Shielding his head, Ransom stepped through the chancel. In the nave the falls of red-hot charcoal were setting fire to the prayer books in the pews. Burning petrol covered the lectern and altar, and flared from a pool around the base of the pulpit.
Slumped inside the pulpit was the broken figure of Jonas, his arms and legs sticking out loosely. Propped on to his temples was a strange head-piece, the severed head of a huge fish taken from the tank of dead sturgeons at the zoo. As Ransom pulled Jonas from the burning pulpit the fish’s head, a grotesque silver mitre, toppled forwards into his arms. Embedded between his eyes was the metal barb of the gaff Ransom had seen in the bo’sun’s hand outside the church.
Ransom dragged the barely conscious man through the vestry and out into the cool air of the churchyard. He laid him down among the gravestones and wiped the fish’s blood off his bruised forehead. Jonas stirred, his chest moving again. Suddenly he started upright from the grave. His long hand grasped Ransom’s arm. His mouth worked in a silent gabble, as if discharging the whole of his sermon, his eyes staring at Ransom in the light of the consumed church.
Then he subsided into a deep sleep, his lungs seizing at the air. As his men returned along the street Ransom left him and slipped away into the darkness.
FOR THE NEXT hour, as Ransom watched from an upstairs window, gunfire sounded intermittently through the streets. At times it would retreat between the houses, then come back almost to his doorstep. Once there were shouts in the avenue, and Ransom saw a man with a rifle running by at full speed, and a group of men in front of the Reverend Johnstone’s house driving cars up on to the pavement to form a barricade. Then the noise subsided again.
It was during one of these intermissions, when Ransom went downstairs to sleep, that the two houses, across the road were set on fire. The light illuminated the whole avenue, and flared through the windows of the lounge, throwing Ransom’s shadow on to the wall behind him. Two of Johnstone’s men approached as the flames burned through the roofs, and then backed away from the heat.
From the window, Ransom caught a glimpse in the brilliant light of a squat, hunch-backed figure standing at the edge of the lawn between the houses, almost within the circle of flames. Pacing up and down beside it was a lithe cat-like creature on a leash, with a small darting head and the movements of a nervous whip.
16
THE TERMINAL ZONE
AT NOON, when Ransom woke, he heard the sounds of two army trucks farther down the road. The streets were deserted again. Diagonally across the avenue were the remains of two houses burned down during the night, the charred roof-beams jutting from the walls. Exhausted by the previous day, Ransom lay on the settee, listening to the trucks reverse and park. Even these distant sounds brought with them a threat of aimless violence, as if the whole landscape were about to fall apart again. Rallying himself with an effort, Ransom went into the kitchen and made himself some coffee. He leaned on the taps as the water leaked slowly into the percolator, and looked through the window at the embers still smoking on the ground, wondering how long it would be before his own house caught fire.
When he went out five minutes later one of the trucks was standing outside the Reverend Johnstone’s drive. Hamilton was now a terminal zone, its deserted watch-towers and roof-tops turning white under the cloudless sky. The lines of cars, some with their windows smashed, lay along both sides of the road, covered by the ash settling from the refuse fires. The dried trees and hedges splintered in the hot sky. The smoke from the city was heavier, and a dozen plumes rose into the air.
The truck by the minister’s house was loaded to its roof with camping equipment and crates of supplies. A shot-gun rested on the seats by the tail-board. Edward Gunn, the owner of the hardware store and Johnstone’s senior verger, knelt by the rear bumper, shackling on a small two-wheeled water trailer. He nodded at Ransom and picked up the shot-gun, pocketing his keys as he walked back to the drive.
‘There goes another one.’ He pointed into the haze towards the city. Billows of white smoke mushroomed over the roofs, followed by tips of eager flame, almost colourless in the hot sunlight. There was no sound, but to Ransom the burning house seemed only a few hundred yards away.
‘Are you leaving?’ Ransom asked.
Gunn nodded. ‘You’d better come too, doctor.’ His beaked face was thin and grey, like a tired bird’s. ‘There’s nothing to stay for now. Last night they burned down the church.’
‘I saw that,’ Ransom said. ‘Some kind of madness was running through the fishermen. Perhaps it was an accident.’
‘No, doctor. They heard the minister’s sermon yesterday. That’s all they left for us.’ He indicated the second truck being made ready for departure farther up the drive. Behind it a large motor-launch sat on a trailer. Fastened amidships was the battered frame of the Reverend Johnstone’s pulpit, its charred rail rising into the air like the launch’s bridge. Frances and Vanessa Johnstone, the minister’s younger daughters, stood beside it.
Their father emerged from the house, a clean surplice over one arm. He wore knee-length rubber boots and a tweed fishing jacket with elbow patches. Climbing up into the pulpit on the launch, he looked as if he were about to set off on an arduous missionary expedition through some river-infested wilderness. Over his shoulder he bellowed: ‘All right, everybody! All aboard!’
Julia, the eldest of the three daughters, stepped up behind Ransom. ‘Father’s becoming the old sea-dog already.’ She took Ransom’s arm, smiling at him with her grey eyes. ‘What about you, Charles? Are you coming with us? Father,’ she called out, ‘don’t you think we should have a ship’s doctor with us?’
Preoccupied, Johnstone climbed down from the launch and went off indoors. ‘Sybil, time to go!’ Standing in the hall, he gazed around the house, at the shrouded furniture and the books stacked on the floor. An expression of numbness and uncertainty came over his strong face. Then he murmured something to himself and seemed to rally.
Ransom waited by the launch, Julia’s hand still on his arm. Vanessa Johnstone was watching him with distant eyes, her pale hands hidden in the pockets of her slacks. Despite the sunlight on her face, her skin remained as white as it had been during the most critical days of her long illness four years earlier. She wore her black hair undressed to her shoulders, the single parting emphasizing the oval symmetry of her face. The metal support on her right leg was hidden by her slacks.
Looking at her for this last moment, Ransom was aware of the unstated links between himself and this crippled young woman. The blanched features of her face, from which pain and memories alike had been washed away, as if all time had been drained from them, seemed to Ransom like an image from his own future. For Vanessa, like himself, the past no longer existed. From now on they would both have to create their own sense of time out of the landscape emerging around them.
Ransom helped her over the tailboard of the truck.
‘Goodbye, Charles,’ she said. ‘I hope everything is all right with you.’
‘Don’t write me off yet. I’ll be following you down there.’
‘Of course.’ Vanessa settled herself. ‘I saw you out on the lake the other day.’
‘It’s almost gone. I wish you could have come with me, Vanessa.’
‘Perhaps I will one day. Take Philip Jordan with you when you go, Charles. He won’t understand that he can’t stay.’
‘If he’ll come. By the way, do you know the captain of the fishermen—Jonas, his name is. . .’
Gunn and his wife made their way down the drive, carrying a wicker hamper between them. The party began to move off. Leaving Vanessa, Ransom said goodbye to Sybil Johnstone, and then went over to the front door, where the clergyman was searching for his keys.
‘Wish us luck, Charles.’ He locked the door and walked with Ransom to the launch. ‘Do watch that fellow Lomax.’
‘I will. I’m sorry
about the church.’
‘Not at all.’ Johnstone shook his head vigorously, his eyes strong again. ‘It was painful, Charles, but necessary. Don’t blame those men. They did exactly as I bade them—“God prepared a worm and it smote the gourd.” ’
He looked up at the charred pulpit, and then at the drained white basin of the river, winding towards the city and the distant smoke clouds. The wind had turned, and carried the plumes towards the north, the collapsing ciphers leaning against the sky.
‘Which way are you going?’ Ransom asked.
‘South, to the coast.’ Johnstone patted the bows of the launch. ‘You know, I sometimes think we ought to accept the challenge and set off north, right into the centre of the drought . . . There’s probably a great river waiting for us somewhere there, brown water and green lands—’
17
THE CHEETAH
RANSOM WATCHED from the centre of the road as they set off a few minutes later, the women waving from the tailboard. The small convoy, the launch and water trailer in tow, moved between the lines of cars, then turned at the first intersection and laboured away past the ruined church.
Left alone, Ransom listened to the fading sounds occasionally carried across to him as the trucks stopped at a road junction. The refuse fires drifted over the avenue, but otherwise the whole of Hamilton was silent, the sunlight reflected off the falling flakes of ash. Looking down the rows of vehicles, Ransom realized that he was now effectively alone in Hamilton, as he had unconsciously intended from the beginning.
He walked forward along the centre of the road, letting his feet fall into the steps printed into the ash in front of him. Somewhere a window broke. Hesitating to move from his exposed position, Ransom stopped, estimating that the sound came from two or three hundred yards away.
Behind him, he heard a thin spitting noise. Ransom looked around. Involuntarily he stepped back across the road. Ten feet away, watching him with the small precise gaze of a moody jeweller, a fully grown cheetah stood on the edge of the kerb. It moved forward, its claws extending as it felt delicately for the roadway.
‘Doctor . . .’ Partly hidden behind one of the trees, Quilter sprang lightly on his left foot, holding the steel leash attached to the cheetah’s collar. He watched Ransom with a kind of amiable patience, stroking the fleece-lined jacket he wore over his shirt. His pose of vague disinterest in his surroundings implied that he now had all the time in the world. In a sense, Ransom realized, this was literally true.
‘What do you want?’ Ransom kept his voice level. The cheetah advanced on to the roadway and crouched down on its haunches, eyeing Ransom. Well within its spring, Ransom stared back at it, wondering what game Quilter was playing with this silent feline killer. ‘I’m busy, Quilter. I can’t waste any more time.’
He made an effort to turn. The cheetah flicked an eye at him, like a referee noticing an almost imperceptible infringement of the rules.
‘Doctor . . .’ With a smile, as if decanting a pearl from his palm, Quilter let the leash slide off his hand into the road.
‘Quilter, you bloody fool—!’ Controlling his temper, Ransom searched for something to say. ‘How’s your mother these days, Quilter? I’ve been meaning to call and see her.’
‘Mother?’ Quilter peered at Ransom. Then he tittered to himself, amused by this appeal to old sentiments. ‘Doctor, not now . . .’
He picked up the leash and jerked the cat backwards with a brisk wrench. ‘Come on,’ he said to Ransom, prepared to forgive him this gaffe. ‘Miss Miranda wants to see you.’
Ransom followed him through the gateway. The garden was littered with burnt-out canisters and the wire skeletons of catherine wheels. Several rockets had exploded against the house, and the black flashes disfigured the white paint.
‘My dear Charles . . .’ The plump figure of Richard Lomax greeted Ransom on the steps. He had exchanged his white suit for another of even more brilliant luminosity. As he raised his little arms in greeting the silk folds ran like liquid silver. His pomaded hair and cherubic face, and the two jewelled clasps pinning his tie inside his double-breasted waistcoat, made him look like some kind of hallucinatory clown, the master of ceremonies at a lunatic carnival. Although Ransom was a dozen steps from him he raised his pudgy hands to embrace him reassuringly. ‘My dear Charles, they’ve left you.’
‘The Johnstones?’ Ransom rested a foot on the lowest step. Behind him Quilter released the cheetah. It bounded away across the ashy surface of the lawn. ‘They were quite right to leave. There’s nothing to stay for here.’
‘Rubbish!’ Lomax beckoned him forward with a crooked finger. ‘Charles, you look worried about something. You’re not yourself today. Didn’t you enjoy my firework display last night?’
‘Not altogether, Richard. I’m leaving this afternoon.’
‘But, Charles—’ With an expansive shrug Lomax gave up the attempt to dissuade him, then flashed his most winning smile. ‘Very well, if you must take part in this madness. Miranda and I have all sorts of things planned. And Quilter’s having the time of his life.’
‘So I’ve noticed,’ Ransom commented. ‘But then I haven’t got the sort of talents he has.’
Lomax threw his head back, his voice rising to a delighted squeal. ‘Yeesss . . . I know what you mean! But we mustn’t underestimate old Quilty.’ As Ransom walked away he shouted after him: ‘Don’t forget, Charles—we’ll keep a place for you here!’
Ransom hurried off down the drive, aware of Lomax apostrophizing to himself on the steps. Quilter and the cheetah were playing about in the far corner of the garden, leaping and swerving at each other.
As he passed one of the ornamental fountains, its drained concrete basin half-filled with sticks and refuse, Miranda Lomax stepped out from behind the balustrade. She hovered beside the pathway, her white hair falling uncombed around her grimy robe. She was streaked with ash and dust, and as she gazed into the dried-up pool she reminded Ransom of an imbecile Ophelia looking for her resting-stream.
Her rose-bud mouth chewed emptily as she watched him. ‘Goodbye, doctor,’ she said. ‘You’ll be back.’
With this, she turned and disappeared among the dusty hedges.
18
THE YANTRAS
TO THE SOUTH, the scarred ribbon of the highway wound off across the land, the wrecked vehicles scattered along its verges like the battle debris of a motorized army. Abandoned cars and trucks had been driven off at random into the fields, their seats pulled out into the dust. To Ransom, looking down as he crossed the hump of the motor-bridge, the road appeared to have been under a heavy artillery bombardment. Loose kerbstones lay across the pedestrian walks, and there were gaps in the stone balustrade where cars had been pushed over the edge into the river below. The roadway was littered with glass and torn pieces of chromium trim.
Ransom free-wheeled the car down the slip road to the river. Rather than take the highway, he had decided to sail the houseboat along the river to the sea, and then around the coast to an isolated bay or island. By this means he hoped to avoid the chaos on the overland route and the hazards of fighting for a foothold among the sand-dunes. With luck, enough water would remain in the river to carry him to its mouth. On the seat behind him was a large outboard motor he had taken from a looted ship’s chandlers’ on the north bank. He estimated that the journey would take him little more than two or three days.
Ransom stopped on the slip road. Ten feet from the houseboat the burnt-out hulks of two cars lay on their backs in the mud. The smoke from the exploding fuel tanks had blackened the paintwork of the craft, but otherwise it was intact. Ransom lifted the outboard motor from the seat and began to haul it down the embankment to the landing-stage. The fine dust rose around him in clouds, and after a dozen steps, sinking to his knees through the brittle crust, he stopped to let it clear. The air was in fever, the angular sections of
the concrete embankment below the bridge reflecting the sunlight like Hindu yantras telling of the movement of the time-stations. He pressed on a few steps, huge pieces of the crust sliding around him in the dust-falls.
Then he saw the houseboat more clearly.
Ten feet from the edge of the channel, the craft was stranded high and dry above the water, its pontoon set in a trough of baked mud. It leaned on its side near the burnt-out cars, covered with the ash blown down from the banks.
Ransom let the outboard motor subside into the dust, and ploughed his way down to the houseboat. The sloping bank was covered with old cans and dead birds and fish. A few yards to his left the body of a dog lay in the sunlight by the edge of the water.
Ransom climbed up on to the jetty and gazed down at the houseboat, stranded with all his hopes on the bleached shore. This miniature universe, a capsule containing whatever future lay before him, had expired with everything else on the floor of the drained river. He brushed the dust off his sleeves and trousers, looking out at the mud flats rising from the centre of the lake. At his feet the swollen body of the dog was blurred by the heat, and for a moment the whole landscape seemed to be covered with corpses. The dead fish rotated slowly from their hooks in the drying sheds, and a spasm of dizziness made Ransom retch emptily.
Above him, on the embankment, a car’s starting motor whined. Ransom crouched down, watching the line of villas and the dust-filled aerial canopies. Nothing moved on the opposite bank. The river was motionless, the stranded craft propped against each other.
The car’s engine resumed its plaintive noise, and masked the creaking of the gangway as Ransom made his way up the embankment. He crossed the empty garden next to Catherine Austen’s villa, then followed the drive down to the road.
Catherine Austen sat over the wheel in the car, thumb on the starter button. She looked up as Ransom approached, her hand reaching to the pistol on the seat.
The Drought Page 8