Black Feathers

by Joseph D'lacey

  For a long time he didn’t notice the total absence of buildings, farm outhouses and dwellings. He was on level ground, the hills far behind him before it struck him. There were no roads, only occasional parallel ridges of hedge where a road might have been. Everything had sunk, the quake so severe that its vibrations had liquefied the earth.

  Clods of soil clinging to his soles, Gordon stumbled over the shaken, reordered land. The only sound was the labouring of his lungs as he fought the weight of his boots. Trying to clear them was useless; within three or four paces they were completely clogged again. As annoying as this was, it didn’t tire him. It merely slowed him down. His newfound strength persisted, aiding him through all this. It gave him a sliver of hope; perhaps he belonged in this new landscape. Strong enough to survive, strong enough to navigate the aftermath, perhaps he was meant to be here. The idea kept him walking, made the idea of finding something, someone or even somewhere more believable.

  67

  What Gordon found that day was a crack in the world.

  He didn’t see it until the moment before he fell in. The soil in front of him, now featureless for miles to either side, began to rise gradually. The gradient slowed his already laboured progress. Something about the slope seemed unnatural, but so did everything around him now. The earth near the top of the slope began to fall away from him and he slid after it, seeming to defy gravity. Instinct seizing him, he dropped to the ground, turning and crawling back down the slope.

  As he scrambled, he felt the earth falling away beneath his legs. He paddled at the earth to get away from the landslide but the weight of his pack pushed his hands deep into the claggy soil, slowing him. He felt his legs sucked down and away behind him, and made one final frog hop, away from the falling ground. He gained the air for barely a moment, not showing the strength he’d hoped for, landing with his face in the mud.

  Around him everything had stopped. His feet hung in space, the weight of the mud on them bending his knees unpleasantly against their natural range. He pulled himself forwards through the mud, hauling his feet back onto what he hoped was solid ground, and crawled a few feet farther just to be sure. He stood carefully and turned to face the precipice.

  He stood at the very edge of a rift about a hundred yards wide. On its opposite side, the world continued but in between was a black chasm he couldn’t measure the depth of without putting himself back in danger. The other side of the rift was lower by a hundred feet or so. Gordon couldn’t decide whether his side had been thrust upwards or the other side had sheared off and fallen down. It didn’t matter much – crossing the gap was impossible.

  One heartening fact was clear. The other side had not been destroyed the way his side had. He could see buildings and roads and people and even animals. The trees were particularly laden with birds. There was damage: buildings leaned or were toppled; some houses had cracked in half; roofs had collapsed; the nearest road was buckled and split, no longer passable by any kind of vehicle; unmoving people lay half covered by rubble; others walked without purpose, wailing at the destruction; some sat with their heads in their hands and rocked on their haunches in shock. Bloodied cows and sheep stood among the damage, skittering away from movement when they were approached, otherwise staring forwards in their own post-traumatic fugues. Wounded people and animals wandered everywhere, their cries mingling.

  This must have been the outskirts of a town, Gordon decided. Near enough to the fields that the animals trapped by fences and hedges had broken through in their terror and made for the relative safety of the community.

  There was no sign of emergency vehicles. The town extended into the distance, reminding Gordon of old footage from the blitz. Most of the buildings were ruined and grey with dust. Smoke rose in grey and black streamers from a hundred fires, creating dirty smog in the sluggish, windless air above the town.

  Gordon tried to gauge how far the rift extended. He could see no end to it. To his right, though, it did appear to narrow. That was the direction he ran in.

  68

  She knows there’s nothing more it can tell her, but Megan stops and checks the map again anyway. She sips some water and is alarmed to discover the skin is almost empty. The lack of food and constant walking have left her hungry and weak. The map shows her nothing except a rough idea of how large the city is – almost as big as the forest she has travelled through to get here.

  All she can do is move on.

  Her pace slows with the gradual realisation of the size of the task before her. Being in a hurry isn’t going to help. The route she has taken widens again, this time joined by another route. Both flow into one and move her onwards. The broadness of the way is a small comfort but it does little to allay the sense of movement in all directions and the feeling of something behind her. Cloud smothers the sky, pressing lower, thickening the air, darkening every smashed doorway and shattered wind-eye.

  The city may be long dead, but something within it lives. Something observes every step she takes. Though she can’t see it, Megan knows it is there. It watches with more than curiosity. It wants something. It hungers.

  Gordon stood amid the devastation in disbelief. Until now he’d only seen this kind of scene on the news, usually in countries so far away as to make no real difference to him. Now the news was real. It was here.

  To all of this there was one counterpoint: the Earth was not dead. She had been sick, yes, weakened by an infestation. Now she was ridding herself of it. For those who remained alive the choice was a simple one, whether they realised it yet or not: work with the land – respect it and give back to it – or die.

  He had run for at least a mile before finding an end to the rift. It narrowed to a sudden point and stopped at the base of a massive ancient oak tree. Gordon walked around the back of the tree, where the roots appeared to be holding the tear in the Earth together. Such a thing wasn’t possible, but it made him feel safer. Hurrying back along the other side of the split in the land, he was able to appreciate how deep it was – the crack extended down beyond sight into blackness. Hundreds of metres at least. Even though he walked on what appeared to be safe ground, having the canyon-deep drop beside made him giddy. Fearing aftershocks, he kept well away from the edge.

  It wasn’t long before he walked among the wounded and the stunned and the dead. No one had escaped the dust thrown up by the quake. Every face was palled grey. Wet eyes stared from gritty faces, the runnels of tears in livid pink or slick brown below them. Gordon, his clothes darkened by mud, was a brown stranger in a country of ash-people.

  Uncertain what to do, he walked in the direction he hoped the centre of the town might lie. The survivors walked in a daze, not sure they were still alive, perhaps not believing the fury of the destruction they’d survived. Since he’d first glimpsed the ruined town, some of the people had begun to band together for comfort or to move debris in their search for friends and family lost beneath the rubble.

  The chattering of a magpie snapped his attention to the right. As he watched, the bird hopped up and flew away between two wrecked buildings. Near where it had perched, on a spike of reinforcing steel, sat a woman cradling a child. The woman was rocking but the child was limp in her arms. Seeing Gordon, she became alert and curious and the desperation in her eyes reached out. He knew he didn’t look like everyone else. With his pack and his boots, he might have been some kind of rescue worker, albeit a young one. She addressed him from her place in the rubble, thirty feet away:

  “She was sleeping when it happened and now I can’t wake her up. I think she’s just scared.”

  The woman’s smile appeared to say: Everything’s normal. Everything’s fine. Just this slight problem with my little girl. How embarrassing.

  Gordon walked towards them.

  “Can you help her? Can you wake her up?”

  Gordon didn’t answer. What could he say? He was fairly sure what kind of sleep the girl had fallen into – the longest, most dreamless of all.

  He kne
lt beside the woman and looked more closely at the girl. She was probably a redhead under all the dust, maybe six years old. Despite the layer of grime, she was still beautiful. The woman placed the girl in Gordon’s arms before he could protest. The weight of the child surprised him.

  The woman took his face in her hands and stared into his eyes.

  “Please. Wake her up.”

  She was insane with hope. Gordon closed his eyes for a moment.

  Why didn’t I just keep walking?

  But no. Walking by was all he’d ever done, all he’d ever been able to do. Now he had to do more. He had to try. He had to become involved in the world instead of running from its pain. He put his face beside the girl’s. No breath came from her nostrils. He laid his ear against her tiny chest and listened.

  All around him he heard the sobs of the bereaved and the cries of the wounded. He heard the shouts of the survivors trying to disinter those still trapped beneath jagged layers of destruction. He heard the distant cawing of crows.

  But he heard no heartbeat.

  As he’d known from the moment he saw the pair, the girl was dead. He opened his eyes and the woman was smiling at him, smiling and nodding. It was magic she wanted and she was waiting for him to bring it. He broke the eye contact by looking down at the girl again. How could he tell this woman her child was dead?

  A single black-winged thing streaked across Gordon’s periphery and landed on a cracked, leaning brick wall. He didn’t have to look to recognise its form. It gathered itself up and let rip a throaty call.

  Where the dead lie come the carrion-eaters.

  Across the ruins, on their highest prominences, crows began to land, wheeling in and dropping from every direction. Against the drab of urban destruction they were clean and sleek.

  He shouted at them in his mind: You mustn’t be here now.

  And the crows replied, We came because of you, Gordon. Your need calls to us and so we answer.

  Gordon shook his head at the ruins, making the woman’s smile falter. You can’t let the people see you. They won’t understand.

  There seemed to be a smile on every beak: Those who don’t understand will die.

  The woman looked at Gordon, her expression changing – not expectation any more but that other thing, that far more dangerous thing: a question. And if she questioned, Gordon knew beyond any doubt he’d be the one she blamed for the death of this little girl.

  It wasn’t that fear which moved him to act, though, it was the knowledge that there was no longer anything to be gained through fear or inaction. From now on there was only the pursuit of possibility and the belief that something far greater than Gordon, something wise and benevolent, was marking his path for him. In surrendering to that, he might find strength beyond any he’d yet known. There would be hope too, a real and distinct hope for the future for those who, as the crows would have it, “understood”.

  Silently, he addressed them again: Help me, then. Help this woman and this little girl.

  Gordon’s fingertips began to itch. He placed the girl on the smashed ground and looked at the palms of his hands. Something was gathering there. At first it was only the very ends of each finger that showed a change. Tiny beads the size of pin-pricks welled and sparkled between the whorls of his finger pads – the dust of black diamonds. He rubbed the fingers and thumb of his right hand against each other. The particles did not come off. Instead they shone, glimmers that might have been his imagination becoming solid points of dark luminescence. And then he realised that the beads growing not only in his fingers but in his palms too were not beads at all but openings in his flesh. Something was bursting through.

  He held his hands out to the crows, crushing his eyes shut against it all, and his part in all of it – the devastation, the death – he knew there was so much more of it to come.

  Silently he offered his hands. Silently he screamed at them:

  What is this? What’s happening to me?

  What you hold in your hands is the Black Light, Gordon. The beginning and the end of everything.

  He opened his eyes. The crows were agitated now, hopping and flapping, changing places atop the fresh ruins, cawing, showing their sharp tongues. The woman watched him, any question she may have had devoured by a new fervour. The way he knelt there, palms outstretched, eyes clenched shut until now – she knew what this was. This was a moment of faith, of the creator moving through his representative on Earth, the precursor to a miracle.

  Elsewhere, distracted by the commotion of the crows, survivors were glancing their way. Those not engaged in the search for the buried drifted towards the woman, Gordon and the little girl.

  But what am I supposed to do?

  You know what to do.

  The Black Light burned upwards from his hands, a transmission from the boundaries of the universe and from its very heart. A hiss accompanied the dark emanation: the echo of the beginning of everything, the oldest sound in the universe. Perhaps it was this noise which stopped the survivors, prevented them from coming any closer. His hands bled raw shadows into the smoky air. Did the others see it? He couldn’t tell. All he knew was that if he didn’t find somewhere for the Black Light to go, it would destroy him.

  69

  When Gordon placed his hands on her dusty head, the little red-headed girl, limp with crush-wounds, went rigid. The woman and the small crowd recoiled. Whatever had used his hands as conduits was gone in the same instant. On the ground, the little girl coughed and a puff of dust escaped her lips. Then she retched, her lungs and throat clogged with concrete and brick particles. The woman’s hands went to her mouth. Her head cocked to one side as though she now saw the little girl for the first time. Her face creased into a tight mask of weeping and shock. She didn’t seem to quite believe what had happened – in much the way she couldn’t believe the girl had been dead in the first place. Before she could recover herself, Gordon took water from his pack and offered it to the girl, who sipped and spat the gritty muck from her mouth before sipping and swallowing the rest.

  Gordon stood up. Instinct told him he needed to move away fast. The crows rose up as one, hundreds of them calling and flapping, blurring the air. He felt the downdraught from their wings and it pushed him away from the woman and the little girl. He turned and walked through the small clot of onlookers. They parted for him to pass. Some of them watched the woman who now held the little girl so tightly in her arms, the woman who now wept tears of joy and didn’t care how or why the little girl had been returned to her, only that she had been restored. Others watched the murder of crows, rising in apparent chaos, their knowing caws a kind of tribute, a kind of celebration.

  Gordon was already making progress towards what he hoped was the centre of the town. All along his path were strewn the sleek black feathers of crows – dropped in recognition? Dropped in respect? He didn’t know. Every few paces he knelt to gather a few up – soon there were more than he’d ever collected before. He filled his pockets with them.

  Somewhere behind, the woman had regained herself enough to stand up and shout, “Thank you… Oh, thank you…” between each fresh spasm of tears.

  “You’re welcome,” he whispered.

  Though he was already far away, he still heard her voice when it dropped in volume and she said, in embarrassed tones, to those who stood around her:

  “I don’t even know his name.”

  What Gordon had done was beginning to sink into the minds of the already traumatised survivors.

  “If he helped her, he can help us,” one of them said.

  They spilled away from the site of the miracle and saw Gordon making good speed along the avenue formed by partially razed houses and shops. One of the men ran after him.

  “Hey! Wait!”

  Gordon looked back at the small crowd in the street. He broke into a trot.

  Someone else shouted:

  “Come back! Please!”

  Gordon looked to the sky for guidance but the crows, wheeling
above in such vast numbers only moments before, were gone. The sky was grey with cloud and the smoke pennants raised over a thousand ruins. Behind him, some of the people were running to catch up with him. Most of them were desperate but some of them were angry. His trot became a sprint, dodging cracks in the road and leaping piles of debris.

  The trail of feathers disappeared.

  Ahead Megan sees several of the largest buildings the city boasts towering up into the sky – wrists with the hands torn away. Among them other structures large enough to hold most of Beckby village within them have been reduced to jagged, spilled walls and jutting, rusted bones. Between these structures, the wide open spaces beckon to Megan. The farther she can be from the buildings, the better.

  The ground underfoot softens. She kneels to touch the earth. Beneath the debris and dust, there is soil. Glancing around she sees stumps, some in rows, some scattered. There were trees here once. And grassland. All dead now. Dead forever. The land here is so damaged, she can sense no life in it at all. It may never regenerate. Yet, to know she has found something beneath all the destruction, something that once lived, is such a comfort that she is finally able to weep much of the fear and tension away.

  When she is done, she brushes the dust from her fingers and stands, calmer now. Her eyes are drawn to something at the centre of the broad space, something circular. She approaches the structure cautiously. It is a low wall, about knee-high and, unlike everything else, it appears undamaged. At the centre of the circle is a large block. What once stood upon it, an effigy of some kind, lies smashed within the perimeter of the low wall. She places one foot over the wall, testing the ground on the other side with a gentle prod of her boot. It seems safe enough.