The Best of The Best Horror of The Year

Almost morning; it is early summer, not quite five o’clock. The sky has a colourless lightness, faintly golden in the east across the fields. In the woods birds sing in pale, clear sprinklings of sound.

There is a slight visual softness to all distances, perhaps mist, or haze. The air is fresh, but not unwarm.

The golden edge of the sky intensifies, begins to dazzle. The sun is nearly free of the horizon.

The bird-chorus redoubles, eagerly encouraging the dawn. From the farm over towards the main road, some heavy vehicle or machinery rumbles.

It was the day when Alice came to clean Cigarette Cottage. Of course, that was not the cottage’s proper name. After it was built in the 1930s someone pastorally minded had christened the place “Woodbine Cottage.” And following various renovations, and the removal of the name-plate above the door, “Woodbine” still stuck.

But George Anderton, moving in during 2003, coined his own private version of the name, in memory of those cigarettes he could recall his grandmother puffing at, in the days when smoking was a pleasant habit rather than a capital offence.

George himself had smoked, but no longer did so. He had never really been that serious a smoker. But, although having successfully given it up some twenty years before, he still occasionally missed them. The act perhaps, more than any hit.

“I’ve counted twenty-four magpies just as I was walking along the lane from the Duck,” said Alice, as she put down her bag and accepted a mug of coffee. “What do you think of that?”

Alice laughed. She was only about forty, and very attractive. She made no secret of the fact she found George, a man more than ten years older, attractive too. But she was happily married and so would, hopefully, never impinge on George’s solitary country life. He had given up London rather as he gave up smoking, missed the act, or idea of it, but not constantly. Women he had not given up. But there had been plenty—too many, he supposed—in his previous life. To be truly alone at last was restful.

Once a fortnight Alice came in, to dust, hoover and bleach the bathroom and the cooker. Now and then she cleaned the windows unasked. She charged the going rate, damaged nothing, did not get on his nerves, and was out of the house in never more than three hours.

“The old rhyme,” said George. “One for sorrow, two for joy, that stuff. There are several versions. The ones I know all end at nine magpies. And one of them finishes ‘Seven’s for Heaven, and Eight’s for Hell.’ So: three times eight equals twenty-four—triple hell.”

He was a writer; novels, and even some stage plays put on at the Lyric and the Royal Court. Now all he seemed to turn out were short stories, but his reputation, if not major, was not quite non-existent. To Alice, he thought, he was a curiosity, maybe a sort of catch in the cleaning market. The rest of her clients were more usual, weekenders or locals with enough money, plus of course the Duck pub up the lane.

When he went upstairs to his workroom (his study, Alice called it), he glanced from the window. Downstairs by now the trees in the small front garden, and the woods to the back, were thickly leafed, obscuring much of the sky. From the cottage’s upper story however, he could see out across the shorter trees to the fields, as far as the farm. So he noticed a magpie fly up at once. And then, about half a minute later, another. And then, approximately equally spaced, several more. They rose singly, each from a different area, from behind the ring of trees on the fields’ edge, from the fields themselves, from over the farm, out where the main road to Stantham cut ugly through the curve of the landscape.

Downstairs Alice was gently clinking something. George stood at the window and watched the magpies rising, he thought at first every one from a different spot, yet now and then another one would go up later from the same spot. There seemed always a similar interval, though he did not bother to check it exactly. It was curious. He wondered briefly what had caused it, so many of them, and so regular in rising. But then he told himself to stop prevaricating and go back to the computer. Most writers used almost anything, he knew but too well, to absent themselves from work.

It is midday. The church clock in the village a mile off chimes out twelve. The light is very bright now, metallic and clear. It shines on the hills that rim the distance, and sparks up the windows of the cottage. A woman has cycled away about an hour before. The man is working diligently in the room on the upper story, drinking his fourth mug of coffee now. He is on a roll with the story he writes, does not wish yet to stop for lunch.

A sluggish car lurches along the lane, heading for the pub. Bees buzz, and a few grasshoppers creak in the hedge. A grey squirrel performs acrobatics in the garden trees, then bounds overland for the wood.

It is now the most recent example of hundreds. The man in the cottage might have seen, if he had been looking.

It flies straight upwards, straight up into the glare of the zenith sun. Light digests it. It has vanished.

Smaller birds flutter about their business, wood pigeons, finches, a robin, a blackbird. Some are already teaching their young to fly. They quarter the lower air, flit past the oak trees and the now-wild apple that cast its last blossom only a week before. None of these birds heads directly upward. Not even the crow which abruptly wings over, cawing harshly, black as computer ink.

Soon after 6:00 p.m., George Anderton backed up the day’s work, checked for e-mails—none—and switched off the computer.

Downstairs, lingering over a drink, he made a swift mental foray into the fridge, and promptly decided to visit the Duck for dinner.

At seven he opened the door of Cigarette Cottage, and stood, gazing through the trees into the glowing upper sky. It was blue, and feathered only by faint eddies of cloud, that seemed to foretell a fine tomorrow. The sun was westering towards the hills, visible in gaps, molten yet filmy. At least another hour before it set. This place. He had never regretted coming here. The lack of unnecessary human noise, beyond the intermittent legitimate agricultural sounds from the farm, the birdsong, the notes of various wildlife, the silences. Absorbed, he filled his ears with blackbird music, filled his eyes with the light. He had forgotten the magpies.

Then one rose, straight up, from the copse across the lane. Straight up and into the heart of the westered light, vanishing, as if dissolved.

Another magpie rose. This one was further over towards the hills, framed in a gap, a small pinpoint of darkness. Perhaps it was not a magpie.

He looked at the hands of his watch, counted off the seconds—lifted his eyes…I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills—nothing. No magpie had risen. Crazy, why would it?

Behind him. George turned around, moving almost too fast for himself. He saw this next magpie already high above, in the last moment before the light devoured it.

Had they gone on rising, continuing to rise, all day? Why? Where were they going? To the top of the sky?

In the Duck the usual evening crowd was sitting over its drinks. George Anderton had lived here long enough by now that two or three regulars greeted him. In the dining room beyond the front bar, a handful of summer visitors sat, lightly tanned and animated. George scanned them cautiously.

(He had once been trapped here by a mad-ish young-ish woman who was a fan of his work, and had apparently previously met him in London at a book signing. Her recalled London intentions were not strictly literary, but he was then involved elsewhere. Besides she was hardly his type, whatever that really meant. Age had not improved her, or her intentions, or his inclinations. It had been difficult to shake her off without being rude. He had finally only managed to by telling her he did not want to be rude, which did the trick.)

Tonight there was no visitor who appeared to recognise him, or care about him in any way.

“What do you think it is, then?” Colly asked him, as he rattled a bottle from the fridge.

“What’s that?” George felt curiously oppressed. He knew already what that would be. He was correct.

“Which birds?” My God. George realised he was pretending he had not noticed. Why on earth?

But Colly, handing him a glass, explained, “Bloody magpies. Going up like rockets all the time.”

“I s’pose you ain’t seen it, mate,” said Colly, who like George hailed from London, and had kept his accent with him though in situ here for more than eighteen years.

“Here,” said Colly to Amethyst, as she came from the kitchen with two plates, “old George ain’t bloody seen them magpies going up all day. One every thirty-seven seconds Arnold reckons.”

“It’s true,” said Amethyst, widening her eyes at George through the pleasant steam of one meat and one vegetarian lasagne.

From along the bar a couple of the other men joined in. They told George, and the room in general, how Arnold Weller had timed the darn things. Between thirty-two and thirty-eight seconds. He had counted them for a whole half-hour. Over forty-three magpies, though old Arny had lost count, he thought, by a little—not much—forty or forty-three or even forty-eight. Near enough. And still flying up, one by one. One after another. And all of them from different places, or from the places no other bird was then rising from.

An elderly voice spoke from the corner, under the oil painting of Ducks in Flight. “Was on the one o’clock news. I heard it. They made a joke about it. Then someone else came in—some politician. Said he saw ’em too, in Sussex or whatever, that morning, and coming into London all the way.”

George turned to Amethyst. “No, thanks. No fries. Just the steak and salad.”

“You’re, like, clever,” said Amethyst. She was in her earliest twenties, bright, respectful, a non-reader who unusually and wrongly seemed to believe writing a novel or play was the act of a wise, well-educated person. “What do you think’s causing it?”

“Maybe it’s global warming,” said one of the dining room visitors, moving in to ask where the gents was. Once told, he added, amused, over one shoulder, “Jude says she saw them from the car when we were driving down. I didn’t notice. But Jude’s gimlet eye picked them out okay.”

“What’s a gimlet eye?” Amethyst asked George over the two cooling dinners.

“God knows,” he said. “I used to know. Can’t remember. Old age,” he added, smiling.

“You’re not, like, old,” Amethyst insisted so vehemently and staring in his eyes with her wide, and certainly un-gimlet-like ones, he felt a hint of random desire. But it passed. It was food he lusted after, he decided, as he walked through into the pub garden.

Dusk was coming now, gradual and inevitable. A moth flew towards him as if in greeting, then on into the lighted pub.

From the farm the lights blaze out, and along the main road the headlamps of the occasional truck, or group of fast cars, spangle up the cats’-eyes like broken glass. A badger crosses, pausing to snuff at the tainted tarmac. A lucky badger, meandering sluggish yet unscathed, in a lacuna of traffic, to the farther side.

A frog croaks from a hidden pool. The night wind stirs softly and brushes through the leaves and grasses.

The moon, almost full, will rise later. It will show far better than the stars the rising magpies, thirty or forty or fifty, that passage upward during every half-hour within the radius of visibility.

The Duck burns like a golden lantern in the darkness. It is almost 11:00 p.m. A couple of vehicles glide down the lane, away to the side-roads that lie north and west of the main one.

Later the more dedicated drinkers emerge, taking various paths homeward. Two cross the fields, a young man and a girl, pausing to kiss among the new-beginning crops, like lovers from Hardy. Behind and sometimes before them, unseen, unnoted, magpies rise one by one, straight up into the stars.

The man who is a writer, and has sat in the pub garden until utter darkness beyond the lights closed up the sky, who afterwards had a vodka at the bar, listening with the publican and a few others to the ten o’clock news, the comments and views of a celebrity, a twitcher, and an eminent ornithologist, leaves the Duck, and himself goes back along the lane. In the doorway of the cottage he stands a moment again, studying the skyscape. Indoors, upstairs, he watches too a while at the workroom window. But he can no longer be certain they are rising. If they are, then not near enough for the lights of his house to catch the white pattern on their wings.

They are like ancient Egyptian birds, he thinks, magpies. Their markings seem primal and elder as the spectacle designs about the eyes of certain snakes.

In the deep hollow of the night, dreamless, he wakes. He hears the eruption of wings leaping at Heaven from the roof above his head. Then he gets up and crosses through again into his workroom. Against the yellow three-quarter face of the hot moon, he sees another magpie rise. Another magpie, more southerly, side-lit, half a minute, or thirty-six seconds after it. In other areas that the moon can find, presently another. Another. Another.

Back in bed he switches on the radio for the World Service. But all the BBC will give him now is war, famine and disease; misery, and a tiny bit of the tune called “Lily Bolero.”

He turns it off and falls asleep again, and dreams the young girl from the pub is stalking him as the mad-ish woman had tried to do. Nevertheless he lets the pub girl in. Then just inside the doorway, she turns into his cleaning woman. Before the dream can become properly erotic, unfortunately—or perhaps actually fortunately—it fades away from him. He does not wake until the alarm clock sounds at 7:00 a.m.

George Anderton no longer bothered regularly to read newspapers. Any allure they ever had for him had melted away in his forties. Two days after he saw the first magpie ascending from his window, two nights after hearing the other magpie clattering up, as if suddenly evolved from the very slates of the cottage roof, he walked to the village. Orthurst had its point-topped Saxon church and ancient yews, the scatter of shops and now-defunct post office, the bus-stop for Stantham Cross, and the other pub, the Cart and Plough, and some two hundred or so cottages, several dating way back. There was also the unfinished new estate, virtually builder-abandoned, that no one had wanted here, and was called the Lavvy.

At Rosie’s, now owned and operated by Pam, he bought some butter, lettuce, pears and bacon, the Independent and Guardian, and the local Stantham Spotter.

“It gives me the creeps,” said Pam. She was a nice, comfy old thing of thirty-going-on-sixty-five. “My gran used to tell me they were unlucky. Ill-omened birds. If you saw one you had to say, ‘Good-morrow, Master Magpie.’ Or even, ‘Good-Morrow, Lord Magpie.’ Then it might be all right. But I tried not to see them, when I was a child. Once one flew right at me on my bike, when I was only seven, and five minutes after I fell off in a ditch. Broke my little finger. Look. It never came back straight. Doesn’t bend like it should, neither.”

“Poor you,” he said. He refrained from saying gran’s scare tactics had freaked Pam out enough that she had been bound to fall off the bike, after a close meeting with a magpie.

“Can’t avoid seeing the blessed things now, can I? Nobody can. And the telly news goes on and on about them. They’re everywhere. Going up. Did you hear about the plane at Heathrow last night? Yes, of course you did.”

But he had not heard, slept solidly last night and through the alarm, missed the news this morning, had only just now seen the Heathrow report, a secondary headline on the Guardian’s front page.

It seemed, rather than inhaling a flock of the birds—what usually happened—the Boeing had been struck repeatedly by magpies, rising as if blind and insane, directly in its path, therefore hitting or being hit by fuselage, wings, and next the undercarriage, as the plane descended. The pilot had lost his nerve, many of the passengers too. The co-pilot brought the plane in, but the landing was a bad one, the touchdown heavy, the Boeing slewing across the runway. Three people had died, and seventy were injured, five seriously.

“On TV Breakfast they said, in Scotland,” went on Pam, unhappy and excitable at once, “one plane there ditched in a loch.” She pronounced this “lock,” but he nodded. She expanded, “But at Manchester they’ve grounded them all. They’re going to ground all of them, unless they can shoot them out of the sky.”

“No one can get home, then, except by sea. And they’ve closed the Chunnel, too. It’s on page two in the Mail—a train struck so many birds on the approach it had to stop—the wheels and the windows were all…” she hesitated, grimaced. “Black and red.”

He had, by then, seen the headline glaring on the Mail: WINGED DEATH RISES FROM THE TRACKS. A picture of the stalled train, surrounded by firemen and railway workers, was accompanied by a caption that began: They seemed to come up out of holes under the line, said driver Ken Rains.

Pam, shocking him slightly, abruptly started to cry. He had the urge to put an arm around her, tell her everything would be fine and would get sorted out. But he was unsure he himself believed this, going on the general everyday mess. And anyway, he had found out in the not-so-distant past where such gestures might land him.

She said, “No, it isn’t that. I don’t know what it is. My age, I expect.”

Poor Pam, he thought again, but did not say it. To be gallant might also be misunderstood. He left the shop having bought the Mail as well, the price of an extra paper to appease her. Not much of a consolation.

All the way back, now downhill to the fields and woods, he could watch the magpies rising on all sides, and behind him should he turn round, and off towards the hills those specks which, now, he was sure were magpies too. On his way to the village, going uphill, a single magpie had sprung directly from a bush at the side of the path. And later another from about three metres ahead of him. They might, these two, indeed have been engendered out of holes in the ground. Out of holes in reality.

It was overcast today. The patch of fine weather had disintegrated. Well, this was England. High up, cloud had settled, like a pale grey duvet. And the silence. How silent it seemed. Not even the magpies made a sound, beyond the abrupt clapping of their wings, when near enough. That signature rattling chatter of theirs was oddly always absent. There was a fitful, warmish wind. It carried a smell from the farm, he thought, not strong or really unpleasant; animal. Somehow depressing.

It’s my age, I expect, George told himself with dry mimicry. He had stuck too on the bloody story.

“Eyewitnesses are mistaken! It is entirely impossible that the huge number of birds people are claiming to have seen could even be found in the whole of the British Isles!”

An argument broke out at once between the four guests in the studio. The presenter tried to quieten them in vain.

George switched to another channel. A soap filled the eye and air with over-exaggerated drama that, beside the theatre of the swarming magpies, seemed ludicrous, laughable, and redundant.

It had emerged from the duvet of cloud into a swollen vividity, murky orange, more like that of a wintry dawn.

When the microwave disgorged the frozen pasty, presumably cooked, he started to eat it.

The next news told him, and showed him, men and women interminably shooting at rising magpies. Some birds fell at once. Some fluttered and spiralled away, mutilated and dying. Some, entirely missed, rose on into the overcast of the TV-recorded afternoon.

On the first channel they were still shouting, red in the face under their make-up tans. The presenter, unable to control the verbal fracas, shrugged wryly.

The phone sounded in the front room. George wiped his hands and went to answer it.

“Yes.” It was Lydia, an actress who had appeared in one of his plays. They had slept together at the time. Lydia was his own age, but beautiful in a way not often seen. He had always liked her voice very much. He found he accordingly tended, during her phone calls, to hear her voice rather than what she said.

“Yes, it’s an awful line, isn’t it. I’ve heard, half the lines are down.”

“They fly right into them. Poor old birds, all tangled. Then the lines come off those pole things. It’s as if they can’t see. Or only see one thing—the upper sky. Do you have it there, Georgie?”

“Everyone has it everywhere,” he said, “it seems. At least, in Britain.”

“The—what did he say they called it?—oh, I can’t remember. But it’s dire, isn’t it?”

“The RSPB,” someone else said loudly. But it was the television in the other room. The sound for some reason had revved right up, then sunk away.

“…and I just sit at the window and watch them. It’s quite hypnotic. They just go up, straight up, and disappear in the clouds. I wonder why?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a magpie in central London before. Not here.”

“Everything else. Sparrows, gulls, pigeons—and pelicans and swans in the park. But magpies… None of the other birds are doing it, are they?”

He thought they were not. Then again, he had been noticing, or imagining, the other birds were rather quieter. There was less singing, less of the territorial tweets and cries. The dawn chorus—did that still happen? It was too early in the season for all birdsong to taper off. As for the magpies themselves, they made no sound, as he had been aware for a while. Aside from the flurry of their wings as they rose.

Through the window, in the small front garden, a magpie evolved from the rogue apple tree. It lifted straight up into the half-tone upper sky. He could have sworn it had not been there a second before.

“Hello?” she said. “Hello, darling? Oh bugger. I can’t hear you. Just a sizzle sort of thing. Never mind. If you can hear me, come up to town soon, won’t you? We can go to dinner at the Royal.”

George heard the TV again, the new voice, a woman’s, was telling some-one that the lower, or upper, stratosphere—he did not take it in—was full of birds, floating, only that, like a fleet at anchor. Updraughts or thermals carrying and supporting it, or them; hundreds, thousands. But when he went back into the room, the pasty, which going by the commandment on its label under no circumstances must anyone reheat, had congealed to a cold, gooey fudge, and the screen was blank. Only the woman’s impersonal and rather annoying voice talking of helicopter gunships, or ground-to-air missiles. Another programme then, about Afghanistan, or Pakistan.

George turned off the TV. Not with a bang, he thought, as if an alien authoritarian voice was speaking also in his head. Not with a bang, but with a feather.

During the night the battery-powered radio, which he had left on, woke him with a blast of between-items noise, some sort of militant jangle now representing the World Service, and obviously designed violently to awaken any insomniac who had managed to fall asleep. So he heard that an Italian plane, approaching Bournemouth airport, had found itself unable to land due to the maelstrom of birds. Having circled for some time, all the while with birds smashing into it, it headed back out to sea. An adjacent bulletin announced the plane had gone down in the water, not a mile out. All passengers and crew were feared dead. On the heels of this, came reports that European and US airlines were refusing to let their craft attempt landing anywhere on British soil, until the avian crisis was resolved. Countless Britons would be stranded. Perhaps they were glad? It seemed the Bird-Blanket, as one commentator called it, was limited to the British Island (also a recent coining), involving only England, Wales and Scotland. The radio then, despite having new batteries, began to fail. He switched it off. That the failure had nothing to do with batteries he understood perfectly.

Morning, noon, evening, night. Time has passed, is passing. Passes. Above the sky, they are to be visualised, the fleets, massed close and massing ever more closely, as more and more of the components rise up to fill them, pack them tight. A black and white expanded and expanding cumulous.

Spy planes have taken photographs. By now the phenomenon is visible from space. Satellites relay batches of curious pictures.

Fighter craft have also risen. They have blasted out gaps in the living, quasi-suspended, fluttering cloud-ceiling. There has been speculation as to what, precisely, keeps the bird cloud in place. Some oblique abnormal thermal, perhaps, some unforetold updraught, maybe created even by the birds’ own upward flight. Or else it is all some new facet of pollution, global warming, some scientific experiment that has—of course—misfired, gone wrong…human worthlessness and wickedness in general.

As for the aerial fighters, frequently their planes ingest the half-destroyed bodies of their composite black and white target. Then the planes fall too, like the dead and dying burning birds. Aerial activity is cancelled. And in any event, the endless streams of magpies continue to rise, one bird it has been estimated roughly every half or three-quarter minute. During an hour, a hundred, sometimes one hundred and sixty birds are reckoned to be lifting from every square mile of land. If that is at all conceivable, likely, possible. Eyewitness statements, even those of trained observers, vary precariously.

Beaters plunge for a while through fields, woods, gardens, along hillsides, over moors, by riverbanks, and guns blast like a never-ending soundtrack of war. In towns and cities, citizens are summonarily ordered off the streets, while rapacious bird-dogs and their handlers seek, and always find, their quarry, But for all the birds slaughtered, quick and clean, misjudged and horribly, for all the carnage and the debris and the stink, the pity of it all—poor things, poor things—new birds rise, and keep on rising. Fifty, a hundred, two hundred, to a square mile. They seem to burst from the concrete skin of the streets, the stony ground, the trunks of trees and walls of buildings, out of the impervious world itself, self-perpetuating, ineradicable, inexhaustible.

Feathers lightly, omnipresently, carpet the earth. Feathers are caught in trees, lie along windowsills, drift into offices, houses, shops, stations, subways, alleys and avenues, caves and churches, libraries and reservoirs. Along the side-roads, high streets and motorways the feathers drift, black and white (and red with recent blood), several scorched and many broken. Cars and other vehicles lie tumbled along these thoroughfares too. Broken, some of them also, from multitudinous collisions with the bodies of rising birds which—all dead now and decaying—are plastered against their sides, stuck in their mechanical entrails and between the teeth of their wheels. Feathers drop from the air as well, a thin drizzle of feathers, an autumn of feathers, always falling. Black as ink, white as snow, often sheened mysteriously, mystically blue. Down from the sky that, darkened over now, and made tomb-like after each invisible day’s end, reveals no sun, no moon, no single star. The magpie cloud, the blanket, an opaque dome, shuts everything out. Day is dusk, night an upside-down abyss. No more golden mornings, no more ruby settings of the sun.

Sometimes a feeble rain falls too. It is very warm and has a filthy taste, smelling of chickens and giving off a strange, sooty, chemical undertone.

There have been great rushings to and fro on the land, naturally. Flurries of anger and protest, crime and hoarding, as well as the useless bird-war. Then came escapings—towards the nearest coast, where the blanket, the dome, stops, and the fearful ceiling uncannily comes undone. But the road-long deserted ruins of cars and campers, buses and bikes, provide evidence of how few made it there. Or if they did, they will have managed it by other means.

To the majority left inside the trap of Britain, unable to reach any coast, the idea of that exit point is by now nearly a myth. Can it be true that the coast, any coast—is clear?

It is true. All coasts are clear, as glass. Just past the beaches or shingle or stones or rocks or cliffs, the river-mouths, estuaries, bays and sandbanks, the dunes, the spits, the coves—there, where the surf or the big rollers begin; at Eastbourne, Great Yarmouth, Whitby, Berwick-upon-Tweed, at Helmsdale and Melvaig, Aberystwyth, Weston-Super-Mare, and Plymouth—there—for there “it” finishes. To look up, there, standing in the fringes of the water, is to see suddenly the calmness or disturbance of actual sky, clouds, real weather, light; for there even the night is brilliant again with its stars and moon, with summer lightning, with distance. Open heavens. Open, open. And gulls fly over, in a graceful, ordinary way.

And beyond, out across the shining sky-lit sea, the islands. All of them are quite unclosed—the Orkneys, the Hebrides, Wight and Man stand sheer, like miraculous ghosts, like platinum pebbles on a horizon of pure glow, and the hem of Ireland, that too, and the longer strand of France: these are banks of deep blue smoke under a halo of sun-or-moonshine.

What then of the ones who managed an escape, who sped away from Britain’s edges, in the racing ferries, fishing boats, speedboats and yachts? Did they, having reached the shining other shores, glance back? Surely they did, surely they still do, for out of Britain now no television picture comes, no telephone call, no e-mail, no text. Britain, robbed of her masts of communication, of a sky through which signals can flow, has grown silent and primitive, secretive and supernatural, as in the ages of darkness. Nor is she to be penetrated, her airways shut, her roads and railway-lines negotiable only on foot, and that with vast difficulty.

And this shutness, this secret, is all that can be seen of her through the satellite cameras, telescopes, and other lenses trained on her, with flat and weary persistence. Not even the straining periscopes of nuclear subs, drawn in from the Atlantic to patrol her shores like voiceless wolves, can determine anything much, beyond her emptied coastline, her immobile interiors veiled by cobwebs of shadow. She is a darkling plain.

Except where, now and then, something surfaces through the dimness, like a fleck of flint in dirty water, a tiny black bubble in poisoned lemonade: a magpie rising, flying straight up. And then another. And then. And then.

The pub looked different by now. And, it went without saying, the pub was different. In the first weeks the soldiers, initially in multifarious vehicles, then on foot, brought oil, matches, lamps and candles, besides gas canisters to swell the store at the Duck. Out here, in the “heart of the country,” only electricity had formerly been available, and the series of chefs at the Duck always preferred, apparently, to cook with gas. Lucky. Electricity now, along with the phone, the TV and the radio, the computer and the World Wide Web, had all become things of the past, a recent past, but one which already seemed to have existed some centuries ago. Tap water was gone too. Reservoirs were polluted with incredible amounts of feathers, even by dilute disseminated bird crap, which had descended into them. For while the magpies had, and did, ascend, their innumerable cast-offs, sometimes including their slaughtered bodies, fell down.

In certain parts of the woodland you came into a stretch where branches were thickly coated in feathers instead of leaves. But the leaves were dying anyway. The woods, the copses, even the fields, deceived by the constipated yet oddly defecating sky, believed winter had suddenly returned. Half the trees were bare, the rest shedding their parched, rusted foliage. The grass was also turning brown. Not much hope of grain or cereal, no promise of fruit; nothing really it seemed could grow.

But for now, some fresh foods persisted. Though the fridges and freezers had long since surrendered, they did not eat too badly at the Duck. Fresh meat—rabbit, chicken, beef and mutton. (They had been lucky there too, those nearer the big cities had had their flocks and herds sequestered by the army early on, before all transportation was understood to be impractical.) Fish, or ordinary low-flying birds, might be contaminated, and were off the menu, however. Tomatoes, salad, even potatoes, all these from hot-houses run off generators, were available. And certain canned, dry, or otherwise less perishable goods, brought from Stantham, currently a two-day trek, aside obviously from any extra time given to bargaining with, fighting off, or else eluding the Stantham locals.

They had boiled the water and put it through filters. Now everyone drank bottled. Alcohol, thank God, George Anderton thought, came with its own indigenous preservatives and antiseptics. He had even relearned a liking for warm beer.

Tonight he was sharing a long table with three of the refugee families now living at the “Lavvy,” the unfinished estate at Orthurst. They had been en route for the coast when their cars, spattered with birds, gave up the struggle. Some of the estate houses were not in too bad condition, floored, roofed and insulated, with closeable front doors and glazed windows. Their lack of electricity and plumbing hardly mattered either, of course. No one had any.

The refugees were all right, causing little trouble, only grateful not to be cast out. They had already lost their homes. And there had been Draconian rationing in London, and elsewhere, and plans for some type of peculiar military call-up of the young, that seemed to have no purpose. They took to Orthurst as the drowning take to solid land. And each communal evening, the Cart and Plough, like the Duck, did stunning business—if anyone had charged, or paid.

Over by the bar, Amethyst was laughing with one of the two soldiers who had stayed behind, when the rest were force-marched back to Stantham barracks. The young man leant forward and kissed her. An entirely normal scene, it took on instantly a look of utter abnormality.

“What worries me,” said Jeremy, from London-and-the-Lavvy, “is the nuclear power stations. How are they coping with this? Have they shut down, or are they just…”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” said Dave, Liz’s partner, “they’ll have taken bloody good care of the oil-rigs off Scotland. Sea’s supposed to be clear there, innit. You can bet they’ve got those rigs well protected.”

“Who’d you mean?” asked Jeremy. “The so-called government? They’ll have scarpered straight down their bleeding bunkers. And they couldn’t run anything anyhow. Couldn’t run a piss-up in a toilet.”

A trio of children watched, wide-eyed. The eldest was only seven, and Sharron of Reigate-and-the-Lavvy quickly diverted their attention back to the pandas on the special kids’ napkins Colly had produced.

“What I miss,” said Sharron’s boyfriend—Rob, George thought he was called—“is the sport. All had to be stopped, didn’t it? Motor racing, rugby—even golf!”

Jeremy said in a light, grieving voice, “And that match—Arsenal versus Brighton—that would have been a cracker.”

It was handy, George thought, the way these people talked about this, regularly skimming their terrors, yet also distracting each other, with the pandas of political complaint, food and drink and company.

He was glad too, that the smell of oil and kerosene, and the candles, some of which were scented, the smell even of people now less-washed and over-deodorised in compensation, helped mask the insidious presence of that metallic chicken stench, that dropped with all else from the sky. But probably too they were all becoming used to it. Soon they would not even notice.

Outside it was a jet-black abyssal night, the only kind, finally. But the pub basked in its pre-electric flame-lit radiance. This was how faces, forms, suddenly moving hands and glasses might have looked in paintings from the Renaissance. Similar at least, he corrected himself, for constructed light was bound to have altered, somehow. You knew, even in the Victorian era, no oil-lamp had cast quite this sort of illumination, or shadow. Everything changed.

And the pub’s noise, chatter and clatter, and sometimes a singsong—were also like that. They stood to replace the notes of mobiles, recorded music, radio—and still did not make an elder noise but a modern one, anxiously filling up the void. Beyond which void loomed the agglomeration of silence the magpies had created. The magpies, that themselves no longer chattered or called, that made no sound. How silent then must be the upper skies where they clung or hung. Dumb and deaf, all questions futile, all answers obsolete.

As Jim put the new bottles on the table, George saw Alice come in out of the dark.

She paused a moment to speak to Amethyst, who nodded, while her soldier turned aside to light a roll-up; no one seemed likely to object to it now.

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.

“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?

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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—”

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.

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.

“I can leave once it gets—once it’s lighter. I don’t want you to feel—I know you like to be alone.”

“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.

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.

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 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.

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.