The Miscreant leaped back, pulling the string from King’s hand. He ran, but Leah dived after him and brought him down by the ankle, and the others piled straight on top of him. Leah jumped up off the scorching ground and pinned his leg down. Barto bucked on the other one and Tabatha and King took care of arms and torso. ‘It’s too late. It’s too late,’ Tabatha said grimly into the man’s ear. ‘Where do you think you would run to?’
Still he struggled. ‘Bloody hell,’ said Barto, almost thrown off the leg. He took a firmer hold. ‘Strong! Who would’ve thought such a flabby old thing—’
The Miscreant bucked and rippled again.
‘How can he stand it? He must be burning all down his front—’
‘You know what will stop this?’ Leah hissed at Barto. ‘Grabbing him by the nuts. Bags you do it.’
‘Bags I don’t.’
‘Go on.’ This was almost funny. Leah was almost laughing. ‘You’re the boy.’
‘Eesh, I’m not grabbing some old feller’s nuts!’
‘Here.’ A firesuit came up. ‘Move aside,’ it said in a muffled voice. ‘I’ll pitchfork him.’
Gently he lowered his spike-points onto the Miscreant’s back.
‘That’s better.’ Tabatha gingerly climbed off the captive.
They all slid off him. King took up the string again. ‘Now don’t try that again,’ he said. ‘This man will happily poke you straight into the fire like a marshmallow on a stick.’
They helped the Miscreant up. He was crying now; his front was all red, flecked with black from the ground. His face was terrible, all crumpled and slavery like that, and with its injuries.
‘Please, please,’ he said. ‘Oh no, please!’
He could hardly use his legs. He was extremely heavy. They dragged him towards the lid. It was a little way open now. Something moved in the smoke like a dark sea anemone. Trying to see it more clearly, Leah felt holes open in the Outer’s greyness, which shrank somewhat on her mind, at the touch of a realisation, and with the realisation, feeling.
For they were hands, all those movements, blood-red hands on the blood-streaked, steaming arms of the Damned. In a frenzy they waved and clutched at the Outer’s air, they pawed the lid and the ground; they left prints; they wet and reddened the rock with their slaps and slidings.
The firesuits stood well back from the opening. Any hand that found a grip they prodded until it flinched back into the waving mass, into the high suffering howl of Hell.
The Miscreant pressed back into his escort; Leah couldn’t hear him for machine-noise and screaming, but she felt the horror as if he were squeezing it out like a sponge, as if she were taking it up like a sponge, a grey, dry sponge soaking up juice and colour. Suddenly Barto’s face was open, lively; suddenly there was a vigour in Tabatha’s bracing herself to push, in King’s new grasp on the Miscreant’s upper arm. Leah pulled in a great noseful of the dreadful, wonderful cooking-meat smell of the Damned, the hot-metal smell of the machinery, the thick yellow stench of brimstone.
The machinery ground; the massive lid lifted unsteadily, revealing its many layers of black polished rock and brass, all smattered with Damned-fluids. Smoke, some yellow, some grey, some black, belched out all around; steam jetted white across the ground. Coughing, Leah heaved the Miscreant forward by his shoulder.
A Damned Soul sprang out of the smoke. It caught the Miscreant by the shoulder, Leah by her arm, and screamed in their faces in a fast, foreign language. Its eyes rolled and steamed; its whole face was misshapen. The skin of it, the raw skin!
‘Git back there!’ growled a firesuit, forcing the Soul back with a pole across its middle. Through the smoke and the glorious all-engulfing sensations of her own retching, Leah had an impression of a person being folded and forced away. Like a crab into a crevice, she thought, pushing the Miscreant forward again – only rubbery. And raw – that skin! The points of the pitchfork had sliced across that Soul’s belly, and the wounds had sizzled with blood and fluids rushing to heal it, to make the skin clean and raw again and ready to suffer more.
This was what she wanted, what she needed, to see such things and to see them clearly. The sulphur jabbed her nostrils and she sniffed it up and coughed, exultant. The Miscreant’s shaggy boot-toes flamed near the lip of the opening; hands painted them red, stroke by stroke. She took slippery white handfuls of him and, in a spasm of revulsion and joy, forced him into the centre of the red sea anemone.
Its many arms hauled him in. Maybe they thought they could pull themselves past him into the Outer; perhaps they thought to plead with him; maybe they just wanted someone else to share their misery. Whatever they wanted, the red Souls folded the white, flailing Soul in.
It was like watching a kebab being rolled, Barto would say later. A chicken kebab.
Don’t be awful, Tabatha would say, trying to cringe, trying to care enough.
The escort pulled their hands and feet free of the roaring Souls. Pitchforks poked and hissed, intervening for them. The machinery clanked; the lid shuddered and began to lower. In the desperate red scramble just inside the rim, the faces – I will never forget these, Leah thought raptly, I will never be able – the hairless faces, all melted and remelted flesh, spat and bubbled and ran with juices. And they knew – their eyes begged and their bloodied lips pleaded in a thousand different languages.
Barto gagged beside Leah, King clutched her and wept, Tabatha dragged at their sleeves: ‘Come away! Come away!’
But Leah stayed, her eyes and heart still feasting. Just as she’d craned for the last possible glimpse of that other eternity, Heaven, so she must peer around the firesuit to see as many hands, as many faces as she could, as the lid crushed them, as they clutched the very pitchforks that forced them back into suffering.
‘Bloody, sticky things!’ The nearest firesuit scraped off against the rim a Soul that had impaled itself chest first upon her fork. ‘How much more pain do you want?’ The Soul fish-flopped, then was clawed away by others more desperate, more able.
The dire howling lessened; there were just hands now, flickering among the yellow flames that came up where hopeless souls had dropped away and left gaps in the crowd. They made a frill, a lace-work of red fingers, a fur of black and yellow smoke, a feather of gold flame, a stinking sleeve edge that shortened, shortened—
Thud. The lid closed, sealing in the Damned.
The firesuit turned away and snatched off its hood. The woman inside grinned down at Leah. ‘Better get a move on,’ she said.
Tabatha was already starting for the tower, grabbing up the satchel as she passed the desk. Barto stared at the lid over Leah’s shoulder, both hands to his mouth. King, on all fours, leaned hard against her knees, retching.
‘Come on, laddie.’ The firesuit prodded him gently with her bloodied pitchfork. ‘Those boots won’t last much longer.’
‘And you’re burning yourself.’ Leah pulled on his shoulder.
Supporting him, she followed Tabatha. They must take the stamped papers up to Heaven Gate and lodge them. Leah’s imagination was as clear as a sunlit tide-pool now; she could just see those snooty Registrars dipping their quills to add the marks, the brownie points, to each team member’s record book. Those marks would build – who knew how fast? Who knew how many were needed? – until there were enough to release him or her from the Outer forever, and into Heaven and the Eternal Benediction and the Light.
Leah’s feet stung. The soles of the bootees were black and fringed with burnt rush-weave.
‘Hurry, King.’ She pushed him along in the small of the back. He tried to speak over his shoulder – his face was greenish, and his lips puffed out with nauseated burps. ‘I heard one of them say—’
‘Just run, King! Talk when we get to the ladder!’
And they ran, pell-mell, elated. One of Barto’s bootees gave out, shredding off his foot. He tried a strange hopping run for a few paces, then seemed to take off and fly across the hot black ridges to the scaffolding.
They flung themselves after him, finally landing in a clump on the lowest steps. A few moments filled with-groans and panting. Then they spread out onto separate steps.
‘Oh, my feet!’
‘Uff! This is from his fingernails, look! Like a – like a tiger-claw or something.’
‘Look at King!’ King’s hands and knees had puffed up as if inflated.
‘He whacked me in the mouth so hard, that Soul. I thought I’d lost some teeth. I think this one’s a bit wobbly. Does this look wobbly to you, Leah?’
When every injury had been noted and admired, quiet descended. The greyness crept in at the edges of Leah’s mind.
King pushed his face into the hot breeze. ‘I heard someone say, It’s so cool out there! ’
‘I heard that too,’ said Tabatha quietly.
‘I heard someone call out, Water, water!’ whispered Barto. ‘And you know? For just that moment, I was thirsty.’
Leah’s tongue searched her mouth for that feeling. No, she wasn’t thirsty, not even after all that heat and smoke and running.
‘I didn’t understand anything they said.’ She spoke quickly, while there was still a bit of space in the middle of the encroaching greyness. ‘But what I saw . . .’ She tried to remember that screaming Soul’s face well enough to make her stomach churn again. She rubbed her tearless eyes, and saw against the lids a vague bobbing of bald, red heads, waving hands, silent mouths. Nothing that would upset anybody. ‘Aagh.’ The greyness reached the centre of her feelings and winked them out. That was all she would be left with, until next time – that bobbing impression, all the intensity faded to a thin grey knowledge, a small, puzzled struggle to remember – what had been so wonderful?
Tabatha was binding Barto’s burnt foot with a strip torn off her uniform. ‘We must move in and out quicker, next time,’ she said absently. ‘Like a pick-up. This never would’ve happened with a pick-up.’
‘How do they get them out of there, with a pick-up?’ wondered King. ‘Without anyone else escaping?’
‘If you ever get to work there, I guess you’ll find out,’ said Tabatha flatly.
‘You can’t blame us for being curious,’ said King. He must have not quite recovered, thought Leah.
Anyway, ‘curious’ wasn’t the word for it. She followed the others up the stairs, rolled over and dropped into the Outer’s gravitational field, followed them through the bootee-room and down onto the stony red plain. Curiosity was a lame, small-scale thing. What it was, was . . .
She picked her way through the stones towards the lighter regions of the Outer. She tried to think, to search what she thought was her heart. But she was not let see. The Outer’s greyness had her; it walled the thought she was reaching for in fog, embedded the feeling in cloud; it clumsied her toes and fingers and all her finer faculties and left her with only this, the barest inclination to keep moving, in the direction that felt like forward, but might turn out never to be forward, or backward, or any way, anywhere, ever.
{ Mouse Maker
‘Who started this?’ Bet struggled with the women holding her down. ‘That Topsy Strongarm, I’ll be bound! She’ve been looking for her chance.’
‘Let’s shut up that noise, for a start,’ said Pater Bill, and they stuffed one cloth in her mouth and tied another round it.
At least, that is what Darby says. I wasn’t there myself. I would have none of it. It had all happened without me. Honestly, I said not a word to anyone about what I had heard nor seen. But these things get known, gossip or not. However quiet you keep, matters like this, they come out some way.
She lives not far from me, Bet Cransk. The land is arranged so she must walk along my fence-line, in my field, to get to her own place from the road. I am used to her, and maybe people would have left her alone if they had been used to her too. Because most of the time she is harmless, if noisy when you get her going.
‘And handy,’ Dan’s widow said when she was being friendly, when she was thinking maybe she could like me for the sake of picking up my land as well as Dan’s. ‘It don’t hurt to have a salve-woman up your own hill, that you can run to in fever or tummy-rack.’
Which was also true, though I only ever used Bet for that bad sickle-wound I made in my leg, and the one evening where she told my fortune. And a solid fortune it will be. I don’t know how I’m to get to it from here, exactly, but there it is.
There it is, Bet said. It’s in the cards and it’s in the cup and it’s in that oil-and-ink. If all three say it, it’s gold and good opinion all the way for you, Pedder.
We laughed at that, sitting in her grubby house, that is more burrowed than built into the bank there. Even her dandy-wine was dirty, sediment shifting in it like white smoke. Her cards were so filthy I could barely see the signs on them.
Taking against the mayor was her error. Well, really, she was against the whole town council in the end; well, really, the whole town. But she got it fixed in her head that Pater Mears was the one with the set against her, so she was loudest against him.
‘It’s only a scare,’ I said. ‘Just wait. Be cunning,’ I said. ‘Leave your cards at home a few times; tell in other ways. People still want to know. Some will even come up here, if they want the cards. Laurel Whistler, for one. I don’t mind her using the way.’
But Bet was fretting, there on my doorstep. ‘The cards is the best,’ she said. ‘The cards is what everyone wants. The cards is what people pay for.’
‘Well, the cards is what gives people the wobbles, too,’ I said testily; how long had I been standing there saying and saying?
‘By-laws!’ She spat a big white spit on my path. ‘Coming at me with his papers. This here, he says, it’s my seal, look at it. It means you have to stop with the weeds and the divination, or I’ll have you put in the roundhouse a week or two.
It’s law now, he said – smug pottlehead – here in this writing.
I told him – Jollyon Mears, young enough to be my granson! I told him he could put his big red mayor’s seal in his big red—’
‘You want to be careful,’ I said. She had already told me all this. ‘They can do what they say, however young they are.’
‘They’re a bunch of scheming souses, taking away a widow’s honest living while they guzzle and chomp in the meeting-house!’
‘Maybe so,’ I said. I was tired. I had been ploughing all day while she was off squabbling. I had just sat down to my bread and tea when she arrived. ‘But you don’t want to get on their wrong side, either.’
The widow thing – I don’t know even if it was true, though she always brought it up when she wanted sympathy. It was well before my time, and no one could tell me who the lucky gentleman had been – but no one could exactly say she hadn’t had him, either. She is not a solid citizen, that you can feel sure of. There’s always this cloud of uncertainties around her, like mist or flies. Some of the time I like that, when the solid citizens are getting up my nose; some of the time it gives me the jinks just as badly as it does everyone else.
Pater Bill had his beadle-stick, Darby says, and he laid the first blow. Which was all the others needed. Women they were, mostly, dealing as they must with a woman; they wanted the beadle’s authority to begin, but once he gave it, he might as well have left Bet’s house right then for all the chance he got at her.
‘It wasn’t like they wanted to kill her,’ says Darb. ‘They just wanted to teach her a lesson.’
‘In which case why they went for her head is mysterious to me,’ I said to him. ‘Why they knocked her senseless so that she could not hear their lesson, hm?’
Darby was quiet.
‘And why they kept hitting when she was down and had long ceased to fight them?’
Darby pulled at a scrap of loose skin by his fingernail.
‘They should have put her in the prison,’ I said.
‘They could prove nothing,’ said Darby. ‘It was all rumour and old history and the word of Sarah Slattly and—’
�
��Not for punishment,’ I said. ‘For protection.’
At first it was only rushings in the night, very like wind or a passing patter of rain. It was only later that they woke me properly and made me wonder, later when the damage became clear and it looked like we might all bloody starve. That’s them now, I thought. They’re running past my door. And they’ve been coming and coming, a run of them every short while, regular all night, regular every fine night this last while. And I got myself up and when I judged the time to be right I opened my door on the moonlight and stood there wrapped in my blanket and waiting.
And there they came, all running together in a pack, so tiny and yet so many that all their little toenails scraping, all their little paws hitting, made that sound upon the ground, that whisper like wind or rain. They ran so close together they were like a stretch of moss that pulled itself up and went hurrying off. They gleamed with good health and with eyes in the moonlight. I stood on my step and they ran along the front of my house and some fetched up and swirled against the step and some ran across and around my feet. But none ran in my door; every one passed on. They ran straight through my small crop without climbing a single stalk. I saw them flow through like water and be gone.
It was a cold night and, as I said, fine. I walked out onto my path in my blanket and the moonlight was silver all around me, throwing down hard black shadows, their edges fine as a butcher-knife’s. Up the hill where the mice had come from, a wisp of smoke floated over Bet Cransk’s place, and I couldn’t say I was surprised.
I could have protected her. I could have stood up and spoken for her. I’m not small. I’m not the most respected man, I’m no Pater, but neither am I no one; I am not of no account.
I could at least have given them pause. A better neighbour might have been there and said something, made them think what they were doing.
Red Spikes Page 9