Black Feathers

14

Until Gordon had fetched the post from the wire box inside the front door, breakfast had been relaxed. Judith had stayed with friends in the village the night before and Angela was at university in Bristol. This left him, Mum and Dad to have a peaceful start to the day. The envelope, which Gordon knew contained something bad, bore the Evan Davies School crest. His father slit it and drew out a letter headed with the same symbol. The piece of toast he was halfway through sank back to its plate and Louis Black stopped chewing.

“What is it, darling?” asked Sophie.

Louis was silent a few moments longer as he finished scanning the document. Then he laid it on the table top.

“They’re shutting the school.”

“What?”

“They’re shutting Evan Davies indefinitely.”

His mother snatched up the letter but still asked:

“Why would they do that?”

“The attendance figures have dropped too low. Lots of people can’t afford to drive in since the buses stopped running. The headmistress says the Ward are concentrating all their resources on schools in urban areas.”

Gordon watched his mum read the letter, her eyes returning to certain passages over and over again when she lost concentration. She looked over at him and tried to smile but to Louis she said:

“Gordon’s barely done a year at the school. What are we going to do?”

Gordon was surprised to see his father break into a widening smile.

“We’re not going to worry about it.”

“Not worry? How can you sit there and–”

Louis reached across the table and took his wife’s hands in his.

“I understand why you’re worried, Soph. I really do. But there are no jobs out there even if Gordon did finish school. And what were they really teaching him there anyway other than how to be a drone for some corporation? Or worse, a career as a Wardsman? We can get him a couple mornings of tuition a week – I’m sure there are plenty of unemployed teachers out there who’d work for food and a few quid. The rest of the time Gordon can get stuck into making the place run like a proper smallholding.”

Sophie Black sat back on the bench, laughing without a trace of humour.

“Do you really believe you can dodge and weave your way through everything that’s happening, Louis? The world is falling apart.”

Gordon saw insanity flash in the whites of his mother’s eyes.

“I have to believe it, Sophie. And I can do it.”

“What, just like that?”

“Just like that,” said Louis. “Times have changed. Let’s not fight it, eh?”

Gordon watched his father’s optimism growing as the moments passed. Soon he’d chewed down the rest of his toast, guzzled a full cup of tea and pushed his end of the bench away from the table.

“Come on, Gordon. Get that food down you and get your boots on. We’ve got work to do.”

High winds had stripped both dead and live wood from the various trees. They spent the morning gathering fallen wood from every part of the garden, none of it large enough to be considered a log but the pile they created constituted almost a month’s supply of firewood. Judith and Sophie both helped and though they worked mostly in silence, the common goal they strived towards made for a harmonious hour or two. They exchanged quiet smiles and occasional words but that was all. When the pile was complete, Sophie and Judith went inside to make lunch, while Louis and Gordon sawed and chopped the timber into manageable sizes for the fires. They removed all the tiny twigs and set them aside for kindling.

It was as they covered the wood pile with a thick blue tarpaulin that they caught sight of two figures. The two strangers, men in long grey coats and broad-brimmed grey hats, entered the front gate, bypassed the front door and came around the side of the house towards them without any hesitation. Their eyes roved over everything they saw, studying, gathering in the details of both house and garden.

Louis pretended to bend down and resecure a corner of the tarpaulin. As he did so he whispered to Gordon.

“Don’t say a single word, no matter what they ask you. Let me do all the talking. Understand?”

“Who are they?”

“Just answer me, Gordon. Do you understand?”

The men were too close now for Gordon to say anything. He caught his father’s eye and hoped that would be enough. Louis finished fiddling with the tarp and stood up to his full height, feet planted slightly apart and arms folded. Even so, one of the men was taller than him by a good six inches. The other was a stumpy tub of a man, his spectacled eyes making a frog of him. They stopped a few paces away and Gordon studied their faces.

The frog, his tiny eyes magnified to bulging by lenses so thick he must have been almost blind without them, looked intelligent, his mind sharp and quick. The tall man’s face was wasted and mean, his sick-looking skin tight over his cheekbones, the area between them and his jaw angular and recessed. His jutting bone structure cast shadows into the pits elsewhere in his face; the vertical crack in his chin, the squarish hollows of his cheeks, the caves of his eyes. This man, who might have looked incisive at first glance, exuded only numbness from his eyes, as though the soul behind them was imprisoned deeply within. Gordon noticed his massive hands and long strong fingers. The knuckles were rough and scarred, the fingernails thick but chipped. He smiled now, an automated expression, a machine coming to life.

“Have you lost your way, gentlemen?” asked Louis.

Gordon’s throat tightened. He looked down at the ground, embarrassed. But he could only look away for a few moments. He wanted to see the response.

“Hardly,” said the frog, his voice husky but effeminate. He reached into the pocket of his coat. Gordon tensed but the frog drew out a black wallet which fell open to reveal a photo ID card marked with some stamp of officialdom. He held it up for them to see, flipping it away before either of them could read it.

“My name is Archibald Skelton and this is my associate Mordaunt Pike. We’re Sheriffs of the Ward.”

Louis shrugged.

“Never heard of it, I’m afraid. We don’t go in for religion. Now, the Robertsons, they love all that kind of thing. You’ll find them back towards the village on the right hand side. Lions on the gateposts. Can’t miss it.”

Louis nodded a silent goodbye, put his arm around Gordon and began to lead him away.

“I don’t think you quite understand, Mr Black. Mr Louis Anderton Richard Black. Sheriff Pike and I are here on official Ward business. Government business. You’d do well to furnish us with a moment of your time.”

Louis turned back to them, smiling again.

“Government?” He looked Skelton and Pike up and down. “Well, I suppose sending a couple of brogued, macintoshed civil servants into the countryside is the kind of money-wasting, time-wasting activity the government engages in these days. They could have spent that money on keeping our local school open, don’t you think?”

“That would be a matter for your local councillor, Mr Black. Sheriff Pike and I have other… more pressing concerns.”

“As do I. So, I’ll politely request that you leave my property now. This is private land and, frankly, you’re not welcome here.”

Louis held out his hand, gesturing towards the front of the house and the gate through which they’d come. Neither of them moved.

“Right now, please, Mr Warden or whatever you said your name was. We don’t want you here.”

Gordon’s throat was so dry he couldn’t swallow.

“I’m very sorry, Mr Black, but we won’t be able to leave just yet,” said Sheriff Skelton. “This is a very sturdy-looking house you have. And I can’t help noticing these are rather productive-looking grounds. If it turned out you were hoarding items that other people could benefit from, it might not turn out well for you. Did you know that?”

“Our house and what we do here is none of your business.”

“I’m afraid it is. The Ward are very concerned with such things. If you don’t acquiesce to our requests, we may decide to scrutinise your property. We may find the community would be better served if we shared what you have here with everyone in, say, a three-mile radius.”

“You can’t do that.”

Sheriff Skelton smiled, exposing yellowed teeth.

“I hope it won’t be necessary for you and your family to find this out through personal experience, Mr Black, but the Ward can do anything we like. Anything. We have what you might call a special dispensation.”

Gordon, who’d been both proud of and frightened by his father’s defiance, now felt a cold snake of dread in his guts as he saw the spirit shrinking from his father’s stance. As if in response, expression came to Sheriff Pike’s gaunt face. Until that moment he’d stood like a dormant engine. It wasn’t a smile, merely a tiny flicker of interest from behind his faraway eyes.

“What is it you want?” asked his father.

“We just want to talk to you, Mr Black. You and your wife. And, if it becomes necessary, your children.”

“If it becomes necessary?”

“If we don’t hear what we want to hear.”

Sheriff Pike’s interest seemed kindled to a flame at the thought of it. Sheriff Skelton reached into another pocket of his grey raincoat and brought out an envelope. He handed it to Gordon’s father.

“Call us within twenty-eight days to arrange an interview and we’ll transport you to our substation in Monmouth. If we don’t hear from you within that time, you and all the members of your family will be collected. Goodbye, Mr Black.”

The two men turned and walked away.

Louis and Gordon stood watching them and even after they’d been gone for some time, neither of them moved. To move would be to enter the future.

This time, the boy who comes to Megan in the night country is not the same boy.

He looks the same and is just as beautiful with his pale skin and gentle manner, but he is troubled. He stands beside her bed and weeps the tears of someone who has lost something very precious. Not a possession, perhaps not even a beloved one, but something even more valuable. She sees the hole in the boy’s chest. It is a ragged-edged wound. Something has sawn through his sternum and ribs. The hole has been made hastily and without care. A silvery light illuminates the cavity.

The boy’s heart has been taken away.

The boy beckons and Megan rises from her bed, the touch of the night country on her skin and behind her eyes like liquid silver, cool and enticing. She follows him. Out through the front door again but as soon as it closes behind them she sees that they are not in Beckby village any more. Though she has never seen this landscape, she has heard about it. She knows what it is.

Ruins surround them. Buildings so great that even their smashed remains are four or five times the height of her family’s cottage. The valleys between these fallen edifices, where the streets once ran, are blocked by rubble and things she doesn’t understand. Things from before the Black Dawn.

The boy takes her hand. His fingers are cold as a plough blade on a winter’s dawn but his skin is milk smooth and his touch is something like the flow of water in the Usky River. He leads her between the buildings in this broken world. Soon the buildings are far behind them and they are walking on roads of black stone avoiding great fissures which have split them apart – these they fly over at his behest. Farther along, the cracks deepen and widen until they are walking beside canyons which extend deep into the earth. The bodies of people and animals lie everywhere, decaying and pecked upon by grey-beaked rooks. Megan is undisturbed by any of it. She trusts this boy from the night country. If she had a brother, he would be like this.

The boy brings her to a forest of dead trees. The remains of their trunks and branches are either white, and glow bonelike in the darkness, or are black as soot. They walk through the dead wood and the moon lights their way, a silver disk shining through clouds of smoke. They come to a single tree in a broad clearing, gnarled and warped and blackened, straining under the weight of the night sky. In the tree sit three crows, cawing into the night, cawing at Megan and the boy.

He turns to her, weeping and smiling, and for the first time since she has entered the night country with him, Megan is moved. She steps towards the boy to embrace him and ease his wound. But when she reaches him he is gone. She looks around the clearing and all that is left is the black tree and its three cawing crows. The rest of the forest is gone too: a barren land rolls away in every direction, a land where fires burn on every horizon.

She looks into her hand. She holds the boy’s still-beating heart.