The Nature of Balance

by Tim Lebbon

  “How many emergency lines are there?” the grass-chewer had asked. “How many calls do they have to have to make them engaged?” Nobody bothered to answer, but each of them was quietly considering the implications of what he had said.

  The villagers remained by the pond, which already felt haunted. They were waiting for something to happen, the atmosphere tense to the point of tearing, but nobody moved. Closeness seemed to bring some comfort, and shock acted as a drug.

  The sun rose high and cast its spirited gaze across the landscape, disregarding the dead people scattered across it. The ducks on the pond became more animated once the sun struck the water, fussing and calling for food from the people assembled in the square. A soft haze of steam rose from damp grass and thatched roofs, slowly dissipating like the spectres of those who used to live there.

  Blane wondered how many dead people there were in the village that morning. There were nine survivors around the pond, he and Holly included, and the fact that they had all decided to gather here could mean one of two things: they were in the minority; or they were the only ones left.

  “There’s a little dead boy in the churchyard,” Blane muttered, “I’m going to fetch him.” He stood and left quickly, feeling suddenly uncomfortable close to so many people, living and dead. He so wanted to be back in the forest listening to nature shouting and screaming, whispering and rustling, waiting patiently for the dark when the land would really come alive. But even there, in his favourite place in the world, there was the dead deer, tingeing his memory of last night with unexpected death and the strange, half-heard sound from the dusky dawn.

  He had almost reached the gate to the churchyard when he realised that Holly was following him. She still had her arms crossed, her face a maze of tears. She seemed used to affording her own comfort.

  Blane did not want her to see the dead boy. Slates dying had been bad enough, but he had not had his throat chewed and torn. He was not arranged like the boy in the graveyard. Not on display.

  “Maybe you should go back to the pond,” he said.

  Holly blinked rapidly, but she did not move. “I don’t just want to sit there,” she said. “It’s too hot. Too quiet. Spooky. I don’t want to sit there … with them.”

  Blane was unsure whether she meant the bodies, or the survivors. “Stay here, then, while I fetch the boy.”

  “No.” Holly shouldered past him, nudging him aside, hands still cupping her elbows. “Don’t tell me what to do. Last I heard, you hardly ever spoke to anyone, so don’t start now by giving orders.”

  Blane watched Holly enter the graveyard, indecision holding him back. There was no explanation for what had happened to the boy, or why he was surrounded by dead animals. And there was no point telling her of the shadow he had seen from across the field. The shape that, along with the voice in the woods, inspired a niggling memory struggling to be recalled, as though déjà vu were stuck in the routes and byways of his mind. Whatever past Blane spent his nights trying to recall had taken one step nearer that morning.

  He suddenly felt an overriding terror, not simply of what was happening, but also a fear for his soul, an icy finger working its way in between ribs and lodging there, burrowing ever closer to his heart with each breath.

  “Where’s the help?” the grass-eater shouted from across the square. He stood, waved his arms, stumbled around, punch-drunk by so much death. Blane knew, more than anyone, that death was the most natural consequence of living. Most people hardly ever realised that.

  He glanced through the gate. Holly was standing over the dead boy, hands fisting, body tense with shock.

  The deer in the forest had a broken, crushed neck. The nearest road had been almost a mile away. He’d seen roadkill before, a hundred times, and the victims were always stained with the car’s exhalations: radiator marks; oil splashes on bloodied hide; tyre-marks splayed carelessly across crushed ribs. No, something else had killed the deer, something other than a car. And then that something had sent it to Blane.

  Perhaps the same something had killed the boy.

  Blane entered the graveyard and walked quickly past the church, away from where Holly was standing. He hardly noticed the woman huddled up again the door, tapping insistently with a red-raw fist, calling, “… Father … Father….” He climbed the stile without looking back, and he was pleased that there were no pleading calls from behind him. Soon he was in the field again, and the forest, his home, beckoned.

  Holly could not move.

  The sun stroked the back of her neck, but she was stone-cold. Nervous sweat ran cooly down her sides and pooled at her waistband. Goosebumps prickled at her skin. Her knees began to shake. She wanted to bring her left foot forward, stand properly, but terror had broken the link between brain and limbs and she simply stood there, staring down at the carnage before her.

  The boy by the pond had been bad. She’d seen dead bodies before, but never an actual death. Not like that. Not so strangely. Like someone had hit him with a bus.

  This was worse. Worse than if she had actually seen it happen, because the mystery of the child’s death remained, and not knowing somehow made it even more awful. This had design to it, intention. This was a display aimed at people like her. The perpetrator had wanted it to be seen. His wounds were clotted into chopped-beetroot patches on his skin, his arms thrown out in a casual display of affection for the dead animals surrounding him. A tableau.

  The presence of the animals was even more disturbing. Why surround a dead boy with dead creatures? And why was the boy the only one of them to bear obvious teeth marks?

  She wanted to pick the child up, hug him to her, imbue him with some of her warmth in the hope that it would inspire a vanished life to return. But she was cold, and she was certain that there was not enough warmth in her own weak flesh to go around. That’s how Tommy had put it when the doctor told her she was sterile. There’s nothing wrong with you, he’d said. You just haven’t got enough life to go around. You need it all yourself.

  Poor, dead Tommy. Holly hated him for dying. But she resented herself more for not being able to keep a part of him back. He’d always wanted a child.

  She tried to turn away, but the scenario held a horrible fascination. She had seen such human nature at work before, been subject to it, watching from a crashed car in disbelief while the whole motorway slewed and slowed to see blood. Seeing eyes flit over her living form to the covered mess at the roadside.

  She fell to her knees, vomiting, turning and cricking her neck in a desperate attempt to direct the puke away from somebody’s dead son. She went down onto her hands and knees, spitting out the last square meal she had eaten before something had gone sour with the world. She hung her head, wishing she had long hair so that it would hide what she could see from the corner of her eye. Dangling earrings tickled her cheeks, precursors of the fresh tears which inevitably came. She waited that way for a while, expecting Blane’s comforting hand to fall on her shoulder any minute. But when he did not come she sat on a nearby grave and turned away from the dead boy.

  There was no sign of Blane. At the church door, a woman was crying and shaking and tapping against the wood, mumbling and suffering her own private grief with the rest of them. Holly wanted to go and help her, hold her, but she would have felt like an intruder. The woman was in a world of her own, and Holly did not know that place.

  She looked at the marker for the grave she was using as a stool: Mary-Jane Elizabeth, loving mother, adored wife, 1897-1974. At least she had a gravestone. Tommy, her dead boyfriend, had little more than her own memories to mark his passing. And perhaps a rose on a bush in the garden of remembrance. But she would never know, because she refused to go there. No use aggravating wounds barely healed.

  She stood and walked away from the boy. It crossed her mind that she had come here with Blane to fetch him and take him down to the pond, lay him out with the others, but the thought of picking him up was suddenly abhorrent. And if Blane had decided to leave, then
why shouldn’t she?

  The sound of an engine crept in from the distance. At first Holly thought it may be the first of a fleet of ambulances, and they’d come in and clean up and tell them all that there had been some terrible accident, but it was all right now.

  But the boy was lying there with dead animals around him; there was no accident here; there was only murder.

  Holly trotted to the gate and out into the square just in time to see a tractor come trundling down from Pond Lane. It was towing a trailer, and even from this distance she could see the bloodstained bundles jumping on the boards. She remained by the church. She knew what was to come, and she could not bear it.

  The man driving the tractor had wild hair, a beard which hung down to his chest, thick National Health glasses held together with layers of sticky-tape of varying ages. When he came into the square, saw the people around the pond, saw the two bodies on the grass, Slates’s blood darkening Blane’s pullover, the tractor jerked to a clumsy halt. The farmer stared in disbelief. He glanced over his shoulder at the bed of the trailer, and when he looked back there were tears spilling out from behind his glasses.

  “You too?” the man said. He spoke quietly but his voice carried, because there was no sound other than the indifferent singing of birds to drown it.

  Blane went into the woods. The solace he sought was not there.

  Instead, silence welcomed him. As he approached the trees the cacophony of birdsong slowly died down, until the only noise to mark his arrival was the sound of his shoes on last year’s rotting leaves.

  Blane loved nature. He could not recall a time when it had failed to love him back. But now he felt as if he was being shunned, as though nature had turned its back on him and left him standing alone in a cold, empty place.

  He found a familiar path and quickly passed into the shadow of the trees, eager to lose sight of the church and the village altogether. An occasional breath of wind passed overhead, shaking the highest branches and brushing newly-budding leaves together in secretive whispers. Blane looked up, but he could discern nothing in the canopy overhead. He could see no squirrels or birds, no butterflies flitting from tree to tree. The familiar springtime scent of the woods seemed jaded and somehow old; the tint of new life had faded into a memory of the smell of something aged, vaguely musty, dried and desiccated. Blane bent to pick a bluebell from a cluster between two old sycamores, but when he put it to his nose and inhaled the smell was distant, a ghost of what it should be.

  A tension had lifted when he left the village, the pressure of nearness to other people, which often set him on edge and sent him into a clumsy flush. Guilt accompanied the easing of this tension, but shock did much to override the guilt, and Blane found it easy convincing himself that he was doing the right thing.

  But a different kind of stress bore down on him as he passed within the influence of the trees. He felt shoved from all sides so that as he walked, he was buffeted by opposing forces. The trees exuded an authority over him, nudging him here, urging him there, steering him in every direction at once. And they seemed to be growing closer together than they had before, forcing out emptiness and filling it with more of their own gnarled certainty. They were shouting to be heard, or perhaps eager to hear. Either way, Blane felt further from nature than he ever had. Today, he was a stranger in these woods.

  He could not help thinking that what he’d seen in the graveyard had made him so.

  He stopped, sat on the damp ground, lowered his head and shut his eyes. There was an incredible urge to leave, to run to his dilapidated home, flee from this place where he had spent much of his life.

  The deer had been killed and shown to him, and then the shape in the churchyard had watched him coming across the fields. He had been lured to the display of the child and the animals with a teasing glimpse of buried memories.

  What was happening?

  He tried to imagine the singing birds and musical laughter he had recalled earlier that day. But all he heard now was the low, throaty chuckle which had followed the bloody death of the deer. And still he could hear no birds.

  The atmosphere changed suddenly, from loaded to threatening. What before had been an absence of the normal forest noises fell instantly into utter silence. Blane kept his eyes closed, his head bowed, though the temptation to look was becoming unbearable. He wanted to see how such a wonderful, alive place could be so quiet and still.

  A sourness entered his mouth, either the taste of fear or something from outside. He opened his eyes a fraction, and the leaves beneath him shifted. They slid sideways, as one, as though he were on a great carpet being tugged at one end, though he could feel no movement. They did not move again, but now they looked wrong; they were the same shape, the same pattern, but suddenly they no longer seemed to belong here.

  Things had shifted.

  There was a noise from his left, a shape rattling through the branches up above. Then something fell to the ground to his right, shrieking slightly as it hit, then silent. He looked up, stared about wildly, for some reason expecting a shape with teeth and claws to come racing at him. But it was only a woodpecker, its glorious colours faded and dirty in death. One wing still twitched, trying to haul its broken body back into the trees.

  There were several more thumps as birds struck the leafy ground around him. Some of them fluttered briefly, calling to each other in confusion, then seemed to turn and stare at him. One, a robin, opened its beak and let out a loud hiss, a sound it should not be able to make.

  Blane stood, turned and ran. Behind and around him more birds fell from the trees, calling and hissing and squawking, not one of them singing. Blane was being chased from the place where he felt most content, but the change that had been wrought here terrified him. He had to leave before he saw any more.

  He took a circuitous route that brought him out half-way down Pond Lane. As he emerged from the woods, the sense of panic that had consumed him evaporated like sweat. He turned and stared back through the trees, where shadows hid secrets he had once thought he knew, and history was wrapped tightly within old trunks. As if his leaving was a signal, the twitter of birds ended the silence. Soon the sounds were almost as familiar and comforting as the feel of the old oak in his favourite clearing.

  It felt like the birds were mocking him.

  He reached his home after five minutes of rapid walking, a time in which he tried without success to hear the birdsong as it had once sounded; beautiful, soulful, magical. Magical, like the laughter he had remembered. But the singing now sounded as grim and dark as the chuckle he had heard in the woods that morning, as if the passage of that sound through the air had polluted whatever it touched.

  He opened the front door, the familiar creak of rusting hinges welcoming him in. But even here, he no longer felt at home.

  The echo of the closing door was askew, coming back from all the wrong directions. He stepped across the main room, unfamiliar creaks rising from previously sound floorboards, mysterious chirps and snicks sounding from within the walls. A monotonous dripping reached him from the back boiler, and the one radiator in his living room gurgled as if constantly being replenished. It was cold to the touch.

  A window had cracked. From sill to head, the thin white line zigged jaggedly through the dirty glass. Moisture had bled in from outside and run down onto the frame, staining it dark with mould as if it had been this way for years. The ceiling bowed downwards, cracking plasterboard and opening an upside down network of valleys and ridges in which earwigs and spiders went about their business. His bookcase, previously piled high with texts on natural history, mankind’s progress through the technological era, theological studies of the harmony between nature and God … had rejected its contents. They lay scattered across the threadbare carpet, already yellowing and shrivelling as though subjected to an intense, sustained heat. The bookcase stood empty and defiant. Even the footprints of the books in the dust had vanished.

  His world had rejected him. Blane left his home
for the last time.

  7. The Absent They

  Peer had nowhere to go. But she had to go somewhere.

  She shut the door to her flat after picking up her keys and hauling on a pair of dirty jeans from the washing basket. Shutting Kerry in, so no-one else would have to see her. Then closing Kerry’s front door as well, so she would not have to see Keith’s ribs again.

  Calmness had emerged from somewhere, a strange calm like the temporary peace at the eye of a hurricane. Control took over and started telling her what to do, guiding her actions with a dispassionate eye, steering her across the echo-chamber landing to the flat opposite. She rapped on the door, although she could hardly imagine anyone still being asleep after Kerry’s murderous screaming. There was no answer, so she knocked again, louder.

  “Mr Stapleton? Could I use your phone? I need to call an ambulance. And the police.” Still no answer, no voices, no sounds of movement from behind the heavy door. In fact, Mr Stapleton’s flat exuded an unnatural stillness. Or perhaps it was just because everywhere else seemed to be a source of grotesque noise. Perhaps the Stapletons were in there now, huddled under a blanket, cuddled together in the sure knowledge that thirty years of companionship would guard them against whatever had ruined the night. Peer hoped that was the case. She could not imagine them dead. “Could you ring them for me, Mr Stapleton? Please?”

  Peer jumped as a shout erupted from the open lobby two floors below. It was incoherent, a roar of terror and woe, someone screaming in tongues at a God who could have let something so appalling happen. Peer composed herself quickly; that buffer zone again, pulling her back from the infected area of thought and calming her by distancing her from things.

  But some things cannot be tempered. On the way down the final flight of stairs fear bit in abruptly, richer and sweeter than any she had yet experienced. It stretched her skin, tingled in her nipples and at the base of her neck, and still she had to see. If anything, she moved faster.