by Kim Newman
Ingraham was lying down now, feebly trying to get up. X joined his hands over his head in victory, then fell forwards on to his friend. In their heap, they lay.
From out of nowhere, Lisa Steyning appeared in a nightie. She pulled his hair, making him ouch, and ran off into the dark, slippers flapping. That was the last thing he would put up with. He scrambled out from his nest of tyres and ran after Lisa’s filmy nightie. She was only a girl. When he caught up, he’d smack her face until she bled, and kick her until she cried.
* * *
Jessica tried to cuddle him, but Ferg battered her off. She was turning into a whining hag. The invisible invaders had landed, and he heard them clumping through the village. He saw dents in the road where they’d trod, weight cracking the tarmac, crushing the cat’s-eyes. Everyone was panicking. They would come for him and Paul soon.
* * *
Hazel lay down beside Beloved, content and complete. At last, she belonged. She was Loved for herself as she was, not for someone else’s idea of her. She was too happy to sleep.
* * *
Allison knew she’d done what she had to. She put the stiletto back in its sheath on Jazz’s hip, and stood. The small tear over the girl’s heart expanded, pinpoint of blood glowing like molten metal. The tiny bubble was the focus of the fire. She took Terry’s hand, and Mike Toad’s, and led them back. They stood at the crest of the crater, watching Jazz. She convulsed, face bright red, casting her own light, the blood bubble so bright it was hard to look at. Jazz was swallowing her own aura.
* * *
Susan looked down the hallway, and lashed out with her mind. Panels on either side of the door exploded into fragments, which burst outward in a shower. The frames smoked, and she felt petty satisfaction with her destructive potential. Karen goggled at her.
‘Abracadabra,’ she said, bitterly.
* * *
Lisa’s nightie stood out, blonde hair streaming down it, as the small shape ran. Jeremy knew he could catch her, even if she did try to get lost in the crowd. Lisa pushed through a gate into the Pottery, and Jeremy followed. The Bleaches had a big garden. He remembered it from a barbecue his parents had taken him to. Lisa had teased him and kicked him when no one was looking. He’d been sent home early for throwing orange juice over her party dress, and she’d huddled giggling with Hannah as Daddy, angry, carted him off to a smacking, no supper and an early night.
It was dark in the garden, but he still saw the nightie. Lisa was heading up the hill, but had slowed down. She was too weedy to want to run all the way to the top. Jeremy was getting a stitch. Lisa stopped still, and turned to look back. He imagined her tongue poked out.
‘I’ll get you,’ he said to himself.
He ran up to her, slowing down, making fists. She walked towards him, and dread struck him down. The blonde wig came loose and was thrown away. The nightie was shucked. He found himself looking at the vacant, drooling face of the Evil Dwarf, and his bladder gave way. Giggling like Lisa, the Evil Dwarf came for him.
* * *
Paul knew it’d be safest to get off the road. But there was fighting between the tree and the Pottery. He wondered about Hazel, about how she was. With all this commotion, they couldn’t have had time to finish their ceremony. Perhaps she had not been initiated after all. Perhaps she was savable. He bit down, and his tooth flared.
* * *
Jazz was inches off the ground now, head lolling back. Light around her throbbed. Allison saw the blood bubble burst inwards, and tried to look away. It was a sudden explosion of darkness, sucking everything into a tiny spot. There was a crack, and a violet discharge that hurt her eyes. Where Jazz had been, there was nothing.
INTERLUDE THREE
‘At the end of the programme, it was in Westminster Abbey, a hundred feet high, with eyes and tentacles and slime and…’
‘Nahhh,’ Reggie sneered at him, ‘youm makin’ it up.’
‘No, it was on the television,’ Maurice insisted, ‘last night.’
The boys were out on the wetlands, bored. It was August, school weeks away. Reggie was two years older, and his dad worked on the farm. The Major didn’t really like him playing with Reggie, and he sometimes wondered himself why he put up with the bulky, sulky, bullying boy. He somehow always ended up wading barelegged through stinging nettles, raising fierce red blotches on his skin that took days to subside. Reggie was often hanging around the farm at a loose end, although Maurice had never been invited to the Gilpin house. There were few children in Alder, and Reggie, because his dad worked for the Major, was the only one who didn’t stay away from the newcomer as if he carried the plague. The Maskells had been in Alder a year, since the Major had bought the farm, and they were still newcomers. Maurice’s father liked it that way, believing it important that everybody knew their place. ‘The rich man in his castle,’ he explained, ‘the poor man at the gate, He made them high and lowly, and ordered their estate.’ The Major liked to stride around the farm, quirt at his side, making sure everything and everyone was in their place.
‘Tellyvision,’ Reggie said, spitting a lump at a cowflop. ‘Load a’ rubbish, boy.’
‘No,’ Maurice said patiently, ‘the monster was real. I saw it.’
He had, too, just before the names of the actors came up, and the eerie music he couldn’t whistle sounded out, sending a chill straight to the base of his spine. Lying awake last night, with his torch on under the bedclothes, he had decided the Quatermass Experiment was the scariest monster to which he’d ever been exposed. It was worse than the silver robot in The Day the Earth Stood Still, worse than the Nazi war criminals Yank Steyning had told him about, worse than the werewolves in the American comics his father had burned. It sat there in the rafters of the abbey, writhing and dripping. Next week would be the last episode, and Maurice thought he wouldn’t be able to get a real night’s sleep until it had been transmitted and the world was put to rights. He imagined the monster frozen in the abbey for a week, waiting for Professor Quatermass to come and put it in its place. Next week, he hoped, the professor would find some way of destroying the monster, and the world would be saved. If not, then it would be the end of all things, and everyone would be turned into tentacled, many-eyed monstrosities. It was too dreadful to think about. No one would know their place then, because there wouldn’t be places any more, or people to know them...
‘Where’d thic bleddy monster come frum then?’
‘The spaceman turned into the monster. Remember the spaceman?’
Reggie sneered. Maurice had been explaining all summer what was happening with Professor Quatermass and the spaceman. Professor Quatermass was a scientist, brisk and dedicated, and he took no nonsense from the soldiers and politicians who got in his way. The soldiers reminded Maurice of the Major, snapping orders and not paying attention, sure everything was in its place while the world disappeared under writhing slime. Reggie pretended he wasn’t interested in Professor Quatermass, but when Maurice finished the explanation of this week’s instalment, he always asked questions, digging for extra details.
‘When the cactus got into the spaceman, he turned into a giant cactus monster.’
‘With they tentacles?’
‘Yes,’ Maurice said, ‘lots of tentacles.’
The only time Reggie Gilpin had seen television was the Coronation, when the Major had invited everyone in the village to watch the great event on their receiver. Maurice’s parents had the only set in Alder. That day, the vicar and the other farmers had a party afterwards. All the children had stared well into the evening at the bubbly screen with its fuzzy little people. Maurice had been bored rigid by the Coronation, which was just people talking and wandering in and out of Westminster Abbey. If there was going to be anything in Westminster Abbey, he preferred it to be a hundred-foot-high monster from outer space.
A herd of cows milled around in the field, stupidly chewing grass, full udders sloshing. Reggie’s dad had been working steadily over the past few weeks, st
ringing up wires in the fields. Yank Steyning, an American who had come over for the war, helped out, wearing thick cowboy gloves and talking like Tim Holt. Maurice always wondered when Yank, who’d married Anne Starkey, would saddle up and ride on like Tim Holt, vanishing over the horizon on a horse, wandering to the next town for the next adventure. Reggie’s father and Yank had done a thorough job, but the wires were pretty useless fences. A cow could easily knock one down. A series of iron poles held up the wire, which was two feet off the ground where it wasn’t sagging, and they were already sinking at funny angles into the wet ground.
The Major had told him not to mess around with the wires or else he’d get hurt. Maurice knew what that meant. Whenever he did anything his father told him not to, he got hurt. The Major kept his quirt, which was like a tasselled riding crop, with him all the time. He’d used the quirt in the Far East during the war. When Maurice wouldn’t go to bed or broke anything or talked back, his father would tell him to drop his shorts and underpants and bend over, then he would strap him across the backside with the quirt, always ten times. It certainly hurt.
‘Did they cactus come frum out a’ space?’
‘No, the hospital where they put the spaceman when he came back ill.’
‘Sounds stupid t’me.’
Maurice didn’t quite understand how the cactus and the spaceman had become combined in the monster.
‘I suppose it was the radiation.’
‘Like they bomb buggers?’
Maurice nodded. ‘Yes, atomic radiation.’
Reggie’s upper lip, skilled in the art of the curl, expressed his opinion of Maurice’s stupidity, and he spat again, apparently hawking a fist-sized gobbet of slime in with the spittle. Reggie always treated Maurice as if the younger boy were a mongoloid idiot, but Maurice knew Reggie was near the bottom of his class. They were at the same school, but when he took his next exams, Reggie would be going to the secondary modern in Achelzoy, while the Major had already made arrangements to send him away to the school—the posh school, Reggie called it—he’d gone to himself. That had nothing to do with being clever. That had to do with tradition, the Major had explained to him. Reggie told him that at the posh school, he’d have to do five hours of homework every night and take cold showers at six in the morning. He’d complained to his mother about this prospective torture, but she told him Reggie didn’t know anything and was just showing his enviousness.
‘’Tomic raddyation. Tha’ss wha’ss in they wires,’ Reggie said, pointing to the droopy fence.
Maurice laughed. ‘Don’t be silly. Atomic radiation comes out of bombs’
‘Weren’t no bomb got they bleddy spacyman bugger.’
That was true, he couldn’t deny.
‘That was outer-space radiation.’
‘Same diff’rence.’
Maurice was impatient, unable to explain to Reggie why he was stupid. He didn’t have all the facts himself, but knew the older boy was wrong.
‘If there was atomic radiation in the wires, we’d be dead. And the cows would die too.’
‘Not if’n i’ss they slow-type raddyation.’
Reggie didn’t even read comics, so he didn’t know what he was talking about. But he’d often try to make Maurice angry by arguing stupid things. Once, he’d called Maurice a red, and argued that only communists had televisions. How else were they supposed to get their orders from Stalin in Russia if it wasn’t through the television?
They were quite near the wires. Nearer than Maurice’s father had said he should go. Up close, he could see the wires weren’t nailed to the iron posts, but strung into little loops at the top of each. He thought he could hear humming.
Maurice felt itchy. He wanted to piddle, but the Major had told him not to relieve himself in public. When he was younger, he’d wet the bed a few times and his father had made him lie in it until it was dry, then quirted him.
In the Far East, the Major had been an officer prisoner-of-war, and had to keep up discipline in the camp. He had stories about troublemakers and slackers who let the side down, and how he brought them into line. He had medals and a letter from an important general commending him for spirit and bravery. He didn’t tolerate indiscipline in the ranks and came down hard on it. But when Yank Steyning saluted him, he got red-faced and angry, accusing the American of being disrespectful. Yank had been in the war too and had medals to prove it. He hadn’t been a prisoner, though; he’d loaded bombers at the airfield in Achelzoy.
The Major wouldn’t want Maurice to piddle in the field. Still, he had drunk most of a bottle of pop this morning and not been to the lavatory. He could feel the pop in his bladder, pressing to get out.
‘You can hear they raddyation raddyatin’,’ Reggie said.
‘Don’t be silly, it’s just a fence, that’s all.’
‘One touch, and you’m be a pile a’ they ashes.’
This was another of Reggie’s stupid arguments, Maurice could tell. Like the time he said the Bomb Site was haunted by the ghost of a German parachutist who’d come in the war. Or his attempt to convince Maurice that Danny Keough limped because he had a wooden leg the army had given him. He had persuaded Maurice to stick a pin into Danny’s leg to disprove that story. That had been worth twenty strokes of the quirt, with Danny watching quietly while his father did the business.
‘It’s just wire.’
‘Prove it,’ Reggie said, quietly.
‘Father says I’m not to touch it.’
Reggie’s sneer was out loud, a laugh of victory. ‘See, ’tis bleddy ’tomic. ’Ven yer red daddy knows it.’
‘No, I’m just not to touch it.’
‘Then don’t touch it, jus’ cluck-cluck-cluck chicken.’
‘But it’s not atomic.’
The wire looked harmless, a dead line hanging like an old skipping rope. It could be jumped over or crawled under. Cows would trample it soon enough, and they wouldn’t be turned to ash. Maurice knew the Major wouldn’t have anything put up that might threaten his livestock. He was always talking about how much money he’d invested in the farm.
Maurice was bursting. He turned to a ditch, unbuttoned his fly, and took out his knob. He didn’t like to with Reggie watching, but he didn’t want to wet his shorts and get the quirt.
‘Tell youm what,’ Reggie said, ‘youm piss on thic wire.’
That was one way to settle it. His knob in his hands, Maurice waddled over to a place where the wire sagged almost to his knees. He aimed, and let go. The stream of piddle missed the wire, but he brought it closer, until it touched…
There was a steaming crackle, and the worst pain Maurice had ever experienced shot through his knob. Sense shocked out of him, he collapsed.
PART
VI
1
This could turn into a rock-’n’-roll riot, even a disaster of tabloid-headlines-for-six-months, hospital-visits-from-the-Prime-Minister proportions. The pre-festival bacchanal was turning into ragged scuffling. A homicidal dickhead was tossing home-made Molotov cocktails into the street. A boy with fluid spurting from a burst eye slammed into Lytton and ran on, hurdling firelines. When the dawn came and the figures were in, this could rack up a kill-count to make an airliner crash or a football-stadium collapse seem a picnic on the lawn.
The Browning was back in the Gate House. Lytton wished it were with him. He’d left it behind because he didn’t want the discomfort of it in his waistband all afternoon. Now, that seemed like a beginner’s mistake.
An amplified cassette deck was playing the Ramones’ ‘Rock ’n’ Roll High School’. Some were passing buckets around the patches of fire in the road, others were dancing in firelight. Lytton saw Ursula Cardigan jiving topless, warpaint dashes of soot and lipstick on her cheeks. A milk bottle full of paraffin sailed across the road, burning handkerchief jammed into its neck. It burst against a parked Ford Escort, flames spreading over paintwork, fire dripping to tarmac. A leading edge of fire washed down the Ford’s body, swarming toward
s the petrol cap.
Lytton dragged himself over a low wall. He was in a flowerbed in front of a small cottage; he smelled crushed roses, felt thorns scratching, tasted soft earth. Crouching against the dry-stone wedge, he counted, as if timing the distance between lightning and thunder. After fifteen, the Ford’s petrol tank exploded. He felt the shudder in the ground. Even with eyes shut fast, he saw the flare, a white blast in the dark. Hot hail fell on his back, and he writhed in his jacket, trying to get the searing shrapnel off him. Heat poured over him in waves. The small garden was floodlit by magnesium-harsh flames. Someone screamed and leaped the wall, fire sprouting from back and hair, slammed against the house and collapsed into a bush, life shocked free of the body. A sick-making smell of scorched flesh smoked off the burning person.
Slowly, he got off his knees and looked at the main road. Fires were spreading, the exploding car having spat hot chunks against a row of cottages. One of the last thatched roofs in Somerset was dotted with burning debris, clouds of smoke boiling from its depths. The amateur fire-fighters had given up and joined the rock-’n’-rollers, thrashing heads in the firelight. The cottage front door opened, and a middle-aged woman in curlers came out, wearing only a pyjama top. Naked from the waist down, she tutted at the damage to her flowers, and started fussing with a row of carefully cultivated chrysanthemums, squatting down to talk to the blooms. She ignored Lytton and the still-burning body.
As a field agent, he’d never been mixed up in the wet end of the business before. Montreal hadn’t been Belfast, Beirut or Phnom Penh. This wasn’t like his training exercises. This wasn’t like anything.
‘Gabba gabba, we accept em, one of us! Gabba gabba, we accept em, one of us!’ the Ramones sang. ‘Gabba, gabba hey, gabba gabba hey.’
He looked up at the Agapemone, and imagined Jago sitting with his camera obscura, watching it all, half knowing he had caused it. Was Beloved pleased with the world he had made?