The Auguries

by F. G. Cottam

  She didn’t have a photo of Handy Andy’s parents, but Dawn thought she could probably take their picture without them seeing her do so if she stalked the library on one of those evenings Andy’s dad gave his mum a lift home from her volunteer job there. She could do it using the phone for which her brother no longer had any practical use. Then Dawn could make Andy an orphan and he’d have to go into a home just because he hadn’t had the sheer resourcefulness she possessed in such abundance.

  There were other spells she could inflict on Andy. If she made a sketch of a spinning top and posted it to him, then recited the quite simple liturgy, he would have a permanent problem with his equilibrium. He would lose his balance for the rest of his unbalanced life to the point where he literally wouldn’t be able to stand up without immediately falling down. He’d careen around like a delinquent dodgem at a funfair, and that would be genuinely funny. Probably a single Nurofen spell.

  Or there was the hunger spell, which was a bit more serious. She’d have to send him some vomit for that, probably most practically in one of those bubble-wrap-lined envelopes they sold at WH Smith. Then every time he ate he’d throw up, until the moment he perished, having starved to death. Death by starvation was notoriously agonizing so that was obviously quite a tempting one to inflict. Except that Dawn could only acquire puke by puking personally, which she really didn’t fancy at all. And it would probably take Diazepam to deal with the fallout.

  There were some very simple spells that would seriously inconvenience Andy on a permanent basis. There was one which caused in its subject’s mind, whenever or wherever they were walking, the delusion that they were barefoot on a bed of nails. Almost as medieval as the lopping-off spell, but effective nevertheless. Two aspirin? One paracetamol? Very tempting.

  Speculating on getting her revenge on Andy Baxter got Dawn quite excited. And that made her think there might be another way altogether of doing it that didn’t have to involve any magic. She’d heard that adolescent boys thought about sex, on average, about every five seconds. They were completely obsessed by the subject. She’d seen the way he’d looked at her the day he’d knocked on the door asking for the hospital address when Pete had suffered the imaginary bout of meningitis Dawn had given him. He’d looked at her in that pervy way grown men sometimes looked at grown women.

  She could call him and lure him around with some seductive half promises. Dawn had not personally felt the stirring of any sexual impulses, but she could pretend to convincingly, she knew.

  Except that Pete had told her ages ago that Handy Andy regularly confessed his sins to that nice Father Gould. That was a sobering disincentive to any sort of hanky-panky, wasn’t it? Maybe not, if the hanky-panky was just a bullet in the temple from the attic Luger before using the disappearing spell to make Andy’s incriminating corpse vanish completely. No Andy, no confession to Father Gould. And no body, no murder conviction. Dawn knew that from the Netflix crime dramas she sometimes watched on TV.

  But Dawn truthfully felt rather torn. And that was where the dilemma occurred. Much as she wanted to get even with Handy Andy Baxter, she also very much wanted to see if she could pull off the spell that created a new life out of nothing. It was the most complex and ambitious ritual in the book. It required great concentration, total focus. Offing Andy would be satisfying, even fun; but it wouldn’t give her the same sense of accomplishment that creating life would.

  She’d read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in her Special Studies Group. She’d had her own recent experiences with her grandpa and her brother. She knew that restoring someone, reanimating them, was a process that could go seriously pear-shaped. But creating a life? It was a clean slate, wasn’t it? What could possibly go wrong with that?

  ‘So much magic, so little time,’ Dawn said out loud.

  She’d had that feeling for a few days. It was a sort of inkling, or instinct, that some kind of conclusion was coming to all this. On the television, Russia had declared war on two neighbouring countries. Israel had invaded Jordan, which was fighting back furiously. Only eleventh-hour peace brokering had stopped the Chinese navy taking on the American Pacific Fleet. And that treaty looked unlikely to hold. There was anarchy in the sub-Saharan African states, where dozens of seriously pissed-off tribal groups were all armed with Kalashnikovs. Sweden was in the process of building internment camps for its militant Muslim population. Norway was threatening to follow suit. Nobody was calling it that, but a race war was being waged in South Africa. Turmoil, Dawn thought, all over the world. People were openly talking about the End Times.

  London was practically a ghost town. Well, ghost city, because of its size. But its size on the TV made it look terribly empty. Distinctly short on population, apart from the high piles of decaying corpses no one was clearing up because of the exponential risk of disease.

  Would one more spell, even a complex and ambitious spell, really do that much damage? Dawn was familiar with the saying that there was no point crying over spilled milk. She was familiar too with the one suggesting that you might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. She agreed with both sentiments. She thought in the end it might come down to the toss of a coin. Getting even with Handy Andy, or creating a life out of thin air.

  She was in the kitchen, musing on all this. She was watching images on the TV with the sound turned down. She knew that there were swathes of what had once been the capital which had been without power since before the flood. Water and electricity apparently didn’t mix. But her area was mostly OK. There’d been a couple of outages, but their supply had been quite quickly restored. It was evidence to Dawn that some people were still trying to convince themselves that things would eventually return to normal. She’d come privately to the conclusion that they were wrong. It was the reason she had stopped revising and dug the spell book back up.

  The images on the TV screen were apocalyptic. There was no other word, really. People were dying on a Malthusian scale and had been ever since that weird eclipse and then the sinking on the Thames with all hands of the Esmeralda. That had been the beginning of it, Dawn thought, looking back. And the Esmeralda sinking had been such a small-time event, in retrospect, that you could almost feel nostalgic about it.

  The book was on the table at which she sat. Its vellum cover was plain, wordless, benign. The book gave off the slight musty smell of centuries of age. It didn’t honestly look much, closed, in repose. It almost looked innocent.

  Movement through the kitchen window caught her eye. He was there again, the angry looking man with the terrible haircut who wore a garment like a belted cassock and was shod in boots without laces. He was from the past, she knew. He was from history, though his part in history might well have gone unrecorded. Was he a ghost? He looked more solid than before, more substantial. She could no longer see the bricks of the back garden wall through his body. He looked almost real, to Dawn. And then he raised his bowed head and beckoned to her.

  Curious, she opened the back door and went outside. The garden smelled of summer; of sun-warmed grass and scent-sweet flowers. But there was something else. It was an odour sweet and bitter at the same time, and Dawn knew what it was. It was the scent of the smoke drifting from the fires deliberately lit by the looters and rioters who were all that was left of London’s population in the inner-city lowlands to the south of where she stood.

  She knew that he would speak to her, this time. But it was still a shock when he did. His voice was a rusty echo, more like something remembered than something happening now. And he spoke to her in Latin.

  ‘You must desist,’ he said.

  ‘Who are you? Who were you?’

  ‘It matters not. I beg you to desist.’

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘Recompense. Remorse. Repentance. Attempting, after all this time, only to save my soul.’

  The figure before her shimmered then, roiling a bit like smoke from a fire rising and twisting in the flue. And Dawn knew that the effort involved in this was e
normous, for this man. And that soon he would be gone and would be unable to return. What he was doing, his being here, was unsustainable.

  ‘How did you die?’

  ‘Badly. Deservedly. It matters not. Desist.’

  ‘Spoilsport.’

  He raised his eyes to her. They were pale and sightless. His skin was cratered with scars. When he opened his mouth she saw that his teeth were black with decay. He said, ‘You sport with your world.’

  He faded then; he struggled not to, but slowly disappeared from sight despite himself, and was gone. Dawn guessed he’d been something to do with the spell book, possibly even its author. In life he’d been someone capable of powerful magic, but in death, after all this time, the magic had dissipated. It was still a pretty good trick, coming back centuries after your death and then eventually being capable of communicating with someone living. But Dawn didn’t think she’d take his advice. She didn’t think for a moment that she would desist. She wasn’t at all the desisting type. And she was not in the habit, either, of taking advice from ghosts.

  FORTY-FOUR

  The trawler put out of Fleetwood Harbour quite close to dusk. Its skipper was a twenty-three-year-old man named Alan Turner. Alan was fourth or fifth generation, fishing was what he’d grown up with, the job less of an occupation than a family custom carried out with an air of contented inevitability. It could be hard in the winter, and was tough on social life for a man of his age because the fish were less elusive prey at night. But he was not apt to complain. Complaining was what farmers did. He had his own boat and was his own boss and the fishing suited his temperament.

  Conditions were calm. The night was mild and the forecast unthreatening. Weather could change very quickly at sea and often worsened severely and without warning over a short space of time. Alan didn’t expect it to do that tonight. But he was prepared if it did. The craft he was aboard was properly seaworthy, a resilient little vessel, a former tugboat converted for its current role by the fitting of a hoist for the nets and some imaginative welding. The Marnie chugged into open water with a throaty purr Alan thought would be music to any nautical mechanic’s ears.

  His crew numbered two men. They were Phil Halsall and Joe Palmer. They were older than he was, in their thirties, but he wasn’t so authoritarian a boss that they rankled at his style of captaincy. He didn’t need to order them to do anything, really. They were sufficiently experienced to know what to do without being told. Crewing a fishing vessel was all they’d ever done and the only living either man had ever sought to earn.

  The Marnie travelled at about eight knots. They were in no hurry. The best fishing to be had was about twelve miles offshore. But there was no point burning fuel unnecessarily in a rush to get to where they’d lower and tow their nets. Their progress was leisurely, the wake gentle at their stern, and the setting sun turned the water a pink that would deepen to crimson before the orb disappeared and left them in moonlit darkness.

  Summer wavelets hit the side of their boat with a somnambulant slap. The craft pitched and rolled with the sort of gentle motion that had non-seafarers retching green-complexioned over the gunwale and into the water. These men were almost unaware of the movement. They were veteran sailors, afloat regularly since their teens. They respected the sea. It was a capricious element and could be deadly too. They’d each of them lost friends and shipmates to maritime tragedy. But they were relaxed enough on a serene and lovely evening.

  Alan felt glad to get off the land. It was easier a few miles out to sea to pretend that matters were still normal. The London rioting, before the city emptied into the New Forest refugee camp, had proven to be contagious. It had spread to Southampton and Plymouth and Reading. Then it had spread to Birmingham and Leeds. And then to Liverpool and Manchester.

  There was talk of the government resigning en masse. It was Alan’s personal point of view that the Home Secretary, David Anderson, was the only senior politician with the brains and backbone for the job. The only member of the Cabinet with the right combination of calmness and leadership quality. Though he hadn’t shared that thought with either Phil or Joe. Discussion of politics was a great way for a boat crew to fall out with one another spectacularly.

  He’d had a conversation about the wider situation with his new wife, Valerie, only that morning over breakfast. They’d been married for just over six months and Valerie was keen on starting a family. Valerie was a lecturer at the Open University and worked via computer from home. She could work through her pregnancy and return to work quickly if she wished to after the child was born.

  Recent years had been good to Alan. The catches had been profitable enough and he worked hard and had quite a bit put by. They could afford to start a family. But money wasn’t the point.

  ‘We can’t bring a child into this world, Val.’

  ‘We’re talking a minimum of nine months, Alan. Things will surely have calmed down.’

  ‘Or they’ll have got worse.’

  ‘If they get much worse it’ll all be over. Does anyone really want that?’

  ‘I suppose not. Except for the real fanatics. But no one seems to know how to stop it, Val.’

  ‘It’s bloody depressing.’

  ‘And scary.’

  Alan had stopped then. He’d seen the tears in his wife’s eyes. Escalation didn’t only apply to the international crisis. Escalation could happen at his own kitchen table. He’d got the new wife he still couldn’t believe he’d successfully wooed off the subject of a baby and on to something else less fraught.

  They talked about the degree results her mature students were currently getting, how well some of them had done. Alan thought, following their unspoken coda, that this was not the time really to think about a fresh start or launching a second career. Normality would have to return to make a university degree a thing of relevance again.

  Now, surrounded by the serenity of a calm sea, the situation on land seemed surreal, like a nightmare or a hallucinatory experience. Post-traumatic stress or a batch of bad acid. An experience endurable only because it was temporary and not real. Except that the world was their only reality and it was swiftly falling apart.

  Alan was in the wheelhouse, piloting the craft almost by rote. He could navigate easily just by noting the position of the prow in relation to the setting sun. There was a binnacle-mount compass next to where he stood. Or he could navigate on the return leg in darkness, on a clear night, from the position of the stars.

  At first, Alan thought the slight misting he’d begun to be aware of was just smearing on the glass pane through which he watched the sea, steering their course. A job for a bottle of Mr Muscle and a clean rag. Then Phil came up from where he’d been repairing a torn net below and said that a mist was coming up.

  ‘Coming up?’

  ‘It’s rising from the surface of the sea, skipper. It’s bloody unusual. And it’s got very warm, suddenly. Almost unbearable down below, that heat.’

  Alan engaged the auto-steer and stepped out on to the deck and was immediately aware of how warm the air felt. He’d experienced British heatwaves, but this was close to dusk and like stepping off the plane on to a broiling runway somewhere like Antigua or Barbados. Out at sea was always, always cooler than on land. That was a fixed law, an article of nature. The combination of water and wind made it so. This was more than strange. It was bizarre.

  And Phil was right. That mist was rising from the sea. Except that Alan didn’t think it was mist in reality at all.

  Just then something plopped to the surface and rolled lazily in water starting to bubble. It was a large flounder and it looked cooked, poached, and other fish were rising all around it to the surface; bloated, also cooked, dead. The smell of them was rich and overpowering and profoundly wrong.

  ‘What the fuck, skipper,’ Phil said to Alan, almost under his breath, wide-eyed with astonishment and fear. ‘The sea is boiling.’

  Alan Turner bolted back into the wheelhouse and switched on the radio. The
airwaves were thick with the clamour of panicked voices. They came from men aboard vessels off Padstow and Ventnor and Barmouth and Hull. Off Brixham and Lowestoft and Whitby. All around the coast, the sea simmered under a rising blanket of steam.

  FORTY-FIVE

  ‘Clarify something for me,’ Paul said. His eyes were on the computer monitor mounted in the carrel Juliet had used researching Major Creed’s SAS unit. ‘Are the Auguries the phenomena that occur prior to the disasters, or are they the disasters themselves?’ He was listening to a BBC news bulletin, looking at footage of vessels returning to seething harbours through clouds of vapour, appearing out of it first in outline and then etched in detail like ghost ships crewed by sweat-lathered sailors mostly stripped to their underwear.

  ‘They’re the precursors,’ Juliet said.

  ‘Then I’d say we’ve a major disaster coming,’ he said. ‘“Looming” might be a better word.’

  ‘Unless we nullify the Almanac. That might prevent it from happening.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘They’re not natural events. They’re apocalyptic. It was Gunter Keller’s intention to trigger the End Times. I think if we sow the book with salt, as he said to, it will lose its potency. The disasters will stop.’

  Paul was quiet. ‘Some of the ships have broken up and sunk,’ he said. ‘Some have drifted back with dead crews who’ve just succumbed to the heat. I think your salt theory might only be wishful thinking.’