The Power

by Ian Watson

  “You all right, Jen?” Mitzi was touching her.

  “Yes … but how about Andy?”

  Andy looked on the verge of fainting; Mitzi diverted her attention to him.

  “So now I must tell Mrs Diamond,” Partridge announced to one and all. “And take her home yes! Take her well away from here so that you can bring the martyr back.”

  By ten o’clock the butchered corpse had been stowed away in the beer cellar. They had heard the Prime Minister address the nation, followed by the Home Secretary.

  And amongst much else, such as the requisitioning of the assets of all private haulage and transport firms, the closure of petrol stations pending a priority allocations system, the outlawing of any strikes in a swathe of major industries, the takeover of British Rail, of all merchant shipping by Royal Prerogative, all aircraft by powers under the Civil Aviation Act, and the closing of all major roads so that city fire brigades, excavators and many other categories of vehicle could be redeployed into the countryside, they learned that private telephone subscribers were being disconnected. Temporarily.

  Smart idea, to neuter subversive groups, to stop rumours spreading, to prevent panic or protest especially if the rumours were truth. And of what use was your phone when the police were too busy to answer, when fire engines and ambulances were speeding towards quarries and woodlands? “Constable! The US army just dynamited our house – will you do them for criminal damage?” “Hello, I want to report a nuclear explosion down our street….”

  Who had killed the boy so terribly? This horror, stunningly closer to home, competed with all those scaring government announcements. Yet Felix Diamond’s death also seemed like a projection of those announcements into their midst in the most visceral fashion. It was a foretaste. Police had ceased to be available; a bandage had been torn away from their lives, causing its own wound. From now on the law might be an M-16 or a British Army weapon, but it would be the law of summary execution. For hoarding a sack of potatoes, or driving somewhere in your own car.

  In addition to the vicar and Ainsworth, Bert Morris and Jack had actually seen the body raw when they went with Ainsworth to bag it and wheel it back. The pig farmer still insisted that what had been done to the boy was a physical impossibility, as though this could somehow alter the facts. Partridge hadn’t returned to the White Lion. He’d still be consoling, still preventing Sheri Diamond from searching for wherever her boy might be – in a barn? in the back of a van? – in such a condition that no one would let her see him. Had the vicar felt obliged to confide in Mary Kuzka?

  Andy was lolling drunk in a seat. Jack had been silent a long time before he said to Jeni:

  “This aal has te do with them happ’nin’s at wor camp, eh?”

  “Do you mean it’s a sort of tit-for-tat for Mal’s death?”

  He looked surprised. “Na. Aa mean it’s the same kind o’ thing. A paranormal thing.”

  “Maybe….”

  “Aa divven’t shake no hands with it when it rives a bairn. Nay bairn’s te blame. Nivva! Nell was right.”

  Nell was sitting by Andy, with a glass of cider in front of her. Occasionally she dipped a finger in and drew wet lines on the table top. Playing tic-tac-toe with herself? Pretending the lines were ley lines?

  Nobody, least of all Tom Tate, was interested in the other end of licensing hours either, though people were beginning to filter away by eleven. Gareth and Jack had to guide Andy back to Jeni’s; he puked in Green Street.

  Jeni had feared that she would dream about Felix’s murder by the toilet thing.

  She didn’t. She dreamed that she killed the boy herself.

  She met Felix near his home. He was a fair, slim, quiet lad who knew he should be polite to villagers he recognized. Their voices were a bit funny, but they were friends. In the failing light he was swinging to and fro on a tyre roped underneath an oak tree. Waiting for Daddy to drive home? But Daddy wouldn’t; Daddy was in the sky. Mommy and Daddy had been talking not long ago – serious talk – and he’d overheard some, which was why he hoped Daddy could drive back, snatching the boy up when Felix ran to him so that Felix flew for a while like a bird, like Daddy.

  As Jeni walked towards Felix, she found she was reading his thoughts. She was linked to him, which was why the boy wouldn’t worry, at first. Even though he guessed that Mommy and Daddy didn’t like this lady much. He thought that Daddy regularly flew towards heaven, where a starred, striped flag also flew, on a white lawn of cloud. And his Daddy made thunder, which was like God’s voice. God was Daddy’s father in the sky, and somehow Mommy’s too. But there were devil airplanes as well, which his Daddy might have to fight. Of course Daddy would win because of superior techknowledgy. Which meant knowing you were right.

  When it started raining, like now – though it wasn’t yet under the big tree – Daddy would land on a cloud and haul down the flag to keep it from spoiling. If a flag got wet, the colours might run into each other, then you’d never know whose flag it was. It might even turn all red.

  That big black doggie sure walked funny, as though its back leg ached.

  “Shall I push you?” asked the lady with the dog. “Shall I make you fly?”

  He nodded. “Sure.”

  She stepped behind him.

  Jeni strangled the boy then she lugged his limp body down the lane, skidding like a skater. Bess gambolled alongside, pausing to sniff and cock a leg. The boy mightn’t be dead, only unconscious, but they were out of earshot now. A cow bellowed from the byre like a klaxon starting up, like the siren on top of the school gym which had gone off accidentally a few weeks earlier, scaring some of the third year half to death. Gone off accidentally – unless the siren was secretly being tested.

  Here was far enough. As she ripped off the boy’s shorts and underpants to give him his cervical smear she couldn’t help noticing that her own right arm was becoming – it shifted before her eyes – a pale yellow tube, an unsegmented sausage of crap, a powerful muscle like a thin eel. What had been her arm plunged inside the boy, and she woke up screaming.

  She bottled her scream, but Jack came hurrying upstairs, flipping on the light. She persuaded him to go away. A nightmare, that’s all. Who wouldn’t be having nightmares tonight?

  As she stared eastwards, trying in vain to telescope her vision so as to see the roadblocks and Rapier missile batteries poking from bulldozed fields, the sun appeared, ruddy and quivering, through the golden curtains of dawning. A trio of jets – Phantoms – screamed overhead bearing southeast. She felt herself shoved as if by their slipstream, by a hand of air, into the chilly lee of the church tower.

  A moment later the shadow where she stood went quite black. By contrast. The tower was a seam of darkest coal, a column of ink, behind which the brightest floodlight ever was switched on. The eastern sky glared bright white as burning phosphorus.

  A millisecond earlier Kerthrop – or vicinity – had been nuked.

  Eighteen

  So therefore all the missiles in the world had been launched, and were being launched. All gone, all gone forever. In that expanded instant before death actually reached her, it was as if she was sucked empty, empty of any hope, and possibility. In the belly of her spirit there was instantly only desolate cold void.

  This was more than mere emptiness; this was ultimate despair, total sorrow. Nothingness draped an arm around her shoulders, and showed her the end of life – not only of her own, but of all life. Life past and present, life future. Life all over the Earth, and the memory of all past life. Perhaps the only life existing in the universe. It died, disappeared.

  In that moment of stunning light the whole future ceased to exist, ceased to be possible. And the past, all of history, all art, all knowledge, all civilizations, all gone.

  Together with all birds and beasts, all flowers and songs and dawns. All beauty or desire, every dream or hope.

  All gone.

  Nothing mattered any more. Nothing could ever matter again. There would be no “a
gain”.

  Her life had become death, but her lungs still took one more breath.

  Standing there in the shadow of the church she shut her eyes and still could see. As she stood there in the cool of the wall, reflected heat baked her skin. In another second trees and thatched roofs and woolly coats of sheep would incinerate.

  Next the blast wave would come. She would be a splattered egg upon the fabric of the church hurled westward.

  Momentarily she twitched a glance. Such furnace light! Turf was steaming, winter’s dead weeds were crisping. In after-image she saw the tower wall start to stretch, stones begin to separate from each other like that Channel Four logo –

  She lost all sense of weight as though she’d fallen down a lift shaft. Dank darkness, strange silence, engulfed her.

  She squinted. Then opened her eyes wide. Seconds had passed. The tower still stood. She still stood below it, giddily. Thin black mist boiled out of the ground everywhere, dissolving into the sky which had become a grey blank without content. Beyond the churchyard she could see, dimly but distinctly, cottage roofs. The toupee of one thatch had slipped. Slates had slid, exposing battens. Some damage. Hardly any. Where were the raging fires? Where was the blast wind, the hot hurricane from hell? Why was she, a dead person, still alive? Unharmed?

  An inch-wide crack had riven the tower, zig-zagging down like a shaft of lightning. Yet otherwise….

  She looked twice. Surely that crack emerged from the foundations, from out of the soil, and wended upwards to where stones and mortar were still firm? As if the finger-fracture was clutching the tower together instead of cleaving it.

  A sheep lurched into view, and Jeni almost threw up. She might well have done if the smell wafting to her nostrils hadn’t been so enticing. That hot juicy smell of roast lamb. Wool had gone from all along one side of the animal. Exposed flesh was fresh-cooked, bubbling, dripping fat and broth stock. The animal was a walking side of mutton. One eye was blind, a boiled egg. Yet the sheep walked. Yet it lowered its half-cooked head to graze. Some teeth fell out of its jaw.

  Jeni ran into the open. To the east, where she ought to be seeing…inferno, a mountainous, convulsing dirty lurid mushroom cloud full of spores of Kerthrop or Churtington …nothing. Nothing but the same grey quiet blanket.

  “Something’s wrong – terribly awfully wrong!” she thought in cold fear. Now she had time for fear. Fear had a chance to enter the emptiness in her. Could anything conceivably be worse than the nuclear war which she had just seen begin? No! But –

  But she was alive, genuinely alive. Melfort hadn’t burnt and blasted to shreds.

  A nuclear explosion only miles away had been…negatived, neutralized. That wracked woodland over there…! The heart of the sun had barely touched those trees. The blasting wind had brushed – brushed by. Space and time had warped around the village, the surrounding fields, enclosing them. What did that mean? It had no meaning. No sense. A protective blanket had fallen. Or risen. There was no possible protection. And yet there was. She was bleeding. No, she had pissed herself. This wasn’t the sequel to a nuclear explosion as she’d ever imagined it. Not the aftermath of nuclear war. There couldn’t be any sequel, any aftermath.

  Just then she saw the vicar’s black cloak lying near the south door. His body sprawled out underneath.

  Body, body. Amongst broken ice of shattered glass, which wasn’t stained glass. Greenhouse panes, hurled from further away.

  Body. Only.

  The vicar’s sliced-off head had rolled several yards, to end perched upright facing in her direction.

  The whipper-in of the church: his head had been whipped off. Jeni giggled in horror. There appeared to be very little blood…for a guillotining.

  The bodiless head looked at her. It did look. The eyes bulged. To express themselves. The jaw tried to move to open the mouth. Like a sheep grinding grass.

  Terribly awfully wrong.

  With skin clammy and gooseflesh crawling, Jeni stepped slowly towards the severed head. Her legs were bidding for promotion to the first division of the jelly league.

  The head croaked. It was a big burping toad.

  She bent, nearly buckling over.

  “But you can’t talk,” she exclaimed crazily, “on account of your chin’s upon the ground! The weight of your brain’s pushing down, eh?”

  Croak.

  The vicar’s eyes blinked. One for yes, two for no? Partridge had hazel eyes. She’d never really looked into them before. She’d never scrutinized his features quite so closely and, um, detachedly. That slim fastidious nose. Skin-ruts ploughed by the advancing season of middle age. The bald circle at his crown. Always before his thinning black hair had been bouncy and groomed, as if he shampooed it every morning. An eruption of sweat, doubtless due to the shock of decapitation, had plastered the hair to his scalp. Now his bald patch was a monkish tonsure.

  On his left cheek grew a little brown mole with a trinity of stiff hairs. A miniature Cavalry. If she had a magnifying glass she might make out three tiny skin mites crucified to those bristles, enacting the passion on the Jerusalem of his cheek.

  Plenty of glass lying around. Wrong shape, though.

  Oh never so detachedly! She felt close to hysteria.

  “What are you trying to say, Vicar?”

  Croak.

  The head appeared agitated – but who wouldn’t be? His vocal chords couldn’t be in much condition. Maybe they were a few yards away in his neck. Untuned, unstrung. The Reverend Jeremy’s voice obviously needed restringing.

  But then, its eyes ping-pong balls of effort, the head uttered a single wheezy word, which sounded to Jeni like: “Re…lic.”

  Of course! Why hadn’t she thought of it? The martyr’s relic, guaranteed to cure any agues or bilious megrims! Such as those caused by loss of body. Warranted to ward off wickedness. To restore amazed speech to the dumb. Roll up and be shrived! A snip at three florins! Only ten groats cost to the poor of the parish!

  It was only when she’d carried the vicar’s head gingerly into the church and saw the cage door wide open, with the reliquary deposited on the floor below, that she recalled her vile flash of vision on that previous visit.

  Partridge had unlocked the cage. Key was still in the lock. He’d lifted out the stone turret. Been praying for a miracle, maybe. Rumbles in the heavens – those Phantoms – had lured him anxiously outside.

  The head rocked excitedly in her hands. Perhaps it was desperate to turn away from that empty cage? Silly! – how could it move of its own accord? Her hands were shaking, that was all.

  Turning Partridge’s head so that it would face outwards, she put it into the cage. A lot safer in there! Safe from crows and rats – the bars stood close together. Maybe not safe from mice…were there any church mice in St Mary’s?

  Kneeling, she lifted the gabled lid off the turret. In the hollow within on a purple velvet pad lay the anonymous dusty throat bone. A horned hyoid bone, oddly reminiscent of…a jaw’s harp! Twang-twang, twang-de-twang…de-doo-de-dah-de-twang. Through the witching medieval forests, just like in Bergman’s Seventh Seal….

  Wasn’t it obvious what she had to do? The vicar’s eyes goggled either in ghastly protest or in welcome – welcoming the communion wafer – as she prised his lips apart and thrust the throat bone into his mouth. His teeth closed on her fingers painfully. With a cry she snatched her hand away to suck at the hurt. He’d almost drawn blood. Then other dead muscles convulsed; the bone was gulped back inside him. Jeni slammed the cage door, locked it, pocketed the key.

  The mouth began to gasp. Tongue jutted. Teeth clamped. Some dark maroon blood welled sluggishly, seeming already half coagulated.

  Then the mouth opened wide and vomited a torrent of brown lumpy filth. Flecks squitted on to Jeni’s anorak and hands. She smelled shit.

  She’d often thought the vicar talked a load of crap.

  Where could the filth have come from?

  Terribly, ghastly wrong.

  At la
st Jeni shrieked. She fled from the stony echo of her squeals out into the porch. She noticed the big old church key still in its keyhole, locked the main door, pocketed that key too – and continued her flight out into the graveyard, into that eerie quiet greyness, where a roast sheep grazed. Staggered. Grazed.

  PART THREE

  Nineteen

  “Gar-eth – Jones!” he exclaimed to himself over and over.

  Verbal equivalent of a limp. Ideal marching tune to propel himself, when his own dead body lurched and shambled so.

  “Gar-eth – Jones!” Hup-one-two. Or in his case: huppity one-and-a-half.

  Must keep going. Get there. (Where? And where had he been? He forgot.)

  “Gar-eth –” How many times had he said those words? A hundred? Ten hundred? And what did they mean?

  Just then a black cloud rolled away from the sun in his mind, and he could think clearly for a while. So he halted.

  He was standing by the lamp post in the middle of the green, facing towards Green Street. The goat sat, chained, its Uncle Ho beard tickling the dingy grass. Milky cataracts blinded both its eyes, and most of the hair had fallen out of its sagging flanks, where a few open sores gleamed slickly. Otherwise it seemed content to munch meditatively on nothing in particular, going through the motions. Curved handles of its horns were two question marks of bone.

  The ducks on the pond were also on auto-pilot, swimming in circles like wind-up bath toys. Two looked plucked for the oven. The others, which had kept their feathers, could well have stuck in the oven for a while before being snatched out again hastily and dunked. Somehow one duck swam upside down, its orange webs wagging in the air. Semaphoring monotonously, “Turn me right way up!” Its nervous system had been scrambled worse than –