Harvest Read online

  The sun still shone, the column of spray rose no higher than before, people continued what they were doing, many not yet noticing the plight of the water fowl, the river’s peculiar flows and the sinkhole.

  They felt they now were witnesses to an unstoppable drama, a horrible thing. But if their instinct was to turn and flee and find shelter, their feet were rooted to the ground.

  Then, as suddenly as it had risen, the column of spray fell back and the river’s flow returned to normal.

  ‘The hole must have filled,’ said Stort, ‘and the river’s now flowing the way it should again.’

  Three of the mallard swung back into view, circled the place where the sinkhole had been and landed on the bubbling water. Cows in an adjacent field, which had stopped grazing, began to do so again.

  Finally, a pair of swans appeared high across the fields, heads and necks pointing their way back home. They came in low, circling as the mallard had done, and landed in the field between the cows and the river. They immediately set off for the water’s edge.

  ‘They’re looking for the cygnets,’ said Katherine softly.

  One of the church bells rang a solitary note. Just that, no more. A toll of time.

  The crisis seemed over; all felt good.

  But Stort was shaking his head uneasily.

  ‘Do not be deceived,’ he said. ‘When the Earth shows her teeth she is rarely so benign as to limit her appetite to four cygnets. This is surely the calm before the storm.’

  The surface of the river was now so calm and flat that it reflected once more the light in the sky above. It snaked away into the distance.

  A couple more mallard returned to the water.

  The swans made their cumbrous way through the longer grass and reeds back onto the river, looking for their young.

  ‘Seems all right to me,’ said Jack, turning towards his ’sac to heave it on and encourage the others to move. He felt they were too exposed.

  But he took no more than a couple of steps.

  ‘Jack!’

  Stort had no need to point, Katherine was already doing so.

  No sooner had the swans settled down, ruffling their wings to rid them of excess water, than one of them was suddenly sinking beneath the water, straining its neck, scrabbling its paddles, trying desperately to raise its wings against the weight of water that flowed over them.

  Its mate turned its way, stared, and then began to sink as well, but backwards, rump and wings first, feet scrabbling in thin air. Then they were gone beneath the surface entirely, one after the other like stricken ships unable to stay afloat a second longer.

  Even as this was happening, the cows in the adjacent pasture raised their heads as one, turned and looked towards the river, and started to run in the opposite direction across the grass, bellowing in panic as they did so. For a moment it was hard to make out what they were trying to do or why . . . but then it became all too clear.

  The field was tipping backwards and they were struggling to run uphill in a field that had been flat seconds before. They were running for their lives and failing.

  The sinkhole, which had so quickly come and gone, had returned, but much wider than before.

  The river and the fields on either side, along with hedgerows and trees, a water butt and a fence, were being tipped backwards and down into it as the first cow lost its balance entirely and slipped into a mixture of water and mud, its bellows stopping suddenly, its front hoofs threshing before they too were gone from sight.

  The column of spray reappeared, as the north and south flows of the river crashed into each other once more.

  There were flashes of silver and green in the column as if it was shot through with silk.

  ‘Fish,’ said Stort.

  Then heavier, ragged shadows dark and green-brown. ‘Bushes and mud,’ said Katherine.

  The perimeter of the sinkhole continued to expand, taking in the garden of a house, then another, then three houses.

  The water climbed higher in the sky, a swirling mess of spray and foam, detritus and loose green foliage.

  Then the roaring began, like that of a heavy sea at high tide on a shingle shore, on and on, unremitting.

  A ragdoll dressed in pink spiralled up with legs and arms all over the place.

  ‘A child,’ whispered Jack wanting to run down the hill to save it, but it was already too late.

  ‘A little girl,’ said Katherine, reaching a hand towards her helplessly.

  That was when they saw a man running wildly towards the expanding sinkhole, screaming. The sound of a man losing his child, his home, his everything, before the scream was cut short as he lost his last possession – his own life.

  As he disappeared downward into the Earth, the whole church lurched, first one way then another, its steeple wobbling before righting itself once more, masonry falling and people approaching the churchyard sent spinning into free-fall, some smashing into the ground, others turned over and falling on their backs, one grabbing hold of a gravestone for support.

  That did not help.

  Like dominoes in slow motion, the gravestones began to fall, some onto grass and others onto the stone structure of the grave of which they were part, where they smashed into pieces. Here a shattered cross, there a fallen angel and near the church itself, where a new grave had been dug, the piled earth simply covered with bunches of faded flowers, the corner of something shiny and brown shot into view. A new coffin.

  The bells of the church now started ringing at random, and violently. A sudden donging, then momentary silence, then several bells at once making a clashing of sound, dong dong dong doi . . . nnng! It was as if a group of bell-ringers had gone mad, their tugging at the ropes frantic and out of accord with each other.

  A thump of metal on wood and stone, a shout and a roar as a crack appeared in the square tower that supported the spire, a woman’s scream from within the church, shouting men and, over it all, the first howling of dogs.

  The crack in the tower of the church widened and shot up the external masonry like a tear in stiff fabric, the sound of it deeper and louder.

  The ground beneath them shook. Jack stepped to the side and then in front of Stort protectively as if, even from so far away, he was in some personal danger from whatever was happening to the village below and now threatened them where they stood. To right and left of them the leaves in the trees nearby trembled and the ground shook more, like the subtlest of shivers.

  ‘But . . .’ said Katherine, ‘it’s . . . there’s . . .’

  It was impossible to say what was happening because suddenly so much was; and all the while the column of water where the river was, or had been, grew broader at its base, its colour darker with the flotsam it carried spiralling round, amid which they saw dead people, living people, dogs and a last cow.

  Swirling around before they sank down, lower and lower, into the open, greedy, hole.

  Cars had stopped on the bridge beyond, their foolish drivers getting out to lean on the parapet and stare at the wild water below as if they felt themselves immune from its dangers.

  The church steeple swayed again, the bells rang and thumped, and the edge of the widening sinkhole neared a row of old cottages. It paused as if looking at them, hesitated as if thinking and then pushed forward straight at them. They swung as one on their axis, as if caught by a flood; someone inside one of them shoved a little window open and tried to look out. Perhaps he had slept late, perhaps risen and fallen, concussed. Whatever his story he was thrown violently back into the darkness of his room now as the cottages tilted high and slid into the hole.

  Further off from this maelstrom, people came out of houses to find out what the roaring and shaking was. Those nearest who could see the horror turned and tried to escape. Those further off, their view obscured by their neighbours’ houses, made the mistake of coming forward.

  As for the bridge, it lurched too and the people staring down began to fall forward, helpless to stop themselves, their cars
sliding after them into the water.

  The column was now clogged up with mud and trees, cars and people, and it rose higher still as, all around it, dust shot into the air to the sound of small explosions. The sun, briefly bright, became muted, the sky angry grey. As for the sinkhole, it spread ever wider, sucking all that was in its path straight down.

  Then the church itself tilted and sank towards the hole, breaking free of the tower at its eastern end, the roof and walls falling away to reveal rows of pews, someone clutching at a Norman column, the top half of someone else’s body protruding from fallen stones, a scream on their faces. Then all that dropped away into the darkness, drenched by filthy water filled with things as they went, before being overwhelmed and lost.

  The day was overtaken by a cracking, roaring, ripping violence of sound beneath which, like disharmonious bass notes to a terrible tune, came roars and subterranean rumblings.

  All the time, the people on the far outer edge of these events who could hear but not properly see made the mistake of walking towards the void and falling or being sucked suddenly to their own frightening deaths.

  Further north, another column of water shot into the sky; the ground ripped open and a secondary sinkhole appeared where the bridge had been and was no more. It widened and for a brief moment a man and his wife were caught between the two, facing an impossible choice. They each ran, in opposite directions, and then their ground was gone and they plunged down into chaos, the crushing, suffocating, darkness of a liquid mud filled with the dying, the dead and all the inanimate objects between.

  The crystalline dust that rose up from the ruins of the houses billowed higher still, clear of the dirt and catching the dark light. Below the maelstrom of tumbling, breaking, falling, imploding cottages and cars, people and dust, asphalt and vegetation, everything turned and sank, boiled and frothed like the rolling boil of jam in a preserving pan.

  The huge void looked like the maw of a great beast whose solitary fang was the spire of the church, rocking back and forth but held in place by the rock on which it had originally been built, like the last incisor poking from a filthy jaw bone.

  Half Steeple seemed almost nothing now but its own spire.

  It became too hard for Jack, Katherine and Stort to watch, too terrible, utterly incomprehensible. One by one they turned away, as if to look was to do a shaming thing.

  Yet further off, across the landscape beyond Half Steeple, the sun was out. A train moved across the horizon, cars along roads, an aeroplane in the sky.

  For Stort and the others, time had ceased to be, as initial shock was replaced by a kind of drifting wonder at what they were reluctant witnesses to.

  Stort had glanced at his chronometer when the trouble began, but when he did so again, assuming that ten or fifteen minutes had passed, he saw that it was little more than seconds, a minute perhaps, no more than two. What had happened was so shocking, so vast in its scale, so bewildering, that words failed them all. So, at first, did any notion of taking action. There was nothing they could do, together or separately. Nothing anyone could do.

  Half Steeple and its people were in the grip of Mother Earth. She, who had given them life and abundance for so many centuries and millennia, was calling in her debt and taking back her own.

  Now, wherever they looked, disaster and tragedy were in the making. To the north, coming down the Malvern road, a silver-grey vehicle sped towards what was now a vast hole in the ground in which the remnants of the village were violently stirred about by an unseen hand.

  It reached a roundabout as, weirdly, the garage that was there exploded in a ball of flames and black smoke, which prompted the driver to put his foot down and accelerate ever faster to his doom, thinking he was escaping it. His vehicle began to swerve from side to side on a road whose camber had begun to shift, until, too late, the road steepened, broke up and took him and his car into the swirling stew.

  To their far left, almost behind them, a flash of colour appeared along the same road from the opposite direction, red and yellow. It was a racing cyclist, then another, then two more.

  ‘No!’ screamed Katherine. ‘No . . .’

  They were too far off to hear and if they saw the rising dust and smoke and plumes of water ahead, they did not show it, their heads down, their feet pumping at their pedals. They rounded a corner, the leader sat up, puzzled by the shaking in the road perhaps, but it was too late.

  He tried to stop, turning sideways to the way he was going, right foot on the road, but the ones behind crashed into him and as the road fell away suddenly, they too were all gone into the void, the wheels of their bikes turning slowly as they went.

  Then things stilled and silence of a kind fell. Birds and wildfowl, which had first fled in panic and then come back, circled the village high up, in and out of the vast billowing cloud of dust, their bearings lost and their sense of purpose all gone, dark against the sky, like the ashes of burnt paper above a fire.

  The air thickened and grew acrid, a slight breeze brought dust over the hill and into their faces. They coughed and turned, stumbling into the wood behind them, eyes streaming, faces drained of colour, words failing in their mouths.

  ‘Stort,’ began Jack, ‘Stort . . . ?’

  Stort sat on the wood floor, his weight against a tree, eyes down, head shaking, as shocked as his friends.

  ‘It isn’t over,’ he said, ‘there’s something worse coming.’

  The wood darkened and they saw that the drifting dust cloud had obscured the sun, casting a pall of twilight and sudden cold over where Half Steeple had been.

  ‘There must be survivors,’ said Jack, staring to the edge of the wood again.

  ‘There may be,’ said Katherine, ‘but there are some who do not understand what’s happened or that there is still great danger.’

  She pointed to people who were approaching the village along roads and lanes from all directions, alerted by the dust and rumbling Earth, some in cars, some running, some walking from farms and houses towards the edge of the destruction.

  ‘We stay where we are,’ said Jack firmly. ‘Go down there and we go to our deaths.’

  The others agreed.

  He was right and so was Stort; it wasn’t over.

  The Earth shook again and began to roar and rumble. The edges of the void rose up in a vast circle, a vile raised hole, like something organic, filthy, ulcer-like. The lips of this foul thing pouted horribly and then began to close in towards themselves, a mouth closing.

  It narrowed, it moved inward, the hole began simply to disappear. Until what teetered on the edge of the darkness were whole houses, stretches of unbroken grass and the church tower with its twisted steeple around which the mouth was closing.

  The tower began to sink into the ground.

  Down it went, grass and rubble all around and an occasional gravestone that had survived the sinking earlier.

  Down like a sinking ship at sea, upended, clinging on, then shooting down into oblivion. First the tower then the steeple, a third, a bit more, a half, and then . . . it stopped.

  Dead, as if it had hit solid rock.

  Still.

  Vertical once more, but half gone.

  Half Steeple was gone, but a half steeple remained.

  Stort shook his head in wonderment.

  Katherine wanted to weep but her shock was too deep and she could not.

  Jack said, ‘We had better see if there’s anything we can do.’

  But his words came out thick as if covered in dust, without purpose or intent. Before such monstrosity there was nothing mortal kind could do.

  Arnold said, ‘My boat’s gone. Stay here, there’s some down there.’

  He set off before stopping and looking back.

  ‘I’ll get you all away,’ he said, ‘south-westward like Mister Stort says. Where you better find that gem and give it up to her who did this!’

  ‘Who was that?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Her!’ said Arnold, setting of at speed d
own the hill. ‘Her!’

  It was hard to see what he meant, for it was dark by the river and dust swirled about confusingly.

  They couldn’t see much.

  Just dogs and riders on them and the form of a woman, bent and broken, weeping and wending across the wild waters there. It was Judith the Shield Maiden.

  She cast not a single glance towards where Stort stood, but he did at her. Then the dust swirled and fell and she was gone, cursing as she went, and the dogs with her.

  ‘The end of days has begun,’ said Stort.

  Arnold waved from far below.

  He had found a boat drifting, a big clinker-built thing, which he swung with the flow to the shore.

  He raised an arm and Stort raised one back.

  ‘We’re leaving,’ he said, ‘all of us together. Rough the water may be but who can trust our Mother Earth after what we have been witness to? Agreed, Jack? Everybody?’

  ‘Agreed,’ they said one by one, the risk seeming as great whatever they did. But they were all together now and on their way south and west to fulfil a quest that might be the only thing protecting all life itself from the end of days.

  50

  GETTING THERE

  Stort now knew where they were going, but so did others too. Quatremayne knew.

  My Lord Sinistral knew.

  Leetha as well.

  And Borkum Riff.

  Katherine had a vague idea. When they first stood on the bank of the Severn discussing which way to go, didn’t she turn south-westward as if hearing a song to her heart? She did.

  But she let it go and turned with Stort and Jack and left it behind when they went the wrong way.

  Did Jack know where they were going, even now? He knew what he wanted but not how to get there. He’d fight for them all, right to the death, but he couldn’t hear musica to save his soul.

  So Jack didn’t know but maybe he would.

  As for Arthur, he didn’t know where to find the gem.