There was even room for them to stand in a circle, if they wished.
~
He called her late at night after she’d drunk a whole bottle of wine on top of the medicine she was taking, and the whole thing seemed unreal the next morning, like a drunken memory so unlikely it didn’t form a link with events before or after. Nonetheless she was convinced it was real, that it had happened.
“How did you get my number?” was the first thing she said after he introduced himself, but Mr Markham just laughed.
“Don’t you want to talk to me? Aren’t there things you want to ask?”
“Wh... what?” she said groggily.
“Then let me help you. Have the disappearances started yet?”
Emma felt her head pound; felt like the background static hum of the phone was in her own ears. Everything seemed dulled and fuzzy like her flu was sheltering her from the world.
“Let me see,” he said, “who would it be first I wonder... Michael Potts? Lorraine Chambers?”
“How..?” Emma said. “Has Mister Hall...?”
Markham’s laughter cut her off; he seemed to be enjoying himself.
“No, no,” he said, sounding like an mocking actor who didn’t believe in his part. “I just suspected it would be her. She wasn’t as... receptive, shall we say, as some of the others. Already so grown up for her age! So I figured her for the first scapegoat.”
“Scapegoat?”
“Maybe sacrifice is a better word,” Markham said, as if good-naturedly conceding a point. “To appease a few gods perhaps. You won’t find her body you know.”
Emma closed her eyes and entered the darkness where her headache boomed. Eyes shut none of it seemed real, not possibly real at all, and she jumped when Markham spoke in the darkness.
“There’s nothing to find. Which is the only truth, or suggestive of it anyway. Just like all that medieval shite I taught them. And just like your Aunt Jess, cancer-thin and coming for you. For you.”
“How did you know...?”
Markham laughed. When he spoke next Emma was vaguely aware his voice had changed, as if he’d changed parts. He sounded like some fusty academic.
“Of course your ‘monster’, your ‘Aunt Jess’ was a very pure example of the archetype, undiluted one might say. Because all of childhood’s monsters represent one thing in the end...”
“Where’s Lorraine?” Emma interrupted, her head pounding, but Markham barely paused. Instead his voice changed again, became frantic, almost aggressive:
“... one thing only! And contrary to what you think now, all grown up and repressed Emma, it will get you, one day, the monster will get you and take you with it...”
“Be quiet!” Emma said, but her blocked nose made her anger sound feeble. She couldn’t think with this madman’s voice infecting her thought processes. Before she could gather her wits he was off again, with yet another voice. He didn’t just sound child-like, he sounded exactly like a child: high-pitched, mocking, malevolent:
“Ring around the rosie,
“A pocketful of posies,
“Ashes, atisho!
“Who falls down?”
Emma’s head span with the words; surely this man, who sounded insane, couldn’t be a teacher? But then as soon as she thought that his voice became adult again, stern, authoritative – exactly like a teacher’s.
“Of course you know what the posy was for?” he said. Emma answered automatically.
“To... they thought it would protect them...”
“Gold star Emma! Many prayed too of course, thinking God would protect them, if no one else. But He didn’t. But people still wanted protection, from anyone, anything. And some people remembered old songs, old even then... “
Emma sneezed thunderously, unexpectedly, and this seemed to interrupt the voice where her stammered words couldn’t, to throw him off his stride.
“I don’t care about any of that!” she said quickly whilst he was silent. “I don’t care about history, I care about what’s happening now. Where’s Lorraine?”
But he had recovered, and his voice had changed again.
“Don’t you think, Emma, that in her last instant your Aunt Jess would have sacrificed anyone – absolutely anyone, including you – to save herself?”
Then there was blankness and then it was as if she had awoken some time after the conversation had ended, although that couldn’t be the case. Emma still had the phone pressed to her ear and her eyes closed. She swayed slightly with the wine and affects of her tablets, and she wasn’t sure which of them it was who had hung up or when.
~
Lorraine didn’t turn up; Emma spoke to the girl’s mother on the phone the next day, and the franticness in the other woman’s voice made Emma feel sick. She didn’t mention the conversation she’d had with Markham; the fact that he’d said the body wouldn’t be found. She hadn’t told anyone she’d spoken to Markham, not having anyone to tell, and not quite believing it had happened. When she put the phone down she looked out of the office windows – the fog seemed to be thinning, but revealing black clouds crowding the sky and beating it downwards.
Mr Hall had been listening to Emma’s call the whole time (he had refused to speak to the parents himself, although he’d have to speak to the police later) and now he impatiently gestured for her to leave his office. He didn’t seem to feel the deep lurking panic that Emma did. She went back to her classroom, and her children barely seemed to be hiding their whispered conversations now, their looks of smiling contempt at what she had to teach them. And it did seem to Emma something paltry; sums and spellings thrown in the face of death.
She couldn’t stop thinking that, despite being young, she knew a lot of people who had died. Not just her Aunt Jess, but also a girl from school (in a car crash at seventeen), three grandparents (two strokes, one cancer); a little boy before that, bald and with a tube in his nose at age seven which none of the kids had understood, and then he’d been gone from class one day. And a man at a factory where she had worked one summer, who had got pulled somehow into the roaring machinery while Emma’s back had been turned (and as the screaming panic had started behind her she’d kept her back turned, thinking that if she didn’t look then it couldn’t affect her). She couldn’t stop thinking about all these deaths, which perhaps made up for the small amount she had thought about them before. But it still didn’t all seem quite real to her. Death was something that happened to other people. She didn’t believe in it, not in any way that seriously threatened her...
But Lorraine. She could, just, imagine Lorraine being dead if she set her mind to it. Or rather, if her mind set itself to it, for she seemed to have little control over the images it projected into the spaces behind her eyes. Lorraine had always been one of her favourites and she had failed to protect her...
The bell rang for the afternoon break, the final one of the week. The children got up, their eyes directly challenging hers. They seemed more sombre now, but still beyond her, out of her influence. There was a forced swagger in their gaits, like teenagers walking past a group of the opposite sex. They walked like this past Emma now; something in their manner convinced her that this was it, somehow, the last chance to alter anything or find out what was going on with them.
Emma got up and followed directly behind them, like she was a child too.
This seemed to surprise them but not concern them unduly. The children walked in a row outside – the fog was thinning visibly now, black shapes and shadows emerging from its tight grey sheeting. The tension of an impending storm fell from the massed clouds above, proceeding the raindrops themselves. The change in pressure seemed to clear Emma’s head, for her thoughts seemed faster and freer than they had all week, although she still felt a clot of wordless fear in the centre that she couldn’t articulate much less relieve.
The children ignored her, and proceeded round the side of the playground, to the quadrangle. No one talked.. Emma, at the back of the line, didn’t know how to ass
ert her authority. She stood aimlessly beside one of the overflowing bins, the smell adding to her nausea. The secret quadrangle was darker and colder than everywhere else, washed over by shadows. The light seemed to be visibly fading as the children, watched helplessly by Emma, held hands and formed a circle. She expected them to start singing, the song Markham had no doubt taught them (“we all fall down”) – instead Michael Potts raised his left hand and pointed at the girl next to him. Without meeting anyone’s eyes he chanted a childish rhyme, which trembled with his voice:
“Ip, dip, dog, shit, you, trod, in, it, and, O, U, T, spells, out.”
With each syllable he moved his pointing finger one along the circle of children; the girl branded “out” breathed a visible sigh of relief. The dipping continued, this time with another rhyme:
“Ip, dip, sky, blue, it, is, not, you, and, O, U, T, spells, out.”
Alternating between these two rhymes more and more children became “out” and all looked relieved. But the tension, rather than lessening, increased; Emma could feel it spitting between the children like it was spitting between the storm clouds above, which were creating a wall of darkness atop shadowy walls.
Only Michael Potts and Rebecca Beckett were left in. Michael diligently started the rhyme, but all the children, and Emma, worked out before he’d finished that he’d be out and Rebecca left in.
The two children on either side of Rebecca left go of her hands; she turned in mute appeal to them, her mouth working at the air. The other children pushed her into the centre and joined hands again, the circle becoming one link smaller around her. Rebecca turned slowly looking at her classmates, silent but her eyes pleading. Emma realised the girl looked absolutely terrified. The other children looked at their feet and started to turn...
“No!” shouted Emma, reminding them of her presence. Markham’s words seemed to be running through her thoughts: “scapegoat”, “sacrifice”, “ashes, ashes”. She had no idea what was happening, but saw Rebecca’s eyes look to her like she was her last hope. Emma rushed forward and pushed into the centre of the circle. The children didn’t say anything. Emma took Rebecca’s hand and started to led her out of the quadrangle...but when the girl got to the edge of the circle she simply turned round, took the two proffered hands, and returned to her previous place. Her eyes looked anywhere but at Emma.
The circle started to turn again, with Emma in its eye. The children started to sing:
“Ring around the rosie,
“A pocketful of posies...”
Their voices didn’t sound innocent, but fully aware of the song’s history and connotations.
Emma stood there, watching the children turn, not knowing what to do. Each time the song was repeated it was faster, and the circle turned faster. The children’s faces turned passt her, blurred into generalities. Because of the shadows and clouds she felt like she was in a tight black box, full of the smell of rot and decay. She remembered singing this song, and it seemed to her that the faces of some of those she had sang it with were amongst those which turned and turned around her. She felt dizzy and unstable, like she could fall down just because the song lyrics suggested it. The circle whirled faster, sang faster, and Emma closed her eyes.
In the darkness she saw Aunt Jess, shrunken and death-bound and reaching out for her, to embrace her... but that embrace would pull her into the darkness too, Emma saw. She saw herself reflected in her aunt’s pupils, a tiny child Emma caught in the darkness and screaming, realising what every child realises and immediately represses.
The circle was singing different words now, older ones perhaps, which Emma heard in her darkness – they were unintelligible but expressive, and they were sung with childish total belief. There wasn’t any monster in her wardrobe really, only blackness... not even her Aunt Jess just blackness, which was worse, much worse. It was nothing and too much. As the song was sung knowledge awoke and arose in her, spreading outwards and infecting everything, turning the spinning centre of every atom black. She was no longer sure if her eyes were open or not and it no longer mattered, because everything was black. Everything was black and everything was consumed, and she knew she was consumed too. She was consumed and she was going to die; she believed it finally and totally because the song and the circle made her believe it. And believing it and absorbing it would make it so; she felt herself falling down, falling away into the blackness, and she knew, with the total fascination that the dying reserve for their final thought, that the others around her were glad that at least, this time, it hadn’t been them.
And then the circle stopped turning, and Emma fell down.
Drones
The rest of the soldiers call me ‘Drone’ because that’s what I fly – UAVs. Unmanned drones that can circle battlefields many kilometres wide, and deliver a precise Hellfire strike against any target in that zone, all based on commands from my computer terminal back at base. That distance in part accounts for my contemptuous nickname, of course – the pilots, the artillery, the medics, the infantry (especially the fucking infantry) are all in the firing line at some point, all in some theoretical danger even from the ragtag bunch of guerrillas we are fighting in the mountains. Whereas I am watching events on a screen miles behind the rest of them. They treat me like one of the civilian bureaucrats, and not like someone who has trained and fought alongside them, someone who has saved their ass on occasion.
There are other UAV pilots than me of course, but only I am ‘Drone’ and I know they mean something disparaging about my manner by this as well. I am not against this war (how could I be, when back home so many people voted for and continue to vote for the politicians who launched it?) but I feel no jingoistic bloodlust or hatred for our enemy either. Flying drones is what I have been trained to do, so I do it, in a manner I like to think is both precise and competent.
The enemy would be hard to hate anyway, for I barely see them. The screen I stare at is usually the washed out and ghostly green of night-vision, and I see the compound, the truck convoy, the tanks, but rarely the people. Even if I do they are just glowing smudges of infrared heat. I know the missile is on its way before they do – the numbers count down in the bottom-right of the screen. When they reach zero my screen fills with pixelated white light, and then the image returns, but emptier.
The drones can only send back visuals not sound of course, so the strikes seem to take place in complete silence. If anything it seems even more silent afterwards, unless someone squawks their aggressive congratulations into my ear-pierce. But I am already back, flying the drone to wherever the plan says it needs to be next.
~
Back home, when driving I’ll sometimes arrive somewhere and not remember the drive there – I’ve negotiated traffic, manoeuvred round junctions, and even changed the radio station, all without conscious thought. Just conditioned reactions to the world on the other side of my windscreen.
This job is like that – trained reaction to stimulus. If I’ve fired I can normally remember the screen pooling with light, but not the decision-points, not the reasoning that got me, and them, to that destination.
~
Today was a fuck up and people are angry. ‘Friendly fire’ – I agree with them it’s a slimy, mealy-mouthed phrase. We are supposed to be fighting for these people, whether they want us here or not, and that means alongside their ‘official’ army (some of whom are as young as sixteen but everyone turns a blind eye) but instead there was a fuck up and somehow a convoy of their jeeps and artillery returning back from enemy territory was identified as coming directly from enemy territory. Attack helicopters were dispatched, but my drone was already in the air.
I was hardly at fault so I don’t see why everyone is looking at me like they are. I didn’t identify them as the enemy, someone else did, and once that identification was made everything was just a matter of protocols, and training, and numbers counting down... The numbers had already started falling when my ear-piece squealed there was an error – I can delive
r strikes from miles away but obviously once I’ve fired they can’t be recalled. They tried to radio them, but another fuck up means their troops and ours use incompatible equipment most of the time...
I didn’t look away, I watched the screen until it went white. Maybe the signal had interference (or maybe it was just sand in the computer again) but the white wasn’t total this time, it had faint structure. Almost like...
But that must have been something I added to the memory afterwards, from guilt.
I do feel guilt, despite what the others think of me. But feeling guilty doesn’t make me to blame.
I am off active duty until it has been looked into.
~
It will be hushed up of course, the media don’t really care unless some of our troops are killed. And who would they be to start accusing people anyway? All the newspapers and TV stations supported the war, just like all the politicians who voted for it, and everyone who voted for them. If people make a decision they can’t blame the people who carry out that decision if it’s the wrong one. And everyone knows war is messy and chaotic – despite all the rules how could it not be, with all this pent up emotion always behind its logic? Not my emotions you understand, but I can feel it in others: in the way they shout over the mic, in the kill-tallies they paint on the sides of choppers and tanks, in the way they stomp sand from their boots and glare at me.
~
As predicted, I am back on active duty. I have been cleared of all blame – it is true that if I had been slower the order to abort the attack would have come in time, but they can hardly blame me for being competent. A few here at the base still give me funny looks but mostly they understand.
I actually feel a little nervous about tonight’s mission; it’s like being home from duty and driving for the first time in months, and it feels odd and unnatural for a few minutes, until you reacclimatise. Briefly, the stresses and dangers of driving seem real again. I feel like that about tonight’s mission, although I will be fine once it has begun. Maybe it is a lingering reaction to how that silent white light looked when we knew we’d targeted the wrong side; how it had briefly looked like a face.
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