Peter Dickinson - Earth and Air

She knew at once when the time came, and turned Josh onto his back, leaned over him, pulled both eyelids down with her fingertip, whispered “Now sleep,” and kissed him. Before she had withdrawn her lips he was asleep.

She wormed out of the sleeping bag and crawled naked from the tent. The broomstick leaned by the entrance. She took it to the mound, straddled it, leaned forward and whispered the word. The broomstick surged forward and up in a tight spiral to clear the trees. It was a full moon night, very bright, on the verge of frost. A few lights still glowed from the village a mile down the valley, and others speckled the darkness of the opposite slope. The broomstick headed directly downhill, flying only a few feet clear of the treetops.

Below the wood was a stretch of bare slope, and then small, stonewalled fields running along the bottom of the valley. Among them was an isolated copse, much smaller but even darker than the wood they had left. The broomstick headed directly for it, and as they came nearer Sophie saw that the trees were ancient yews, unlikely to be found growing wild in such a place, though there was no visible reason why anyone should have planted them there. A large modern prefabricated shed stood in the corner of the next field.

“There,” said Sophie.

The broomstick swung aside, skimmed the roof of the shed, slowing all the time until she could alight as if from a still gently moving bicycle. At once it lost all buoyancy and became an apparently inert object. She laid it down and settled herself at the edge of the roof with her legs dangling into space, her elbow on her knee and her chin on her fist. The shed stood in its own patch of ground, rutted with wheel tracks and cluttered with bits of farm machinery, most of them engulfed in a tangle of brambles and nettles. The yew copse was immediately beyond the fence. The humming in Sophie’s head had quieted as soon as they had left the clearing, to be replaced by a tenseness of expectation, a heavy stillness that spoke to her, saying “Wait.” She was strongly aware of this being the appointed place and hour, but knew nothing of the event, and did not try to guess.

Time passed, enough for the moonshadows on the mat of ivy beneath the yews to have visibly shifted before the church clock in the village down the valley began to strike the midnight quarters. As the chimes floated past her the nape of Sophie’s neck crawled, and her jaw muscles stiffened. She swallowed twice to ease them, then rose and moved back, crouching to peer over the rim of the roof. Her hand felt for the broomstick and gripped it.

In the pause that followed the quarters the ivy seemed to stir, as if a lot of small creatures were scurrying among it. As the first stroke of the hour reached the forgotten cemetery the tangled mat erupted and burst apart and the buried but never fully dead Community crawled into the air. The chill of the night changed its nature as the clean winter air mingled with the heavier cold of deep earth.

There was no reek of decay, because the flesh had not decayed, though the shrouds in which it had been buried had rotted centuries ago. But the bodies had held their shape, absorbing into themselves the weight and dullness of the clay in which they had lain, until they had become something like soft fossils.

Now they rose and moved into the open, grey in the moonlight, naked. They stared around. Who knows what they saw? The shadowy roofs and walls of the village where they had lived their human lives? Or the night as it now was, with only the old yews to mark their graveyard, and the strange-shaped modern barn beside it?

Sophie saw the grey faces begin to turn towards her and ducked down out of sight. Her throat was dry and her heart hammered. In her night flyings in other years she had felt the excitement of adventure, but never any fear, because she had always had the confidence that her powers, with the wizand’s, were more than enough to keep her out of danger. But this time she understood she was in the presence of something whose power, whatever it consisted in, was at least equal to her own.

Carefully she raised her head and looked again. The Community were beginning to move now, all together, a grey mass shapeless as a cloud, crashing through the hedge into the lane, and on through the wall on the other side, tumbling the heavy stones out of their way, then on up the hill, following an ancient track untrodden for three hundred years. There was a gap in the next wall, blocked with barbed wire. The hooked points tore into their flesh as they strode through it, but no blood came. They crossed more fields and started up a bracken-shrouded slope.

The broomstick twitched in Sophie’s hand. She straddled it, laid her body along it and spoke the word. The broomstick swept away and climbed the hill, well to the left of the line the Community was taking. They reached the wood together, and Sophie heard the crash of trampled undergrowth as the heavy remorseless limbs forced their way in under the trees. The broomstick skimmed the treetops, its new-cut birch twigs whistling sweetly wild as they sped through the still night air.

It slowed above the clearing and spiralled down, but before it reached the ground veered upward like a settling bird, allowing Sophie to reach out and grasp the side-branch of a sycamore bough that partly overhung the space below. Before the broomstick lost buoyancy she found a scrabbling foothold and managed to heave herself onto the main bough. She worked herself along it to a point where she would be clear for takeoff, laid her naked body against the flakey bark and drew the broomstick in beneath her right thigh.

The midnight moon shone down into the glade, lighting the tent where Josh lay asleep, and the logpile, and the mound that might once have been a dwelling. A silvery wisp of smoke still rose from the embers of the fire. The strange hum was back inside Sophie’s head, quiet but persistent, with the chanting voice almost audible beneath it. No, more than one voice, several, chanting in unison, strong, quiet voices, certain of what they were doing, as Sophie was not yet certain.

The sounds of trampling drew nearer. Beneath her leg, Sophie felt the broomstick lose the tingle of secret life that was always there when she touched it.

“Hide,” came the toneless voice in her mind.

Yes, she thought. I too have powers that these creatures might sense. She could indeed feel those powers wavering around her, like the tentacles of an anemone in a rock pool, so, just as an anemone does when its pool is disturbed, she retracted the charged network into herself and closed it away. A moment later the leaders of the Community crashed out into the open.

They paused. The grey faces stared at the glade, expressionless, but Sophie sensed a sudden check to the impulse that had drawn them here. They had come to do a particular thing, and found that thing no longer doable. Now they drifted across to the mound. Their groping arms patted the empty air, feeling for lost walls, a vanished door.

They turned and stared around again. For the first time they seemed to see the tent, and drifted towards it. Hands clutched the fabric and wrenched it away. Josh, locked in the sleep spell, didn’t stir. They ringed him round, staring down.

Without word or signal certainty returned. Clay-chill hands seized Josh by the shoulders, dragged him from the sleeping bag and hauled him to his feet. He half woke and stared around, too bewildered for fear. His naked body was bone-white in the moonlight. While two of the creatures held him others turned to the woodpile. They carried the logs to the centre of the clearing and stacked them into a pyramid. Another crouched by the smouldering fire and blew on the embers. Others broke brushwood and piled it on, or stuffed it in among the logs. Smoke rose from the fire, silver white. A flame woke and flared, lighting the glade orange, but the grey bodies showed no tinge of it. Their stuff absorbed the light and sent none back.