by Ellen Datlow
George could see Alice, too, had changed. She had lost weight, become oddly fragile and attenuated, her hair seeming blown about. There was a bruise on her left cheekbone. She put her hand to it absently. Amethyst was pouring Alice a glass of wine. No doubt one of the birds had struck her. In the last weeks that had begun to happen. Before, the birds had seemed, when rushing upward from the ground, or wherever it was they burst from, to strike only inanimate objects. But recently several people had some tale of a magpie springing abruptly past them inches away, the slap of a wing, long scratch of a claw, minor concussion of round body and hollow bones. Old Tim claimed to have seen one bird dash straight upward through the body of a cow that had been grazing on a slope behind the farm. She had not seemed hurt, just frightened. But later a bruised and reddened area had appeared along her ribs. They had decided it best to slaughter her quickly, and then remove the perhaps-contaminated meat when preparing her for eating. But Tim had always romanced, embellished facts. Even something like the thing that now went on might seem worth enhancing, to old Tim.
Alice raised the glass and drank. Her eyes connected with George’s. She seemed about twenty, he thought. An infallibly revealing illusion. She smiled a nervous little smile, as if she had never seen him before. But George smiled broadly back, and beckoned, getting to his feet, and Jeremy obligingly shoved himself and family, and their chairs, along the table to make room.
“Oh,” said Alice, very low, “I didn’t mean to—”
“You’re not. It’s nice to see you, Alice.”
“I’m so sorry I haven’t been up to the cottage—”
“Well. Cleaning the house doesn’t seem so important, frankly, do you think?”
“I suppose. I don’t know. Todd—” Todd was her husband, “always wants everything clean. Or until…” Alice stopped. She drained her glass. She glanced at George under her lashes. Their unexpected meeting had become a liaison of two spies, but what was the espionage Alice had in mind?
“It’s fine, Alice.”
Jeremy leaned over and refilled her glass. It was the same red wine, or near enough, and everything was free. She thanked Jeremy, but he had already turned tactfully away, leaving the spies to their clandestine conversation in code.
“How are you?” George asked.
This was a fatal, leading question, and he knew it.
She did not answer. Then she softly said, “It’s awful, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Alice. It’s awful.”
“I’m—scared,” she said.
He saw the oldest child take note, and an expression of fear creep into his face. George smiled broadly again. He said to her, “Why don’t we go back to the cottage? Talk there. I can walk you home later. I’ve even got some spare food.”
She too had noticed the child. She brightened, falsely but giving quite an actorly performance. “That would be—yes, let’s do that. Why not?”
As they were going out of the door. Colly appeared and handed George another bottle of wine. “Last of the best Merlot. Go on. Have a treat. You know, I knew a feller once, he always wanted a pub. Then he comes into some dosh, buys the pub, gets it done up, cracking, ace cook, full cellar, top class guest-rooms. What d’you think he does then?” George and Alice waited between light and night. A singsong had started, “Oliver’s Army” by Elvis Costello. Behind the bar Amethyst was snogging the soldier. “He locks everyone out, and keeps the place to himself, just for him, I mean. Nobody else let in, ever. The Bugle it’s called. Up Camden way. What do you think of that?”
“This mark on my face—it isn’t anything to do with the birds. He hit me. Todd. He hit me.”
“Christ. When was this?”
“This morning. He just—did it.”
“Had it happened before?”
“No. Not…not really.”
“Where is he now?”
“With Pam Boys. You know, from the shop.”
They stood still in the lane, in the dark, among the alopecia of the trees, balancing on spent feathers. No car would try to drive through, not any more, and footsteps would be clearly audible. He had turned the torch off, because its batteries were running low. He had had a solar-powered torch too, but it went without saying it was unrechargeable.
He had an urge to touch her, hold her, comfort. But George grasped very well this was not gallantry or outrage—despite the fact that the image of her bastard husband hitting her incensed him. No, it was desire, lust. But then. What else was left? It puzzled George too, the manner in which, above all else, carnality survived, just as biological hunger and thirst, and an extraneous liking for the taste and effect of alcohol. Oh God. The Last bloody Days of Pompeii. Eat, drink and be merry before the volcano exploded, or the circus lions came to tear you limb from limb. Just as in the old “B” movies. But also, be fair, here at least, where some quiet remained, courtesy and camaraderie also persisted, a sort of familial gentleness. Be gentle then.
“I’m so sorry, Alice.”
She came into his arms, there in the near-blind blackness of the lane. She was beautiful, smooth and pliant, and her hair curiously rough and savage. Her mouth was as appetising as he had believed it would be. When they drew apart, she shuddered. “Can we get inside the house—I don’t like being out here, in the dark.”
He switched the torch back on.
Not until they reached the gate of Cigarette Cottage did it occur to him he had not heard, nor even in the ray of the torch seen, a single magpie. By some fluke they had somehow missed the ones that must have gone on rising all about, as they continually rose, as he had even seen them rising at six this evening. What power sex had, sex, (not love), that drove out fear.
During the night he went to get a bottle of water downstairs, and stood at the window looking out into the front garden. Three foxes grouped there, limned by the light of the candle. All males, he thought, young, healthy enough, but huddled on the wild lawn and staring in at him, exactly as he stared out at them. It was as if they wanted something from him. He wished he could offer something. But maybe what they asked for was what everyone wanted: an answer. Their eyes flamed, all surface, luminous in a spiritless way that made him think of rabies posters from the 1970s—or of demons.
Animals had been behaving oddly for days. You did not notice, then an especially unnatural event made you see, and so recall other incidents. He had first become aware of it with a cluster of robins, nine or ten, then almost twenty of them, a flock almost like that of starlings, flying round and round the copse, before dazzling off through the dirty dreary day-twilight towards the farm. Robins were generally solitary, just as foxes were, out of the mating season. But there had been the cats, too. Each screamed and cried and ran towards you, or from you, still calling. One he had met in the lane. It had a magpie feather in its mouth. The cat hurried up and down, up and down, not dropping the feather, not chewing it, growling low in its throat. Some animals had simply vanished. Consensus opinion had it they were hibernating, misled as were the trees. That—or they had got wise to the idea they also might be shot for food. The absence of all grey squirrel activity, squirrels that even in a real mid-winter were often about, was telling enough. He had not seen or heard any frogs, or pigeons, nor heard a single dog bark or howl for weeks, either. There were no insects. Even the clothes moths had gone away.
George turned from the foxes, collected the water, and went back upstairs.
Alice sat up in the bed, no longer sobbing. She had wept after they first made love. Then fallen suddenly asleep against him. Later she woke, and told him she had always wanted him, had fantasies about him. “But you’re better.” So there had been more sex, rich, brain-flooding orgasm. And then she had begun to sob again, could not stop. She said, “It isn’t about him. Sod him. He can fuck off. It’s the rest. It—reminds me of that Hitchcock film—”
“From the story by Daphne du Maurier?”
“Was it?”
George did not say that the short story had been far bleaker
and more terrible than the film. “But those birds attacked, didn’t they,” he reminded her instead. “Our magpies—they just fly upward.”
“Oh,” Alice whispered, “what’s going to happen?” She knew he could not tell her, beyond the obvious, which was bad enough.
He said, “It’ll be all right, Alice.”
“Will it?”
“Yes.”
And then she had calmed, knowing, he supposed, (as he did) that either it would or it would not. Out of their hands. Better off also therefore out of their minds.
Now they drank the water.
“Can I stay?” she said, like a child.
“Please do stay.”
“I can leave once it gets—once it’s lighter. I don’t want you to feel—I know you like to be alone.”
“How do you know that?” he inquired, playfully.
“So you can write.”
“That,” he said. He visualised the unfinished story trapped there on the computer screen, now lost in space. Backing up had hardly mattered when the whole bloody lot went. He could have foretold, and printed it. But then, why write stories while Rome burned.
“Do you remember the PM talking, just before Radio 4 went off the air?” she surprised him by saying.
“I didn’t listen. He gets—got on my tits, frankly.”
“But that night he was so good, he was… It brought out the best in him.”
They laughed, bitterly. Then lay down to sleep, back-to-back. How long since he had felt that sumptuous comfort, female flesh against his? And for how much longer? Till the muffled sun rose behind the black and white sky? Until the food and bottled water were all gone? Tears ran also from his eyes. He cried then quietly, not to wake her. The pillow soaked them up, his tears, as eternity soaked up all such flimsy things, weeping, blood, the shells of beasts and men.
In sleep he felt rather than heard a vague amorphous rumbling. Thunder? Some storm created by the choking of the stratos—or a phantom train perhaps, once more enabled to run all those miles off in Stantham. Asleep, he did not care. He was dreaming of Lydia, faithless after all as Alice, (or Todd), Lydia in that hotel in Paris, thirteen years ago.
In the moments before daybreak, or what now passed for it, George’s dreams altered into a perfectly coherent recollection of researching magpie legends, which he had done about nine days before. The book was an old one, something he had picked up in London in the 1990s. A writer never knew, he had always maintained, what might or not ultimately be useful.
Birds of Ill-Omen and Evil Luck. This had been the heading. But at the end of the section came a concluding paragraph, with the sub-heading: Exonerating the Magpie:
The Magpie is often badly thought of, as reputedly it refused to don full (black) mourning at the death of Christ. However this would seem to be a misunderstanding of the story. In an older version, the Magpie donned half mourning, it is true, to show respect for Christ’s suffering and death. But the bird’s snow-white feathers were intended to indicate that life continues after death, and that indeed Christ Himself would rise physically from His tomb. Why else does the Magpie remain with the Zodiac sign of Virgo, the Virgin, which connects directly with the Virgin Mary, the Mother of Christ? At least, apparently, Jesus and Mary were sure that the Magpie was both innocent of all blame, and a witness to the Great Truth. And for that reason the Virgin herself added to his elegant attire the extraordinary sheen of blue, (Mary’s own sacred colour), which is to be seen most evidently on his wings.
Almost morning, technically; it is about twenty minutes short of five o’clock. The sky has a colourless darkness, but is strangely faded at a point near the zenith. Gradually this thinning of an upper canopy begins to fill with muffled, dulled, but undeniable light.
In the woods birds do not sing. Then a shrill chorus, not song but warning, surges up, fragments, and ends.
From the copse across the lane no bird rises. No magpie rises. All about nothing stirs. Silence is concrete, now. Stone.
To scan from horizon to horizon is to fail to detect any movement. Not an animal slinks or runs along the earth, let alone takes wing in the lower element of the sky.
No magpie rises.
No magpie rises.
Since 8:00 p.m. yesterday evening, as surprisingly only a very few have noted, nowhere on the landmass of Britain has a single magpie risen, to fly straight upward. Or in any direction.
Above, just east of the zenith, the hole, for so it is, continues dully to grow lighter. Perhaps too it perceptibly widens, just a very little.
Then, to the north, another dim vague thinning seems to be taking place, another occult lightening appears to be wearing through.
Over the fields, miles up it seems, and in some other dimension, a loud indescribable crack bellows through the air. A splintering line, scribbled in silvery radioactive ink, careers across the masked dawn-dusk of the heavens.
A kind of storm, cloudshift and whirlwind, discourages darkness. The episodes of lights brilliantly flash now, knife-like. Then, the sky—is falling.
It is falling everywhere. Far off, near, immediately overhead.
It falls in masonry blocks which, as they descend, drop apart in chunks and waterfalls and tidal waves, and all is blundering and spinning downward. Bodies. The corpses of dead birds. A million million, a trillion trillion. Lifeless and almost weightless yet, in this unthinkable and unavoidable mass, a weight of unguessable and incorrigible proportions.
The air resounds to a type of steely scream. Whether voiced or only a by-product of the avian deluge, it swamps and pierces all and everything.
Death begins to slam against the earth.
The prelude impacts are awesome enough.
Before vision becomes only a mosaic, like scenes from an ancient and damaged film, it is feasible to see whole boughs snapped off from trees, on buildings a slide and tumble of slates and chimneys and TV aerials, satellite dishes, shattering and scattered—smashing with the white-black downpour of death to the ground below.
From the church in the village the clock is silent as its automatic hands approach ten to five, yet the bell in the tower, if barely audible, clangs dolefully. Part of the church roof has been riven open and, cascading by, the dead are striking the bell.
But now the next phase of impact is arriving. To this the prelude was nothing. In the woods the young trees reel, are toppling. Hedgerows and fences crumple and disappear. From the little pool huge gouts of water are displaced—who would have thought it could hold so much?
Whole roofs buckle now. Joists give way. Windows collapse. In the village street shop-fronts disintegrate one after the other as if bombed. The pavement and road are piled high, the gardens. At the half-built estate all the building is coming undone. Something is on fire at the farm, smoke curdling upwards, but blotted away almost at once as the rain of the dead pours on—the main road is hidden. Even the stranded cars are covered over. Fields, tracks, hills, landscape—all now under this thick white-black snow…
Through the cacophony of rushing, the whine and shrill of the great lost scream, no individual sound is to be deciphered.
The cottage on the lane is piled high, high as its roof, as if with discoloured sandbags. The pub is only a mound, a sort of heap of unclean washing, featureless and silent, a mashed tree lying against it.
The magpies fall. The ultimate gush of the volcano. They drop and strike and crush and break and are broken. They cover and they bury everything. They load the world like bandaging, like grave-wrappings. And still they are falling. The heads of distant oak trees—drowned. Eradicated.
And the stench, the thunder that seems never likely to end, tempest, tsunami, eruption. Poor things. Poor things. It is 5:00 a.m. The church clock does not chime, even if anyone could hear it.
High, high above the fall, from the widening, shining chasms in the darkness, light foams clear as clean water. And in the east the sun has risen, is visibly rising, like the pitiless eye of Man Himself.
Not for the first time—from an idea by John Kaiine.
THE MONSTER MAKERS
STEVE RASNIC TEM
This is all I can bear of love.
Robert is calling the children in, practically screaming it, how we all need to go, now. But I’m too busy gazing at the couple as they talk to the park ranger, the way their ears melt, noses droop, elongating into something else as their hair warps and shifts color, their spines bend and expand, arms and legs crooked impossibly, and their eye sockets migrating across their faces so rapidly they threaten to evict the eye balls.
“Grandpa! Please!” little Evie cries out, but now I look at the park ranger, who has fallen to his knees, his face pale and limbs trembling, mouth struggling to form a word that does not yet exist. Because it isn’t the way it is in the movies; human beings cannot accept such change so easily—at some point the mind must shut down and the body lose itself with no one left to tell it what to do. “Please, Grandpa, now,” Evie wails, and the intensity of her distress finally gets to me, so that I hobble over to the battered old station wagon as fast as I can, which isn’t very fast. Because Evie is that special grandchild, you see. Evie has my heart.
The car bucks once as Robert gives it gas too quickly. It rattles, then corrects itself. Alicia is safely in the backseat beside me, but I’m not sure if she ever left. She doesn’t move as much as she used to. But it’s amazing how young she looks—her long hair is still mostly blonde, even though she’s about my age, whatever that might be. We agreed long ago not to keep track anymore. I’ve loved her as long as I’ve known her. The trouble is, these days I can’t remember how long.
The grandkids are both on the other side of Alicia. They’re small, so I can’t see all of them, just four skinny legs which barely reach beyond the front edge of the seat, and the occasional equally skinny arm. They kick and wave, thrilled. Despite their fear—they have no understanding of what they’ve caused, or why—they’re quite excited about what’s happening to them. I suspect this is the way some addicts or athletes feel—something takes over you, as if it were a spirit or a god, seizing your blood and bones, your muscles—and it makes you run around or die. From this angle, there’s no discernible difference between Evie and Tom, but they are not twins, except in spirit. They sing softly as they often do, so softly I can’t make out the words, but I’ve come to believe that their singing is the background music to all my thoughts.
