Dylan
Prologue
His first, jolting scream of horror was followed by a second, then another and another, each overlapping the last as they came, layer on layer, weaving and jabbing like mosquitoes at a street lamp, flashing colours spinning faster and faster like a bright-painted ride at a fairground. As each deadly wave flailed down harder than the one before, any defence too quickly became a feeble hands on head protection of inner self, inner soul against the hooligan terror. He knew what was happening, deep down, even now – hadn’t he predicted this? – even now, sadly weighing up his lame, pathetic knowledge of the inevitable against the true terror of this onslaught, even through the pain as it stabbed and pecked at the fragile, fraying cords still supporting his thoughts and mind and sanity and oh God the pain … and he felt his grip weaken, and he felt the cords fray and break one by one, and he gave a last scream as he snapped away and fell into the chaos, as his mind, like his consciousness sank down to drown in the still, black depths beneath a frenzied, insane sea.
It was one hour before sunrise. The dull half-light of the new day gave silhouettes their dim outlines, pitch against grey slate. A light breeze, chill-edged by the cold, cloudless night, was just beginning to disperse the rising marsh-mists of morning, picking up a leaf here and there as it cut through the copse.
Barely a sound; not a movement. Only the arrival of the dawn light was there, agonisingly slow to spite any impatient early riser. The silhouetted shapes now a clearer black against stone : here, a tree was reaching up from the fuzzy edges of the brush; and there a pile of knotted branches loomed from the even darker backdrop of the clearing. Easy scare-play for any youth’s overenthusiastic imagination.
Barely a sound; not a movement. But a smell: a cold, burnt smell, like morning after a pig-roast on the common, mingling woodsmoke and water and the charred remains of the night before’s feast. A smell of death.
Away to the east, the horizon went from dull grey to a yellow-edged, rosy dawn. Wisps of young cloud stretched across the sky, glowing with the new day’s colours. And finally, slowly, the horizon’s glow gave way to a fingernail breadth of February sun, weakly warming as it rose to light the acres of fields and marsh on the plateau below.
As the light of the new day’s sun approached the clearing, a single, ragged watcher leaned up on one hand and strained to focus through sleep-crusted, fearful eyes.. She peered at the hazy, dull shapes, hearing as she did the tiny voices of misplaced hopes unbelieving of the night before, refusing what she had seen, rationalising all as a nightmare now past, telling her that she would wake up and shake her head and laugh to herself with relief, and … STOP! She stopped, desolate again, now turning her gaze to the shadows forming along the ground before her. Each shape she matched, one by one against the fire-torn images stamped on her mind. From each charred stump she grew a thornbush or a hazel, again to see it shake, then crack and glow in the heat, then splinter into a thousand charcoal embers, still glowing red as they flew past her. For each black patch on the ground she saw brush-grass swaying, then hissing, then flaring up and burning away to nothing. And, in the centre of them all, that knotted tangle, images and memories of companions and screams and engulfing in flame, and screams and engulfing and burning and burning and burning …
He found her like that, curled and snivelling like a half-drowned kitten, hands and matted hair covering her face. He spat, unable to empty his mouth of the acid-bile taste of retching an empty stomach. He knew what she was thinking; he couldn’t clear his thoughts of it either. Turning his back, he let the sun shine straight into his eyes as he squatted before her, leaving the horror behind him (they were his friends, too, but she was more important, right now…); not knowing quite what else to do but prod her gently on the shoulder.
“Hen, s’me! Dil!” he whispered. He tried to put some interest into his voice, couldn’t harm, no more than already. “Come on, Hen… got to get up… come on, Hen…”
Slowly, she re-opened her eyes, pausing a second before tensing a hand, then the other, still not shifting her frozen face from the cold ground, afraid even to breathe. Through her hair she saw Dil, simple Dil, kind Dil, thick outline against the now blue sky.
“Dil,” she attempted, acheiving only the feeblest whimper.
“Come on, Hen,” repeated Dil, again gently prodding and tugging at her coat.
“Dil,” she managed to say. “Oh, Dil.”
He pulled her up as best he could, smoothing hair from her face, pulling leaves and twigs from her night-grimed coat as she rolled up and against him. For a long time they stayed there holding each other, each mumbling their own thoughts, neither wanting to break off from the other’s hardly adequate warmth. Then he cried, barely discernible sobs of loss and fear and desolation into her shoulder, and it was her turn to comfort, “Dil, Dil lad, there, come on, come on Dylan, come on now my lad, come on Dil,” as they rocked back and forth, each gentlest squeeze and word giving them the strength to face that which, for the moment, they were trying so hard to ignore. And so they stayed, rocking and crying and hugging and comforting.
And so they stayed. Hen opened her eyes again, this time to see only the wool of Dil’s coat. She raised her head, daring (from this, safe vantage point) to lift her eyes over his shoulder and face the clearing once again. She stifled her repulsion and picked out details in the pyre, imagining that she could recognise them, one by one, yes, there was Tam, and there Bez, and Larry, and … but there was no and.
“Dil,” she whispered, “Someone’s missing.”
Dylan took a deep breath as he started to twist his head around.
“Uh? What?”
“Jess ain’t there”
Slowly, stiffly, they disentangled, turning and stretching as they peered into the near daylit clearing. How horrible light could be, leaving nothing to the imagination. They got up and approached the pyre, seeing, sure enough, three skulls, three sets of bones, only three when there should be a fourth.
A skull moved, toppled. Hen screamed.