Black Feathers

by Joseph D'lacey

  Gordon was almost too frightened to approach. Then he saw that her whole body was vibrating. Brooke was shivering.

  She was alive.

  John Palmer was on his knees, staring up at his daughter’s ruin as though the pain was all his. Gordon was disgusted.

  “We have to get her down,” he said.

  John Palmer didn’t move. Gordon walked over, placed his boot on the man’s shoulder and sent him sprawling.

  “Now!”

  John Palmer looked up, crying as though Gordon’s shove was the most painful incident of the day.

  “Find something,” said Gordon. “Quickly. Help me get her down.”

  John Palmer stood up, dazed. Gordon took his shoulders, pleaded to his face.

  “Tools. A crowbar. Anything.”

  John Palmer ran into the tiny clearing and upended a small leather bag. He returned with a pair of yellow-handled pliers between his quivering fingers. Their eyes met. Gordon took the implement, his own hand showing no trace of a tremor.

  41

  They buried Brooke beside the tree.

  The removal of the nails reopened her ruptured arteries. The blood leaked in meandering pulses as Gordon lay her on the earth.

  She spoke for several minutes to both of them before falling silent.

  “The pain isn’t so bad now.”

  She was shaking so hard, every word came out juddered. Gordon wept because he knew how much pain he’d caused in trying to release her. The renewed bleeding was his fault too, but there’d been no choice – they couldn’t have left her hanging.

  “It’s just the cold,” she said. “I can’t bear the cold.”

  They’d placed a foam camping mat under her and two sleeping bags on top, tucking them tightly around her, leaving her arms untouched. Her blood leaked straight onto the leaves and into the earth. John Palmer ran to fetch the last sleeping bag. Gordon wanted to hold her hand. Instead he placed the palm of his hand over her heart and tried to send warmth and comfort into her body. Her shaking seemed to settle.

  She looked at him, and he could tell Brooke knew she was dying. Something held the terror of that approaching darkness off, some strength she had that her father did not possess.

  “I wish we’d had a little more time together, Gordon.”

  “I wish we’d had a lot.”

  She smiled.

  “You’re a good person. Don’t ever think you’re not.” She was nodding, more to herself than him it seemed. “I know you’ll find him.” Her eyes closed for a moment. “Yes, you’ll find the Crowman. And he’s for the good, Gordon. I’m sure of it now.”

  John Palmer returned with the blanket and rested it over her. She smiled at him, but he couldn’t look at her face.

  “So cold,” she whispered.

  John Palmer’s face creased further into grief.

  “Hold her,” said Gordon.

  John Palmer didn’t move.

  Very gently, Gordon took the man’s hand and placed it on Brooke’s forehead.

  “Just touch her,” he breathed.

  John Palmer shuffled closer and placed his face beside Brooke’s. He cradled her head. Gordon watched the smile this elicited slipping from her face. And then it was peaceful. Gordon stood and left the man with his murdered child.

  It was more than an hour later that John Palmer walked the few yards back into camp, his face pale and his hands still dirty with Brooke’s dried blood. It took Gordon a long time to convince him that they needed to bury her and even longer to persuade him that the tree she died beside should be her final resting place. Eventually, John Palmer gave in.

  But Gordon was sincere in what he told the man:

  Brooke needed to return to the land that had birthed her. Now that her spirit was flying and had no use for her body, it should be left to nourish the tree.

  The burial took until dusk. By the failing light the blood on the beech tree’s bark became charcoal on grey. They didn’t try to remove it. John Palmer muttered some half-remembered Christian solemnities and fell once again to his knees beside the freshly-turned earth.

  Gordon whispered:

  “The crows will carry you home, Brooke.”

  He felt stupid saying it, but on a level he couldn’t consciously access, he believed it.

  Whatever had held John Palmer together since he’d lost his home and sent his wife away was now unravelling. What he’d run away from had caught up with him. It looked as though, at any moment, he might claw away the earth from his daughter’s body and try to pull her back from death.

  “We’ve got to move the other bodies,” said Gordon.

  He stepped away from her graveside towards the clearing, hoping he could draw John Palmer away. The man looked up at him, pale and sickened.

  “I’m not burying those murderers. Those… raping, child-killers.” His words came out clogged with tears and fury. “They’ve taken… everything.”

  Gordon stood silent for a few moments.

  “I know,” he said. “And I’m sorry. We don’t have to bury them. But we have to move them. How far is the tunnel from here?”

  Gordon hadn’t been back since they found him. John Palmer shrugged.

  “Not far.”

  “Can we carry them there before it gets dark?”

  “We can drag them.”

  Gordon didn’t wait for John Palmer or ask again. He walked to the nearest raider, the one with the machete, and grabbed hold of the man’s ankles. The trainers he wore were muddied and the laces had been replaced with garden twine. The soles were almost worn through. The man’s bones weren’t encased in much flesh. The attackers were starving. They may once have been respectable men with jobs and families and hobbies, but they’d become homeless marauders, thieving to stay alive. Gordon wondered how long it had taken for their moral codes to break down. Denied what they wanted or merely angry at their lot, violence would have come next. Perhaps with that violence came a certain reinstating of the illusion of power over otherwise unrelenting circumstances. And then taking not only goods and money but taking more precious things like dignity and chastity. Their own lives annihilated, they had become destroyers of other people’s existences; rapists and murderers, as John Palmer rightly stated. This was one of the ways evil spread, a disease of the will that anyone could contract. Gordon couldn’t condone what the men had done. There was no excuse.

  And what of his own guilt? Violence against his family and against Brooke and John Palmer had given birth to violence in him. He had stabbed three men now and one of them lay dead a few paces away. Was there any way back from that? Would he become nothing more than a starving survivalist? He could only console himself with the knowledge that each aggressive act he’d committed had been in defence. Had he not fought with enough conviction, he could easily be dead. Surely he had the right to protect his own life.

  All these things he thought as he dragged the machete man over the leafy forest floor. In a few minutes the sun would be beyond the horizon and this job would be impossible. He looked towards the place where John Palmer still knelt beside the grave of his daughter. The man didn’t move.

  “Look,” he said. “Just show me where the tunnel is and I’ll move them. I want to get it done before it’s too dark.”

  The John Palmer who stood up to help him was an old man, his hair suddenly greyer and thinner, his face slacker, his body weaker. For once, Gordon was glad of the silence that existed between them as they hauled the dead men from their clearing, through the quietly observant beech trees to the darkness in which Gordon himself had almost died.

  Gordon moved the third body on his own, leaving John Palmer to sit once again beside Brooke’s grave. Once he’d reached the tunnel mouth he pulled each of the bodies as far inside as he could and laid them beside each other in the darkness. He knelt there with them for several minutes, praying in silence. He prayed that their spirits would travel to somewhere less terrible than the world they’d left behind. He prayed for their families. An
d he prayed for their forgiveness.

  42

  In the morning John Palmer was gone.

  Gordon checked Brooke’s resting place first. It was undisturbed. He made a circuit of the tiny camp and spread his search in a widening spiral. He checked inside John Palmer’s tent. All his gear was there but there was no sign of the man. The camp fire was cold. No food was missing.

  The day lengthened, and John Palmer didn’t return. Gordon set off thinking that perhaps he might have gone to check his snares. He knew this was unlikely. John Palmer had a knife on him at all times, and Gordon didn’t think it was unreasonable to suspect that the man was walking back to the town he’d come from, back to the place where the men who’d escaped still lived. Like those men, John Palmer had nothing left but hate and a desire to put things right with violence.

  Gordon stayed in the cover of the trees all the way down to the river, following the path they’d taken the first day he’d accompanied John Palmer to check the snares. For the first time in some days there were heavy-looking clouds in the sky. Through the denuded branches above him, Gordon could see the mass of iron grey thickening and darkening as it proceeded across the sky. The same wind that forced those clouds onwards pushed through the exposed arms and fingers of the beech trees, waking whispers from their bones.

  He reached the edge of the wood where it opened onto the wet grassland and the river bank. The water had receded from the flood plain and the level of the river had dropped. Willows grew beside the water, some of them straight and tall, others leaning out over the water. It was in one these far-reaching willows, its trunk close to horizontal, that Gordon found the body. Many of the willow’s leafless branches draped into the water, their sinewy tips depending from thicker boughs like hair. The tree made Gordon think of a woman washing herself by the riverside. It would have been beautiful but for the ugliness of John Palmer.

  He hung from a thick bough, his face swollen, his eyes red. His head rested on two fists thrust under his chin, giving him a slight pout and the aspect of a man who’d died of boredom. In his struggles he’d managed to hook the fingers of both hands between the tightening cord and the skin of his neck. The fingers had been trapped there and then broken by the weight of his body and the pulling of the river water at his legs. The rope he’d used was lightweight nylon and thin: useful for outdoor pursuits. It had cut quite deeply into his neck, far enough to disappear but without breaking the skin. The fatness of his face had given him a pumpkin-headed appearance. His body turned first a little to the right and then a little to the left as the current of the river tugged at his calves and waterlogged walking boots. The branch he hung from bounced very slowly, dipping him, extracting him.

  Two magpies landed in the willow tree, breaking Gordon’s almost-dreamy exploration of John Palmer’s suicide. They clattered and chattered at each other in great excitement, their tails flicking high, before hopping towards the place where John Palmer’s rope was secured. One of them fluttered down onto the dead man’s head. It looked at Gordon, rattled out one more cry and then pecked into John Palmer’s eye. Soon its partner joined it and their cries ceased as they feasted on the fresh carrion.

  Gordon turned away.

  He remembered the last time he had seen two magpies. Their message then had seemed to be to enter the tunnel. Circumstance had caused him to do exactly that. He had come close to death in that darkness. Until the man who now gave his flesh to the magpies had found him and his daughter had nursed him back to health. Surely, if it was a message those two magpies had given him, it had been a sound one. They had led him in the right direction. What was their message now?

  He looked at John Palmer one last time and watched the magpies tearing at his face so hungrily and with such relish. He approached the river bank some distance away from the tree.

  At the water’s edge he took out his father’s lock knife and unclasped it. It was flaky with the dried blood of a dead man. He submerged it in the river and used his fingernails to chip at the encrusted gore. The water soon rehydrated and loosened the blood. Streaks and flakes swirled in the water and were gone. The knife came out clean, the blade gleaming even under the deepening shadows cast by the clouds overhead. He shook it out, blew into its cracks to clear the water, and dried it as best he could on his trousers before folding it away and putting it back in his pocket.

  He walked quickly back to the camp. By the time he was there he had an idea of what the magpies might be telling him. The more he thought about it, the more sense it made: in happening upon death, the birds had secured a little more life for themselves through the bounty of John Palmer’s flesh. Gordon knew he could respond positively to the situation too – there was an opportunity here.

  In the camp he dragged all the equipment into the open and dumped everything onto a groundsheet. He took his time discarding what was not useful and what was too heavy to carry, calmly measuring the value of every item before keeping or abandoning it. By noon he had dismantled the camp. What he could not use he carried to the tunnel and placed it far enough inside that the rain would not spoil it. With luck, someone who needed the equipment would find it one day. When everything but his new pack was stowed, he brushed the camp with a branch, redistributing leaves where they’d slept or cooked so that the mark of their habitation was minimal.

  He hefted John Palmer’s rucksack onto his back. For a long time he stood at Brooke’s graveside, not wanting to leave her. Not wanting to be alone again. When he knew there was no more reason to stay, he whispered some words to her and set out to the edge of the forest. He stepped into the open just as the rain began. In the distance, obscured by cloud, were the hills.

  That was where he would begin.

  43

  Sheriff Skelton and Sheriff Pike arrived at the Monmouth Ward substation mid-morning, with a handful of their own men. They commandeered the profile room and pinned maps, photos and charts to the walls. When Skelton was ready, Pike summoned the local Wardsmen to join them.

  Skelton made a presentation using his laptop, relying for much of his talk on enlargements of the physical “evidence” the Ward had gathered over the previous three or four years. He showed photos of their objective at many stages of his life from birth to present – all collected from Hamblaen House. He predicted, based on artists’ sketches, how the boy might look with longer, shorter or different-coloured hair – they fully expected him to hide now.

  Skelton also displayed the better-known images of the Crowman from several scrapbooks of collected eschatological predictions and displayed transcripts taken from hundreds of identified prophets from the past ten years. Skelton exhibited excerpts of poetry and prose on screen, reading it out in his disdainful feminine tones, now flat with restrained rage. He showed artistic impressions, drawings and paintings by people of all ages from toddler to centenarian. Again and again, Skelton reiterated one point: the boy must not find the Crowman. They must never be united. The prophecies varied in many ways, enough to make a single cohesive story almost impossible to pick out, but one thing was agreed upon by every author. When the boy came into contact with the Crowman, the end of civilisation – already in motion – would begin in earnest. Eighty per cent of the world’s population would be erased in a matter of months. Infrastructure would be destroyed, power would cease to flow, water would run dry in every tap, gas lines would be severed, roads would be impassable, crops would fail, rivers would find new courses, the earth would split, the rain would fall and fall, disease would rise in every city, the air would be poisoned and humanity would cry out as one for mercy.

  The boy had to be found. The Crowman had to be stopped.

  This, Skelton reminded his London crew (and the rural Wardsmen he trusted as far as he could see from his blind left socket) was the purpose of the Ward first and foremost. Yes, they served the global economy. Yes, they served the New World Order. Yes, they believed in harnessing the Earth for the gain of men, and the conquering of men for the gain of the Ward. But if
they couldn’t find Gordon Black and bring him in, if they couldn’t root out the Crowman and end him before he ended the world, then there would be no point in serving and nothing left to serve. The Crowman was here, in England, and that made England the final arena. There would be some assistance from the Ward in other nations who could spare it, but this was now an English fight. It was up to every Wardsman in the country to put this mission before anything else, to lay down their lives if that was what it took. Otherwise, all possibility of power would be rested from their grasp forever because the world and all its bounties would be no more.

  They were opposing the suicide of the planet. They needed to master the world, chain it, mine it, own it and its peoples. Only then would their task be fulfilled. Only then, Archibald Skelton told the assemblage of men in the profile room, would he take a day off.

  After showing Ordnance Survey maps and aerial photographs of the area around the Blacks’ smallholding and telling his men not only where but how he wanted them to search the terrain, he dismissed them all but for Pike.

  “We need to take a trip downstairs,” he said to the skull-faced automaton that was Mordaunt Pike, the most reliable and relentless Wardsman he’d ever worked with.