Twelve Beats Per Minute

You want to know what's interesting about the Loxley Overhang? Not the drop — the drop is forty feet straight down to the river and interesting only in the way that all preventable deaths are interesting, which is to say, worth noting and then declining. Not the canopy, though the canopy is relevant and I'll come to it. What's interesting about the Loxley Overhang is that it's the most direct route between the upper valley and the Wisewood junction, it's been the most direct route for longer than anyone living can remember, and something about the combination of geography and what lives there has made it, over the last several years, into a path that nobody takes any more without a reason that substantially outweighs the cost.

I had a reason. I'm not going to pretend it was a good one.

The commission came through on a Toid'y evening — not a time when I was at my most professionally rigorous, I'll admit, though I'd argue that any time in Hellsborough is a time when rigorous professional reasoning is going to run up against the economics of this place and lose. The client was a runner coordinator from the upper valley. He had a scout — had, past tense, which I should have weighed more carefully at the time — who'd been carrying a packet of intelligence along the Overhang path three days prior, making the run from the upper Loxley exchange to the Wisewood junction, a route they'd made perhaps fifty times without incident. The scout was no longer contactable. The coordinator needed the packet back. The packet was time-sensitive. The coordinator was paying accordingly.

I told him I'd need to see the path in murklight first.

He looked at me the way people look at you when the murklight option has already been considered and ruled out for reasons they're not going to explain to a crosslander they've hired for three hours. I took his point. I took his money. I took my field kit and the heavier coat and I walked up to the Overhang at the hour when the light does that thing it does here at murkfall, which is not quite to fail but to become something else entirely — dimmer and more textured, as if the air has developed opinions.

The Overhang path runs for roughly a kilometre along the left lip of the Loxley valley, as you walk northwest: the drop, a stone wall that's a formidable barrier, the river below running dark between the rocks. On your right: the canopy, old growth, the sort of trees that have stopped responding to seasons in any meaningful way and operate on their own schedule entirely. The path itself is flagged with stones that were set when someone had plans for this route and maintained up until the point when those plans were quietly retired. There are gaps in the flags now. Grass growing through. You can still see the line of it, but the line is becoming optional.

You have to understand what the Overhang looks like at murkfall. The drop to the right becomes invisible — you can hear the river below but the light has collapsed below the valley rim and what's down there is just darkness with water sounds in it. The canopy to the left closes over the path. The murk comes in from the northwest, which is where it always comes from, and it moves along the valley rather than across it, so the effect is of walking through something that is slowly filling from ahead of you. The murk along the valley carried with it the temperature of what it had passed through, and what it had passed through that evening was not warm. This is important context. I'm not describing it for atmosphere. I'm describing it because the atmosphere is what made me think, initially, that I was observing something benign.

I was about three hundred metres along the Overhang when I saw the first one.

Small bird, on the low stone wall to my right. The size and general shape of something you'd catalogue as a yellow-wagtail and not look at twice. Tail moving in the characteristic way, that vertical pump that off-world ornithologists spend an enormous amount of time theorising about and that here, as I have since learned, serves a function considerably more operational than temperature regulation. In the murk, at that level of light, I noted the tail movement, registered it as a wagtail, thought briefly about the off-world version and how pleasant it was in comparison, and kept walking.

Then I stopped.

The tail tip was glowing. Faintly. A soft pulse, almost imperceptible in murklight, but at this level — there. Each wag producing a fractional bioluminescent flare at the tip, dying quickly, occurring again. Once every two seconds, roughly. I stood and watched it for perhaps thirty seconds. It did not move. It watched me back, which I noticed only after I'd been standing there long enough to feel conscious of being observed, and observed the eyes: void-black, oversized for the skull, set slightly too far forward. The beak was fractionally open. I could not see what was at the tip.

I consulted my field notes. I read the relevant entry. I looked up.

There were three more on the wall to my right. A fifth in the lower branches of the nearest tree. The first one was still watching me. I counted the pulses at the tip of the first one's tail: one, two, three — each wag coming in roughly at one per two seconds. Resting rate. The relevant entry in my notes, which I had written based on Van's account and cross-referenced against two other field observations, was very specific on this point. Resting rate, one pulse per two seconds, means approximately one other individual aware of the same target in proximity.

I looked at the five visible birds and revised my arithmetic upward.

The thing is, I still had a job to do. The coordinator had been paying at the rate that suggests genuine urgency, and the packet was time-sensitive, and I was already three hundred metres along a path I'd committed to. I applied the sort of reasoning that sounds sensible in the moment and reveals itself as motivated thinking approximately forty-five minutes later. The wagtails, I reasoned, were present along the whole path. The scout had presumably passed them. The scout had presumably been continuing along the path rather than standing very still at a wall watching birds count their companions, which is what I was doing. Motion might be better than stasis. I should keep moving.

I kept moving.

The birds watched me go. The pulse rate on the nearest one ticked up fractionally. I kept walking.

I found the scout's kit about a hundred and fifty metres further on, at the point where the path curves slightly away from the drop and runs under the heaviest section of canopy. A field pack, lying on its side against the base of the wall. Not thrown — set down, with the careful placement of someone who had put it down deliberately and intended to come back for it. The buckles were closed. The oilcloth packet was in the outer pocket, still sealed. I confirmed the seal against the wax mark the coordinator had described. I put the packet in my own kit.

I did not look too carefully at the rest of the pack's contents, or at the state of the stones immediately around where it had been lying. I made a note. I will tell you only that the entry wound would not have been visible from the front, which is consistent with what the relevant field entry says about how the curlbeak hunts, and that the damage to the flagstone underneath suggested a significant downward force from height.

I mention this because it informed my subsequent decision-making.

I had closed my kit and was standing up when I heard the first call.

It came from the canopy overhead and to the left. A falling three-note phrase — hollow, the notes spaced slightly too far apart, as if produced by something that had learned to approximate birdsong but was working from a description rather than an instinct. The phrase fell: first note, pause, second note, longer pause, third note. Then silence.

I stood very still.

You have to understand what it costs to stand very still on a path where you have just found evidence of what happens to people who were presumably also trying to stand very still. You do the maths, you apply the information you have, and you decide that stillness is the response the situation calls for, and then you are still, and the stillness is the most expensive thing you have ever paid for.

The second call came from my right. From the direction of the drop. From, in other words, a position that the creature could only have reached by moving between the first call and the second, which is the point of the second call, which is what the second call communicates.

Silence after the second call means optimal distance has been reached.

I am going to be honest with you: I did not breathe for approximately ten seconds after the second call. I stood on the path in the canopy-dark at murkfall with a courier's packet in my kit and five wagtails on the wall to my right with their tail-pulses elevated and somewhere above and behind me a curlbeak that was communicating its own readiness to itself, and I did the most constructive thing I could think of, which was nothing, and I waited for a third call, and there was no third call, and I understood the relevant entry in my notes well enough to know that this was not good news.

I moved. I did not run. Running produces sound and movement, and movement on that path drops you forty feet to the river if your foot finds the wrong gap in the flagging. I moved at the fastest pace that permitted me to see where my feet were going and I did not look up at the canopy and I did not look back at the pack lying by the wall. The wagtails tracked me along the wall as I passed them. Their pulse rate had settled back toward resting.

I came around the final curve of the Overhang and there was the junction, the path widening back to the proper route, the Wisewood track going south, the upper valley road going north, the murk from the northwest settling across the open ground. I stopped at the junction marker and looked back along the path.

The xaexs was at the canopy edge where the Overhang ends, perhaps eighty metres away. Standing. Looking at me. Eight feet of insectoid stillness in the failing light, four arms at rest, which is also the fighting stance. I could see the compound eyes from eighty metres. I noted — and I'm aware this is the kind of noting that a person does when they are frightened and the fear has resolved into an odd, attentive calm — that it had positioned itself at exactly the point where the path becomes proper road, and it had not crossed that line. Whether this represented a territory boundary, a considered decision about jurisdiction, or something else entirely, I cannot say.

It watched me for perhaps five seconds. Then it turned and walked back into the canopy. It did not hurry. The wagtails marked that too — each tail-pulse steady, each wag counting the departure with the same indifference they'd shown my own, as if they had never needed to distinguish between something leaving and something returning.

I delivered the packet to the coordinator the following murkrise. He confirmed the seal, counted my pay, did not ask what the Overhang looked like. I did not tell him about the scout's pack, though I described its location clearly enough that he would know where to send someone to retrieve it or confirm what I already knew about its former contents. He took this information with the flatness of a man receiving confirmation of something he had already understood when he hired me.

The thing that stays with me — and I'll be honest, quite a lot of things stay with me about that evening, is the question of why the xaexs let me leave. There are two answers. The first is that I was below its threshold: too small a target, too little return. The second is that it had already eaten, and the return was therefore genuinely insufficient. I have turned these two answers over and concluded that they are equally unwelcome, that neither of them constitutes good news about my standing in The Dark Peak food chain, and that the question of which one is correct is something I have decided, for the sake of ongoing functional daily life, not to resolve.

The wagtails were still on the wall when I walked back the next murkrise to confirm the coordinates for the coordinator. Their pulse rate was at resting. One per two seconds, steady. I counted, as you do. I stood at the safe end of the path and counted, and I did not go back onto the Overhang, and whatever else was true that murkrise, the count was at resting, and I was grateful for that, and I went home.

— Pip Rippon, field notes, The Nags Head, Loxley

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