. “Now,” he says. “These old people here, they tell me this girl is special. That she looks up to the sky and speaks to powers above.” Amber’s shaking in Jon’s grip, her chin tucked down on her chest. “I hope for their sake they are not boasting.”
“Right,” Jon says. “’Cos if they’re lying they go straight to the dogs.”
“Not much meat on ’em,” someone shouts from the crowd. Nobody laughs or cheers. The air’s thick with hateful anticipation. Pav glares at the men as if daring anyone else to interrupt him.
“All of you,” he says, “on your knees.”
A brief chorus of rustling. Rory can’t look. He’s fixated on Pav and his mask.
“I think they are not lying,” Pav says, when everyone’s quiet again. “I have heard stories about this girl, about this place. I think she has the special blood. A god talks in her mouth.”
“And the god speaks the truth,” says a voice in Rory’s ear. Right in his ear. He jumps—actually leaves the ground—and squeaks in fright, spinning around, a fist closing around his heart: caught, he’s thinking. They got me. A man’s appeared behind him without the slightest sound. Rory’s legs give out, but at the very moment he’s falling on his face he knows it’s not the Pack who’ve found his hiding place, because the man couldn’t look less like one of them if he was the mirror image of Rory himself. He’s a tall clean smiling man in a long coat the color of the flowers on the gorse, of late-afternoon sun in autumn. He’s not making any effort to hide himself, though he’s tall enough to overlook the bushes. He’s standing straight and strong, like his brown boots couldn’t actually be attached to something as messy as the ground. There’s something about his face which is impossible to look at, and yet Rory still knows he’s smiling, which is almost the weirdest thing of all: how could anyone possibly smile at this? Rory cowers in front of him on the broken earth.
“Do you know,” the man says, in a brilliant, beautiful voice, “what God is?”
Something’s still going on beyond the gorse, on the ramp, where the torture and the horror are. Rory can hear it, dimly: the two men talking, a girl’s voice rising to a breathless shriek. None of it matters anymore. The man with the yellow coat has banished everything else to an irrelevant distance.
“Necessity,” he says, “and death, and disease, and love. Famine and fear. The ocean and the winds. Fire is a god. Hunger is a god. Joy is a god, and madness. The power by which things grow, and its twin by which things waste. Music. Silence. The sun. The sun is a god.”
The girl screams once, and stops; they’ve cut her. Everything else goes still. The air feels heavy. The man keeps talking as if nothing else matters or will ever matter.
“All these things,” he says, “are gods. Have you understood? God is everything in the face of which man is no more than animal.”
Someone shouts Look!
There’s a collective gasp. Rory, groveling in the mud, is thinking (with whatever defiant fraction of himself remains available for thought) They’ve seen him. That’s it. We’re done for. He twists around and looks up.
A shadow falls over the camp. Falls, and stays there, drifting slowly, turning in the air.
It’s winged and taloned but it’s no bird. It’s a hundred times too big for any bird. If it plunged and clutched it would be like death itself descending. A huge black creature is wheeling silently over the kneeling crowd. It dips a wing and circles again, watching.
The first person to speak is the old woman, Amber’s auntie. She’s on her knees. She gibbers hoarsely but everyone else is so still they can hear what she says perfectly clearly.
“The angel!” she says.
She’s right. Rory knows she’s right. Everyone knows this shape, everyone in the world. It was, when you look back, the dividing line. It marked the moment when Before turned into After. No one in the world knows What Happened. No one can say, though millions of people tried. But everyone knows what it looked like. It looked like this: this gigantic black thing halfway between a crow and a man, seen in that one photo everyone saw, and in all those wobbly videos, described in dreadful detail in that BBC report they tried to stop everyone from hearing. This was the sign. This was the messenger. Everything’s changed, it said. You no longer know anything you thought you knew. Its arc in the air sliced The Old Days away from the new.
“Everything returns,” the man says, and steps around the thicket of gorse.
Something’s happened on the ramp while the man was busy terrifying Rory. Jon is holding Amber in front of him. There’s a cut on her hand, dribbling blood. The other man, the foreigner, has put the dog mask over his face and crouched down on his hands. He’s pushing his head under the dribble so the blood splashes down on him. They’re all frozen like that, staring at the black apparition overhead. Soph and Ellie are gaping up at the sky as well. So are all the kneeling men beyond the fire. The dogs have flattened themselves against the ground. Nothing moves except the angel above and the man in the yellow coat, striding out towards the fire, one step, two, three.
Then things begin to happen with bewildering speed. It’s as if the moment of silence was a tipping point, a teetering on the edge, and suddenly the whole scene’s falling headlong and screaming.
A man in the crowd shouts “The black angel! It’s back!” The dogs spring up, howling, tearing at their leads. A few men are up and running too, scattering for the cover of the buildings. Other men get slowly to their feet. Quite a lot of them have noticed the yellow-coat man now. They stare at him with expressions of surprise turning to slow bullying anger, pack rage. Ellie and Soph have squirmed against each other. They’re both staring at the angel with open mouths. Ellie’s face is horribly scratched and scarred. Amber scream
s again, a long mad scream, which makes lots of people turn that way even though there’s a mass of stumbling and shouting now. Rory looks towards the ramp as well. The masked man is still crouching by her feet. There’s something odd about the way he’s doing it, like he’s ill. He’s hunched, shaking. His hard black face appears to be twitching. The big hairy man shoves Amber away. He lifts the staff and is about to try shouting over the hubbub when he too notices the yellow-coat man, who’s now walking straight towards him.
“Who’s this joker?” he says, squaring his shoulders but stepping back a little, like he’s pretending he’s not afraid. The yellow-coat man doesn’t break his stride. He tilts his head back a little and answers in a golden voice.
“The joker in the pack,” he says, and points his arm at where the masked man is crouched.
The man howls. It’s a sound so savage it makes Rory want to dig himself into the mud to hide. It’s utterly inhuman. The crouching man isn’t a man anymore. He’s down on his hands and knees but his hands and knees have become legs, covered in ragged grey fur. The black mask has become his face. Its muzzle writhes and opens, baring vicious teeth. Where the foreign man was, a huge dog is prowling the ramp. It snarls at Amber, who collapses in a dead faint. The big man is staring at the beast with a stupidly dazed expression. Per’s staff drops out of his hand, clatters, and rolls away. The dog springs up at him and tears a spraying red chunk out of his throat.
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