River of Blue Fire (32 page)

Paul, who had decided some time back that since he couldn't trust his own mind, he certainly couldn't trust anything else he encountered, shook the man's hand and gave a false name. “I'm . . . Peter Johnson.”

“A pleasure, Mr. Johnson. Then if we've done that properly, do let us hurry.”

Pankie led him up the hill, through a patch of the ubiquitous red Martian grass that held the hilltop like a conqueror's flag, and down the other side into a copse of beech trees. Just when Paul was beginning to wonder again if the stranger might be leading him into some sort of ambush, the small man stopped at the edge of a deep gulley and leaned over.

“I'm back, my dear. Are you all right? Oh, I hope that you are!”

“Sefton?” The voice was a strong alto, and more strident than melodious. “I thought certain you had run off and left me.”

“Never, my dear.” Pankie began to make his way down into the gulley, using tree roots for handholds, his lack of coordination again apparent. Paul saw a single figure huddled at the bottom and swung down to follow him.

The woman wedged in a crevice at the bottom of the gulley had lodged in a difficult and embarrassing position, legs in the air, dark lacquered hair and straw hat caught in a tangle of loose branches. She was also extremely large. As Paul made his way down to where he could see her reddened, sweat-gleaming face, he guessed that she was at least Pankie's age, if not older.

“Oh, goodness, who is this?” she said in unfeigned horror as Paul reached the bottom of the gulley. “What must you think of me, sir? This is so dreadful, so humiliating!”

“He's Mr. Johnson, my dear, and he is here to help.” Pankie squatted beside her, stroking the expanse of her voluminous gray dress like the hide of a prize cow.

“No need to be embarrassed, Ma'am.” Paul could see the problem clearly—Pankie's sister weighed perhaps three times as much as he did. It would be hell just getting her shifted loose, let alone helping her back up the steep slope. Nevertheless, he felt sorry for the woman and her embarrassment, doubly worse because of its indelicacy—already he was beginning to absorb the Edwardian mores of this place, despite their irrelevance in the face of what the Martians had done—and bent himself to the task.

It took almost half an hour to get the woman disentangled from the branches at the bottom of the gulley, since she shrieked with pain every time her hair was tugged, no matter how gently. When she had finally been freed, Paul and Sefton Pankie began the formidable job of helping her up the hill to safety. It was nearly dark when, all extremely disheveled, dirty, and soaked in sweat, they finally stumbled onto the level area at the top.

The woman sank to the ground like a collapsing tent, and had to be persuaded over some minutes to sit up again. Paul built a fire with dry branches while Pankie hovered around her like a tickbird servicing a rhino, trying to clean the worst of the dirt from her with his kerchief (which Paul thought must be a record for pointless exercises.) When Paul had finished, Pankie produced some matches, clearly a treasured possession at this point. They put one into service with lip-biting caution, and by the time the sun had disappeared behind the damaged skyline on the far side of the river, the flames were climbing high into the air and spirits were generally restored.

“I cannot thank you enough,” the woman said. Her round face was scratched and smeared with dirt, but she gave him a smile clearly intended to be winsome. “Now it may seem silly, after all that, but I believe in proper introductions. My name is Undine Pankie.” She extended a hand as though it were a dainty sweetmeat for him to savor. Paul thought she might be expecting him to kiss it, but decided that a line had to be drawn somewhere. He shook it and reintroduced himself under his hastily-assumed name.

“Words cannot express my gratitude,” she said. “When my husband was gone so long, I feared he had been set upon by looters. You can imagine my horror, trapped and alone in that terrible, terrible place.”

Paul frowned. “I'm sorry—your husband?” He turned to Pankie. “You said you needed help to save your sister.” He glanced back to the woman, but her look was one of perfect innocence, although there was some poorly-hidden irritation to be seen.

“Sister? Sefton, what a curious thing to say.”

The small man, who had been busy with a futile attempt to reorder her hair, gave an embarrassed chuckle. “Is, isn't it? I can't imagine what got into me. It's this invasion thing, don't you know. It has quite rattled my wits.”

Paul accepted their explanation—certainly Undine Pankie showed no signs of guilt or duplicity—but he was obscurely troubled.

Mrs. Pankie recovered herself quite rapidly after that, and spent the rest of the evening holding forth about the terror of the Martian invasion and the horrors of living rough in the park. She seemed to give these burdens about equal weight.

Undine Pankie was a garrulous woman, and before Paul finally begged leave to lie down and sleep, she had told him more than he had ever wanted to know about life among the
petit bourgeois
of Shepperton, both pre- and post-invasion. Mr. Pankie, it turned out, was a chief clerk in the county surveyor's office—a position his wife clearly deemed beneath his due. Paul could not help feeling that she thought that, with diligence and artful politicking, this might one day be remedied—which, unless the Martians reopened the surveyor's office, he thought was unlikely. But he understood the need to cling to normality in abnormal situations, so as Mrs. P. described the perfidy of her husband's unappreciative supervisor, he tried to look properly saddened, yet optimistic on Mr. Pankie's behalf.

Mrs. Pankie herself was a homemaker, and she mentioned more than once that she was not alone in thinking it the highest position a woman could or should aspire to. And, she said, she ran her house as a tight ship: even her dear Sefton, she made very clear, knew “where to toe the line.”

Paul could not miss Mr. P.'s reflexive flinch.

But there was one great sorrow of Undine Pankie's life, which was that the Lord had seen fit to deny her the joy of motherhood, that most sublime of gifts a woman could give to her husband. They had a fox terrier named Dandy—and here for a moment she became muddled, as she remembered that they did
not
have a fox terrier, any more than they had a house, both of them having been incinerated by a sweeping blast from a Martian heat-ray that had devastated their entire block, and which the Pankies had escaped themselves only because they had been at a neighbor's, trying to get news.

Mrs. Pankie halted her account to weep a few tears for brave little Dandy. Paul felt the tug of the grotesque, to have seen so much ruin, and then to see this huge, soft woman crying over a dog while peering at him from the corner of her eye to make sure he saw how helplessly sentimental she was. But he, who had no home or even idea of how to reach it—how was he to judge others and their losses?

“Dandy was just like a child to us, Mr. Johnson. He was! Wasn't he, Sefton?”

Mr. Pankie had started nodding even before her appeal. Paul didn't think he had been listening very closely—he had been poking the fire and staring up at the red-washed tree limbs—but clearly the man was an old hand at recognizing the conversational cues that led up to his own expected bits.

“We wanted nothing more in this world than a child, Mr. Johnson. But God has denied us. Still, I expect it is all for the best. We must rejoice in His wisdom, even when we do not understand His plan.”

Later, as Paul lay waiting for sleep, with the twinned snores of the Pankies beside him—hers hoarsely deep, his flutingly high—he thought she had sounded like she might very well be a little less tolerant if she ever met God face-to-face. In fact, Undine Pankie sounded like the kind of woman who might give Him a rather unpleasant time.

She scared Paul badly.

It was strange, he thought the next morning as the boat floated up the Thames, how the tiniest hint of normality could push away the worst and most unfathomable horrors and fill up the day with trivia. The human mind did not want to work too long on vapors—it needed hard fuel, the simple simian things, catching, grasping, manipulating.

It had been less than a day since he had met the Pankies, and already they had turned his solitary odyssey into a kind of punter's day trip. Just this moment they were wrangling over whether Mr. Pankie could catch a fish with a thread and a safety pin. His wife was of the strong opinion that he was far too clumsy, and that such tricks should be left to “clever Mr. Johnson”—the last said with a winning smile that Paul thought had more in common with the lure of a flesh-eating plant than with a normal human facial expression.

But the fact was, they were here, and he had been so subsumed in their relentless, small-minded normality that he had not thought about his own predicament at all. Which was both good and bad.

When he had arisen that morning, it was with more than a little distress to find the Pankies spruced up to the limits of their meager abilities and, as they put it, “set to go.” Somehow the idea had developed, with no help from Paul, that he had offered to take them upriver, in search of something more closely resembling civilization than this park on the outskirts of Twickenham.

Mrs. Pankie's attempts to convince him of the benefits of company—”it will be almost like a holiday, won't it, like a jolly children's adventure?”—were almost enough in themselves to send him fleeing, but the couple's need was so naked that he could not turn them down.

But as they had made their way down the riverbank to his boat, which happily was still where he had left it, an odd thing happened. He had gone ahead to pull it all the way onto the shore—the idea of wrestling Undine through the water and trying to boost her into a rocking boat being more than he could bear—and when he turned to watch them coming down the bank, the two shapes, one massive and one small, sent a bolt of terror through him, a rush of fear so sudden and so powerful that for a moment he thought he was having a heart attack.

The things in the castle
! He saw them clearly in those shapes on the riverbank, the two dreadful creatures that had been following him so long, the large hunter and the small, both heartless, both remorseless, both more terrifying than any mere human pursuers should be. And now they had caught him—no, he had delivered himself to them.

Then he blinked, and the Pankies were again just what they appeared: two unfortunate denizens of this unfortunate world. He squinted, steadying himself on the railing of the boat. Now that the panic had subsided, the situation did not
feel
the same as when his two stalkers had come close before: on those occasions he had felt naked fear from their mere proximity—a sensation as tangible as chill or nausea. But here, until he had seen the resemblance in the silhouettes, he had felt no alarm at anything except the possibility that Undine Pankie might talk all night.

And surely, if these people
were
his enemies, they could easily have taken him when he slept. . . .

Mrs. Pankie leaned on her hardworking little husband and waved, holding her crushed hat firmly on her head as the wind freshened. “Oh, look at the boat, Sefton. What a noble little craft!”

It was coincidence, he decided, that was all. One that had struck him on a very tender place, but a coincidence all the same.

But if the Pankies were not his enemies, he thought as the greenery of Hampton Wick slid past on the north bank, they had certainly managed to distract him, and that might be harmful in the long run. The fact was, he had a goal of sorts, and he had not come a whit closer to it as far as he could tell since crossing into this other England.

Her
voice—the voice of the bird-woman in his dreams—had spoken to him through the Neandertal child and told him what to do. “
You said you would come to me
,” she had chided him. “
The wanderer's house. You must find it, and release the weaver
.”

But who or what was the weaver? And where in this or any other world could he find something as vague as “the wanderer's house”? It was like being sent on the most obscure scavenger hunt imaginable.

Maybe I'm the wanderer
, he thought suddenly.
But if so, and I found my house, then I wouldn't need anything else, would I? I'd be home
.

Unless I'm supposed to find my house, but find it here in this other London?

The prospect of actually doing something was intriguing. For a moment he was tempted to turn the boat and begin rowing back toward the crippled heart of London. Certainly the house in Canonbury that contained his flat would have been built by this time—most of his street was Georgian—but it was an open question as to whether there was anything of it left. And according to all accounts, the dead were much more numerous in the center of the city.

It seemed, the more he thought about it, a rather long chance—”wanderer” could mean so many things. But what other ideas did he have . . . ?

“He's muddled it again, Mr. Johnson. Stop it, dear, you'll just break the thread! Really, Mr. Johnson, you must come and help my Sefton.”

Paul sighed quietly, his thoughts again scattered like the flotsam bobbing on the brown river.

The Thames narrowed as they approached Hampton Court, and for the first time Paul saw something almost like normal English life. As he soon discovered, the people here had followed in the wake of the tripods' original march, and a community of the dispossessed had begun to form a few months after the invasion. These refugee villages were even heralded by the unusual sight of smoke; the residents boldly tended their campfires and transacted their barter in the open, protected by a mile-wide perimeter of sentries with signal mirrors and a few precious guns. But Paul guessed that they had hiding places prepared—that, like rabbits grazing on a hillside, they would be gone to cover at the first hint of danger.