Cloud Walker, All Fools' Day, Far Sunset

by Cooper, Edmund

  Greville gazed down at the approaching men below with an odd air of Olympian detachment. No doubt they had women and, perhaps, children dependent upon them. But in the transnormal world of the 1980s it was simply a question of sauve qui peut.

  He flattened himself against a chimney-stack so that he would be hard to see, and took the pin out of one of his precious grenades. There was no time to warn Liz; and in any case, she would be aware of the situation quite soon enough.

  He waited until the little group was about thirty yards from the car. Then he tossed the first grenade. He did not wait to see its effect but immediately withdrew the pin from a second grenade and dropped that, too. Luck – or whatever powers there were – was on his side. The first grenade dropped a little behind the men: the second grenade dropped a little ahead. There was hardly more than a second between the two explosions. Eight or nine of the men appeared to be killed instantly, a couple lay screaming and writhing and three who were only lightly wounded or mildly concussed picked themselves up and fled.

  Greville thought their leader had been killed; but evidently he hadn’t. He lay on the grass fumbling with his sword. Presently he raised it, displaying an off-white handkerchief knotted hastily on the end. Then he stood up. At the same time, Greville stood away from the chimney stack and called out to him. However, even as he shouted there was a flat, muffled crack. The man with the sword spun round and fell down. Liz had shot him from a bedroom window.

  Greville went down to her. She was half in and half out of a green velvet cocktail dress.

  ‘Come on,’ said Greville. ‘Grab your things. Our friends may have more friends. We’d better get out as fast as we can.’

  Liz grabbed a few of the dresses that lay at her feet and followed him downstairs, still trying vainly to zip up the green dress.

  Outside, in the late sunlight, Greville briefly inspected the dead and dying. He gave the coup de grace quickly to two of the wounded, and hustled Liz into the car. Then he reversed the station wagon, drove at a recklessly high speed to the open road and headed back to Ambergreave.

  They did not get home until very late, but Liz insisted on trying on all her new dresses for his approval before they went to bed. Greville was tired and nervous and depressed with his reaction to the afternoon’s encounter. Luck would not be with them always. Sooner or later they, too, would be on the receiving end. He found to his surprise that he could contemplate his own death but he could not bear to think of Liz being killed.

  ‘I hope you are satisfied with the dresses,’ he said brutally. ‘I hope they fit. And I hope you like the bloody colours. Dresses are getting quite expensive these days. That little lot cost a dozen men. Do you think they were worth the price?’

  ‘Nothing is ever worth the price,’ retorted Liz calmly, ‘but it always has to be paid … Let’s go to bed. After all, there’s a price on that, too, isn’t there?’

  Greville didn’t answer. He wanted to take her in his arms; but he was chilled by the knowledge that every day gave him more to lose.

  SEVENTEEN

  It was the night of the first really heavy autumn fog, as Greville later recorded in his diary. It was a night for sitting by a log fire, reading, talking, listening to music, mending clothes, making impossible plans and finally dissolving the said plans in a deep and luxuriously warm sea of sleep. During the course of the night Liz and Greville managed to do all these things with a quiet satisfaction that might almost have amounted to happiness. And during the same night what was left of the village of Ambergreave began to die – violently and in a fashion bizarre even for the world of transnormality.

  Greville had three clocks and no means of knowing the time. The second clock was always an hour ahead of the first clock, and the third clock was always an hour ahead of the second clock. When one stopped it could be reset by the others, when one gained or lost it could also be reset by the others. Thus, he argued, it was possible to maintain an arbitrary standard – and it was also possible to adjust the concept of time to one’s personal convenience. If he got up late, he could look at the first clock and cherish the illusion that he had risen early. If he felt like going to bed early, he could look at the third clock and demonstrate that it was late. Actually he had long ago lost interest in clock time; though he still liked to feel it was available if he needed it. That was why he took care to wind the clocks regularly. It was a private joke that Liz could never understand.

  Clock number three (Greville was in a going-to-bed early mood) struck midnight just as the shooting started. Greville stared at Liz; Liz stared at Greville. They were not particularly worried – merely interested, for the shooting sounded quite far away. And anyway they were separated from it by more than a hundred yards of water. Anyone who wanted to attack them would first of all have to find himself a boat.

  ‘What the hell?’ said Liz unconcernedly, as she endeavoured to thread a needle in order to sew a button on her shirt.

  ‘Dogs,’ said Greville. ‘Just possibly rats, but dogs most likely. The fog has probably drawn them into the village. They’ll be looking for easy pickings. They don’t need vision as much as human beings do.’

  Liz shuddered, remembering her own encounter with dogs on Chelsea Bridge. ‘I hope they are in for a nasty surprise. To be eaten by dogs is bad enough, but to be eaten by dogs in a pea-soup – that’s the absolute end.’

  Greville laughed. ‘The female mind never ceases to surprise me. If you’re going to die, what does it matter whether you die in summer or winter, in sunlight or in fog?’

  ‘A hell of a lot,’ retorted Liz. ‘When I die I want to be able to have a last look at something worth seeing … We’ll have to go scrounging again pretty soon. I’ve got three working shirts and they’re all dropping to pieces.’

  ‘I’m not going to risk a bullet in the belly just for shirts,’ said Greville. ‘We’ll wait until there’s a longer shopping list. Now stop making like the extinct suburban housewife and come to bed. We’ll go and find out who has been eaten by the dogs tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Let’s have some more music first,’ suggested Liz. Her appetite for music was beginning to be insatiable. They had already listened to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 and the Rachmaninov Second Piano Concerto.

  ‘Balls to music. We’ve had a surfeit. I want sex.’

  She smiled. ‘I’m hungry. It’s a long time since we ate.’

  ‘Well, go and cut yourself a slice of ham while you’re taking your knickers off. I’m tired.’

  ‘If you’re tired, you won’t want it.’

  ‘I’m not that tired.’

  There were more shots. They sounded farther away.

  ‘Definitely dogs,’ said Greville. ‘If they meet the dogs at the windmill it should be quite an interesting duel. The baddies won’t know the goodies, but the goodies will have very strong ideas about the baddies … I wonder if Miss Worrall has forgiven you for stealing two of her Alsatians yet?’

  ‘It was you who killed them,’ Liz pointed out.

  ‘And it was you who tried to get them to kill me, you little bitch.’

  Greville stretched and yawned. The shooting seemed to have died away. ‘Now. You either come to bed or I drag you there. Which is it to be?’

  Liz giggled. ‘A bit of both,’ she said.

  But by the time Liz had eaten her fill of ham, the mood for making love had deserted him. It had given way to a disquieting tenderness. He simply wanted to hold Liz in his arms and abolish the world. In the end that was effectively what he did – for a few hours.

  The fog was still there in the morning. There was nothing to do and nowhere to go, so they stayed in bed until hunger made them rise. Then they had a lazy breakfast and went back to bed again. This time they made love, for it was as if the fog had effectively and permanently cut them off from all humankind. It was as if they were entirely alone on the planet – so much alone that it was possible to entertain visions of unending isolation, of immortality and a closeness and interdependence
so satisfying that it was almost painful.

  There had been no more sounds of shooting to disturb their night. There were none to disturb the drugged sensual limbo of their morning. But by mid-afternoon the fog had cleared. Liz was prepared to declare the entire day a sexual holiday, but Greville was beginning to feel restless.

  When the sun broke through, he had a sudden desire to get up and find out what had been happening in the outside world. He had a desire to see other people, to look at a world broader than that bounded by four bedroom walls.

  Presently, he and Liz rowed away from their enchanted island. Now that the fog had cleared, the day was perfect in its autumn glory. There was not a breath of wind, and the leaves of all the trees round Ambergreave Lake – brown and bronze, orange and deep crimson – looked as if they might have been somehow riveted to the still air.

  The landscape was motionless. In the low golden sunlight it seemed petrified – a fantastic and lovely vista of still life.

  In the village of Ambergreave there were aspects of still-life also; but they contained nothing beautiful – only the hanging terror of violence, the obscene degradation of pain, the musty flavour of wanton destruction.

  The first bizarre object Liz and Greville encountered was a body, a male, clothed in what was apparently a monk’s habit. It lay untidily in the middle of the village street. The man’s throat had been torn out. There was also a bullet wound in his chest.

  Liz and Greville stared at each other. Instinctively they stepped back from the body and gazed warily at the nearby cottages. They saw nothing but the vacant eyes of windows. There was not a sound to trouble the still air.

  Greville fingered his shotgun nervously. He was surprised to find that his hands were wet with sweat. Death itself was not strange to him, nor was violence. But this was something absurd, something utterly grotesque.

  ‘My God!’ whispered Liz. ‘What a horrible mess!’

  ‘Shut up and listen,’ snapped Greville. ‘And keep your gun handy.’

  But there was nothing to listen to – only a dreadful stillness, the frightening nullity of silence. They waited, motionless, expecting attack, expecting noise, expecting anything. There was nothing.

  ‘All right,’ said Greville at length. ‘It won’t come to us, so let’s go and look for it. Keep about five paces behind me and watch the left-hand side of the street. I’ll take the right. Something pretty bloody crazy has been going on.’

  They advanced cautiously along the street. Cottage after cottage spewed forth nothing but silence. It was as if, thought Greville, the whole village was transformed into a vacant film set.

  Then they saw a head stuck on the end of a pole which had been fastened to a cottage gate. The head was Big Willie’s head, grinning in death as it had often grinned in life. A message had been painted crudely in white on the roadway. Greville had the briefly hysterical illusion that Big Willie was trying to read it.

  There were only four words: Despair! The Lord commandeth.

  Greville muttered an obscenity and turned to Liz. She stared back at him, white-faced.

  ‘Let’s take a look inside the house,’ said Greville grimly, ‘and see if Big Willie’s mother has also repented.’

  They went up to the cottage door. Greville kicked it open and rushed inside, shot-gun ready. He need not have worried.

  Whether Big Willie’s mother had repented of incest and probable cannibalism was now a point only of academic interest. She lay on the floor, her knees drawn up, her skirt thrown back, her ankles tied to her wrists, and with a wooden stake driven through her chest. She had not been a very old woman – probably, thought Greville, only in her late forties – and she had been quite handsome in a gipsy sort of way; with big dark eyes and prominent cheek bones.

  Like Big Willie, her eyes were still open. But they did not register either amusement or pain. Only a horrible comic expression of infinite surprise.

  There were two dead ‘monks’ in the room. One had a knife in his back, the other had what presumably was a hatchet wound in his head, since a bloodstained hatchet lay nearby.

  Liz had followed Greville into the cottage. He pushed her out again almost immediately. The scene, he felt, was not one to linger over.

  ‘The hell with all this,’ he said roughly. ‘Let’s see what has happened at the windmill.’

  Neither Big Willie nor his mother was an insupportable loss to the community. But Miss Worrall came under the heading of key personnel. Without her services as a grinder of corn it would be virtually impossible to make bread. Besides, Greville rather liked her. She seemed to him the kind of transie who was almost eccentrically normal.

  The mill was on the far side of the village. Liz and Greville had to go down the entire length of the main street to get to it. They passed more corpses, including that of Charles Cuthbert the blacksmith, and three more pseudo-monks. Cuthbert had evidently had his throat cut. The ‘monks’ appeared to have died variously of gun-shot wounds and dogs.

  But the windmill itself was the scene of greatest devastation. It also presented the remains of what must have been quite a battle. Miss Worrall’s Alsatians – Greville counted five of their bodies – had done phenomenal service, for they appeared to have accounted for at least twice their number of ‘monks’.

  The Alsatians had died of gun-shot wounds, knife wounds and sheer bludgeoning. The ‘monks’ had died mostly of throat and facial wounds. In death, dogs and men seemed to be mingling almost affectionately – as if each was now regretting the excesses to which they had been driven by fear, blood-lust, pain and plain savagery.

  The tower of the mill was of solid stone which Miss Worrall had covered with pitch a long time ago. The ‘monks’ – at least, the survivors – evidently found such a permanent surface irresistible: they had painted more choice slogans upon it.

  Only God washes whiter than white … Heaven has fewer vacancies … and, with final simplicity, Transies go home …

  Neither Greville nor Liz paid much attention to the slogans, however. Their eyes were drawn to the windmill sails, now slowly and creakingly rotating in a barely perceptible breeze.

  The sails had been used as a makeshift cross. Where they joined the hub and the hub joined the main spindle in the windmill cap, Miss Worrall hung. She had been crucified in the traditional manner.

  Liz tried to be sick – but nothing would come. Greville wanted to find something – anything – and smash it to pieces.

  It was fortunate he had his shotgun ready, for as they gazed at the appalling sight he heard a low growl. A surviving Alsatian, dripping blood, seemed to drag itself in slow motion from inside the windmill. It summoned up its strength for a last onslaught – doubtless so crazed by pain it no longer knew or cared who was friend and who was enemy. It was as well that the Alsatian’s reactions had been slowed down, for so had Greville’s. He only just managed to shoot it in mid-air. The close range blast from the twelve-bore almost tore the dog in two. It was dead before it touched the ground.

  Liz stopped trying to be sick and began to cry.

  ‘Shut up!’ said Greville. ‘Save it till later. This isn’t the bloody time for luxuries.’

  Liz looked at him and shut up. As she did so, both of them became aware of another sound. It was like a long low animal moan that subsided in a fit of coughing. It seemed to come from inside the windmill. There was silence for a moment or two. Then it came again. This time it sounded human.

  ‘There’s one of the bastards left,’ cried Greville exultantly. ‘Maybe we can trade an eye for an eye.’

  Throwing caution aside, he ran to the open windmill door and scrambled up the wooden steps. Fearfully, Liz followed him.

  There was nothing on the ground floor – nothing but a couple of sacks of corn, half a sack of flour and Miss Worrall’s old piano. Greville ran upstairs to the second storey – Miss Worrall’s bedroom and the sleeping quarters of her two favourite dogs. There was nothing there either.

  The third storey was t
he grinding room. It contained the millstones, a pile of empty sacks – and the source of the noise that Liz and Greville had heard. One of the ‘monks’ lay on the pile of sacks. There was blood on his face and – symbolically enough – blood on his hands.

  Greville felt a sudden surge of satisfaction. Here, at least, was something that could be made to suffer for all that other suffering.

  He raised his shotgun. The man on the pile of sacks smiled faintly.

  ‘Vengeance may prove somewhat inadequate,’ he said apologetically. ‘I rather think I’m already dying.’

  Greville was surprised as much by the voice as by its owner. He was no less surprised by the words.

  ‘Maybe we can persuade you to put off that happy event for a little longer,’ snapped Greville. ‘Now who the hell are you and what were all the fun and games in aid of? And talk quickly and sensibly or I shall have the pleasure of blowing your hands and feet off one by one.’

  The man on the sacks did not appear to be greatly perturbed by the threat.

  ‘I’d like some water,’ he said. ‘I’d never have believed I could feel so damned dry.’

  Greville turned to Liz who was standing behind him. ‘Get him some water. There’s a pump just outside.’

  She went back down the stairs and returned a few moments later with an earthenware jug. The man on the sacks licked his lips.

  Greville took the jug and went close to him. ‘Now, let’s talk.’

  ‘The water first, please.’

  Greville poured some of the water on the floor at his feet.

  ‘I said: Let’s talk.’

  The wounded man half-stifled a moan. ‘Much good may it do you,’ he said weakly. ‘But as a point of what once might literally have been academic interest, you are being uncharitable to one Professor Francis Watkins, sometime holder of the chair of psychology at the late and not entirely lamented University of East Anglia … Oh God! For Christ’s sake kill me.’ The last words rose into a scream, and the scream brought a fresh trickle of blood from his lips.