The Quickening and the Canker

From: Issue 5

When the repair-shop door crashed open, they found me in an unlady-like pose, down on my back scrubbing canker from an old grain-hauler coupling that had seized yesterday. As Town Steward, I dare say I could have prevailed on others, but I wasn’t above taking my turn. Not when there were too few of us for watching duties as it was, and a community depending on this year’s harvest coming in clean and untainted.

But I wished to god it had only been rust I was scrubbing away. Even with the mask tied tight, my throat felt raw and I imagined my skin flushed and red beneath the heavy gloves.

“Anja—we found him asleep at his watch-post. Again.”

They shoved the boy, Javin, forwards until he stood in front of me. His shoulders shook, unable to hold back his sobs. He was not yet eleven, but even at that age—especially at that age—boys needed to learn.

I sighed and pulled myself out from under the coupling. Even so, some part of it held my gaze, my eyes lingering on the metal joint that had bubbled into a smooth black eruption like ripened blackcurrants. I might have stared the same way at a vial of poison: harmless enough from a distance, deadly within.

“And?” I asked the man who had been holding him.

“Ay, there are signs. Quickening that’s spread along the northern edge of Fifty-Acre field. Right beneath the observation post, would you believe? The boy must have slept half the afternoon for it to have taken like that.”

“I didn’t!” Javin protested. “Ten minutes, no more. I swear!”

I shushed him to silence, wanting time to think.

“But no canker?”

The man shrugged and I understood. Too soon to tell. Canker—in all its different forms—could latch on to a quickening faster than a lighted match held to a tinder-box.

“And the boy?” I asked.

“What about him?”

I sighed. I shouldn’t need to spell it out. “Have you checked him over? Did anyone observe him? Properly, I mean?”

Shakes of the head from the group of men.

Alright. So I would have to do it myself—and soon. But first…

“Show me the field. Maybe we can salvage something.”

Ah, foolish optimist. That was me all right.

I pointed. “And bring the boy.”

— # —

The sky was the color of a darkening bruise and the watch-fires along the valley ridge were already lit, forming a string of flickering pearls off into the distance. When night fell, there was little enough one could observe by fire-light but over the years we had convinced ourselves it made a difference. Beyond the reach of those watch-fires, it would be down to the dawn patrols to locate fresh areas of quickening sprung up overnight. Then we would send as many as could be spared to sit and watch, forcing Nature to obey the natural order of things.

As we walked the farm tracks, all of us fell into the unconscious habit of looking: at the ground, the trees, the fences, the outhouses, the crops. Observing as much as possible, protecting what we could by the simple act of watching.

Roke had tried many times over the years to explain, but he used terms I could never grasp: quantum tunneling, closed systems, the crucial role of an observer in influencing outcomes. Somehow that quantum-scale weirdness had risen up to poison the macro-scale world. The science of it hardly mattered to me. All we needed to know was that once loosened by the process that we called ‘quickening’, things could begin a subtle change when no one was looking.

I knew the place they led me to only too well. The town community farmed the valley lands as a collective, but this place was scarcely a stone’s throw from my farmstead and outhouses—the place Roke and I had called home since we were newly-weds some thirty years ago. It was hard not think of these fields as our own.

Was I to blame then?

I quashed the thought with practiced ease.

The corn was ripening well, except for an irregularly-shaped patch maybe twenty yards by thirty. It looked…wrong. Quickening could be hard to see; you had to have an eye for it. The failing light of evening wasn’t helping, but I thought the stems looked a little glassy, and the heads of corn wore a sheen of… What?

Possibilities.

Uncertainties where only certainty ought to exist.

Corn that might yet become something else if left unwatched.

The quickening might have already gotten into the soil. This was, after all, a place where the unholy union of observed and observer had been fractured. Down in the quantum weeds, Nature’s grip on reality might have loosened. While we observed, Nature’s laws couldn’t be broken. But we couldn’t watch all the time.

“We should burn—” one of the men began.

“No.” I raised a hand, wanting a moment to think. Fire was the only certain way, but we’d all go hungry this winter if we put another field of corn to the flames. I stared over the crop field, the light draining away moment by moment, imagining I could see tiny changes happening in front of my eyes. Daring them to.

“Do you see?” I thrust the boy a step or two closer to the corn. He tried to shy away but I held him steady. “Constant vigilance, Javin! The price we must pay. Things change and deform when there is no one to see. But an observer forces Nature to obey her own rules.” I gestured to the quickened field. “Didn’t we teach you anything?”

The boy wiped his snotty nose on his sleeve. “I suppose,” he mumbled, sullen defiance in his voice.

I struck him with the back of my hand. Not a hard blow, but the shock of it did the trick and he howled. Boys like him had to understand, or future generations would be lost even as the world rotted around them.

“Bring me torches,” I told the men. “Enough to last till morning. I’ll watch tonight.”

I stayed as they led the boy back along the track, tears still streaking his face. When they passed close to the long shadow of our barn where we used to keep the animals penned, I turned away, my throat suddenly dry.

Perhaps the long night ahead would serve as a kind of penance. It was surely no more than I deserved.

— # —

Javin returned at dawn, sullen and with downcast eyes. He worked like a trooper though, digging out the small area where the crop had quickened and carting it away to the pyre, while I sat atop the rickety watch-tower, glaring at the good heads of corn as though daring them to defy me.

I was taking a risk not burning the whole field; cauterizing instead of amputating, but we had risked worse before. I believed it’s what Roke would do, though I’d known better than to ask him.

At noon, Javin and I sat together in the shade of the old oak tree near our farmhouse. Roke loved that tree. Before his blindness came on, he would wander out at first light, a brew of sweetened tea steaming in a mug, to inspect our little kitchen garden. He’d sit awhile under that tree, maybe watching the way the sunlight dappled the ground through its branches. It was his special place. Small wonder he smothered it in such doses of watchfulness I often joked that he cared more about the damned tree than he did me. Roke would laugh, a deep rumbling in his throat that I loved more than anything. Then he would pinch my cheek and tell me not to be so silly.

I ached for those days: happy, carefree times. Lately I’d started to think canker gets into one’s memories too, warping and changing them. Maybe that would be a blessing.

The kitchen garden had succumbed to weeds now. I knew how much that would pain Roke to see, but of course he wasn’t able to now his sight was gone. As for the oak tree, I hardly spared it a glance when I passed in the mornings. There always seemed to be something more important to do.

“What’s that on your forehead?” I asked, frowning.

Javin rubbed at the spot, turning his head away. “Just dirt.”

“Let me see,” but he danced away, finding stones to hurl across the valley.

I said nothing, calmly setting aside a share of my bread and cold cuts of ham to share with the boy.

“You have to understand,” I told Javin when he slouched back. “There are no second chances. Once the canker gets a grip—and god forbid it should get a grip on us—it’s too late. It leaves behind something less than human, something monstrous. There’s nothing to be done then.”

I looked for understanding in his blank expression. Was there still a faint trace of that mark on his forehead? In the dappled light beneath the oak tree, it was hard to be sure. My heart beat a little faster.

“I know,” he said, though I doubted it.

“One day, we’ll find an answer. A way to put things back to how they should be.”

He shrugged and I couldn’t tell if that meant he didn’t believe me, or if he didn’t care. We ate in silence.

“Mam says your Mr Parnell never leaves the house since he got blind. Is he sick?”

His bluntness caught me by surprise. I chose my words carefully. “A little.” Then, as if my answer was inadequate, “I take care of Roke’s needs, since his eyes failed him.”

In the silence that followed, I felt the barn to be an uncomfortable presence nearby.

“Mam says she misses seeing him. She says his jokes can be very ripe and that he can light up a whole room with his laughter.”

“Ay.”

I wished now that I’d sent Javin away when the work was done. There were plenty more watching duties across the valley, and never enough eyes to carry them out.

“Is it hard for him, not being able to see and all?”

Lord knows it was hard for all of us. Always work to be done, important decisions to be made, never-ending chores—and so many things to watch over every day. And there was Roke himself. Some mornings I barely had the energy to snatch up the mirror and study my own naked body in all its pimplish, wrinkled glory. Observation was protection. Observation was cleanliness. Only when no one watched could the canker start to change things. This was a chore that mattered. But I worked so hard. Roke was always saying that. Easy to let things slip…

“We make do.”

I let the lie sit awhile, wondering if Javin would see it.

I touched the boy’s arm lightly, but he jerked as though my touch was electric. “Do you look at yourself? All over, with a mirror? Every day?”

“Ye-es,” Javin said, and I knew immediately it wasn’t true. I thought of all the things I wanted to say, the warnings he doubtless heard from his parents; stories of slow decay, the body being consumed from within. Changing.

I wanted to confess all, purge myself of guilt, speak my failings aloud. If it saved another, then perhaps I could salvage something of myself.

Instead, I rubbed at the mark on his forehead before he could pull back. “Just dirt,” I said, satisfied now.

Javin squared his shoulders and sat a little straighter. “I’m going to be a good watcher from now on. I won’t nap, no matter what.”

“Make sure of it.”

“Mam says we should always try to do the right thing.”

I drew in a sharp breath, then let it out. “That can be terribly hard. You know… I haven’t always done what I should.”

“Not burning the field?”

I hesitated, then nodded. But it wasn’t what I meant at all.

“Ay. There’s no place for sentimentality, or the canker spreads and takes hold of everything that’s precious and eats it alive.”

He shrugged. “There’s still time.”

And the thing was, the boy was right.

I stood suddenly, knowing what needed to be done, what had to be done. Bad enough that I’d dithered for so long.

“Bring logs from the wood-pile,” I told Javin. “Pile them over there. I’ll get the firesticks.”

“By the barn?” I saw puzzlement in Javin’s eyes, but under my unflinching gaze he hurried off.

My fault. My carelessness.

My dear, wonderful Roke.

Who else was there to blame but me?

I loved Roke for his generosity of spirit. Always thinking of others, so eager to lend a hand that sometimes he forget to tend his own needs. I’d wept on seeing the first blemishes on his back as he lay sleeping in the cold light of dawn. “Let me watch over you,” I’d begged. “Day and night. So long as I watch, it can’t spread.”

“Of course, dear,” he’d said, hugging me tight but then pushing me away. “Now go, my love! There’s work to be done and the town needs you.”

And like a fool I’d gone. A day’s observation missed here or there, surely that wouldn’t matter? That’s how it had happened. My resolve, my good intentions, had broken in tiny increments, fed by carelessness and tiredness and a dozen more pathetic excuses.

Until I finally awoke to the certainty that I’d left things too late.

— # —

The flames took hold quickly. I pulled the boy back to a safe distance and we watched the barn burn, its tarred timbers catching easily, thick coils of smoke twisting into the sky like angry serpents.

There came a crashing, thudding sound as if something large—some wild, blind creature trapped within—was charging at the walls, unable to break through and escape the heat and the smoke. And then the flames were leaping up the sides of the barn and the thatched roof caught in a crackling uprush of cinders—and if there were screams coming from inside, they were all but lost in the roar of the flames and abruptly cut off.

As the barn burned, my insides turned to ash. But I forced myself to watch and the irony was not lost on me.

It was little enough of a penance, but it would have to do.

© 2021 David Cleden

From: Issue 5

About the Author

David Cleden is a British SF/F author and previous winner of the James White and Aeon Awards (both competitions for new writers), and was a first-place winner in the 2019 Writers of the Future. Since then his stories have found their way into print in Interzone and a range of other venues and anthologies. There have been occasional rare sightings of him on Twitter (@davidcleden) and at his blog https://www.quantum-scribe.com.