Refuge

by Richard Herley

  Although they had momentarily interrupted their advance, the dogs had by no means remained stationary and, under the authoritative leadership of the rottweiler, were beginning to increase the rate at which they were inching forward. By now they were no more than ten yards away and had spread out to either side, widening their front in a classic display of canine tactics.

  The rottweiler began to growl.

  They may well have heard him kicking down the fence and followed him into the ground. In that case, he was looking at the whole pack. If not, he was up the creek, and no mistake. In a razor-wire canoe. Ohne ein Paddel.

  His three friends from Shanley might already have discovered the freshly broken fence and deduced its meaning. At any moment one or more of them might appear along the touchline. But, however much he wanted to look, he couldn’t afford to take his eyes away from the dogs, even for an instant.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Who wants it first?’

  Sometimes, if rarely, a simple face-off sufficed. The trick was to think ugly thoughts and engage the gaze of the dominant beast. Suter was staring at the rottweiler’s face with all the aggression he could muster. The brown irides were dung-coloured, the pupils slanted and alien. Its nose glistened. Saliva had foamed at the corners of its mouth. He focused again on the eyes, filling his mind with images of previous encounters that had ended in extreme violence, of oncoming dogs being mangled, mutilated, left trying to crawl away.

  The growling ceased. A bad sign. Very bad. If it started again he might have a chance. If, after that, he could make any of them bark, he might be able to avert his eyes, show submission, and get away without the fireworks.

  ‘You,’ he said, directing all his attention into that inscrutable brain. ‘Yes, you. If you give me grief I’ll blast you first.’ It did not take much imagination to picture and, with luck, transmit, the effect a close-range, twelve-bore charge would have on that crumpled face: he had lost count of the dogs he had been compelled to shoot in the past twelve years. ‘That’s right. I’m talking to you. You’re up against an adult male human. A big one. Me. I’m the most dangerous animal you’re ever going to meet. That’s because I’m intelligent and you aren’t. I’ve got a shotgun and you’re so stupid you don’t even know what that is, you cretinous mutt.’

  Suter did not look away from the animal’s eyes.

  The rottweiler, uttering a further puzzled, almost inward growl, stopped moving forward. The others took its cue. They knew something was amiss, but could not understand why their leader had not simply sprung at the prey. After all, it was alone and helpless. They were seven, and they always got what they wanted.

  This was the critical moment. If Suter tried to retreat, if he revealed the slightest weakness, he knew they would attack.

  To his left, somewhere beyond the scrub, from the direction of the vestibule he had entered just now, he heard a shout.

  ‘Steve! Any sign?’

  Behind him, from the south-western stand, came the reply. ‘No!’

  By sheer chance, Steve had chosen to circle the pitch anti-clockwise.

  ‘Get some height, Steve!’

  The urge to look, to take his eyes away, was overwhelming. But he didn’t. Nor, apparently, were the dogs distracted by the shouting, which made it, in the instant when he realised what was about to happen, all the more inexplicable and unfair that the rottweiler, jaws opening, had already bunched its muscles and sprinted into the charge, drawing the others along in a widening formation so that, whatever he did, one or more could jump him from behind.

  If he fired, he would give away his position with almost pinpoint accuracy. Steve and his companions could rake the goal-line and be sure to cut him in half.

  It took the rottweiler no more than two seconds to come within fifteen feet, the range of certain fatality. Suter thumbed the safety catch and blew away its left haunch, stopping its onward rush and throwing the corpse sideways. The next booming explosion destroyed the Labrador to the right, spraying flesh, then an Alsatian, the terrier, the second Alsatian. Shooting from the hip, absorbing the recoil, Suter was aiming by reflex, reacting and working the pump so quickly that he scarcely knew what he was doing. The Doberman took two shots before he’d blown it to bits. One of them had also mortally wounded the lurcher. It fell to the ground, writhing, and lay still.

  As, his ears ringing, he started to replenish the Remington’s magazine, he heard the echoes of the outrageous noise he had made returning to him from the vast caverns of the stands, crossing and recrossing the ground, rising above the skeletal pylons of the floodlights, dying away towards the hospital. He had expected an immediate sweep from the assault rifles. When it didn’t come, he saw that his shots would have made the three men take cover, albeit briefly, and the echo would have disguised, to some extent, their source. He had unwittingly bought himself a few seconds of advantage.

  How to use them?

  He could make for that gap in the fence. The L85 was equipped with a telescopic sight. To minimise his exposure to it, he would have to use the cover of the scrub to get as far along the goal-line as the next corner before climbing the terrace. From that angle, the direction of the light would also be in his favour.

  Alternatively, he could crawl into the scrub and from there, if God was on his side, get into position to do battle as planned.

  He took a final glance at the dogs’ bodies, hideously becrimsoned, broken, lumps and scraps of heated, oozing flesh, fur, bones and teeth strewn in outlandish attitudes across the clinker.

  If God had a side, Suter had never been on it.

  He began sprinting along the goal-line.

  Before he reached the next corner, he heard unintelligible shouting behind him and to his right. They were on both sides of the ground still. Steve, the one in the south-western stand, had obviously not yet got sufficient elevation to see him. They were not going to waste ammunition on a speculative sweep.

  Suter reached the corner. Without pausing, he turned to his left, almost directly into the sun, and passed through the open crush-gate. Of necessity he would have to follow the gangway between the seats. As he took his first step up, the expanse of his back felt unnaturally broad. His head, too, felt as if it were there for no purpose but to take an impact, a 5.56 millimetre NATO round arriving at six hundred metres a second. He imagined Steve’s grip tightening on the L85, pulling it harder into his shoulder as Suter’s form rose in the sights and crystallised at the centre of the crosshairs.

  ‘The clock struck one,’ he said, only half crazily, for the hour really was nearly that: the sun, on the shoulder of its zenith, glaring into their eyes, was his only friend in all creation. It was inviting him to rise, to follow, to come closer, Icarus in camouflage. He heard more unintelligible shouting, disregarded it and, bending low, began making his way to the top.

  The bullet arrived in silence. With a plangent, tangential ping it struck the rim of a seat-back a few yards to his left and spun viciously away, bringing in its wake the sound of its report, and the next, and the next. The chatter followed Suter diagonally, up two and three levels of terracing, chewing out a course of fragments from the seating which ended by spraying his head and shoulders. A shard of perished plastic stung his right cheek as he turned back on himself, dodging down again and out of the line of fire, which continued across to his right for several feet more. And stopped.

  Thirty rounds in an Enfield’s box. At most. Steve would have to reload.

  Suter started again. The gap in the fence drew closer.

  Behind him and to the left, shooting started from the other side of the pitch, a more ponderous, old-fashioned, lethal noise: the Kalashnikovs, maybe both of them.

  Now, surely, he would be killed.

  A row of loud, bright holes raked the metal fence from left to right, ending in space, ending where Suter would have been an instant later had not some deep instinct made him dive to the ground. His knees took the brunt; his hands took the rest. His shotgun clattered to a halt. He r
olled on his side and looked back, above the regular rows of seats and across the pitch. A muzzle flashed from the stands there, preceding by half a second the next train of bullets to blast its way towards him.

  When he opened his eyes he found himself whole. In grabbing his shotgun and rising to a crouching position he saw new movement lower down, near the pitch.

  Dogs. More dogs. Coming up the gangway. After him.

  There were three or four, perhaps even five. He did not have a chance to count them, because by now he was teetering at the very edge of the concrete slab where the fence had fallen away. It had reclined at an angle, a rusty, corrugated chute leading down to and partly overgrown by a mass of stout brambles, beyond which ill-seen scrub covered the face of a low embankment abutting the hospital grounds.

  Suter hit the fence with a crash. Half sliding, half bouncing from the force of his fall, clutching his Remington as life itself, he was propelled boot-first into the brambles.

  5

  Tangled in the brambles’ claws, Suter looked upwards and back to see the dogs arriving at the edge of the slab. Three were joined by a fourth, peering down at him and sampling the scent of blood, crushed blackberries, high explosive, fear and sweat rising from their would-be prey. In that moment it seemed as though they would jump after him.

  Ripping his hand free, twisting at the waist, he raised the shotgun to his shoulder and fired. The pellets may have blinded a couple of the dogs, or done worse. At any rate they all disappeared.

  Even trying to get to his feet caused the hooks and prickles to strengthen their grasp, snagging and tearing at his skin. Spotted lines of new blood covered his hands. His right foot was being supported by something unstable, an old paint-can or an object of that sort, which collapsed without warning and pitched him forward. He shut his eyes as tightly as he could, using his arm and the shotgun to ward away the brambles directly in front of his face.

  ‘God damn it!’

  Opening his eyes, he rejected the idea of trying to roll his way out. It wouldn’t work. He’d just get in deeper. Nothing for it but to tread them down, tear them aside, cut the thickest with his knife. However sharp the brambles, whatever layers of his skin and clothing they tore, he’d be dead if he didn’t get out of here this instant. He wondered if both sets of his pursuers, men and dogs, would meet. How long would it take the three men to run from the stands and reach the top of the terrace?

  Terror again threatened to overwhelm him as he made his way to the edge of the bramble clump. Now, at mid-October, the plants still had a few ripe berries, each one a complex mathematical arrangement of domed druplets, the clusters here and there left incomplete, a bare receptacle showing where a thrush or whitethroat had plucked the fruit. In his former life, Suter’s private studies of lowland English botany had encompassed a fair knowledge of the various species, hybrids and apomicts of the Rubus fruticosus aggregate. He thought he had known the plant through and through, the dark, rosaceous perfume of the leaves, the profile, angled or terete, of the stems, the tenuous shades of pink and paler pink investing the petals. He had studied it on the chalk, on the Lower Greensand, on the London Clay. He had picked and eaten the berries straight from the bramble-patch, or taken them home to stew with apples or store in jars. He had come closer to this organism than most of the people who had ever lived, yet now he found he knew nothing about it except its silent, God-like malevolence. Though he professed not to believe in God, he was quick to utter his name: where else had been directed the one-sided conversation he had been babbling these twelve years past? Silence, immanent silence, had been the only reply. In struggling to get free of the brambles, he hated them, just as he had come to hate the universal silence of which they formed a part.

  Half mad with fear and pain, he saw that God and the bramble were the same. A single long stem, the colour of congealed blood, when encircled and plaited, would make a perfect crown of thorns.

  Suter heard shooting from the other side. The remaining dogs were being dealt with. And then he found himself stumbling through the space between tightly packed rows of cars, across a moss-covered concrete apron. He had reached the hospital grounds. His hands, his face, his lips, were bleeding profusely. His groin and the right leg of his trousers were drenched, but not, as he had at first supposed, with blood. The cap of his water-flask had merely burst open in the fall.

  He clapped a confirming hand to his waist. The holster and its Browning were still there. But his knife, his trusted friend, had gone from his calf. He remembered wielding it, cutting branches, frenziedly slashing. He should have returned it to its sheath, but he hadn’t, and he would never see it again.

  Still, he had his shotgun and the bandolier full of shells. The Dialyt was inside his jacket. Round his neck, under his shirt, on a length of white cord, hung his army compass.

  Ahead loomed a huge concrete building, six or seven storeys high, adjoined by a brick-built extension that might have housed a generator. Beyond lay more buildings, the silvery column of a furnace chimney, walkways, a flight of ivy-covered steps. Entering shade, he passed under a concrete overhang and ran along a broad pavement beside a row of grimed windows, some smashed by looters or rioting relatives, some whole, with or without venetian blinds. Through the intact window of one office he glimpsed a dusty but bizarrely ordered desk, the back of a computer monitor, a curled calendar, two filing-cabinets against the wall beyond.

  Two low, paved steps led up to the threshold of a pair of glass-and-timber doors. All four panes of the wire-reinforced glass had been knocked in. The right-hand door opened, but with difficulty, since it had to push aside an arc of thick leaf-mould.

  Suter reached under his shirt for the compass and started along the corridor.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Sitting on the floor with his back to the bed, forearms resting on his raised knees, Seumas smoked a cigarette while watching Bex eat lunch. Seumas had carried the meal on a gilt tray, up from the kitchen for the head man’s daughter to taste. Mostly Bex took his meals in the dining hall, holding court with the others, but sometimes he ate alone, or just with the woman, in this fusty, old-fashioned room.

  The furniture and tapestries looked really old, contemporary with the house. According to a history of the Manor House that Bex had found downstairs, Queen Elizabeth I had slept here several times, in this very bed. Bex had told him all about her.

  The windows overlooked the gardens. A Turkish hazel, planted by the fourth Earl in 1707, stood in the middle of the lawn below. Seumas thought the room creepy. Once it had been the head man’s. Now, for the time being, it belonged to Bex; was the scene of their nocturnal trysts.

  They had spent at least part of three of the last five nights together. On the second night, Seumas had relived the rapture of the first. But on the third, last night, it had been different.

  As he watched Bex plying his knife and fork, Seumas wondered if he could be mistaken. Did he really love Bex? He had never been in love before and didn’t know the signs. Surely it was authentic, what he imagined he felt.

  At the divination yesterday afternoon, Bex had performed what he called a hepatoscopy. This meant examining the liver of some dead person involved in the question being posed. Muriel’s liver had borne signs that the creature she had met was not human, but an angel. Conducting the ritual of taking meat, Bex and the others had then eaten the raw organ as the prelude to the most arcane and terrifying ceremony of all. From his copy of The Secret of Gilgamesh, inscribed in Greek by himself in lamb’s blood on vellum, Bex had recited the Ninth and Thirteenth Canticles. These two canticles embodied the ancient Enchantment of Theurgy, the most puissant spell of Gilgamesh, conveyed to him in the Abyssal Kingdom by the necromancer, Azdoth.

  During Bex’s utterance of the Thirteenth Canticle, all but one of the flames in the Long Room had suddenly gone out, the air had turned freezing cold, and the crimson shadow of Satan had appeared on the wall. Muriel had risen from the dead and, displacing Satan, had taken possession of
Bex’s soul. Bex had collapsed on the floor. When he had come round, he had been able to report that he had relived her meeting with the angel.

  Specifically, Muriel had identified him as St Michael the Archangel, patron saint of Shanley. He had been sent down from the Third Circle by God, first to avenge Martin and the others, and secondly to join battle with the New Order. The angel had been given earthly form and could only be defeated by earthly means.

  Before the ceremony Seumas had heard mutinous voices half-heartedly raised against the Master. But now, if that was possible, his standing with the others was greater than it had been before. They believed absolutely that the gunman was supernatural, that he had been deputised by God, and that he was hence capable of penetrating the shield of invulnerability conferred on the New Order by Satan. In vowing to kill St Michael, Bex had triumphantly confirmed his position. He was everything to Seumas: priest, visionary, hero, father.

  Seumas could not remember his own father and was unsure whether he had even had one, except as an abstraction, a single inconvenient spermatozoon. His mother had reared him and his older half-brother and half-sister in a council flat, high up in a block somewhere. Harlow, perhaps – he knew it had been to the north and east of London. Her face had become vague. Blonde hair, possibly dyed, rather frizzy; an irritable voice, always complaining; a tendency to fat, exponentially accelerated and then cut short by her swollen-faced death.

  The six-year-old Seumas had been found wandering the streets, crying and alone. He remembered a large black lady, driving a big car and searching for survivors. She had taken him to a village in the country, to be received with much rejoicing.