He rolled a slim, neat fag and lit it, blowing smoke with no small amount of satisfaction.
“So, it’s up to you. Tomorrow you can have a lie in like you always do or you can rise while it’s still night and walk that night road out to Mr Keeper’s place. What do you want to do?”
Megan smiles now as she remembers that moment and pulls her woollen wrap tighter around her shoulders to pass through New Wood without catching her clothes on the pines. A lot of tears have been shed over the course of seven days. She even saw Apa cry once. But each night she dreamed of a small boy with moon-silver skin, tar-black hair and eyes of polished granite. A boy who held out his hand to her. A boy who always smiled.
New Wood is dense with trees, and despite her attempts to shrink, the branches of the pines snag and catch at her along the narrow path. The chill here is different. It breathes all around her and the silence is muffled by a frosty mist and a hundred thousand green needles absorbing all sound. The ground is soft and peaty beneath her brown leather boots and her way is defined more by touch than by sight in the darkness. And then, quite unexpectedly, the trees end and the path opens out. Above is a circle of lightening sky in which the stars still observe her. She can smell smoke on the air and up ahead, near the opposite edge of the clearing, she can see a large, squat shadow from which a flicker of light escapes. This is the source of the smoke and possibly the source of the stillness in New Wood.
She has reached Mr Keeper’s roundhouse.
August 10th ’13
My eyes only
I’m such a saddo.
Even though I know I’m welcome in the world and even though I know my family loves me, I feel like a stranger.
At school I’ve never done well in any subjects except art, which doesn’t count. Never made any really good mates. Never had a proper girlfriend. Never been in the football team. Never really been in trouble either. I’m just like this big… nothing. A loser. Even at home I feel like it’s me who doesn’t belong.
Why?
If I knew the answer to that I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this stupid diary. I’d be out there doing something. Doing anything other than thinking. Thinking is all I do. And nothing ever comes of it.
There is still time to change her mind, even as she stands here on the threshold of the clearing where Mr Keeper lives. She could turn and walk back the way she came, back to the safety of her family and their small comfortable cottage. She knows there will be nothing comfortable about the work which lies ahead with Mr Keeper. It would be better, surely, to allow knowledge and adulthood to arrive in their own natural time. Even in her ignorance of the future and of where Mr Keeper may lead her, she understands that she will look back on these times and wonder, no matter what she does, whether she made the right decision. She already regrets the loss of a carefree mind. How much more of herself will she lose by walking forwards into this moment when she could so easily step back into the past? She thinks about this for several chilly moments, each out-breath unravelling in the still air. Her thoughts seem no more permanent than those same spent breaths.
But there’s no undoing her visions from the night country, is there? No sending away the gentle boy with the black hair and grey eyes. And there’s no unseeing of the thing in Covey Wood. If she turns away now these new presences in her life will never be fully addressed and she feels their import so very strongly. They are like parts of her already. Parts she neither wants to, nor is even sure she is able to, live without.
Before she realises what is happening she is walking towards the roundhouse, confidently despite the darkness, and her thoughts and fears only catch up with her just at the moment she rings the tiny bell beside Mr Keeper’s squat doorway. Cracks of flickering yellow and orange are visible through the sticks and mud which form the walls, and between the doorway and its ill-fitting wooden frame, but she cannot see Mr Keeper. She is about to ring a second time when she hears a rumble from inside. She almost steps away until she realises the rumble has a voice – Mr Keeper clearing his early-morning throat. The noise goes on for some time and Megan finds herself willing the phlegm upwards so that the poor man can finally speak to her. The noisy proceedings end with a throaty hoik followed by a massive-sounding wad of mucus leaving Mr Keeper’s mouth at high velocity and landing somewhere impressively distant.
After a few more coughs and grumbles a croaky voice says:
“You’d better come in, little thing.”
10
Oct 5th ’13
My eyes only
The weather’s been getting strange again. We’ve had thunder storms and heavy rain all over the country. Even though it’s October, the rain is warm, like a monsoon or something. Before the storms hit the air gets hot and heavy. It feels wrong.
Jude and I watched one yesterday. It had been sunny all day but then that steamy feeling made it hard to breathe. We huddled in the bay window at the end of the upstairs hallway and watched the sky go black. It was like nightfall. Jude and I held hands really tightly. The wind got up, whipping leaves into spiral flurries. Downstairs I could hear Dad locking windows and pulling the shutters closed. Angela was in her room, no doubt with her iPod wired into her brain, and the only light upstairs came from under her door. Mum was in the kitchen singing the chorus of some old song over and over to take her mind off things. She looks scared all the time now but I worry the storms will send her mad.
Down in the garden the wind picked up more leaves and spun them into a vortex that danced on the grass near the horse chestnut.
Dad shouted up the stairs.
“You two be careful by that window.”
The upstairs hallway window is still unprotected. Last year, Dad fitted roll-down aluminium shutters to every other window in the house but he hasn’t got around to doing the one where we sat, even though Mum nags him about it all the time.
“And tell Angela to drop her shutters if she hasn’t already.”
Angela wouldn’t have known a storm was coming unless someone hacked into her iPod and gave her an emergency bulletin. I left Jude on the window seat, knocked on Angela’s door and walked in. She was multitasking – reading a magazine, texting her boyfriend and listening to music all at the same time.
“Fuck right off, Gordon. What are you even doing in here?”
I shouted “storm” and pointed to her window. She rolled her eyes and continued to text. I thought about telling her to unplug her computer but didn’t bother. Let it fry, I thought.
After the brightness of her bedroom, it seemed like midnight in the hallway. I could just see Jude’s black silhouette in the darkened window. As I walked towards her the sky outside turned white. I thought I’d gone blind at first but then an afterimage of her open-mouthed shock floated in front of my eyes. I started counting as I used the wall to guide me to where she sat. When I reached ten there was the loudest noise I’ve ever heard, a single boom like an explosion in the nearby hills. Ten miles, I thought. What’s it going to be like when it’s right overhead? I reached the window and Jude hugged me. Rain was falling slow and steady outside. No light came from Angela’s room. Even from so many miles away the storm had knocked out the power. Next thing I knew she was in the hallway.
“Dad? Dad! Can you reset the trip switch? My lights have gone out.”
You could hear the disbelief in his voice as he shouted back up to her.
“There’s a bloody great storm out there. Paint your nails in the dark.”
She went back into her room, slamming the door. After the thunder, the bang of the door sounded pathetic.
The wind hurled rain against the windows, smearing it across the panes. The lightning was so bright we couldn’t see where it struck and the thunder got so loud you could feel it in your chest and skull. With every flash, I saw the ground turned to water as the storm dumped inches of rain in a matter of minutes. Between the thunderclaps, I heard Mum crying and Dad trying to calm her down.
We’re lucky to live on a hill. The
rain’s washing away houses and taking people with it. Every night we see it on the TV. It sweeps crops off the fields and carries them to the sea. It overflows from the sewers. All over the country there are emergency shelters for those who’ve been made homeless by the weather. Here in Hamblaen House we’re still safe. For now.
Mr Keeper’s roundhouse is a single circular room. They sit on sheepskins laid over a floor of woven rushes. At the centre, an iron stove like a fat cauldron with a flat top glows orange, giving off enough heat to make Megan’s forehead prickle. She unwraps the woollen blanket from around herself and lets it fall to the reed matting. Opposite the front door, a small area of the roundhouse is partitioned by blankets hung across twine. This, she guesses, is where he must sleep.
A kettle on the stove top exhales a constant, forceful jet of steam. Beside it stands a small tool of some kind, the tiny handle of which pokes straight up from the hot plate. The chimney rises in a series of crooked black joints, straight out through the domed roof.
A heady confusion of scents fills the hot, dark space.
A hovel, she thinks. That’s what it is.
Megan can’t define all the smells. There’s pine-laced wood smoke, of course, which escapes from several imperfections in the stove’s chimney pipe, not to mention the burning baccy. She detects dozens of dried herbs, particularly sage. But there are fresher, more bitter scents too, like those that might rise from poisonous berries pounded to pulp.
Mr Keeper has gestured for her to sit and handed her a clay bowl of hot water, sieved from a charred-looking teapot on the stovetop. He flicked the catchings of the sieve to his right without looking and that is where the single wind-eye of the roundhouse is located. She hears the tiny patter of something landing outside. Drinking the hot brew now she tastes mint and fennel – she’s smelled this on him before and it comforts her just a little. She is too nervous to speak.
As if picking up on her thoughts, Mr Keeper breaks the silence.
“It doesn’t do to make a lot of noise and fuss in the morning. It takes an old man like me quite a while to get started. I like to do it slowly.”
He looks over at her for the first time and in the dim glow of wood fire and tallow candles his face is defined only by its cracks. The half light does strange things to her perception and she sees in his face two centuries of age in one moment, and the freshness of a six-year-old boy in the next. He places his empty tea bowl to his right on the matting and turns towards her. His eyes, not cruel but intense to the point of terror, skewer her.
“I don’t have to tell you that there’s no going back, do I, little thing?”
Her stomach jittering, she says:
“No.”
“Good. That’s very good. I knew from the moment I met you that you’d understand how these things work. I have great faith in you, little thing. Great faith…”
He trails off, his eyes looking towards the stove.
“And that’s why I want you to know that I would never hurt you for any reason.”
“Yes. Of course.” She’s confused now. And suddenly frightened. “But why–”
He holds up his palm.
“Any pain this path holds for you is not of my making, little thing. It is in the nature of the path itself. I tell you this because you must trust me as your guide. Trust me always. Can you do that? Can you do it no matter what befalls you?”
In her panic Megan can’t think. What is he asking of her?
“You knew this would not be an easy thing. You knew it would not be a game. You’ve been visited by the Crowman, little thing. Nothing will ever be the same for you. Nothing can ever be as it was. But I swear to you that I will guide you in the best way I can and with as much care as I am able. The path is not without pain, but neither is the path of life itself. I only need to know if I can rely on you to trust me.”
She watches his face and sees uncertainty there for the first time. Here he is, this very tall, very old man. A man with grooves so deep in his face it is as though life cut him to put them there. He has been Mr Keeper to their community since before she was born – possibly since before her parents were born. This was not something that was bestowed upon him lightly. The lives of hundreds of people have been in his hands over the years. He has delivered children, healed the sick, tended the elderly, the crippled and maimed. He has driven out madness and given nothing but his love – though sometimes it is an angry love – to everyone hereabouts.
And he is the only one who can show her the path.
“I trust you to guide me, Mr Keeper. No matter what happens on the path, I trust you.”
In the dark, his smile is like sunshine before the dawn.
“Oh, well done, little thing. That is so very, very good to hear.” He sighs. “Now, I must ask you to be brave for the first time. And it won’t be the last. It is all very well saying words and meaning meanings for the future. But you must be sealed into this future and sealed into your word. The Crowman has visited you and now he must mark you. Take off your jacket, little thing, and loosen your clothes a little.”
By the glow of the stove, Megan reddens.
“It isn’t what you imagine. Come now, do it quickly.”
Unable to think at all now about what is happening, not knowing whether her trust is already about to be broken – maybe Mr Keeper exacts a price from the community that no one ever talks about – she does as he has asked.
“Come here to the stove where I can see, and expose your chest.”
She moves as commanded, pulling open her cardigan and shirt, stretching down her lambswool vest. She is embarrassed by the fullness of her tenderly ripening breasts and does her best to hide them. It is only then that she sees what Mr Keeper is doing. He snatches the tiny tool from beside the kettle. Before she can react, he places one palm behind her back and with his free hand forces a faintly glowing piece of iron into the centre of her chest.
As she screams, the smell of her own skin burning mingles with the many other scents in Mr Keeper’s roundhouse.
October 10th ’13
My eyes only
Since the shortages have gotten worse, the vegetable patch has doubled, taking over most of the lawn. I’ve spent most of the holidays digging, weeding and hoeing. Most of the apples and pears usually drop and rot on the ground. This year, we’ve harvested the lot. Some are wrapped in paper up in the attic and mum has canned the rest or cooked them into sauce or chutney.
We also have a new chicken enclosure with six hens in it. They arrived with a nanny goat in the back of Dad’s pickup and Mum says this is the only milk we’ll get soon enough.
Everything in the garden is a reaction to what’s happening in England and everywhere else. Mum and Dad act as if we might starve to death sometimes. Can they really believe that?
The other day we went into Tesco with mum. They have security forces in the store now. We saw them wrestle a young mum to the ground, spray mace in her eyes and electrocute her with a taser. Her baby was still in the trolley screaming. It made me feel sick. We got out in a hurry.
You’re not meant to hoard petrol but everyone does. We started before the price rises put vehicles off the road, taking five litres at a time. It’s hidden in jerry cans in the hedge by the back gate. There’s enough to get us to the coast if things get bad. But where would we go? More and more countries are closing their borders as they try to deal with the weather, fuel shortages and economic chaos. The only things going in and out are trade goods under military escort.
Everything is scarce now. Gangs are stealing anything. Not just TVs and phones but heating oil and diesel. They’re even chopping down trees so they can sell the wood. It wouldn’t take much for someone to break into the garden and take all our produce, as well as the chickens and the goat. Dad keeps his shotgun handy now. He bought a second one for me and there’s a whole wall of ammo boxes in his study. You’ve got to hand it to Mum and Dad. They saw all this coming and they were ready.
I’ve got to g
o. I can hear shouting from downstairs.
11
December 2nd ’13
My eyes only
Proof now, because I’ve already got it written down. I’ve definitely had this dream before!
Against a white sky streaked with clouds the colour of grey milk stands a skeletal tree, its branches blackened and dead. The topmost limb divides into three finger-like branches that look withered and dislocated. On the tip of each charred fingertip perches a large black bird. Crows or ravens, I think. One faces left, one right and one looks up into the sky. Then the three of them look down at something I can’t see. On the horizon, far behind the tree, the sun is setting. It’s the same red you see when you look at the midday sun with your eyes closed. Flesh red, shot through with veins of gold. I do not want to see the sun go down. I can’t face the possibility of it not returning.
Someone is screaming. Hoarse, uncontrollable screams. The crows caw at something out of sight. Their cawing sounds like laughter.
When Megan opens her eyes she remembers the scorching of her heart but she feels no pain there now. She is lying on sheepskins in the roundhouse and the morning sun penetrates the cracks in many places. Mostly, it comes in through the open front door and the tiny hole where Mr Keeper ejects unwanted things. He appears from behind the curtained area and kneels beside her. Only then does she become aware of something wet and heavy on her chest. He places a hand over it and the weight increases. With his other hand he holds hers. The skin of his fingers and palm is warm and dry but rough. From his hand radiates a thick aura that seems to envelop her hand and spread into her chest.
Black Feathers Page 7
