There had been about sixty people at Chilton. Looking back, Seumas realised they had been completely mad. Their rituals had involved making vast grids of braziers on the ground. Until Bex had told him otherwise, Seumas had believed that the Grey Beings of Fornax-5 had induced the plague to cleanse the Earth of the unworthy. Gigantic spaceships, pulsing light, had descended to evacuate the Purified, but by some incomprehensible oversight the occupants of Chilton had been left behind.
Life there had not been happy. He had never been able to rid himself of the idea that there had been something wrong with the Caller and his consort, who had rarely spent a night without at least one little girl in their bed.
Bex and six others, including Danzo and Pinch, had arrived there last June. Having ingratiated themselves with the Caller, and having learned that Seumas and Redmond – the Filthy Irish, as they were known – were at odds with the rest of the village, they had shot everyone else with two sub-machine guns, set fire to the place, and moved on towards Essendon. On the day when Bex had thus set him free, Seumas had fallen in love: not just with him, but with the glamour of everything he said and did. Yes. He was sure. He loved him.
Bex looked down from the table. ‘This is pretty good,’ he said. ‘Who cooked it? Stolly?’
‘Coco.’
Bex glanced at Helen, who was seated in the armchair by the window.
‘I like trout, dearest.’
At the unexpected word, her eyes briefly but without interest searched Bex’s face before she again looked away.
‘Their dorsal spots blend so charmingly with the pebbly bottom of the brook. A trout’s back is just the same colour as that browny-green stuff that clings to the stones. Did you ever stand on a bridge and watch the trout, dearest?’
Bex waited for her to answer. When she remained silent, he politely went on speaking. ‘I do like the way he weaves with the current. Very fishy. One moment you see him, the next he’s just a bit of turbulence. Then he reappears. You must have seen it, living next to the river as you do.’
‘No.’
‘That’s a pity, dearest. You are my dearest, aren’t you, Helen?’
‘If you say so.’
‘Hear that, Seumas? She’s my dearest.’
Seumas was not sure how to respond. He had recognised the beginnings of one of Bex’s games. The rules were made up as he went along. The object of the game was always to demonstrate the dullness of the victim: in this case, Helen, whose lurid religiosity Bex found both offensive and laughable. Play took place in the stadium of his imagination, where, revelling in his own intelligence, he could show off his repertoire.
‘Do you think she’s pretty?’
‘Never thought about it,’ Seumas said, although, in truth, he had been unable to help admiring her. She was not exactly beautiful, especially now that Bex had had her hair cut short, ‘like a boy’s’, as he had informed Seumas. Whatever it was she had, it seemed to come from within. Sitting there, the sunlight falling across her skirt to the floor, she appeared even more self-contained, as though she had retreated yet further into herself. Seumas had conversed with her only once or twice. He liked her soft voice, her brown eyes.
‘My friend here is a homosexual, Helen, did you know?’
The bewildering onrush of shame did not overtake Seumas for several seconds. He knew he must have misheard: yet he felt his cheeks turn crimson, so the words must have been spoken. He stared at Bex, unable to comprehend the magnitude of his indiscretion, of his betrayal.
‘Yes,’ Bex continued, smoothly, in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘Seumas likes nothing better than a nice length of cock. In that very bed, actually. Last night, for example, he sneaked in here unbeknownst and let me plug him up to the hilt.’
If he was telling Helen, why shouldn’t he tell everyone else? Pinch, Stolly, Danzo? Or was Helen about to die? Was this Bex’s way of telling him they were going to pack up and leave the village?
‘Tell her it’s true,’ Bex told him, setting aside his plate and contemplating the chocolate mousse. ‘I love making her jealous.’
Seumas no longer understood what Bex was doing. He wanted to speak but was unable to formulate any words, still less utter them. He felt as if he were falling into a great void. In one swift movement he had been expertly opened up, his vital organs exposed to view, and pushed over the brink.
Bex said, ‘“Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination”. Leviticus eighteen, verse twenty-two. Right, Helen?’
In her eyes Seumas saw something new and disturbing, akin to resistance.
‘Do I know my scriptures, or what? I must say that Levitical law can seem a bit abstruse. I understand it’s mainly a matter of desert hygiene.’
She was regarding him levelly.
‘Those old fellows, they knew their hygiene. Take buggery. The only problem, as everyone knows, is the fudge you get on your plunger. All very well in the heat of pleasure. You don’t mind it then. But afterwards, when the bird’s back in his nest, so to say, you get this pong. Reminding you what a hopeless sinner you’ve been.’ He smiled. ‘Unless you give it a thorough scrubbing. Which, this morning, because it was so delightfully sore, I signally failed to do.’ He opened his legs and looked down at his lap. ‘Do come and have a sniff, dearest. Savour the aroma. Even better, you can have your pudding while I eat mine.’ Holding her gaze, he beckoned with his forefinger, which he then extended diagonally and slid into his mouth.
She did not move.
‘Come here.’
‘I will not.’
‘Ah! At last!’ He smirked at Seumas.
Seumas’s own pain was momentarily forgotten. Helen had defied Bex. The last person to do that had been her husband.
Even more remarkable was the stillness that had stolen across her body. Her eyes, normally so lacklustre and evasive, were becoming increasingly fiery: they had arrogated to themselves all the energy she had once expended on yielding to Bex’s will.
‘If you’re going to shoot me, do it now.’
‘Shoot you? Shoot you? Why should I do such a horrid thing?’ He turned to appeal to Seumas. ‘Seumas, have you ever known me to shoot anybody?’
Seumas saw yet again the head man’s execution. He would never forget it. Most of all, he remembered the purity of the pitilessness Bex had displayed. Dispassionate, sleek, streamlined cruelty, shorn of all impediment: this was the key to the Golden Dawn. To protect himself, God had created guilt. Without guilt, without all the emotional jumble with which he had surrounded human beings, God had no defence against the thrust of that long, rigorous blade. Fashioned in the hard steel of inhumanity, cruelty alone could cut through all the imposture and reveal God for the fraud he was.
A glimmer of understanding came to Seumas’s rescue.
‘No, Bex,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I ever have.’
‘There, Helen,’ Bex said. ‘See? What can you be thinking of?’
Seumas was struggling to keep up. It seemed that, by undermining her beliefs and making the most disgusting suggestion he could, Bex had manoeuvred her into defying him. By mocking her defiance, he had shown that it had been of his making, not hers, and, as the final humiliation, welding together her faith, its lack of efficacy, and her present situation, he had forced her to relive, as vividly as possible, the scene of her father’s death.
Despite himself, part of Seumas found her impressive. She had been goaded far beyond the point of endurance and still she had not lost her composure. Seumas looked at Bex, trying to catch his eye.
Bex avoided him. Had their eyes met, he might have burst out laughing and that would have ruined everything. ‘And how dare you suggest that Seumas is bent? He’s as normal as you or me. As me, anyway, knowing some of the things you like getting up to.’ Bex shook his head in disapproval and dipped his spoon into the chocolate mousse.
Seumas was watching her face closely, eager to detect a sign of weakness: if not a teardrop, then at least a crack in her mask of piety.
‘God forgive you,’ she said, at last.
A subtle, triumphant smile forming on his lips, Bex licked his spoon and again dipped it slowly into the mousse.
6
Steve proceeded beside the wall under the overhang. He stopped as he came to each of the windows, his back pressed to the brickwork, and, with a darting motion of his head, looked round the edge of the frame before crouching down and moving on to the next. As far as he could tell, the angel and his shotgun were not in any of the rooms.
He passed the final window and came to the doorway.
A long corridor, receding into gloom. No one there either.
With his left hand, Steve beckoned to Carl. Carl left the shelter of the corner, crouched down below sill height and ran the length of the wall. When he joined Steve, he too stood upright, his AKMS braced across his chest.
Gil now left the corner and caught up with Carl.
Steve bent down and extended a forefinger to the lower of the two steps. A small drop of blood there, minutely splashed on its circumference, still felt liquid to his touch. He showed his fingertip to the others, then wiped it on his trousers.
Carl looked impressed. ‘You said he’d go in this door.’
‘How long ago?’ Gil whispered.
‘Few minutes.’
They had been delayed by the dogs, by the need to find a way round the brambles, and by the possibility that he might be lying in wait, perhaps behind one of the windows. That’s what Steve would have done himself: he’d have fired through a venetian blind and got at least one of his enemies like that.
Steve peeped round the doorframe again. He wondered where the blood had come from. Just the brambles? Or had he been hit?
‘He could be anywhere inside,’ Steve told the others.
‘It’s a hospital, right?’ Carl said. ‘If we go in we might catch something.’
‘You ain’t going to catch nothing.’
Steve could not prevent himself from shaking his head. Why Bex had lumbered him with these two morons he would never know. Especially Gil. He had been getting on Steve’s nerves ever since they had left Shanley. It had been Gil’s fault that they had missed the angel back there, at the house where he had spent the night. Gil’s, and Carl’s.
‘Plague’s over and done with. Believe me, you won’t catch nothing.’
‘So what we going to do?’ Carl said.
‘How many bangers you got left?’
‘One.’
‘Gil, you still got all yours?’
Gil opened the flap of his haversack. There, on top, like the tessellated eggs of some small, metal dinosaur, rested a clutch of three lever-action grenades.
‘Giss one,’ Steve said, and slipped it into his jacket pocket.
‘We could always set the fuckin’ place on fire,’ Carl said.
‘Too many exits. ’Sides, it’d take too long.’
Whatever else they did, they would have to go in after him. Steve did not welcome the idea. He thought for a moment longer. ‘We got to split up. I’ll follow the blood. I reckon he’ll go in deep as he can, into darkness.’ He reached into his haversack and made sure of the night sight. ‘You two keep to daylight. Don’t take no risks. He’s a dodgy bastard. Try to trap him. Get him into a small room and use a banger. Carl, you work left. Gil, work right. And for fuck’s sake don’t shoot each other. Or me. Especially me. Understood?’
‘Sure, Steve.’
Steve was issuing orders with all the authority conferred on him by Bex himself. ‘He might get out while we’re inside. But I don’t think so. He wants us off his case. That’s why he led us into the football ground. Thing is, he didn’t plan for no dogs.’
In the space of a few seconds the angel had turned the main pack into so much mincemeat. There had been seven consecutive reports from his shotgun, which meant the shotgun had a seven-shell magazine. Because the angel had abandoned his sniping rifle yesterday, and because he had not tried any shooting before stealing the lorry, Steve had already surmised that he was probably armed with nothing more than that: a pump-action shotgun. Wherever he kept his cache of arms, it was nowhere on the route from Shanley to here. Maybe he kept them in heaven.
‘I’ll go in first,’ Steve said. ‘You two count to a hundred, then follow.’ Gil looked blank. Steve remembered that he couldn’t count beyond ten. But Carl could. ‘Don’t forget,’ Steve went on, pointing at them alternately, ‘you right, you left. Give it about two hours, tops. We’ll meet back here. If you score, make sure he’s dead before you get your blade to him.’
Bex had told them to bring back the head.
‘All right?’ Steve said.
Gil nodded.
‘See you later, then,’ Carl said.
‘Yeah. Start counting.’
The business of giving orders, of being decisive, had given Steve a brief respite. However inadequate the other two might be, at least when he was talking to them, when they were depending on him for guidance, he was no longer alone with his thoughts. But as he started along the corridor, leaving them behind, he immediately re-entered the mental state he had occupied ever since Bex had handed him this mission. Yesterday evening, when they had been forced to retrace their steps to Shanley, he had hoped that Bex might have called the whole thing off. No such luck.
Even as he checked the first room he came to, Steve was debating with himself whether he should just forget it all. Forget this pesky old twat, about whom he cared nothing. Forget Carl and Gil. Forget Bex and the New Order of the Golden Dawn. He could function on his own. Eventually he might find another settlement somewhere. Persuade them to take him in. Become a good boy. Spend the rest of his days weeding cabbages.
What cabbages?
There were no cabbages. He might wander for ever before encountering another village like Shanley, where the people were basically all right. The alternative was the sort of place like Pinstead, where he had been raised. No way would he ever go back anywhere like that.
‘No way,’ he whispered.
He was stuck with Bex. He had made his choice at Pinstead. And, even though he had never really bought into that Golden Dawn shit, the exhilaration, the freedom, were hard to resist.
Yesterday night, on his return to Shanley, the others had told Steve about Bex raising Muriel from the dead. It was the scariest ceremony the Order had ever performed. Steve was very sorry he had missed it, despite his suspicions that not everything at these events was as it seemed. Danzo always seemed unusually busy.
Steve knew his Bible. At Pinstead it had been forced down his throat every day. Even in the Old Testament, he could recall nothing being said about pump-action shotguns. And did angels, clad in camouflage fatigues, really hide in the bracken with state-of-the-art sniping rifles, cleanly squeezing the trigger to deliver explosive rounds, one after the other, into people’s heads and torsoes?
Whatever was going on here, Steve was determined not to get himself killed, or even hurt, for Bex’s sake.
The further he went into the building, the worse the smell became. At the end of the corridor he peered through the cloudy perspex window of one of a pair of floppy doors and found himself looking out on what must have been a waiting room. Rows of fixed seating in brown and orange plastic faced a pair of reception windows set in the partition wall on the left. Near these windows stood three vending machines. Straight ahead, the corridor resumed and widened: this had obviously provided the main access. To the right were a number of doors, some ajar or askew, torn off their hinges.
St Michael was nowhere to be seen.
Like the corridor behind him, this waiting room, in the final days, must have been used as a ward. It was lit by eight large skylights, now extremely dirty, which shed a serene, spectral glow on the human forms sprawled in various attitudes on the rows of seats. Varying amounts of mummified flesh, blackened or the colour of rotting leaves, adhered to the bones, which were further clad in the verminous remnants of clothing or blankets. Those without any su
ch covering seemed paradoxically less naked, less immodest. Few of the corpses remained intact. Many had been completely dismembered. More bodies and parts of bodies, also ravaged by rats and dogs, lay about on the floor. Steve’s eye fell on a clean-picked skull, minus jawbone, resting upside-down in the dust like a child’s abandoned top.
The bodies in the corridor had been little more than scattered collections of bones. These here, however, unventilated, protected from the elements, had been better preserved, maintaining this tableau of suffering, this vision of hell.
‘Jeez, what a niff,’ he muttered, opening the floppy door and taking his first breath of waiting-room air. The bacterial reek of putrefaction had long ago departed from the bodies. It had become changed to something else, something that had migrated into the floor, walls and ceiling and now permeated everything equally, a foul, sweetish exhalation that had become one with the fabric of the building.
The smell was the signature of humanity. The diseased and dying people who had made their way here surely could not have hoped for a cure. They had come only to be together.
Though he had seen plenty of bad things during and after the epidemic, Steve had escaped London before it had really taken hold. At Pinstead, as a boy of seven, he had been shielded from the worst. His imagination had never had to absorb anything like this.
The angel’s trail was faintly and intermittently visible in the dust. He would be quite easy to follow, after all.
Steve thought of waiting for Carl and Gil, then decided he was safer without them. He crossed the room and entered the further corridor which, like the waiting room, was littered with human remains. In fact, the whole hospital was a charnel house, a place of the dead. The smell here was even more powerful than it had been in the waiting room.
Further on he found another drop of blood, elliptical, its long axis indicating the direction of travel. St Michael had been in a hurry, almost running where he had not been forced to avoid or step over bodies and bones. His stride-length occasionally became even greater than it had been on the road. In one place he had tripped and fallen, apparently scuffing the floor with the muzzle of his shotgun. Now and then, coming to doorways or intersecting corridors, he had stopped to consider.
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