by Kim Newman
What had happened up here in the orchard? It hadn’t been an out-of-control camp fire, and he didn’t think Paul had been having an after-lights-out session with an incinerator to get rid of garden rubbish. It had to be Jago, of course. Somehow, it had to be Jago.
Pyrokinesis. He remembered the word from Dr Cross’s briefing at IPSIT. Pyrokinesis, psychokinesis, apports, effective hallucination, psychic fallout. Lytton wasn’t sure he understood half what Cross had told him about Anthony William Jago. In the last few years he’d learned to be wary of undue scepticism. Giving something a scientific name didn’t make it natural. What Jago had could not be calibrated, dissected or exorcized with a Graeco-Latin tag. The man was possessed of... powers.
Nearby, at ground level, something groaned.
Instantly: still, listening, gun in hand. Good. The instinct override kicked in when he needed it. It was a long time since his basic training, and he’d had little use for his night skills since.
More groaning. It was someone too hurt to be dangerous. He reluctantly let go of the Browning. He’d have to be careful, or else he’d shoot a hole through his jacket. Or, worse, his thigh. He made his way, half crouched, towards the noise. He could make out someone lying face up, limbs spread as if staked to the ground.
‘James,’ the body got out, ‘I’m done over.’
It was Teddy Gilpin, dark patches—not shadows—on his face. His breathing was noisy and uneven. Froth trickled from his mouth. Lytton knelt and frisked the boy. There were no extra groans.
‘No broken bones, I think. What-?’
‘Terry. It were bloody Terry.’
‘Of course, Terry. Stupid bastard. Can you stand?’
‘Reckon so.’
Lytton helped him. Teddy made it to his feet, but sagged immediately. He felt for his head.
‘Ohhh, my nut.’
Teddy dizzily tried to stand on his own. He managed it, although he had to paw at the air like a seal to keep steady. One of his eyes was almost closed by bruising, and his cheek was open and streaming. The boy had been knocked senseless.
Lytton gave him a handkerchief. Teddy dabbed his cheek, yelping at the touch, but persisting until the grit was out of the cut. He hawked a lump of bloody phlegm into the linen.
‘Did Terry start the fire?’
Teddy thought, then painfully shook his head. ‘Nahh, don’t reckon so. Wouldn’t put it lower ’n him, but he were here well after us. He’s in a bloody foul mood.’
‘Too right, by the looks of you. Where is he now?’
‘Still up here somewhere. With Allison and some crazy biker bloke. He an’t got much of a face. They were in it together. They gone off into the woods’
‘Did the three of them beat you up?’
‘Nahh’ Teddy’s grin shone in the dark. ‘That were Terry on his own.’
Lytton tried to make some connections.
‘Allison? Is she with Terry?’
Teddy shook his head, grinning again, crusts of blood between his teeth. ‘Not likely. Terry’s petrified of her. He’s bad enough, but Allison’s a ravin’ psycho loony. She’m the one who kills cats. Terry’ll have gone with her ’cause he’s too chicken not to do what she tells him.’
Teddy’s hands were fists against the cold.
‘Do you want me to get you home?’
He shook his head. ‘Nahh, we best find Terry ’fore he does somethin’ else stupid. I reckon Allison’s new bloke is ten times the weird he is.’
‘Did you get a good look at this lad?’
‘Just enough to make out a fuckin’ mess where he ought to have a face. Could’ve been a mask, I s’pose.’
Lytton wished Susan were here. She might have been able to make something of Teddy’s testimony. She was effortlessly intuitive.
‘Where’d they go?’
‘Where d’you think? Up the hill.’
Lytton looked up towards the wood. ‘Okay, let’s track them.’
‘Sure thing, kimosabe’.
Teddy would be all right; he hadn’t had daft jokes beaten out of him.
‘I just hope you’re stocked up on silver bullets, kimosabe, cause I reckon bloody Terry is turnin’ into one o’ they werewolves.’
‘There are worse things,’ Lytton said. Jago’s face peered into his mind, and he shivered. ‘Come on, we’d better get going.’
There was only one path out of the orchard. It had been used recently. There were wet footprints, which meant someone had come this way since the fire. The woods were a mess up here. Dead trees had split and fallen. Low branches were half furred black with soot.
‘This was damn nearly a forest fire.’
Although overgrown enough to be, in some stretches, a tunnel rather than a path, the way was negotiable. Lytton supposed several bodies had been through in the last day or so, swiping too low branches and too thick shrubs out of the way.
He might not be the Lone Ranger, but he was getting well up on his woodcraft. These years in the country must have taught him something, even if only by osmosis. They proceeded with the minimum of noise and fuss, Lytton going ahead, Teddy following.
A scrap of tune went through his head, repeating a phrase from a song, ‘In the still of the night…’ It was late. Nearly four by his watch. The first fingers of dawn would soon be crawling over the horizon. It was also, after this summer of drought and heat, really cold. He was glad now of the sleep he’d caught earlier. The cold seeped through his clothes, reaching for his bones. ‘In the chill, still of the niiiight…’ Their breath was frosting.
The path ended. Before them was the Bomb Site, a slight dip in the flat top of Alder Hill, half grassed, half bare shingle. During the Second World War, he understood, a Luftwaffe bomber returning from a raid on Bristol had dumped its payload in the woods, mistaking the hill for a target. Nearly fifty years later, the resultant depression was still called the Bomb Site. Away from the towns and cities, time creeps like a glacier.
‘They London kids were camped out here,’ Teddy said, ‘but they’m gone.’
Opposite the path, there was a house. A wooden structure, built on a platform supported by piles, set into the gentle slope of the hollow. It had a shaded porch, and many of its boards hung loose.
‘That weren’t here before,’ Teddy whispered.
He was right. Lytton had never seen the place, and he had been to the Bomb Site several times before. The house was old, something from a Wild West ghost town. It could not have grown overnight like a mushroom.
‘Careful. Let’s go quietly.’
Lytton stood at the edge of the hollow, in the shade cast by two trees. The quality of the air in the Bomb Site was different, charged with electricity or heavy with an odourless gas. Above, the sky sparkled, inset with diamond chips. The house was as unmoving as a photograph.
On the porch, there was a movement. Wood creaked against wood. A shape bobbed back and forth. Someone was sitting in an old rocking chair. A man. Lytton got an impression of a face leaning towards the light but drawing away before he could get a look at it. The rocking man wasn’t alone. A woman, with long hair, stood by the chair.
Lytton had his gun out again. He heard Teddy’s curt sucking-in of breath, and signed to him to keep quiet.
Stooping low, he advanced into the hollow, taking care to keep his footing on the loose shale.
‘Evenin’, stranger,’ shouted the woman, ‘no need to creep and crawl like a snake.’
Lytton’s foot sunk into shingles. A fall of jagged pebbles shifted away from his ankle. He stood up straight, foot free, and walked as calmly as possible towards the house that shouldn’t be there. The woman stepped down from the porch to look at him. She’d been Allison Conway a long time ago. Now she was dried up and scrawny. Hair still black, eyes still sharp, her face was worn leather, her hands knuckly lumps of arthritis. Lytton would have to be cautious. The strangeness was beginning.
‘Welcome, stranger,’ said old Allison, exposed teeth rotten.
There
was an explosion off in the trees behind the house, and a flashbulb burst of fire. Lytton was flat on the ground, his ears echoing, slithering forward on his elbows toward cover. That had been a shotgun.
Terry. Bloody Terry.
He’d missed by a mile. A shotgun was no use at night, except for close work. And for that, Terry would have to come out of his coward’s corner and square up to him. Of course, that would mean he would have to get near enough to be in range of Lytton’s gun. He had the Browning out again, safety off.
Shit, shit, shit, shit, he thought. But he was working around a calm centre in his mind. Lytton didn’t want to have to shoot a kid, no matter how obnoxious. He didn’t want to have to kill anybody. But he’d signed up for life, and he knew what came with the territory. There were things not in the job description, to which he had committed himself when he wasn’t much older than the bloody silly boy out there in the woods with his punky rabbit gun. A snake knows how to bite.
Lytton almost made it under the porch. But the shape got out of its rocker and came for him. He thought he heard spurs chinking.
‘Cease fire, fuckface!’ The words came out of the shape with difficulty, over a sundered palate, through shredded lips.
Lytton hoped Teddy had the sense to make a run for it. This could easily get nasty from here.
He looked up. Allison and the rocker man stood over him. A fist grabbed his hair, and jerked him to his knees. A dead rot of a face floated before him in the twilight, life in its eyes and tongue.
‘Pretty fucking ugly, huh? They call me Badmouth Ben, Mr Snake. I’m putting my mark on you.’
Badmouth Ben produced a huge blade—a bowie knife, Lytton recognized—and touched his tongue with it.
‘This is so I’ll know you later.’
The point went to Lytton’s temple, and he felt a tug at the corner of his eye as the icy steel pinpricked him. But his hands were still free. And he had his gun. Lytton jabbed the pistol—now it felt like a toy in his sweat-slick fist—and jabbed the muzzle into the underside of Badmouth Ben’s wrist, pushing the knife away from his head.
The shot was muffled by flesh and bone. The bullet burst through the back of Badmouth Ben’s hand, raising an eruption of red in the greasily overcooked skin. He let go of Lytton and howled at the pinking sky. Another howl, even more feral, answered from the wood.
Lytton was on his feet, braced squarely against the porch. He drew aim at Badmouth Ben’s chest, but the howling man was suddenly gone, twisting into the crawl-space under the house.
He was pulled away. It was Allison, young again, mad as a harpy. He pushed her off. Teddy was skipping along the side of the house, kicking boards. The structure shook and settled. Inside, nails burst from wood. Teddy was whooping. Lytton wanted this over. He wanted to put his gun away, but Shotgun Terry was still out there, whining like a dog, and Allison could still go for his eyes with her nails. The girl hissed at him, and spat like a vicious cat.
There was another blast, and a hole the size of a tea tray appeared in the side of the house. Teddy jumped away from the splintered gap, and gave the wood a V-sign. The house strained and creaked and fell in on itself. A dust cloud rose from the ruin as boards crumbled quickly, a time-lapse film of decay. The dust bubbled a little and sank into the earth.
Allison showed them her teeth and waved claw-fingered hands. Lytton and Teddy stood back, away from her darting scratches, and she looked from one to the other. Her eyes were still alight. Then, with foxlike swiftness, she was gone into the wood. There was no sign of Badmouth Ben in the fast-dispersing remains of the house.
‘Terry,’ Teddy called out, angry, puzzled, i’ll ’ave ’ee for this.’
There was no answer from the woods.
Dawn broke the sky. Somewhere, in the village, a dog barked. Even the dust of the house was gone now. There was just the familiar Bomb Site, shingles and grass, a few bits of weathered rubbish.
Teddy looked at him, then down at the Browning, eyes wide enough to show white around the irises. ‘Fuck, James, wha’ss this game?’
Lytton had no answer. Self-conscious, he put his pistol away. A tear of blood ran from forehead to chin. He smeared it away.
‘Now we go home,’ he said.
INTERLUDE SIX
He was a foot shorter than Clint Eastwood, but he’d practised that dead look about the eyes. It didn’t really fit his thickeyebrowed, thick-lipped ventriloquist’s-dummy face, but it could help get him what he wanted. His clothes were copied faithfully from Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda in Hell’s Angel films, his language picked up from his favourite writer, Richard Allen. His bike began life as a sleek Kawasaki, but he’d jazzed it up. The front wheel was forward and the banana seat back, the handles curved like the Devil’s horns and the petrol tanks had red flames painted on them. In the panniers, he packed everything he owned. The bike was more than his home, it was a part of his body.
He heard about Rivendell in the village pub. The old turds were bitching about it in Welsh, but the lads he played darts with and bought pints for translated and embroidered the stories. Rivendell was a hippie hideaway. Girls with no bras, longhairs trying to grow dope. Kids who’d thrown away everything except their stereos and started all over again. Arseholes, basically. They had moved into three adjoining cottages, derelict until they did them up, and played Robinson Crusoe until they had a farm going. The locals hated them, but Gareth, the boy he was talking to, had stories of girls and grass and generosity that made Rivendell sound like just the roost for Badmouth Ben.
That night, while America was celebrating its bicentennial, he slept by the road, a mile or so from the village, hiding his bike behind a pile of slates that might once have been a wall. Before crashing out, he reread a few chapters of Skinhead, his favourite book, admiring the way Allen had life sussed. This summer, he could camp in the open as much as he wanted, not even using his sleeping bag. He thrived on the drought that yellowed the country, turning fruit on the bough to clumps of prunes. Dope would be good this year if the Rivendell folk had watered it properly. So far, he’d stayed cool by keeping on the move. Still, the idea of a real bed with someone else in it, and real food at regular intervals, was getting prettier and prettier by the hour. He’d been from festival to festival, and everybody was saying that was the best summer since 1967. Now, he wanted somewhere to make the summer his own for a while.
At first, the Rivendell crowd were suspicious. He took off and buried his swastikas before tootling up on his bike, but still had to overcome the bad publicity bikers had been getting since the year dot. The hippies gave him wholemeal bread and home-made jam, no butter, and horrible herbal tea, but didn’t want to form an opinion until their chiefs had made up their minds. Jeff and Conrad were the chiefs, oldies in their late twenties. He talked to them. Jeff didn’t like him straight off, but Conrad was won over by the bagful of mushrooms he had been toting since Stonehenge. He was invited to crash for a couple of nights. The first night, he wound up fucking one of the spares, a tall and skinny girl called Vanda with long eyeteeth and flowers tattooed all up one arm.
Three nights later, he passed round some of his own dope, and took Jeff’s girlfriend Nad upstairs. He made her like it. Conrad was well off Jeff now, and had long, stoned conversations with Ben about negative vibes. Conrad liked to talk about the old days before it all got fucked up, and Ben knew he could easily handle him if he had to. Within a week, Jeff was gone. Nad took off after him in a beat-up Mini, the only car the Rivendell folk had, and neither came back. Nobody cared much except a fat cow called Wendy, who whined and cried until Ben had to get her away from the others. He belted her where she couldn’t show the bruise. She was outraged, a little kid finding out for the first time that not everybody keeps the rules. She looked as if she was going to go red and stamp her feet and shriek, ‘It’s not fair!’ Conrad had gone on a long trip now, and Ben knew where there were some more mushrooms. Ben started sitting in Jeff’s old place at the table. One night, he had a ceremon
ial burning of Jeff’s album collection.
It was so hot everyone went around in shorts and sandals or nothing but hair. But Ben kept his leathers on, and always wore his shades. He was still cool. He had long, stoned talks with them all, individually or in groups of two or three. It was like taking sweeties from kiddies, finding the weak spots and working on them. He could smell out the long-term relationships about to reach the boredom and irritation phase. He could spot the middle-class moaners who were starting to miss inside toilets and electric fans. Then there were the hard workers who resented the slackers, the hoarders who didn’t share, the girls who didn’t fuck enough. Any group breaks down like any log, along five or six different grains. Everybody can find something to dislike about everybody else. But Badmouth Ben was everybody’s friend, his own most of all.
There were arguments every day now, fights, even. Never actually in them, Ben always got a ringside seat. Conrad got sick one night while he was tripping, and couldn’t keep his food down any more. Ben thought if he was being fed that vegetarian crap he’d want to puke it up again too. As a joke, Ben made Stodge the leader. Stodge needed a lot of advice, and Ben was pleased to oblige. Fed up with the wholefood produce they’d been raising or bartering for, Ben sent Chris and Phil into town to rip off stuff from the supermarket. When Phil got caught, Ben told the rest to forget about it and act shocked when the pigs came round. Ben told the constable Phil must have been keeping the money they gave him for groceries. He hoped the bastard would go to jail. The constable looked at him in a funny way, a way very few people looked at him. It was as if the pig knew exactly what Ben was about, but wasn’t going to step in and do anything because, deep down, he approved. Someone at dinner that night seriously suggested Chris be given a suicide pill to take on his next raiding mission, and Ben called them a bunch of fucking useless kids.