by Steve Harris
Even authors who committed the sin of hubris realized that no matter how hard they tried, some people would pig-headedly refuse to be drawn in, and Martin thought that Peter Perfect had him down as one of this type.
He also thought that Mr Perfect had correctly estimated that Essenjay (and Harold, too, by the look of him) belonged to that group of readers who would be captivated by even the flimsiest rendering of a story.
This wasn’t much help as far as discovering what Peter Perfect intended to do to Essenjay, but it did give Martin a little more confidence. He would get back to Bude before it got too late to save Essenjay and he would prevail. And if it came down to violence, Martin knew he could handle that too. I’m no pushover,’ he muttered darkly.
‘It’s going to be too late,’ Harold muttered. ‘By the time you get there, if you get there - and I don’t think you will -she’ll be long gone. He’ll have her by then.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Martin said, squinting through the rain at Harold. ‘I don’t think he can put every taxi and train in York out of commission, or even latch himself on their drivers. He has limitations and I know what they are.’
‘You won’t stop him taking her though,’ Harold said, ‘because he won’t actually be taking her. She’ll be invited to go and she’ll go of her own accord.’ Harold stopped talking and walked away, splashing through the rain like a competition walker, his hips wiggling, his elbows working furiously.
Martin ran a few paces, caught him up and half-walked, half-jogged along beside him. ‘You sound a little concerned,’ he said.
Harold didn’t reply.
‘You listening, Harold? Well it doesn’t matter if you aren’t, I suppose, because you’re not here, are you? I haven’t been talking to Harold, whatever-his-name-is for some time now, have I? Fe, fi, fo, fum, I smell a case of author intrusion here.
‘Don’t you know, Mister Perfect, that you’re supposed to let your characters speak for themselves? It is you out there somewhere having this conversation with me, Peter, isn’t it? You just couldn’t resist stepping into your story to straighten things out a bit, could you? To lay down the law. I wouldn’t let one of my authors do that, but then, my authors get to see their books in print. Is that what this is all about, Peter? Did I once turn down one of your books and get you mad at me? Is it revenge? You’re going to hurt Essenjay to get at me, aren’t you? Because you haven’t the courage to get at me direct.’
Harold didn’t reply, but the edges of the ice block in Martin’s brain flickered with red light.
‘Yeah, yeah, you’re going to show me a picture now, to frighten me away. It won’t work, Peter Whoever-you-are. Whatever you are. I’m coming to take Essenjay away from you, and you know you can’t stop me.’
Then come,’ Harold said.
And in Martin’s mind’s eye, the ice block flared with a brilliant red light.
It hurt. Badly. Spikes of ice-cream pain drove down his optic nerves and into his brain. The blinding light only lasted for a few seconds but it left him feeling as though he’d spent the last ten minutes staring at the business end of an arc-welder. Huge puce and purple after images flared across his retinas.
‘If that’s the best you can do, you’re in trouble, you bastard!’ he called after Harold who was striding ahead.
Harold, apparently surrounded by swathes of bursting maroon light, stopped and turned. Try this then,’ he called. This is what happens to unwelcome visitors.’
Afterwards Martin would never be sure whether he’d actually heard the sound that followed this statement or if he’d just imagined it. It seemed to be an introductory flourish and it sounded like someone running their fingers across the strings of a harp. It was the kind of noise you would expect to hear from a magic wand used to enchant someone.
It lasted for less than a second and as soon as it ceased, the ice block in Martin’s head lit up and began to show him the image of Black Rock he’d seen earlier. The front aspect of the building. Seen by moonlight from a distance. There was no light from the upstairs window, but there was a double pool of illumination shining on the track that ran down the hill to the rock.
Headlights, Martin thought, and watched as they drew slowly closer to Black Rock’s entrance.
The scene looked as though it was happening in real-time. It was like watching a live broadcast. For a few seconds Martin couldn’t see the car itself because it was out of shot. Whoever was behind the wheel was a stranger to the house because he or she was driving very carefully. Martin thought that the car’s driver might just turn out to be Essen jay, dressed in a transparent white dress. She was going to be naked beneath it, he knew, and when she got out of her car and the breeze flattened that dress against her body, he would catch glimpses of the milky-white, marble smooth flesh that lay beneath.
What are you, a fucking Mills & Boon editor? he asked himself.
Then he forgot the thought because the car that rolled into view was not Essenjay’s, it was a big beaten-up American thing that might well have started its days as a Cadillac Eldorado. It had squishy suspension and its wings bounced gracefully as the wheels found each indentation in the track.
The image was unbelievably crisp. As the car rolled slowly towards the house, Martin had time to take in the fine detail. Moonlight shimmered on the dark flat sea that surrounded the rock on which the house stood; there were a few traceries of high cirrus cloud in the sky - the kind called ‘mare’s-tails’ - and the stunted hedge that marked the house’s border leaned spiny wooden fingers out towards the land, as if grasping for it.
While this went on inside Martin’s viewfinder, Harold stood facing him, about a hundred yards ahead. Harold wasn’t moving, so Martin ignored him. The outside world now seemed much less substantial than what he could see in his head.
As Martin watched the Cadillac creep forward, there was a disturbance in the air about fifty feet ahead of it, and thirty or forty feet above it. There was barely anything to see: whatever was taking place was visible only because it somehow distorted the night sky behind it. It was similar to looking through a heat-haze except the stars above and behind the disturbance shone purple and seemed to be moving like fireflies.
The car stopped almost immediately, so Martin assumed the driver had also seen what was happening. Either that, or the car’s engine had cut out - it was impossible to tell without sound. Martin thought it probably was the engine. Peter Perfect seemed to have a way with cars.
He watched the odd patch of air as he waited for the car’s driver to get out. It was expanding. Martin was pretty certain it had been almost spherical when it had appeared, but now it was flattening and spreading, moving very slowly.
The car’s headlights went out.
Even before it began to take on colour, Martin was almost sure what the
disturbance would turn out to be. He could tell by the way it was spreading and building up in the middle.
It was going to be a thundercloud.
Peter Perfect was going to subject the occupant of the car to a lightning strike.
The cloud began to show its colours even as Martin realized this. It was not the dark and angry hue of a thundercloud at all, but an ugly shade of dirty brown, like smoke from a chemical fire. Around its edges, wisps swirled outwards and were drawn up and back in, folding themselves over and becoming more dense as they moved. The cloud seemed to be making itself bigger by stealing streams from the bottom of itself and piling them back on the top. And impossible as it looked, it was working. The cloud was soon almost the same size as the house and so dense that Martin could no longer see through it. The top of it coalesced into the anvil shape normally seen on a thunder cloud, and then, just as Martin expected to see the first strike of lightning, the movement ceased. The brown cloud hung in the sky like a solid object. No stray wisps of vapour trailed away from it and it didn’t float towards the car or the house but stayed exactly where it was, as though waiting.
The door of the Cadillac finally opened.
Martin was relieved to see that it was a man who got out, rather than Essenjay. He looked vaguely familiar, and Martin thought that he ought to recognize him: mid-twenties, tall and good-looking. He moved like someone who kept fit, and his bare arms were muscular and sinewy.
And judging from what he has in his hand, he’s going to die, Martin noted.
That much was obvious. It wasn’t the heavy-duty torch in his left hand that was going to kill him, it was the jemmy he held in his right.
If Martin was correct in his assumption about the cloud being a thunderhead, and the reason for it being there, this kid was going to wake up on a mortuary slab, fried to a crisp.
Put the fucking crowbar down, Martin thought. Don’t you know a thundercloud when you see one? Don’t make it easy for him, you drip!
Judging from the jemmy, it looked as if the guy had come with a score to settle. And by the look of the weather conditions, Peter Perfect had been expecting him.
Who the hell are you? Martin wondered looking at the man’s moonlit face as he glanced back towards his car. His features looked very familiar indeed. I know you, don’t I? Martin asked the image.
The man turned back to face the house and looked up at the cloud.
Leave it! Martin thought. Just get outta there. He knows you’re coming and he intends to kill you! He tried telepathically to broadcast this to the man. If this scene was really happening, he ought to be able to do that. Peter Perfect had contacted him telepathically, and if he was able to see a real-life image of what was happening now, he was doing so by telepathy. And if it worked one way, it ought to work the other way too.
Except that it didn’t.
Martin thought the words to the man again, half expecting to see the guy’s head tilt to one side in response. This did not happen.
Go away, he’s getting ready to zap you! Martin mentally shouted.
The man gave a little shrug, shook his head as if he’d imagined something and began to walk towards the dark brown thunderhead.
I can’t believe this, Martin told himself. I’m standing here in the pouring rain staring at Harold while I visualize a man doing something hundreds of miles away and. … and I can’t intervene!
‘We’d better get going,’ Harold announced in a worried voice.
He let go of you then, Harry, did he? Martin thought. He finally gave you your mind back.
‘I’ll catch you up!’ he called aloud.
Martin watched Harold turn and hurry away through the rain while, in his mind’s eye he simultaneously watched the other man walking slowly towards Black Rock.
And suddenly he remembered where he knew him from. It was the guy from Cars Inc., the tyre and exhaust centre in Bude. Martin had been there on several occasions to get tyres for the Dino. They’d had to order them specially. The guy down there about to get zapped by a bolt of lightning was one of the fitters who drooled over the Ferrari each time he took it in. Martin felt his name on the tip of his tongue.
James, he told himself. That’s it. What the fuck is he doing there?
James looked up at the cloud, then at the crowbar. Then he set the crowbar down on the ground. Apparently he’d just had the thought that Martin had been having for him for the last couple of minutes.
Good boy! Martin thought. But it can still get you. You’re going to be the tallest thing passing under that cloud when the lightning strikes and you’ll be the easiest path to earth. What you don’t know about lightning that I do, is that it isn’t as simple as a flash of power hacking down from the sky. The earth acts as one potential electrical pole and the cloud acts as its opposite. And even if Peter Perfect isn’t guiding the outcome, you’re going to be putting the earth’s pole about six feet closer to the cloud. If there is a lightning strike it cannot miss you. So don’t fucking well walk anywhere near that cloud!
James hesitated for a few moments.
And then, to Martin’s dismay, he marched towards Black Rock.
Goodbye, James, Martin thought.
When James got to the cloud’s perimeter, light flashed, but it was an undefined light within the cloud rather than a bolt of raw power, and instead of being white like lightning, it was the deep angry red of molten metal.
It lit again, and this time the red glow moved, slowly at first. It began to expand as if it was seeping into every molecule of the brown cloud that contained it. The movement quickly accelerated. Within two seconds the cloud was seething with something that looked very hot and very angry and extremely anxious to escape.
I don’t know what the fuck it is but that’s not lightning waiting to happen! Martin thought. For Christ’s sake James, move it!
And as James began to run, not back towards his car, but towards the entrance of Black Rock, the boiling cloud began to rain.
Except that what fell from it was not droplets of water.
It was fire.
It fell in hundreds of bright red, fist-sized clumps that spiralled down slowly on whickering tails of flame. When the clumps hit the ground they burst like balloons and sprayed out fire which ran as if it was liquid.
It’s like napalm! Martin thought crazily. It’s a rain of fucking fire! Give that ghost a medal for inventiveness!
James was serpentining now. So far nothing had hit him, but it soon would. He wasn’t going to stay alive long in that lot. It must be like trying to dodge hailstones. Except that if a hailstone hit you, it wasn’t going to burst and shower you with burning liquid. Any second now, one of those parcels of fire was going to hit James on the head or shoulder and then it’d be Game Over.
Martin knew that it wouldn’t be long. James was rapidly running out of places to go. Most of the ground beneath the cloud was ablaze and there se�
�emed to be a solid wall of fire between him and Black Rock’s gate. What air there was left had to be hot enough to scald his lungs.
Any second now, Martin predicted, James is going to keel over into one of those burning pools and you’ll have the pleasure of watching his flesh peel away from his bones like melting plastic.
James glanced up, saw a huge teardrop of fire spiralling down towards him and leapt from his tiny island of safety to another, close by. But Martin concluded that this clump of flame apparently had James’ full name, and probably his address too, written on it because when James jumped from beneath it, it winked out of existence and winked back in again over the spot James had moved to.
It looked as if someone had suddenly rubbed it out and redrawn it again in a better position. Or they’d crossed it out and rewritten it.
That isn’t fair!’ Martin complained aloud. That’s fucking cheating!’
But cheating or not, it had happened.
James watched the fireball descending, waited until the last second, and leapt back to where he had been before.
This time, Peter Perfect wasn’t quick enough to rewrite the scene to suit himself. The fire hit the empty ground and exploded into a shower of bead-sized fragments… some of which headed directly towards James.
He saw them coming and leapt again, but not quite quickly enough. Two tiny beads fell on the right shoulder of his tee-shirt.