Moving Westwards
Ragged men drive women and children across the moor. Exodus from bombed out villages on East Dartmoor. Chagford crater. Makeshift camps reduced to shredded fabric. The hillside scorched. Hellfire and granite shards cut through people and things. Hum of drones with infrared give no respite at night. Beneath the stars at Scorhill circle I saw a tiny boy weep before a dead foal. His mother was left behind a week earlier. We set-up camp in a valley within the shadow of a great unnamed tor. Cold stone witness to this second age of exodus. Men with some experience of the land drew a crude map on the ground with twigs. We resolved to move westward as far from the roads as possible. A young man is sent ahead with a message for militiamen at Tavistock. He does not return. Three days later we discover the town laid waste, all supplies destroyed. Suicides mount. As dusk fell on the ninth day a strange congregation at the half derelict church of Sydenham Damerel gave us shelter in the nave. Some were foreigners, though none of colour. We, this shivering mass of non-persons and the wished-to-be-forgotten. The Muslim girls slept in the chapel. Obsidian stone forms compete with gothic revival and neo-paganism. Totems and sigils, some using human excretions adorn the walls. Frantic chanting on the morning of the tenth day. The girls are driven out of the chapel. Futility of purification leads to lingering distrust. Fug of incense and candle smoke amplifies the fear. Drone hum as counterpoint to choral plainsong. Most single men moved on during the night taking what they could from the outhouses. I stayed to assuage the wrath of the faithful. They expect libations. By the bank of the river Tamar I saw their women dance naked, raised up to a frenzy of jerking spitting flesh. Bodies scarred from revived penitentials. Rebounded superstitions, renewed extremity after the eschaton was permanently deferred. Dead foal boy shrieking at the water's edge as if transformed into a coyote. At dusk one of the Muslim girls was found drowned in a foot of water. The remainder of us left at first light. The offer of an escort as far as the highway which cut the region from north to south was refused. We had scant sense of geography but even less trust in them. Two days to cross Bodmin then down into the South West as far as we could get by the end of the month. Ancient paths cross poisoned soil. Abandoned military emplacements stud the peaks. Freezing moorland water polluted with discarded munitions. The eldest woman among us passes out from thirst and exhaustion. We carry her to a ruined farm house. The domes and antennae of a listening station can be seen on the horizon. I know we cannot stay long. On waking she curses her absent husband in a language I cannot understand. The food is nearly gone. She refuses her share, gesturing to the children who are not hers. Late in the evening she loses consciousness for the last time. I wake in the morning to the sound of spades cutting wet earth. A man who spoke her language lowered the body down. I could not understand him either. Tracking along the north coast a day away from Truro they caught up with us. There was no warning before the gunfire started. Most were cut down immediately. I saw the dead foal boy shaking, rooted to the spot before the bullet shattered his skull. White light panic. Screams like waves of static blot out the sound of the shots. My body carried away by them. I fall down to the beach. Wash up beneath the cliff face. Static resolves into oceanic rhythms. I wake upon the altar of a Devonian cathedral. Time is abandoned here. The world is gone. I am alone with the sea.
