The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  No matter, Harry thought: let the sea smash everything, drag out the contents of the house and replace them with the sand and stones and weed it brought in. No matter, he mumbled to himself as he stared at the wreckage. Ynys Elyrch was a trompe l’oeil. From a distance it looked like a fine, handsome house: in reality, it was a piece of the beach, for the sea to requisition and rearrange as it liked. And Harry Clewe was a trompe l’oeil as well, he thought bitterly: he looked like a man, but he was a fossil, stiff and cold, with all the life crushed out of him . . . as dead as the ammonite on the mantelpiece.

  He waded from room to room. As well as the dead birds en­tangled in the weed and branches, Harry found some of them still alive: a gull, its wings broken or its legs wrapped up in plastic string, sculling around the hallway like an overwound clockwork toy; a curlew, lying in the wreckage and panting as though its waterlogged body would burst; a duck, garrotting itself with a length of fishing line. He knocked them dead with the ammonite he fetched from the living room mantelpiece and slung them to the dogs, which crunched them in their heavy jaws and swallowed them whole, beaks and feet and feathers and all.

  After the wildest of storms, the house was loud with hundreds of starlings which had blown inside for shelter. Carrion crows worked through the shattered rooms for all the wounded and dying things they could find.

  Another morning, there was a sheep in the flooded drawing room, matted and heaving, staring with wild, yellow eyes. Its front legs were broken. Harry slugged it with the ammonite. Replacing the fossil on the mantelpiece, he floated the sheep into the hall, manoeuvred it past the Bechstein jammed in the doorway, into the yard, where he gutted it with a very sharp knife. He fetched the axe from the Daimler and dismembered the carcase. The dogs watched and waited, and then they fell on the pieces, devouring them entirely. Soon, only the fleece and the head remained, which Harry dropped into the cellar.

  Such was the power of the sea. Such was the ferocity of the storm. Night after night, Harry Clewe lay in his bed, buried with Gog and Magog under the blankets, and felt the house shaking.

  Harry made himself comfortable upstairs. He carried sacks of potatoes up to the landing and all the tinned and dried food he could find in the kitchen. He cooked on a little gas stove. He had boxes of candles. The spare bedroom he’d used since Helen had gone, with its narrow bed and single armchair, had an open fireplace; now, working through the blustery hours of daylight, he gathered armfuls of driftwood, sawed it and split it in the yard and carried it up to the bathroom, where he stacked it in the deep, rusty bath. He would never run out of fuel, as long as the tides brought him more and more wood to cut and store, and there was plenty of kindling in the furniture that the sea had smashed. One evening, giggling at the irony of it, he prised the remains of the Whistler from the living room wall and took it upstairs, where, for the first and only time, the trompe l’oeil was a real fire, casting a warm glow on his face.

  All day and all night, the flames flickered in the spare bedroom. Harry and the dogs were snug up there, however the storm might roar, however the tide might drive into the house, however the rain might lash his window. He rescued a few books from the drawing room. He had his radio. He battened himself into the little room while the house trembled around him, while the sea swelled and surged at the foot of the stairs.

  Furthermore, Harry had a double-barrelled shotgun and boxes of cartridges. Squelching across the fields, he would pot at the wildfowl on the shore. And then the dogs, which could still swim strongly although they were old and arthritic, would retrieve whatever he’d hit. He gutted the birds in his ruined hallway and fed the entrails to Gog and Magog. In the evening, as the tide rolled over the fields and filled the house to a depth of four or five feet, Harry and the dogs were shut in the candle-lit bedroom. A fire blazed in the hearth; a teal turned golden brown on a spit across the flames; a pan of vegetables bubbled on the gas stove.

  Sometimes, when the tide was up in the daylight and Harry was in his room with dogs and fire and radio, he shot from the landing window. And then Gog and Magog would tumble downstairs, dive headlong into the water sloshing in the hallway and swim powerfully through the front door to retrieve the prize. For this reason, Harry left the gun loaded, leaning on the landing, ready for the rafts of duck which floated around the house.

  Thus he was self-sufficient. For him, the flooding wasn’t so terrible. He’d been alone for years, a recluse, avoiding other people as much as possible; now the floods made it easier to avoid them. He was rude to the coastguards when they came back in their Land-Rover. When the yellow rescue helicopter from Anglesey hovered overhead, churning the water and lashing the fields, he would flap his hand and gesture with his hook as though the huge, deafening machine were no more than an irritating insect, a gigantic horsefly or a hornet, until it swerved away without bothering to try and land.

  Harry had everything he wanted. He didn’t want people. The floods kept them away.

  Chapter Three

  No, not everyone. Two sorts of people came onto Harry Clewe’s land: beachcombers and windsurfers. He tried hard to discourage them.

  After the big tides had gone down and the fields were drained, the beachcombers wandered along the foreshore. They were families from inland who wanted an exhilarating day out with their children and dogs on a blustery beach, who sifted through the wreckage to see what they could find; or else they’d come simply to see the damage to other people’s property. Spotting them from the landing window, as they struggled to pull the grandfather clock out of the ditch or tugged his dining-room chairs from the mud, Harry would stumble downstairs and hurry outside, urging his dogs to go with him.

  ‘This is still my land!’ he would roar. ‘And this is still my house, as long as I choose to stay in it!’ Waving his hook at the wreckage of spars and furniture and washed-up rubbish, he would shout, ‘All these things are mine, so long as they’re on my land! Bugger off and don’t come back! Or the dogs’ll have you!’

  Gog and Magog would lunge forward, bristling and huge, so that the beachcombers scurried away.

  The windsurfers were harder to see off. The first time they came, Harry was so startled by the whoosh and crackle outside his window, by the flash of a brightly coloured sail, that he leaped for his gun, imagining for a moment that some great, exotic bird was swooping around the house. He stared and stared. The dogs barked excitedly. The craft passed close to the building, the blue and yellow and purple sails rippling like flags, the boards cutting through the water like sharks; muscular figures gripped and crouched and flexed, gleaming black in skin-tight rubber suits. And, seeing the man at the upstairs window of the flooded house, the windsurfers would wave and grin at him.

  Harry stared from his landing. The windsurfers were trespassing on his property. But he couldn’t go out and chase them off, with the water so deep and rough around the house, and there was nothing the hounds could do. Flinging open the window, he shook his hook. Feebly, he threw potatoes as the windsurfers rushed past, but the potatoes splashed into the water. The windsurfers shrieked with laughter, scudding as close as they could to draw his fire, ducking easily, taunting him with grins and shouts.

  One of them, a blond youth controlling a gorgeous purple sail, caught one of the potatoes in his outstretched hand, and, in one athletic movement, without losing his balance or speed or direction, hurled it back so hard that it burst on the wall of the house, spat­tering Harry with juice. Then he shouted an obscenity that Harry had never heard before and hurtled away.

  So the windsurfers came back again and again, to enjoy the sport and the spectacle of the bilious, wild-haired man throwing potatoes from his window. Harry tried to ignore them. He bat­tened himself into the upstairs room with his dogs in front of the fire.

  One day in the middle of November, when the tide had gone out and left the foreshore littered with weed, Harry spotted another trespasser on his land: a slim figure in a baggy jacket and jeans and black Wellington boots, bending swiftl
y to the things that the sea had left behind.

  ‘A job for you two!’ he said, and with his foot he woke the dogs, which were snoring very noisily on the fireside rug. They went downstairs together, across the rock pools in the hallway, squeezed past the piano which was still jammed in the front door and stepped out of the house. He kept the dogs close, holding them as tightly as he could on short chains, thinking to approach quietly and give the trespasser a surprise. The land was a mess of uprooted hedges, mounds of driftwood and seaweed, flapping black plastic bags, the littered contents of the downstairs rooms he’d abandoned to the tides. Around and about, Harry saw the potatoes he’d thrown out of the windows.

  Within twenty yards of the preoccupied figure, Gog and Magog caught an unfamiliar scent and broke into a shambling run. Up to their bellies in mud, they gathered speed, dragging Harry with them. He shouted, outweighed, out of control, and the dogs snarled with a high-pitched, gurgling snarl as they strained on their chains. As a flock of starlings materialised from the weed and whirled noisily into the air, the figure on the foreshore straightened up, turned and stared in horror and started to run as well.

  There was a chase across the beach, the trespasser dropping handfuls of seashells and pebbles, the man and the dogs in breath­less pursuit. The four of them stumbled and slipped on the wet rocks. Gog and Magog, despite their age and weight, were nim­blest. When the beachcomber cried out and tripped, sprawling head­long in a deep pool, the dogs were there at once, snarling horribly, tearing at clothes and boots to make a wounding bite.

  Harry tugged with all his strength to hold the dogs off. He seized their collars with hand and hook and heaved them away from the figure in the rock pool, who was huddled face down in the knee-deep water to keep away from the dogs’ teeth. Gog and Magog strained to close again, foaming, wild-eyed, until Harry knocked their heads together and they stood still.

  Scrambling upright, spluttering mouthfuls of water, the beach­comber turned towards him. For a second, Harry saw a pale, young, girlish face, bleary with tears; long, dripping, blonde hair; bleed­ing, white fingers where either the dogs must have bitten or the skin had been torn by the barnacled rocks . . . and then, as he restrained the animals by holding their collars, while they lunged again with all their weight, the beachcomber flicked the bleeding hands at Harry’s face and turned to run off, clumsy in the big black boots and waterlogged jacket, loose-limbed like a girl.

  Harry hung on to the dogs. Heaving with breathlessness, he watched the figure stumble away. At last, when he could hold the animals no longer, he let them go; too late to give chase, they sniffed at the rocks where the beachcomber had fallen. Harry knelt at the pool. There was blood on the surface of the water, which was gone as soon as the dogs splashed in.

  ‘Well done, you ugly buggers!’ he whispered. ‘The little bitch won’t come back after that!’

  He returned to the house, calling the dogs with him. They were delighted with the chase; they fanned their tails in the keen afternoon air and grinned enormously. Harry was pleased too. He went upstairs and sat by the fire, brewed some tea, listened to a play on the radio and watched from his window as the tide crossed the fields and surrounded the house.

  As dusk fell, he heard the waves breaking into the hallway. All evening, in the flame-lit room, he heard the sea smashing at the foot of the stairs. In the darkness of night, the storm blasted the house so hard that the walls and the chimney seemed to quiver. The gale shrieked. The flood tide crashed and sucked. But the man and the dogs were warm and dry.

  The flames burned low. It was time for bed. Harry got up to fetch some wood, to fuel the fire for warmth and comfort through the night. Shielding his candle from the gale that howled up the stairs from the gutted hallway, he crossed the landing to the bath­room, where the wood was stacked.

  There he paused to look at himself in the shaving mirror. His face was deeply lined, burned by the salt wind, reddened from all the years he’d spent on the Ozymandias with Lizzie and then Zoë, his years at Ynys Elyrch with Helen and since Helen had gone. He peered closer. He rubbed at a smear of mud on the bridge of his nose. No, not mud . . .

  Holding the candle to the mirror, he peered closer still. His cheeks and forehead were spattered with blood. He puzzled for a moment before he remembered the trespasser that the dogs had chased, who’d flicked at him with bleeding fingers before running off. He rinsed the blood from his face, shuddering with distaste to think that it had been there all afternoon and evening. Satisfied at last that he was clean, he picked up an armful of wood from the bath, crossed the landing to the spare room, built up the fire and climbed into bed.

  For a little while, as he huddled under the blankets and squeezed his eyes shut, the beachcomber’s face seemed to swim before him: distressed, angry, smeared with tears.

  ‘Bitch,’ he whispered. He said it again. He rubbed at his cheeks, where the blood had spattered and dried, then he pulled the dogs closer and fell asleep.

  A few days later, Harry was watching the fields from his bedroom.

  He moved to the landing, opened the window as quietly as he could and reached for his shotgun, which was leaning nearby. It was already loaded. To aim more steadily, he knelt on the floor and rested the barrel on the windowsill. He squinted along it at a pair of shelduck which were paddling in the wet mud: handsome and plump, gleaming white and black and rufous in the low, winter sunshine, they waddled close to the house, slapping with their broad webbed feet and feeding in the pools of water. Sometimes the drake, a bigger bird with a knob on its red beak, stood very upright, gooselike, and scanned the field for danger.

  Harry concentrated hard: the drake would be a fine dinner for him. He snuggled the butt of the gun more comfortably into his shoulder. As the shelduck moved, he moved the barrel on the window­sill so that the bird was fixed at the focus of his vision. He took a slow, deep breath and squeezed his finger on the trigger.

  Too late. Suddenly the ducks were up, taking to the air after a pattering run on the waterlogged field. With short, powerful wing­beats, they made for the shore and disappeared. Something had startled them into flight.

  Harry remained kneeling on the landing, squinting down the barrel of the shotgun. He swore viciously with all the breath he’d been holding in his chest. The dogs, which had been sitting behind him and staring out of the window as well, stood up and started to pace about, slobbering horribly. They knew what the noise and the smell of the gun meant, that the man would send them downstairs and into the fields for some flapping, floundering, wounded thing; and they knew they must bring it back alive and drop it into the man’s hands or else they’d have their heads knocked together. But this time, after so much breathless waiting, there was no deafening explosion, no cloud of acrid smoke. So the dogs paced backwards and forwards. Harry peered down the gun barrel, training it over his field of vision to try and see what had disturbed the ducks.

  He saw a figure in a baggy jacket and jeans and black Wellington boots, splashing along the foreshore.

  Harry swore again. He trained the gun on the approaching figure, just as he’d trained it on the duck. Moving the barrel as the figure moved, he snuggled the butt into his shoulder, held his breath and tightened his finger on the trigger. The figure came closer, pushed through the wreckage of the hedge, stepped over the rubbled wall, and with a short run and a jump, sprang easily across the flooded ditch . . . paused to look at the grandfather clock, stopped to turn over a couple of dining room chairs which were stuck in the mud, and walked towards the front of the house.

  Harry locked the gun on a head of flopping blonde hair. His sights wavered on a small, pale face. Suddenly finding that his chest was hurting with holding his breath so hard, and that his finger was crooked on the trigger, he swore again, scrambled to his feet and leaned the gun in its usual corner. He turned to the dogs, which were waiting with an unbearable tension for the great bang.

  ‘Don’t just stand there!’ he hissed at them. ‘Send her off, you bu
ggers! Go on! Send her off again!’

  Shoulder to shoulder, the dogs careered downstairs. They cleared the hallway in a single leap, fought for a few seconds to squeeze past the piano and then hurtled into the yard. Harry remained on the landing. He knelt at the window to keep out of sight and he watched. His heart thudded with excitement.

  He smiled to see how the trespasser looked up and stared as the great, black dogs came splashing through the front door of the house. He smiled to hear their deep, grunting barks. He grinned when he saw the trespasser’s face go paler still, the mouth hang open and the eyes widen as the dogs lumbered closer.

  But, to his own surprise, the figure didn’t run away. As the dogs charged closer and closer, the trespasser knelt in the mud, pulled something from the pockets of the baggy jacket and met the slavering animals with a pair of the biggest and meatiest bones they’d seen since Harry had butchered the sheep he’d found in his living room. Gog and Magog slithered to a halt. They paused for a second, sniffed and hesitated and leaned forward to take the bones very gently in their mouths. Then, as the dogs flopped down in the wet grass, crunching the bones so loudly that Harry could hear them splintering as he peered from the landing window, the figure knelt closer still and fondled the animals’ ears. They consented to this, growling softly.

  Harry was astonished. In all the time he’d had the dogs, no one had stroked them like that. He himself was increasingly wary, now that they were as short-tempered as he was, although he’d fed them every day for the past ten years. He was rough with them; he controlled them with his voice, with his boots and stick, and by knocking their massive heads together. But he sometimes felt, by the look in their eyes and the way they bared their teeth, that their tolerance of him was a fragile, finite thing. So he stared from the upstairs window, open-mouthed with amazement, as Gog and Magog lay on the field and devoured the bones they’d been given, as the trespasser knelt between them and felt at their shaggy, black ears.