The distant cries and screams of the butchery went unheard. She concentrated on lifting herself up and pushing down, using her whole body now, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, and all the time revelling in the power she was exercising over this magnificent warrior as she rolled the oiled sleeve of skin back and forth. A glance showed that his eyes were still open, searching the long grass for shadows fleeing from the doomed village, but his lips were parted in a silent grimace and his teeth tightly clenched.
It ended with a sudden warmth spreading across her breasts and between her thighs. She straightened and stepped back, smiling at him while working the milky fluid into her skin to be sure of absorbing the strength he had given her. And then the sun went in and the blinding glare on the yellow bush was no more.
Panic seized her when she saw that he was fading. She gave a little cry of anguish, thinking she had taken too much of his power, and reached forward to embrace him, to beg his forgiveness. But it was too late -- a shimmering outline that blended with the distant hills and he was gone. Tears blurred her vision. The elephant grass took on the brilliant greens of spring and she found herself staring south towards the rolling hills of the downs. A breeze played coldly on her pale exposed breasts, her left hand again its customary leaden weight, clinging by suction to her wrist, behind her an approaching diesel engine slowing to a tick-over.
An old-fashioned bulb horn sounded.
She quickly hitched her bra into place, buttoned her blouse, straightened her tie -- all performed with her one-handed skill -- and stepped guiltily from behind the tree. A mud-splattered tractor had stopped before her bicycle that she had left lying across the track some twenty metres away. With her emotions a jumble of charged eroticism, guilt, confusion, and fear, she ran towards the machine and wheeled it clear.
David Weir leaned out the cab of his antique John Deere tractor and grinned down at her. He was a lean, debonair 40-year-old, sandy haired, grey eyes. A broken nose enhancing his aristocratic features. He possessed an unconscious, easy-going charm, and his bachelor status was one that several Pentworth ladies were in favour of changing.
Five years previously he had decided that he wanted more open air than three weeks a year salmon fishing in Scotland, and exercise that didn't require gymnasium fees. He sold his share in a successful Westminster art gallery to his partner and bought the rundown Temple Farm. Another gentleman farmer said the locals and waited with interest to see how long it took for him to fall flat on his face. They reckoned without David's flair for showmanship, which had made his gallery a success, and his capacity for innovation and hard work.
Armed with a bank loan and a grant from Brussels, he had harnessed his boundless fascination with the past, and had turned Temple Farm into a living rural museum with its smaller fields cultivated by implements that dated back to the early 17th Century. Theme farms were becoming big business.
Temple Farm as a museum and its stream of paying visitors was a source of friction between himself and some fellow councillors on Pentworth Town Council, particularly now that he had improved his winter turnover by turning a dutch barn into an Ice Age annex. But as long as he kept the farm going as a farm, there was little authority could do: there were no laws that required farmers to use modern equipment. He was fond of pointing out that Pentworth was an antique shop town that now had an antique farm. He had obtained planning consent from the district council for a car park and farm shop, and the farm shop sold tickets to visit the farm.
`Hallo, Vikki,' he said cheerily, his voice pleasingly cultivated without sounding affected. `Thought it was your bike. Careless of you, m'dear.'
Vikki matched his smile and gripped the handlebars tightly with her good hand to control her trembling. She liked David Weir. Last summer she had spent a hot afternoon with him riding on an ancient, juddering, combine harvester. She had been wearing shorts and all the time he had kept a hand on her thigh to hold her steady on her insecure perch. She had never forgotten the touch of his palm, the knotted veins on his forearm -- which she had found incredible sexy -- or the animal smell of his sweat. Vikki's best friend, Sarah Gale, had boasted that he had done `it' to her last summer, but Sarah was a noted liar and had failed to provide details despite Vikki's eager questioning.
`Hallo, Dave,' she replied, pleased that her voice sounded so steady. `I was watching some badgers; you frightened them off.' And also pleased that she had sufficient control to think up a plausible lie so quickly.
He nodded. `There's an old sett in that field. Probably flooded out of their usual sett by the storm. Thunder and lightning put paid to Prescott's milk yields. Never known that to happen before. Four trees down, too. Pentworth Lake's still the colour of mustard after four days. Always a bad sign.' He broke off and leaned forward to study Vikki's left hand with genuine interest. `Is that the new one your dad was telling me about?'
Vikki smiled. She preferred David Weir's friendly, open approach to that of those who pointedly avoided the subject. She proudly held up what looked like a normal left hand for inspection. It was the silicon skin's imperfections -- some blemishes and even a few matching freckles on the wrist -- that made the hand look near-perfect. `New? I've had it a month. And dad had a spare made.'
`Amazing,' said David admiringly. `You'd never know. It's a work of art. And to think that I thought that British Aerospace made only aircraft and things that go bang. Is that huge watch strap all that holds it in place?'
`Suction. It's a perfect moulded fit. There's a little vacuum pump just under the skin on the wrist. Four presses and it's on. I can even go swimming with it if I'm careful. The watch is just to hide the join. And I can open and close the fingers and thumb by pressing on the palm.'
`Certainly a huge improvement on the old one,' said David. He jerked his thumb at the high-sided trailer behind the tractor that was laden with storm-ravaged leeks. `Try it out by helping yourself. Last of the season. What the storm didn't flatten, the UFO spotters finished off. They were convinced my leeks had been flattened by a mothership. I threatened to flatten a few of them with a tractor. Persistent devils. Worse than twitchers.'
`We had some climbing into the school grounds -- looking for a Silent Vulcan, they said.'
`That's what the press called it. Thank God they've got bored and gone home. Anyway -- you help yourself. I'm not going to get much for them. Washed through with dirt, they are.'
`I hate leeks, Dave.'
`They're for your lovely mother, m'dear.'
Vikki's quick gesture that caused her artificial fingers and thumb to close on the vegetables was so natural that David missed what happened. She repeated the motion more slowly, demonstrating her skill by even using her left hand to cram the bedraggled leeks into her saddlebag.
`Well I'll be...' David breathed in wonder. `That's amazing, Vikki. Anyway -- don't forget to tell your mother where the leeks came from.'
`I think she'd prefer flowers, Dave.'
David laughed good-naturedly and thought how lovely Vikki looked. She had inherited her mother's ash blonde hair and green eyes, and she had shot up recently so that mother and daughter looked like sisters. But what was truly remarkable about Vikki was her bright, vivaciousness -- her infectious, sparkling exuberance that refused concessions to her disability. `Now that's something I might just be tempted to try on her daughter in a couple of years.'
`You'd be wasting your money,' Vikki retorted but inwardly delighted with this confidence-building flirtation.
`Oh -- they'd only be cheap flowers.' With that parting shot and a cheery wave, he revved up and let in the clutch. The tractor rumbled off, splashing through storm puddles.
Vikki wheeled her machine a little way and paused at the spot where Dario had been standing. She stood, lost in thought for some moments, wondering why this particular daydream about Dario had been so powerful and so detailed. Mrs Simmons had taught her class about the Zulus and the Zulu Wars but, as one would expect of a teacher in a Catholic girls' school, she had n
ever gone into details about their sexual practices. She started walking.
Perhaps I read it somewhere?
Unlikely. She knew that she would have remembered such startling details. Something made a noise behind her as she started wheeling her bicycle. She turned around and caught a fleeting glimpse of a multi-legged shadow darting under a hedge.
A giant crab? Oh, God -- I am seeing things today.
She stared hard at the spot where the strange creature had disappeared but was unable to discern anything. She decided that it was probably a hungry squirrel emerging from hibernation to test the lengthening spring days. Odd, though -- it had a mechanical look about it.
Ten minutes later, still in deep thought about her strange daydream and unaware that she was being followed by the strange device, she arrived home, or rather the building site that had been home for the past two years since the Taylors had moved from a modern estate on the edge of Pentworth.
One day Stewards House, so named because it once been a farm steward's house, and the adjoining labourer's cottage that her father was knocking into one would be a single dwelling, but that day seemed even further off than when they had first moved in.
`It'll be finished the day the bloody mortgage is paid off,' Anne Taylor was fond of saying although she was not so fond of having to say it.
Jack Taylor's problem was that he always got bored with a task before finishing it. As a consequence of having two cottages to work on, and a job with British Aerospace that took him out of the country for long periods, there was always an abundance of new jobs to hold his interest until they had advanced to the halfway stage and crossed the sod-it-let's-do-something-else threshold.
Himmler, the Taylors fastidious Siamese cat, had already quit, with Anne often threatening to follow suite. In Himmler's case, he felt quite strongly that he was entitled to decent, civilized standards, where a respectable cat could get its proper ration of 23-hours sleep per day and not have to spend its precious hunting, eating and shagging hour washing cement and plaster dust from its fur. Whereas cats usually suffered from hairballs, Himmler got lumps of cement. After coughing up his third pellet of Portland quickset he decided that enough was enough and moved in with Mrs Johnson in a nearby cottage -- a senile old lady who could not recollect having bought or been given a Siamese cat, but fed him anyway because he seemed to expect it and turned nasty when she forgot.
Vikki padlocked her bicycle to a discarded cast-iron radiator in the doorless garage and went to the back of the house clutching the leeks.
The crab-like device that had followed her took cover under a hedge and completed its transmission of the data it had collected on the girl. While she had been distracted by the powerful daydream, the strange machine had crept up behind her and removed a tiny blood and tissue sample from her leg.
The samples had been analysed and it was decided that more information was needed. Meanwhile there was much for the device to do. It would return that night.
As Vikki went to the back of the house she noticed that a stonemason, industriously watched by three shovel-leaning helpers, was laying paving slabs around the new but empty swimming pool. That was the nice thing about living on a building site -- every time she arrived home from school a new surprise would be awaiting her. The workmen eyed her appreciatively as she entered the kitchen door.
`Sister?' enquired the stonemason.
`Daughter.'
`Bloody hell.'
Anne Taylor's large kitchen consisted of two rooms knocked into one. It was an oasis of order in a desert of chaos. It was finished. Not on account of any great effort by Jack Taylor, but because, in desperation, Anne had withdrawn several thousand Euros left to her by her mother from her building society account and paid a Chichester firm to build her a kitchen. They were in and out in a fortnight leaving gloriously finished acres of limed oak cupboards, tiled worktops, a breakfast bar, and a gleaming Portuguese ceramic floor. They had even installed a television, lit the place with low-voltage lights, and hung strings of Spanish onions. All this was achieved while Jack was installing a radiator that leaked. And the few Euros plus a seductive smile that Anne slipped the foreman fitter resulted in a proper door with a lock on the downstairs lavatory. Being able to have a pee without having to keep a foot planted on the door had become a forgotten luxury.
`Mind my floor,' Anne warned as her daughter trailed in, dumped the leeks in the sink, and turned on the cold tap to wash out the worst of the dirt. Seeing Vikki's skills with her new hand did much to assuage the cancerous guilt that had haunted Anne ever since that terrible day of the accident when Vikki was four. The old hand had been little more than a clumsy plastic moulding; with the new hand Vikki could even turn a tap on and off. That Vikki's bright personality allowed no room for reproach over the accident served only to heighten Anne's guilt.
`Where did you get those?'
`Dave Weir. A token of his undying love. Storm-damaged. The UFO hunters thought they'd been flattened by the Silent Vulcan.'
`Right now I'm cooking your dad a token of my undying hatred,' said Anne, flicking a strand of spaghetti at the wall. She missed and had to unpick it from a crucifix. `Or rather, I was.'
Vikki joined her mother at the Aga. She was a few centimetres shorter than Anne who had longer legs, but Vikki's growth hormones were still at work on the problem.
`Poor dad. What's he done now?'
`Guess what those clowns in the paddock will be doing tomorrow.’
`Wiring-up the pool filter?'
`They've done that. And the underwater lights. They'll be filling it.'
The news delighted Vikki. `Oh -- magic! It'll be finished at last.'
`Watching a pump filling a swimming pool -- a gruelling Saturday job for them. Let's hope they don't run the borehole dry.'
`Not after all that rain, mum.'
`And then they'll do the new septic tank.' Anne was about to make a scathing comment about her husband's idea of priorities but stilled her tongue. The pool had been installed because Vikki loved swimming -- there was nothing that Jack Taylor would not do for his beloved daughter. It was virtually the only thing that was holding the remnants of Jack's and Anne's marriage together. `Still,' Anne concluded, `at least it'll be something that's finished.'
`And a spot of sexual bribery could get the garage door hung,' Vikki suggested, tasting the sauce.
`From you or me?'
`You, of course, mum -- you're so experienced in such matters. They don't teach eyelash fluttering at St Catherine's the way you’ve learned it.'
`Well I'll certainly have the chance,' said Anne, catching her daughter's impudent look and trying not to laugh. `Phone call from your father just now. He's flown back to Rihyad this afternoon and won't be home for another week. A Saudi prince has crashed his Tornado. All the King's men are putting the prince back together again, and British Aerospace men are putting the Tornado back together again.'
Vikki was disappointed but said nothing. She adored her father.
`And a phone call from Ellen Duncan,' Anne continued. `She wondered if you could start work an hour earlier in the shop tomorrow morning. She's had a lot of mail orders in this week. I told her you could.'
Vikki loved her Saturday job in Ellen Duncan's herbal shop, and the extra hour's work brought the boots she was saving for a little nearer. `I could go to Saturday mass right after work,' she decided. `Save going on Sunday.'
`Well mind you do.'
`I always do, mother dear -- you're the one that skives off with migraines.'
`You need a shower, young lady.'
For a terrible moment Vikki thought that there must be evidence about her of her recent encounter, and was immensely relieved when she realized that mother was referring to her mud-splattered legs.
Ten minutes later after a shower, wearing a toweling dressing gown and clutching her clothes, Vikki climbed the nearly perpendicular flight of stairs to her tiny garret bedroom tucked into a south-facing roof hip on the secon
d floor. The alarming creak and groan of the narrow stairs assured her of privacy, and the steep climb minimised parental disapproval of the permanent wall-to-wall carpet of underwear. Best of all, the room was finished because dad never got bored with any job that benefited his daughter. It had a generous built-in wardrobe with linked sliding doors that could be opened and closed with one hand, drawers that glided at a touch, Mary Quant wallpaper, and a wash basin with a hospital lever-operated mixer tap. A dormer window with motorised curtains set into a slate roof looked across the farmland of Prescott Estates Plc.
James Dean had joined her poster collection since she had seen a re-run of `Rebel Without a Cause' on television, but the prime wall space at the foot of her bed went to Dario. The huge, life-size poster of the Zulu warrior had been a special Christmas offer in a girls' magazine. Anne had clapped her hands in delight when Vikki had unfolded the giant envelope's contents.
`He's beautiful!' she exclaimed. `I expect he needs such big shield. Amazing, those guys. I went out with the leader of a steel band before I met your dad. The only man I've ever known who could make my eyes water.'
Vikki had burst out laughing and dad had gone off in a huff to grout some tiles.
Dario's liquid brown eyes greeted Vikki when she entered the sanctity of her bedroom.
`Hallo, Dario.'
The eyes watched her as she rinsed her panties and draped them over the radiator. She sat on her bed and cupped her chin on her hand, returning the warrior's gaze and thinking over the moments of the strange daydream encounter, more worried now that she had time to think as she replayed those disturbingly vivid events beneath the oak tree.
`Why was it all so real, Dario?' she asked the poster. `I could feel your skin, the veins on your arms, and your (an inward squirm of embarrassment and guilt) -- Well -- everything.'
Dario remained silent.
Perhaps I'm going mad? Talking to a poster... Don't be silly, Vikki -- you talk to Benji.
She propped herself against the headboard and put her arms around the huge bear -- the sole-surviving cuddly toy of her childhood. But not even the reassuring feel of Benji's threadbare fur could take her thoughts off her recent encounter or banish the worries crowding in. The dressing gown fell away from her legs as she drew her knees to her chin. She was lost in thought for a few moments then realized that Dario could see her nakedness. Suddenly embarrassed, she covered herself with her right hand before realising the absurdness of the gesture. Luckily Vikki was of a happy disposition that she could laugh at herself, nevertheless, her hand stayed in place and her knees parted. Very soon her breathing quickened.
Temple of the Winds Page 2