by Heide Goody
As Brigit bent to pick it up. Nina raised her wand. Brigit twisted her fingers into some magic Mr Spock shape and the wand blast flowed harmlessly over her. Brigit held the rifle like a green recruit and aimed it underarm at Yang.
“Don’t you even dare,” said Yang. Brigit shot her in the chest.
Prudence yelled; Morag held her tightly. Rod dropped beside the girl, but she was dead, already gone.
Brigit tossed the rifle aside. She’d had her fun. The gun fell near where Steve had crash-landed.
Brigit surveyed the remaining humans slowly. “Nina, Morag, Vivian and, er, Rod, isn’t it?” She smiled. “The consular mission’s finest. Maiden, mother, crone.” She waved her hand dismissively at Rod. “And the male one.”
The King in Crimson leaned in behind Rod, so close that Rod could see his mask-covered face out of the corner of his eye and feel the corpse’s breath on his cheek.
“Look what she did,” said the King smoothly. “A young life snuffed out. Disgraceful.” The King’s skeletal hands massaged Rod’s shoulders, trying to work the rage deeper into his body.
“Come outside your little circle now,” said Brigit. “Have some dignity. We can tear it apart like paper if we wish.”
“Keep talking,” muttered Vivian, still busily scribbling away in that bloody book of hers.
Rod’s fury swelled. He was holding the body of a stupid clever innocent murderous girl, swatted down without a thought, yet it was Vivian’s incessant writing which brought his rage to the surface. The very notion that she could think a book was so bloody important, that all they had bought with their sacrifices was a little time!
“Flamin’ ridiculous,” he growled.
“That’s right!” said the King. “Take your revenge. Yo-Morgantus is right there.”
“The power to knock out any god?” said Rod between gritted teeth.
“Any god,” the King hissed in encouragement.
Rod jumped up and forward, dropping Yang’s body. He was never the fastest man. It wasn’t his forte, but he only needed to be the fastest for a second. He moved towards Brigit and then ducked sideways. She wasn’t expecting that. He stepped onto the back of some fat spider thing, leapt and punched.
It wasn’t a great leap, but he could feel the King in Crimson at his back, lifting him. It was a weak punch, but it didn’t need to be anything but a recognisable one.
Rod punched the tangled web of Bannakaffalatta, or whatever it was Nina had called it.
10:34am
Something weird happened to time, before Morag’s eyes. Outside the circle, figures leapt and jerked.
Rod had flung himself at the mass that was Yo Khazpapalanaka. He became a jerky series of images, like he’d been caught under an epilepsy-inducing strobe light. A figure had winked into existence behind Rod, a skeletal horror, seven feet high, its limbs and lower face wrapped in stained bandages, its body draped in the tattered remnants of regal red clothing. The creature’s bony fingers were plunging, image by stuttering image, into Rod’s back.
Nina shouted in anger, leaping from the normality of the circle into the slowing, sputtering time outside it. She swung her wand round to attack. As she moved into the strange realm of unconnected time, her shout became sliced into discrete chunks: shout, silence, shout, silence.
There was a puff of explosive smoke by the floor. Morag wouldn’t have even seen it if the moments weren’t being presented as separate tableaux. Steve the Destroyer had crawled, unseen, to the mammonite girl’s dropped rifle and fired the grenade launcher device mounted below the barrel.
Time slowed further. Morag could see the grenade itself, unblurred. It was hard to judge where Steve was trying to aim it: Brigit or Morgantus or the skeleton. It struck none of them, hitting the chitinous back of a zhadan warrior spider.
Rod fell. Nina ran. Brigit leapt for the circle. The beginnings of an explosion, opened up in the zhadan’s side, a sphere of fire no bigger than a football.
And time stopped.
Inside the circle, Vivian continued with her work and Prudence struggled in Morag’s arms, screaming at Yang’s death. Outside, nothing moved.
Yoth Mammon was frozen amid the now still colours of Ammi Usub. Yo-Morgantus was a distended but solidly fixed mass of flesh. Yo Khazpapalanaka was a three-dimensional scribble of lines in the air, a sculpture. All the slathering creatures of the Venislarn apocalypse were caught, suspended in time. And there was silence.
It had been a long time since Morag had heard complete silence. Prudence slipped from her grip and dropped beside Yang.
“Don’t leave the circle,” Morag said automatically, but Prudence wasn’t stupid.
Prudence held Yang’s face and brushed the hair away from her eyes.
“We should have protected her,” said Prudence, choking. She looked up at Vivian. “Your circle should have protected her.”
“Magic circles are no protection against bullets,” said Vivian.
“Then your magic circle is stupid!”
“Baby, don’t…” Morag began.
“I should have saved her,” said Prudence. “I’m the kaatbari. I’m the herald of the Soulgate. I have influence. I was going to make everything better. For everyone.” She sobbed.
Morag went to her and held her. She didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t know how to comfort her own child. It was still her first day of being a mum and she’d not been to any parenting classes or read any books or anything.
“I don’t even have laser eyes,” Prudence sobbed.
Morag wanted to wipe the tears from her daughter’s eyes, but Morag had no tissues or cloth to hand. She was wearing a dress made from scabs of flesh and it was not ideal tear-dabbing material. She brushed Prudence’s tears with her thumb and kissed the top of her head.
They stayed like that for a time, or at least a time within the timeless world that now surrounded them.
The scratching of Vivian’s pen stopped. “It wasn’t my circle anyway,” she said.
Morag and Prudence looked at her. Vivian watched them over the open book.
“Do you think I can draw a magic circle which can hold back the massed gods of the Venislarn horde?” she asked. “Do you think I can conjure a circle which can hold back the flow of time itself?”
“Then…”
Vivian pointed her pen at Prudence. “I told you to draw, and you drew.”
“You told me what to draw.”
“I said words, but you created sigils I have never seen before. I said I needed a young woman with imagination.”
Prudence blinked. “I did this?”
Vivian’s expression stiffened and she tapped the book. “I’m doing the hard work, though.”
Morag smoothed Prudence’s hair and stood so she could look at the book on the table. “Why is that book so bloody important?” She tried to sound like she wasn’t fucking annoyed, but she failed because she was really fucking annoyed.
Vivian wrote in an assured and speedy hand, filling in the gaps on a page that featured a complex diagram which looked like a medieval illustration of the cosmos.
“I once told you to read it and then you’d understand,” Vivian said.
“It’s a fucking infinite book,” said Morag.
“Language, mum,” said Prudence.
“We’re all going to die,” said Morag. “And then, because this is hell, we’re going to be resurrected, reborn or rebooted into yet more fresh hell, and it’s going to last forever. Why the fuck would I want to read that book?”
Vivian blew on the drying ink on the page and then turned over a gazillion pages to another section. “Don’t you want to see how it ends?”
Morag resisted. She didn’t want to give the annoying cow the satisfaction. But Morag couldn’t resist forever, and there was nothing but forever inside this magic bubble. She stepped closer and looked.
“Final page,” said Vivian. “I’m nearly done. A word here. Some arrows there.”
10:38am
/> Vivian watched Morag’s face as she read. Vivian didn’t need to watch her face – she had written this moment before, a long time ago – but she wanted to watch it, nonetheless.
Morag read it. She made a strange little noise, too surprised to be properly surprised. She read it again and then looked Vivian in the eye. “This is what happens?”
Vivian nodded.
Morag’s mouth was open, like a slack-jawed ruminant. “All this time, you’ve been working on this?”
“Yes. I tried to tell you. The first week I met you.”
“And Omar?”
“Him too.”
“You two don’t even like each other.”
“Strange times make strange bedfellows.”
Prudence stood beside Morag. Her lips moved as she silently read. “You’ve not finished,” she said.
“Mere markings on the page,” said Vivian. “But, um, ah…”
Outside the circle, Yo Khazpapalanaka stuttered and flexed, a sleeper about to awake.
“No time,” said Morag.
The god of time itself moved a fraction. The massive freeze frame of the universe skipped a thousandth of a second. The grenade explosion expanded to a bright light. Brigit’s fingers grazed the edge of the circle.
Time rushed in.
Rod died. Nina fired her wand. The explosion swallowed the zhadan spider, Nina and chunks of Yo-Morgantus. Brigit was flung forward like a doll. As was Steve, an actual doll. The blast picked up the desk and Vivian with it and tossed them back.
Vivian hit her head and blacked out.
She came to, maybe only a second later, with her ears ringing and a pain in her body that moved whenever she tried to locate it. She squirmed on the floor, briefly tried to support herself with a hand she hadn’t had for millennia, then found her bearings.
The Bloody Big Book was open on the floor a couple of feet away. On hand and knees, Vivian lurched at it.
Only a few more markings to make.
“Pen, pen, pen,” she muttered, looking round for something to write with.
There were booms from the heavens above. In the great play, tin sheets were being banged together to symbolise the tempest of immeasurable forces rallying against and with each other.
Light-blotting gods, bigger than cities, were falling toward the world. Vivian’s vision was dimming by the second. There were no pens here though. She sat up, grunted at the pain, and looked round.
“Pen,” she said.
There was the fizz and vacuum pop of offensive magic somewhere off to Vivian’s left. Either Nina or her husband was still alive and fighting off the creatures. Elsewhere, creatures were tearing into each other. Alliances were falling apart at the end of things.
Vivian saw Morag, hunched with Prudence at her side, not five feet away.
Steve the Destroyer bounced over carcasses and rubble to reach Prudence. He appeared to be partly on fire.
“You’re on fire,” said Prudence.
“Pah!” he exclaimed, his voice warbling with a deranged tone. “You call this being on fire? Steve spits in the face of fire.” He tried to put the fire out with his pencil spear. It was a poor effort.
Prudence suffocated Steve’s fire by whacking him hard with a kneeler cushion.
“Picking a fight with me?” he said, dazed.
Brigit pushed herself up from where she had been thrown among the smashed pews, separated from her host god by the explosion. There was a ragged series of wounds in the side of her torso, a fistful of long wooden splinters embedded in her.
She hissed in pain. “Enough!”
“Ready to give in?” grunted Morag.
Brigit’s face was untamed fury. She held her wounded side and staggered, framed against the shattered window. “The absolute and astonishing gall of it! You think that you can stand against us? It’s preposterous. It’s … it’s offensively stupid. Look at us! We’re unstoppable. Infinite. Divine.”
“And that’s why we’re better than you,” Vivian coughed.
“Better?”
Prudence took the pencil from Steve and presented it to Vivian. Vivian blinking blood from her eyes, stared at it. Grimy and fire-blackened, it was barely more than a stick of charcoal, but it was a writing implement regardless.
“Infinite. All-powerful. You are those things,” said Vivian. “You can do with us whatever you wish. And yet, in the face of the infinite and the divine, we can stand against you. We can say ‘no’ and know what saying ‘no’ means.”
Prudence helped Vivian’s shaking hand put pencil to paper. Vivian underlined a critical word.
Brigit laughed and the laugh became a painful cough. “And that makes you better than us?”
Prudence and Vivian moved as one. A comma. A question mark.
“We are better than you,” said Vivian. “We are bigger than you. In every way that counts.”
Yo-Morgantus reached out to his servants, the willing and the unwilling. Yoth Mammon curved downward to a final dive.
“Words!” Brigit snorted. “Finish your stupid story! See what good it does you!”
“It’s not my story,” said Vivian.
“What?” said Brigit.
The pencil made a final mark. A full stop.
“It’s yours,” said Vivian.
Yo-Morgantus connected with Brigit and comprehension immediately washed over her face.
“No,” she whispered, horrified, but it was too late.
Demons reared and swooped to attack, but it was too late.
Streamers of pure light burst from the pages, shooting up and outwards. They split and curled away, a springtime of plant growth at a thousand times the speed. Golden light of revealing reality shone on the Venislarn throng. There was such an intense twinkling sunshine splendour that it might as well have been accompanied with the voices of a heavenly choir.
“Wow,” said Prudence.
Morag looked up. “What’s with the Disney special effects, Vivian?”
“It’s the way I always imagined this moment,” said Vivian. “And it’s the way I decided to write it.”
The light expanded until it swallowed everything.
Friday
The Library of Birmingham was the largest public lending library in Europe. It had been designed by a Dutch architect and built with a façade of gold cladding overlaid with huge interlocking steel circles that made it look like a robot’s birthday cake. The library was opened some years ago to great fanfare and then, due to local government funding cuts, almost immediately had its hours slashed. It was a bold and beautiful symbol of a city with grand aspirations and poor financial management.
On the third floor of the library, there was a large terrace garden. Visitors could step out of the building and into an area of sculpted flower beds and benches and look out across Centenary Square and the city centre beyond.
Morag stood at the railing and felt the stiff cool breeze on her face. The Birmingham skyline was not a notably impressive one. Bold and classical Victorian edifices stood among brutalist towers and ugly multi-storey car parks. And standing over it all were the cranes. Birmingham was a city that never seemed to stop reinventing itself. In Centenary Square below, people moved in all directions, to and from the convention centre, the canal basin, the theatres, the council buildings and the pedestrianised shopping areas. Traffic hummed somewhere, wherever it was that roadworks hadn’t closed off the streets.
“What are you looking at?” said Prudence.
Prudence Murray, who was – what? Eleven years old? Twelve? – was actually wearing clothes that fitted her. The cuffs of her hoodie were frayed, and one of the neck tassels looked like it had been habitually chewed, as though Prudence had been wearing it every day for months.
“Blue sky,” said Morag. “The city. People.”
Mrs Vivian Grey put her hands on the rail and nodded at the vista before them, as though giving it her grudging approval. “This is a world where the Venislarn never came.”
“Neve
r?” said Nina.
Vivian’s mouth turned down slightly. “We did finish the book in pencil. I wouldn’t want to make concrete promises…”
Prudence took a step closer to Vivian and whispered, a whisper loud enough for anyone to hear. “So, the book we wrote…”
“I wrote. You helped in a minor capacity at the end.”
“Are all the Venislarn in that book? Or is this—” she pointed two index fingers at the ground beneath them “—the book?”
The wind picked up for a moment and the rustling gust momentarily drowned out what Vivian said.
“…draw my own conclusions,” said Prudence.
“So, none of it happened?” said Nina. “Are we all gonna get our memories retconned?”
“I do wish you would use real words, Miss Seth,” said Vivian.
“It’s like that Jumanji film,” said Morag. “The game is finished and all the bits go back in the box. Everything restored.”
“Shit!” said Nina, fighting with her tight jean pocket to get her phone out. Her ancient coat and dress had been lost in the revising of reality. Clumsy in her haste, she tapped at her phone.
“What’s Jumanji?” said Prudence.
“Oh, it’s a good film,” said Morag. “Magical adventure. We should watch it. A movie afternoon sounds good.” She frowned. “What day is it, anyway?”
Nina had managed to make her phone call. “Ricky? Ricky, it’s me, Nina. Yeah. Nina. This is Chief Inspector Ricky Lee, right?”
“I don’t care what day it is,” said Rod, taking a deep, lung-filling breath. “There’s a pint of American Sister waiting for me at the Old Contemptibles. You coming?” He looked to Morag and then Vivian. “Anyone? My round.”
“I do not do pubs, Rod,” said Vivian. “I think I might go for a walk. Perhaps the park.”
“Oh, any particular park in mind?” said Morag lightly. “One with a donkey sanctuary, perhaps?”
“Your lack of subtlety is astonishing,” said Vivian. “I wonder if it is a personal flaw or a generically Scottish one?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”