Last Days by Adam Nevill

Author:Adam Nevill [Nevill, Adam]
Language: por
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Cropped by pdfscissors.com
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Maybe a thousand. Who knows now? Their corpses were salted. The children and some women were sent to other towns in the diocese, but nearly all others died here on this last day of the siege. Verhulst was an educated man and his parents had money. He survived because we think he bribed the Spanish mercenaries. Now look at the sky. Tell me what is happening there.’

The sky seethed with a cumulus of pitch-black smoke, from which curious vanilla gases appeared in places as if a sickly sun was trying to light the ground. A thin red fire glowed on the horizon. Kyle found his throat to be so dry he could barely speak. ‘It’s dark. Smoke maybe, from the fires.

Or a storm.’

‘The captain of the soldiers claimed a storm came on the final day. The Last Day. As they put the heretics to the sword, and as the town and the bodies burned to ashes, he said a terrible wind came up and started to scatter the bones. He said the air was full of smoke and embers and they were forced to withdraw. What was left of Lorche and his chosen was meant for steel cages, to be taken around the nearby towns. The cages were to be hung from the steeples of churches as a warning. But the storm, it spoiled that. Because when the wind blew in St Mayenne on the last day, on the day of the false martyrs, a priest with the soldiers wrote that 393

ADAM NEVILL

the sky filled up with ash and then rained with black bones.

All the soldiers ran when this happened. Now look above the walls, before the air is dark. What do you see?’

‘Birds.’

Pieter nodded beside him. A score of black shapes, crows, seemed to hover lifelessly above the ruined walls. ‘They’d been coming in for many weeks to eat the blessed dead. But on this day, they got lost in the wind. It took them too. Took them into the sky with the remains of Lorche and his dis -

ciples.

‘And now, we come to the end of Verhulst’s triptych. The Kingdom of Fools.’

Rising to the upper margin of the grey charred sky in the third painting, a single figure immediately captured Kyle’s attention. The Unholy Swine. The pig clutched a sceptre in one uncomfortably prehensile trotter, and a gilt-edged book in another trotter. But what most unnerved him about the pig was its apparent glee at the elevation, or even levitation while seated in its throne. Up it went, into the broiling maelstrom of the heavens; the air now depicted as an unpleasant sulphurous-yellow mist.

The pig and its host rose above the suggested miniature detail of a blackened town, crowned with smoke, at the foot of the piece. Up into the sky the host of tormented and stricken martyrs writhed; thin wretched forms of at least a hundred naked human figures.

The ghastly sky filled two-thirds of the picture, with its tainted air seeming to churn, circle, and pull at the earth far below.

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