The
villagers shouted encouragement.
They
were wasting their breath.
One
of the Saf Dar stepped up onto the causeway and walked toward the
accountant. The creature's pace was unhurried. It reached out as the
man staggered by and took hold of him. Then it pulled him down. With
one red-black hand on the back of Wainwright's neck, it forced the
man's bare throat down onto the corner of a stone block that edged
the causeway; it dug deeply into his throat.
Watching
a man slowly choke was something no one wanted to see; but they
couldn't turn away.
Ten
minutes later the accountant still struggled and clawed at the beast
holding him down. He might as well have tried to scratch at solid
iron. The thing merely sat cross-legged beside him and stared with
its brothers at the seafort; only this one was pressing a man's
throat to the edge of the causeway.
Another
ten minutes passed and the man still struggled, but now the movements
were weaker.
Useless.
The
movement had nearly stopped, apart from a few feeble twists of the
torso, when Wainwright suddenly moved once more. He kicked
frantically, his head jerked wildly.
Then
he lay still.
Even
though he did not move again the thing didn't release its grip. An
hour later people began to drift away to sit huddled against the
walls. Still the thing on the causeway didn't move.
Chris
could not take his eyes from the creature's muscular fingers rooted
to the huge fists.
By
the time the tide rolled back in across the causeway, only a few
people saw the creature release its grip on Wainwright. The body
floated away to disappear in the rolling surf.
Chris
moved past those silent villagers who remained.
With
a last look at the water, now covering the heads of the Saf Dar,
Chris, numb, walked slowly down to the caravan.
The
red hands. He couldn't stop himself picturing those brutal red hands.
And
David's fragile throat.
Bored,
David wandered around the seafort.
Something
had happened earlier in the day. Something that made everyone sad. He
didn't know what it was but more than once he'd heard the name
Wainwright mentioned. Wasn't he the man with the unfriendly face and
all his head bandaged? Maybe he'd got angry about something and gone
home. Anyway, he was nowhere about now.
In
the big room with lots of glass windows that looked out over the
gundeck, people from the village sat on old chairs (some had even
been pulled back out of the rubbish skip). Most stared into space.
The old Vicar man (he had a miserable face too, and his breath
smelled nasty), he walked around and round. He never said anything to
anybody.
David
mooched on.
Along
one of the stone-flagged corridors was a smaller room with a few
chairs and a little table. Through the crack in the door he could see
his mum, dad, Tony and Mark talking.
His
mum said: "It's not going to last long. Not when we're feeding
twenty-plus people, three times a day. You brought what you could
carry; we stocked up because its a fifteen-mile around trip to the
nearest supermarket, but it's going fast. There's no more fresh
bread. We're down to the last carton of milk."
"So
we ration ourselves." That was Tony Gateman.
"As
important"-his dad's voice-"is the question: are we going
to sit and wait or are we going to try and get help from outside?"
Mark:
"All the phones are down. There's no way of getting word out."
His
mum: "Have you thought what will happen if we don't? Come Monday
morning the postman is going to try driving into the village. He's
going to stop on the bridge where the road is blocked. Maybe he'll
decide to reach the village on foot. You said there was one of those
things waiting under the bridge?"
"Ruth's
right," said his dad. "By not doing anything we're going to
let people die. You only have to look at what happened to that poor
sod Wainwright to know what's going to happen to anyone trying to get
into OutButterwick."
His
mum said, "How many people will die before the employers realize
their staff aren't coming back from OutButterwick; and how many
police will die before the authorities realize something is happening
out here?"
"I'm
with these two, Tony." Mark's deep voice made the door vibrate
against David's fingers. "If we sit back and do nothing, we'll
have blood on our hands."
This
is Chris Stainforth's nightmare:
Night-time.
He
had been walking around the seafort searching for an axe-head he
could fix to the end of the axe-handle he'd chosen for a club. He
wanted to upgrade his makeshift weapon. He knew he would need it
soon.
His
dream search for the axe-head took him onto the seafort walls. The
dream, unusually vivid, was richly detailed. He saw his surroundings
clearly-the car in the courtyard, the timber and bricks piled behind
the seafort gates to strengthen the barricade, the caravan in
darkness. All the good villagers of OutButterwick soundly asleep.
He
reached the walkway that ran around the top of the walls and looked
out. The night-time beach, a vast expanse of sand; the causeway ran
ruler-straight toward the dunes.
Tide
out, the Saf Dar sat, sentinel-like, dark, brooding, staring at the
seafort. As he leaned forward, his hands resting on the cold stones
of the wall, he saw more things. These were awful.
Lucky
it was only a dream. If this were real he didn't know whether he
could take it and stay sane.
Approaching
through the mist, more figures ... eleven, twelve, thirteen.
As
he watched the figures emerge from the mist, the dream became a
nightmare.
They
formed a procession. Like the victims of some nightmare weapon that
existed only in a diseased mind.
He
knew these were people lost to the sea.
They
were the recently dead, and the long dead.
Almost
straight away he recognized Fox. The beard, matted, hung down in
rats'-tails. The wild-man hair had gone, along with the scalp,
leaving nude bone gleaming whitely. Only one eye remained. The other
socket, a raw split, looked as if it had been roughly packed with raw
liver.
One
hand lacked fingernails. From the tips of the fingers grew pink
cones. As if the force that had thrust its version of life through
what had once been dead flesh had also crudely repaired the damaged
body. Pink growths sprouted from any break in the skin. These men
weren't dead. This was life-some form of life-at its most explosively
dynamic.
A
larger figure followed Fox, its man-shape being lost beneath the
volcanic pressure of growth beneath the skin. How little of the
original man remained Chris did not know. But from the resemblance to
Fox, Chris instinctively knew it was Fox's brother who had died ten
years before. This figure was a bloated copy of his brother.
Shellfish grew across its forehead, creating a heavy black crust;
barnacles rashed in white speckles over its bloated chest which was
bare of any clothing; sea anemones clustered in red and brown lumps
around its distended genitals.
A
sick feeling bit into the pit of Chris's stomach.
It
followed his brother, its oversized feet slapping against the sand.
Behind
the Fox twins came more:
A
drowned pilot wrapped in a rotting parachute like a funeral shroud.
Then
a boy who'd swam too far out twenty summers before, now
bulbous-headed with hands the size of footballs.
Following
him, a fisherman with a monstrous growth erupting from his throat; as
big as a beachball, it was stretched so tight you thought it would
burst with every step he took. Then came the accountant, Wainwright,
walking a different kind of step now, the white bandage still hanging
around his neck; from his smashed mouth a growth the size of a tennis
ball and as red as a strawberry budded out.
In
the nightmare Chris's mind zoomed in on every detail.
Then
came more men, with heads that looked as if they had been formed out
of beef-red-raw and moist-which shook and quivered with every step.
Behind
him, six men who had drowned in the same small boat. They had become
welded together by the explosive growth of flesh to form a single
creature with bent legs. It moved like a crab scraping a furrow in
the beach.
(Thank
Christ it's only a dream.)
They
reached the causeway and crossed it.
He
sensed they had one purpose. One single craving.
They
all wanted to go home. Whatever remained of their minds must have
mumbled the same word like an incantation:
Home,
home, home ...
They
moved like travelers nearing the end of an exhausting journey. Home,
home, home ...
Going
home ...
But
then they suddenly stopped.
He
noticed that the Saf Dar were no longer watching the seafort but had
turned to watch the figures crossing the beach. The figures turned;
then, as if compelled by a will that defeated their own, they began
to walk toward the seafort, their eyes fixed on it.
And
what eyes. He gripped the top of the stone wall. The eyes were like
walnuts, convoluted shapes with ridges and bumps that protruded from
their sockets.
They
approached.
As
he watched, the ones that possessed mouths opened them. They began to
cry out, their faces distorting even more grotesquely. The cry,
faint, vibrated with their agony. They were being forced to do
something they desperately didn't want to do. And it was the Saf Dar
who controlled them. He knew they had become their slaves.
Only
a dream, he told himself.
Abruptly
the force that drove them toward the seafort released them. Their
old impulse reasserted itself...
Home
... home ... home ...
And
they moved off once more down the beach and away into the darkness.
The
Saf Dar watched them go. Then, as one, their heads turned smoothly
back and they stared at the seafort.
A
movement at his side startled him.
It
was Tony.
Tony
looked at him for a full moment. Then said: "No, Chris. You're
not dreaming, you know. You're as wide awake as I am."
Chris
leaned forward over the wall, then vomited forcefully onto the sand
more than twenty feet below.
That
morning Mrs Lamb stood on a packing case, tied one end of the washing
line around her neck, the other end around an iron hook in the
seafort store room ceiling, and stepped off.
Chris
was sleeping late after a bad night. David was eating breakfast with
the others in the gundeck room. Ruth was sharing out cornflakes.
Shouts
from one of the Hodgson boys brought people running to the store
room. Mark got there first to find Mrs Lamb hanging. Her face had
turned dark, her eyes were open but staring, and she spun like a doll
on the end of a string. Mark grabbed her by the waist and lifted her
up while Mrs Hodgson cut the string with a penknife.
They
laid her on the stone floor, calling her name and shaking her. She
urinated where she lay. Mark gave her mouth-to-mouth.
This
went on for ten minutes. Until Mrs Lamb kicked out her legs. They put
her into David's bed in the caravan.
As
Ruth covered her with a blanket she turned her face to the wall. "Why
did you bring me back?"
"Got
a bull's-eye, Dad."
"It's
miles from the bull, David."
"Did."
"Didn't."
Chris pretended to wrestle with his son but it was an excuse to pull
him close and hug him tight.
"Bear-hug!"
shouted David breathlessly. "Cheating."