Black Rock
Page 50
The lion, when it was complete, was totally golden. Its eyes, its teeth, its claws. A travesty of a real lion, its head seemed to be all jaws and teeth. It did not look at all noble, more like a beast that had been designed and built in hell.
It roared and reared up on its hind legs like a frightened horse, swiping at the air in front of it, struggling forwards against the molten gold that was still pouring into it.
And then it was free.
Somewhere out to sea, thunder cracked.
And in the forecourt of Black Rock, it began to snow.
The snow fell in huge blinding flakes that blurred James’ vision.
And the golden animal charged out from the doorway, steaming as it met the snow, leaving melted footprints in the frost.
It got to Martin in three huge bounds.
James saw Martin’s axe-handle fly and heard the deadened thud as it stove into the lion’s head. Then the lion was rearing up and slashing with its claws.
James hammered across the forecourt, bringing the axe up as he ran.
Martin screamed and struck out again.
The lion bellowed, backed off and leapt at him.
Through the blinding snow, James caught glimpses of the beast hitting Martin in the chest, and Martin falling.
As James arrived, the lion sank its teeth into Martin’s leg. James saw his chance. The lion’s hindquarters were facing him, its tail was up and it was male. James heaved the axe at its testicles. Golden flesh split, steaming yellow liquid poured out and the lion roared in what James hoped was extreme pain.
The animal turned towards him, but he was ready and waiting for it. As its paw came up, claws extended, James struck again. The jarring shock almost tore the axe from his hands. He backed away as the lion slashed at him, its paw now half severed and its claws retracted. The hot yellow liquid was pouring from the wound.
The lion snarled at him and turned away. It limped past Martin who was trying to get himself up off the ground, then turned around and crouched. The moment that James realized it was not sitting down because it was hurt but because it intended to pounce, it was in the air.
It came down on Martin and its jaws locked around his injured leg.
‘get it off me!’ Martin shrieked, thumping at its head with the pick-axe handle. Around his legs the snow was red with his blood.
James leapt over his body, skidded to a halt beside the lion, brought the axe up over his head and brought it down with all his strength into the lion’s backbone.
The lion screamed, but it didn’t let go of Martin’s leg.
Martin screeched.
James stood astride Martin, aimed and whacked the axe down into the lion’s face. Steaming yellow blood poured into the snow, mixing with the red from Martin’s leg.
The lion raised its broken head.
James hit it again.
The lion howled, long and hard.
And then it ceased to exist.
What it had done, however, remained.
‘My leg. Fuck fuck fuck. It hurts!’ Martin squealed.
James knelt beside him. Martin’s right leg was so badly mangled between the knee and the hip that it was difficult to tell which bits were the material of his torn trousers, and which were torn pieces of flesh. There was an artery gone in there somewhere, James knew, because down by Martin’s knee, blood was jetting, just like it did in the films.
‘It hurts!’ Martin moaned again. His jacket and shirt were in ribbons too, his chest was badly cut and there were four puncture marks on his left hip but these wounds were not the important ones. The important one was the artery. That was where Martin’s life was pumping away from him.
‘We’ve got to get you to hospital,’ James said, pushing his thumbs into the knee wound. It didn’t clamp off the flow of blood like it did in the movies; all it did was make Martin scream and make the blood squirt out under high pressure.
‘Get in there and get Essy!’ Martin moaned. ‘Don’t worry about me. He’ll be weak now. Just get in there and get her out!’
‘You’ll die!’ James said.
Martin pushed himself up on his elbows. ‘Everybody dies,’ he hissed. ‘It’s just a question of when.’
‘I can’t just let you die,’ James said.
Martin gritted his teeth. ‘Then pull my belt off me and put a fucking tourniquet around my fucking knee, you wanker! Don’t you know anything about first aid?’
Working quickly, James got the belt around Martin’s knee and pulled it tight. It didn’t stem the flow of blood entirely, but it had subsided quite a lot.
‘That’ll be fine,’ Martin said. ‘Now get in there and get your Drezy, we can fight about who gets to keep her afterwards. And if you’re not out in five minutes, I’m getting up, going back to my car and driving myself to Barnstaple hospital. So hurry up.’
James doubted that Martin could stand, let alone walk. It was all just courageous talk. But it worked.
James reached the door, took hold of the door knob - from the centre of which the were-lion glared sullenly at him - and pushed.
The door, as he had anticipated, remained firmly closed against him.
He turned round to glance at Martin and couldn’t see him through the flurries of snow that were falling.
He already knew that the fire-axe wouldn’t take the door down, but there didn’t seem to be any other way. He stood back and swung the axe.
He might just as well have tried to chop the barrel off a Chieftain tank. In fact, he decided, inspecting the spot where the axe had struck, you would have probably had more success doing that.
He swung the axe again, at the door knob this time. He thought he saw sparks and a few glittering flecks of gold falling, but when he looked, the knob was as undamaged as the door itself had been.
Defeated, he glanced at the snow behind him - which was rapidly turning into a blizzard - then he balled his fist and knocked gently.
And the door opened.
The hall was as bare as it had been earlier. James went inside. The first door he opened was the one that led into the lounge. This time there was no sea bed in there. It was just an ordinary empty room. He went to the far end of the lounge and looked out of the back window. Outside, above the overgrown garden, the sky was clear. There was a profusion of wild spring flowers growing in the garden. The sea down behind the rock was calm.
James hurried back to the window which looked out on the forecourt. It seemed impossible that it was winter on one side of the building and spring on the other.
It was impossible. It was spring on this side of the building too.
And there were other changes: the forecourt was no longer covered in gravel; there was a barred gate across the entrance; the bushes that ran around the perimeter of the property were gone. And last, but hardly least, there was no sign of Martin.
I’ve gone back in time, James told himself. Back to before Peter Perfect moved in. That’s why there’s no furniture or fittings in here. That’s how t
he seasons have changed. The bushes around the perimeter haven’t even been planted yet. What year is this then?
What year it was didn’t matter, he knew. The important thing was finding out if there was a link from where he was now to the time at which he’d entered the building. Drezy wasn’t going to be back here in nineteen hundred and whatever it was. From where he was standing she was in the future.
What if you can’t get back to where you started from? he asked himself as he hurried back down the lounge towards its rear door. It might be eighty-odd years ago out there.
He thrust the thought out of his mind and began to search. The entire building was empty but in the room upstairs, the one that Drezy said was Peter Perfect’s writing room, he thought that when he listened carefully he could hear echoes of Drezy’s voice.
But there was no hole in the fabric of reality to crawl through, no veil whose corner could be lifted to allow him under.
Eventually he gave up listening for the echoes of the future and went back downstairs, to where the closed front door was waiting for him.
He reached out and took hold of the cold door knob and the door opened.
The blast of cold air and snow that shot in at him almost knocked him over. Outside, a blizzard was in full swing.
James turned back, but the interior of the house was still in the past. There were no fixtures or fittings, no deep pile carpet. The house wasn’t going to let him in and that was that.
He ran out into the snow - which was ankle deep - and headed for the pink-tinged patch where Martin lay. He was half-buried. His eyes were closed and snow had settled over his eyelids and down the line of his nose.
‘Wwwww?’ Martin murmured in a shuddering questioning tone.
‘I couldn’t get her,’ James said, kneeling in the snow beside Martin and sitting him up. The house is flexible in time. It let me in but on the inside it’s years ago. Before Peter Perfect came. I couldn’t find a way to Drezy.’
‘Gotttaaaahhh,’ Martin shuddered. His head fell against James’ chest.
James shook his head. His eyes blurred with tears. ‘Can’t do it,’ he said. ‘And anyway I’m going to have to get you out of here before you die. I’ll come back afterwards. And I’ll keep coming back until I get Drezy back. I swear.’
He stood, hoisted Martin up, put him over his shoulder and began to walk back towards the car.
This was the result of acting like a book hero, he realized as he trudged up towards the car. If he hadn’t been so stupid last night, none of this need have happened. He could have stopped Drezy coming here.
But it was too late for this now. You only got one chance and if you fucked it up, that was tough. That was real life. One time only, no replays.
He reached Martin’s car and propped him up against the side of it while he yanked open the car door. Martin was too far gone to even squeak at the rough treatment his leg was receiving as James put him in the car.
James got in, started the car, pushed the heater controls to maximum, turned on the fan, selected reverse and looked up the hill over his shoulder. It was a long, steep backwards drive to the top and there was snow on the ground. There wasn’t so much of it up here, but enough to make it difficult.
But James thought he could manage it.
‘You’re going to be OK,’ he told Martin and began to drive.
I’ll come back, he told himself as he reversed away from Drezy. Hang on Drezy, I’ll come back!
33 - The Story’s End
The words she had written earlier rang through S’n’J’s head as she stood at the window watching James carry Martin away through the snow.
And now that power was draining away. There wasn’t enough of it to hold everything in place, she thought to herself bitterly as James and Martin reached the gateposts and slipped out of view behind a swirling blanket of falling snow. For someone who was now supposed to be mortal again and rapidly losing his grip, Philip had just managed a mind-wrenching show of force.
Powerless to intervene since the door had closed on her, trapping her in the work-room, S’n’J had stood at the window watching it all fifteen feet below her on the forecourt. She’d witnessed the whirlwinds and when James and Martin had survived them, she’d cheered and punched the air with her fist, knowing in her heart that her piece of writing was going to come true.
She’d heard what happened when the door opened for them downstairs, and above the constant wail that Janie had been making - and still was - she’d detected the sounds of raised voices and another voice that sounded like Billy-Joe’s.
Then her intuition told her that Philip was losing power and in a moment Martin and James would be charging up the stairs to rescue her.
But it didn’t happen.
Instead, they began to shout at one another, their voices tight with panic. And as she listened, trying to work out what they were saying, the whole house seemed to shift on its foundations. And S’n’J began to unhear what James and Martin had already said. Their calls and responses replayed themselves backwards, fading away. It was almost as if they were being thrust away from her, backwards in time.
No time passed at all before they came sprinting back out of the house with a thousand tiny balls of fire chasing them. Then, out there on the forecourt, Martin and James were obviously readying themselves for an attack which was going to come from the vicinity of the front door. S’n’J could only make guesses as to its nature.
Her mind really began to reel when a black printed line of music appeared in the glass of the window in front of her. She could not read music at all, but she knew what tune she was being shown.
The notes all looked solid and as if they were three-dimensional rather than flat print. In a daze she reached up and touched the cool glass, expecting to feel ridges. But the notes were inside the glass.
This didn’t stop them from playing their tune for her when she ran her finger along the staff that contained them. The tune was the Peter Perfect rendition of ‘Frosty the Snowman’ and the moment she heard the melody, snow began to fall outside and something golden that looked like a lion with its grace and nobility removed sprang from the step, roaring.
S’n’J began to scream when the lionthing found Martin, then clamped her mouth shut because she could feel the house siphoning the scream away from her and feeding on it. Downstairs in the cellar, Janie’s screams were growing fainter so there was a good chance Black Rock was going to run out of power if, for once in her life, Sarah-Jane could keep her terror under control.
Diamond Ambrose Anstey lay curled up on the floor beside the broken computer case and she focused on him.
‘Get up dog!’ she hissed, thinking, I have no fear. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil. I will fear no evil. I will fear no Philip.
Diamond raised his head, cocked an ear, listened, then put his nose back und
er his tail.
Downstairs Janie suddenly fell silent.
S’n’J felt her die. The sensation was that of someone plucking a brief, sad glissando upon the strings of her heart.
Gone, S’n’J told herself and felt tears begin to fill her eyes.
Ten seconds later, the lion ceased roaring and S’n’J drew a deep shuddering breath. Were Martin and James gone too?
Ten seconds after that, she heard someone charge into the house and realized that, against all the odds, James had survived. A tiny flame of hope lit in her heart… and was extinguished again when she called out for him because her voice caught in her throat and suddenly James was unrunning into the house, vanishing backwards in time again.
S’n’J turned to go back to the window simply because there was nothing else she could do.
And there was James in front of her.
‘James!’ she cried.
He looked directly at her but didn’t seem to see her. He came towards her as she spoke again, and her hopes were dashed. He was here but he was not here. The surface of his body rippled as though he was made of gently stirring water and when he moved she could see through him.
‘Where are you?’ she moaned. ‘I’m here, in front of you! Come back to me!’
She held out her arms to him as he came closer and her hands passed through him. The place where he stood was made of freezing air.
She followed James to the end of the room, yelling at him, then she followed him back again, to the door.
‘Don’t go out!’ she wailed as he took hold of the door handle and turned it. I’m here!’
James opened the door.
Except that it didn’t open. He looked as if he was miming the action.
Somewhere, S’n’J knew, in another time, the invisible door he was opening really did exist. She just couldn’t see it because James was in the past or the future. All she was seeing was a reflection of James across time.