Christ,
he loved his son; he loved his wife. Why had this happened to them?
He screwed up his eyes and wished everything normal again.
Play-fighting on the beach, picnics, sunshine, working on the
seafort.
That
morning he'd taken David up into one of the empty seafort rooms to
play darts. There he'd put on at least a mask of normality. Not that
it fitted particularly well after what had happened over the last
forty-eight hours. Wainwright's death. Then, last night, the weird
procession of drowned men along the beach. Mrs Lamb with the noose.
Maybe they would all be better trying what Mrs Lamb ...
"Da-ad.
I can't breathe."
Chris
relaxed his hug.
"Can
I have some sweets, please?"
Chris
looked away from those blue eyes. "As soon as I can get to the
shop I'll buy you some."
"When
will that be?"
"Can
I play?"
To
Chris's relief, Ruth joined them. She performed the happy, carefree
trick more convincingly than he could.
They
played darts. For a while Chris and Ruth could make David forget that
their lives were no longer the same.
Normality.
Then
came the sound that shattered it.
"Shhh
..." Chris held up his hand. "What's that?"
They
listened. Reverberating through the seafort came the sound of two
hard objects being smashed together. Voices and footsteps passed
quickly outside.
"Come
on." Chris picked David up.
"What's
wrong, Dad?"
Ruth
said, "It'll be nothing, love. It just sounds like someone
knocking at the gate."
It
was.
Chris
made David stay at the bottom of the steps that led up to the
walkway. Already Mark and Tony were up there with half a dozen
villagers. They craned their heads over the walls to see something at
the base of the wall.
By
the time he reached the top he was panting, not from exertion but
from tension. Now he dreaded looking out there. Each time seemed
worse than the last.
Standing
at the gate was one of the Saf Dar, its body color, even its shape,
now altering. The dark cherry-red color and emaciated frame had gone.
Now the skin had turned an intense red that made you think of chronic
sunburn. But there was still some lingering darkness beneath, as if
the blood of the thing was as black as coal.
Beneath
the skin its muscle bulk had grown, making the limbs and torso
swollen, with hard knots of muscle bulging at the arms and thighs,
forcing veins as thick as ropes to the surface.
In
its left hand it held a pebble as large as a melon. It used this to
pound at the oak gates. Each enormous blow sent white splinters of
rock flying outward. Now and then a bright blue spark would flash
when the rock hit one of the iron gate studs.
Even
though the force of the blow made the stone floor vibrate, it was
hard to believe it could actually get through the gates that way.
They were built to withstand cannon-balls. Chris leaned over the
castellated wall as far as he could, but he couldn't see the gate.
The
thing focused its attention on the gates. It didn't exert itself. The
blows were slow, rhythmic.
Chris
found himself counting the beats between each blow.
Crash-one-two-crash-one-two-crash
...
The
muscular arm would slowly rise, then whip down to smash at the gate
at the creature's eye level. It could have been some bastard machine
down there. It didn't tire; it didn't get bored; it didn't need a
piss. Nothing.
Perhaps
its intention was to unsettle the people inside the seafort, rather
than to break the doors down. If it was, it had succeeded. The
villagers flinched with every cracking blow.
The
pounding went on and on. ...
After
an hour most of the villagers had moved back to the main seafort
building to try to escape the noise of the hammering.
"Come
on," said Chris to Mark and Tony, "we've got to talk."
Chris
led the two men into the old mess room. Half a dozen straight-backed
chairs formed a circle where some of the villagers had sat talking
earlier. A bare hundredwatt bulb hanging from the ceiling was the
main source of light.
He
still believed that Tony hadn't told him everything. Even if it
didn't help a fig, he wanted to be in the picture.
They
sat, Mark with the shotgun across his lap. Chris leaned forward and
said: "Tony ... Mark. Two questions: one, why is all this
happening? Two, what are we going to do about it?
Tony
and Mark looked at Chris for a moment, the sound of the distant
pounding pulsing through the thick stone walls.
Tony
rubbed his jaw. "Now's the time to bare our chests. You're in
this with us. And to be honest I'm to blame for it." He began to
peel the cellophane from one of his cigars. "When Fox tipped
that petrol all over the place I should have put a match to it when I
had the chance."
Chris
raised his eyebrows.
"If
I'd done that you wouldn't have been in this bloody awful mess. Fox
would have been carted away to the nearest psychiatric hospital. And
I'd be behind bars in Munby. At least I'd be far enough away from
OutButterwick."
Mark's
voice rumbled softly. "You don't believe that, Tony. The other
side of the earth won't be far enough away if they break out."
"Who
are they really?"
As
Chris asked the question, Ruth slipped in through the door and sat
beside him.
Tony
shot a look at Mark which said, who's going to talk? You or me?
Mark
nodded back. "You're the one with words, Tony."
"If
you've got time, folks ..." Tony's smile was forced. "Then
I'll begin at the beginning." He lit the cigar. "About six
months ago a woman bought a large piece of steak. Big as a plate.
Anyway, she cuts it in half. Puts one piece in the fridge on a plate.
The other half she grills for her dinner. Later that day she begins
to feel ill and goes to bed. Her husband comes home from work and she
tells him to get the other half of the steak and cook it for his
supper. Anyway, he goes to the fridge and opens the door. The piece
of steak not only fills the plate, it's hanging over the side, all
the way to the bottom of the fridge. When he comes to look at it more
closely he sees it's just-it's just moving. Then he notices some raw
sausages. It had touched the sausages and somehow infected them so
they had split out of their skins and were swelling up to twice their
normal size; a piece of bacon he'd left that morning had become as
thick as the Bible. Of course he took the steak to the environmental
health office. And what do you think it was?"
Chris
and Ruth shrugged.
"Cancer.
The steak had been cut from a cancerous cow. What the man's wife had
bought was nothing more than a slice of living cancer."
"Nice
little horror story," said Chris, "but I don't follow."
Again
during the pause they became conscious of the rhythmic pounding and
shifted uncomfortably on the chairs.
"That's
just what it is. A modern folk myth that circulates every few years.
But I used the idea of the story, the cancer steak infecting the
sausages, to illustrate what's happening here. What I'm going to tell
you is really about ordinary things being transformed by something
extraordinary."
Tony
leaned forward. "Look. Remember at the barbecue I told you that
Manshead, the little island here, on which the seafort is built, was
believed to be one of those special places that lie on the boundary
between our ordinary, run-of-the-mill world and the next world, the
supernatural world, heaven, Valhalla, Olympus, home of the gods-give
it any bloody name you want. You've probably heard the legends about
Sri Lanka, that there is a certain mountaintop, so close to the
boundary between this world and the next one that if you listen hard
enough you can hear the fountains of bleeding paradise. Manshead is
one of those places." He spoke in a low, even voice, his glasses
flashing hypnotically. "Here on this slab of rock in the sea
stands one of those doorways to a world beyond this one. Pagans,
mystics, early Christians, even a cynical git like me, Tony Gateman,
believes it. This is where, when the times were right, people
gathered, carried out their religious rites, and opened the doorway."
"These
were the sacrifices you mentioned? They took place here?"
"That's
right, Ruth. If you strip away the fairy stories surrounding
sacrificial rites, the bare essence of the ritual is a commercial
transaction with the gods. Nothing more than a trade. The sacrificer
was saying, 'Look, I cut the throat of my valuable ox and give it to
you, the god I worship. In return, I trust you will give me the power
to defeat my enemies, or ensure that our community enjoys an abundant
harvest this year.' In all sacrifices it's basically the mortal
giving something of value to the god in return for a special wish
being granted-good crops, healthy children, a mild winter."
Chris
said, "I remember you said the more precious the thing you gave,
the more you would expect in return."
"True.
Big things cost big prices ... An arm and a leg for a fast car, as
they say. In times of great need such as famine or invasion they
would sacrifice what they valued most-a loved member of the
community. Or a member of the community they all love or would love
if it was theirs: a child. Or even children."
Ruth
shook her head. "Okay, so it's a way of buying a granted wish
from this cosmic shopkeeper, but what on earth is this god going to
do with a dead horse or sheep?"
"That
troubled me, Ruth. I ruminated on it for many a long month. But then
I put myself in the place of the person making the sacrifice. You
have a valuable cow, say. It's important to you; it provides food for
your family. What do you actually feel when you kill it? You're
basically going to be pissed off. You're giving away something
precious which you could have put to damned good use yourself. Or, in
a more extreme case, how do you feel when you sacrifice your own
child? Cutting your own son's throat. ... Breaking open his head with
a stone axe. ..."
"But
why? How does that give this god what it wants?"
"Ancient
people understood what was happening. They weren't being pointlessly
savage and cruel when, say, the Aztecs took a warrior to the top of
the mountain, used a ceremonial flint knife to cut through his
chest-wall to expose the still-beating heart, then yanked it out with
their bare hands. Or when the priests would skin a woman and wear the
skin like a disguise.
"Listen,
today modern psychiatrists are only beginning to understand what was
happening. Catharsis: purification, purging. Catharsis is a way of
discharging a buildup of psychic power inside yourself before it
begins to damage you or affect how you behave. We've all heard of the
woman, say, whose husband has died. Until she cries she can't really
come to terms with what has happened. She may become withdrawn and
reclusive. But when she cries it's an act of catharsis: the
floodgates open and release all that grief that's built up inside
her."
Ruth
nodded. "So ancient people understood, although it might have
been on an instinctive level, the benefits of catharsis."
"The
Aztecs had a ceremony where they killed a number of their own
children. This is a horrible, horrible thing to do. But again they
weren't stupid or cruel, or incapable of feeling grief. On the
contrary, they would weep and weep and weep. Look, to get to the
point about sacrifice, what it actually does is this. One, the Aztecs
killed their own children at these rituals. Two, this would make the
people weep uncontrollably. Three, this would release a huge rush of
unconscious mental energy. You see someone crying, really crying,
they weep, cry, sob, shake uncontrollably, they can't walk. This
tidal wave of grief cripples them. But you see all the emotion come
flooding out. Multiply this by fifty, a hundred, a thousand. It would
be like breaking down a great dam between the conscious part of the
mind and the unconscious." Tony tapped his temple with a thin
finger. "All that worry, fear, hate that had been building up
there for year after bloody year come out. And we're talking a real
gusher; there's lots of pressure built up there. It's like striking
oil."
There
was a pause. The distant pounding of rock against wood continued.
Muffled, like a heartbeat. Mark, uneasy, shifted the position of the
shotgun across his lap.