The Power

by Ian Watson

  Gar-eth – Jones’s!

  “Stop it,” he told himself. Now that he’d woken out of his Gar-eth trance he could think some new thoughts. He could remember the warhead exploding. Got up early, he did. Furnace doors opened to spill white-hot steel all over him. He wasn’t sure what happened afterwards except that he’d been very badly dead for a time.

  A half-life: that’s what he was living now. There’s an improvement, boyo. A few moments ago he’d been as badly off as that duck.

  As badly off as the other villagers. Putrescent puppets, that’s what. Rotten bodies with automaton brains. He’d been that, too. Wasn’t even a half-life.

  Was he genuinely better off now, all of a sudden? Much about “life” remained a mystery. He could feel loss, grief, resentment, and torment at what he was missing. He knew who the living ones were. They were Jack and Bert. Jeni and Nell and Mitzi. And Sheri Diamond. A disproportion of females. Why them? Why not himself? Bloody unfair.

  He should be able to remember what life was all about – except that it was a state of existence almost as far beyond his own as a human being is beyond a sheep. Difference between a live performance and a recording, eh? He felt he was brightening up. Yes, he was a sort of flexible recording – interactive – which could join in a duet with the living. After a fashion; if the living let him. Otherwise the disc, the tape merely repeated itself automatically, to itself. Some discs were scratched and warped worse than others. Some tapes were half blank, and tied in knots.

  How long had he been in his Gar-eth trance? How long since doomsday? Time appeared meaningless. He knew it remained light for hours on end, in a gloomy grey way, but he couldn’t recall noticing a sun. It also remained black for hours on end; he couldn’t recall moon or stars. Maybe days had passed, maybe weeks.

  Was he really getting well again? Might he even become alive? Like Jack and Jeni? Whatever “alive” had been.

  No. Or not yet. Something had cranked him up, filled him with missing purpose, to do…what? Why, to force Jeni to go to St Mary’s; that was it. (And something more, too.)

  Outside the wooden bus shelter three dead girls stood in mute vigil, juvenile dummies from a bombed shop window. The trio must be waiting for the school bus, which would never arrive, to take them off to…Churtington, yes, that’s where. First Years, by the size of them. Names? No idea. Their mostly hairless heads were covered in mouldy scabs and their exposed legs were suppurating with gummy ulcers. The eyes of one girl were of ground glass hooded in purple oozing lids. Nevertheless they’d put on their school uniforms: the cherry-red blouse, the serge navy skirt. That’s how he knew they were girls. The blouses were stained by slimy leakage from the slow rot of flesh beneath. Oddly, it was the girl who looked blind who had managed to put on both of her black shoes. Routine memories must have stirred in those three girls that morning. How long would they wait before trudging back home? All day, till the hour when the bus ought to have returned with them?

  That was how the dead mostly lived, unless the village hall committee stirred them up. Gave them a kind of physiotherapy, animated them, wound them up like faltering clocks. Just as he’d been stirred up by the committee from time to time, he recollected, though at the time he hadn’t understood; he’d only responded.

  The village hall committee! Anguish spiked his heart.

  He’d been animated….

  For a moment he peaked, so it seemed, into genuine full life, and marvelled as on a high mountain at a vista of memory, understanding – and terror. Oh my God, I was dead, what is operating me? Like a glove puppet. What is operating those schoolgirls?

  If his mind was a fruit machine like the one in the White Lion, then the jackpot line had just tumbled into place. However, this winning line wasn’t three golden bells. It was three grinning skulls, each with a snake sliding through the open jaws like an amorous tongue.

  Yes, he saw this clearly in his mind’s eye. Instead of the fruit machine playing a victory tune, the three skulls spoke:

  “And to her was given the key of the bottomless pit,” they chorused.

  “And she opened the bottomless pit.

  “And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it…

  “And shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them…

  “And shall not suffer their dead bodies to be put into graves.”

  And instead of coins clanking into the silver tray, shit spewed into it.

  A moment later the black cloud covered his inner sun again. But by now he knew what he had to do. Both the things he had to do.

  A tug at his ankle almost unbalanced him.

  The goat was munching the soiled tatters of his trouser leg, perhaps a flap of skin too, though he felt nothing, thought nothing about it. Tearing free indifferently, he stumbled on his way, past the three fouled mannequins of schoolgirls.

  The marching tune in his mind was different now.

  “Je-ni – Church!”

  Twenty

  The village committee were meeting at Jeni’s place. Of the six people who had survived the end of the world intact and entire, Bert Morris had not only been a member of the former village hall committee but also a parish councillor. Since the Parish was the last ditch authority when the final chips were down, by rights Bert had become chairman of the new committee.

  Its members were all too aware that a different, invisible authority ruled the village of the dead now. Something unbelievable, mischievous, foul; something which could animate the dead and could spin out their terminal dying interminably, and keep corpses abominably on their feet, rotting, shuffling, and mumbling. The village was plasticene, play-dough in its vicious idiot hands. A hell for its amusement.

  Melfort and surrounding farms was a necroquarium, an aquarium of living death. Some power had encapsulated the village, putting an unseen wall around it, and in the sky too a grey blank ceiling.

  Outside of Melfort and its environs, out in the burned, blasted, poisoned wasteland of nuclear winter, snow might be tumbling, icy radioactive gales could be howling over ruins and dead land. It could have been The Revelation come true.

  Sheri had pointed this out. She’d had to study that book of the Bible in school. The sun had probably become black, the heavens would have vanished like a scroll behind smoke, wormwood would have polluted the waters, the soil itself would have been sickled from the rock. Yet of the scorching with great heat, they’d experienced only half a second. Of the smoke of torment, barely a sniff. The village was locked as if with seven seals. They were closed away inside the village and surrounding land, within a grey fog. And Melfort had no need of the sun, neither of the moon.

  And the repulsive dead continued to amble about, or stand in the same familiar spot for hours, or loll about at home in foul armchairs, or lie in reeking beds. Never quite sleeping. Rarely eating much at all, drinking sparingly, if eating or drinking occurred to them.

  Oh yes, and Bess the labrador was alive, unlike other pet animals and deadstock which wandered around stunned or stayed still. Catatonic cats, dog derelicts, cadaver cows. Bess couldn’t be a member of the new committee, though.

  Amazingly so to the others, in spite of her son’s hideous murder the very night before the nuclear war, Sheri Diamond had rallied and pitched in on organizing – to the extent that they could – this foul farce of Melfort’s post-mortem existence. Sheri now saw Felix’s agonizingly sordid death as a preliminary tentacle from the evil power which had grabbed hold of the whole village as its plaything. Once it had tormented them all sufficiently to satisfy its taste, once it had tuned this torture of a false, mad survival to the point where they actually began to hope…then, Sheri suspected, would be the time when it laughed and hitched up its cloak to let in the cold and the darkness, the radiation, and the last despairing eternal end. Meanwhile, there was something in a person – a defiant, exploitable animal something, or spiritual something maybe – which made them try to continue. This was in her; that’s why it had let her surviv
e, the more to enjoy her final defeat, when the time came and the last drop had been squeezed. But she’d sure as hell go down fighting, as Ron would have done. At least she thought so. Hoped so. And hope could so easily be her betrayer. So easily.

  As Jeni sorted through the minutes of the last meeting, her mind was more on Sheri, wondering how fragile Sheri’s strength might be. Yes, Jeni had become minutes secretary. How chuffed Gareth, whom she had once known, would have been….

  Poor brave Sheri was ample proof of how the Power would play its games of clever cruelty. Perhaps it murdered and mutilated Felix just so that it could keep his mommy fully alive and fully aware.

  On the morning when the war began (and probably ended too) it hadn’t taken the few survivors too long to find each other. Jeni had met up with Nell, Mitzi, and Jack – and Bess – back in Green Street.

  There, Sheri had seen them. She’d been staying overnight at the Kuzkas, numb with grief, and had finally wept herself to sleep assisted by several large bourbons. She’d been roused by a zombie Mary Kuzka blundering into the bedroom, her nightdress stained with piss and diarrhoea, her blotched limbs jerking, her face a mess of dripping sores, only tufts of her hair remaining. The smell of her was foul.

  Sheri had screamed wildly but couldn’t wake herself up from the nightmare, since she was already wide awake. As Mary glugged at her incomprehensibly, Sheri fled past her to find Ed swaying in the corridor, his arms hanging flaccidly. Dressed in candy-striped shorts, his body also was striped with puffy, livid weals. His face twitched with palsy. A Staffordshire dog had tumbled from a shelf and lay smashed. A water-colour had fallen, cracking its glass.

  Still screaming, Sheri fled to Carol’s room and found the girl rocking feebly from side to side on her bed, wearing only rags of pyjamas. Her body was as palely pink and soft and drippy as a bad side of slaughtered pork. Except for her left arm; this was twisted in stiff rigor, a claw of a hand clutching a much-loved stuffed toy, a Snoopy hound.

  Carol’s eyes, like two burnt-out pearl light bulbs, fixed on Sheri. Goitrous cancers adorned her neck.

  “Gurgle, gurgle,” said the girl.

  Then Sheri had really gone nuts, till she met the others.

  And this, Jeni remembered, was how it had been by and large throughout the village. In their shaken, though un-demolished, houses, people had become week-old, month-old living corpses as if time had been tied into knots. Some had been sliced as though by flying glass, some crushed and battered as by collapsing masonry, or badly burnt. Many had been rotted by radiation, and then rotted rather more by death’s tenderizing, stinking, maggoty touch – this was true of all the living dead.

  But as Galileo remarked slyly a few hundred years before, once he’d recanted:

  Epour si muove. “Yes, it moves.”

  Yet the corpses moved. Dead, but they couldn’t lie down. Not in oblivion, not in peace. The best they could do in that line was slump exhaustedly, pretty much in a trance; not that there was anything pretty about it.

  For his part Bert Morris was already up and about collecting eggs in the deep litter hen house, prior to helping George with the morning milking. No caged battery birds for Farmer Vaux; he was even talking of going fully free-range for the sake of his hens almost as much as for the extra price premium. The world had lit up, and Bert had thrown himself into chaff and shavings. Briefly parts of the hen house became a microwave oven. Several birds flopped, sizzling, from perches. Others staggered with advanced foul pest. Then with a sickening twist came the sudden grey silence.

  Bert had rushed outside just in time to see George Vaux turn into instant-corpse, rotten with maggots. And begin to shuffle in a circle.

  Unable to help the boss – unable to think how, since the horror he saw made no sense at first – Bert had dashed the few hundred yards home, spying a broken window and slates dislodged from his cottage roof. Half way there, it had come to him that there must have been some kind of nuclear explosion such as Jeni Wallis was forever going on about, and quite right too after the latest terrifying news, though she did rather go over the top (pant, pant), and the country probably needed credible defences the way the world was these days (pant), but how could the bomb have been dropped and farm and buildings still be standing? – unless it was one of those neutron bombs (pant) which only destroyed people and other living things; but in that case how was everything so still, why was there nothing but a grey overcast?

  Back at Farm Cottage he’d found his missus Pauline in the kitchen, a mouldering carcass standing at the sink in soiled skirt and sweater, who responded to her hubby with the dribbly, reeking affection of a cow for its calf, so that he shrank back revolted.

  “Hel-p me, Ber-t,’’ she’d spluttered. “We’ll be laaaate for June’s wed-ding.”

  It was ten years since daughter Jane had been wed. Mastering his nausea and the pluckings of insanity, he’d guided her through into their little sitting room, sat her down, and tried to clean her up a bit, but carefully so as not to knock any parts off. In case the dead felt the cold, he put a rug over her.

  Afterwards he’d gone up the village and met Sheri Diamond who desperately needed comfort, almost more than he did himself; and then the others.

  Twenty-one

  It was early evening of that same war day when, led by window climbing Jack with a flashlight, they broke into a dismally dim White Lion to find Tom Tate at his usual post behind the bar.

  Tom’s head was glutinous, coated in dark jelly. His lips had fallen away, exposing long discoloured teeth in gums like blancmange. One eye was a pit of maggots like an eggcup of fisherman’s bait. One dangling, viscous hand had lost all the flesh from two fingers. The man wore slacks and shirt and carpet slippers, soiled by the corrupting of his body. Bulges pressed against the stained shirt as though his innards had broken loose through his belly.

  Eppursi muove. Still, he moved.

  Tom’s other, bleary eye regarded them, and he grunted like a wistful pig whose sty had been peered into.

  Fortunately the light was very poor, even later when they fetched candles from the pub kitchen, where Tom’s wife slouched confusedly in a state marginally worse than her husband. She smelled even fouler than him.

  Too much to expect a corpse to think of unlatching the door at opening time. Too much to expect him to find candles or light them. Too much to expect old Tom to serve any drinks without spilling most of them, though he looked disposed to try, if he could remember how. Jack had gently eased Tom aside to do the honours.

  By then they’d mostly come to terms with the truth that all the other villagers weren’t so much dying of the blast or burning or radiation that had seriously injured them, shocked them into near-idiocy, scrambled their nervous systems. The villagers were already dead, kaput, finito, had been corpses from the start. Yet they continued to exist in a foul hangover of their previous lives, a sick parody.

  Gareth, too, and Nancy; they’d left that pair at Old Roses looking like two papier mâché people who’d been left out in an acid rainfall.

  Andy was another of the living dead. But then, he had, already given up the struggle…in a way. Hadn’t he?

  As the evening wore on a few dead regulars wended their way clumsily into their habitual watering hole and stood or slumped about in a mockery of their usual custom, failing to drink, failing to talk, but present nevertheless. As was their odour.

  Half a dozen candles burned.

  Sheri had been nursing a Southern Comfort. “If these guys are all, well, continuing even though they’re all dead….” Her voice shook as much as her glass. “Do you s’pose…my Felix might have…come back to life? I got to know where he is! I got to see him now! He might be…saved.” The word sounded flat and foul as last week’s slop tray.

  Jack exchanged glances with the others.

  “I got to! Don’t you see? Whatever kinda shape he’s in. You’ve no right to –” She tailed off, then her jaw jutted. “To keep him from me.”

  Bert was
shaking his head firmly at Jack. But Jack grinned, ghastly.

  “Wey, Ha’ll just gan doonstairs an’ take a look, pet.”

  “He’s here?”

  “We put your poor bairn doon in the cellar, where it’s cool. Howay, Landlord, gee us some scissors.”

  “Scissors?” cried Sheri. “What are they for?”

  “He’s inside some plastic bags.”

  “Different…bags?”

  “Na, he was all in one piece. Aw, I’ll take that lemon slicer.” So saying, Jack snatched the knife and a candle and departed.

  “What…what was done to him?” Sheri asked. “I think I can take it. I guess I probably saw worse today.”

  “Better wait till Jack gets back,” advised Bert.

  Which wasn’t many minutes, though in the meantime Jeni experienced a mounting dread that Felix might be alive after all. Maybe the Power would have repaired the boy after a fashion by stuffing some guts back inside him. Down there in the beer cellar cupboard, wrapped in rubbish bags, Felix might have been whimpering for his mommy: a scarecrow corpse whom Sheri would still try to cuddle and console irrespective of his condition so that she would be like an ape mother at the zoo, insane and lost to them, toting her dead rotting bundle of baby, a corpse which might point a little pinkie at Jeni…No!

  In came Jack with knife and candle.

  “Na hinny, I a’s sorry to say your lad’s still deed. I a wad imagine that’s cos he died last noot, so he couldna benefit like everyone else. I a’m really sorry, Missus Diamond.”

  “You are telling the truth? Felix isn’t alive again but….”

  “Too fettled to be much of an athlete, ye mean? Na. We’ll bury him decent in the chorchyard – tomorrow or the day after, eh? Can’t leave him lyin’ doon there. Listen, Missus, what wes done to him wes his tripes wes aal drawn ot an’ tied in a knot roond his gizzard. That was nay human crime. It was done by whitever power’s in charge now, gettin’ its hand in afore havin’ its fun with everyone else.”