by Brian Lumley
There were greater wars than ever Chylos had dreamed, more of rape and murder than he ever could have imagined. War in the sea, on the land and in the air.
And at last there was peace again, of a sort. And finally—
Finally…
Two
Garry Clemens was a human calculator at a betting shop in North London; he could figure the numbers, combinations and value of a winning ticket to within a doesn’t matter a damn faster than the girls could feed the figures into their machines. All the punters knew him; generally they’d accept without qualms his arbitration on vastly complicated accumulators and the like. With these sort of qualifications Garry could hold down a job any place they played the horses—which was handy because he liked to move around a lot and betting on the races was his hobby. One of his hobbies, anyway.
Another was rape.
Every time Garry took a heavy loss, then he raped. That way (according to his figuring) he won every time. If he couldn’t take it out on the horse that let him down, then he’d take it out on some girl instead. But he’d suffered a spate of losses recently, and that had led to some trouble. He hated those nights when he’d go back to his flat and lie down on his bed and have nothing good to think about for that day. Only bad things, like the two hundred he’d lost on that nag that should have come in at fifteen to one, or the filly that got pipped at the post and cost him a cool grand. Which was why he’d finally figured out a way to ease his pain.
Starting now he’d take a girl for every day of the week, and that way when he took a loss—no matter which day it fell on—he’d always have something good to think about that night when he went to bed. If it was a Wednesday, why, he’d simply think about the Wednesday girl, et cetera…
But he’d gone through a bad patch and so the rapes had had to come thick and fast, one and sometimes two a week. His Monday girl was a redhead he’d gagged and tied to a tree in the centre of a copse in a built-up area. He’d spent a lot of time with her, smoked cigarettes in between and talked dirty and nasty to her, raped her three times. Differently each time. Tuesday was a sixteen-year-old kid down at the bottom of the railway embankment. No gag or rope or anything; she’d been so shit-scared that after he was through she didn’t even start yelling for an hour. Wednesday (Garry’s favourite) it had been a heavily pregnant coloured woman he’d dragged into a burned-out shop right in town! He’d made that one do everything. In the papers the next day he’d read how she lost her baby. But that hadn’t bothered him too much.
Thursday had been when it started to get sticky. Garry had dragged this hooker into a street of derelict houses but hadn’t even got started when along came this copper! He’d put his knife in the tart’s throat—so that she wouldn’t yell—and then got to Hell out of there. And he’d reckoned himself lucky to get clean away. But on the other hand, it meant he had to go out the next night, too. He didn’t like the tension to build up too much.
But Friday had been a near-disaster, too. There was a house-party not far from where he lived, and Garry had been invited. He’d declined, but he was there anyway—in the garden of the house opposite, whose people weren’t at home. And when this really stacked piece had left the party on her own about midnight, Garry had jumped her. But just when he’d knocked her cold and was getting her out of her clothes, then the owners of the house turned up and saw him in the garden. He’d had to cut and run like the wind then, and even now it made his guts churn when he thought about it.
So he’d kept it quiet for a couple of weeks before starting again, and then he’d finally found his Thursday girl. A really shy thing getting off a late-night tube, who he’d carried into a parking lot and had for a couple of hours straight. And she hadn’t said a word, just panted a lot and been sick. It turned out she was dumb—and Garry chuckled when he read that. No wonder she’d been so quiet. Maybe he should look for a blind one next time…
A week later, Friday, he’d gone out again, but it was a failure; he couldn’t find anyone. And so the very next night he’d taken his Saturday girl—a middle-aged baglady! So what the Hell!—a rape is a rape is a rape, right? He gave her a bottle of some good stuff first, which put her away nicely, then gave her a Hell of a lot of bad stuff in as many ways as he knew how. She probably didn’t even feel it, wouldn’t even remember it, so afterwards he’d banged her face on the pavement a couple of times so that when she woke up at least she’d know something had happened! Except she hadn’t woken up. Well, at least that way she wouldn’t be talking about it. And by now he knew they’d have his semen type on record, and that they’d also have him if he just once slipped up. But he didn’t intend to.
Sunday’s girl was a lady taxi driver with a figure that was a real stopper! Garry hired her to take him out of town, directed her to a big house in the country and stopped her at the bottom of the drive. Then he hit her on the head, ripped her radio out, drove into a wood and had her in the back of the cab. He’d really made a meal of it, especially after she woke up; but as he was finishing she got a bit too active and raked his face—which was something he didn’t much like. He had a nice face, Garry, and was very fond of it. So almost before he’d known that he was doing it, he’d gutted the whore!
But the next day in the papers the police were talking about skin under her fingernails, and now he knew they had his blood-group but definitely, too. And his face was marked; not badly, but enough. So it had been time to take a holiday.
Luckily he’d just had a big win on the gee-gees; he phoned the bookie’s and said he wasn’t up to it—couldn’t see the numbers too clearly—he was taking time off. With an eye-patch and a bandage to cover the damage, he’d headed North and finally holed up in Chichester.
But all of that had been twelve days ago, and he was fine now, and he still had to find his girl-Friday. And today was Friday, so…Garry reckoned he’d rested up long enough.
This morning he’d read about a Friday night dance at a place called Athelsford, a hick village just a bus-ride away. Well, and he had nothing against country bumpkins, did he? So Athelsford it would have to be…
It was the middle of the long hot summer of ’76. The weather forecasters were all agreed for once that this one would drag on and on, and reserves of water all over the country were already beginning to suffer. This was that summer when there would be shock reports of the Thames flowing backwards, when rainmakers would be called in from the USA to dance and caper, and when a certain Government Ministry would beg householders to put bricks in their WC cisterns and thus consume less of precious water.
The southern beaches were choked morning to night with kids on their school holidays, sun-blackened treasure hunters with knotted hankies on their heads and metal detectors in their hands, and frustrated fishermen with their crates of beer, boxes of sandwiches, and plastic bags of smelly bait. The pubs were filled all through opening hours with customers trying to drown their thirsts or themselves, and the resorts had never had it so good. The nights were balmy for lovers from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s, and nowhere balmier than in the country lanes of the Southern Counties.
Athelsford Estate in Hampshire, one of the few suburban housing projects of the Sixties to realize a measure of success (in that its houses were good, its people relatively happy, and—after the last bulldozer had clanked away—its countryside comparatively unspoiled) suffered or enjoyed the heatwave no more or less than anywhere else. It was just another small centre of life and twentieth-century civilization, and apart from the fact that Athelsford was ‘rather select’ there was little as yet to distinguish it from a hundred other estates and small villages in the country triangle of Salisbury, Reading, and Brighton.
Tonight being Friday night, there was to be dancing at The Barn. As its name implied, the place had been a half-brick, half-timber barn; but the Athelsfordians being an enterprising lot, three of their more affluent members had bought the great vault of a place, done it up with internal balconies, tables, and chairs, built a modest car pa
rk to one side—an extension of the village pub’s car park—and now it was a dance hall, occasionally used for weddings and other private functions. On Wednesday nights the younger folk had it for their discotheques (mainly teenage affairs, in return for which they kept it in good repair), but on Friday nights the Barn became the focal point of the entire estate. The Barn and The Old Stage.
The Old Stage was the village pub, its sign a coach with rearing horses confronted by a highwayman in tricorn hat. Joe McGovern, a widower, owned and ran the pub, and many of his customers jokingly associated him with the highwayman on his sign. But while Joe was and always would be a canny Scot, he was also a fair man and down to earth. So were his prices. Ten years ago when the estate was new, the steady custom of the people had saved The Old Stage and kept it a free house. Now Joe’s trade was flourishing, and he had plenty to be thankful for.
So, too, Joe’s somewhat surly son Gavin. Things to be thankful for, and others he could well do without. Gavin was, for example, extremely thankful for The Barn, whose bar he ran on Wednesday and Friday nights, using stock from The Old Stage. The profits very nicely supplemented the wage he earned as a county council labourer working on the new road. The wage he had earned, anyway, before he’d quit. That had only been this morning but already he sort of missed the work, and he was sure he was going to miss the money. But…oh, he’d find other work. There was always work for good strong hands. He had that to be thankful for, too: his health and strength.
But he was not thankful for his kid sister, Eileen: her ‘scrapes and narrow escapes’ (as he saw her small handful of as yet entirely innocent friendships with the local lads), and her natural, almost astonishing beauty, which drew them like butterflies to bright flowers. It was that, in large part, which made him surly; for he knew that in fact she wasn’t just a ‘kid’ sister any more, and that sooner or later she…
Oh, Gavin loved his sister, all right—indeed he had transferred to her all of his affection and protection when their mother died three years ago—but having lost his mother he wasn’t going to lose Eileen, too, not if he could help it.
Gavin was twenty-two, Eileen seventeen. He was over six feet tall, narrow-hipped, wide in the shoulders: a tapering wedge of muscle with a bullet-head to top it off. Most of the village lads looked at Eileen, then looked at Gavin, and didn’t look at Eileen again. But those of them who looked at her twice reckoned she was worth it.
She was blonde as her brother was dark, as sweet and slim as he was huge and surly; five-seven, with long shapely legs and a waist like a wisp, and blue eyes with lights in them that danced when she smiled; the very image of her mother. And that was Gavin’s problem—for he’d loved his mother a great deal, too.
It was 5:30 p.m. and brother and sister were busy in workclothes, loading stock from the back door of The Old Stage onto a trolley and carting it across the parking lot to The Barn. Joe McGovern ticked off the items on a stock list as they worked. But when Gavin and Eileen were alone in The Barn, stacking the last of the bottles onto the shelves behind the bar, suddenly he said to her: “Will you be here tonight?”
She looked at her brother. There was nothing surly about Gavin now. There never was when he spoke to her; indeed his voice held a note of concern, of agitation, of some inner struggle which he himself couldn’t quite put his finger on. And she knew what he was thinking and that it would be the same tonight as always. Someone would dance with her, and then dance with her again—and then no more. Because Gavin would have had ‘a quiet word with him’.
“Of course I’ll be here, Gavin,” she sighed. “You know I will. I wouldn’t miss it. I love to dance and chat with the girls—and with the boys—when I get the chance! Why does it bother you so?”
“I’ve told you often enough why it bothers me,” he answered gruffly, breathing heavily through his nose. “It’s all those blokes. They’ve only one thing on their minds. They’re the same with all the girls. But you’re not just any girl—you’re my sister.”
“Yes,” she answered, a trifle bitterly, “and don’t they just know it! You’re always there, in the background, watching, somehow threatening. It’s like having two fathers—only one of them’s a tyrant! Do you know, I can’t remember the last time a boy wanted to walk me home?”
“But…you are home!” he answered, not wanting to fight, wishing now that he’d kept his peace. If only she was capable of understanding the ways of the world. “You live right next door.”
“Then simply walk me!” she blurted it out. “Oh, anywhere! Gavin, can’t you understand? It’s nice to be courted, to have someone who wants to hold your hand!”
“That’s how it starts,” he grunted, turning away. “They want to hold your hand. But who’s to say how it finishes, eh?”
“Well not much fear of that!” she sighed again. “Not that I’m that sort of girl anyway,” and she looked at him archly. “But even if I was, with you around—straining at the leash like…like a great hulking watchdog—nothing’s very much likely to even get started, now is it?” And before he could answer, but less harshly now: “Now come on,” she said, “tell me what’s brought all this on? You’ve been really nice to me this last couple of weeks. The hot weather may have soured some people but you’ve been really sweet—like a Big Brother should be—until out of the blue, like this. I really don’t understand what gets into you, Gavin.”
It was his turn to sigh. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” he said. “The assault—probably with sexual motivation—just last week, Saturday night, in Lovers’ Lane?”
Perhaps Eileen really ought not to pooh-pooh that, but she believed she understood it well enough. “An assault,” she said. “Motive: ‘probably’ sexual—the most excitement Athelsford has known in…oh, as long as I can remember! And the ‘victim’: Linda Anstey. Oh, my, what a surprise! Hah! Why, Linda’s always been that way! Every kid in the school had fooled around with her at one time or another. From playing kids’ games to…well, everything. It’s the way she is and everyone knows it. All right, perhaps I’m being unfair to her: she might have asked for trouble and she might not, but it seems hardly surprising to me that if it was going to happen to someone, Linda would be the one!”
“But it did happen,” Gavin insisted. “That kind of bloke does exist—plenty of them.” He stacked the last half-dozen cans and made for the exit; and changing the subject (as he was wont to do when an argument was going badly for him, or when he believed he’d proved his point sufficiently) said: “Me, I’m for a pint before I get myself ready for tonight. Fancy an iced lemonade, kid?” He paused, turned back towards her, and grinned, but she suspected it was forced. If only she could gauge what went on in his mind.
But: “Oh, all right!” she finally matched his grin, “if you’re buying.” She caught up with him and grabbed him, standing on tip-toe to give him a kiss. “But Gavin—promise me that from now on you won’t worry about me so much, OK?”
He hugged her briefly, and reluctantly submitted: “Yeah, all right.”
But as she led the way out of The Barn and across the car park, with the hot afternoon sun shining in her hair and her sweet, innocent body moving like that inside her coveralls, he looked after her and worried all the harder; worried the way an older brother should worry, he thought, and yet somehow far more intensely. And the worst of it was that he knew he was being unreasonable and obsessive! But (and Gavin at once felt his heart hardening)…oh, he recognized well enough the way the village Jack-the-Lads looked at Eileen, and knew how much they’d like to get their itchy little paws on her—the grubby-minded, horny…
…But there Gavin’s ireful thoughts abruptly evaporated, the scowl left his face, and he frowned as a vivid picture suddenly flashed onto the screen of his mind. It was something he’d seen just this morning, across the fields where they were laying the new road; something quite obscene which hadn’t made much of an impression on him at the time, but which now…and astonished, he paused again. For he couldn’t for t
he life of him see how he’d connected up a thing like that with Eileen! And it just as suddenly dawned on him that the reason he knew how the boys felt about his sister was because he sometimes felt that way too. Oh, not about her—no, of course not—but about…a boulder? Well, certainly it had been a boulder that did it to him this morning, anyway.
And: Gavin, son, he told himself, sometimes I think you’re maybe just a tiny wee bit sick! And then he laughed, if only to himself.
But somehow the pictures in his mind just wouldn’t go away, and as he went to his upstairs room in The Old Stage and slowly changed into his evening gear, so he allowed himself to go over again the peculiar occurrences of the morning…
Three
That Friday morning, yes, and it had been hot as a furnace. And every member of the road gang without exception looking forward to the coming weekend, to cool beers in cool houses with all the windows thrown open; so that as the heat-shimmering day had drawn towards noon they’d wearied of the job and put a lot less muscle into it.
Also, and to make things worse, this afternoon they’d be a man short; for this was Gavin McGovern’s last morning and he hadn’t been replaced yet. And even when he was…well, it would take a long time to find someone else who could throw a bulldozer around like he could. The thing was like a toy in his hands. But…seeing as how he lived in Athelsford and had always considered himself something of a traitor anyway, working on the link road, he’d finally decided to seek employment elsewhere.
Foreman John Sykes wasn’t an Athelsfordian, but he made it his business to know something about the people working under him—especially if they were local to the land where he was driving his road. He’d got to know Big Gavin pretty well, he reckoned, and in a way envied him. He certainly wouldn’t mind it if his Old Man owned a country pub! But on the other hand he could sympathize with McGovern, too. He knew how torn he must feel.