by F. G. Cottam
‘What’s that noise?’
There was a rhythmic, booming sound coming from somewhere below them.
‘Next door,’ Dawn said. ‘Remedial work. What do you want?’
Andrew didn’t know what remedial meant. He just knew that next door’s work sounded pretty close. He said, ‘I’d like the name of the hospital and ward Pete’s in. I want to send him a card.’
‘Have you got the card on you?’
‘Haven’t bought it yet.’
‘When you do, bring it round. I’ll take it on my next visit, save you the postage.’
‘That’s kind of you, Dawn.’
‘I know. I’m all heart.’
Except that Dawn didn’t look all heart to Andrew. She looked shrewd and suspicious and maybe also slightly amused. She was also much easier on the eye than he’d ever previously noticed. Noticing now made it a bit difficult to concentrate. He was having the sort of thoughts about her he would end up having to confess to Father Gould.
‘Terrible about Mrs Mahoney,’ Andrew said.
‘Tragic,’ Dawn said. ‘But she was quite overweight.’
There’d been a note about the death of Mrs Mahoney taped to the locked school gate that morning to the right of the notice announcing the school’s closure. On it had been a xeroxed snapshot of the teacher. It had looked to Andrew like a holiday snap.
The remedial work, whatever that meant, continued. It sounded like one of those pneumatic hammers used by council workmen to pound pavements flat. Dawn hadn’t sat, and Andrew hadn’t been invited to do so. He didn’t really want to be offered a cold drink from the fridge or a cup of tea or coffee. The kitchen had a sort of derelict look. And that fish tank smelled more rank the longer he stayed. And though Dawn was generally much more alluring than he remembered, the bandage oozing blood on her upper arm was undeniably gross.
There was a funny atmosphere in Pete and Dawn’s grandpa’s place. Though Andrew thought ‘peculiar’ a better word than ‘funny’. It gave him a feeling he had only ever experienced when a fast lift descended from one of the upper floors of a tall building. It was a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that had him clenching his bum and his fists. It was uncomfortable, and he couldn’t make it go away or stop. And he was beginning to feel confined in there. Trapped, even.
‘I’d better go, Dawn. My mum’s expecting me back.’
‘Of course she is, Andy. Drop that card around at ten o’clock tomorrow morning, will you? WH Smith do a nice range and they open at eight a.m. so you’ll have plenty of time to choose.’
‘I’ll just stick it through your letterbox. Don’t really want to trouble you again.’
‘Whatever.’
Dawn Jackson showed him to the door.
She closed it on him with a sigh. The Great Dane had been her brother Pete, who had moved with unexpected and ferocious speed in taking a chunk out of her right bicep and then swallowing the flesh. She’d managed to lure him into the cellar afterwards only by dangling a raw lump of beefsteak and walking backwards down the stairs in case he pounced again.
She’d dropped the meat on to the cellar floor. He’d dropped on to all fours to eat it and she’d yanked out a hank of his hair, which he hadn’t even seemed to notice. Then, as he ate, she’d barricaded the cellar door with a chair, its back wedged under the doorknob.
She’d still had that hank of her dead brother’s hair in her hand when Handy Andy knocked, on his touching quest to earn a bit of breathing space from damnation. He was an altar boy like her brother had been, and so of course went in for all that pious crap. Though she was now totally convinced that Pete had been bang to rights about bringing people back without a soul. At best, they were disappointingly incomplete.
Now she went to get the hair from where she’d hastily hidden it, in an unused sugar bowl in the cupboard. She was going to burn it and recite the spell that caused people to lose parts of their body. That bite was going to cost her brother his head. That was her intention, anyway. Pete might carry on living, headless, as the Freddy precedent had proven was possible. But headless, he wouldn’t be able to bite her again.
It was all a bit of a bore, Dawn thought; the novelty of magic wore off rather rapidly. There were unexpected repercussions. That said, she was a bit like a learner driver at the wheel of a car, wasn’t she? The perfect three-point-turn or precise angle necessary for parallel parking came only with practice. And she was buoyed by the death of Mrs Mahoney. But for the two-paracetamol headache after singing the deadly lullaby and the accompanying feeling of weariness, that, she considered, had been completely and utterly cool.
She went to fetch the book from the place where she now habitually hid it. Once she’d performed the lopping-off spell, she’d look for another that would heal her bitten arm. It was throbbing and still oozing blood under the bandage. And she was running a temperature that would only get higher without intervention. The wound was infected. But she was confident that the book would work much more quickly than a course of antibiotics.
ELEVEN
Juliet reached her hotel room at just after nine thirty in the evening. She ordered a room service dinner and bottle of lager to wash it down with. Her preferred tipple was white wine, her habitual choice Chablis, but she needed a clear head the following morning, not the self-inflicted handicap of a hangover. And the Germans did happen to do lager rather well.
She switched on the TV and tuned it to Sky News in English. Pockets of rioting had broken out in London. There’d been a sprinkling of arson attacks on shops and cars, and some looting. Juliet didn’t think this an Augury. This was just the response of a frightened and frustrated population to events over which they had no control and for which they could find no rational explanation. It was an unhelpful response, but rioters were disinclined to see things that way.
The rioting wasn’t an Augury. But Juliet thought that what had impeded the rioting – and then stopped it altogether – was. A fog had covered London. It had spread as far as those parts of Surrey nearest the capital. It was thick and noxious, a dirty yellowish colour, sulphurous and choking, almost like a chemical spillage, the news reporter was saying into a microphone from behind the handkerchief tied bandit-fashion around the lower half of his face.
Meteorologically, it was so far inexplicable. It hadn’t descended on the city. Witnesses to the start of it were saying it had ascended, and spread, from the river.
Juliet had been lucky. All flights from London City and Heathrow and Gatwick had now been grounded indefinitely. She’d felt quite alone before hearing that, in the cab taking her from the airport to her hotel. But hearing it now increased her sense of isolation still further.
What fresh calamity would follow the fog once it lifted? How long would it take for people generally to start linking these weird phenomena with the toll on human lives that followed? The bad news was that fifty-six of the plague outbreak victims had died. The good news was that the rest were responding to treatment and the epidemiologists had the spread under control. But at a price, in that the whole of Whitechapel had been quarantined. There was now no getting in – or out – of one of the most vibrant and prosperous areas of the capital.
There was already an End Times character to what some of the more prominent clergy, particularly the evangelicals, were saying publicly. And people were leaving London. Nobody could say accurately how many had gone. But the tube trains and buses rolled along empty. Work absenteeism had risen by 40 per cent. Tourists were cancelling by the thousands, maybe by the millions. Plague outbreaks and sightseeing didn’t exactly go hand in hand. The only people readily taking to the streets now, it seemed, were those intent on mischief.
Two hours after seeing that first bulletin Juliet got into bed, more tired than she could ever remember having felt before. She thought about the following morning and the Keller archive. Her own German was pretty rudimentary, but they were sending along a German national who worked at the British Embassy to translate for her. H
alf of what Keller had written had been done in Latin. But this translator was an expert linguist. She hoped he was also a nice man, someone easy to get along with. She’d had enough over the past eighteen months of fractious men such as Martin fucking Doyle.
Just before she fell asleep, Juliet’s last conscious thought concerned the Marchioness disaster. She’d been six years old when that occurred but still remembered the anguished mood of the time, the outpouring of public grief and widespread anger and bewilderment. She’d been at school then in Wandsworth. She thought about that seven-year-old boy, Joshua Porter, aboard the Esmeralda. She thought about an A&E department swamped with the sick and dying. And she wondered what would next befall the capital, unable to guess but gloomily sure that it would be something terrible.
Just what that was, she discovered the following morning as soon as she woke and tuned into Sky News. The fog had cleared, so the carnage at the scene was vividly apparent through the camera lens in a chilling tracking shot and then a devastating close-up. Because of the fog, the riots had petered out the previous evening. But it would not now be remembered for that. All flights out of the region’s airports had been grounded. But there were still the incoming flights, and one of those hadn’t turned back.
Something had gone wrong with the aircraft’s electronics, and communication with it from the ground hadn’t been possible. Perhaps it hadn’t had the fuel to turn back by the point in its flight when the fault was discovered. Probably continuing on its journey had been a calculated gamble. If so, it was a gamble that hadn’t paid off.
The aircraft was a 747, a Jumbo Jet. It had strayed off course and descended too low. Without a fully functioning flight computer, the pilot must have flown into the fog completely blind. At least the passengers would have had no warning, Juliet reasoned. At least there would have been no fear or panic, or even any trepidation, before that moment of colossal impact.
Flight 201 from Chicago had crashed into the Thames Barrier. The aircraft and the central section of the barrier were both virtually unrecognizable as what they’d been. The area now was just a tangle of metal and flung debris, still smoking from the inferno of flame sparked by the collision. The shiny metal of the barrier – where it still stood – was smoke-blackened, despoiled, like huge, rotten teeth, giant human molars gaping out of the water.
‘A flood will follow,’ Juliet said to the TV. It was early summer, June, and the English weather was predictably fine, but if the curious, petulant, profoundly self-interested soul using the Almanac continued to do so, she thought, the rains would come, and they’d persist. The tide would surge and London would drown, consumed by water. And people would drown, and those that didn’t drown would panic and it would seem with this litany of catastrophe that the End Times really were upon them. And prophecies were self-fulfilling, weren’t they?
She switched off the TV and showered and dressed casually. She had an early breakfast meeting with Paul Beck, her translator. She would brief him fully on what it was they were looking for.
When she got to the café that was their rendezvous point and first shared destination, it had only just opened and there was a solitary customer, a rangy man of about thirty, sunglasses pushed up into his longish blond hair and wearing a leather jacket and jeans and a pair of engineer boots. She thought a professional footballer or track athlete, one who would have no trouble attracting the advertising endorsements. She looked at her wristwatch. Her embassy translator was late. It wasn’t an auspicious start.
Until the blond man got up from his table and strolled across to her smiling. He held out his hand to shake hers in formal greeting and introduced himself as Paul Beck.
TWELVE
Provisionally, they’d said that her school would reopen a week after the plague outbreak that had closed all London schools. On this basis, Dawn Jackson realized that she needed to take a break from the book of spells she had discovered in her grandfather’s attic. She had English literature essays to write on the fiction of C.S. Lewis and Robert Louis Stevenson. She had a maths paper to prepare for, the specific subject geometry. A vocabulary test had been scheduled in Spanish, a language with far fewer words than English boasted, but a subject she had rather neglected. She was proud of being a part of the school’s Special Study Group and didn’t want to jeopardize that status.
Her private thinking on the Narnia books was that they were sentimental slop and that Treasure Island wasn’t very much better, Long John Silver too much of a wuss to be a proper pirate. But the public Dawn would enthuse about these works rather than confound her teacher’s expectations. Trial and error had taught her that people generally were too soft-hearted to respond well to what they saw as negativity.
She hadn’t visited the cellar since completing the lopping-off spell intended to prevent her dead brother from being able to bite her again. She had successfully restored her arm to how it had been before. The headache afterwards had been relatively minor and the fatigue only a dull and temporary ache. She had stolen down to the cellar door and heard scuttling movement, so assumed he was still animate in some way. But the hammering at the door had stopped completely.
There was food down there. Dawn assumed this was as a consequence of her grandpa’s having lived as a young child through the Second World War. He had experienced rationing and this, at an impressionable age, had made him a hoarder in adulthood. There were cans of boiled ham and corned beef and sardines and pilchards down there, the sort of vile produce old people ate. And there were piled pallets of bottles of bitter lemon and lemonade. Probably past their sell-by dates. And quite how someone without a head would eat, Dawn didn’t really know. But the scuttling sounds from behind the cellar door suggested that what remained of Pete was surviving, at least for the time being. And no longer trying to get out, which was a relief. After seeing what became of Freddy the terrapin, she really didn’t want to see what had become now of her brother.
Had she made him a monster? She thought that she probably had. But she’d put the silent kitchen-table rebuke of his unfinished Airfix model in the bin and felt much better for no longer having to look at it.
She’d had to chuck away the get-well card duly delivered by Handy Andy Baxter first thing that morning. That too had given her guilt pangs about Pete and what she’d done to him. She’d shot him only on a whim, out of curiosity to see just how powerful the spell book was. He hadn’t been the perfect brother, he’d been too dull intellectually to be that. But he’d been company, however lacklustre, and with Grandpa gone she felt alone in a way that didn’t feel terribly pleasant.
There was a passage long enough to register as a chapter in the spell book about making a companion. It was a bit vague about the shape this companion would take and not terribly clear as to its actual origin. Or its character. Or, to be honest, its intentions once you brought it into the world. Despite the setbacks with Freddy and Pete, Dawn remained optimistic. Her arm had healed completely and without apparent side effects. Mrs Mahoney had died neatly and emphatically in her sleep as planned. The pros and cons were probably, so far at least, about even.
Dawn had noticed that London had recently become rather accident prone. Because she absolutely wasn’t on the spectrum, because she took an interest in the exterior world, she was aware of the Esmeralda tragedy. She’d taken an interest in the plague outbreak. The Jumbo air crash was all over the news. In a sense, these events provided welcome distractions. They preoccupied people generally. In this climate, questions about her brother’s continued absenteeism were not going to be at the forefront of the meddlers’ minds when school reopened.
With less to distract them, she thought that the neighbours might have noticed by now that her grandfather no longer seemed to be around. In ordinary circumstances, she thought that a social worker might have knocked on the door as the consequence of a tip-off. But the circumstances were far from ordinary and personally, Dawn felt grateful for that.
She went out and paid for a thick sheet of poly
thene and a role of strong adhesive tape from a hardware store. She very carefully wrapped the spell book when she got home. Then she fetched a spade from the garden shed and dug a hole at the centre of the lawn her grandfather had so assiduously tended before his death. She dug to a depth of about two feet and tamped the base of the hole flat, placed the book in it and filled the hole in.
Dawn had been careful to cut and roll back the turf rather than damage it with the spade, so that when she replaced it, only a slight depression in the ground at the spot signalled that anything had been done there at all.
Dawn didn’t feel denuded of power, as she’d expected to, in the absence of the spell book. This was because she now knew some of her favourite spells by heart and didn’t need a prompt or reference to put them into effect. Should it become necessary to blind someone or have someone die in their sleep, she could do that now entirely independent of the book.
There was one slight anomaly she hadn’t understood. After she had shot her brother dead and was seated on the floor in front of his corpse studying the ritual that would revive him, he’d suddenly and quite spontaneously started to writhe like an eel, his limbs sort of juddering and breath whistling out of his dead lungs. It had stopped after less than a minute, this movement, but had still struck her as strange.
And then she’d remembered the phenomenon of the unrestful dead and what had happened at the graveside at the funeral at which Pete had served. This happened around corpses when you’d been in contact with the book. Like radioactivity or something.
Her school was a small one and all the pupils above the age of twelve had been invited to attend Mrs Mahoney’s funeral. In ordinary circumstances, Dawn would have gone. She liked funerals. Grief wasn’t supposed to be a spectator sport, but she enjoyed seeing those ungovernable outpourings of emotion loss provoked. They were strange and interesting.
She’d have to give this one a miss, though. She didn’t want to provoke Mrs Mahoney into dancing in her coffin like Beyoncé did onstage. It wasn’t something suited to the occasion. Funerals were supposed to be dignified, even solemn, events.