Refuge

by Richard Herley

  ‘What do you think?’ He began unbuttoning his dripping jacket. ‘I’m wet. I’ve been shot at. I spent last night in a rat-hole. I’ve had no breakfast. Then I had to run about ten miles back here. Course I’m not OK, you fuckin’ pratt.’

  ‘What about the angel? Did you see him?’

  ‘I saw him.’

  ‘What does he look like?’

  ‘He’s all in white. With wings.’

  At that moment, followed by Coco, Bex entered. Seumas had not set eyes on Bex since the previous evening. According to Coco, he had spent the night in Helen’s room and breakfasted with her. Coco had taken up the tray. Though pretty far gone, Coco had said, Helen’s sanity was still, heroically, holding out. Bex had not long ago bathed and washed his hair, which remained damp. He had changed into fawn chinos, an off-white cashmere sweater, and a new plaid shirt with a button-down collar. He looked at Seumas. ‘Stolly,’ he said. ‘You and Coco, rout that old fart Goddard and bring him here. You know his place?’

  ‘Off the green?’

  ‘That’s the one. If he’s not there, find him. Don’t tell him anything. Just get him here. Right now.’ He turned to Seumas. ‘Fetch Matt and Dave, then wait in the dining hall. I want to talk to Danzo on my own.’

  ‘Can I take this?’ Stolly said, meaning the machine gun.

  ‘Where’d you get it?’

  ‘At his house,’ Danzo said. ‘He’s tooled up for World War Three.’

  To Stolly, Bex said, ‘Leave it on the table. But don’t go without a piece. You too, Coco.’

  Seumas found Dave upstairs, lying on his bed, smoking and leafing through some of the amazingly pornographic magazines Gil had found on a lorry-trip to Watford.

  Dave said he did not know where Matt had got to. Sheltering under an umbrella, Seumas hurried across to the church tower and rang one of the bells a couple of times, giving the pre-arranged signal to assemble at the Manor House. Matt appeared a few minutes later: he had been searching through nearby cottages, looking for a better waterproof jacket.

  The three of them went into the dining hall and sat morosely at the table, Dave at the head, Matt almost opposite Seumas, who had his back to the main doors.

  Unable to maintain the intensity of its first onslaught, the rain had now settled for a more realistic, but steady and unvarying, rate of fall. The air had turned noticeably colder. The interior of the dining hall had become very gloomy. Again Seumas felt the presence of something sinister. It was almost tangible, suffocatingly close. He looked at Matt. They exchanged apprehensive glances.

  What manner of being were they up against? All in white, Danzo had said, with wings. First Redmond had been killed. Then Terry and Beezer. Now Pinch too. Steve, Carl and Gil were missing. That made seven. By normal standards, each of them had been invulnerable. This time on Sunday morning, the Order had numbered fourteen. And today was only Tuesday.

  Seumas had known Redmond most of his life. When Bex and the others had liberated the two of them from Chilton, Redmond had embraced the novelty and excitement of the ideas Bex had brought. But somehow, at bottom, it had all been, for Redmond, an adolescent game. The evil Bex had spoken of, the rites and Satanic possessions, the occult practices, had not really meant anything to Redmond. In some vague manner, Seumas had sensed that Redmond had assumed Bex was making it up.

  Seumas had known that Bex had meant every word. And now he understood that the evil they had been so eagerly summoning had heeded the call. Finally, on this wet October morning, it had arrived. He could feel it. Cold, clammy, utterly black: evil had entered the walls and boards of this old house. Seumas was powerless to escape. He had been clamped into his seat.

  Satan was here, in this room.

  He was inspecting his troops. One among them, Seumas, had become immortal. God and all his legions couldn’t kill him now. But what terrible and deathless form would the conflict take?

  Seumas dared not take his eyes from the table-top.

  Reaching into an inside jacket pocket, Dave produced one of his magazines, folded vertically. He laid it on the table and spread out the pages. ‘Here,’ he said, pushing the image of three obscenely entwined women towards Matt. ‘You can read. What’s this say?’

  ‘No, Dave, I can’t read,’ Matt said, eyeing the photograph.

  ‘Nor me,’ Seumas managed to say. Whether under glaring studio lights or in the secrecy of a canopied bed, whether performed for the gratification of inadequates or indulged for depraved pleasure, however personal and acute, there was no qualitative difference between these three women and Seumas’s memories of himself and Bex. He thought of Bex in the lamplight and in the dimness of the ice-house, his hoarse, urgent instructions, the lubricated, enteric stench filling the sheets, the burning copulative pain. And Bex, kneeling behind, had gripped him so that he could not get away. It was he who had rendered Seumas powerless to escape.

  Seumas heard Stolly and Coco coming into the room. They laid their assault rifles on the table and sat down. Stolly reached out and dragged the magazine towards him. He took a glance, then slid the image back to Dave.

  Seumas felt his spine grow cold. The thing was drawing even closer. It was out of control.

  The others seemed to be oblivious. ‘Think these three are really doing it?’ Stolly said.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Dave said.

  ‘Reckon it’s posed.’

  Only one of the women, the blonde, was showing her face. Dave’s forefinger touched the ecstatic features. ‘She likes it.’ He licked his lips. ‘What’s it say, Stolly?’

  Stolly again pulled the magazine across the table, and perused the line of text below the picture. ‘Just good friends.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what it says. “Just good friends”.’ He thumbed through a few succeeding pages. All the photographs, large and small, seemed to be of naked women in pairs or threes or fours. He turned back to the cover and examined it. ‘You shouldn’t be reading this, Dave. It’s for dykes.’

  ‘Get rid of it,’ Seumas said.

  ‘What you on about?’ Dave said.

  ‘It’s filth.’ The presence was all round him, heavy as stone, overwhelmingly disgusting and vile.

  ‘You joking?’

  Seumas looked from face to face. They were regarding him curiously. He found he was gripping with both hands the forestock of his AK47. He made himself produce a sort of smile. ‘Yeah, just a joke.’ He let go of the gun. ‘Stolly,’ he said. ‘Do you know what’s going on? With Goddard, I mean?’

  Stolly pushed the magazine back to Dave. Then he said, addressing the whole table as if in private anticipation of some tantalising pleasure, ‘Reckon we might soon be on our way.’

  3

  Suter spent most of the afternoon in the woods on the northern side of the village, sheltering under a camouflaged nylon cape. The brim of his waxed cotton hat protected the eyepieces of his binoculars from the rain whenever, through gaps between the trees, he chose to resume his study of the village. Now and then he got up to move cautiously about: to stretch his legs, to urinate, once to defecate. At three o’clock he ate some tuna, then spooned apricots from a tin. The litter he returned to his pack.

  It was near this spot, on Sunday, that he had left an apple core behind. Over there: that was roughly where Muriel had surprised him, coming through the trees with her basket.

  Just before I found you I was praying for a miracle.

  That’s what she had said. He remembered her words; had felt no need to commit them to his notebook. And he remembered what he had heard outside the hospital. It had haunted him ever since. That old woman … said … you was an angel from heaven. St Michael the Archangel, protector of the faithful. Prince of the celestial armies. Walking in the ways of righteousness, a dazzling vision of refulgent light.

  Despite the scabs left by windscreen glass and brambles on his skin, he was beginning to doubt the truth of any of it. His mind felt as if it were unravelling, just as it had when he had wandere
d the land, a homeless tatterdemalion, his sanity overwhelmed by isolation.

  But his solitude had not started with the plague. It was genetic, had resided in him always: was part and parcel of his earliest memories. In its company he had traversed these woods as a child, his apparent passion for bird-watching a mere ruse allowing him to spend more time on his own. Even then he had been inclined to invisibility and camouflage, to keep his distance.

  He would never forget his first pair of prismatic binoculars, army surplus Kershaws. He remembered the odour and the crimson felt lining of their solid hide case, their angular, tropicalised weight and substance, the ravishing quality of the image they conveyed to his wondering eyes. Above all he remembered discovering the sense of safety they conferred. They simultaneously brought the world closer and kept it at bay. Their glamorised version of reality was cleaner than the original, simpler and easier to contend with.

  Using them then, what, indeed, would he have made of this future, this wet and decidedly unrefulgent Tuesday, had they been able to see that far ahead?

  He took another swig of water. Smoke was still issuing from the embers of one of the barns in the farmyard on the western side of the Manor. It was rising diagonally into the rain, drifting away from him and to the left. Apart from this, there was no movement in the village, no sign whatever of human life. Perhaps the rain was keeping everybody indoors.

  The other thought had already occurred to him. The trail he had followed back here had been made by one man, travelling at speed. This, undoubtedly, had been the second man in the kitchen last night. Suter estimated that he had arrived in the village at about ten-thirty this morning, three hours ahead of his own arrival. Those three hours would have given Bex time enough to take his leave. The fact that there was now no sign of people might be very simple to understand.

  However, the barn had been burning for twelve hours at least. Maybe Bex had not waited. Maybe he was long gone. Maybe, Suter thought, when he finally got to examine the ashes, he would find the forty-seven bodies of the villagers there.

  No more than eight of the original fourteen gang-members remained. He had to account for them all. If he left even one alive, or if Bex had already departed, Suter could kiss goodbye to his house for ever.

  He looked again at his watch. Nearly three hours till dusk.

  In the bungalow last night he had found a polythene mattress cover which he had cut up and adapted to protect the L85. Tied at either end with string, the rifle now lay in the autumn leaves at his side. Rain had gathered in the folds of plastic. This weapon would prove his principal ally in the task that might lie ahead. He wished he could have brought the Kalashnikov as well, but there was only so much he could carry.

  Suter was sitting cross-legged under his cape, motionless but for the regular rise and fall of his chest. For the first time today he felt perfectly calm. His very posture lent him control, poise, tranquillity.

  Even he did not fully realise how much, like the dogs who competed for his space, he had reverted to type. For tens of thousands of years men just like him had roamed the forests of northern Europe. His intelligence had become again a hunter’s intelligence, forward-thinking, self-reliant, endlessly receptive to subtle patterns and change. He had regained the ancestral faculty of patience. Lying up in dense vegetation, he might have to wait half a day for the correct moment to shoot.

  The rain did not cease. It pattered on the cape, on his bracken-clad hat, on all the complex surfaces of the woods around him. He allowed his thoughts to disconnect. His eyes were open. He was aware of his surroundings, yet he dozed.

  A faint rustle of dead leaves revealed the nearby presence of a bank vole. He saw it, russet and grey, emerging to squat on a hazel root, sniffing at a minute sample of his air. The whiskers twitched. Suter’s smell meant nothing specific: only unfamiliarity, hence danger. The tiny, bulging eye-beads could register only myopic vagueness. Suter was colossal, a mountain, the Kamakura Buddha, far too big to comprehend. The vole’s life comprised a string of vast, unimaginable terrors, any of which might crystallise at the instant of death into an owl, a kestrel, a cat, a stoat or weasel. Taking no chances, it dived for cover.

  Birds came and went: two jays, collecting nuts; a party of tits, among them the needle-thin calls of goldcrests. A treecreeper was with them. Unaware of his presence, it clung for a few confident seconds to the ash-stole three feet from his face.

  Suter’s consciousness drifted like the smoke from the barn, across the village and the soft Tudor chimneys of the Manor. Detached, nowhere, the hunter meshed with the prey.

  All. He was fated to account for them all.

  To his surprise, he noticed that the daylight had already started to go. He became aware that his legs had fallen asleep. He uncrossed them, stretched them out, massaged the muscles.

  He momentarily bared his watch to the rain. Two hours had flown by. Two hours of Seiko time, a few minutes of his.

  Though he was not hungry, he decided to take another meal, since he did not know when next he might. From his pack he produced a foil sachet marked CHICKEN TIKKA 200 GMS: EAT OR DESTROY BEFORE 20-JUL-2019 and, below this, PROPERTY OF MINISTRY OF DEFENCE. He took out his spoon and broke the seal. According to the label, the contents should have become toxic over ten years ago. Military rations seemed permanently resistant to decay. Possibly to digestion, also. He had always liked that phrase, ‘eat or destroy’.

  To get rid of the taste he ate one of his own apples and a couple of glacier mints. Afterwards he brushed his teeth and spat white foam into the leaves. He concealed it from view and, crouching now, put away his dental kit.

  He stood up and took a few paces towards the edge of the wood, confident that in the waning light he would be even harder to see from the village. If they were still around they would be expecting him, of that he was sure.

  He leaned on the trunk of a young oak to steady his hands. The Dialyt’s circular field travelled from one building to the next. Touchless, noiseless, it lingered about the leaded casements of the Manor and on the doors and downstairs windows of the houses near the river. It inspected the remains of the barn, four hundred yards away. It tarried at the church tower and, over to the right, at the escarpment where on Sunday he had fired those first three shots.

  Its lateral passage revealed its edges as somewhat convex, an artefact of the Zeiss roof-prism system. Suter’s heartbeat was slow and steady, as solid and reliable as the binocular in his grasp. At Baldwin’s Lane, looking out of the window at the men arriving in the lorry, he had been the pursued.

  Now the tables were turned.

  In scanning the rear of the houses along the Chorleywood road, he almost missed the light. He back-tracked, and there it was: the first glimmer of an oil lamp, in a kitchen window and the adjoining glass of the door. Soon a second light appeared, and a third, and a fourth. As the darkness grew, many other, similarly dim and yellow, lights began to appear. Open curtains were drawn together. A halogen lamp showed downstairs in the Manor.

  Suter returned to his pack. With his hand cupped over the lens, he quickly tested his torch. Temporarily doffing his hat, he removed the cape, shook it, and folded it away. He checked the magazine in his Browning and refastened the holster. He checked his two boxes of 5.56 millimetre ammunition and put them in his jacket. He checked the bandolier, heavy with Webley high-power shells, and fastened the shotgun crosswise across the top of his pack.

  ‘You’re really going to do it, then.’

  ‘I am.’

  He was as if standing on the edge of a precipice high above the crawling sea. The imp of vertigo was dragging him forward, urging him to fall. A sturdy breeze of self preservation, bringing ocean salt and the smell of weed, was pushing him back.

  The decision had been made last night, in the moonlight. Nothing remained to debate. There could be no question of changing his mind.

  ‘Now this.’

  He struggled into his pack and locked the alloy buckle at his waist.
>
  ‘And this.’

  He stooped and picked up the L85. He unfastened the knots at either end, slid away the polythene sheath and crammed it in his pocket. Guitar-fashion, he set the sling over his shoulder. The weapon hung loose, balanced, the grips ready to hand.

  He was ready. He straightened his shoulders, just as he had on the escarpment on Sunday afternoon. Ahead now, below, horizonless, lay the longed-for gulf of suicide and release, of perdition and oblivion, the sea of nirvana.

  His mud-caked boots, in travelling forward, towards the village, stepped without hesitation over the edge.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  He approached using every scrap of cover and making detours to avoid exposure to the most obvious points of vantage, such as the church tower. During the afternoon he had already chosen a relatively isolated cottage, white-rendered, with a tiled roof, standing in a plot screened on the Manor House side by a privet hedge.

  A sprung wicket gate gave access from the meadow. He shut it behind him and eased the catch into place, the horizontal muzzle of his shotgun almost touching a pane of the small, aluminium-framed greenhouse. This end of the garden was given over to tilled rows of leeks, sprouts, onions, the feathery fronds of carrots. Like Suter’s own, the runner bean frame had not yet been taken down. The leaves, glowing yellow, disembodied, seemed to stand forward in the dusk.

  His burdened form passed before them and along the concrete slabs set like stepping-stones in the turf path. Moth-like, he was drawn to the illuminated window at the side of the house. Trespassing on the flowerbed, he put his face, sooty with cork, very close to the frame. A scent of nicotiana rose from the turned earth at his feet. The window was steamy. From within Suter thought he detected the smell of cooking cabbage.

  He grasped the L85 with both hands and risked a peep into the room.

  An oil lamp, brass-bowled, with a white glass shade, stood on a table just inside the window. The table had been set for a meal. Before he pulled back, he glimpsed through the mist a single place-mat surrounded by steel cutlery, a side-plate, a jug of water, a bowl of pears and apples, a rolled napkin in a wooden ring.