REMNANTS OF DARKNESS, by Eldrice

Standard Disclaimers Apply: Wil Stanton, Bran Davies, Jane Drew, and the entire Dark is Rising universe belong solely to the lovely Susan Cooper.

Chapter Five: A Tragedy of Means

Occurring this very night
By no established rule,
Some event may have already hurled
Its first little No at the right
Of the laws we accept to school
Our post-diluvian world:

But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgment waits
My person, all my friends,
And these United States.

- W.H. Auden, "A Walk After Dark"

They were inside. Will's hand released its grip on his shoulder. Peter opened his eyes. The room was dark, and it was several seconds before his pupils adjusted to the sudden dimness.

Jane Davies was sitting on the couch, her face buried in her hands, her husband's arm about her shoulders. Peter stared hard at her for several seconds, trying to find some evidence of whatever it was that had made her scream. But his mother bore no marks of physical injury. He let out his held breath in relief.

But then she lifted her face and looked at him, and all relief vanished.

Grief stared out at him from her pale face: tired, numb, disbelieving. Restrained tears glistened in her eyes, and she was fretfully gnawing the end of her ponytail. The tears, the hair, and the gesture all made her seem very much like the thirteen-year-old girl in the picture.

"Peter . . ." she murmured, and her voice trailed off as if she had forgotten that she was speaking in mid-sentence.

Then there was his father, sitting beside her with a look of absolute blankness on his face.

Some innocence in Peter died when he saw that emptiness. Until that moment he had not realized that he'd never seen his father frightened before. Not when they sold the farm; not when they moved to the States.

But Bran Davies was frightened now.

While the unknown grief made his mother look like a child, the fear brought lines of age and pain to his father's face, and Peter had a sudden vision of what his father would look like as an old, old man.

Annie appeared in the archway to the living room, pajama-clad and stretching. "What's going on?" she yawned. "Who was shouting? And I don't feel well."

The girl's voice broke the Peter's trance. He snapped his gaze from his parents and looked around himself as if he were emerging from a spell woven by his own fear and foreboding.

Everything seemed normal. Sunlight was streaming in through the air curtains, and the TV was spluttering in the corner. There were the usual magazines strewn across the coffee table, and Will was leaning silently against the bookcase that was overflowing with pictures, novels, and CDs. Peter's music competition medal was in its usual place of honor and the –

Television.

He hadn't noticed the electrical static when he first entered the room. His imagination had prepared him for the worst, for broken bones or a bloody body, and in his relief to see his mother safe, everything else had gone unnoted.

"Annie," Jane whispered as she stared at her sleepy daughter. "Annie . . ." and she pointed silently at the television.

It was turned to CNN, but that was nothing unusual. Part of his mother's job was knowing what was going on in the world. And there was nothing unusual either about the blonde Botox-beauty delivering the morning news. Except, perhaps, it was that her grave expression contrasted a little too strangely with the perfect makeup and colorful suit she wore.

And then the anchorwoman's face was replaced by an image Peter would remember forever and always after. It was a city, viewed from a camera stationed atop a distant hill. Or it had been a city, once upon a time, for now it was burning, burning burning burning, and the camera was not so far away that it could not pick up the faint echoes of people screaming, screaming screaming screaming . . . screaming as his mother had screamed.

Peter staggered. The nausea returned in waves of red and black, and he bent over in agony.

But if he could no longer see, he could now hear, and the anchorwoman's words finally registered on his ears. Words spoken in a voice that was careful and slow and tragic:

"Early reports are estimating that more than 250,000 people died in the initial attack upon Sindal. There have been no reports concerning Beniste as yet, but we know the city had a population of over 2 million. The President spoke this morning in the Rose Garden about his decision, explaining that retaliation was necessary once Yeria bombed Sindal. He described President Muscharch's actions as "the most brutal, evil, despicable act ever committed, one that deserved swift and immediate retribution – "

Peter looked up. The first face he saw was Will's. He was standing at the window, gazing outside with an elemental fierceness in his face. The sadness Peter had seen in the driveway was there too, and it combined with the fierceness to create an emotion Peter had no name for. Will was muttering to himself, and Peter strained his ears to hear the words.

"For this . . .! Hawkin and Rowlands and Merriman, and all that and so much more, everything, only for . . . this. Why did we bother, if it was only for men to destroy themselves in this manner?"

Peter shook his head and straightened up, steadying his weak, nausea- wracked body by pressing his hand against the wall. He glanced at the television again, and he understood now what it could have been that made Jane Davies scream. The blonde was gone, as well as the image of the burning city – which had it been? Sindal or Beniste? Did it even really matter? Now there was just a face, a child's face, fiery red against the whiteness of hospital linen. Except that it wasn't a face, but a melted conglomeration of flesh in which one could just barely make out where the eyes, the ears, and nose had been . . . yes, that gaping hole, that must have been a mouth once, and it must have laughed at one time, laughed with childish delight and abandon. There would be no more laughing now.

And the words kept coming – nuclear revenge premeditation bombs ethic uncertain radiation – except that now they melted into one another so that Peter could only hear snippets, entranced as he was by the images flashing at him from the screen, one face after another, each contorted into a new hideousness, each one fresh evidence of the thousand and one ways that a human being could die. All tended by faceless radiation suits, white fabric with a sheet of dark glass where the face should have been.

A small cry escaped him, something that would have been a shout, had he had any strength left for things like shouting.

"Enough!" Will Stanton exclaimed. He took several swift steps and reached over to switch off the television. The spell was broken, but the silence still complete. No one had said anything since Jane had pointed at the television and said her daughter's name as if she were speaking to a ghost.

Annie was still standing in the archway. Her hands were pressed against the wall on either side of her. Her eyes were wide and terrified, and she continued to stare at the television as if it were still a window into that horrendous Elsewhere that was not, could not be anything like that which her happy young life had ever prepared her for.

She staggered forward into the silence, into the family room that had been transformed into a place of death, and buried her face in her mother's lap. Jane grabbed her daughter and lifted her up, cuddling her close and pressing her face against the young girl's neck, as if it were the mother taking comfort from the daughter and not the other way around. Annie let out a sickly, muttered protest and shut her eyes.

"Mum, what's happening?" she whispered fearfully.

But it was Will who stepped forward. If Peter had been overwhelmed by all he had seen and heard in the last minute, Will Stanton, at least, had missed nothing. "What's happened," he said, slow and blunt, "is that humanity's worst nightmare has come true. Last night, President Muscharch of Yeria dropped the first hydrogen bomb on humankind. He dropped it on his neighbor country, Sindal, an American ally. And so an hour ago the American President dropped the second and third hydrogen bombs on humankind, on the Yerian city of Beniste, and who knows where it all will ends?"

Annie sniffed, rubbing one hand in her grubby eyes. "But why do I feel so sick?"

"I feel sick too," Peter admitted. The words were difficult to say, and to speak he felt as if he had to stretch his mouth awkwardly around them like a rubber band. "I threw up this morning."

Will's eyebrows lowered sharply and he stared at the two children for a second. Then his face cleared. "Nothing more than a flu bug, obviously," he said dismissively. "You both must've caught it yesterday. There are more important things to worry about now." Peter, resentful (more at the tone of the man's voice than the content, for who could worry about a tummy- ache on a day like this?), opened his mouth to give a scathing reply to Will's callousness. But Will's blue-grey eyes fixed on his so forcefully that Peter choked the words back and contented himself with glaring at his father's friend.

"This can't be happening – it can't be," Jane was muttering. She had lifted her face from Annie's neck and was staring blankly at Will, as if she were waiting for him to contradict what he had just said, as if his denial could erase the images that the television had seared into her mind. "Nobody could be so full of hate that they would do such a thing. Kill so many people. Kill us all."

Bran Davies looked at his wife and reached his hand out to grasp hers. "Jenny," he said, his first words since Will and Peter's entrance. His voice sounded as stiff and unwieldly as Peter's had. "It's horrible, but it's true. It must be – "

"No it must NOT!" Jane cried, suddenly wild. She threw her husband's hand from her. "I will not have it! This cannot be the world I live in, this cannot have happened to my world! I hate it! I hate it!"

"Jane Drew!" Will Stanton said severely.

Annie gasped.

Jane looked up at the motionless Will, and for a second Peter saw blazing across her face the same resentment that had burned inside him a minute ago. "You! How can you take this so, Will Stanton? How can you be so . . . so . . . inhuman?"

Will Stanton stared, struck dumb. A muscle in his cheek jerked. Peter saw the severity waiver and dim, and compassion rise to take its place. His eyes lost their resolution and his mouth opened and shut several times. Without a word he turned away and resumed his solitary vigil at the window. Jane's face fell.

"Will," she said, a stricken shame in her voice. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have spoken so."

"There's nothing to apologize for." The words bristled from the straight back.

"No there is. None of us can help the way we are – "

"Thanks for the compliment." Will turned, and a self-mocking smile played at his lips.

"That's not what I meant!" Peter's mother cried in frustration.

Bran had disengaged himself from his family and stood up. He approached Will Stanton and laid a hand on his friend's shoulder. "Will," he said slowly, wonderingly, his golden eyes looking straight at the other man. "I don't know why you would think so, but you could not have prevented this."

Will Stanton had been staring ferociously at something unseen, his eyes vacant as they searched some unknown distance. But at Bran's words, his gaze suddenly snapped to his best friend. Some sort of helpless condemnation and despair smoldered in his face.

"Perhaps," he whispered. Peter thought he sounded very much like a boy who had forgotten that which was most important for him to remember. He looked lost. "Oh, I wish . . . I wish he was here."

"Who?" Peter asked. Will shook his head as if to clear it of something and turned away.

Jane Davies was watching her husband and best friend standing by the window, tears transforming her brown eyes into muddy forest pools. "As if any of us could've stopped his from happening," she said helplessly. "Sindal and Yeria will destroy each other, with American help, and the rest of the world will be destroyed with them. What can anyone do in the face of such madness?" It was her turn now to sound fierce. "Come here, Will."

Will obeyed the command and came to stand before Jane. She removed Annie from her lap and placed her gently beside Peter. Jane stood up and put her arms around Will's neck and buried her head in his shoulder. Will's own arms closed around her waist and held her close.

"Oh, I'm sorry, Will! So sorry!" Jane Davies' voice was muffled against the man's sweater. "I don't know what it was that made me speak in that horrible way." She pulled away and tried a wobbly smile. "If such a thing is to happen, at least you're here with us, and we're all together. You, Bran, Peter, Annie and I."

Will smiled in return, but the smile didn't reach his eyes. "Think no more of it, my dear." He reached out to wipe a tear from her cheek.

Annie was looking up at the adults dominating the room in scared confusion. "What's going to happen?" she asked solemnly. "Are we all going to die?"

"Of course not," Jane said hastily, wiping at her eyes. She let go of Will and sat down again next to her daughter.

"Who knows?" Bran Davies said simultaneously. His wife shot him a warning look. "Well, no one knows anything," he continued with a shrug. "They say Sindal has the bomb, they probably didn't even need us to protect them. I doubt they'll hesitate to use it. And if Muscharch continues dropping his own weapons on them, and they or us keep retaliating, it very well may be the war to end all wars. Mutually assured destruction: M.A.D. We knew Yeria had been armed for years –"

"With black-market weapons," Jane injected bitterly.

"Yes, with weapons the great nations designed and developed and sold for an illegal profit. The whole world is guilty of this together. No one is left with clean hands."

"Only creatures of the earth take from one another," Will intoned softly. "All creatures, but men more than any. Life they take, and liberty, and all that another man may have – sometimes through greed, sometimes through stupidity, but never by any volition but their own. Beware your own race, they are the only ones that will ever harm you, in the end." The small speech ended on a dim, unhappy note.

"Women take too, you know," Jade added absently, automatically.

"Where did you hear that?" Bran demanded.

Will shrugged mutely.

Peter looked outside the window. The early winter sunlight was brilliant and glittered sharply off the white snow. The sky was jewel blue. It was hard to imagine that somewhere, that same beautiful sky was choked with flame and smoke; and that instead of snow, rubble and corpses covered the landscape. He had a sudden vision of his beloved Cader Idris: red, barren, burnt, scorched, clouds of smoke rising in the distance, all the trees, grasses, flowers wilted in death. His breath caught in horror.

Bran Davies was pacing restlessly up and down the room. "Will," he said reluctantly, as if he couldn't keep the words from leaving his mouth, even if he didn't understand them. "What is to be done? Darkness cannot be allowed to fall in this manner."

"No," Will said quietly. Peter saw his gaze pass briefly over him. "It cannot."

"But what can we do?" Bran looked at his friend, and there was a shadow on his face that spoke of an attempt to grasp at something he could not quite reach.

Will started at Bran's words, and stared at his friend with curiosity and uncertainty. "Do?" he asked, genuinely surprised. "Why would you think there is anything that we could do?"

"There is you wisdom, Will," Annie said solemnly, her small voice ringing through the room like a bell. There was no hint of whimper now. Peter stared. What was she talking about? She didn't even sound like herself . . .

"Wisdom!" Will scoffed bitterly. "My wisdom won't protect you from a 15 megaton H-bomb."

"We can wait," Jane said firmly. Tear tracks still gleamed on her face, but her eyes were dry, her voice clear and strong. The cheerful, let's- make-the-best-of-it voice dispelled the cloudiness in the room, the darkness Peter had felt ever since he first saw Dick C. Winslow, Esquire staring down his father in the driveway. "And we can live today as if it were any other day. That is the most important thing." She got up and walked towards the kitchen. "I, for one, am dying for some coffee."

Will and Bran glanced at each other. They grinned, and both looked surprised that they were still capable of grinning.

Jane's voice floated dimly back from the kitchen: "I didn't mean it that way!"