by Mike Wild
"Shoot 'em, man!" Ness shouted.
Verse hesitated. Then he fired a shot over the heads of the Dobermans as they circled below him. The dogs were not deterred.
"Och, we dinnae have time for this," Ness said, leaping the gate. As his boots crunched onto the farmyard gravel, the heavily-muscled dogs rushed at him, fangs bared. His eyes narrowed, the Scot watched them come, standing his ground, perfectly calm, waiting...
The dogs leapt for his throat. Ness swivelled and trapped the head of one in his right armpit, shrugged and snapped its neck instantly. At the same time he brought his fist up under the jaw of the other, dislocating the bone and flipping the yelping dog onto its back. Before it could right itself Ness stamped his boot down on its throat, and the dog spasmed horribly. Ness repeated the manoeuvre on its ribcage. There was a loud crack and with a pathetic yelp the dog went limp.
"For God's sake, man," Lawrence Verse said with horror. "You didn't have to kill them!"
Ness looked at him stupidly. "Aye. Ah did."
"They were only guarding their territory!"
"Aye. An' iffa hadnae done wha' a did, there'd a bin an extra lump o' dogshite for 'em to guard tomorrow. Now, are we stoppin' pissin' aboot an' gonna talk ta this old git or no'?"
Verse clambered down off the car. "Did it not occur to you, you stupid bastard, that he'd talk more easily you hadn't killed his-"
The main door of the farmhouse slammed suddenly open and a burly figure of a man filled the frame - a man aiming his own shotgun and whose attitude was clear.
"You killed my dogs. Give me one reason why I shouldn't kill you."
Mikey Ness let loose a rapid burst of fire from a machine pistol concealed inside a pocket in the folds of his coat. The bullets ricocheted around the stone doorframe like a swarm of deadly wasps. "Because I'm faster, better armed, an' a psycho."
Verse held up his hands. "Mr Jardine. I'm sorry about your dogs." He stared over at Ness, barely able to contain his dislike for the crazed ex-soldier. "My colleague belongs in an inst-"
"They were only dogs," the farmer said somewhat unexpectedly. "And dogs die." As Verse and Ness looked at each other strangely, he added, "I know why you're here. The two of you had better come in."
Cautiously, Verse and Ness entered. The inside of the farmhouse was no better than the farmyard itself - a vast and rambling collection of waste that had accumulated over the years in the hands of someone who no longer cared. Unwashed plates, old newspapers and clothes littered the room, and the only object whose surroundings were even half-clear was a computer. Doubtless Jardine did both his shopping and his socialising on the internet. Jardine sat Verse and Ness next to it, crammed together on a tiny, foul-smelling sofa. The ex-priest did his best to ignore the overriding feral stench of his companion.
"I was under the impression you didn't welcome visitors," he said.
Jardine regarded him steadily, deeply. "Not my usual habit, no." The burly man looked to be in his late sixties, early seventies, face drawn but rugged and weather-beaten, as though he indulged in long, lonely walks out on the Yorkshire moors. The man's most outstanding feature however, were his eyes. They were heavily veined, rheumy, and almost cartoon-like in the way they bulged from their sockets, as if at some time they had been subjected to an intense pressure from which they had never recovered. "But I figure you two ain't here to kill me 'cause if you were, I'd be dead already." He stared out of a grimy window. "I also watch the sky and see summat strange going on. I figure maybe it's starting again. Figure maybe you need to see me 'cause I'm the only one round here who knows what went on in '44."
The only one anywhere, actually, Verse thought. "We need to find out. Rather urgently," he said.
Jardine ranted suddenly. "Who are you people? MoD? Department Q? Only I'd have thought you'd know well enough what your people - those people - did."
Verse and Ness exchanged glances. Department Q had been here in 1944?
"We work for a private organisation," Ness told the farmer. "We, er, havnae access to government records."
"Caballistics, Inc," Verse said, showing him a business card. "We resolve matters of an unusual nature."
Jardine laughed coldly. "An unusual nature, eh lads? Is that what you call Judgement Day these days?"
"Judgement Day? What the foo-" Ness began but Verse held up a quieting hand.
"We simply need to know what happened, what is happening in this town. So that we can stop it. I ask you to trust us... Please."
Jardine hesitated, studied the two men. He had lived six decades with the memories, sharing them with no one, able to trust no one, wondering when some government spooks might show up and he would once again have to run. He did not know why they never had but he did know that while waiting he'd grown too old to run. If it was starting again - if these men were here to stop it - then maybe it was time things were out in the open.
Judd John Jardine told Verse and Ness all about the events of the night over six decades earlier. About the Voice. About the fires. And about the figure above the hill. Jardine ended the account by telling them what the so-called good guys had done to his mother... what they had tried to do to him.
"They were paranoid times. You have to realise that no one knew then that the war would be over in less than a year - and the walls, as they say, still had ears. They knew I'd seen too much and heard too much. Bad enough that I was five years old and could identify every member of the highly secret Department Q, but worse that I'd seen what they'd done... Buried innocent people alive. Is it any wonder they saw me as a threat to national security, by which of course, I mean their own."
Jardine laughed hollowly. "In the comic books they'd likely have flown me away to their hidden headquarters, given me a ring decoder, taught me their secret handshake and made me their spunky but irritating sidekick." He paused. "But all they did was murder my mum - almost murder me."
"Such power as Magister holds, it surprises me that you got away."
"I ran. Jesus Christ man, I was five years old and my mother told me to run and I ran. Wouldn't you have done? Wouldn't you now? I ran like the wind with the devil up my arse, which he was. My legs could do it then but still every step I took was red-hot, iron-booted agony - and slow, like a dream - and even halfway across town I could feel Magister scratching at my mind, sharp as a cat's claw, trying to rip what I knew away."
"He didn't track you down?"
Jardine paused, remembering. "At some point, I collapsed. When I came round I was in a hospital up the coast, though I didn't know it because I was little more than a twitching heap of piss and shit. I was there for five years, unable to even breathe for myself and attached to so many tubes I used to choke on them when I screamed at night. If you'd asked me who I was, I'd have dribbled at you."
"You recovered well."
Jardine shrugged. "I was lucky, young. After the hospital I spent decades in care, in clinics, and eventually the synaptic pathways healed. But there were side effects I've lived with since... Bipolar disorder. No colour perception. Voices in my head. I came home to the farm in the mid-Sixties, by which time I suppose Magister and the others had covered their tracks well enough. My memory returned over time, apart from the little things gone for good. For example, I'd a dog by my side that night in '44 - the only friend I've ever had - who died trying to save me." Jardine shook. "And I've never been able to remember her name."
"I'm sorry," Verse said.
Jardine leaned in, snarled. "I told ya. Dogs die."
"A wee word," Ness said. He pulled Verse aside and whispered. "Ah thought my napper was bad bu' this poor bast-"
"What was it, Mr Jardine?" Verse asked over Ness's objection. "Just what caused Magister and the others to act like they did? What is it that is under Scratch Tor?"
"I don't know," Jardine said.
"Oh, fer foo-"
"But there's something evil down there, mark my words. Something so bad Magister and the others sacrificed half a town to bury it and
save their own skins."
"A man in town mentioned a - collection," Verse probed gently. "Something called Acre 51?"
"Acre 51!" Jardine laughed. "Should have known those bastards would give it a name like that. A crazy collection for crazy old Fistulous Withers, right?" It took a second before the old man went on. "But it exists, sure enough," he said.
Verse asked the farmer about the artefact. Did Jardine hold anything resembling the Eyes.
"No, nowt like that. But you're welcome to see what there is."
Jardine led Verse and Ness out the back of the farmhouse. The storm had worsened now, the rain hammering down onto a yard floored with cobbles. It seemed to hiss. Verse pulled his coat closely about himself but Ness, on the other hand, seemed to relish the downpour, tipping back his head to allow the rain to run in rivulets down his scars. Verse supposed he had spent too long on special forces duty in the desert. And he wished that he had stayed there.
They passed the dogs' kennels and Ness actually grinned.
"You're a psychopathic bastard, you know that?" Verse said.
"So the quacks tell me, aye."
The priest hadn't forgotten the altercation in the helicopter. "Keep it away from me and mine."
"Whatever you say, father."
"Here," Jardine said. They had reached an area of the yard covered by a huge tarpaulin, which the Yorkshireman unhooked from the ground and rolled back. Accumulated rainwater spilled from it in a sudden flood that soaked Verse's boots, and a rat scurried away. Lying beneath the tarpaulin was what seemed to be Jardine's own personal tip, a rusting pile of junk that must have lain on this very spot for years.
"What I don't understand," Verse said, "is how you came by this. You said you were in hospital all that time."
Jardine nodded. "Ah was. And the Ministry of Defence removed all potential evidence from the town before they shut it down completely. But this is a wild part of the world, lad. The tides on this coast can suck things under the rocks and not give 'em up for years. You'll find nooks and crannies round Scratch Tor where no bugger ever goes. Things fetch up there, having been carried off by animals and the like. You can still find things, all right. Interesting things."
"Looks like a heap o' shite to me," Ness said.
"Oh, I wouldn't say that," Verse answered as he rummaged. "There's this."
Verse handed Ness a scale similar to the one in the Breaking Point. There were at least ten or so more in the pile, of slightly differing shape, as if they belonged on different parts of a huge reptilian body. They were all cracked or rotten to some degree, as if shed by a beast that was in some way injured.
"Then there's this," Verse said. He pulled out a largish, jagged piece of metal - although oddly it didn't feel like metal - that looked like some hull-plating off an aircraft, though considering its shape, off an aircraft unlike any he knew.
Ness pointed out some lettering. "Is tha' wha' ah think it is?"
Verse nodded and looked at him. "German."
"Strange craft in British airspace in World War Two. Yer think we're talking Sonderkommando Thule here?"
Verse nodded again. "And where they go..." he said. He plucked a final object from the pile - the top half of a broken walking cane inscribed with the initials MM.
"Michael bloody Magister," Ness growled. "That confirms it. The old git isnae imaginin' it."
"You thought that I was?" Jardine protested.
Verse stood, wrung his palms, smiled at Jardine diplomatically. "There was a certain question of sanity, for which my colleague offers apologies."
Jardine stared with his rheumy eyes. "Aye, well. If it's confirmation you want, you'd best come back inside. 'Cause I've got one more thing to show ya..."
Once again inside the farmhouse, Jardine handed Ness a black, round metal canister, the diameter of a small dinner plate.
"Wha's this?"
"The surveillance footage from the Mosquitoes in 1944," Jardine said simply.
"Jeezus Christ, man. How did ye-?"
"The wreckage was all over the local hills. As I said, there's nooks and-"
"Crannies, aye," Ness finished. He prised open the canister's lid, frowned, showed the contents to Verse.
"Degraded," Verse said, shoulders slumping.
Jardine slid another kind of container into the priest's hand. It was a jewel case with a PC CD. "My mother is on the film. So I had it digitised two years ago."
Quickly, Verse flipped open the case and placed the disk into the drive. Grainy, black and white footage from another time flickered slowly across the monitor. Flaming bodies, the charred remains of bodies, shambling bodies - then a waving woman and a glowing, unknown shape.
"This is invaluable," Verse said. "We have to get this to Brand."
As he spoke, the sky outside one of the room's grimy windows flashed suddenly, illuminating two dark shapes beyond the glass.
"Shit," Ness said.
"Probably just the next ley pulse earthing," a preoccupied Verse told him. He stole a glance at his watch. "I don't think that you need to worry yet."
"Isnae the pulse I'm worried aboot," Ness said. "It's the dogs."
"Doubt they'll be bothered. They're both dead, remember?"
Ness stared at the window. At the rolling wild eyes and at the sharp, bared fangs gnawing at the grime, and at the scratching claws trailing blood smears on the glass.
"No' any more," he said.
TWELVE
Dammit. Graaah, dammit!
Hannah hated being naked and helpless when she hadn't asked to be.
It really pissed her off.
Okay, she reasoned, there was every chance that being pegged out like a shop window dummy waiting to be dressed in a skydiving suit was apt to piss anybody off, but she had more reason than others. The ordeal had been a formative experience, sure, and to be fair it hadn't even been her fault, but the fact remained that it had happened before.
Hannah had been young and green then, in her early days with the Agency, just a field trainee. She should never have been sent out with the agents that she had been. She and the boys - Perconte, Niland and Warren, the senior agent who dismissed her as a useless little girl, that total bastard - had been investigating the disappearances of a number of women in backwoods Louisiana. The boys had found the shallow graves hiding their abused and tortured bodies, but, abandoned by Warren to her own devices, it had been Hannah who had found the shack where the perps had done the deeds that put them in the ground in the first place. She'd been alone but fuming with Warren, and that anger had made her cocky enough to go in. Mistake. Stupid. Sucker-punched and chloroformed, she had fallen into the hands of a bunch of redneck Clive Barker wannabes and their black and gold spray-painted Rubik's Cube.
At first, she thought she'd be okay. The boys were nearby, after all.
Only they weren't.
What she didn't know was that Warren had called off the search for the night. That one of the slavering rednecks had acknowledged his alert on her walkie-talkie and Warren had been taken in by his muffled voice. The boys had returned to the motel before Warren realised she was missing, and by then they'd have needed Grizzly Adams to get them back through the woods before dawn.
Nine hours. She'd spent nine long hours being introduced to the delights of lit cigarette ends, barbed wire corsets and rusty cutthroat razors, which were always so much worse than gleaming ones because they snagged. Luckily, "Bonehead" and his pals had been relative amateurs, not realising how far the human body could be pushed before it gave up the ghost, and as a result they had held back, afraid to take her too far and spoil their fun. But it had been no picnic all the same. Even now she remembered how she had bucked involuntarily in pain, how the cold sweats had chilled her body to the bone, how the tears had hung hotly in the lids beneath her eyes, and how the searing waves of volt-like agony as the wannabes discovered another patch of sensitive flesh to play with had made her want to scream like a baby.
But she hadn't.
> She hadn't.
She had refused to.
At last, Warren and the others had come. They had shot dead two of the four, then Perconte and Niland had persuaded Warren to at least have the decency to look away while Hannah administered an off-the-record admonition. Regaining possession of her own tools, she had demonstrated to the two survivors how their Barkerian tenet of ecstasy-inducing cycles of pleasure and pain was somewhat unsound and that there was a scream-shrilly-and-beg-for-your-balls kind of a difference between the two sensations. And after she had made that particular point clear, she'd recommended that if they wanted to arse about with the occult again, they should join the Dark Shadows fan club instead. Her boot heels had inflicted a few dark shadows of their own, all over their bodies, as a reminder.
Outside, on the porch, she had vomited long and hard, and she had felt her innocence spilling out with her guts. After she had spent seven days in Baton Rouge General recovering from the nightmare ordeal, she returned to the office. Perconte and Niland were sheepish to say the least, but it was not their fault.
Warren refused to accept responsibility for his ineptitude. He didn't even have the common sense to let it alone. He even tried to turn it into a joke.
"Momma says not to forget to wear clean boxers, Hannah. Why's that, Warren? In case Hannah gets hit by a bus? No, my man, in case somebody decides to strip and torture her... again!"
Maybe Warren thought he was talking to the same little girl he'd taken out into the wood one week before. He was wrong.
He had no idea how much that night had hardened her.
As she walked away from his whimpering and bleeding frame on the office floor, she told him. No more shit. Not any more. The little girl had grown up. And her name was Hannah Chapter.
"Hannah Chapter," Helen Earth said.
Hannah squirmed in her bonds, attempted to talk but found she couldn't because of the ball gag she felt expertly fixed in her mouth. Dribble leaked from her mouth onto her chin.