Black Feathers

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 knelt 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.