John the Revelator by Peter Murphy

like crime-scene outlines testifying to recent acts of autocide, and then he was gone.
    Â 
    I walked home across the meadows, cutting through a three-cornered field with an old fairy fort in the middle, a stand of evergreens encircled by a wall built from quarry stones. The grass there was long and yellowed. I was exhausted by the day’s toil, so I lay down to rest in the shade of the fort. I gazed at the reddening sky, and after a while I could scarcely tell if I was lying flat on the face of the earth or hanging from its underside, magnetised by gravity. I closed my eyes, but the skin of my eyelids didn’t so much blot out the twilight sun as merely dim its intensity. My mind wandered, drugged with heat and fatigue, imagining the world as a stone skimming across the surface of space, sending ripples outward across the universe. Or maybe it was a ball bobbing in the vast blueness. A mote of dust floating across the pollen-strewn heavens.
    A rustling sound made me open my eyes and sit up, dizzy and confused. When the sunspots cleared, I saw a grey buck hare, not ten yards away. He watched me warily before burrowing into a hole under the wall of the fairy fort. Slow and stealthy, I got to my feet and crept after him in a sort of caveman’s crouch, and I climbed over the wall and into the shadowy glade.
    The air was rich with pine-needle smells. Cones were scattered on the ground like grenades. It was dank and cool, sheltered by a latticework of overhanging branches. I pushed through the leaves and came to a clearing at the centre of the fort, where the ground rose steeply into a clay mound.
    Suddenly cold, I rubbed my arms.
    At the summit of the mound was a nest of briars and twigs. I climbed the slope to get a better look. Inside the nest, a single black egg lay on a bed of black feathers. As I ran my fingers over its smooth surface, a jagged line began to work its way across the shell with a wet cracking sound. The egg broke apart and I caught a glimpse of blood-smeared flesh, a single eye, inflamed and rheumy, and I drew back and lost my footing and slipped and tumbled down the slope. Above me, something cawed and screeched. I scrambled to my feet and bolted, headlong through the thicket, thorns and briars scratching my skin, clothes smeared and torn. Hoofs thudded the ground behind me, hot breath on my neck. I cleared the wall and tore across the field, black wings rending the air at my back.
    Spears of light seared through my eyelids. I opened them. My shirt was sodden with sweat and I was weakened by the heat. Above me, the dying sun glared down, a bloodshot Cyclops eye.
    Â 
    School was out long enough for the novelty to have worn off. The radio kept saying it was the warmest summer in years, that burn-time was down to an all-time low of twenty minutes. Everywhere felt central heated.
    Slathered in my mother’s sun cream, I met with Jamey outside Donahue’s pub. He was slouched against the wall as though posing for a photograph, one boot flat against terracotta brickwork tagged with faded Tippex swastikas and Crass logos and H-Block slogans.
    â€˜You gonna help me spend this?’ he said, waving a wad of notes.
    Earlier that day his family had left on holiday, entrusting him with the keys to the house. Dee was nervous, and when his dad’s back was turned she slipped him a handful of twenties ‘for emergencies’.
    â€˜I’ve to meet someone inside,’ Jamey said. ‘Have a pint with me while I’m waiting. I’m buying.’
    We ducked into the pub. The dank shade and stale beer smells were a welcome relief from the blazing sunlight. A television blared over the bar. To the rear of the room, on a small stage set into an alcove that looked like a midget Santa’s grotto, a man in a short-sleeved summer shirt plugged a mandolin into a buzzing Peavey amp. He fiddled with a crackling lead and ran a plectrum over the strings. The chord rang out, almost