Nightmare Magazine Issue 25, Women Destroy Horror! Special Issue

by Nightmare Magazine

  The light in the other room flickered.

  George heard the TV again, the new voice, a woman’s, was telling someone that the lower, or upper, stratosphere—he did not take it in—was full of birds, floating, only that, like a fleet at anchor. Updraughts or thermals carrying and supporting it, or them; hundreds, thousands. But when he went back into the room, the pasty, which going by the commandment on its label under no circumstances must anyone re-heat, had congealed to a cold, gooey fudge, and the screen was blank. Only the woman’s impersonal and rather annoying voice talking of helicopter gunships, or ground-to-air missiles. Another programme then, about Afghanistan, or Pakistan.

  George turned off the TV. Not with a bang, he thought, as if an alien authoritarian voice was speaking also in his head. Not with a bang, but with a feather.

  • • • •

  During the night the battery-powered radio, which he had left on, woke him with a blast of between-items noise, some sort of militant jangle now representing the World Service, and obviously designed violently to awaken any insomniac who had managed to fall asleep. So he heard that an Italian plane approaching Bournemouth airport had found itself unable to land due to the maelstrom of birds. Having circled for some time, all the while with birds smashing into it, it headed back out to sea. An adjacent bulletin announced the plane had gone down in the water not a mile out. All passengers and crew were feared dead. On the heels of this came reports that European and US airlines were refusing to let their craft attempt landing anywhere on British soil until the avian crisis was resolved. Countless Britons would be stranded. Perhaps they were glad? It seemed the Bird-Blanket, as one commentator called it, was limited to the British Island, (also a recent coining) involving only England, Wales, and Scotland. The radio then, despite having new batteries, began to fail. He switched it off. That the failure had nothing to do with batteries he understood perfectly.

  • • • •

  Morning, noon, evening, night. Time has passed, is passing. Passes. Above the sky, they are to be visualised, the fleets, massed close and massing ever more closely, as more and more of the components rise up to fill them, pack them tight. A black and white expanded and expanding cumulus.

  Spy planes have taken photographs. By now the phenomenon is visible from space. Satellites relay batches of curious pictures.

  Fighter craft have also risen. They have blasted out gaps in the living, quasi-suspended, fluttering cloud-ceiling. There has been speculation as to what, precisely, keeps the bird cloud in place. Some oblique abnormal thermal, perhaps, some unforetold updraught, maybe created even by the birds’ own upward flight. Or else it is all some new facet of pollution, global warming, some scientific experiment that has—of course—misfired, gone wrong . . . human worthlessness and wickedness in general.

  As for the aerial fighters, frequently their planes ingest the half-destroyed bodies of their composite black and white target. Then the planes fall too, like the dead and dying burning birds. Aerial activity is cancelled. And in any event, the endless streams of magpies continue to rise, one bird it has been estimated roughly every half or three-quarter minute. During an hour, a hundred, sometimes one hundred and sixty birds are reckoned to be lifting from every square mile of land. If that is at all conceivable, likely, possible. Eyewitness statements, even those of trained observers, vary precariously.

  Beaters plunge for a while through fields, woods, gardens, along hillsides, over moors, by riverbanks, and guns blast like a never-ending soundtrack of war. In towns and cities, citizens are summarily ordered off the streets, while rapacious bird-dogs and their handlers seek, and always find, their quarry, but for all the birds slaughtered, quick and clean, misjudged and horribly, for all the carnage and the debris and the stink, the pity of it all—poor things, poor things—new birds rise and keep on rising. Fifty, a hundred, two hundred, to a square mile. They seem to burst from the concrete skin of the streets, the stony ground, the trunks of trees and walls of buildings, out of the impervious world itself, self-perpetuating, ineradicable, inexhaustible.

  Feathers lightly, omnipresently, carpet the earth. Feathers are caught in trees, lie along windowsills, drift into offices, houses, shops, stations, subways, alleys and avenues, caves and churches, libraries and reservoirs. Along the side-roads, high streets, and motorways the feathers drift, black and white, (and red with recent blood) several scorched and many broken. Cars and other vehicles lie tumbled along these thoroughfares too. Broken, some of them also, from multitudinous collisions with the bodies of rising birds which—all dead now and decaying—are plastered against their sides, stuck in their mechanical entrails and between the teeth of their wheels. Feathers drop from the air as well, a thin drizzle of feathers, an autumn of feathers, always falling. Black as ink, white as snow, often sheened mysteriously, mystically blue. Down from the sky that, darkened over now, and made tomb-like after each invisible day’s end, reveals no sun, no moon, no single star. The magpie cloud, the blanket, an opaque dome, shuts everything out. Day is dusk, night an upside-down abyss. No more golden mornings, no more ruby settings of the sun.

  Sometimes a feeble rain falls too. It is very warm and has a filthy taste, smelling of chickens and giving off a strange, sooty, chemical undertone.

  There have been great rushings to and fro on the land, naturally. Flurries of anger and protest, crime and hoarding, as well as the useless bird-war. Then came escapings—towards the nearest coast, where the blanket, the dome, stops, and the fearful ceiling uncannily comes undone. But the road-long deserted ruins of cars and campers, buses and bikes, provide evidence of how few made it there. Or if they did, they will have managed it by other means.

  To the majority left inside the trap of Britain, unable to reach any coast, the idea of that exit point is by now nearly a myth. Can it be true that the coast, any coast—is clear?

  It is true. All coasts are clear, as glass. Just past the beaches or shingle or stones or rocks or cliffs, the river-mouths, estuaries, bays and sandbanks, the dunes, the spits, the coves—there, where the surf or the big rollers begin; at Eastbourne, Great Yarmouth, Whitby, Berwick-upon-Tweed, at Helmsdale and Melvaig, Aberystwyth, Weston-Super-Mare, and Plymouth—there—for there “it” finishes. To look up, there, standing in the fringes of the water, is to see suddenly the calmness or disturbance of actual sky, clouds, real weather, light; for there even the night is brilliant again with its stars and moon, with summer lightning, with distance. Open heavens. Open, open. And gulls fly over, in a graceful, ordinary way.

  And beyond, out across the shining sky-lit sea, the islands. All of them are quite unclosed—the Orkneys, the Hebrides, Wight, and Man stand sheer, like miraculous ghosts, like platinum pebbles on a horizon of pure glow, and the hem of Ireland, that too, and the longer strand of France: these are banks of deep blue smoke under a halo of sun-or-moonshine.

  What then of the ones who managed an escape, who sped away from Britain’s edges in the racing ferries, fishing boats, speedboats, and yachts? Did they, having reached the shining other shores, glance back? Surely they did, surely they still do, for out of Britain now no television picture comes, no telephone call, no email, no text. Britain, robbed of her masts of communication, of a sky through which signals can flow, has grown silent and primitive, secretive and supernatural, as in the ages of darkness. Nor is she to be penetrated, her airways shut, her roads and railway-lines negotiable only on foot, and that with vast difficulty.

  And this shutness, this secret, is all that can be seen of her through the satellite cameras, telescopes, and other lenses trained on her with flat and weary persistence. Not even the straining periscopes of nuclear subs, drawn in from the Atlantic to patrol her shores like voiceless wolves, can determine anything much beyond her emptied coastline, her immobile interiors veiled by cobwebs of shadow. She is a darkling plain.

  Except where, now and then, something surfaces through the dimness like a fleck of flint in dirty water, a tiny black bubble in poisoned lemonade
: a magpie rising, flying straight up. And then another. And then. And then.

  III

  The pub looked different by now. And, it went without saying, the pub was different. In the first weeks the soldiers, initially in multifarious vehicles, then on foot, brought oil, matches, lamps, and candles, besides gas canisters to swell the store at the Duck. Out here, in the “heart of the country,” only electricity had formerly been available, and the series of chefs at the Duck always preferred, apparently, to cook with gas. Lucky. Electricity now, along with the phone, the TV and the radio, the computer and the World Wide Web, had all become things of the past, a recent past, but one which already seemed to have existed some centuries ago. Tap water was gone too. Reservoirs were polluted with incredible amounts of feathers, even by dilute disseminated bird crap, which had descended into them. For while the magpies had, and did, ascend, their innumerable cast-offs, sometimes including their slaughtered bodies, fell down.

  In certain parts of the woodland you came into a stretch where branches were thickly coated in feathers instead of leaves. But the leaves were dying anyway. The woods, the copses, even the fields, deceived by the constipated yet oddly defecating sky, believed winter had suddenly returned. Half the trees were bare, the rest shedding their parched, rusted foliage. The grass was also turning brown. Not much hope of grain or cereal, no promise of fruit; nothing really it seemed could grow.

  But for now, some fresh foods persisted. Though the fridges and freezers had long since surrendered, they did not eat too badly at the Duck. Fresh meat—rabbit, chicken, beef, and mutton. (They had been lucky there too; those nearer the big cities had had their flocks and herds sequestered by the army early on, before all transportation was understood to be impractical.) Fish or ordinary low-flying birds might be contaminated and were off the menu, however. Tomatoes, salad, even potatoes, all these from hot-houses run off generators, were available. And certain canned, dry, or otherwise less perishable goods, brought from Stantham, currently a two-day trek, aside obviously from any extra time given to bargaining with, fighting off, or else eluding the Stantham locals.

  They had boiled the water and put it through filters. Now everyone drank bottled. Alcohol, thank God, George Anderton thought, came with its own indigenous preservatives and antiseptics. He had even relearned a liking for warm beer.

  Tonight he was sharing a long table with three of the refugee families now living at the ‘Lavvy,’ the unfinished estate at Orthurst. They had been en route for the coast when their cars, spattered with birds, gave up the struggle. Some of the estate houses were not in too bad condition, floored, roofed, and insulated, with closeable front doors and glazed windows. Their lack of electricity and plumbing hardly mattered either, of course. No one had any.

  The refugees were all right, causing little trouble, only grateful not to be cast out. They had already lost their homes. And there had been draconian rationing in London and elsewhere, and plans for some type of peculiar military call-up of the young that seemed to have no purpose. They took to Orthurst as the drowning take to solid land. And each communal evening, the Cart and Plough, like the Duck, did stunning business—if anyone had charged or paid.

  Over by the bar, Amethyst was laughing with one of the two soldiers who had stayed behind when the rest were force-marched back to Stantham barracks. The young man leant forward and kissed her. An entirely normal scene, it took on instantly a look of utter abnormality.

  “What worries me,” said Jeremy from London-and-the-Lavvy, “is the nuclear power stations. How are they coping with this? Have they shut down, or are they just . . .”

  “. . . leaking radiation,” concluded Liz from Chatham-and-the-Lavvy.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” said Dave, Liz’s partner, “they’ll have taken bloody good care of the oil-rigs off Scotland. Sea’s supposed to be clear there, innit. You can bet they’ve got those rigs well protected.”

  “Who’d you mean?” asked Jeremy. “The so-called government? They’ll have scarpered straight down their bleeding bunkers. And they couldn’t run anything anyhow. Couldn’t run a piss-up in a toilet.”

  A trio of children watched, wide-eyed. The eldest was only seven, and Sharron of Reigate-and-the-Lavvy quickly diverted their attention back to the pandas on the special kids’ napkins Colly had produced.

  “What I miss,” said Sharron’s boyfriend—Rob, George thought he was called—”is the sport. All had to be stopped, didn’t it? Motor racing, rugby—even golf!”

  Jeremy said in a light, grieving voice, “And that match—Arsenal versus Brighton—that would have been a cracker.”

  Jim was plodding by to the bar. “Want another, anybody?”

  They did.

  It was handy, George thought, the way these people talked about this, regularly skimming their terrors, yet also distracting each other with the pandas of political complaint, food and drink and company.

  He was glad, too, that the smell of oil and kerosene and the candles, some of which were scented, the smell even of people now less-washed and over-deodorised in compensation, helped mask the insidious presence of that metallic chicken stench that dropped with all else from the sky. But probably, too, they were all becoming used to it. Soon they would not even notice.

  Outside it was a jet-black abyssal night, the only kind, finally. But the pub basked in its pre-electric flame-lit radiance. This was how faces, forms, suddenly moving hands and glasses might have looked in paintings from the Renaissance. Similar at least, he corrected himself, for constructed light was bound to have altered, somehow. You knew, even in the Victorian era, no oil-lamp had cast quite this sort of illumination or shadow. Everything changed.

  And the pub’s noise, chatter and clatter, and sometimes a sing-song—were also like that. They stood to replace the notes of mobiles, recorded music, radio—and still did not make an elder noise but a modern one, anxiously filling up the void. Beyond which void loomed the agglomeration of silence the magpies had created. The magpies that themselves no longer chattered or called, that made no sound. How silent then must be the upper skies where they clung or hung. Dumb and deaf, all questions futile, all answers obsolete.

  As Jim put the new bottles on the table, George saw Alice come in out of the dark.

  She paused a moment to speak to Amethyst, who nodded, while her soldier turned aside to light a roll-up; no one seemed likely to object to it now.

  George could see Alice, too, had changed. She had lost weight, become oddly fragile and attenuated, her hair seeming blown about. There was a bruise on her left cheekbone. She put her hand to it absently. Amethyst was pouring Alice a glass of wine. No doubt one of the birds had struck her. In the last weeks that had begun to happen. Before, the birds had seemed, when rushing upward from the ground or wherever it was they burst from, to strike only inanimate objects. But recently several people had some tale of a magpie springing abruptly past them inches away, the slap of a wing, long scratch of a claw, minor concussion of round body and hollow bones. Old Tim claimed to have seen one bird dash straight upward through the body of a cow that had been grazing on a slope behind the farm. She had not seemed hurt, just frightened. But later a bruised and reddened area had appeared along her ribs. They had decided it best to slaughter her quickly and then remove the perhaps-contaminated meat when preparing her for eating. But Tim had always romanced, embellished facts. Even something like the thing that now went on might seem worth enhancing to old Tim.

  Alice raised the glass and drank. Her eyes connected with George’s. She seemed about twenty, he thought. An infallibly revealing illusion. She smiled a nervous little smile, as if she had never seen him before. But George smiled broadly back and beckoned, getting to his feet, and Jeremy obligingly shoved himself and family and their chairs along the table to make room.

  “Oh,” said Alice, very low, “I didn’t, mean to—”

  “You’re not. It’s nice to see you, Alice.”

  “I’m so sorry I haven’t been up to
the cottage—”

  “Well. Cleaning the house doesn’t seem so important, frankly, do you think?”

  “I suppose. I don’t know. Todd—” Todd was her husband, “always wants everything clean. Or until . . .” Alice stopped. She drained her glass. She glanced at George under her lashes. Their unexpected meeting had become a liaison of two spies, but what was the espionage Alice had in mind?

  “It’s fine, Alice.”

  Jeremy leaned over and refilled her glass. It was the same red wine, or near enough, and everything was free. She thanked Jeremy, but he had already turned tactfully away, leaving the spies to their clandestine conversation in code.

  “How are you?” George asked.

  This was a fatal, leading question, and he knew it.

  She did not answer. Then she softly said, “It’s awful, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Alice. It’s awful.”

  “I’m—scared,” she said.

  He saw the oldest child take note and an expression of fear creep into his face. George smiled broadly again. He said to her, “Why don’t we go back to the cottage? Talk there. I can walk you home later. I’ve even got some spare food.”

  She too had noticed the child. She brightened, falsely but giving quite an actorly performance. “That would be—yes, let’s do that. Why not?”

  As they were going out of the door, Colly appeared and handed George another bottle of wine. “Last of the best Merlot. Go on. Have a treat. You know, I knew a feller once, he always wanted a pub. Then he comes into some dosh, buys the pub, gets it done up, cracking, ace cook, full cellar, top class guest-rooms. What d’you think he does then?” George and Alice waited between light and night. A sing-song had started, “Oliver’s Army” by Elvis Costello. Behind the bar Amethyst was snogging the soldier. “He locks everyone out, and keeps the place to himself, just for him, I mean. Nobody else let in, ever. The Bugle it’s called. Up Camden way. What do you think of that?”