Shame fell over the room like a blanket. Eyes fixed on far walls, floors, pews, and candle brackets, anywhere but her. The echoes died away and the cathedral was plunged into deep quiet.
Robert looked down on her in admiration. He hadn’t known such power could come from something so small, yet moments ago, she could have toppled mountains. He squeezed her shoulders in thanks, and she gripped his hand in reply.
He cleared his throat. “The turbines are gone. Once the last of the gasoline is gone, our generators are going to die. After that, we’ll only have our coal reserves. The lights won’t be coming back on.” He let the whispers whip through the room, but then continued in the most sonorous tones he could muster, before the panic could catch. “Our food stocks are thin, but if we work hard re-sowing, we’ll pull through.”
Mr Higgins, a senile, gentle old thing, stepped forward with his hands clasped. “And the others? What have we heard of our friends? Alexander? Messrs McKay and Creek?”
“No word.” Before more than a shared inhalation could sweep the room, he hastened to add, “But that doesn’t mean anything in itself. We know the convoy reached London safely, and that the council summit was due to begin. Alexander left with the others a little over twelve hours ago. So far as I’m concerned, that’s no time at all. We should be prepared to hunker down for a lot longer. For now, we’re on our own.”
Sarah said, “They’re still here, in the city. I know some of you knew that.” She stepped from Robert’s reach. “We’ve been into the vaults, and things are missing. They’re still amongst us, even now. We can’t keep hiding in here, else we’re just inviting them to keep inching closer. If we don’t make a stand, then before long, they’ll be pressed up against our doors and it’ll be too late.
“I know you’re all scared.” She paused. “I’m scared too. I’ve never been so afraid—afraid of starving, of disease, of strangers coming to kill us, of the darkness.
“But the others are gone, and they might not be coming back. We can’t keep waiting for them to save us, holed up in here like animals in a corral. We have to save ourselves.”
What’s gotten into her? She’s always been so prim and quiet.
He felt a burst of pride. Alexander always did choose his friends well. That man knows people better than they know themselves. I wonder whether he knew she had this in her.
There was strength in the room, where only a minute before there had been only a wilted, listless darkness. Lethargy gave way to a single golden band of hope, threading every pair of eyes under the cathedral roof. Suddenly, he became aware that she had started something, and he hoped she was ready to step up to the plate, because these people were going to follow her, not him.
Then a voice rose up from the ether, and Robert’s heart iced over.
“Fire!” The call came from outside. It wasn’t a bellow intended to raise the alarm; it was the species of exclamation that escapes a person’s mouth at the sight of certain mortal dangers. “Fire!”
Robert was the first to the door, forcing his way out as everyone rushed for the cobbled streets. He had barely emerged into the late afternoon light when he caught sight of the amber glow on the horizon. The conflagration had taken hold near the edge of the occupied portion of the city, reaching almost fifty feet into the air, furious raging flames billowing copious spires of black smoke, the kind that could only mean burning paper.
He knew what it was long before they came in sight of the building. It was the warehouse that most called the Library, a vast hanger that stored hundreds of thousands of volumes that they had painstakingly collected—those that hadn’t yet been sorted for the vaults or sent as kindling for civilisation elsewhere. Countless antiques, first editions, rare finds and original manuscripts. All ablaze.
A wail swept over his head from behind, the cry of a mother who sees her child in peril. It was coming from Sarah.
She raced forward, but Heather was on her in a moment, grappling with the writhing librarian while crying, “It’s too late! There’s nothing you can do.”
“No!” Sarah screamed. “It can’t be. We have to do something. Robert, Robert, water. Water! Everyone, get water. We can save some of it, we have to.”
“Sarah,” Robert said. He had never felt so helpless. “It is too late. The fire’s too high.”
She screeched. “Do you know how long it took us—?”
“Yes.” Robert didn’t know how he kept his voice level, confronted with the raw pain etched into her cheeks, but he did it. He had to, for her. “I’m sorry.”
She sank to the floor in Heather’s arms, great hacking sobs shooting from her body. Her eyes were huge, enormous, bulging with bloodshot veins and tears the size of raindrops. Her mouth hung open in an inarticulate gape of terror and rage. Heather locked eyes with Robert and nodded toward the clinic. He nodded in reply; they needed to get her away before she did something foolish. He wouldn’t put it past her to rush headlong into the pyre if it meant saving a single book.
The cathedral refugees were rushing toward the river with buckets and pails in their hands. Something had broken; they had been spurned into new life. They were going to take charge of their destinies. Perhaps now they stood a chance.
But it had come at a price.
“I’ll kill them!” Sarah’s shriek came from out of sight, over towards the clinic, but it seemed to pierce the bellowing flames, the crash of shattering glass, and the hundreds of hollering city folk. “I’ll kill them all!”
Robert was left standing alone outside the cathedral, scanning the horizon for signs of approaching enemies. If they attacked now, there was little he could do but get to the clinic, and try to get as many running as possible. But it seemed the fire wasn’t the opening salvo of a new attack; instead, he suspected, merely a symbol, a reminder that they were not alone.
Something was glimmering by his feet: Sarah’s spectacles, one lens shattered upon the cobbles, the other cracked—each sliver catching the warehouse in reflection, burning down into a fractal infinity of roaring flames.
*
Something dark was on the move. It was far beyond the horizon, so far away she couldn’t believe the world could be so large, but Billy could sense it. A long, thin, fuzzy-edged stain the colour of treacle, oozing across the land. She had first felt it a little over an hour before, a patch of shadow that could have lain under a wandering cloud, somewhere out of sight. But as her feet had carried her ever westward, toward the setting sun, the shadow had deepened and elongated.
Now, it could almost have been a snake, slithering across the unseen reaches of New Land—Enger Land, Daddy had called it. Enger Land. What a strange name.
Whenever she stopped, she slept. Each time, she dreamed, but on waking the dreams were already half forgotten. She was left with only muddled images. She had been standing in a street flanked by tall buildings, and the rain had been hammering down on darkened tarmac. She had stood to one side of a huddle of bedraggled people all bent over a twitching young boy. She could almost see his face under an unruly mop of black hair—
But the rest was a blur, fading fast. All that remained was a feeling, one of having touched someone, as if she had reached across a great distance and, somehow, bumped up against somebody.
But who?
She had been walking since she had left Sammy locked behind the storm drain door, and had avoided every tree as though they were hungry carnivores waiting to devour her. She was not eager to become lost to another forest any time soon. Instead, she had kept to the edges of open grassland, skirting bare rock outcrops and tracking ancient public walkways, past fallen farms, train yards, housing estates and motorways.
Just like back home, everywhere there were signs of Before—something Daddy, Ma, and Grandpa had kept secret from her until they had arrived in Enger Land. Though the rusting relics had been playgrounds since she could walk, she had never guessed there had been other people. She had only ever seen the three of them and a few passing tradesmen; al
l the stories, photographs, artworks and buildings had surely come from them.
But it wasn’t so. Daddy had told her that Before there had been millions, all gone now, vanished. Poof. Into thin air.
Her mind still reeled. She couldn’t imagine so many. And the world was so big, so very big.
She had suspected that it had been the fever, making him say those things, that all the wonders of which he told her were just dreams brought on by his sickness. But here, now, walking amongst all this, the rusted metal, crumbling homes, scattered precious jewellery, cooking utensils, photo frames, wires and the strange hulks of metal called cars, she had to believe it. It was all true.
And if that was true, maybe the Panda Man was real, too. It would be far less strange than the rest of New Land, the vast, unending graveyard.
The land had flattened of late. The rolling hills had given way to unceasing fields and meadows, the heather and tangles of knotted crops giving way to unbroken pasture—thousands of acres of grass that stretched toward the horizon, opening out in every direction. It was almost unnaturally flat, without a single rise or dimple in sight.
At some point she had passed a road marker upon a buckled green sign, the writing barely legible: Salisbury - 4m
Trying to ignore the foreboding she felt when she looked in the direction of that dark smudge afar, she pressed on, following the unyielding itch that arced down her legs, pulsing through her feet and into the ground. She kept on constant watch for others, but she was no longer desperate to see another human face, not like she had been before. In fact, she often found herself hoping she wouldn’t find anyone, and that she would find herself inexplicably back at the cabin.
If other people in New Land were like the medicine women, she was better off taking her chances on her own.
Thoughts of Daddy were now ever present, a splinter growing in her mind. She had been gone too long. The Panda Man had sent her on a fool’s quest into the unknown, and there was no end in sight; by now Daddy had either awakened to find her gone, in which case he would be angry—what if he tried to look for her? If he fell down the hill leading inland from the cabin, he would never make it back.
But the alternative was worse: he hadn’t woken. And if he hadn’t woken for this long, would he ever?
Slowly, her resolve dissolved, the edifice that Panda Man had set under her being eroded by dual images in her mind’s eye: in one, Daddy clutched the cabin door, ghostly pale and spluttering bloody sputum as he toppled end over end towards the charred wreckage of the travellers’ camp; the other showed him in ruinous repose beneath soiled bed sheets, his unseeing eyes staring up at the ceiling.
Soon, not even the fear the Panda Man had instilled in her, nor his promises that the task he had set could save Daddy’s life, was enough to quell that all-consuming mental image. She had to be with him, even if that meant he was going to go away like Ma and Grandpa. The thought of doing what the Panda Man had asked, and then arriving back at the cabin only to find he had already gone, was too much to bear.
She was on the verge of turning back when the arch appeared.
One moment the endless grassy plain stretched away toward infinity, fringed by the ribbon where green met blue sky and clouds, and bordered only by distant streaks of ancient lumbering ash and oak. The next, she was facing a stone archway twelve feet high. It looked far older than anything from Before she had ever seen, half covered with creepers and ivy. The workmanship was jagged, but deliberate, the carving rough and ready. The stone was a mottled obsidian and flint colour, shining with slivers of igneous crystal and pyrite that swirled in complex vortices about its face. Atop it were patterns that looked like those Billy had seen at home but hadn’t seen here in Enger Land—Daddy and Grandpa had called them Celtic—and at the very top, an inset carved symbol: a swinging bob upon a string. A pendulum.
She blinked, agape, and took a leap back. It hadn’t grown up out of the ground, nor rushed up from afar; it seemed almost as though it had slid into view, as though she had been looking from the wrong angle before, and some trick of the light had hidden it.
But she knew it hadn’t been there before. There had been so sign of it. And there was nothing else for a mile in any direction. She couldn’t have wandered so close without noticing its presence.
Yet here it was, right before her.
At almost the same instant it appeared, the itch in her feet died, replaced by a sudden lack of certainty in direction and purpose. A lost sensation rushed in, almost nauseating.
She stood staring, all thought of Daddy gone from her mind. This was some other thing of the Panda Man’s doing, some other bastardisation of reality and common sense. For a moment, she wasn’t thinking of anything, then she realised that she was waiting for him to appear.
But nothing happened, bar a gust of wind blowing across the meadow as though only to amplify her sense of isolation. One of the pigeons that had been following her alighted atop the arch and bobbed along its ridge.
So it is real. Is that comforting, or not?
She couldn’t decide.
She about faced, scanning the open expanse for a sign of pale cheeks and dark streaks, and that disturbing wolfish smile. But there was nothing.
And, somehow, she sensed that this wasn’t his doing. This was something else. It felt different, somehow less potent. A shiver ran down her spine and into her limbs.
She considered ignoring it. She had been on the cusp of deciding to turn back. Daddy’s face was hovering in her mind’s eye again; even this apparition couldn’t keep him from her thoughts now. She needed to get back to him before it was too late.
The pigeon strutting atop the arch fluttered down and alighted on her shoulder, bobbing and pecking at her pack in search of food.
She hesitated, then stroked its head. It was tame enough. Almost like a pet. That meant people.
“Get help, can’t you?” she said, more to herself, stroking its head.
The pigeon cooed in reply, and cocked its head, an oddly human gesture that seemed to say, “Sorry, no can do.”
She knew that was just her mind playing silly tricks, but the bird really did seem to have understood her.
She sighed. “You and your friends are following me. The least you could do is return the favour,” she muttered. She smiled to herself. She was talking to a bird. It was good to be silly. It had been too long. “Go on, show me. Show me the way, birdie.”
The pigeon cooed again, and this time took wing, flying through the arch. And as it did so, it quite perfectly vanished.
Poof.
Billy stared, blinked, and accepted what she’d seen. Too much oddity had already passed for disbelief.
The bird had disappeared just as the arch had blossomed from the ether: in the same impossible warping movement, sideways into some other space.
Enger Land is like the fairy tales Grandpa used to tell. All magic and spells. I wonder where the faeries and wizards are. Daddy said all that was make believe. Daddy was wrong.
The itch in her feet was gone, and she felt strange without it. It had been in her so long that to have it taken away so suddenly was like losing a hand.
But the birdie had shown her the way.
Daddy needed her, and she still intended to turn back—Daddy couldn’t wait any longer; the Panda Man would have to find those men on his own—but not yet. The arch was too fantastic to ignore.
Billy stepped up to the stone arch that could not have been there and stepped through.
She expected to come falling out through the other side and find that the pigeon had been fluttering there, just out of view behind the archway the whole time. Instead, intense cold stole across her body, like a winter gale that reached down to her bones, and her skin contracted as ice formed in a thin layer over her head and limbs.
Then the meadow was gone, along with the blue sky. She was in a murky gloom that was all too familiar. The half-light and clustered sunbeams had become etched into her memory, wrapped up with
the trauma of her brush with death; she knew she was in a forest long before her eyes registered it.
Panic swelled behind her eyes.
She couldn’t be lost under the trees again! Not now with the itch gone and Daddy fading by the second.
It had all been a trap. The Panda Man must have known that she was planning to turn back.
She cursed her foolishness. If she had only kept her word and seen it through, she might have saved Daddy. The Panda Man had promised, after all.
Now, she might have killed him and herself. She failed to stop a whimper passing her lips.
But it wasn’t the same forest. That was obvious at a glance. The trees were bigger, bulkier, and much older, so old that the bark of their great trunks was like granite, and cobwebs thick and tangled as rope hung from the branches. The air, too, tasted old—not spoiled or foul, but prehistoric, so old as to have lost all life or discernible scent. From the tenebrous depths echoed a low, preternatural creaking.
And ahead, standing in the middle of a small clearing, was a low building that had long lost all paintwork or furnishings. She approached the hull of the structure, an iron-rusted brown-and-red husk with windows that had become opaque from weathering, blanketed heavily with moss and leaf litter.
A sign hung over the doorway. Though it too was rusted and covered with mud, to the point of being almost illegible, after squinting a few moments, Billy was able to sound it out.
Laurent’s.
A few twisted metal stumps stood outside, which might once have been tables and chairs; but save for that, the building merely sprang up out of the forest, the only construction in sight bar the stone arch. She looked back through the arch, expecting to the see the plain from which she had come, but saw only the same tapestry of gnarled stone-like branches and knotted roots.
With a flutter of feathers, the pigeon dropped down onto her shoulder once more, and the two of them looked upon the strange building’s carcass.
She tried to think of something to say, but after a full minute could only come up with, “I don’t understand.”
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