Black Feathers

62

Megan’s lap is the playground of spiders now, many of them as big as her hands. The gauze that traps her against the tree is their web, drawn from a thousand spinnerets, woven and tightened by eight thousand legs. In the night, their tiny eyes reflect white-orange and she knows that every eye is watching her. Snakes have coiled themselves around her limbs and body, nosing their way between the silken fibres, knotting themselves against her. Their heads rest against her in a dozen places, their blind eyes regarding her, their dark forked tongues tasting her terror. Megan stops struggling and sits very still.

“Wise, wise,” says Black Jack, his voice the roar of articulate fire.

In the scorching light that pours from the many wounds in the tree, Black Jack shines like polished onyx. This is not the figure she saw in Covey Wood. This thing before her is a mass of evil intent, of spite and unholy mockery. His deranged face has not stopped grinning. He is more animal than man. His breathing is like the breath of the giant bellows in the blacksmith’s workshop; he pants and heaves as he paces back and forth. His black feathers flash like blades, his breast feathers ripple and shimmer in anthracitic glory with every breath. The tall, flat-topped hat she remembers from their first encounter is split and broken. Feathers burst up through its torn fabric. He has the bloodthirsty black eyes of the raven. Where his boots were, he now walks on scaly, thin bird feet, the claws of which curve down into the soil of the clearing, tearing it up with every step he takes. All his other clothes are gone. What had seemed to her to be a cloak the first time she saw him is now his folded wings. He still has his human arms, though they are covered with feathers, and his hands are invisible inside cuffs of black down.

His face moves and ripples like the surface of a lake on a summer’s midnight, and she sees there many faces: a pale boy with dark hair, a thin adolescent with hunted eyes, a man with the sorrows of the world on his back, the same man’s face twisted in wrath and rage, the same man’s face white in death. She sees the faces of Mr Keeper and Carrick Rowntree. She sees Bodbran and her hooded helpers. Her amu and apa. The fortune-teller from the market. The stallholder who cooked them the barley bowl. Between each shift of visage return the inscrutable, untrustworthy eyes of the raven, a downturned blade of silky beak, feathery lashes, the wild lust of the corvid for the flesh of the dead. Through all of this Black Jack, the one she believed right up until this very moment to be the Crowman, unleashes his raucous caws into the night like a demented spirit, insane in the loneliness of the forest.

He stops pacing, the mad restlessness departing him like vapour.

“What are you doing out here, Megan?”

She says nothing. She won’t. Until he hurts her, of course, which she knows he will do the moment he doesn’t get what he wants. She can’t fight a force like this, but she can hold out a little longer if she tries.

The light from within the tree pulses in a slow rhythm, dimming and brightening the creature in front of her. Its face continues to shift form in the changing glow. Or is that her imagination? Perhaps it is only one face she sees there, and the shadows and flickers of light from the tree are playing tricks on her.

“Suddenly you’re unwilling to talk to me.” His voice has dropped from a roar to a whisper. “How strange.” He approaches a few paces. His feathers are so real, gleam so blackly bright in the darkness she has to turn her eyes away. “You used to tell me everything, Megan. And now you can’t even look at me.”

In spite of the dozens of threads attached to her lashes, she manages to draw her eyes shut. He moves closer. She would turn away if she could but the spiders have pinned her head fast. His face, stinking of rotten meat, comes nearer.

“You know, in some parts of the world, to walk the Black Feathered Path you must surrender your eyes first. Seems a little extreme to me but what do I know? I mean, apart from knowing everything, obviously.”

His voice is the caw of a crow, jeering and dismissive.

She senses his beak very near her eyes and squeezes them tighter, knowing if he wants them he will merely peck them out.

“They say if you don’t seek the Crowman with a true heart you’ll go blind inside, and then you’ll never find him.”

Megan, her face screwed up tight, weeps. Her bladder releases and then the whimpers escape her mouth. The whimpers become sobs.

“Why are you doing this to me? Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

“We both have our obligations, Megan.” He withdraws, taking his beak out of her face, but she can hear the smile in his comment. “Your destiny and mine are bound together. We are in each other’s bodies, we share the same blood.”

“I’m nothing like you,” she screams in sudden fury.

He stands a few paces away now, by the sound of it.

“We are the same.”

Why is his voice such a gentle whisper now?

“Look,” he says.

She can’t.

“Open your eyes, Megan. If you have any courage left, you must try to see what is really in front of you.”

She allows her eyes to open just a fraction. She sees nothing at first, her vision blurry with tears. She blinks the brine away – something is wrong with Black Jack. He is shrinking, lightening in colour. There is something vast behind him. Megan strains to see now. She recognises this scene. Her focus sharpens. There, just a few steps from her, is a vast tree. In front of it are the white ashes of a dead fire. At the base of the tree is a girl tangled in a poncho and the toppled remains of a shelter. The girl is wrapped in the shelter’s thin covering and cannot move. She struggles in her sleep, facing an army of terrors in her own personal night country.

There are no webs holding her against the trunk of the tree. There are no colonies of spiders creeping over her body. No snakes have coiled around her. Nor does the tree appear harmed or burned. There is no sign of Black Jack, but in a branch not far above the dream-trapped girl sits a raven. Megan could swear the raven is smiling.

She blinks.

On opening her eyes she finds the thin light of morning whitening an insubstantial mist. There is no tree opposite her. Nor is Black Jack there to torment her. She lies amid the collapsed remains of her badly built shelter. Her body is not restrained, other than by a tangle of material.

Above her there is a flurry of wings as a bird leaves the branches just over her head. The raven bursts from the leafless tree and glides out into the fine mist that fills the clearing.

Rarrrk! RRRaaarkk!

His call is laughter.