My friend read my mind.
‘It’s a funny old world,’ he said.
‘It is,’ said the Sug.
I looked at them. We were all aware of the importance of the moment. You appreciate that type of thing when you live outside time. I licked my lips.
‘Well, folks,’ I said. ‘Let’s go make some history.’
We went.
29. The Hunters Outside
The refectory was a large room with a long wooden table at its centre. In front of the table the abbot lay on his back, his arms outstretched. His thin face was chalk white. The front of his dark habit was darker with a wet spreading stain.
Simon was kneeling silently by the dying abbot, his eyes fixed on the still white face. Stephen stood by, feeling useless. He kept glancing towards the doorway, expecting Philip to burst in at any moment. It wasn’t just that he feared the big monk – he did – but he was more angry than anything else. There was a lot of strain on all of them. Thomas hadn’t managed to cope, but it was only Philip who’d cracked and resorted to physical violence.
After a while, when there was no sign of either Philip or the strangers, claustrophobia got the better of Stephen. He wanted to be doing something. He was almost tempted to go looking for Philip, to force the confrontation that it seemed must come. In a way he felt guilty. It was his image after all that had provoked the shooting – his image, though not, consciously at least, his doing. He should take his pistol and face Philip down, for better or for worse. Thinking of the big man’s expertise, and of his willingness to shoot, Stephen guessed that it would be for worse. But it seemed somehow his responsibility. He said as much to Simon.
‘Don’t be foolish,’ Simon said, without taking his eyes off the abbot. ‘That’s pride talking.’
‘Pride?’ Simon couldn’t have picked a word that surprised him more.
‘Yes. Pride. None of us is responsible for any of this. Even Philip – though it galls me to admit it – isn’t responsible. He’s mad with fear. We’re not mad with fear, but that doesn’t mean we’re not afraid. None of this is our doing. Blaming yourself for it is just another way of making yourself out to be more important than you are.’
Stephen had to admit that he hadn’t thought of it like that, but maybe Simon had a point. It didn’t exactly make him feel better, but it let him forget about confronting Philip. He’d felt he ought to do it, but that didn’t mean he’d been looking forward to it – he was in no hurry to die.
Instead he went looking for Kirsten, who hadn’t been able to face the sight of the dying abbot. He walked along with his eyes and ears alert for any sounds. Steeling your nerve to face up to Philip was one thing, running into him rounding a corner was another thing entirely.
He found Kirsten in the courtyard. She was standing by the gates, looking out, and she didn’t look happy. Stephen went over.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘There’s someone out there,’ she said without looking at him.
‘Another sick person, maybe.’
‘No. There’s more than one. I’ve seen two now, and they move far too carefully for my liking.’
He followed her gaze. Even as he looked he saw a figure scurry across the path that led down the hill from the gates. It happened too fast to make out any detail. The figure emerged from the long grass on one side of the path and disappeared into a stand of trees on the other side.
He saw what Kirsten meant. The figure hadn’t wandered across, but moved furtively and deliberately like an animal crossing exposed space.
‘This is trouble,’ he said.
‘Not at all,’ said a cheery voice behind them. ‘This is good news.’
The strangers from the car had come up silently and stood watching them. The man who’d spoken was the man Stephen had last seen as a headless monstrosity. He wasn’t headless now. His coat and shirt were gone, and he stood there, barechested, with a bandaged neck. A shivery feeling ran through Stephen when he looked at the bandages, but apart from that there was nothing disturbing about the man. He was younger and slighter than the other two, and his smiling face looked friendly. His eyes were grey and clear, and they looked at Stephen and Kirsten with open curiosity. The driver stood calmly beside him with his hands in his pockets, while the third stranger hung back behind. He was the only one who didn’t look friendly, but even he no longer looked quite so sour.
‘Should we close the gates?’ Stephen asked.
The re-headed man shook his head.
‘They won’t come in,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to go and get them later.’
‘Get them?’ Kirsten said. ‘Do you know what those things are?’
‘Well, yes,’ he said, ‘I do. We’ve gathered them here precisely because we know what they are.’
‘And what do you intend doing with them?’ Kirsten demanded. She seemed to have no fear any more of the strangers. Stephen envied her. He felt that no amount of reassurance could make him feel at ease with them. They were just too strange.
‘I asked you a question,’ Kirsten snapped. ‘If those things out there are like the ones who attacked us yesterday, then they’re very dangerous. You say you’ve gathered them here – to do what exactly?’
The man smiled at her with what looked like real affection.
‘Why,’ he said, ‘to exterminate them, of course.’
Kirsten hadn’t been expecting that.
‘Oh!’ she said.
The driver had heard enough banter.
‘Come now,’ he said. ‘We can’t waste time in idle chatter. There’s work to be done. This isn’t over yet.’
But looking at these most peculiar but very confident men, Stephen thought that maybe, somehow, it was. For all their strangeness they were the only people he’d seen lately who seemed to know exactly what they were doing. He still didn’t trust them – but it might be a case of having to.
30. The Bread and the Cheese
In the refectory the abbot was lying as Stephen had last seen him, although there was no sign of Simon. The driver and the bandaged man knelt on either side of Paul, each putting one hand on his chest. The third man stood beside them, looking on. On his face was a very odd look, a mixture of fascination and disgust. Stephen and Kirsten stood by.
There were footsteps in the corridor. Stephen turned, ready, he hoped, for anything. But it was only Simon who came in. He was scowling, though his face lightened when he saw the two strangers kneeling beside the abbot. The two men were as still as the dying man himself. They might have been carved out of stone. There was an identical expression on their faces, a distant trance-like look.
‘I found Philip,’ Simon said in a low voice.
‘Where?’ Kirsten asked.
‘We keep a chapel here for those who are inclined to use it. He’s there now, praying and crying for forgiveness. I still haven’t found Thomas though. He’s probably hiding under a bed somewhere.’
‘Philip still has his gun?’ Stephen asked.
Simon sneered.
‘His gun is in his hand. A most obscene combination if you ask me – beating your breast and asking for forgiveness with a pistol in your hand. He’s grabbed a big crucifix and he’s praying at that. I never liked having a crucifix there at all, it seemed like an insult to our non-Christian Brothers, myself included. But Paul felt it helped some of them concentrate. Well, Philip is certainly concentrating on it now.’
He grimaced in disgust.
‘I never trusted that man,’ he said. ‘He had too much hate bottled up inside him. Hatred for himself. It was bound to explode one day. If it hadn’t been this that caused it, then it would have been something else. I said it more than once to Paul, but accepting people at face value is Paul’s way.’
‘It’s not himself that Philip hates now,’ Stephen said glumly. ‘It’s us – it’s me.’
‘Bah!’ Simon said. ‘That’s how self-hate works, you push it out onto someone else.’
The strangers hadn’t moved
a muscle in minutes. Simon looked at the silent tableau on the floor as though to distract himself from his own anger. He nodded towards the bare-chested stranger.
‘I must say,’ he said, ‘that man seems to have made a remarkable recovery. Maybe there’s hope for the abbot yet. But it’s not good. I’ve seen a lot of gunshot wounds in my time.’
He turned to Stephen with a sudden sharp look.
‘Do you still have that pistol?’ he asked.
‘I do.’
‘Do you think you’ll be able to use it?’
‘I don’t know.’
Simon pursed his lips.
‘I killed my first man in 1944,’ Simon said. ‘August twelfth. Twenty past ten on a beautiful summer evening. I was older than you, but not a whole lot. The man was a German soldier – only a boy himself, come to that.’
‘Was it hard to do?’
‘It was very hard to make myself do it. I kept telling myself that he deserved it, that he was an invader. They were cruel invaders, the Germans. They’d killed many of my friends – tortured them and killed them. But that fellow was just a fellow like myself when all was said and done. At another time we might have been friends. I always rather liked the Germans, really.’
‘How did you manage to make yourself kill him then?’
‘He saw me. He saw my gun. I knew that he’d kill me – he’d been trained not to have qualms, and he’d fought before. So it was him or me. And when it came down to it, I didn’t want it to be me.’
He nodded, remembering.
‘He was eating bread and cheese when we crept up on him,’ he said. ‘After he was dead, I saw the bread lying on the ground. The marks of his teeth were still in it. It’s funny what you notice at times like that. They were hungry times. I picked up the bread, tore off the bloody bits and threw them away. But when I went to eat it I saw the marks of his teeth and I thought that I’d killed him and that those teeth would never bite bread again, and I couldn’t eat it.’
‘But you killed again afterwards?’
Simon shrugged.
‘Sometimes what you feel like doing isn’t so important,’ he said. ‘Sometimes you simply have a job to do. You have the right to have fear, the right – the duty, I’d say – to feel qualms, but not the right to endanger others whose lives and well-being depend on your actions. So you do whatever it takes.’
‘And you did it?’
Again Simon shrugged. His face had the look of a man who’d seen much that he didn’t want to see.
‘I couldn’t eat the bread,’ he said. ‘But I did eat the cheese. Like I say, they were hungry times.’
Stephen turned to Kirsten, to see what she might have made of Simon’s story.
But Kirsten wasn’t there.
Stephen looked around desperately. She wasn’t in the room. He turned to the third stranger.
‘The girl!’ he said frantically. ‘Where did she go?’
The man gestured at the open door, puzzled by Stephen’s intensity.
Simon realised what was wrong. He said something in a foreign language that sounded like a most un-monkish curse.
‘The little fool!’ he hissed. ‘She’s gone to the chapel to try and talk sense to that madman! He’ll kill her for sure!’
The big stranger obviously understood now. He was out the door, running, before either Stephen or Simon had time to take a step.
31. The Corpse in the Chapel
The big stranger moved with incredible speed for a man of his size. By the time Stephen got outside the door, the corridor was already empty. He turned to Simon, who was at his heels.
‘Where’s the chapel?’ Stephen said.
Simon took the lead, jogging off down the passage. Stephen followed, his heart pounding in his chest. At every step he expected to hear a shot. They rounded corners and went down passageways. The running footsteps of the big stranger were always just ahead of them. Then suddenly they were silent, and rounding another corner Stephen saw big double doors standing open ahead. They were odd doors, one made of a dark wood, almost black, the other light and bright. Stephen and Simon went through the doors with their guns at the ready.
The place was a largely bare room that looked nothing like Stephen’s idea of a chapel, but he didn’t take in any details right then. He only saw the three figures standing in the middle of the room. Furthest from them was Philip, standing in front of a large squared block of dark stone that had to be the altar. He looked as though he’d risen from his knees on hearing someone enter. His gun was held tightly in one hand. In the other he held a big wooden crucifix, and it was this rather than the gun that he held out threateningly towards them. Kirsten stood a few steps away from him, holding out her empty hands as she said his name softly.
‘Philip,’ she said. ‘Please!’
The big stranger had stopped about halfway between Kirsten and the doorway. Philip’s eyes were on him as Simon and Stephen came in. They were eyes quite mad with terror. He shouted at them in a strangled voice that was hardly human in spite of the fact that it formed words.
‘Devils!’ he shrieked. ‘Devils! Do you come for me now?’
His eyes shifted to the newcomers. Stephen watched the gun in his hand, wishing that Kirsten and the stranger would get out of the way. He thought of what Simon had said – you have the right to be afraid. Right or no right, he was terrified now, though whether he was more terrified of shooting or of being shot it was hard to say. Still, he felt that, one way or another, the resolution of this thing had come.
‘For God’s sake, Philip,’ Kirsten said in an entreating voice. The voice tried to sound calm, but it trembled.
Philip’s eyes rolled madly back at her.
‘God?’ he hissed. ‘You say His name, witch? The tongue will wither in your blaspheming mouth!’
He brandished the crucifix at her as though it were some kind of weapon. Indeed in Philip’s hands it was a weapon, whatever its intended purpose. Kirsten flinched, maybe thinking that he meant to hit her with it. Philip grimaced in a kind of ugly triumph.
‘See now,’ he said. ‘It frightens you, does it? Truth at last!’
‘The idiot thinks he’s in a horror film,’ Simon hissed in a low voice. Aloud, he called, ‘Philip! Put down your weapon! I order you as your acting superior!’
Again the crazy eyes flicked back towards Stephen and Simon.
‘My superior?’ Philip said. ‘My superior?’
He slowly raised the big black pistol. Stephen’s fingers tightened on the grip of his own gun. But Philip only raised the gun to display it. He held it up beside his face, its muzzle pointing at the ceiling, its sleek ugly blackness rubbing against his cheek.
‘My superior is dead!’ he said. ‘My superior and my friend. This is what killed him. It was in my hand when it killed him, but it wasn’t me who did it. Oh no! It wasn’t me.’
Simon made a disgusted noise.
‘Philip,’ Kirsten said, ‘Paul isn’t dead. Nobody killed him. He’s going to be all right.’
‘Liar!’ Philip roared. ‘They’re dead! They’re all dead! But it wasn’t me. It wasn’t me who did it!’
He was looking at the pistol now, the cold black metal inches from his demented eyes. The eyes moved slowly over the gun-barrel. It was as if he’d never seen such a thing before and was trying to guess what it was. For those few moments he seemed to forget them all. It was a macabre sight, the way he crouched there by the altar, animal-like, with his crucifix and his gun.
They all stood as still as Philip, almost afraid to breathe. The tension that flowed from him seemed to fill the chapel. The man was like a primed bomb – any move might set him off. It was going to happen anyway, Stephen was certain of that. Simon’s shotgun would be useless, he couldn’t dare shoot for fear of hitting Kirsten or the big stranger. There was only one other weapon in the room apart from Philip’s, and that was the one Stephen now held in his hand. Whether they all lived or died was almost certainly going to depend on him, on hi
s ability to make himself shoot the demented monk.
The big stranger turned his head slightly to look at Stephen from the corner of his eye.
‘I will do this thing for you, Tellene,’ he said.
Stephen blinked. Tellene? He remembered the attacker in the library who had snarled some word at him that he hadn’t understood. A word that had sounded something like ‘ten’. Was that it: tellene? And what did it mean?
The big stranger’s eyes flicked back to Philip. The monk was still looking at his pistol. His eyes, Stephen thought, were more frightening than anything he’d seen since he’d woken here; and if he’d seen anything scarier in that other life, the one he couldn’t remember, then he didn’t want to know about it. He wondered what Philip saw through those eyes when he looked at them – demons and devils, it seemed.
Those mad eyes turned slowly now to focus on Stephen. Stephen read in them, as plainly as though it had been printed there, the message he already knew: the time had come.
‘You,’ Philip said. His voice was very, very quiet. Stephen’s mouth was dry.
‘You!’ Philip said again, a little louder.
Stephen felt sweat in his palm where it held the plastic grip of the little pistol. Bread and cheese, he found himself thinking. Bread and cheese. Squeamishness baulks at the bread; prudence eats the cheese. Stay alive.
‘You!’ Philip said again, in a voice like the hissing of snakes. ‘It was you who made me kill my friend. You and your devil works!’
It happened then. It was as though someone had tripped a switch.
The hand holding the crucifix dropped it. The hand holding the gun moved out and down. As the gun-barrel dipped, Simon cursed and raised his shotgun pointlessly. Stephen ducked to his left, looking for a clear shot, hoping that he could make himself pull the trigger.
In the end, neither Stephen nor Simon contributed anything to the result. It was the big stranger who, true to his word, took care of it.
Even with the speed he’d already shown, he was too far from Philip and Kirsten to touch either of them in time. But he didn’t even try. Instead he raised his right arm and swept it off to one side. Kirsten was thrown through the air, out of harm’s way. She squealed in surprise, collapsing to her knees on the ground where she landed. At the same time the stranger thrust the splayed fingers of his left hand straight at Philip. Philip reacted as though he’d been hit by something big and heavy – like a stone wall. He was slammed back against the altar, yelping in fright. The gun fired. Stephen flinched. The sound of the shot boomed and echoed around the stone chapel.
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