The Truth of Things Unseen

Crawler

Down past the Highrun, where the land rises, and the river carves a gorge between black cliffs, I climbed up, out of the valley, onto the hills. The wind blew fresh and free. I could see hundreds of coloured boats threaded along the grey ribbon of water like beads on a string.

The forest was calling, so I left the path and went cross-country. The ground was complex and layered, fallen trees crisscrossing one another, buried beneath verdant moss. Rabbit houses were banked up, thousands of holes together with chalk and flint and fresh bracken spilling from them—warm bodies snug beneath the ground.

I climbed a tree to spy out the land. The ocean was closer now, though I could not see the edge of the forest.

I should have paid more attention to where I was going. There was a weight on the land, as though the trees were leaning away from something, but I was a fool, full of thoughts of a girl's half-remembered insults, and so I noticed nothing until I burst out into a big round open space.

It was a thousand paces wide, a great ring of bleached timber, piled like driftwood across the clearing.

In the middle of it was a tall ring of charcoal, as though a big fire had burned out months ago. I crouched at the edge of the enormous space. I could see the trees waving to me on the other side of it. All was silent.

I could have worked my way around, stalked through the trees and carried on my way, but the walking looked easy, and the day was getting late.

I step, stepped out into the open between the white branches that littered the ground. The air was very still and warm. No birds flew, no sign of life at all. I climbed over the broken branches, heading for the charcoal mound in the centre.

A hundred paces out, something crunched beneath my toes. I looked down, frozen. It was a jawbone, definitely human. The skull watched me from nearby with empty eyesockets. I looked around and suddenly understood that much of what I had taken for dry timber was the white and raggedy bones of men, thousands of men, some whole, some scattered around as though thrown by some hidden force.

Many of them held weapons. I saw knives, swords, axes, all good iron, not yet marked by rust. There were spears and bows with quivers of arrows. There was gold too, coins spilling from slashed-open money pouches, rings still threaded with fingerbones. Here and there circlets and crowns adorned domed yellow heads.

I should have turned around right then, but something in me pushed me on. Some thread of self-loathing that drove me to destruction. I had left her, and she had insulted me, and I would not be pushed or sent away any more, not even by a field of ragged bones.

I tiptoed on, careful not to step on anything that had once been human. Something had happened here, and these people had been left, unlooted, bones bleaching on the hillside.

The charcoal mound loomed over me as I approached the middle of the area. I could see that it had not been fuelled by wood. Withered black hands reached from it in the heat of the afternoon.

It was a cylinder, like a chimney, thrice as tall as me, built of stacked corpses. Dry faces peered from it, hard skin still clinging to the insides of the empty eye sockets. A hundred fire-blackened heads. Two hundred hands outstretched, reaching for nothing.

I wondered what could have made such a pyre of men, living men they must have been from the tilt of the faces and the reaching hands. I wondered what force could have pinned them there in that great cylinder pattern, like a charcoal burner's mound made of people, the feet and the hands and the wide open mouths, and all around the bleached white bones of the multitude, and as I was thinking, I misstepped and kicked a skull.

It rolled and clattered and bounced across the space, ricocheting from bone to bone with a series of hollow pops like pottery, over and over.

Pop.

Pop.

When at last it came to rest, I felt eyes upon me.

I looked up at the great cylinder of charcoal blackened bodies. Every leathery face was now tilted towards me. Every mouth was stretched wide. The eye sockets were no longer empty, a greater darkness churned within, a hollow stomach-eating nothingness. The darkness summoned me as the hands stretched out, dry tendons snapping and cracking like insect legs.

I stood before it, frozen, the mound of burned people, the arms and hands reaching down towards me, the faces, eyeless but staring. The mouths silently opening and closing. The sky was bright and clear and the sun was hot upon me. The tower clicked and popped as the corpses within it struggled to free themselves from the stack, and yet they could not. They were pinned there, jammed in like bricks in a wall.

Behind me, I heard the dreadful dry hiss of breath being drawn between loose teeth. A rustle and a crackle. I turned slowly. The bleached bones began to twitch.

A skull rolled towards a femur. An old pelvis twisted upright, balanced on the remains of a spine. The bones came together without rhyme or reason, mounding up and out. Leaning in. Leaning towards me.

I caught my breath and started to run.

A dry hand snatched at my trouser leg. I stomped on it - a crunch, but another grabbed at my boot. I struggled with it, wading through the gathering mound of bones. I kicked at it and it came free.

Ribs and shins and crawling spines inched towards me, studded with skulls, mouths snip-snipping, every hollow eye socket staring at me.

The black tower of burned corpses swayed down, reaching with a thousand slow arms. The creatures of bone snapped and cracked like half-crushed insects.

A rib cage swung at me like a claw and I ducked beneath it. Fists made of pelvis bones closed behind me, spines bloomed like flowers, coiling around my ankles.

I leapt from skull to skull. I snatched up a gold-handled sword and cleaved a bone creature in two. It fell apart like a stack of plates struck with a bat, but there were more. The bones piled around me. They pull me into the mess of them. A thousand hands in my pockets and in my hair. Hands snagged on the buttons of my shirt. Fingers hooked in my navel. Dry fingers in my mouth.

The sword was dragged out of my hand. I kicked with my boots and felt bones snapping. I crawled free. The edge of the clearing was ten feet away, now five. I waded waist-deep through a sea of death. It clambered over my shoulders, blind creepers, tangling my hair, in my ears and my nostrils.

Then I was out amongst the trees and the thing was heaving and crashing in the clearing, unable to follow between the close-set trunks.

I ran, and I didn't stop running until I reached the river again. There was a boat passing. I sprinted beside it, waving my arms, sucking air. I could see movement in the woods behind, a thrashing as though great hands were pushing the trunks aside. I didn't wait for the boat to stop. I dove into the river, inhaling water, dragging myself against the current until the sailors heaved me up and over the rail.

On the bank, a darkness was churning and coiling. I lay on my back as the boat coasted downstream, watching the movements between the trees, and I didn't look away until we rounded the corner.