Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

Florian was sitting nearby, almost invisible in shadow until he moved. He had left a hare skinned and ready by the remains of the previous night’s hearth, and next to it was a small heap of mushrooms and a handful of clouded purple berries.

‘I think we could risk a fire,’ he said. ‘Before the mist clears.’

Lom started on the fire. The intense cold made his fingers clumsy: he fumbled the tinder, dropped it. He couldn’t make his stiffened blue-pale hands work properly. He found that the water had frozen in the pan. He went for fresh.

Dawn greyed into morning, sifting darkness out of the mist-dripping branches, condensing detail. Pine needle, twig and thorn. When they had eaten, they went back to the railway track and started to walk north again. Through gaps in the trees they could see the mountain ahead of them, rising pale grey and snow-streaked into the cloud. At one point Florian paused to reach up and pulled a snag from the side of a birch trunk. He studied it, then held it out to Lom.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘It is not right.’

Lom studied the sprig. The leaves were grown too large, and some were misshapen. Sickle-edged. Distorted.

‘And here,’ said Florian. ‘I found this also.’ A small branch of pine, the needles long but floppy and fringed with edges of lace. ‘They are not all like this, but some. And more near here than when we landed.’

After an hour they found the body of the wolf. Or most of it. Its belly was ripped open and empty and one of its hind legs was gone, torn out at the hip. The wolf carcase was impaled on a broken branch at head height, the sharp-splintered stump of wood pushed through the ribcage and coming out, blood-sticky, from the base of the throat. Its head hung to one side, eyes open. Gibbeted. A warning? Or a larder?

‘Was that you?’ said Lom.

‘No,’ said Florian. ‘Of course not.’

‘I had to ask,’ said Lom.

At mid-morning the rain came in pulses, wind-driven, hard, grey and cold, washing away the covering of snow and turning the path to a thick clag of mud. The noise of the rain in the trees was loud like a river. The galloping of rain horses.

Lom’s clothes were soaked. They smelled sourly of wet wool and woodsmoke and the warmth of his body. Rain numbed his face and trickled down his neck and chin. Rain spattered across the brown surface of rain-puddles. He kept his head down and walked against it, mud-heavy feet slipping and awkward. Everything distant was lost in the rain.

A wisent stepped out of the trees into the clear way ahead of them. When it saw them it stopped, head bowed, nostrils flaring, watching them with its dark eyes. Lom saw the massive rain-slicked wall of its shoulders, the rufous shaggy fall of hair, thick from neck to chest and down its muzzle from the crown of its head, the fine stocky inward-curving crescent horns. Lom and the wisent faced each other, watching. The wisent tested the give of the mud with a fore hoof and flicked the rain with its ears. Then it turned and walked on across the rails and faded between the trees.

The rain passed, and they came to a place where a stream was running in a ditch alongside the railway track. Lom knelt to drink but Florian put a hand on his shoulder and held him back.

‘Don’t,’ said Florian. ‘Look. Over there.’

Half-buried in the bank of the ditch, where a birch tree had canted over, roots unearthed, was a human head. It was blackened, damp and rotting, and wrapped in a length of mud-brown hair. The face stared blackly sideways without eyes, and brown-stained teeth showed in its lopsided sagging mouth. And near the head a human arm reached out from the mud sleeved in sticky green. At first glance the arm had looked like the root of a tree. Too far from the head to be attached to the same skeleton, it trailed mushroom-white and mushroom-soft fingers in the flowing water.

Walking between the railway and the stream, Lom and Florian saw more like that. Pieces of human body. When the stream turned aside from the ditch and retreated under the trees it was a relief.

And then something happened that shook the world.

A silent snap of blue-white light reflected off the clouds and left after-images of skeleton trees drifting across Lom’s eyes. Many seconds later he felt the sound of it in the ground through his feet, a roll of noise too deep to hear. Ahead of him Florian stumbled, and would have fallen had he not steadied himself against a stump. A tremble of movement disturbed the underside of the cloud bank like wind across a pool. The trees prickled with fear: the nap of the woodland rising, uneasy, anxious. They stood, listening. Nothing more came. Nothing changed. The clouds settled into a new shape.

‘What was it?’ said Lom.

‘I don’t know.’

‘It came from the north.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Florian. ‘I think it was everywhere.’

The railway track began to sink into cuttings and rise to cross embankments and small bridges. Every few hours one of the long trains came through, heading for the mountain or coming away. Away from the cleared trackside, the going was harder. The trees were sparser now, and they had to push through scrub and thorn and accumulations of snow. They were climbing slowly, the mountain to the north growing clearer and more definite against the sky. Rock and scree. Ice and snow.

They disturbed a parcel of dog-crows gathered on a ragged dark bundle. The birds were a heavy drab and loose-winged black, with unwieldy bone-coloured beaks too heavy for their heads. They carried on picking at the thing on the ground and watched them come. Lom picked up a stick and threw it among them.

‘Go on! Get away!’

The crows glared, but moved off a few feet with slow ungainly two-footed jumps. A couple hauled themselves up on flaggy wings to squat low in the trees and stare.

The body on the ground was small and had no head. The crows had picked at its neck and shoulders, spilling red pieces of stuff, and parted the clothes between trousers and shirt to open the belly.

‘It’s a child,’ said Lom. ‘Just a boy.’

Florian had walked some way off. Lom thought he was looking away, so as not to see. But he had found something else.

‘Not a boy,’ said Florian. ‘A girl.’

The head was hanging from a branch by the tangle of her hair.

Something was passing near them. Lom felt the woods stir and bristle. The alien watchfulness of what was passing brushed over him, rippling across his mind like rain across a lake. He felt the bigness of it, its steady earth-shaking tread. The top of a distant tree trembled faintly, though there was no wind.

‘Mudjhik patrol,’ he hissed. ‘Coming this way.’

‘We separate,’ whispered Florian. ‘Hide yourself.’ He crouched and slipped away. Lom caught a glimpse of him disappearing into the trees, loping from bush to bush, bounding low across the ground.

Lom flattened himself against the ground under a thorn bush and lay quiet, breathing shallow slow breaths. Covered his mind with woodland. Focused his thoughts into a pointy vixen snout, thought vixen thoughts, calm and tired and waiting, warm and cold in the daylight, in a waking sleep. Keeping low. Pass by. Pass by. The mudjhik’s awareness skimmed across him and moved away, but Lom lay on, vixen-still and thoughtless, faintly stomach-sick, dulled and aching and hungry behind her eyes as if she had not slept at all.

The mudjhik’s awareness jerked back, swung round and pinned him. A blank hunter’s glare.

I see you. I have sniffed you out. I am coming.

There was a sudden crashing through the trees. Branches breaking, heavy limbs thumping the ground. The mudjhik was rushing towards him. It was still several hundred yards off, but running was not an option and he could not hide.