by Aaron French
Fairlight. The small Cornish fishing village of his childhood. Now the subject of the national media as one of the many coastal resorts to succumb to the devastating floods.
But that’s miles away. What the hell is he doing here in Oxfordshire?
Brother Alexander smiled. Or tried to; but to Mark the cold smile looked like the parting of skinned cod flesh.
“We have grown, Brother Mark. Our Order has expanded.” The toothless smile vanished; the cod flesh sealed shut.
“Bloody hell... how many Temples do we have now?” No, not we – THEY! Christ, even now he has this effect on me!
Alexander sighed. It sounded like a death rattle, a perfect accompaniment to the dead leaves shaking free from the trees in the autumnal breeze.
“Since you... left us, the Order has taken possession of six more buildings. All on the coast, with the exception of our most recent acquisition.”
Mark swallowed the bile that rose in his throat. The swirling leaves around his feet made him feel like the world was spinning out of control.
Six? And all on the coast – God, that would explain the floods... but not why he’s here. The Order would never move inland. Not unless...
Brother Alexander’s fish-like eyes sparked with new life, his pain forgotten momentarily as he stared into his former acolyte’s gaze, recognising the question that was on Mark’s face.
“Yes. The Order has strengthened. Our Father felt confident enough to take the waters inland.” He grimaced. “You were right to flee, Brother Mark. Our Father deceived us. Our faith is a lie.”
What? The Order’s most devout follower, its harshest tutor... now he realises? Rubbish – this has gotta be a trick.
Mark’s eyes narrowed. “I told you that years ago. And all I got were beatings. Forced immersions and... and...” His voice trailed off with the memory. “What took you so long to realise, Alexander?”
Alexander’s bulbous head slumped. His eyes stared at the ground, a look of shame and guilt; of a man finally forced to admit that the pupil was correct and the master was wrong.
“The floods in Cornwall. The bodies that remained, and how they had changed. I knew then... and I remembered what you told me as you fled the Temple.” He raised his head to stare warily at the sky, and Mark started at the sheer despair in Alexander’s eyes. The words Mark had screamed were written in Alexander’s face.
Our faith is a lie!
Mark glanced upwards and saw the rain clouds swallow the rising sun. Darkness shrouded the country lane once more.
The radio report... more flooding is expected, and not necessarily confined to the south coast.
The rumble of thunder rolled along the lane, bringing with it a scent of brine. Storm clouds. Coming in from the south. From the sea.
Our Father felt confident enough to take the waters inland.
Mark felt ice water freeze in his guts, almost as cold as the crypt-waters he had inadvertently swallowed in his youth. “My God. You finally did it, didn’t you?”
Alexander shook his head. “I tried to stop it. Last night, before the floodwaters came to Fairlight... I defied the Brotherhood and Our Father.”
“Yeah? Prove it.”
Alexander sighed, and then pulled the front of his robe downwards. It made a wet, sticking sound, like the peeling away of Sellotape or sunburnt skin. Mark made out the familiar pattern of the brand that all members of the Order were marked with upon their initiation.
Just a trace, though. Mark saw why the heavy material of the robe came away so reluctantly, and why his former mentor was so pale.
Mark had gone through a series of painful skin grafts to hide the sign of his youthful torment, but the mark of the Eye was still visible. Too visible to allow him to undress in front of a woman, even after all these years. Curries, Chinese takeaways and beer were his closest companions.
Still, the weight he had gained over the last five years had a positive effect: the layers of fat and flab spilling down his throat and chest hid the fleshy creature.
Alexander, it seemed, had been in more of a hurry to remove his brand. He had cut through to the muscle and subcutaneous fat beneath what was once a hairy and well-toned chest. Mark’s jaw dropped in astonishment. To think that the old man had travelled here, with such a wound...
Alex winced as he replaced the robe.
“I cut that mark away, before Our Father’s very own eyes. I threw the flesh in his face. I defied them, and I denied Him. Unlike you, I didn’t just flee. I made a stand.”
Mark’s cheeks coloured with shame, remembering his panic-stricken flight from the Temple of Fairlight fifteen years ago. No thought of fighting back, no desire to make a stand and defy that... that thing.
Don’t be so hard on yourself, you were just a kid! If anyone should feel ashamed it should be Alex. He was your mentor. He was twice your age, with a responsibility to bring you up in the ways of Our Father. To show you the truth of all things... and now he’s realised – only twelve bloody years too late, of course – that he’s been lied to as well. No wonder he feels the need to take them down...
“Okay, Alex. What else did you do? Please tell me you barricaded the Order within and set fire to the place.”
Alexander gave a dark smile and indicated the brown canvas holdall. “I did the next best thing. I took what is most precious to them. The icon.”
Mark took a deep breath. The original article of faith from the South Sea island?
“You actually took it from the altar?”
Alexander nodded. “The Order will be powerless without their most precious relic, and we may be able to prevent the waters reclaiming the land, as foretold. But we have little time. They will hunt me down – as they vowed to hunt you...”
Mark stiffened. He felt the first spots of rain. He glanced upwards.
“That’s going to be a real cloudburst,” he muttered. “As big as the one that sank Cornwall... the Order’s doing?”
Alexander nodded. A drop of rain landed on his nose, ran down the bridge and dropped into the hidden mess of his former chest. He let out a small cry.
“Okay. What now, Alex?”
“Christian ground.” He dragged the holdall to the rear of the van. “The relic must be destroyed. Burned, on ground consecrated to the one True God.”
“And that’ll help?”
Alexander gave a desolate smile. “It will... if one of the Brotherhood offers himself to the flames as well. Make no mistake, Mark. I’ve sinned grievously. Only now do I realise how I’ve profaned the one True God. My death will be some form of recompense...”
Yeah. The least you can do. I’m sure those poor sods in Cornwall will be grateful.
“Please, Mark. I’ve been walking for so long... I don’t think I can continue. Can you drive me to...”
Mark stared at him. “To a church. To kill yourself. You’re really serious?”
“Won’t you feel better, Mark? Seeing the man who lied to you, brought you up in a false faith... to see him seek absolution and then to kill himself? Only you can decide which one of those will satisfy you more.”
Bloody hell. What do I say to that?
“At the very least, you’ll be helping to save this land from the sea. You can’t deny our country this.”
“Okay.” Mark opened the rear door and gestured for Alex to put the holdall inside. “In there, though. I don’t want that thing in the cab with us.” God knows, I spent too many years being scared by it.
After he slammed the door, Alexander hobbled over to the passenger door. He opened it and stared at the interior of the cab, like a man confronted by an alien spaceship.
“Been a while since you’ve been in one of these things, eh?” Mark climbed in and twisted the ignition key. “Welcome to the twenty-first century. In all its wonder and glory...”
“And we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.” Alexander gave a weak smile as the van moved off. “I can’t believe how we lived by that chant. The Brotherhood�
��s credo.”
Mark flipped on the windscreen wipers. Fat blotches of muddy rainwater smacked into the bonnet like rotten grapes.
“Words to be reborn by... we really thought we had the answer. We were just another stupid bloody cult.”
Mark glanced at his passenger and couldn’t resist a shudder. “Let me guess. It was the Change that made you realise.”
Alex nodded. Thick, oil-like tears of self-pity oozed from his bulging, unblinking eyes. He held his hands up to the dashboard lights and Mark’s eyes widened in horror.
The fingers were not just pale and skeletal. They were almost transparent. Mark caught a brief glimpse of purple veins and sluggish red fluid between the folds of webbing that joined the digits together.
“It’s advancing,” Alexander said with a whimper. His voice was barely audible above the pounding of the rainwater on the van’s bodywork. “I didn’t know it would come so soon...”
You talking about the floods or the Change?
The stench of rotting fish was overpowering. Mark fought down the bile in his throat. He would’ve opened the window but the pounding sheets of rain would soak him. The windscreen misted. Reluctantly, he put the blower on full blast, knowing it would make the fish-stink even worse.
“Not far to the abbey church – just past Didcot, the coffee shop there is one of my first calls. Christ, this bloody rain...”
Alexander took a deep breath. It sounded strange to Mark’s ears, and then he realised the inhalation was coming from within the cowl. Alexander’s neck.
Gills, Mark realised with a shudder.
Thick tears spilled down Alexander’s eyes like the raindrops on the windscreen.
“I was so stupid. I really thought we were preparing for the next stage of mankind’s evolution. That the Floods were God’s Plan...”
Mark’s fingers tightened on the wheel. God’s Plan... that the waters would reclaim the earth, and only the Chosen would be granted the physical transformation required to survive.
“Yeah, well – now you know better. It’s the Order creating the floods, not God. Shame it took the bodies in Cornwall for you to realise.” Mark’s anger rose, exacerbated by the increasingly treacherous driving conditions. The brown road sign for the abbey was barely visible through the sheets of rain.
Alexander stared unhappily at him, and then back to his webbed hands.
“Women, children, old folk... drowned in their beds, in the schools and nursing homes. Only the Brotherhood surviving, but not because the monastery was built on high ground...”
“Please, Mark. Don’t...”
Oily tears and brown rainwater accompanied the van to the abbey. As did something else, knocking from the back of the van. Didn’t he close the bloody door properly? Mark thought with a snarl.
“... but because the Brotherhood was built on lies and evil. How many lives were destroyed, Alexander? All the other kids my age, suffering in the cold, on their knees praying to a god that has nothing but the destruction of this planet on its mind?”
“Kids... there were very few, Mark. Only the orphans such as you. The adults...”
Alexander’s voice trailed off. Mark nodded grimly. Yeah, of course. The adults took the Third Oath. After loyalty, secrecy, the promise to mate with the deity in the flooded crypt...
Kids... he remembered the Skater Boy he’d almost knocked down yesterday morning. Remembered how much he’d cursed the little sod, but knowing part of his anger was envy. That kid was your typical snotty teenager. Not a care in the world.
I hated him because I knew then how much I’ve lost. I should’ve been riding skateboards and flicking old bastards the finger. Not on my knees, feeling the lash on my back and the promise of Armageddon, the pain of my parents’ absence...
The abbey church of St. Peter, normally a shining jewel of Early English Gothic architecture, was just a grey smear of frowning masonry against the black sky. Mark reduced speed and changed down into second gear, remembering how treacherous the slope to the driveway was in the best of conditions. There was no retaining wall on this side of the abbey, just a row of cedar and yew trees.
He heard Alexander take a sharp breath as the wheels struggled to gain purchase on the muddy slope.
“Relax,” Mark grinned. “I do this for a living.”
The van rocked on its springs with the explosion. Mark felt the plastic bulkhead shiver behind his headrest, heard the clatter of the Hubbard chiller unit dismantling. The steering wheel spun under his fingers and the van went into a skid.
He resisted the impulse to slam his foot on the brakes; years of experienced commercial driving took over. Steer into the skid.
Another explosion distracted him. This time the bulkhead split with a wet cracking sound and ice vapour clouded the cab, with a stench of rotting fish.
He whipped his head round to see what had caused the breach. A rumbling flooded his ears, and his eyes streamed with tears from the ice-blast. Through the cloud of freezing white fog he saw a grinning fish-like face. Saw webbed hands reaching for him.
For the steering wheel. There was a look of hunger and triumph on Alexander’s face as he pushed Mark’s right leg down and across. Onto the accelerator.
The engine roared. Mark tried to force the fish-like hands off the wheel, to stop Alexander pushing it to the right.
The van tore through the lower branches of the trees. The higher branches smashed into the windscreen and the glass of the driver’s door. The shriek of metal against wood was drowned by the screams of Mark as Alexander pressed his body harder onto his former acolyte. The stench of rotting fish filled his nostrils once more. Alexander’s slit of a mouth gaped open, and now Mark could see rows of tiny, needle-shaped teeth that belonged to the mouth of a Moray eel, not a human being.
The van bounced across the grounds of the abbey, shaking Mark’s head against the ruins of the door window. The spider-webbed glass of the windscreen bulged outwards as the van came to a crashing halt.
The bonnet crumpled and steam rose into the rain, through the cracks in the windscreen and mingled with the ice vapour from the van’s chilled cargo unit. Alexander leaned back and raised his hands with a triumphant smile.
“Go, Brother Mark.”
Mark’s fingers shook violently on the seatbelt release and the door handle. His heart pounded and his chest felt like it was going to explode as violently as the bulkhead. He backed out of the cab, not taking his eyes off Alexander for a moment. Too quickly; his boot slipped on the sill and he fell sideways, his bulk crashing heavily into the soaking grass.
His vision swam, and he saw stars hurtle past him. He blinked, realised that they were falling drops of rain given illumination by the interior light of the cab.
The light was hidden by the bulk of the thing that poured through the crack in the bulkhead, filling the cab. Mark’s mouth opened in a scream that was stifled by the falling rain. He twisted on the ground, ignoring the pain shooting through his ribs, and climbed to his feet with wheezing breaths.
A shadow fell ahead of him; a shifting, shapeless thing that writhed sinuously in the arms of Brother Alexander. The voluminous sleeves of Alexander’s habit gave the snake-like creature the semblance of wings.
His back towards the open van, he stared at the wooden doorway of the abbey. A light on the porch beckoned to him, promising sanctuary from the thing that screamed a primeval roar behind him.
That roar was accompanied by the stench of rotting marine life, and the chill of the flooded crypt beneath the Temple of Fairlight.
He didn’t bring the icon – he brought one of THEM with him! Jesus Christ Almighty! Mark caught sight of the stone structure that had halted the Sprinter’s progress as he ran to the abbey: the high stone wall of the old well was smashed to pieces and now coated in diesel oil and antifreeze.
“Wonder and glory, Brother Mark!” Alexander’s words were barely audible over the roar of the beast and the pounding rain. Mark’s tears of despair mingled with the r
ainwater that streamed down his forehead. How could he have been so stupid? How could he have thought for one moment that the most trusted and senior member of the Brotherhood would have had a change of heart?
...the Order has taken possession of six more buildings. All on the coast, with the exception of our most recent acquisition.
An abbey church in Oxfordshire, the heart of England. A place of Christian worship and brotherhood, now taken over and corrupted by a darker order of monks.
There was someone waiting for him on the porch of the abbey. One wearing a monk’s habit identical to Alexander’s. The cowl was thrown back and Mark groaned in recognition of the surly, teenage sneer.
They had allowed him to keep his baseball cap. It was doffed towards Mark in mock greeting, and then Skater Boy held his arms and face to the weeping heavens with a cry of joy.
The Order has strengthened. Our Father felt confident enough to take the waters inland.
Mark sank to his knees, clutching his chest and leaning forward as pain rippled down his arm. The door beyond the porch opened and an iridescent blue light spilled onto the flags. A light cast by a lantern, mounted on a pole carried by two more cloaked figures that now joined Skater Boy on the porch. All three stared coldly at the deserter who kneeled on the ground before them.
Mark felt cold, clammy hands lift him to his feet and spin him roughly around. He gazed dumbly into Alexander’s eyes. The pupils had vanished into a sea of opaque milk.
Alexander reached a hand into his habit and – with a smile rather than a grimace this time – pulled a piece of flesh from his chest. He dangled it in front of Mark’s uncomprehending eyes.
Rubbery plastic. Illuminated by the piercing blue light of the acolytes’ lantern it looked like dead, rotting cuttlefish. In the brief patches of daylight it had done its job as a disguise, perfectly masking the chest brand of the Eye of Dagon. The branded chest that Brother Alexander now proudly held up to the sky.
More hands held him. The light was directed to the well. Unearthly blue painted the jagged ruin of the stone wall and turned the scales of the thing that squatted over it into sparkling jewels.