‘I curse your god, General Kirk. I curse everything which is cruel and mean.’ Her hands tore at the red searing blanket that wrapped her, but the wind still blew, the flames roared and her feet stumbled on towards the abyss. ‘Why should he have given us a vision of eternity and then left me alone in the dark?’
For perhaps five seconds, but they seemed like hours, Kirk watched her hover between rock and air and then there was suddenly no more pain, no light, no sensation or thought for him; only the void; nothing at all.
Chapter Twenty-two
‘Charles, it is all right. Everything is going to be quite all right.’ The voice sounded as if it came from a great distance and he appeared to be wearing spectacles with bright yellow frames. Through them Kirk saw Marcus Levin’s face beaming down at him. ‘Very soon we are going to put you to sleep again, but first I want you to know that you are out of danger and there will be no permanent disfigurement.’
‘Thank you, Mark. I expect I shall be a nasty sight for some time, but not to worry. I never was much of an oil painting.’ Kirk tried to smile through the slits in the tannin-soaked bandages, but his lips and eyelids would not obey him. He could remember the agony as he had been hauled towards the fire, how his whole body felt as if it were melting, the faces he had seen and how the wind had suddenly changed and the wire had gone slack. But, beyond that, he could remember nothing at all.
‘I wanted to die, Mark. I honestly believe that I saw Death and I wanted to go to him.’
‘Sorry you were disappointed, Charles, but you’ve got a constitution like a horse.’ Marcus was kneeling beside his stretcher. ‘You’ll just have to carry on being a senile delinquent for a few more years, I’m afraid.’
‘I suppose so.’ Once again Kirk tried to form his cracked lips into a smile, but it was quite useless. ‘How long have I been unconscious, dear boy?’
‘About an hour and you’re very weak and full of dope, so try not to talk.’ Behind Marcus, the fire had dwindled to a mere heap of smoking embers and the clouds had blown away, leaving a clear sky and a big white moon to light up the hills.
‘In a moment, we’re going to put you out again and take you to hospital. But before they move you I want you to understand that it is all over and there is no need to worry about anything.’
‘Yes, it is over. Dead and done with.’ Kirk moved his face towards the edge of the cliff and everything came back to him. The scream, the curses and the little figure in its cloak of flame staggering out into the darkness. Beyond the cliff he could make out a line of silver which was the sands of Spaniards’ Bay. ‘“God blew with his wind and they were broken”, Mark.’
‘I’m not with you, Charles. What has the Armada inscription got to do with it?’ Marcus frowned and then his face cleared and he pointed towards the R.A.F. helicopter drawn up beside an ambulance and two police cars.
‘No, it wasn’t God, I’m afraid. That was the thing which blew. I commandeered it at Lochern and when the pilot saw what they were doing to you, he brought her in close. The rotors fanned the flames towards that . . . that child, woman, thing, whatever you like to call her and she ran back over the cliff. My dear, clever wife is the one we have to thank God for. Tania telephoned me from London and gave a theory which helped us to put two and two together.’
‘Don’t let them take me yet, Mark.’ Two ambulance men were waiting to lift the stretcher, but Kirk waved them aside. He had to hear the end of the story in the place where it had actually happened. ‘You know everything, Mark? What they were . . . what they had become . . . what was done to them?’
‘Almost everything, Charles. While you were unconscious Cameron and Inspector Grant had a nice cosy chat with Fawnlee and the others and I gather they have told the truth.
‘But what will they do to him and his companions, that’s what I want to know? What possible punishment can there be? Children, little children.’ Marcus’s face was flushed with anger. ‘The rest of the kids are all right, that’s the only mercy. But the others . . . !’
‘Kids . . . Children.’ Kirk shook his head. ‘You call them that because you don’t understand anything, Mark. You don’t realize who they are even now. Those creatures weren’t children any more. They were . . .’
‘Take it easy please, General Kirk.’ Dr Knight was at the other side of the stretcher and he reached for his pulse. ‘Sir Marcus was referring to the children who had not been treated yet. They ran away when the helicopter landed but they have all been rounded up and are safe and sound. The others are dead. They went like the rats of Norway.’
‘Norway rats? You mean lemmings?’ Kirk closed his eyes for a moment. He was so weak that it was an effort to concentrate on anything. Lemmings; the rats of Norway. Small rodents with suicidal tendencies which every three years join in a mass migration, ravaging the crops in a straight line till they reach the cliffs and the beaches and go on to meet certain death in the sea.
‘That’s right, Charles, they followed her.’ Marcus nodded towards the cliff. ‘I saw it happen and we don’t have to worry about them. When their leader fell, they went after her. One and all, they threw themselves over the edge as though they had been tied to her by strings.
‘Strange, isn’t it? Those people longed for actual, physical immortality. They feared death so much that they would go to any lengths to avoid it and, in a sense, they succeeded. Yet, when they saw their leader die, they followed her. In a fiendish way, theirs really was a fellowship.’
‘You could call it that.’ The embers were dying, caving in, subsiding and Kirk looked away. Somewhere among the glow were the remains of the woman they had hunted with troops and dogs and machines; the one they had judged guilty of everything while, all the time, the real demons had walked secure and unafraid to propagate a race which was as maimed and crippled as his own torn hand. Without a hunch, an accident and Tania Levin, they might have gone undetected for generations. In his mind’s eye, Kirk could picture the successors of Eric Yeats and Laura Rose squinting down at another drugged little body and preparing to graft a sliver of old decayed tissue on to the brain of a child.
‘But you are sure they are dead; all of them?’ The very thought of one creature remaining alive sickened him and Kirk croaked the question. ‘You are quite certain . . . All?’
‘There is no doubt about that. The cliff is a hundred and fifty feet high and they have been dashed to pieces on the rocks or swept out to sea long ago.’ Something glinted in Marcus’s hand. ‘There’ll be no frightened, split children to rot in asylums. Nothing to worry about.
‘Now, you’re going to have a good long rest and wake up in hospital, beddy-byes for you, Charles.’ Kirk felt a prick in his arm and the ambulance men stooped forward to raise the stretcher.
The moon was high above the island now, and as they carried him away Kirk saw a long stream of golden light creeping across the bay. It was very beautiful, but he was glad to feel the injection start to work. The bodies beneath the cliff belonged to monsters, but they had been children once and that strip of gleaming, heaving water reminded him of a child’s flowing hair.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Blackburn was born in 1923 in the village of Corbridge, England, the second son of a clergyman. Blackburn started attending Haileybury College near London in 1937, but his education was interrupted by the onset of World War II; the shadow of the war, and that of Nazi Germany, would later play a role in many of his works. He served as a radio officer during the war in the Mercantile Marine from 1942 to 1945, and resumed his education afterwards at Durham University, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1949. Blackburn taught for several years after that, first in London and then in Berlin, and married Joan Mary Clift in 1950. Returning to London in 1952, he took over the management of Red Lion Books.
It was there that Blackburn began writing, and the immediate success in 1958 of his first novel, A Scent of New-Mown Hay, led him to take up a career as a writer full-time. He and his wife also maintained an ant
iquarian bookstore, a secondary career that would inform some of Blackburn’s later work. A prolific author, Blackburn would write nearly 30 novels between 1958 and 1985; most of these were horror and thrillers, but also included one historical novel set in Roman times, The Flame and the Wind (1967). He died in 1993.
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