The Nature of Balance

by Tim Lebbon

  Now he was experiencing an uneasiness which, if he did put it down to instinct, scared him more than anything. There was no reason to be frightened. Nature faced him, as it did every morning, but this time he was being stared at rather than skirted around.

  Fear kept the warmth from his bones.

  Leaving his rucksack inside the front door, he dropped his coat back on the hook and set off for the village. As he closed the garden gate he felt suddenly exposed, naked under the glare of a million eyes. It was as if the whole world was watching him. He glanced around, truly fearful, expecting at any second to be attacked from the sky or the hedgerow. But nothing came, and silence had once again descended across the landscape. Looking back into the garden, he saw only the sights he was used to. Birds fluttering around the hanging baskets of peanuts, the secret dashing of rabbits in the field. Normality.

  He hurried down the road, watchful and alert. The lane was so rarely used that weeds and grasses grew along its centre hump, and Paul kept to this in an effort to hide the sound of his footsteps. He smiled uncertainly at his actions, but the fear as still there, nestling in his stomach and warning him, with indelicate twinges, that everything was not right with the world today.

  The lane fell slowly down into the shallow valley, curving around hedgerows and hillocks, old stone walls on either side held up more by the plants piercing them than by design. The day seemed to be in tension, sprung with some massive event waiting to be unravelled, heavy with the promise of future strangeness. Paul wondered what the hell had happened during the night. He no longer felt at home walking down this lane. Rather, it seemed that he was an outcast, excluded by nature and turned into an intruder. He felt an unreasonable sense of betrayal; unreasonable, because nature did not deal with such pettiness as vanity and that, in truth, was what Paul was exercising. He mourned the loss of his place. He grieved the shunning of his love; a love given freely, because Paul knew he could love nature without having to worry about the feeling being reciprocated. And perhaps that was why he felt so hurt: he had thought it could never happen this way.

  He passed Milligan’s Pond. It was silent this morning, the usual chirrup of crickets and the covert splashing of fish or frogs absent. The surface of the water was still and undisturbed, mirroring the clear, bright sky. Paul felt the sun on the back of his head, drawing sweat from his body beneath the two pullovers, coaxing the final reticent buds to open on the trees and plants around him. He passed the pond quickly. He wanted to reach the village, chat with Mrs Greenwood in the shop, spend a couple of hours in the company of his own kind.

  Maybe he’d been shutting himself away for too long, avoiding the company of other people in the vain belief that he was closer to nature than they. Could he really think that, and still be the reasonably minded person he took himself for? Was he being conceited, hiding away in the woods with his clipboard and an air of natural superiority? Was he full of shit?

  “Full of shit.” Paul shook his head. As he rounded a bend in the road he saw an ambulance. It sat at the T-junction of the lane and the main road through the village, idling, puffs of exhaust rising into the still air.

  And, as if to amplify the feeling he had been trying to shake this morning, there was something very wrong.

  The front cab doors were open. There was no-one inside. The engine was still running, waiting for a getaway, but nobody seemed ready to jump in and go screeching off on some life-saving errand. Indeed, apart from the steady grumble of the engine the vehicle was as quiet and eerie as the fields surrounding it.

  Paul trotted the last few steps and leaned in the driver’s side. There was a smear of blood across the white paintwork next to the door. The vehicle stank of sweat. There were sandwich wrappers and squashed drinks cartons scattered in the footwells, drifted against the gearstick housing like windblown refuse. As if the missing paramedics had had a busy night.

  “Hello!” Paul cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered, thinking that perhaps they were off treating someone; a fallen biker, a clumsy farmer who’d become entangled in his own barbed wire. He circled the van once, looking out into the fields and along the road towards the village. Nothing. He walked to the overgrown hedge between the road and the pond, expecting to lean over and see some sort of rescue operation already in progress.

  Nothing. A dead cat lay in the hedge, slowly drying and melting down into the landscape. But there was no sign of any ambulancemen. No sign of life.

  Paul went back to the vehicle and climbed in the driver’s door. He didn’t want to have to touch that smear of blood, or even pass it. It was proof that something had gone badly wrong. “Pretty normal in an ambulance,” he said, eager to disturb the spooky silence. “Got to be expected. Probably in a field somewhere, behind a wall, can’t hear me calling. Treating a runaway kid with exposure or some loony-toon, wandered away from their nursing home, hair-brush in one hand, melting Mars bar …

  “I wonder what’s in the back.” He did not really want to know, of that he was sure. But he was equally certain that the same inquisitiveness which directed him to sit in the woods for weeks on end, cataloguing and recording and counting, would now urge him to open the back doors and see. Human nature, to be nosy. That’s what makes us powerful and superior, many said. Paul would argue that humanity was inferior, rather than superior, but in this case he could not argue with instinct.

  The doors were not locked. They opened easily. There were no bodies inside, but Paul wished there had been.

  Rather that, than all the blood.

  It looked like someone with a grudge against white had taken to the interior of the ambulance with a spray-gun full of blood. Walls, ceiling, floor, all glistened with new, or shone with the faded sheen of old blood. There was one trolley, covered with a mish-mash of bloodied blankets and used, caked bandages. It stank like a butcher’s shop first thing in the morning. Open, fresh meat. Insides.

  Paul turned away, gagging. “What the hell?” he said, staggering back around to the cab, supporting himself against the vehicle. The engine died. It coughed, gave out a couple of shuddering gasps, then cut out. Jumping into the cab, more to sit down and calm himself than anything else, he glanced at the dashboard. The fuel gauge was flashing red. “These guys don’t forget to fill up,” he murmured. Then he saw the radio.

  He’d never used one before; all he could get was blank static. He twiddled knobs, depressed buttons, shouted into the mouthpiece, but nothing happened.

  Abandoned. It didn’t sound good – it sounded decidedly bad, to be truthful – but it was the only word that seemed to fit. An ambulance, idling away until the fuel ran out. Full of blood. Abandoned.

  The village was not far away. Paul decided to run.

  10. Wake Up Falling

  Blane felt lost.

  The lane headed in opposite directions: to his left, it led back down to Rayburn and all the heartache resident there this morning; to his right, it wound its way past the forest and the pond, up the hill and out into the open country. He was torn both ways, between the comfort he yearned from nature and peace, and the solace he may yet find with the other victims of this tragedy.

  He stood on the verge in front of his house, undecided. Wondering how he could possibly decide.

  The skin on the back of his neck prickled. He looked once more at the front façade of his home. The plastic gutter had tipped at a jaunty angle, giving the house an expression of pure mockery. He could recall living nowhere but here, yet this place felt truly alien now.

  Blane stared up into the cool blue sky, watching a bird circling high on updrafts of warm air. It seemed to hang suspended, drifting slowly to and fro, never once having to use its wings to gain lift. He used to be like that, he thought. Rambling along on the rush of nature, being swept in whatever direction it chose to take him. Kept warm and dry, cosseted by the implied love which nature could impart to those who loved it. Now, he had been sucked into a downdraft. He was plummeting towards rock, and he had no wings. He h
ad the sudden, painful awareness that the direction he took now – to or from the village – would decide whether or not he was broken when he eventually struck the ground.

  He closed his eyes. The torment did not recede.

  The sound of pounding footsteps snapped his eyes open.

  There was a man running down the lane, flicking up puffs of dirt behind him as though he were racing ricochets. He was tall and strong looking, like an athlete, and he took long, graceful strides. But his face showed that he was ill at ease. He slowed as he neared Blane, then stopped altogether, panting but never dropping his eyes.

  “You look scared,” Blane said.

  Paul nodded. “It’s been a weird morning.”

  “It has, at that.”

  The two men stood there for a while, sizing each other, both wondering how much to say about what had happened. Nature was silent about them, holding its breath.

  “Aren’t you the scientist? Staying up in the holiday cottage?” Blane had heard about this man, his counterpart in many ways, who spent much of his time in the forest. The villagers seemed to accept him with the same good-humour as they did Blane, raising their eyebrows and staring skyward if he was mentioned in passing in the village store. Perhaps it was their constant nearness to nature, living within it, which made them take it so much for granted.

  Paul nodded. “Hardly a scientist, more a counting boy. But yes, that’s me. Paul Toré.” Normally he would have held out his hand, but today was not normal. After a while, having not heard a name in reciprocation, he asked: “You are?”

  “Blane.”

  Paul nodded. “Heard of you. You’re a forest fan too?” He tried to sound ironic, but it came out all wrong.

  Blane nodded. The banter was light but necessary. He was not used to meeting people in such a casual, unexpected manner, and he sensed a similar distrust emanating from this tall man, perhaps borne of the strange day they had all awoken to. They were assessing each other as well as making their introductions.

  “I love the woods,” Blane said. “I virtually live there. I watch things, rather than documenting and counting. I don’t need a reason to be there.”

  The two men looked at each other. Both could see a glimmer of distress in the other, an uncertainty slowly growing and propagating in the strange atmosphere hanging over the fields and woods.

  “It’s quiet,” Blane said. “Strange.”

  “The birds were watching me outside the cottage,” Paul burst out. “Squirrels too, and rabbits. The pair of buzzards? Sitting there, watching me. Spooky.” He was fisting his hands at his side, still panting from his sprint, sweat beaded on his forehead like clear boils.

  Blane frowned. “In the woods … birds fell from the trees. Most were dead. Those that lived didn’t sound like birds at all. Everything’s wrong today.”

  “I know,” Paul said. “All wrong.” As though a barrier had been broken, Blane sensed that Paul wanted to tell him more. They had never met, but already there was a curious sense of kinship between them. In time, perhaps, they could talk some more.

  “Coming down to the village?” Blane asked. Paul nodded. “Well, we’d better go. They’re waiting for help.”

  Paul stopped cold. “The village?”

  “Things are bad in the village.”

  “What things?”

  Blane diverted his eyes. “People are dead.”

  “I just saw an ambulance,” Paul said, breathless. “Back at the junction with the cottage lane. Abandoned.” That word again. It sounded so final.

  “No drivers?”

  Paul shook his head. “As I said, abandoned. Empty. Just … covered with blood.”

  Blane stared at the man for so long that Paul thought he was being accused of some nefarious crime, perhaps suspected as the root cause of all of this. He was about to defend himself, protest innocence, when Blane spoke again.

  “We’d best get to the village.”

  “How did the people there die? Oh God, who?” Paul seemed to slump, shrink where he was standing.

  “Last night,” Blane said. “I was in the woods. It was … strange. You know. Then I heard a scream, ran to the village. A few of them were around the pond.” As he described what had happened, remembering details which had passed him by the first time, he realised how surreal and out of kilter all this was. How ridiculous it sounded. He wished Paul would laugh at him, mock him, but he seemed to be taking it all in with a stunned, wide-eyed acceptance.

  Blane did not mention the shape in the churchyard. The sound of its laughter.

  The men began walking towards the village, Blane continuing to prepare Paul for what he would see when they got there. “There was a car burning in the square. Dead woman in the pond, looked like she’d drowned. Another dead kid in the graveyard.”

  “How had he died?”

  “I don’t know,” Blane snapped, a little too sharply. “He was just dead. I think some dogs had got at him. They’d got at Saint, too … you know Saint? … in the bandstand in the square. Other people had died in their houses, and their wives and husbands … and kids … were wandering around in a daze. A young boy was there, Slates.”

  “I’ve met him,” Paul cut in. “Saw him in the woods sometimes. Nice kid. He seemed genuinely interested in what I was doing. In a slanted sort of way. Laughed, but kept coming back.”

  Blane did not talk for a while, and both men took comfort in the sound of gravel crunching beneath feet other than their own.

  “Slates died,” Blane said, eventually. “Badly. Fell asleep and just died. Like something had hit him while he was sleeping. Crushed his head.”

  “On the green?”

  “Yes, by the pond there.”

  “In front of everyone?”

  Blane nodded.

  Paul shivered and flexed his shoulders.

  “Everyone’s waiting for ambulances and the police,” Blane continued, “but from what you were saying, they may have a long wait. They all tried the emergency services, usually got an engaged tone. One got through, but was told they were too busy and they’d be called back.”

  “What?” Paul said in disbelief, his voice high. There were so many questions that they all tumbled over each other, and ended up in a hazed mess in Paul’s mind. He felt stunned, shell-shocked, and walked on in silence. Neither man mentioned the strange stillness about them.

  “Where are you from?” Blane asked after a pause.

  “The Dominican Republic. Lived here since I was six, though.”

  “A lovely place,” Blane said.

  “Which part did you go to?”

  Lush mountainsides covered in rich tropical growth; banana plantations spread across hillsides; the smell of distilling rum, drifting from long, low factories. Blane frowned, and shrugged. “Never been there,” he said. “It just sounds nice.”

  “It is.” Paul said no more, but felt that something had just happened which belonged to the day. Something strange.

  Blane would have agreed with him.

  Holly felt lost the moment Blane disappeared.

  He had brought if not a sense of calm, then at least a semblance of control to the terrified people in Rayburn’s village square. He’d seemed removed from what was going on, concerned with something else. As he left and the farmer drove despairingly into the square, panic rose once more, like a malignant mist from the ground.

  The grass chewer had run away from the pond, screaming and shouting that he was coming home, it was all right, Daddy was coming home. They could still hear an occasional scream.

  The woman who had held Slates as he died stood, walked calmly towards the still-smouldering car and seemed ready to throw herself upon the twisted wreck. Holly ran to her, grabbed her around the shoulders and hauled her back onto the grass. The woman protested at first, with a vehemence that almost scared Holly into letting her go. If someone wants to die so much, Holly thought, who am I to stop them? Then the woman’s screaming faded and she began to cry, and Holly had been cuddl
ing and cajoling her ever since.

  The farmer lifted the three bloody bundles from his wagon and laid them lovingly on the ground by the pond. He kept them slightly apart from Slates and the drowned woman, as if the dead could spread infection. Then he sat next to them, touching one after the other, in turns whispering and crying, rocking on his heels and going down on all fours. His glasses had fallen off, but he seemed not to notice. He was blind with grief.

  A terrible stillness sank down across the village, and hopelessness reflected in the eyes of those still alive. Holly wanted to do something to help, suggest some wise course of action, but shock had bitten into her harder than she would admit, even to herself. She felt as useless as she had trapped in the car years ago, watching her boyfriend’s blood dry in the afternoon sun as firemen cut her out and motorists stared with wide-eyed fascination at the blanketed figure at the roadside. Then, as now, she needed someone to help her. Perhaps she was not as strong as she made out. Even in her sweatshirt, she was cold.

  And then Blane came back. He walked into the square from behind the stalled tractor, a tall black man next to him, both of them wide-eyed as though they had been chased by something impossible. The tall man glanced back up Pond Lane as they entered the square, saw the bodies and the burning car and the shattered people sitting or standing around, and he could do nothing but stand and stare.

  Blane walked straight across the grass to Holly. She felt a tingle of satisfaction at this, pleased that he had singled her out. The woman in her arms looked up, then down again at the grass, sobbing dryly.

  “Blane,” Holly said.

  He smiled, but seemed unused to it. “Sorry I left. I … it was the boy in the churchyard.” He glanced at the bodies by the pond.