Paul never reached his target. A bullet tore into his shoulder, threw him sideways, and remained there searing the flesh like a flame, and he couldn’t hear anything for an instant, and he couldn’t see anything. Then there was a second shot, and when his senses returned, his face was bent over the steering wheel and the only sound came from the wind and the tortured building and Strand’s voice gasping in agony.
‘Why – why – why?’ The old man lay sprawled out on the back seat. His wife knelt at his side and he was staring down at the pistol which she had tried to wrench away from him, turning the muzzle against his heart.
‘Why did you go and do that, Mary? Ain’t I been good to you, little lass? Rough perhaps – a bit demanding at times – tried to be kind, though – thought you loved me.’
‘George, I do love you. I never wanted to hurt you. I only wanted to stop you doing harm.’ Blood oozed from his chest and stained her hair. ‘You must forgive me, George. Please, please forgive me.’ Her hands fondled the great dying head. ‘Say you forgive me, George.’
‘There’s nowt to forgive, child; nowt at all.’ He laid his arm across her back and smiled at Janet who had scrambled out of the car and pulled open the driving seat door.
‘Why, what’s your rush, young woman?’ There was a trace of the old hearty gruffness in his voice. ‘Aren’t you going to stay and see the end of the show I laid on for . . . ?’ The eyes closed, the mouth dropped wide open and Strand had followed Stephen Dealer.
‘Come on, Paul. Get out quickly.’ Janet tugged at his wrist. ‘They’re starting to break up, darling. At any moment those towers will fall.’
‘Yes, Jan.’ Weak with pain and loss of blood, Paul forced himself to climb out. The humming had changed to a great clanging, rattling roar: a bellow of fury as though some giant or legendary hero was awakening to reap his revenge. The very earth was heaving and Mallory Heights had taken on a vague and blurred appearance in the moonlight. Not only balustrades, but panels, and window frames, and whole balconies were falling from the towers: human bodies too.
‘Lady Strand, your husband is dead.’ He opened the door and took her arm. ‘You must leave him, my dear.’
‘Leave him? Leave George – my darling, darling old George?’ Her lips were against Strand’s and Paul could hardly hear her. ‘Don’t be stupid, Mr Gordon. George gave me everything out of life. He’s the only man I’ve ever loved. He needs me. I can’t desert him now.’
‘He’s dead, I tell you, so please come with us.’ Paul tried to pull her away from the body. ‘You must save yourself.’
‘What a poor liar you are, Mr Gordon.’ She raised her head and smiled at him, and then picked up the automatic. ‘A god can’t die – not a god who taught me how to live – not Sir George Strand, my great immortal man.’ The muzzle of the gun was pointing at Paul’s chest. ‘Go away, Mr Gordon, because I have to stay here and serve my god. Let go of me or I’ll kill you.’
‘Do what she says, Paul. She really will shoot if you try to make her leave him.’ Janet pulled his arm around her shoulder. ‘Try to run, darling. Lean on me, but you must run, Paul.’
‘I’ll try, Jan.’ The appeal to Mary Strand had sapped his mental energies, and hardly knowing what was happening, Paul forced his legs to obey her. What was the urgency, he wondered while they staggered and stumbled across the mud and rubble. Why was his shoulder so painful? Why had they left the Strands behind in the car? What was that deafening noise behind them, and why did the ground heave and tremble beneath his feet? He stopped and allowed his knees to buckle when he finally realized the truth. Everything was just a dream.
‘You run on, if you want to, darling, but I’m going to stop and watch.’ What a passionate girl Jan is, he thought, as she threw herself down beside him and pressed her face against his chest, as Mary Strand had done against her husband’s. But this was no time for love-making. He wanted to observe the spectacle in peace.
Paul smiled happily up at the Heights. Of course it was only a dream, because buildings designed by Sir George Strand, F.R.S., A.R.I.B.A., M.I.C.E., don’t dance. Towers of steel and concrete set on rock and solid bored piles could not spiral and waltz and pirouette as those towers were doing.
And he had always imagined he knew the design like the back of his hand. Surely the towers should be joined by bridges? There were certainly no bridges now, and the nearer tower was much larger than its neighbour; much much larger and getting bigger all the time.
No, that was wrong. The tower was not growing, it was coming closer; bending forward like a mountain on the move. Falling as a tree falls, slowly at first and then faster and faster; rushing to meet them at the speed of an express train. How odd – what a strange sight – how clever of George Strand to design a moving mountain. What a genius old Strand was.
Epilogue
‘Over one thousand five hundred killed, seven hundred and thirty-two injured, countless bodies unrecovered; total destruction of Mallory Heights.’ Jack Baxter was reading the Daily Globe.
‘Extraordinary story of Mr Paul Gordon and Miss Janet Fane, who escaped death by inches.’ Extraordinary was the right word. The authorities had suppressed all references to the ‘Sailormen’ and Jack shook his head in disbelief. Not even a maniac would do what they claimed Strand had done, surely? The old boy had made a hellish bloomer and gone round the bend when he realized that the towers were going to fall. He’d been raving when he invented that tale about deliberately designing a building which would collapse; poor old sod.
‘City’s housing programme set back by at least two years – hundreds remain homeless.’ Jack scowled around the grim, converted schoolroom with its steel beds and lockers, and dark-brown linoleum, and the contending smells of disinfectant and sweat. Two years in these sodding hostels: not likely. He and Hilda couldn’t live apart that long. They’d have to find a furnished place soon, though it would cost them a packet.
Still; ‘one thousand five hundred killed.’ They could count themselves lucky to be alive. Even hostels were better than being buried under a pile of rubble.
But to hell with that nigger. Jack looked at his watch, his scowl deepened and he stomped across to the wash room. ‘For Christ’s sake get a move on, Rastus.’
‘Don’t you go calling me that, you piece of white garbage.’ Luke Virgil rounded on him from a mirror. He had been rubbing aftershave lotion on to his cheeks and they gleamed like polished mahogany.
‘I’ll call you what I damn well like.’ Jack held out the watch. ‘We said we’d meet Molly and Hilda in the pub at six and it’s almost that now. You know what bloody-minded bitches women can be and they’ll probably start to tear each other’s eyes out if we leave ’em alone for long.
‘Besides, I’m thirsty, so stop admiring your great, black mug and let’s get going.’
He grinned and clapped Luke on the shoulder. Another wall had come tumbling down.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Blackburn was born in 1923 in the village of Corbridge, England, the second son of a clergyman. Blackburn attended Haileybury College near London beginning 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 antiquarian bookstore, a secondary occupation that would inform some of his work, including the bibliomystery Blue Octavo (1963). A Scent of New-Mown Hay typified the approach that would come to characterize Blackburn’s
twenty-eight novels, which defied easy categorization in their unique and compelling mixture of the genres of science fiction, horror, mystery, and thriller. Many of Blackburn’s best novels came in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with a string of successes that included the classics A Ring of Roses (1965), Children of the Night (1966), Nothing but the Night (1968; adapted for a 1973 film starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing), Devil Daddy (1972) and Our Lady of Pain (1974). Somewhat unusually for a popular horror writer, Blackburn’s novels were not only successful with the reading public but also won widespread critical acclaim: the Times Literary Supplement declared him ‘today’s master of horror’, while the Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural regarded him as ‘certainly the best British novelist in his field’ and the St James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers called him ‘one of England’s best practicing novelists in the tradition of the thriller novel’.
By the time Blackburn published his final novel in 1985, much of his work was already out of print, an inexplicable neglect that continued until Valancourt began republishing his novels in 2013. John Blackburn died in 1993.
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