Fzz, in Eliot’s ear. “What in blue blazes are they blathering about?”
“I’m going ahead with the recitation,” Eliot told Command. “It’s now or never.” He cleared his throat and opened the channel again. “My friends, this piece is called What The Thunder Said. After the...”
The Martian voice interrupted immediately. “No! No! We do not want this piece. We want your earlier piece, Middlemarch.”
Fzz. “Oh,” said Control. “Bloody hell.”
With a discombobulating internal vertigo, as if part of his mind were falling down the mineshaft of an inevitability he had foreseen but not understood, Eliot understood what was happening. “My friends,” he said, “there has been a misunderstanding.” He realised he hadn’t routed his words through the loudspeakers, so he switched channels, and said again: “Martian friends, allies. There has been a misunderstanding, I fear. Middlemarch was written by George Eliot. I am Thomas Stearns Eliot.”
“Bring us George,” commanded the Martian voice, instantly.
“That will not be possible, I’m afraid,” said Thomas, with a nervous little laugh that rolled like cannon fire around the arena. “She, alas, is dead. I, however, am alive, and keen to read you my new poem, which I trust you will find...”
“Dead,” said the Martian voice, and froze Eliot’s words in his throat.
Fzz. “They’re functionally immortal,” gabbled Control in Eliot’s ear. “Unless killed. They bud off new versions of themselves. They don’t understand how foolish it is to ask for a writer who died half a century ago.”
“I’m going to read them my poem,” said Eliot, determinedly.
“Middlemarch contains the Key to All Mythologies,” said the Martian voice. “And we require that key. You, Thomas Stearn, are budded from George, that you can give us this key?”
“My friends,” said Eliot. Sweat was tickling his cheeks and neck. His heart was pipping along at a terrific rate. “This is not how the generations follow one another for human beings. I am not budded off, or indeed in any way related to, George Eliot. In point of fact, George Eliot was not her real name. She was called Marian Evans, and only wrote under Eliot as a nom de plume.”
“Plume?” repeated the Martian voice. “Pluuume?”
“I am not a novelist, and have no interest in reciting her work, or her satirical representation of Casaubon’s project for a key to all mythologies. But I am a poet, whose work may interest you...”
The quality of vibrations under Eliot’s feet changed.
“Deceit,” blared the Martian voice in its uncanny monotone. “Lies. This is not the Eliot we were promised. Here is no key.”
“Permit me to disagree, if I may,” said Eliot, his voice higher by a semitone and much more rapid. “In an essay I have recently published I make the argument that, although in prose one may be legitimately occupied with ideals, in the writing of verse one can deal only with actuality, and...”
Fzz went the communicator in his ear. “Run you fool,” yelled Control. “They’re firing.”
Eliot looked to his left. Heat rays were targeting the Imperial Troops, kicking up alarming gouts of dust and slicing right through the more lightly armoured cars. His ability to process what he was seeing stalled, stuttered, and then he saw clearly. Everything was ending. He saw the agony of the honour guard in that stony place, saw their faces distort behind the visors of their helmets and could easily imagine the shouting and the crying. There was a boom loud enough to be heard even inside Eliot’s helmet and a shuddering reverberation that almost knocked his legs from under him. Around him was chaos.
British Imperial troops were returning fire and trying to fall back. Behind the line of columns were sandbagged positions, and a dug-in heavy gun, and once out of the wide dish of the arena itself the landscape became more defensible. But the people inside the crater were horribly vulnerable to Martian fire.
The sound of a gigantic tuning fork sang through Eliot’s speakers, and resolved itself into a long-drawn-out ulla screech. Terror of lamentation. He picked up one heavily booted foot and clomped it down again. Then he did the same with the other foot. Moved his left, moved his right, a lumbering run towards the edge where the pillars were. To his right he saw the hooded hordes of Martian machines swarming round, one or two stumbling in the cracked earth as Earthly weaponry found its target. But still they came. Heat rays played over the ground, cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air. The suit was heavy but the Martian gravity was lighter than Earth’s, and his destination was ringed by an ever nearer horizon. He told himself I shall make it. Gasping and struggling. I shall. I shall, I shall. Chaos everywhere, screaming audible through his feed, falling towers—Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London, flashed through his memory—unreal. All of Mars is falling down falling down falling down. Le Prince d’Arcadia à la tour abolie. Fragments sheared from the masonry leapt and danced, as if possessed by mad spirits. Eliot was almost there—almost at the lip of the arena. He hurdled the eviscerated corpse of a human soldier, jinked around a toppled chunk of masonry, gasped for air, and told himself, I shall do it, I shall. And then, turning his head just a little, he saw a heat ray cutting into the dust like a plough, and sweeping in its inevitable path towards him. It must intersect with his struggling fragile form in moments, and he had time only to think, as to the possibility of him making it to cover, and with a sinking sense of the inevitability of his fate: I shan’t. I shan’t. I shan’t.
The Menagerie
a true history, by
EMMA BEEBY
COIRA CHECKED THE lane then waved the stuffed bear toy at the little girl across the street. The lane had to be empty; Newhaven village was small enough that one grown-up seeing them could ruin everything.
She’d never liked this part of the trade. Fear was the only way, though. Every time she saw the Royal Articulated Hussars scratching up the hillon those metal spider legs, she was sure they were coming for her. Fear was her only protection.
She beckoned the girl. Her name was Daisy and lookedabout as threatening as one. She had maybe six years to Coira’s ten.
“Ah’ve no got all day!” Coira said, and tugged Daisy into the lane.
Daisy quailed, but followed. Coira stopped where the late afternoon light fell helpfully through a break between the fishermen’s houses. Daisy needed to see what she was paying for. Coira set the bear on the ground. It flopped onto its side with a quiet clunk.
“K-Kenny said y-you can make it dance.” Daisy mumbled.
Kenny. That wee shite. That was twice now. Still, she needed the business. Her family needed it.
“Aye. Ah can make him do a Highland Fling, if ye like.”
Unseen by Daisy, Coira slid the smooth metal ‘switcher’, as she called it, out of one pocket. It sat like a cool pebble in her palm, apart from the bump in its centre. She pointed it at the bear on the ground. Her other hand she waved like she’d seen a street magician do once on the Edinburgh High Street. She wondered if anyone else had noticed his boy picking the pockets of the audience.
The bear righted itself. Daisy gasped, then stepped back in fright as the bear got to its feet and twirled on the spot before it flopped down and fell still. Coira grabbed the girl’s arm to stop her running, expecting this.
Then came ‘the look’. It was always the same. Wonder and worship with a hundred questions behind it, which only made the next part worse.
“How—” Daisy didn’t get to finish.
“—Let’s see yer own bear, then. Need to check it’s up to dancing before we agrees a price.” Coira thrust out a hand for the girl’s toy bear, which Daisy produced from her pinafore pocket. It was missing an eye. They were always missing something. Coira pretended to consider it, like maybe she’d changed her mind.
“Can ye do it?” Daisy’s eyes were hopeful.
Coira didn’t answer, waiting.
“I got sixpence and a ha’penny.” A pause. “And my pieces, for the whole week? Ma puts honey on
them.”
Coira grinned. Good money, and a week of sandwiches.
“Aye. He can dance.” She turned her fierce glare at the girl, gripping her arm again.
“But ye have to promise. There’s rules. Kenny mention those?”
“Aye. I cannae let anyone else play wi’ him. An I won’t! I promise!”
“No, the rule is ye cannae let anyone else see it. No one. No yer ma, no yer pa, nobody. No even Kenny. Do ye ken what happens if you break that promise, Daisy?”
Daisy nodded, but Coira never took it on faith. She pointed her switcher and waved her other hand again, a more violent action this time, then watched the girl’s eyes go wide.
The bear on the ground shook and started issuing thick black smoke. There was a crack and the bear’s legs shot off its body, followed by its head which jumped straight up. Coira caught it and thrust it in the girl’s face.
“This is what happens if ye break yer promise. An’ I can dae this fae anywhere.”
Daisy’s eyes filled with tears. Good.
“Ye understand?” said Coira.
Daisy wiped away a tear and gave Coira a solemn nod, her eyes never leaving the decapitated bear head.
BRODIE WAS WHERE Coira had left him at the other end of the lane, asleep and curled up on her little wooden pull-along cart. He could sleep anywhere. She envied that; she found it so hard to sleep. Coira knelt and put a hand on his dark messy mop of hair. He stirred and almost immediately reached his little hands out to grab the bear, now reassembled.
“Dunk Duncan!” Brodie squealed, hugging the bear.
She’d made the bear for his second birthday, almost a year ago now. It got his name because it fell down every few steps, much like Duncan, the village drunk who near lives in their parent’s pub. Brodie had laughed whenever he fell down, almost as much as he laughed at the bear right now.
Coira grinned. “Duncan did his dance very well, but he wants tae go hame now.”
“Time go hame, Duncan. No mair dancin!” he scolded the bear.
She lifted the handle, and tugged the cart into motion, Brodie now sat cross-legged, cradling the bear. She headed for the street past the harbour, avoiding the hill for now. The tide was out, and on the beach children were combing for crabs and pennies. She looked away; she never went to the beach if she could help it anymore.
Coira turned the cart onto the hill and looked at her destination. The Whale’s Heid public house stood at the top of the Whale Brae, which rose right up from the harbour, short but steep. Supposedly a huge whale got beached on it once, though Coira no longer believed this; the pub’s main draw was a whale bone supposedly from that whale, which hung from the ceiling, but Coira knew Pa bought it from the City museum when it closed. The pub’s view of the Firth of Forth was rivalled only by the six flats stacked in the tenement above, though the only people who lived there now were Coira and her family.
Not far away, Coira heard the train announce its arrival at the Newhaven station, emerging from the tunnel underneath the hill. Her grandfather had helped make that railway as a young man, blasted through the hill, as he’d often told her. The train used to take people into the city, before, when there was work. Now it brought the Hussars for evening curfew.
Coira entered the tenement stair; the stone kept the air cool. She pulled her shawl higher over her shoulders.
“That you, Coira, hen?” her Ma’s voice called from the pub side door. Coira wouldn’t get away with going upstairs without seeing her.
Brodie leapt off the wagon and pulled Coira into the pub, which, with the sole exception of Duncan, was predictably empty. Brodie ran straight to Ma’s arms, waving Duncan’s stuffed namesake.
“Dunk went dancin!” he shouted, delighted to tell Coira’s secrets.
“Did he, aye?” Ma swept him into her arms. “What else did he do?”
“He... he do spinning an’ his head fwies!”
“Always got a tale, this one, just like my Coira,” Ma said, giving Coira a fond look.
Ma must have a sherry in her. Coira could tell she was going to tell the story. Again.
“You ken yer sister saw a giant crab when she were a wee lassie? Aye. You heard this one, Duncan?” she shouted at Duncan, at the end of the bar. Sherry for him, too, Coira noted.
“Naw,” slurred Duncan.
He had. At least twice. Coira sighed.
“She was at the beach, looking for crabs, it was gettin’ late, ken, but she could never be reasoned wi’, that one, even at three.
“Francis and I lost sight of her. I thought she’d drooned. I was screamin’ an’ ballin’; what a state I was in! Francis ran to the Port Free House and roused every man, but soon as they set foot on sand and there she was!” In full flow, Ma turned her attention back to Brodie. “Tellin’ the funniest tale of a giant crab catching her and waving her in the air!”
Pa walked in, filling his pipe. Hearing the last of this, he cast Coira a sympathetic glance.
“I remember it wis the day after they Martians landed in England. She must’ve heard a tale fae one o’ the other bairns.”
Coira nodded. That made sense.
“What did ye say tae it again, Coira?”
“I telt it, ‘put me doon!’” Coira said and waved her finger with all the expected emphasis.
Ma laughed. She probably wouldn’t be laughing if she knew that same giant metal crab was two floors above her head.
Coira didn’t know why she’d gone back, all those years later. The memory had stayed fresh and frightening. The deep mud behind the harbour mouth she wasn’t supposed to play beside had sloped straight down into deep cold salt water, even at low tide. She’d thought she’d found a sunken cave: a perfectly round entrance just under the water. She’d seen a glint in the water, and reached down a cautious little hand... then that claw shot out, clamping her by the waist, before the thing itself emerged from the water; a silver crab was a fair description, but it was no crab. Coira had been as fascinated as she was annoyed at being picked up like this, but not afraid. Not then. That came later, in the nightmares.
“So typical of ye, to gie it a tellin’!” Ma laughed.
Coira had never understood why it let her go.
“Aye.” Pa chimed in. “Who needs the British army when ye’ve got fearless Coira.”
Coira held out Daisy’s sixpence. Anything to change the subject.
“Found this on the Brae.”
“A sixpence!” Her father reached for it, wondering.
“Is that true, Coira? You find so many coins,” her Pa asked, stern.
“Well... Brodie saw it, but ah picked it up,” Coira said, as if that was the worst of it.
“Clever laddie!” Ma smiled at Brodie, convinced.
Brodie yawned. That was her cue.
“Coira, our meetin’s startin—”
“—Ah’ll get his supper.” Coira said. There was never any argument.
COIRA, HOLDING BRODIE’S hand, was almost a flight up when she heard muffled voices below.
“Ah’ve got them, Francis!”
“Not here, Doug. The stair.” The pub door flew open and the two men stopped below. Coira paused. She was curious at what her parents were planning this time. The Hussars called them ‘seditionists’, she’d heard her Pa say. Coira wasn’t sure what that meant. She’d worked out enough, even though she wasn’t allowed at meetings. She used to think they came to drink for free and shout about the Hussars and the Prime Minister. One night they all went out after curfew, and the next day she’d heard the Hussars barracks had been set on fire. After that, the Hussars moved elsewhere, using the train to return each night and leave in the morning. Her parents had acted as if this wasn’t interesting news. She’d had enough experience of lying by then to know what that meant.
Doug, an old fisherman, held a wooden box open with what looked like old yellow-brown rolls of paper inside. There was writing on them Coira couldn’t make out, and a few were gunky with something that reminded her
of her Gran’s broth.
“Ah got two mair boxes. A bit auld, but they’ll dae the job.” Dougie grinned.
Pa’s voice was almost a whisper.
“This... this is mair than enough for tonight. We could blast a—”
“Pa! I ca see woo!” Brodie was leaning though a gap in the banister rail, waving.
“Coira! Get him out of here! I dinnae want to see either of you here!” The rage was instant, Pa’s face red.
Brodie wailed. Coira lifted him, though he was really too heavy for her now. “Yes, Pa.”
She wasn’t going to start a fight. Let them go set something on fire if they wanted. She had her own work to finish tonight.
The kitchen was above the pub and Coira could hear shouting. More of the group were there now, sounding excited. Brodie picked at his stovies until, with no prompting, he announced, “s’bed time” and stood, shuffling his feet. Coira sighed.
She lifted the lamp and led the way, but pulled him past their room. His little face frowned, then he broke in to a wide smile, then a run. He knew where she was taking him.
“Come oan!”
“Shh, Brodie!”
Up a flight and into the room she’d told her parents was a play room. It was a dark, uninviting space. Its only furnishings were an old school desk (which, along with a few books, had been stolen by her Pa for her when the school closed down); a moth-eaten rug, and a makeshift cot bed in the corner for Brodie. That was the only part of the room not caked in dust. It had no window, for good reason.
Coira slid the cot to the side to get to the hidden panel, and slid it aside. Brodie jumped on the spot, impatient.
He ran inside. A green glow filled the space. Then another; then a third, higher up. The room rose from the second floor into the third and straight up into the attic, through the large crude holes she’d cut into the floors above. Now it was near thirty feet high and almost as wide. She’d used some of the leftover floorboards to board up the windows and construct a workbench and shelves to make and store her creations. The rest were piled against the wall by the panel. The back of the room had her pile of parts which glittered in the low light. Still the room was only just big enough.
Scarlet Traces: An Anthology Based on H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds Page 9