‘What year, Sam?’
‘Nineteen fifty. I can remember, Rabbit John.’
Bex’s hands went to her mouth. ‘Oh my god.’ Nineteen fifty? It wasn’t possible. ‘What’s he done here? What’s he done to you people?’
Rabbit John tossed Bex her belongings. ‘I think I’m going to help you find your friend,’ he said. ‘Then I think I’m going to find our esteemed Professor Barber and ask him a few blunt questions.’ He went back into the shack and came out again a few minutes later with an old army rifle slung over his back. ‘On the way, you can fill me in on the rest of it.’
The first thing she filled him in on was her real name. Screw Angela ‘Nosey’ Parkhurst; this brooding dark young man with the gorgeous eyes was all hers.
***
‘So tell me about these Rouslers,’ she said to Ted, as they threaded a careful single-file down the trail out of the Rimwoods.
‘I don’t understand it,’ he answered. ‘We saw them. We all saw them. They attacked us – burned down some houses. People died! And you say that there just aren’t any Outside. It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Maybe if you tell me a bit more about them we can figure it out.’ She felt an unexpectedly deep sympathy for the lad. He wasn’t that much younger than herself and having to come to terms with a lot of painful truths about his world very quickly. She knew how that felt. ‘He probably paid a bunch of skinheads to do the job.’
‘Skin-what? What are… why would anybody do that?’
‘Fear,’ she said simply. ‘To keep you afraid. To control you. Which means he needs you for something. I’m betting it’s not anything fun.’
‘The Professor showed us a cine-film he took of them when he went exploring in the wastelands,’ said Sam, trotting behind. ‘I drew some pictures. I can show you them if you want.’
She grinned. ‘That’d be awesome.’
‘Awesome,’ Ted tried the unfamiliar slang, liking the sound of it.
Sam was happily reeling off everything he’d learned about Rouslers from the cine-film, which had been meant just for the grown-ups because it was so disturbing, but that naturally he and Ted had sneaked in to watch. ‘The fields are all desert because of fallout from the Ruskie bombs, and the Rouslers drive around in big fast scary cars made out of all bits and pieces, and their chief is a big bald muscley man called the Lord Humungous, except he wears a mask so nobody can see how badly scarred his face is, and there’s only one small town and it’s pumping petrol…’ He stopped, thinking he must have said something wrong, because Bex was laughing so hard that tears were running down her cheeks.
‘I’m sorry…’ she gasped, ‘I’m so sorry… it’s not funny…’ Slowly she caught her breath and wiped her eyes. ‘It’s awful and tragic I know, but still…’ and she was off again.
When she had calmed down enough to be capable of coherent speech, she did her best to describe the plot of the Mad Max movies, but it was hard to explain the Ayatollah of Rock And Rollah to people who had probably never even heard of Elvis. Underneath the surreal absurdity of it all, she felt her loathing of Barber deepen even further. How much he must have loved his little joke, fooling and terrorising these villagers into thinking that they were surrounded by a nightmare world full of psychotic monsters. How he must have laughed as their cottages burned. I’ll see you burn, she thought. Burn you down to the ground.
But thoughts of revenge were driven from her mind when they all heard the church bell down in the village begin to clamour: a wild, arrhythmic alarm routing echoes around the valley.
They looked at each other questioningly. Then they began to run.
7 The Kiftsgate Stone
It had been placed in the small graveyard of St Kenelm’s church, and indeed it was the same general size and shape as a headstone, but it was furred with moss and so weathered by long centuries that it looked like a giant tooth pitted with decay. One corner had been broken off in ages past, and at some point somebody had bored a hole right through the soft limestone. It was through this hole that Barber threaded the chain with which he manacled Andy.
It was also deeply, fundamentally wrong.
Wrong in the sense of a dislocated finger. Of nails scraped down blackboards. Of two-headed calves and beached whales and small sea-creatures flopping helplessly on the exposed seabed just before a tsunami. It shrieked its wrongness through his nerve endings and made his flesh crawl where he came into contact with it. It was so aberrant that he could barely see it properly, as if his brain refused to let his eyes acknowledge its existence.
Barber returned carrying a slim briefcase, which he opened in the snow. Seven neatly ranked daggers with ornate handles gleamed.
‘I’m not going to pretend that this isn’t going to hurt.’ He used one of the knives to slice through the front of Andy’s layered clothing, baring his pale chest to the chill. ‘It’s the worst kind of pain you can imagine, or so I’m reliably informed. These,’ he gestured to the knives, ‘are the least of it. Besides,’ and he waggled the knife he was holding admonishingly, ‘this was all your idea, remember.’
Andy’s smile was ghastly. ‘That’s right. My idea. And guess what. I’m going to do to you what I did to those skavags, Barber. I’m going to turn you inside out.’
‘Very brave. Very hollow. Now then boy, let’s see what makes you tick.’
Moving with deft precision, he began to array his needles in Andy’s ch’i meridians, forming the complex and forbidden dim mak configurations which would hyperenergise his system and siphon it out through the gateway chakras which swirled in lazy galaxies at seven points down the centre of his torso. The others that had been sacrificed in the city had taken a lot longer; an infinitely more complex procedure of self-incineration by which the entirety of each victim’s soul had been liberated to help restructure the city’s own energy pathways. Nothing so ambitious was required here. This was fast and brutal: all he needed was the boy’s vishuddi chakra, the throat gateway through which he could interrogate his soul directly. Find out whether or not he was bluffing about the stake, and maybe, if there were time before he died, what changes had been wrought in him in the years since he had been stolen away.
He was hunched over Andy avidly, like a vampire, and Andy could see gossamer streamers of his own aura beginning to drift upward, drawn into the black thundercloud of Barber’s own. Small points of heat, like cigarette burns, began to blister his skin under the needles. He could smell his own flesh burning. Instinctively he shrank from this, pressing back against the stone, revolted by it, wanting to bury himself in it, to crawl into the earth and hide forever, remembering as he did so a dream of stones socketed in human flesh.
And as if it had been merely waiting for an invitation, the stone sang itself into him.
In a flash, his perception spiralled out into the Rimwoods, past fields and houses, taking in as it did so every leaf, stone, and living creature on the way – passing Bex in surprised delight as she walked down into the valley with three strangers, and then gone before he could try to make contact. He was dimly aware of his own body as a sensation of burning and choking. Then he was arrowing out along the ley to its anchoring point eight miles away at the Bidford-on-Avon bridge where she had experienced her orgasmic dowsing, and he knew instantly what was so very wrong. The stone had been moved from its proper position, and the ley had moved with it, to be wrapped around this valley. Its discordant singing was the thrumming of an over-stretched guitar string, tightened too far and ready to snap.
This flight lasted barely a second before it recoiled back into the stone, and then catapulted him in the opposite direction – into Barber. Just like with Spike, just like with the skavags, for a fleeting moment he was Barber. He felt the towering arrogance of the man, the monomaniacal certainty of his own rightness, and much more besides. It passed, and he found himself looking into h
is enemy’s awestruck and enraged eyes.
The burning had stopped.
‘Impossible!’ the dark man snarled. He’d been so close to forcing the boy’s secrets from his flesh, when his meridians had inexplicably moved. This was impossible. They should have been as fixed and immutable as the network of his arteries or the swirls of his fingerprints, and yet they had slithered out from under his needles and twisted like serpents throughout Andy’s body, escaping Barber’s reach. It was simply, physically impossible. When you dammed a river, the river changed, yes, but it didn’t get up and go flowing somewhere else.
‘You’re…’ Barber struggled for speech. ‘Unfixed! How can you be unfixed and yet live?’ He didn’t seem to have noticed Andy’s brief intrusion into his soul.
‘You tell me,’ Andy grunted, struggling to his feet. The needles fell from his flesh, twisted and smoking. ‘You’re the scientist.’
‘Professor?’ a timid voice queried from behind them. ‘Is everything all right?’
An old man dressed in a flat cap and waistcoat hovered at the edge of the graveyard, a bicycle clutched defensively in front of him. Quite how he thought the sight of the trustworthy Professor brandishing a knife at a half-naked young stranger could be anything other than not all right was a question Andy never got to ask.
‘Sandy, old chap,’ Barber said without looking around, the effort of maintaining civility straining his voice. ‘You know I have nothing but the deepest affection for you, but now is really not a very convenient time.’
‘But he’s… is that a…’
This time he looked at the old man. ‘Yes. He is. The Rouslers are here again, and in greater numbers than ever before. Best you go sound the alarm, dear chap.’
The bicycle clattered to the pavement as Sandy took to his heels and ran for the church. Moments later, its bell began to ring out a ragged alarm, and rooks fled like a cloud of complaining shadows from the tower.
‘You could never have hoped to keep me a secret,’ said Andy. ‘You knew someone was bound to see this. That’s why you went up into the woods just now. You’ve untethered the Fane around this village. You’re bringing it all to an end – this place, all of these people. What’s the matter, finally tired of playing god?’
‘It was going to end soon anyway. You were just a bonus. As for playing god…’ he shook his head and chuckled ‘…boy, you have no idea.’
‘Oh, I have a very clear idea. I’ve seen inside you, and I know everything now. I know you killed Walter. I know what the Closures are for. I know about the Gates, and the Rotunda, and the urdrog. Why do you think I let you bring me back here in the first place? Did you think I actually came here to let you kill me? I know all of it, and now I’m going to stop you.’ Uncertainty played across Barber’s face, and Andy could imagine how uncomfortable that unfamiliar emotion must be to him.
But the dark man rallied quickly. ‘Very well then, if you know so much, you also I know that I do not play!’
Darting forward, he clamped one hand over the crown of Andy’s head, digging his fingers hard into his scalp, and the other hand just as hard onto the Kiftsgate Stone. Both Andy and the stone screamed with the same voice as he brutally hauled raw power from one and poured it into the other.
‘This is it, boy!’ he raged, now completely beyond the pretence of humanity. ‘Invade my mind, would you? This is what you get for fucking with me!’ His fingers began to curve inwards, pressing through flesh and bone and stone, tearing energy out of the Schumann-Watkins field and ramming it down into Andy’s spasming body. ‘Is this what you wanted? Do you understand? All your pissing around in the Narrows is nothing. This is what the world feels like!’
The field began to collapse inwards under Barber’s relentless pressure, squeezing down from the encircling hills in a rapidly tightening noose which drained the living vitality out of every molecule as it fought to meet the demands of its creator. Trees collapsed in columns of dust, wildlife fled its approach and died as desiccated skeletons – snow exploded into vapour, and the very soil beneath was sterilised of bacteria. The villagers, who had already been roused by Sandy’s alarm, peered fearfully from doors and windows.
‘It’s myself I blame,’ Barber continued through gritted teeth, as earthpower howled around and through him. ‘I should have chased you down as soon as Walter stole you. I should have killed you when I could. Now, you see what you drive me to? You see?’ He pressed harder, viciously, and the earth began to heave in convulsions which spread outwards from the stone like ripples on water. ‘I have given decades to protect this place and further this work. I have taken lives. I have made myself a monster for it.’ With each phrase, he rammed power harder and harder into the screaming figure before him, and he leaned in close, speaking against the burning skin of Andy’s forehead. ‘But I will destroy it all – all life, in all worlds – before I will suffer a rival.’
The surface of Andy’s body exploded into a thousand miniature suns as his meridians attempted to dump the appalling energy overload. His nostrils were filled with the stink of his own skin and hair burning. He couldn’t do this. He’d underestimated; this wasn’t a dog or a scavenger beast. This was a man with the secrets of the universe at his command. Andy was going to die.
8 Ley of the Land
Bex, Rabbit John, Ted and Sam were on the outskirts of the village when the first earth convulsion swept past, knocking them flat.
‘What the bloody hell was that?’ she yelped, picking herself up again.
‘Another one?’ Ted’s eyes were wide with incredulity.
‘It was stronger that time!’ said Sam, bouncing up. There were leaves in his ears.
‘But what was it?’
‘Nothing good,’ suggested Rabbit John. ‘I think we’d better hurry up.’
***
Alice Clee left her baking and hurried to the front door. The sound of the church bell hadn’t really impinged on her awareness; if she’d heard it at all she’d thought it was only old Sandy Wilkins getting in a spot of campanology practice for Sunday. But then the whole cottage had lurched and sent her best Mason Cash mixing bowl crashing into shards, which was a real tragedy, because there were no more of those to be had in this world, and she ran outside to see what was going on.
A pale haze was sweeping down out of where the Rimwoods used to be, flowing over the fields like the photographic negative of a cloud-shadow, and in its wake she could see – well, couldn’t understand what she was seeing but saw it nevertheless – things crumbling. A small flock of their precious black-faced Cotswold sheep were caught up and, bleating their terror, reduced to bundles of woollen rags and stick-like bones.
Her first thought was This is it. They’ve dropped the Bomb. They’ve finally found us, and they’ve dropped the Bomb. It was never safe at all.
Then: Tony was somewhere out there with the men, working on some wall repairs. She had no idea at all where Ted and Sam were. Her husband and her boys.
Alice dropped everything and ran towards the haze, crying their names.
***
The stone began to fracture under the intolerable strain. Chunks of limestone crumbled away as hairline cracks spread upwards from the ground, but Barber dug his fingers in deeper, commanding it to hold together and obey his will. His other hand pressed deeper into the boy’s skull, his fingers like stakes searching out the landscape of his mind, not to reorder or control but to burn utterly.
Yet, incredibly, Andy continued to resist. He was drawing power of his own from somewhere – out of the air, out of the ground, Barber couldn’t tell. Frustrated and enraged, he hauled harder at the earthpower. The stone screamed louder, and the fractures grew.
***
The street was rapidly filling with her friends and neighbours – shouting, calling, crying. Alice thought that if she looked anything like as wild-ey
ed and frightened, then she must be in a real state. Then four mud-spattered figures appeared at the end of the street, outracing the death zone, but she had eyes for only two of them. Sam was riding piggyback on Rabbit John. Weeping with relief, she gathered her boys into a fiercely protective hug.
‘Thank you, John,’ she sobbed. ‘Thank you so much.’ Her eyes searched Ted’s face intently. ‘Have you seen your father?’
He shook his head mutely, and she moaned, turning to appeal to Rabbit John once more. ‘What’s going on? What’s happening? I don’t under… who is this?’ Her voice broke on a high note of near-hysteria. She’d noticed Bex for the first time, and somehow this seemed to be the worst thing so far: the first completely strange face she’d seen in five years. ‘Who is she, John?’
Bex had no time for this. ‘You’ve got to get them somewhere safe,’ she told him urgently. ‘Everybody you can find. Get them somewhere deep. This place is toast.’ Not again, she told herself. I will not let this happen again.
‘What are you going to do?’
She grinned at him. ‘What I do best: stick my nose in where it isn’t wanted.’ She sped away towards the centre of the village. Just before she passed out of earshot she thought she heard Sam’s excited voice shrilling ‘Mummy, she’s a girl! And Ted hit her! Twice!’
***
Bex skidded around the village green to the far corner of the churchyard and pulled up short, gaping. Even though she was an avowed atheist, had never been to church in her life and actively despised the stupid credulity of pretty much everybody who did, the only way she could describe the confrontation before her was ‘biblical’.
Andy was alight. Constellations burned within his flesh, shifting, racing and reordering themselves in frantic geometries as they tried to cope with the torrent of power being directed through him. He knelt as if receiving benediction from a tall, stooped figure of impenetrable darkness which had one hand clamped to his head as if trying to drive him into the ground, whilst drawing power from a large standing stone with the other.
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