Out of Nowhere

by Gerard Whelan

  Stephen had already noticed the silver pistol lying on the ground. Now, without thinking, he bent down, scooped it up and stuffed it in his back pocket. Then he heard Kirsten scream.

  24. The Friendly Stranger

  Stephen raced through the doorway and up the stone stairs. The corridor above was empty when he got there, but the door of the room next to his was ajar. He heard voices inside. He was about to push the door open when the abbot came out. He stopped short when he saw Stephen.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘You didn’t run away.’

  ‘No. I think I was too frightened. What was that scream? Is Kirsten all right?’

  ‘Yes. She came out of your room as we were passing. She got a bad shock. She almost walked right into the, uh, injured man.’

  Stephen looked at the door of his own room. It was firmly shut.

  ‘Can you explain to her?’ Paul asked.

  Explain? Stephen couldn’t even explain it to himself.

  ‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘Don’t you need help?’

  ‘I’m just going to fetch the things that they asked for: towels, water and … a needle and thread.’

  ‘Thread?’ said Stephen flatly.

  ‘Yes. Thread. The stronger the better, the man said.’

  Stephen thought about that.

  ‘I think I’ll talk to Kirsten,’ he said.

  The abbot nodded, then hurried on his way. Stephen went into his room, careful to knock and call out before he entered.

  Kirsten was sitting hunched over by the table, staring glassily at the table top. The very look of her made Stephen pity her. She didn’t react when he said her name. He went over and touched her shoulder. When she looked up at him she started to cry silently. The tears ran down her face and she made no effort to wipe them away. Stephen felt unbearably awkward.

  ‘Monstrous!’ Kirsten said. ‘It’s monstrous!’

  Her voice shook.

  ‘Please, Kirsten,’ Stephen said. ‘They say they’re here to help. We can’t afford to panic. Paul needs us all to be solid now. Thomas lost his … lost control completely. Philip too. There’s only us and Simon now.’

  She buried her face in her hands and her shoulders shook, but little by little her crying eased. After a while she looked up, trying hard to control her emotions.

  ‘I hate crying,’ she said. ‘My face puffs up, and I look like a rabbit. I’ll be all right, honestly. It was just such a shock walking into that … that man.’

  There was a polite knock on the door. The abbot, Stephen thought.

  ‘Come in,’ he said.

  The door opened, and a head looked in. But it wasn’t Paul. It was the stranger who’d done the talking in the courtyard – the driver. Once more Stephen was struck by how harmless he looked. Only the shrewdness of his blue eyes suggested anything else. He looked at them now with a pleasant smile.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to apologise to the young lady for frightening her.’

  ‘Oh,’ Stephen said. ‘I don’t think it was you. Not personally, I mean.’

  ‘No. But it’s my responsibility at the moment. I’m pleased to see that both of you are all right. You mustn’t worry. Everything will be fine soon. We’ll get all this sorted as soon as we can.’

  There was a warmth in his voice that hadn’t been there in the courtyard. There he’d been affable, polite. Now he sounded positively friendly. There was also a tone in his voice that Stephen had thought gone forever from the world – he sounded like he knew what he was talking about. And there was something else too, a faint undertone of …

  ‘Do you know us?’ Kirsten said suddenly, recognising the tone before Stephen did.

  The man gave her question some thought.

  ‘That question,’ he said, ‘raises what you might call metaphysical difficulties. On the one hand I’ve never seen either of you before in my life. But on the other I do know you, yes. In fact I know you both very well indeed.’

  He made a face.

  ‘It’s hard to explain now,’ he said. ‘Please be patient. Nothing bad is going to happen to you, believe me.’

  ‘Why should we?’ Stephen said angrily. ‘Bad things have happened to us already. Why shouldn’t they happen to us again?’

  The driver’s smile twitched slightly.

  ‘Because I won’t let them,’ he said softly.

  And with a last nod he was gone, closing the door behind him. His smile seemed to linger in the room. Kirsten and Stephen looked at each other. Kirsten had stopped crying.

  ‘He knows us!’ she said. Then she said it again, because it sounded so strange. She glanced over towards the mirror, and caught a glimpse of her own haggard face.

  ‘Yuck!’ she said. ‘I look a fright. I’m going to wash my face.’

  There was a bathroom at the end of the corridor, but to get to it she’d have to pass the headless man’s door. A minute before Stephen couldn’t have imagined her doing that; now she positively breezed out of the room. Stephen went to the door and watched her saunter down the hall. The suddenness of the change in her astonished him. But then she’d been like that since they’d met, he supposed – changeable.

  The abbot came back up the stairs carrying a steaming bowl of water and, draped over his shoulder, several bath-towels.

  ‘How is the Fräulein?’ he asked.

  ‘She seems all right now. She’s washing her face.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’m going to leave these things in with our guests. Then I must go and check on the patients. And the monks too, for that matter. I don’t know what to expect – or rather I fear I do.’

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ Stephen said.

  ‘Is that wise? Philip was very upset in the courtyard. He may well direct it at you.’

  ‘He already has.’ Stephen told him how Philip had hit him. The story obviously upset Paul.

  ‘I’d best leave these things in with the strangers,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll … I’ll sort things out. Somehow. Philip has got to get a grip on himself. There’s too much to do. The patients haven’t even been fed this morning.’

  He went into the strangers’ room, and as he came back out Kirsten emerged from the bathroom. Her face had a pink, scrubbed look. She wasn’t exactly smiling, but she was certainly calmer than she’d been earlier.

  ‘Paul,’ she said, ‘who’s looking after the sick people?’

  ‘No one as yet,’ the abbot said. ‘I was just telling Stephen. We must organise the rest of them. Simon is like a rock, but he can’t do everything. I need Thomas. Most of all I need Philip.’

  ‘We have to talk to Philip,’ Stephen said, not wanting to. ‘He’s gone crazy. We have to try to reason with him.’

  ‘Certainly I have to talk to him,’ the abbot said. ‘As for yourself and the Fräulein … do you think it would be wise?’

  He eyed Stephen dubiously. Stephen reluctantly told Kirsten how Philip had hit him. She made a face.

  ‘He was upset,’ she said. ‘Frightened. He has no real reason to fear us – what have we done to him? No, Stephen is right, the sooner we face him and talk some sense into him the better. Maybe I should try. He wouldn’t listen to me yesterday, but maybe today– ’

  ‘No!’ Stephen said. ‘Absolutely not! He certainly won’t listen to you now!’

  Her mood had improved, but that gave her no right to be stupid. Of course, she didn’t know about the apparitions yet. Philip would no doubt have heard Thomas’s story by now, he might be every bit as hostile towards Kirsten as he was towards Stephen.

  The abbot considered. For the first time since Stephen had met him he seemed unsure.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ he said. ‘But Fräulein Herzenweg is right. We must try to talk to Philip.’

  ‘Then let’s do it now,’ Kirsten said. ‘Before I start getting afraid again.’

  Paul hesitated. He looked at Stephen.

  ‘It won’t get any easier,’ Stephen said.

  The abbot nodded.

  �
�Very well,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  And they did. But as they went down the stone stairs Stephen brushed his hand across the back pocket of his jeans, where the little silver pistol nestled reassuringly.

  25. Agent on the Mend

  Becoming conscious again felt peculiar. It was very different from other such returns, like waking from sleep, say, or the slow, tingling passage into flesh in the first place. The body had been technically dead after all, animated only by my friend’s efforts.

  I felt a tightness around my throat – bandages – and the warmth of two solid lumps in the bandages that I knew were the crystals – healing crystals now.

  There was no confusion as such. I knew what must be happening. As to what had happened since I died, that was a different matter. I didn’t even know how much time had passed since then. My memory ended with the last thought I’d had as the hunter with the hatchet jumped from the ditch beside me. My body had been groggy from sleep; getting out of the car, I’d seen the hunter’s movement only as a blur. Even as I’d turned to unshade him that last thought had gone quite clearly through my mind – the thought that I’d been too slow.

  I’d barely had time to deflect the pain, and none at all to deflect the blow itself. I’d known at once that the wound was fatal. I’d concentrated on clinging to the maimed body, hanging on inside until my friend came to help. After that I knew nothing of what took place outside. But I was here now, and the body obviously wasn’t dead anymore.

  I opened my eyes. There was a peculiar feeling of lightness in the air. I was lying on a bed. My friend sat on a chair beside me. The Sug was sitting at a table, looking petulant and uncomfortable, which is to say he was looking Sug-like.

  ‘Well,’ said my friend, ‘here you are at last.’

  I swallowed carefully. There was no pain. I could feel the crystals’ warmth bathing the damaged tissue. My voice, when I tried it, sounded fine – a little hoarse maybe, but under the circumstances that was nothing to complain about.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, you remember the ambush don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ A narrow, hedge-lined road on a hill, a morning mist, and a tree felled or fallen across the track in the half-light before dawn. A thought that even mad hunting things surely wouldn’t be so very, very stupid.

  ‘There were five of them,’ my friend said. ‘I got two, and our friend here got the others. They attacked him as ferociously as us, which proves that at least part of his story is true, I suppose. Your head was almost severed. I had to take it off for a while, I’m afraid – it kept flopping all over the place as we drove.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said. Then I laughed as a thought struck me. ‘I wasn’t very attached to it anyway,’ I said.

  My friend smiled.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not at the time.’

  Then he laughed too.

  ‘You should have seen the look on your face, though,’ he said.

  ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘Why am I laughing? I feel … giddy. Is it the damage to the body?’

  ‘It’s the atmosphere here, I think. I feel the same.’

  ‘But where are we?’

  My friend was smiling again.

  ‘We’re in the place our friend here talked about – the abbey. And he was right: there are people here, humans.’

  ‘Is that possible?’

  My friend shrugged.

  ‘Maybe not,’ he said. ‘But they’re here.’

  It made no sense at all. We’d cleared the area thoroughly and established a barrier no force known to humans could penetrate. Even now their scientists and soldiers sat baffled and furious outside it.

  ‘So the rest of his story may be true too,’ I said.

  The Sug spoke for the first time.

  ‘I told you,’ he said with some bitterness. ‘I swore I was telling the truth.’

  ‘Tut tut!’ my friend said. ‘You can hardly blame us for doubting you.’

  The Sug sighed.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t.’

  In itself that was a remarkable admission for a Sug. This one had been in a peculiar mood since we met. Moods, I should say, because he swung from one extreme to the other. I mean it was extreme even by Sug standards, which is really saying something. No amount of Sug pride could hide from him the calamity his people’s foolishness had almost caused, but at times he seemed almost annoyed by his own humility. Anger and resentment and humility and fear would flash out of him unpredictably, and something else that in anyone but a Sug I’d have called guilt. A Sug with a conscience – now that would be one for the books.

  ‘So,’ I said to my friend, ‘a complication. Tell me, how are the humans taking all this?’

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘I imagine they’re petrified.’

  ‘I’d call that an understatement.’

  ‘What did they think when they saw me?’ I asked. ‘It must have … surprised them.’

  A smile crossed my friend’s face at the memory.

  ‘You could certainly say that,’ he said. ‘One of them just ran away. The others wanted to. Really, it was almost like the good old days. You wouldn’t remember.’

  I looked at the Sug, a big glowering lump at the table.

  ‘What about you?’ I asked him. ‘It can’t be much fun for you, stuck right in the middle of your favourite species.’

  The Sug made a disgusted face.

  ‘I thought I’d remembered how foul they were,’ he said. ‘I was wrong. My stomach heaves just sitting here.’

  I felt no sympathy for him. His people had caused this mess. He’d been a part of it.

  ‘The people here killed those hunters we saw yesterday,’ my friend said. ‘The ones in the town. All in all, we got eight more. According to what our friend the Sug tells us, that leaves only four. They’ll be on their way here now.’

  He gestured about him.

  ‘Do you know where we are?’ he asked.

  ‘This … abbey. In the mountains you said.’

  ‘Yes, but do you know where this abbey is?’

  ‘No.’

  My friend gave a dry little chuckle.

  ‘You do, you know,’ he said. ‘Think about it.’

  I did. I thought about my giddiness, about the odd lightness in the atmosphere. I drew in my breath suddenly.

  ‘It can’t be the crystal works!’ I said.

  ‘It is, you know,’ my friend said. ‘This abbey is built on the royal mound. The birthing lake is right outside the walls.’

  ‘But the crystals are dead in the world!’

  ‘They were, but they don’t seem to be dead now. They’re not fully active, but they’re not dead either. Something is going on here, and it’s not of our doing.’

  I looked suspiciously at the Sug.

  ‘Don’t look at him!’ my friend said. ‘The Sug always hated this place. It hurts him to be here at all!’

  ‘But how can this be?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. The world does what it wants to, as they say. But whatever is going on here, I think it’s what kept these humans free from our clearance.’

  My mind raced with the implications of the news. I calmed it down. First things first: we had a job to do. If the crystal works were in any way active it would only increase our power. But the power we’d been sent with was plenty in any case. There were only the killings to be finished. The presence of humans, grotesque and bizarre though it was, was just a complication. We could deal with it if they just kept out of the way. I hated loose ends. My friend always calls me finicky.

  ‘The humans ran away,’ I said. ‘Do you think that means they’ll stay out of our way while we’re working?’

  My friend gave a little shrug, holding both hands up in a gesture of ignorance.

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ he said. ‘I didn’t say all of them ran, I said they wanted to. There’s one that struck me as a possible problem. He felt dangerous. Their leader, though, is quite civilised
, at least by human standards. Of course that mightn’t work to our advantage when the killing starts. I don’t know, we may have to subdue them all. Certainly I expect some trouble.’

  As if on cue there was the sound of a gun being fired somewhere outside. My friend turned towards the window.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said wearily. ‘I think it’s arrived.’

  26. The Old Monk

  Kirsten, Paul and Stephen crossed the courtyard and went towards the abbey’s main doors. But before they reached them the old monk, Brother Simon, came out. He was still holding his shotgun.

  ‘Paul!’ he called. ‘I was coming to look for you.’

  He started speaking rapidly in French to the abbot. Beyond the odd word here and there, Stephen couldn’t understand a thing. But Kirsten listened with obvious understanding to the old man’s words and the abbot’s replies. After a while she joined in the conversation. Philip’s name was mentioned repeatedly. Whenever it came from the lips of the old monk, the name was said with undisguised distaste.

  Finally the abbot turned to Stephen.

  ‘Trouble,’ he said simply.

  ‘Philip?’

  The abbot indicated the old monk.

  ‘Simon is as good a judge of men as I’ve ever known,’ he said. ‘He thinks Philip is extremely dangerous right now. Thomas is too terrified to help, but he won’t make trouble. They’re both in the refectory, our diningroom. Philip is waving his gun around and mouthing nonsense about the devil and his works being invited into the monastery.’

  The old monk, Simon, spoke directly to Stephen for the first time.

  ‘You figure prominently in Philip’s list of the devil’s works,’ he said. ‘I’d avoid him if I were you, for everyone’s sake.’