chapter TWENTY-SEVEN
NURSE BENNETT STOOD over the bed, looking down at the policeman’s wife. There was something strange about the woman, and he couldn’t quite place what it was. He’d been nursing for fifteen years, and in all that time he’d never had a patient quite like her. The way she lay there, so quiet and calm and unconcerned, as if she knew something that the rest of them didn’t. The angle of her body, the way she tilted her head to the side, as if staring at the plain white wall... it was weird, but it was also oddly comforting.
Yes, that was it: she was a comfort. The ward had never been this quiet, not for as long as he’d worked here. The other patients seemed to take some kind of strength from her presence, too. He’d even caught a few of them casting sly glances her, as if she were something special.
As he stood there, pondering these things, the ward went dark. The lights remained off, not set to come on until later that evening, and he glanced at the window. The sky beyond was filled with squirming black clouds; they seemed alive, writhing over themselves like a nest of snakes.
The patients started to sit up and ask questions. Chatter buzzed around the room. But the patient below him – the calm, comforting policeman’s wife – did not move. The sky outside continued to darken, turning to black. There’d been no freak weather conditions mentioned on the radio, so he had no idea what was going on.
He strained his eyes to make out what was happening up there, and slowly began to realise that the shapes in the sky were not clouds. They were birds. Millions upon millions of birds had come together to form a canopy over the hospital, and over the area beyond. The streets outside were cast into darkness. No lights came on; the false night was vast and threatening. Car alarms went off, wailing in the blackness. Figures hurried indoors, trying to get to safety.
The canopy of birds blotted out all daylight. They were coming from the direction of that shit-hole estate – the Concrete Grove.
There was a sound behind him, a noise other than the rising panic of the patients and the running feet of the other hospital staff: a loud, harsh rustling, like that made by stiff plastic sheets shifting across a tiled floor.
He turned and saw that the policeman’s wife was sitting up, her knees raised and her legs open. Shadows were streaming from between her legs and scuttling across the floor, heading towards the door. For the moment, no one else could see what was happening. They were all caught up in the excitement of this unnatural nightfall.
Nurse Bennett did not know what to do. Was the woman actually giving birth to the tumours they’d detected inside her?
The woman’s eyes were closed. She didn’t seem aware of what she was doing.
Nurse Bennett took a single step forward and then stopped, entranced by what he saw. The shadows were solid; they were corporeal. When he turned his head slightly to one side, he made out small, skittering creatures, made of dust and darkness and empty spaces held together by strings of atrophied matter. When he looked directly at them, they were shadow; if he used his peripheral vision, they became much clearer...
These were not tumours. They were something else... something incredible.
“What are you?”
“The Slitten,” he said, answering his own question in an unfamiliar whisper. He had no idea where the word had come from; it just appeared in his head. But he knew, beyond all doubt, that it was the name of these things. He also knew, somehow, that they were not to be feared – they had been summoned for a purpose, and it had something to do with that sky full of birds.
The Slitten.
He knew what they were called, and that they had come to help. What he didn’t know, was where they had come from.
Then, as the woman who’d birthed them settled back against the mattress to sleep, they were gone.
TOM STAINS WAS drunk again. He was always drunk, but that was okay. Being drunk was how he handled the world; or, rather, how he liked to keep it at bay. Ever since his disabled Helen had killed herself he’d been aware of the world – of stinking humanity – reaching out to try and grab him by the throat. Helen had somehow managed to drag herself out of bed and throw herself down the stairs, snapping her neck. Some days – especially when he began to doubt his own memories of the incident – he wished that he had the guts to emulate her.
So, drunk and shambling around the first floor of his house on Grove Road, he at first thought the sight of all those birds blocking out the daylight was another one of his whisky-fuelled delusions. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and was forced to admit that this was real. None of this was inside his head. Not this time.
He reached out and tried to turn on the light, but the bedroom remained in darkness. He stumbled out onto the landing, and then into the back bedroom. The sky at the back of the house was the same: it was filled with birds, forming a screen of black against the sunlight, cutting it off, trapping him down here, in the pitiless dark.
He glanced down, at his tiny rear garden, and saw a figure standing outside the gate. But there was something wrong with the figure... It had no legs. No, that wasn’t quite right: it had one leg, a very thin one, upon which it was balanced.
He pressed his fingertips against the window glass. He rested his forehead against the cool pane. Downstairs, more figures joined the first one, hopping along on those thin, rigid appendages.
“Scarecrows,” he muttered, hardly even believing what he saw. “F*cking scarycrows.”
He watched in stunned awe as they headed off along the street, in the direction of the Needle.
He ran for the stairs, taking them two at a time as he headed down to the kitchen. On the kitchen work bench, there was a bottle of whisky, only half full. He snatched it up and took a large swig, then another... before he was done, the bottle was almost empty. He thought about poor dead Helen; the Sea Cow, that’s what he’d called her when she was alive. He missed her sometimes. Not all the time, because to think about her too often brought strange memories to the surface... memories he’d managed to block out for a long time. Something about a woman and a girl and the things they’d done together.
He’d always known this day would arrive. Deep down inside, he’d been waiting for the monsters to come. They’d been here before, many times, and they would come again. They never stopped... but now everyone else would see them, and not just him.
There was a loud noise from outside, like thunder... like an earthquake. Tom moved through the ground floor rooms, watching as his trinkets and knick-knacks rattled on the shelves. He pulled open the front door, too drunk to even think about his own safety, and looked on as the surface of the street rippled and writhed, curling around and breaking, snapping as it was torn to pieces and the ground beneath surged and swelled, as if something were approaching from below.
He imagined a monstrous sea cow smashing through and rising above him...
The first tree broke the surface and shot up out of the road, its branches clenched like a fist, and then opening, spreading, coming to life. This tree was followed by others, springing up like crazy film-set props, as if they were on springs. Geysers of water erupted from shattered pipes, soaking the fronts of buildings and flooding the gutters. Car and house and distant shop alarms bleated, creating a deafening cacophony. And the trees kept growing; they rose from the ground almost comically fast, smashing through the man-made skin of society and churning up the earth.
Tom smiled. He backed away, leaving the door wide open. He stumbled, fell, and watched in silent awe as the uppermost branches of a mighty oak tree shattered the pavement right outside his house and the gnarled trunk began to rise, rise, rise, like the long, straight arm of a god reaching up towards that darkened sky, fingers unfurling to grab at whatever it could catch.
He smiled. This was it. They were here. Nothing would ever be the same again.