by Manda Benson
It had never occurred to her, when she had asked Eric to come here with her, hiding her true motives, he might also have had motives he didn’t disclose. She’d had no idea he might be thinking that. She had used him, and she had used the wyvern. The wyvern could be lying dead on some secret Meritocracy scientist’s table for all she knew, and it would all be her fault, for not thinking straight, for thinking only about what she wanted and not what others needed more.
She kept walking, and the field of onions gave way to a road, and then to a field of potatoes, that reminded her of the ones Ivor used to grow in Roareim.
Ivor, I wish you were here now. Ivor would have had something to say that would make her feel better. He always did.
Beyond this she came upon a different crop: a wall of tall plants a little bit like bamboo grass with long, lined blades coming from an upright central stalk. Mop-like anemones with stringy fronds coloured a livid burgundy-purple hung from the junctions between stem and leaves. Dana decided they were the maize plants that sweetcorn grew on, or at least something very like them. She pushed in between a gap in the stems and began to make her way into the field.
The maize plants closed ranks around her. Their long stems reached up well above her head, concealing the flat landscape around the field so all that was visible above was blue sky. She continued until she came upon a space on the ground where some of the maize seeds hadn’t germinated, and crouched down there.
She put her hand in her pocket and found Ivor’s watch and her fuses, and a fortune cookie from the night before, still in its foil wrapper. She took it out and broke it: the slip of paper inside said, Great fortune awaits you. Dana knelt on the ground and ate the cracker, and poked the paper slip down a crevice in the dry soil at the base of one of the maize plant stems.
Dana put her cheek and palms to the hard, stony earth. She gradually stretched herself out, finding a natural position where her joints could accommodate the arrangement of the plants. She lay there and gazed at the forest of maize stems and the soil at eye level, holding Ivor’s watch in the palm of her hand inside her pocket. There was not even the slightest wind, and the field was still and silent apart from occasional small noises from insects. Dana felt the roots below and the leaves above, ensconcing her in a private chamber away from people. She shut her eyes and breathed, and then she twisted onto her back and studied the bizarre flowers against the backdrop of the intense sky. She drank the water out of her bottle until it was all gone.
Eric wouldn’t be able to find her here if he did come looking. There was no point carrying on with this now. She couldn’t face him after what had happened. It would be best if she could just find her own way back to Pauline and Graeme’s house on buses or whatever she could find. She would be able to get to a wLAN and sort something out. And she could send Eric a text message, explaining that she would go home by herself. She would have to make up something to tell Pauline and Graeme. Maybe she could say a kid on the trip who had a nut allergy ate a peanut sandwich and had to go to hospital, and the whole thing was called off and everyone had to go home.
She found her phone in her jeans pocket, the other side to the one in which she kept the fuses and Ivor’s watch. After taking it out, switching it on, and wiping lint and smeary marks off the screen with her sleeve, she considered how to phrase it.
Hi Eric, not feeling well, going home, pretending trip called off because kid had nut allergic reaction.
Dana could think the message direct to the phone, so she didn’t have to mess around with the phone’s touch-sensitive keyboard, but she put her thumb to the send button without pressing it, nevertheless. Was there anything else she could say? She wished there was something that would make it as though it had never happened, something that would put things back the way they were before. Whenever she thought of anything to do with Eric, that image of his face looming over her came to mind, a nauseating sensation of horror at someone else intruding on her. Why did he have to do that? It had ruined everything. She couldn’t even think of the time they’d fought the wyvern off or the time at his house when they’d played Pillage and Burn, which had been good memories before, without this contaminating it.
She read the message again, and imagined sending it, but something else caught her attention, a signal.
Dana put the phone back into her pocket and rolled onto her knees. The signal grew stronger, and then the form of a hawk broke over the patch of sky visible from her hiding place, and it disappeared just as fast from the opposite side.
She got to her feet quickly. She couldn’t see the bird any more, and the signal was already fading, but she could tell it was flying in a straight line. Stuffing her empty water bottle back into her jacket pocket, she began to push on into the maize, following the direction the bird had gone.
It wasn’t easy to walk between the plants. Dana turned her shoulder and tried to slip between them, but still they scraped against her, and she soon became very hot and sticky. She was already starting to feel hungry. Noon had now passed and she’d not had any breakfast and had eaten only a Chinese cracker, and before long she was thirsty as well. Perhaps she should stop and look for a stream or something to fill the bottle from. Pauline always said you shouldn’t drink water you find outside, because deer might have wee’d in it and you could get leptospirosis. The day wore on, and Dana didn’t find any water, and she became so thirsty that she wouldn’t have cared if she’d got leptospirosis.
The sun was low in the sky when she reached the edge of the enormous field of maize. She found a dyke there, but unfortunately its weed-choked bottom was bone dry when she slid down to investigate.
She climbed up the other side and sat down there, her mouth burning and dry. Just below her was an untarmacked road, a dirt trail with grass growing in a centre strip where the undercarriages of Land Rovers and farm vehicles had straddled it. Beyond that was a meadow, gold tinged with purple from the summer drought. And yet further away, the setting sun had stained the sky, and the western horizon brimmed with a colour like flame seen through a glass of red wine. There, like an anvil upon the hearth of the sunset, and standing out starkly on the flat horizon, was a building with the shape of a tall rectangle, a few squarish outbuildings clustered around it.
That was it! Dana was sure it was the building from the wyvern’s memory. The image she’d seen before had been slightly indistinct, but the impression of the overall shape was the same.
There was a fence with two strings of barbed wire at the edge of the meadow, but Dana could just about fit underneath the lowest one, although she did snag Duncan’s jacket once as she crept through. Although the grass was long, it didn’t provide cover in the same way the maize had, and she crouched and moved on bended knee and hoped no-one would see her.
She came upon another dirt track that led her to the perimeter fence. A dilapidated gate made from metal mesh had been chained shut across the road. Signs of Private and No Trespassing had been fixed to the mesh, although the red lettering was faded and the signs were stained from age. The gate sagged so much in the middle, the bottom of it had sunk into the deep ruts tyres had left in the road.
The ruts were so deep Dana fancied she might have been able to crawl under the gate near the posts, and she couldn’t sense any signals from CCTV cameras, but the nagging, irrational feeling that someone might be watching her dissuaded her from trying it. She had also begun to notice a very unpleasant odour hanging in the still air. Although she was still some distance from the building, it looked brutish and hideous in the sunset. It was an old, derelict building made of concrete in a blocky, ugly 50s style, and the effects of age and weather had not mellowed it. The façade was cracked and stained where rainwater had run down, and almost green in places where lichens and moss had taken hold. A barren industrial chimney with a broken upper rim stood like an insulting finger raised at the setting sun.
Instead, she continued around the perimeter, examining the fence for any gaps she might creep through mor
e surreptitiously. Twice she sensed the signal and again spotted the bird circling in the evening air above the building, and she pressed in to the fence where shrubs and small trees had gained a hold, hoping they would conceal her from it.
She found a gap in the fence where a tree had torn the wire out from the ground in its growing process, and slipped through it. The soil within was not meadow or farmland, but a packed-down overgrown wasteground covered in trailing bindweed strands, enormous daisies, ribwort plantains with bobbly seed heads surrounded by halos of pollen-shedding stamens, and brick-red dock flower spikes covered with cuckoo spit.
The building wasn’t entirely in the modern concrete style as she’d first thought. The rear part of it was a much older building that had been extended upon, with filthy bricks and tall, dingy windows covered with algae and grime. It looked like an old Victorian workhouse or something of a similar nature from a Charles Dickens book about poverty and misery.
The bird passed over once more. Dana stayed under the brush surrounding the fence and kept perfectly still as it circled in towards the roof of the concrete building, where a figure reached out to it from behind a low barrier. The last rays of sun were sinking below the horizon, and it was hard to make out much detail. It looked to be a large man, and it was only when the bird alighted on his outstretched arm that Dana realised it must be enormous, longer from wingtip to wingtip than a man was tall. It held its wings half open for balance as the falconer drew it in over the edge and disappeared out of view back onto the roof.
Ivor?
There hadn’t been long enough to see much, just a glimpse of a silhouette against the ruddy sky, but it had looked like a tall, sturdily built man. Dana’s pulse pounded in her throat. There was only one way to find out, and she couldn’t turn back now, not after what she’d seen. Dana withdrew her phone from her pocket. If she was to go any closer, it was important she didn’t make a noise, and that included if Eric tried to ring her. She switched it off.
She looked up at the blank walls, at the dark windows sunk into the concrete and the tall windows within bricks, so begrimed that nothing could be discerned from within. There could be people watching from there, people she was oblivious to. After checking the sky and the ground in all places she could see, she hurried across the overgrown ground with her body held low. She reached the wall of the older part of the building and crouched so as to keep out of sight of anyone looking out the windows, and shuffled along the brick under the sills. The unpleasant smell she’d noticed from the front of the site had by now become much stronger, and somewhere ahead she could hear a faint whining sound, perhaps some kind of motor running. This got louder and the smell became worse as she approached the corner of the building, and when she reached it and saw beyond, the air was thick with flies.
She’d reached what had probably once been a small courtyard. Perhaps there had been a garden in it at one time, but now it was just weeds forcing up through cracked concrete and dry soil in raised beds within stone partitions. Quatrefoil ponds had been sunk into the ground at each corner, the remains of a central fountain visible in the nearest one, but the stony lining had cracked and the only water that remained was a shallow, scummy puddle in the corner that Dana wasn’t tempted by despite her thirst. A pile of rubbish seething with flies leaned against the opposite wall, and as Dana studied it she recognised the things within it as being bones, still with blood and meat on them, reeking from hours of putrefaction in the sun. Some of them looked immense, like they’d come from elephants or something. In school, Dana had learnt that the largest bone in the human body was the femur, the bone inside the thigh, and these were far larger than that, and some looked like curved ribs, almost like the sort of bones she’d expect to see fossilised in a museum from when the dinosaurs went extinct.
In the far wall, the one opposite the entrance to the courtyard, there was a great riveted metal door, ancient with rust and flaking discoloured paint, and it was ajar. As Dana walked to it, her stomach gave a sudden lurch and she quickly put her hand over her mouth at the sight of an enormous vertebra with stringy, blackening flesh sloughing off, as big as an armchair and surely too large to have come even from an elephant. The smell here was very strong and it was hard to breathe without gagging, and the noise of the flies was overpowering.
Behind the gap in the door lay a gloomy corridor, lit only by a light tinged green from a filthy window. The building maintained a chill despite the hot weather outside, and the stone walls sweated.
Dana could still smell the stench from outside, but it lessened as she crept through the building’s annexe and past a doorway with no door into a corridor beyond. The place looked like it had not been used in years, and a musty dampness filled it. Stones and bits of glass and rubbish littered the floor. The corridor had no windows, and Dana could barely make out the shape of stairs and a deformed metal hand rail. She paused for a moment, straining her ears for any sounds, but all she heard was her own rapid breathing reflecting off the stone walls, and the drone of flies from outside. She put her hand in her pocket to touch her fuses and Ivor’s watch and looked at the stairs again. Ivor could be hiding here. It was old and derelict, like Roareim, but Dana had never remembered Roareim being as sinister as this.
Trying her hardest not to scratch loose glass and dirt on the steps under her feet and make a noise, she ascended the stairs. The visibility improved on the first floor, thanks to an empty doorway leading to another dirty window. Dana went to it and peered out. It looked down on the courtyard and out upon the meadows of still golden grass flooded with the warm glow of the setting sun. Outside looked like another world.
She continued down a corridor with the upper halves of dirty windows on one side. The windows were mullioned, made up of lots of squares of glass inside a metal lattice, and a number of the panes had fallen out or been broken, and the gaps sent shafts of light thrusting into the greenish murk the intact parts allowed, illuminating empty rooms leading off the other side. Most of these were missing the doors, although a few of them remained hidden behind heavy, prison-like ones.
At the end of the corridor she turned a corner and heard the drone of a fan and an irregular sound of flapping paper. An open door led to a totally different room. Through the doorway it was obvious the window had been cleaned, and the sunset flooded in through it and illuminated shelves of books and a grotesque tigerskin rug on the floor, the hide misshapen over the skull still inside it and with empty holes where its eyes had been, the fur motheaten and balding beige and grey where once had been orange and black. By the window stood a desk with a chair pushed back and a fan running beside it, and on the desk a book lay open, its pages slowly sliding over from the draught created by the fan.
Someone had been here recently. Dana pulled back from the doorway and checked the corridor she’d just come through, but it remained in its former state of untouched decay.
Then there came a sound like the flapping of wings, from somewhere ahead. Dana pressed in against the wall and looked into another corridor. There were no windows on the side, just one at the end behind her, and a figure was walking away from her, towards the far end, a man with an enormous bird. Dana stepped forward quickly and silently.
It was immediately obvious to her that it wasn’t Ivor, and that she had been mistaken. He was too short and too broad, with massive shoulders and an enormous barrel-shaped chest. Ivor had been tall and solidly built, but he’d always had a sort of elegant grace and balance unique to him that this man hadn’t.
His left hand was clenched inside a leather gauntlet upon which perched the eagle, its great talons digging into the thick hide. Its wings and back were a dark slate colour with lighter stippling and barring, not the brown of the golden eagle Eric had been telling her about.
The enormous bird of prey turned its dark head, fixing upon her with exquisite golden eyes. Dana didn’t move, but the man must have heard her or sensed something, and he turned. She must run, get out of here and away from this stra
nger, but her legs were rigid. She waited petrified for the instant he would see her, for the outburst that would come on account of her trespassing here. The front of his head came into view in the scant light available in the corridor, revealing the skin of the whole of his face and neck to be pocked and distorted. His breath came heavily through thickened, irregular nostrils, and the upper half of his face on one side was just a swollen and sealed eyelid where a scar had been burned, and the other side was a streaky mess of shapeless unmatching skin, as though he had a rasher of bacon stuck to his face.
He had no eyes...
Dana clapped both hands over her mouth, silencing a noise that rose unbidden from her throat. She fought to still her breathing while the man with the horrifying visage stood sightless before her, the bird on his fist staring back at her impassively.
He turned back and walked slowly away, his feet dragging on the concrete floor. Dana shrank back against the wall as soon as she hoped he was out of hearing range. She felt her way to the opening she’d come through and stumbled back to the room with the books. She needed to get away from here, now. There was no telling what was going on here, what she’d just walked into, but her breath would not stop tearing in and out of her lungs, and a susurrating ringing sound had started up in her ears. Her legs and arms were heavy and buzzing pin-and-needle sensations crawled up from the tips of her fingers and toes. Dana leaned against the back wall and slid down to the floor, struggling to block the image of the man out of her thoughts and concentrating instead on the hard textures of stone and concrete and upon the motheaten dead tiger that lay in the vista formed by the two shelves she’d hidden between.
She slowly got her breathing back under control and the strength returned to her limbs. It wasn’t far to the exit, and she visualised the route down, and back past the stinking bones. Her stomach lurched at the thought of them. She’d have to try not to think about that. All she had to do was get up and get out of here, and it would be over, and she could have as much time as she wanted to compose herself.
