Portent

by James Herbert

  'No more of this bullshit!'

  He almost overbalanced at the ferocity of her yell. She moved away from the window, her steps surprisingly light for one of her size.

  'Mama Pitie!' he shouted in desperation.

  She hesitated and that encouraged him.

  'You mustn't interfere with them, Mama Pitie.' Out of the comer of his eye, Rivers caught movement on the bed. 'You mustn't oppose the children, it's too dangerous.' It occurred to him that conditions had become so catastrophic precisely because of the opposing forces and remembered the old man had suggested as much. 'You must leave them alone; they're here to lead us through all this destruction.'

  'That's exactly why I'm here.' The black woman reached over the foot of the bed and grabbed Eva's ankle. She glared at Rivers. 'Don't you see that, boy?'

  Eva screamed as Mama Pitie pulled her towards the end of the bed, a tiny shrill sound that cut through the night like a knife.

  'No!' Rivers shouted.

  Eva was conscious enough to clutch at the bedclothes as she was dragged down the bed and they went with her. Rivers lunged forward and grabbed the big woman's arm, but he might have been a child himself for all the effect he had. Without wasting further time, he drew back his fist and struck at the black woman's disfigured face.

  His knuckles stung like hell, but at least Mama Pitie released her grip on Eva. Instead she seized Rivers, who was half sprawled across the bed, and lifted him. Rivers was helpless as her vice-like fingers dug into his arm and although he tried to pull away she raised him up, then grabbed him by the waist with her other hand. She tossed him over the bed and against the wardrobe on the other side of the room. The wardrobe rocked back against the wall behind as he crashed into it.

  His senses swam as he tried to pick himself up from the floor. He clutched at the side of the bed and pulled against the covering there, hauling himself on to one knee, shaking his head to clear the dizziness. In a blur he saw Eva sit up as her body, shifted by the bedclothes, moved towards him. She gaped at the mountainous creature at the end of the bed, her neck sunk low into her hunched shoulders.

  The black woman saw the movement towards Rivers and lunged at the bedsheets. Her fingers locked through the material and she began to draw the little figure towards her again, her eyes two glittering orbs in the lamplight that revealed the nastiness of her intent. She showed her teeth in an expression that was more canine than pleasured.

  Blood ran down Rivers' cheek from his ear, but he barely noticed it or the pain; he was still stunned, but nevertheless thinking fast. He yanked at the bedclothes so that Eva fell on to her side and when Mama Pitie reached for her ankle once more he scrambled to his feet, stretched for the unlit lamp on that side of the bed, yanked it from its wire and smashed it into the side of the woman's massive head.

  She roared and let go of the child to deal with him. She lifted him easily again, dragging him over the bed and crushing him against her own body. The air left his lungs as she squeezed and he gasped against the pain, sure that his spine would break at any moment. Lightning lit up the room and the thunder that accompanied it was softened by his own blood rushing to his head. He dug his fingers into her fleshy neck, squeezing her throat just as she squeezed his body. He felt his grip weakening, his head spinning, but he renewed his efforts, afraid for himself, for Eva, and for the world.

  It was no good; he could feel the bones of his back bending inwards and the last dregs of air leaving his lungs to emerge from his throat as a last rasping sigh. The gloom seemed darker, the shadows blacker. Mama Pitie's face was only inches from his own and, oddly, his eyes focused on that deep slit beneath her nose, the wide nostril that was like a second toothless grin, mocking him for his feebleness. It began to blur as vision and strength slowly drained away from him. His senses began to go.

  He struggled against her, his head dropping forward as he strained his back against the pressure. His moist lips slid over the scars of her cheek, and then against her big lips in a kiss that held no passion. He bit down hard and she flinched away, releasing him only slightly, but just enough for him to draw in a short breath through his nose. He felt disgusted, sickened, but he sank his teeth harder into her lower lip, tasting her blood, grinding his teeth together to cause maximum damage. He felt himself raised in her arms, his body pushed away from hers; still he clung to her lip, biting down, drinking her blood, fighting the nausea that threatened to choke him.

  Mama Pitie tried to thrust him away. She shook him as though he was no more than a rag doll. But still he hung on to her.

  He felt her relax for the briefest of seconds as she gathered all her strength; then she gripped him beneath his shoulders, straightened her arms and tossed her head to one side in the same movement. Her howl filled the room as the flesh of her lip came away from her face and Rivers felt her bloody meat inside his mouth. He choked, then spat out the thick sliver, bile rising in his throat as he did so. But she had him still and, despite her pain, she held his elbow and yanked at his wrist at the wrong angle, snapping the elbow joint as easily as one might snap a wishbone.

  Rivers screamed with the pain and she threw him aside, leaving him there in a heap on the floor while she turned back to the little bundle on the bed that had been too shocked to move. Mama Pitie would deal with this man when she had more time for pleasure. Blood gushed from her tom lip and flooded her chin and chest with its slick crimson flow, but she ignored the agony and the wetness just as she ignored her antagonist slumped in the comer. There were more important things at hand.

  She wrenched the child from the bed and turned to face the window, her burden held high over her head, her eyes bulging with rage.

  Rivers heard Eva's scream and he looked up, his whole body, and not just his broken arm, a mass of pain.

  'Noooo!' he shouted as lightning lit the tableau before him, the huge black woman, her lower face a gory mess, holding the screaming child aloft, ready to hurl her through the big window. Thunder drowned Eva's screams.

  31

  Her arms were straight and powerful as she stood poised to throw Eva out into the stormy night. The lightning flickered still and the thunder shook the house to its very foundations

  But Mama Pitie paused.

  She stood before the window, the weight she held nothing at all to those mighty arms, staring at something out there in the night.

  Fighting against the pain, Rivers shifted from the comer he'd been carelessly tossed into. Blood was smeared across his lips and the taste of her, vile and rotten, was still in his mouth. It was difficult to move, each stirring sending fresh pain streaking through his body, but he did so, crawling to the foot of the bed so that he was almost behind the big woman. He gagged, but fought back the sickness, the short, dry retching sound he made lost in the thunder overhead.

  Suddenly it was quiet, the patter of rain on the window the only noise. Mama Pitie remained motionless, her gaze fixed on something outside the window, and although his head still spun with the punishment he had taken, Rivers noticed light continued to brighten the room even though the lightning had faded. The last rumble of thunder died away as he raised himself to his knees and looked past the dark-robed woman before him.

  The tiny, shining light was above the courtyard, glowing in the rain, a halo of colours around it, a rainbow circle whose spectrum was soft yet dazzling to the eye. The wind had no influence over the ball of light, for it hovered without movement and not even the rain dulled its blaze.

  As Mama Pitie watched it through the glass she felt doubt for the first time. This thing made no sound, it said nothing, but its meaning… oh its meaning was so clear. Yet so confusing. Somehow the shining light told her through voices implanted inside her own mind, voices that sounded like a million children singing, that the planet was their existence, that it nurtured them and fed them, was their home and their host, and it was them. The revelation was overwhelming. Yet Mama Pitie's tortured soul tried to deny it, for to accept would be to reject all her own p
ast teachings, her own affirmations, the beliefs that had given her a goal, that had taken her from the slums of the city and the entrapment of her own brutish ugliness and laid before her a mission that would sustain her through life and set her aside from others, not as some carnival freak, but as a saviour, a saviour of the Great Mother Earth Herself. And the powers she had been born with were the key, for they told her she was special, someone apart from all the rest, not for her size, not for her physical strength, but for her ability to heal, to read the thoughts of others, to travel with her mind. She believed Mother Earth, Herself, Her Great Self, had bestowed these powers upon her for one purpose alone, and only in recent months had she come to realize just what that purpose was: Mama Pitie had been blessed so that she could help the Great Mother in her final hour of conflict-and now that time had come.

  She stifled the doubt, she smothered her own wonderment at the shining light outside the window-a light that, after all, was put there by other devious minds to confuse and distract her from her true purpose-and she bent her arms to throw this child with its degenerate thoughts, this child who plotted and schemed with others to dominate and cripple the Great Mother Earth. Her arms tensed and she leaned back. The child would join the light outside!

  From the floor Rivers watched as those powerful arms trembled with the tension that ran through them. The woman's fingers were open, Eva balanced between the huge hands. Eva screamed again.

  And Rivers leapt up, the movement awkward but fast. His one good arm wrapped itself around Eva's waist and his own weight as he fell back to the floor did the rest. Her nightdress tore as Mama Pitie reflexively closed her grip, and the child toppled with Rivers, both of them falling in a heap on the floor.

  Rivers cried out as his broken arm struck the bed, but he took Eva's weight on his own chest, breaking her fall. He hugged her to him as he sprawled there, his shoulders resting against the footboard and, with eyes half closed with pain, he watched the huge bloodied woman turn towards them.

  Light burned through the windows behind her, dust motes caught in its rays; her massive lumbering body was almost in silhouette as she towered above them.

  She was screeching as she reached for Eva again.

  32

  At first Rivers thought it was thunder that tore through the room, but the sound was too sharp and even its echo was over too quickly. And its brightness hadn't the electric starkness of lightning, nor did it linger and flicker.

  Mama Pitie staggered backwards, her bloodied chest now tom and bubbling more blood. She stood inches away from the window and roared her pain and screamed her frustration. Her body was rigid, her arms upraised, her fingers curled into thick claws.

  Only when Diane pulled the shotgun's second trigger did Mama Pitie jerk backwards, her arms flailing as she lost her balance. She crashed through the glass, the hem of her gown fluttering in the wind like the wings of some monstrous bird. Her scream was cut short as she hit the cobblestones below.

  The rain and the rushing of the wind was louder through the broken window, but there was a deep silence in the room where Rivers and Eva lay, and where Diane stood in the doorway, smoke from Mack's shotgun curling towards the ceiling. There was a look of utter horror on Diane's face as she stared towards the window, the light outside merely a focus point that had no significance in her shocked mind.

  Rivers felt Eva squirming against him and he released her immediately. 'Mama?' she said as she scrabbled to her feet.

  At first he thought she meant the gross woman who had tried to kill her, the one the man downstairs called Mama Pitie, and he spoke to her, his voice barely a whisper, telling her it was all right now, the bad lady was gone, she was safe; but Eva ran towards the door, her arms outstretched, calling 'Mama' over and over again.

  He raised himself to see Diane drop the empty shotgun and sweep up her daughter into her arms. Eva buried her face into Diane's neck, and Diane held her tight, tight, her eyes closed, her lips moving as she repeated her daughter's name.

  Pain, almost forgotten for a short while, returned and Rivers rested his head against the curving top of the bed's footboard. It felt as if white heat was racing through the whole left side of his upper body. He clung to the bed with his good arm and resisted the waves of exhaustion and hurt that tormented him.

  'Diane,' he managed to say.

  She came to him quickly, Eva still clutched in her arms, and as she approached he noticed the room was bright, the light from outside stronger.

  'What… who was she?' Diane said, kneeling beside him.

  He drew in a breath before he spoke. 'Remember what the Dream Man told me? He said… he said there were others, others like the children… with their power, but opposing forces. He said their beliefs were different…' He couldn't go on, the pain was too great. Time enough to talk of it later.

  'Jim, your arm…'

  'Yeah, the bitch broke it.' He winced and leaned his forehead on the bed. He drew in a long breath again. 'Is Eva okay?' he asked when the fresh flush of agony had subsided a little.

  Diane looked at her daughter who tried to smile but couldn't quite manage it. She rested against her mother's arm and watched Rivers as he turned his body to sit.

  'I took Mack's shotgun from his room before I came into the house,' Diane said hurriedly. 'Oh God, I used to hate him using it…'

  'You had to do it,' Rivers told her. 'She'd have killed Eva if you hadn't. Probably me, too.'

  'Poggsy's in a bad way. I think he's suffered a heart attack. And Bibby's… Bibby's Rivers nodded. 'I think she stabbed one of them before they broke… before they got to her.' He wondered if it had been Mama Pitie who had snapped Bibby's neck like that. God knows she had the strength to do it. 'I got the other one with the same knife.'

  'I saw them downstairs. Jim, there was another one. I saw him leaving the house as I came back with the shotgun.'

  'Let's hope he's long gone. We've got to do something about Hugo, get him to a hospital 'And you. You'll have to get that arm fixed.'

  Eva raised her head from her mother's shoulder and solemnly regarded Rivers, looking from his face to his injured arm. Without a word she stretched out her hand and touched him. She left her mother and knelt down in front of him, her little hand running down the length of his broken arm, starting at the shoulder and moving down to the wrist. He felt the heat from her fingers and the warmth quickly spread through the whole of his arm and shoulder. And as the warmth radiated, so the pain fled before it. The relief was gradual at first, an easing of the pain's sharpness, but soon Eva's magic began to work rapidly, and before long all he could feel was a dull ache. Something clicked and he realised the bones had locked together again.

  'Jesus,' he said, staring first at Eva and then at Diane. He tried to move his arm, but it was stiff; stiff but free of pain.

  He began to haul himself to his feet and Diane rose with him, taking him beneath the shoulder as she did so. The room became even brighter as lightning lit the troubled sky; this time the thunder followed a moment or two later.

  'It's moving away,' Rivers muttered absently as he looked down at Eva. 'Thank you,' he said to her. Tiredness almost overwhelmed him and he leaned heavily against Diane. She held him close and he felt her body jerk with a sudden sob. 'It's over, Diane, the worst is over. Now we've got to help Hugo.'

  He noticed the shadows in the room were moving, running back towards the broken window where Eva now stood looking out, the wind whipping at her tousled hair. He realized the light outside was moving upwards. Diane sensed his distraction and followed his gaze. The small light with its ring of colours was about to disappear from view.

  'My God,' she said quietly, 'it's beautiful.'

  Then it was gone, though its glow still lit Eva's head and shoulders.

  'Eva, careful of the broken gla…'

  Diane's words were cut off when her daughter screamed, 'Josh!' Rivers and Diane moved quickly to the window and peered down into the courtyard below. A small sound escaped Rivers
, for he knew it was not yet all over for them, that the horror had not passed. Clouds rolled towards Hazelrod in a boiling mass, sheet lightning flaring in their vapours as if now unable to escape. Thunder rumbled low and menacing. Towards the far hills a bluish tower swayed erratically.

  Rivers had barely noticed these things as he'd taken the few steps towards the window, and now his attention was on Josh who was standing in the centre of the courtyard watching the dark shape that was stirring on the cobblestones. A short distance away the bespectacled man, whose red braces were vivid under the light from above, also watched the rising heap. This one stood by the Grenada, his shirt drenched by the drizzling rain so that his black skin showed through.

  Mama Pitie's broad shoulders heaved with the effort, her head slowly raising itself so that she could look at the boy just a few yards away. She stretched out a quivering arm towards him, its fingers bent and broken.

  Even from above they could hear her crazed murmurings as she raised herself to her knees, her misshapen hand still pointed towards Josh. They looked on in dread-filled paralysis as she staggered to her feet and stood there, swaying in the wind and the rain. She took one step forward towards the boy, and then another.

  'Run, Josh, run! Get away from her!'

  Rivers held on to Diane, afraid she would fall as she leaned forward and screamed at her son.

  The boy did not move. He seemed mesmerized.

  'Josh.'

  Eva only spoke the name, but he looked up at the window instantly. His eyes found his sister's.

  Diane turned away, ready to make for the stairs, but Rivers held on to her arm.

  'I've got to get to him!' she yelled at him, her eyes damp with tears of fear.

  'Look,' Rivers said, pointing towards the sky. 'Look…'

  The lights were coming from everywhere, moving just below the black roiling clouds, hundreds of them it seemed, the rain causing soft aureoles around each one.