Black Feathers

by Joseph D'lacey

  “I need to stop,” she calls to Mr Keeper.

  He turns back.

  “It’s not much farther, Megan. Just into this wood.” He points to a grey mass of beech trees only an acre or more away across the tussocked grassland. “Can you make it that far?”

  She nods and follows. They pass willows to their right and she can smell the river beyond. It’s the Usky – she would know the scent of its waters anywhere. Its familiarity is a comfort that makes the last part of the hike more bearable. They enter the beech wood and the trees there are majestic, silent grey beasts which rise high and noble into the air. Mr Keeper stops, shrugs off his pack and lowers it to the ground. He stretches forwards and backwards a few times and then squats to ease out his legs. Megan drops her pack as though she has been carrying a boulder, and collapses to the ground.

  The beech trees have left a space among themselves, roughly circular and clear of obstructions, save for the odd fallen branch. These Mr Keeper gathers together in preparation for a fire.

  “Don’t sprawl for too long,” he says after a while, “or you’ll have no energy left at all. Come on, I’ve got a job for you.”

  She groans and rises to her feet.

  Mr Keeper is searching among the beech trees and soon he finds what he’s looking for: a clump of hazel. Its long, thin branches reach straight up from a central stump of trunk. The nuts have fallen and many remain untouched, though it’s obvious the squirrels have had their share. She pockets several handfuls of the nuts while Mr Keeper uses a long, heavy blade to separate the hazel branches from their trunk.

  Together they carry bundles of hazel back to their clearing and Mr Keeper begins to build a dwelling for them. First he marks out a circle by forcing the thicker ends of the sturdier hazel branches deep into the soft earth, twenty-eight uprights which he then bends towards the centre in opposing pairs, lashing them together with twine. He weaves the thinnest branches between the uprights, creating five lateral rings which hold the dome together. From time to time he takes a feather or some dried herbs or the claw of an animal and builds them into the weave of the roundhouse.

  When this is complete Megan helps him wrap the structure. They use a fine, sheer cloth the colour of dried lichen. This Mr Keeper has carried underneath his pack in a cylindrical bolt, which Megan had mistaken for a bedroll. They place this roll of material, thinner than paper but as strong as her coat, around the hazel branches as tightly as they can, turning the whole structure into a bubble of pale, dusty green. They secure the wrap with twine at three levels, pulling it tight and tying it off.

  Mr Keeper crawls inside the roundhouse to burn sage and pine. She hears him praying in whispers. All at once she feels very safe in the presence of this ageless man. A man who seems so much like a naughty boy in the skin of an elder.

  Dusk is coming.

  Mr Keeper keeps the fire small but well-fed, and they boil water in a blackened pan to make tea. The temperature drops and they sit inside the roundhouse to drink it. Mr Keeper smokes in silence, baccy fumes mingling with the scent of sage and pine. Soon the only light she can see is the glow of Mr Keeper’s pipe and the flames of the small fire flickering outside the roundhouse. When Mr Keeper finishes his smoke, he rations out some food. They eat quietly and the darkness deepens.

  As Megan sits, she drifts and dozes, her back resting comfortably against her pack.

  She slips away.

  “Do you feel him?”

  Megan snaps to wakefulness. It is dark but for an indistinct and shapeless orange glow coming in from outside.

  How long have I slept for?

  “He’s here, Megan. Do you feel him?”

  Mr Keeper’s voice is a whisper. She keeps her voice low too.

  “I… I don’t know. I must have been–”

  “Shh.” His voice drops so low she can barely hear it. “Listen, Megan. The Crowman is with us.”

  Megan strains to hear and her heartbeat quickens. Her senses focus. Her mouth is bark-dry in an instant. But she listens, though. It isn’t footsteps she hears outside the roundhouse – its “walls” now seeming more flimsy than a layer of web – it’s the swoosh of huge, distant wings.

  The wings quicken their beat, slowing some massive airborne form for landing. The wind buffets their shelter. The dome shifts and settles and the noise outside is gone. The sound of stealthy footsteps progresses near and then begins to circle the roundhouse. What flew now walks. Is this the same Crowman she saw in Covey Wood?

  The footsteps stop.

  She can see nothing but she senses Mr Keeper reach for some talisman at his neck and clasp it in his gnarly hand. She hears him intoning whispers so faint they might only be her imagination. Suddenly, she wants to pray.

  Pray, she thinks. Before it’s too late.

  Great Spirit, if this is a test, if this is part of my path then make my footsteps upon it sure and strong. Help me to endure this. Let me have the will to be everything I can be for myself and for this world.

  Her terror vanishes. Gone like a pebble to the bottom of a lake. In its place she feels a radiated peace. It comes from outside the makeshift roundhouse, where the stealthy footsteps stopped. She knows – knows – that whatever is out there is for the good. A dark light of benevolence streams into the shelter as she hears words, spoken distinctly but in utter silence, both outside and within herself.

  Have no fear, Megan Maurice, for everything you need will come to hand in the very moment of its requirement and you will fulfil your purpose here.

  There is movement by the entry flap and something enters with a breath of cold air. She stiffens at the intrusion in spite of herself. A hand takes her wrist. The grip is soft and soothing, its touch blood-warm in the darkness. And all about the fingers of this hand she feels a cuff of silky feathers. Feathers, she knows without needing to see, as black as the void.

  Come, Megan Maurice, I have much to share with you.

  The hand draws her out into the night. She finds herself stammering.

  “B-but the book. How will I remember it all?”

  You can never forget. Not even the smallest detail or sensation. It is your gift. It is your curse. That is what it means to walk the Black Feathered Path. All you need is the strength to hold it, Megan, no matter what you see, no matter what you feel. Can you do that much?

  There is no hesitation.

  “I can. And I will. I swear it.”

  They are in the night. The fire’s life is a waning glow, cooling beneath a crust of ashes, barely visible and yet the one thing that Megan can see. When this faint radiation begins to shrink she realises that she has been lifted away from the grip of the Earth by the hand of the Crowman. She rises up, feeling the branches of beech trees passing on all sides. She looks to where the arm and body of the entity which holds her must be, but she can see nothing of him. All she can feel is the rise and fall of vast wings above her and the sensation of being held near to the warm, soft breast of a bird. The Crowman rises and rises and Megan is drawn with him. Higher than she has ever risen before. Into the very beyond.

  They are flying over time itself and over the woven threads of the day world and the night country. Megan is dizzy with fear of falling, not to earth – that would be to die, that would be something – but into oblivion where she would fall forever, away from the Great Spirit, away from time and the beautiful Earth, abandoned, irretrievable and forgotten.

  They ascend through the Weave towards the stars. The Crowman takes her back once more.

  Back to the boy.

  36

  Each morning when John Palmer went hunting and checked his snares, Gordon joined him. He didn’t ask to go along and John Palmer didn’t tell him he wasn’t welcome. The man regarded him with something like fear now and always looked away first if ever their eyes met.

  Gordon shot wood pigeons, pheasants and rabbits with John Palmer’s air rifle, and he showed him better ways of placing and concealing his snares. Meat became plentiful. Since eating t
he rooks, Gordon’s healing had accelerated. He felt stronger than he’d been before the fever. He was a little taller now, a little broader. Living wild appeared to suit him.

  With his returned health came the urge to move on. Not simply a need but a sense of duty. Fear of the journey and a reluctance to say goodbye to Brooke stopped him acting on what he knew to be right.

  In moments when he wasn’t hunting or helping out around the camp, Gordon took his pack down to the stream where he could be alone. He would sit and look through the book Knowles had given him.

  It was a sinister thing. Like a diary to which many people had made contributions, none of them knowing exactly why, or what it was they were recording. Everything related to the Crowman, but sometimes he was referred to as Black Jack, other times the Scarecrow. There were drawings in pencil, drawings in biro or even crayon – anything that had been to hand at the moment inspiration struck.

  The themes of the drawings were always similar, like the nightmares he’d had ever since he was tiny. Barren forests with blackened trees and exposed earth; fallen buildings and collapsed city-scapes; bodies being washed away in flood water; lightning striking the land like warheads; dark clouds rolling over bald hillsides; diseased people crying out to heaven; starving, naked refugees with hollow bellies and pits for eyes sitting beside broken highways; cars and people and buildings falling into great cracks in the earth; lava flowing through parks and streets.

  In every depiction of cataclysm, sometimes in the foreground, sometimes a tiny representation watching from afar, stood the same figure. Long dark hair hanging over his features, arms stretched wide and upwards as if in summoning, a long coat covering most of his body, and at his cuffs and ankles something like black straw or black lightning instead of fingers. Some sketches were portraits in close-up. A beak for a face, grey eyes fixed on the artist or viewer, hair like skeins of black silk and everywhere black feathers falling like snow. A few of the pictures weren’t of a man at all but were merely studies of crows, some in flight, some sitting in high branches, some lying dead in the deserted streets.

  The writing was just as eerie, just as focussed.

  “The Crowman feeds upon the blackened stump of England” was the title of one of the landscape drawings. There was poetry too. Pages and pages of it in dozens of different hands, all stuck into this scrapbook by some strangely obsessed chronicler:

  ’tis a black dawn brings the Crowman

  ’pon a black dawn only will he come

  To the Bright Day will he lead us

  On that Bright Day will his work be done

  The prose entries were lurid and apocalyptic:

  A dark man is coming and his coming signals the end of everything we know. He is tall and his skin is pale. His hair is as black as the wings of a raven. His basalt eyes are mined from the centre of the Earth. They sparkle even as he watches the world destroy itself. I see him high on hillsides watching death sweep the valleys. I see him in trees, perched and cackling. I see him among the ruins of the towns and cities, striding between the heaped-up dead, his ragged coat flapping behind him like feathers. Walking, always walking, pausing only to see the annihilation, through the long darkness towards some weak light far in the distance where he will exit, leaving only smoking remains. Surely, Satan himself is come among us.

  But some were not so bleak:

  When the Crowman returns to our land you will know that the dark times are at an end. For he will spread his wings across this nation and draw away the black veil that has covered it for so long. It will be a cleansing. It will be death and rebirth. Pray for his swift arrival that we may be delivered. Pray for the coming of the Crowman that we may be, at last, transformed.

  Reading the book made him remember his own nightmares anew. With the recollection of a lifetime of bad dreams, all the strength he was gaining would evaporate. Who was it that his parents were suggesting he should go and seek out? Were they telling him to find and confront the very devil himself? Or was it simply a man they wanted him to find?

  One thing Gordon knew for sure was that he was just a boy. A boy alone and without any influence. All he could do was try to find this man, as he had been asked to do. What he suspected was – and the more he thought about it the more sense it made – that many people were out there searching for this Crowman. Sending many might ensure at least one of them succeeded. Probably, they were boys and girls his age because they’d be less likely to be suspected and caught. Perhaps children all over the country had received letters or instructions just like this from their own parents and were searching for the Crowman right now, just as confused and frightened as he was. Thinking about it this way made it easier to live with what he had been asked to do.

  After every reading of the scrapbook, he sealed it, the letters and his own diary inside the Ziploc bag that he’d brought from home. He stowed it all at the bottom of his pack. He knew Brooke and her father had been through his stuff but he doubted they’d studied it, and it was best they didn’t see any more, best they trusted him right now, until he was strong enough to move on alone.

  Until?

  Who am I trying to fool?

  Gordon was fully healed and fit right now. The wound in his leg no longer gave him any pain and the muscle had ceased to be stiff and unresponsive. He had a feeling he was heavier than he’d been before his escape through the tunnel, and he was certainly stronger. Each trip out with John Palmer proved his increased fitness and stamina. Nothing slowed him now, no hill or marsh or thicket. He seemed able to negotiate the landscape without it sapping his energy. Quite the opposite, in fact; the more time he spent outdoors, the more the landscape fed him. Sometimes his body hummed with power and enthusiasm, and he was tempted to run fast and long just because he was certain that he could. All this in just a few days.

  No, there was no excuse for staying other than his infatuation with Brooke and his fear of walking the land alone in search of the Crowman. What sane person would want to do that?

  But the more he considered his situation, the more he had to accept that it was time to take responsibility for himself. If finding the Crowman was the one way he could save his family, he had to begin now.

  He came to this decision as he sat alone by the stream one afternoon. Resolved, he stowed his diary and scrapbook in the pack, slung it over his shoulder and walked the short distance back into the camp. Brooke was busy at the cook pot, adding wild parsnips and herbs to a stew of rabbit and pheasant. Gordon scanned the camp.

  “He’s gone off somewhere on his own,” said Brooke.

  “Oh. Everything all right?”

  Gordon felt himself to be at the root of every problem or disagreement, no matter how small.

  “He can’t show his emotions around me,” said Brooke. “He’s too… closed off. I’m sure he thinks that if he ever let go of his feelings to me, he’d cry for a week. So he goes off and cries alone somewhere from time to time.” She stood up and brushed her hands on the seat of her trousers. “It’s nothing you’ve done. Well, not directly anyway. Having you here reminds him there’s a world out there. The one we left behind. Trouble is, he can’t let go of how it used to be and who he was.”

  “What about you?” asked Gordon, placing his pack on the ground between them.

  “I’ve done my best to put the past behind me.”

  She sighed, and the strength went out of her usually upright, noble posture. Gordon saw for the first time that she had been playing the role of a woman and now she was reverting into girlhood. Stuck between being a boy and being the man he needed to be was such similar territory that he felt an unhealable sadness for Brooke. The woman would always carry the little girl within, a little girl who had been hurt and could never grow up because of it.

  She was speaking to him, telling him her story with great openness before he’d fully registered what she was saying.

  “We were attacked in our home. I didn’t realise it until then, never even thought about it really, but w
e’re wealthy. At least we used to be. I didn’t realise because there was nothing to hurt me and nothing to worry about. I’ve thought about that a lot ever since.

  “Every day you could see more and more people living on the street, but I never understood what that meant. We had food. We had petrol. We had heat and running water. All because we had money. Mum and Dad used to walk through town as though they were shrinking. As if they didn’t want anyone to notice them. I know why now.

  “When you spend money, people notice. If your clothes are clean and smart, people see it. And so many people are going without things now that they hate you if you have what they need. Dad was an investment banker and that probably made people hate him even more. He stopped going into the local pub and Mum started ordering everything we needed online or over the phone. Then they took me out of school and hired a private tutor for me. Jenny Latham. She was lovely. She was there the day they came into the house.”

  Brooke stopped, her eyes focussing on a place of memory. She seemed to lose her way, but Gordon didn’t want to let the moment go. He wanted to know what had happened, of course, but he also knew it would be good for Brooke to tell the story. Otherwise it would be locked inside her the way it was locked inside her father.

  “Who were they?” he asked.

  His voice was a whisper, but it was enough to bring Brooke back to the present, drawing the thread of the story with her.

  37

  Brooke cleared her throat.

  “We don’t know for sure. Dad has his suspicions. They must have known us, or known him at least, because they all wore balaclavas. They arrived in a big white van and Mum opened the door when they pulled into the driveway. She thought it was a delivery vehicle. Six men jumped out. Well, four men. Two of them were… smaller. Just kids really. They didn’t bother with the door. They smashed the downstairs bay window and climbed in. Mum was running for the kitchen when they caught her. I always think it was the knife block she was going for. That’s what I’d have used if there’d been time.