Later,
Tony had muttered, "Hysterical. Seen her reflection in her own
piss."
Chris
knew that Tony had himself been unconvinced by this explanation. The
woman had seen something. And he remembered what he had seen in the
old store room. The face glued there to the wall.
He
had bitten back the foul taste of bile in his mouth and pulled
together enough resolve to examine it. The white stuff (he guessed it
to be a fungus) had grown in the shape of a human face. A smooth
white man's forehead, two eyes-lightly closed like a sleeper's-smoothly sculpted nose, two even lips. He recalled the marble heads
of Greek gods.
Surrounding
it was a constellation of other white blobs, each one a clone-line
copy of the large face, right down to the ones the size of a little
fingernail. High white forehead, eyes, nose, lips. A dozen perfect
white faces.
As
he watched, he had noticed a faint shiver. They were alive.
When
Mrs. Hodgson came to sit with the woman, Ruth and Chris went up to
the toilet the woman had used. He carried the massive hammer in one
hand.
The
white-washed room, bare apart from the old china high-flush toilet,
looked normal. In one corner lay the plastic jug and a pool of sea
water was spreading across the stone slabs.
But
no face.
A
prickle of goosebumps rashed across his skin. He thought about the
pathetic bastard on the beach; a mixture of shellfish and human,
crushed together then fired into an agonizing kind of life. Maybe out
there under the sea near the outflow pipe someone had drowned by the
lair of an eel. One of those thick-bodied congers. He imagined a
human head mashed together with the conger body, thicker than a man's
neck. He thought about the long snake-like body worming up through
the sewage pipe.
Quickly
he picked up a bucket of sea-water and dumped it onto the piss in the
white bowl. On top of that he poured half a bottle of bleach. Then he
and his wife walked quickly away without looking back.
Midday.
Chris restlessly paced the walkway running around the top of the wall
when he heard the noise.
He
immediately ran to the point where the wall passed over the gates and
peered into the mist. The tide had begun its inward roll once more.
Waves frothed around the base of the seafort and along the flanks of
the causeway, but the causeway itself was still dry.
The
sound went as quickly as it had begun. He couldn't be sure what it
was, muffled as it had been by the banks of dunes. He leaned forward.
Below, on the ledge of rock that extended a yard or so beyond the
walls, stood eight reddish figures. They were doing nothing-just
following the old statue routine.
He
looked back down into the courtyard. No one about. Everyone it seemed
had slipped back into their navel-contemplating mode after a lunch
that was getting smaller each day.
The
sound came again, a high wailing, swelling then falling across the
dunes, growing louder. It was ...
It
was a motor. A car. He leaned forward, craning his head to one side
to scoop more of the thin sound into his ear.
A
car. A bloody car! He gripped the wall hard.
No
siren, though. Not police. Maybe the Army. Christ, someone was coming
to get them out of this hell. He willed into his mind the image of
massive armored personnel carriers lumbering around the coast road
and through the gap in the dunes onto the beach.
He
listened hard. The sound of the engine sounded too highpitched. As
if being driven frantically at too high a speed in too low a gear.
Surely whoever it was would have to stop at the barrier of pebbles
that blocked the coast road.
No.
It got closer. Louder. Someone was coming.
The
mental video clicked on and Chris pictured some terrified postman
racing his van along the coast road after coming across
Out-Butterwick-deserted, Marie-Celestelike, doors flapping open in
the sea breeze.
No.
Not this way. Go back. Bring help.
The
car's engine howled as it powered through the gap in the dunes then
skidded sidewards off the road and onto the sand.
From
this distance, the mist fuzzed the lines of the car.
But
he could see that the passenger door was missing.
That
it was a white Ford Fiesta.
Shit.
A
weight dropped into his stomach.
Shit,
no.
The
car was Wainwright's. The one that had been abandoned in the
village's main street. He couldn't see the driver. But he could guess
who was at the wheel.
The
sound of the engine being revved ragged rolled down the beach,
howling like a beast of burden being flogged until it bled.
The
white car lurched forward, engine shrieking, then stopped again,
still on the beach, just feet away from the road that linked the
causeway to the coast road.
"Go
away." Understanding began to seep into his mind. "Go
away."
Again
the engine howled as the driver crushed the pedal to the carpet. The
car pulled to the right then moved slowly forward in a juddering
motion. The front wheels, spinning like fury in the loose sand, sent
spurts back over the car like the plume from a whale.
For
some reason the yellow hazard lights began to blink on and off like
the slow wink of some nightmare lizard, pulsing a blurred yellow
through the mist.
The
car juddered across the sand, then, savagely, jerked forward as the
front tires bumped up onto the raised roadway.
For
a second he thought the car had stuck there, front wheels screaming
in a craze of blue smoke and sand, dragging the car sideways in a
useless crab motion.
"Bog
down, you bastard," he hissed, leaning forward, gripping the top
of the wall, willing whatever drove the thing to fail. "Bog
down!"
No
gods listened to Chris that day.
With
an explosive jerk the rear wheels bumped up onto the roadway. The
one-liter engine howled in a painfully highpitched whine.
Then
the car was moving.
Really
moving this time.
Horrified,
he watched as it blasted along the road, then onto the causeway,
yellow hazards flashing, weaving from side to side, bumping across
the cobbles like a racing car across a rutted track.
His
mouth dried.
He
stared, unable to move or take his eyes from the ton of steel and
rubber and fuel barrelling along the causeway at sixty miles an hour.
Blue smoke spurted from the ruptured exhaust. The thing, unsilenced,
sounded more like a motorbike wound up to a frenzy of clattering
pistons and howling transmission.
Chris
now knew what the Saf Dar intended.
They
had turned Wainwright's car into a battering ram. In ten seconds it
would hit the seafort gates like a guided missile.
The
Saf Dar waited on the fringe of rock below.
This
was it. Chris chewed his lip. Events were rushing to a climax. He
could do nothing. The Saf Dar would flood into the seafort grinding
the life out of every man, woman and-
His
eyes locked onto the car as it weaved at seventy along the slippery
cobbles, the slipstream blasting away clumps of black kelp.
Oh
death, sweet death, where are you now?
End
it... end it... Surely they can't keep even you away forever.
But
the grim reaper had been booted out by something a million times more
powerful. Death's a has-been, death's a loser, death's on the dole
...
These
swollen red men are going to rule. ... They won't let us die.
He
watched in a trance, his brain icing.
There
was Wainwright at the wheel of the swaying car, one hand casually on
the steering wheel as if driving down to the bank to count money;
head rolling loosely from side to side, crimson growths mushrooming
from the split in his head, his mouth hanging open as if he'd seen
something that had surprised him.
Then,
thank Christ. ... God ... or some age-crusted god from beyond the
beyond.
The
car hit a blanket of seaweed and slid, howling madly, to one side.
Dead
Wainwright compensated.
Over-compensated.
The
car veered to the right across the causeway, clean off the roadway.
For
seconds, whole seconds, the fucking machine flew, tail-end flipping
up, lights winking yellow, then splash-
-it
hit the sea, dug down through the skin of salt water, slamming into
the sand below. It cartwheeled in a fury of foam and spray; ninety
pounds of gouged-up sand and seashells splattered high into the air
like a depth-charge explosion; spinning rubber, then--then silence.
It lay belly-up in the sea. Cold water steamed from the hot metal;
the back wheels still turned but the front wheels had gone, along
with most of the engine, radiator and front wings.
The
silence caused by the suddenly killed motor hurt Chris's ears.
The
car had come to a rest alongside the causeway, just twenty paces from
the gates.
Christ,
if it had hit... We would have been lucky to last ten minutes.
He
noticed a shape slide away from the wrecked car. And caught a glimpse
of white bandage trailing slowly through the surf. However broken up
he must be, the Saf Dar weren't letting Wainwright die.
He'd
be back. Along with the rest of them. And the swollen red
man-monsters still stood on the rock below.
"Look,"
Chris told the half-dozen or so villagers who were peering down at
the wrecked car now being washed by the surf. "We need someone
up here at all times. Armed." Oil leaking from the cracked motor
painted a rainbow sheen on the surface of the water. "If the car
had hit those gates, it would have bust them wide open, and ... and
to put it bluntly we wouldn't be standing here talking now. Those
things down there would have been in to slaughter the rest of us."
Without
much interest Tony Gateman asked, "What do you propose?"
"I
propose, Tony, a rota. Someone up here with a shotgun. Also I propose
to reinforce the gates with the pile of bricks in the courtyard.
Thirdly, I propose we have a fall-back position in case those things
break through the gates. Christ, Tony, they only have to get lucky
once. How many cars are there left in the village for them to try
this trick again?"
Chris
forced himself to stay calm. But it was getting tough. After the
attempted gate-ram he had gone around trying to get everyone to come
up and see what had happened. Hardly anyone had bothered. The
villagers wanted only to stare into space.
Mark
Faust had been worse. The big man lay beneath his blanket in the
gundeck room, eyes shut, eating nothing, saying nothing.
It
had taken Ruth five minutes of solid persuasion to get Tony Gateman
up here.
Tony
sniffed and gazed down at the car as the surf rolled over it with a
roar. The man looked divorced from reality.
"Tony,"
prodded Chris, "we need to make plans in case the gates are
broken down and those things get inside. We need to barricade the
lower windows of the seafort. There has to be some way of defending
the doors of the building."
Ruth
added, "Also we need a barrier up here so they can't get onto
the roof of the seafort."
"The
seafort gates are that thick." Tony held up a finger and thumb
with a gap wide enough to accommodate a hefty dictionary. "The
doors of the building are less than a quarter of that. If the Saf Dar
took a rock to them, I imagine they'd hold out two or three hours."
"So
what do you suggest, Tony?"
"Chris,
I suggest we don't bother."
"What?
Not bother to try and survive? Are you serious?"
"Chris,
I don't know if you've noticed, but. ... Can't you feel it? Can't you
feel the tension building in the air? Oppressive, like a
thunderstorm?"
"So?"
"So
the time's almost come. That entity, the old god, it's going to be
here in a matter of hours."