by Steve Harris
‘Oh, no!’ Martin moaned in a pained voice.
James glanced up. For a second he saw Drezy. The haziness had gone and she stood there before the black emptiness, her shirt moving as though tousled by a breeze. She looked like someone playing Peter Pan: she stood tall, her hands on her hips and her feet planted firmly on the ground. A faint smile played on the edges of her lips.
But Peter Pan, to the best of James’ knowledge, had never been surrounded by an aura of fire.
The flames around her weren’t the gentle orange flames you would have associated with the smell of fire lighters. They were blinding and they burned with the ferocity of an oxy-acetylene welding torch.
In the moment before he started to charge backwards down the hall towards the door, dragging Martin with him, James revised his opinion. She didn’t look like Peter Pan at all, she looked like an angel of death.
‘Essy,’ Martin moaned, but there was no trace of her there now, just a human sized column of roaring flame.
And it was moving towards them. Inside a second it was moving almost as fast as he was dragging Martin away from it. It didn’t sway and dance like the tornadoes had done earlier, but came in a dead straight line as if it was following a wire.
When he saw the bottom of the stairs beside him he realized that he was only ten feet or so away from the door.
And he also knew that behind him, the door would be closing.
He tore his eyes away from the approaching column of fire and glanced over his shoulder at the door. Purple blotches swam in his vision. The door was open. Outside on the forecourt the air seemed dark, as if it were dusk already and James thought he could see frost twinkling on the ground.
And as he turned his head away to see how near the fire was, he saw the door begin to move. He dropped Martin -who fell heavily and stayed there - scooped up his crowbar, darted across to the door and wedged the crowbar into the chink of light that was left around the edge of the frame.
The door came into contact with the crowbar and James pushed against the piece of hardened steel, trying to lever the door back. He might as well have tried to prise up a corner of the World Trade Centre.
The door bit into the hardened steel of the crowbar, crimping grooves into it.
‘Martin!’ James shouted.
Martin was on his feet now, glancing from the column of fire to the door and back again while he hopped from foot to foot. He looked like a man who had suddenly found himself standing on a griddle.
‘Through here!’ Martin suddenly shouted and thrust open the lounge door, pushing at it hard as if there was a great resistance.
Behind it was the sea.
But it wasn’t a view of the sea from a hundred feet above as in the book pages James had read, it was the sea bed.
The lounge was under water.
Martin yanked his arm out of the water and stared at it with a comical expression of disbelief as sea-water dripped from his suit sleeve.
The sea was sliced off at the frame of the door and hung there in a flat sheet that wavered slightly like the surface of a big soap bubble. The door was behind the shimmering surface, about two-thirds of the way open.
James glanced down the hall at the pillar of fire and noticed that it had slowed. It hadn’t stopped moving entirely, but it looked as if it was struggling up a steep hill.
James peered past Martin into the dim green of the sea bed. There was a solitary crab scuttling sideways across a flat patch of sand. About twenty feet away something that might have been an eel flashed past a tangle of rock.
Martin looked over at James, his mouth dangling, his head shaking slightly. The pickaxe handle dangled in his left hand.
‘Ideal,’ Martin said distantly and took a deep breath.
Then he turned away and thrust his head and shoulders through the door and into the sea.
A second later, he withdrew, gasping.
He shook his head, spraying water. ‘No good,’ he said. ‘Thought we might swim it, but it’s too deep and too cold. You can’t even see the surface from here. We’d die.’
James glanced over his shoulder at the approaching flame, then back at the crowbar wedged into the door. In another three or four seconds the door would bite through the bar. But in another three or four seconds this would hardly matter, because by this time he would be too busy being burned to death to care.
Martin turned towards the column of fire. ‘It’s going to go out before it reaches us,’ he announced confidently. ‘He hasn’t got the power to keep all this happening.’
James took no notice of him, just leaned on the crowbar.
‘He can’t keep it all going,’ Martin said. ‘Something’s got to give.’
And the column of fire broke into a thousand tiny balls of flame which collapsed to the ground and spread out like a wave. James glanced at it as it sprayed up the side of the wall and the side of the staircase, then started to roll towards him, moving faster now that its height had been reduced.
Many of the tiny balls of flame were winking out, but there were going to be enough left to engulf him and Martin, James knew.
He leaned hard on the crowbar and the door began to swing open again.
‘Quick!’ James screamed, already forcing himself through the narrow opening, but Martin was right behind him.
Outside the house the ground was crusted with frost.
The marble sized balls of fire followed them out of the house and flowed down the step. Most of them extinguished themselves in tiny puffs of smoke when they hit the frosty ground, but some survived, and speeded up. These broke into two groups, one of which tracked Martin, and the other of which targeted James.
‘He can’t have the power!’ Martin complained, dancing away from the sizzling gobbets of flame.
His breath making white plumes in the freezing air, James watched the leader of his group approach him. The house had got hold of the story and had taken it over. The house was providing the power now, draining its reserves. And James thought that if E really did equal MC2 those reserves were going to turn out to be pretty near infinite.
He stamped on the first tiny fireball as it reached him.
Smoke and steam hissed out from beneath his baseball boot and his foot got very hot indeed.
He expected the ball to eat its way through the sole of his boot, but when he took his foot away, the ball didn’t stick to it. It lay on the ground smouldering, no longer a ball of fire but a badly charred cockroach.
‘Beetles!’ Martin shrieked from behind him. ‘They’re fucking beetles!’
James dodged the next one and saw Martin who was standing his ground and using his pickaxe handle as a club on the approaching balls of fire. Sparks flew when he hit them.
James hefted his crowbar and whacked the flaring roaches away from him. There weren’t many left now. All across the forecourt they were winking out like sparks from
a Brock’s skyrocket.
‘Did it!’ Martin bellowed triumphantly and then said in an astonished voice, ‘Oh my good God!’
James stamped on the last of his group and turned to see what Martin was yelling about.
This isn’t possible,’ Martin complained, coming up beside him. ‘It just isn’t fucking possible. He can’t be doing it!’
Martin was literally steaming. Like a racehorse. His face was dark and angry and James was relieved to see that he’d come back to himself after the episode inside the house. He no longer looked like someone who had tripped off the edge of sanity and wasn’t coming back.
‘Look!’ he said and stabbed a finger out across the bay.
In a line across the bay from the castle to the rock on which the house stood, the sea had been sucked up into a peak, just as Drezy had claimed she’d seen. Vapour was rising from it as if it was purposefully being sucked up into the cloudy sky. James could see a distinct line in the cloud that corresponded to the ridge of water. Along that line, angry cloud was swirling.
‘He’s changing the fucking weather, that’s what he’s doing!’ Martin complained bitterly. ‘He’s already made it cold out here. You know what he’s going to do, don’t you?’
James nodded. He knew exactly what was happening. In the book, the man who lived in this house was called Mr Winter.
‘He’s going to make it snow,’ Martin said. ‘It’s only October, it can’t possibly snow.’
‘Oh yes it can, my little pals,’ a voice said from behind them.
They whirled round.
Billy-Joe stood behind them, his face blank and his head stoved in.
He was carrying a fire-axe.
‘It can snow, but you won’t be around to see it,’ he said, and his mouth moved out of synchronization with the words. It was like watching a film that had been badly dubbed.
He hefted the axe and grinned.
Tuck off, Billy-Joe,’ Martin said in a voice of pure disdain. ‘Mad axe men have been done to death. Where the fuck have you and Peter Perfect been hiding for the last twenty years? Don’t you know anything about the genre in which you’re working? It won’t wash, I’m afraid. The fire beetles were pretty good and the underwater lounge was excellent, but this is pure cliche. Now stop it at once.’
Billy-Joe glared at him. ‘I had you down for a prize cunt the first time I met you,’ he said, his lips still moving out of synch. ‘And Janie’s told me all about what a wanker you are, too. Now, I think that a selfish bastard like you ought to be punished. That’s punished, not published. And that’s what I’m here to do.’ He took the axe in both hands and raised it above his head.
And to James’ dismay, Martin walked right into his range.
‘Martin!’ he warned, but Martin merely made a flapping motion with his free hand - presumably because he wanted to indicate that he knew what he was doing.
Martin stopped right beneath where the axe would fall. ‘What a crap line,’ he glowered. ‘I don’t know if you’re inside that smashed-up skull, Billy-Joe, but if you are still in there somewhere, I have something to tell you. I know how much you hated books and writers and editors and the whole back-slapping literary shebang. So you should know this. Inside that house, there’s a total arsehole with literary pretensions using your mouth to speak to me. In his voice. He isn’t even bothering to use your voice, Billy-Joe. And he has the worst line in dialogue since Lulu Kaminsky. Think about that, Billy-Joe.’
‘You’re dead,’ Billy-Joe said and the axe went right down behind his head for a good long swing. His head was high and the front of his body was curved back, tensed to strike.
‘So are you,’ Martin said and swung the pickaxe handle upwards with his left hand.
The end of it caught Billy-Joe underneath the chin. With a great deal of force.
Billy-Joe toppled backwards to the ground.
That one’s for Janie,’ Martin snarled. ‘I know what you used to do to her, you motherfucker!’
He turned to face James, a triumphant look on his face. ‘Now he’ll get up again, just like they do in all those crap zombie movies and horror books,’ he announced.
But Billy-Joe didn’t get up. He lay there on the ground looking very broken. His limbs quivered and his face twitched.
James went over to where Martin was standing, gazing down at the man.
‘Go away, Billy, you’re dead now,’ Martin hissed.
Billy-Joe’s eyes blinked open. His lips worked and a shard of tooth came out and lay on his chin. ‘Hurts,’ he said, and this time his voice was his own.
‘I’m sure it does,’ Martin said. ‘Janie used to hurt after you’d beaten her up.’
‘Kill me,’ Billy-Joe whispered.
Martin shook his head. ‘You’re already dead. You’re dead and he’s let you go now. It doesn’t have to hurt any more. Go home.’
And Billy-Joe’s eyes closed.
Martin looked up at James. There were tears in his eyes. ‘He deserved worse,’ he said acidly, then turned towards the house. ‘So much for your axe-battle climax!’ he yelled.
At which point the door slammed shut and the big gold knob began to melt.
‘He’s on the run now,’ Martin observed as a toffee like strand of golden goo descended from the knob. ‘It’s all coming apart.’
The melted metal pooling on the step began to rise, as if it was filling an invisible mould.
‘What the Sam Hill is that?’ Martin shouted, stabbing an angry finger towards the door. He had stopped steaming now and begun to shiver.
The air temperature, James noticed, was falling rapidly. It wasn’t just cold out here, it was bitter and the ground was crusted with frost.
The golden liquid was now pouring steadily from the door knob into a shape which looked not unlike the paw of a huge animal. James thought he knew what that animal was going to turn out to be. He’d read about the were-lion embossed into the door knob, and now he was seeing the gargoyle figure forming in front of him. One of the back legs was already complete.
James’ mind railed against the fact that so much liquid was pouring from one molten door knob, but it was happening in front of him. The other leg was now finished and the molten gold was flowing into the shape of a tail. And the tail was already swishing from side to side.
‘I think we ought to retreat,’ he said, glancing at Martin.
‘It won’t hurt us,’ Martin said.
James turned to him. ‘What do you think it will do then, serve us tea and cakes?’
‘Look, I’m an editor and I will not allow a door-knob gargoyle to come to life in any story that I get sucked into. I won’t do it! Now quit it, Peter Fucking Perfect!’
‘Martin! We’d better run!’ James insisted.
Martin turned to him. ‘Where to?’ he said. ‘I can barely stand, let alone run. If it comes, we have to kill it. If we don’t, we die. That’s the top and bottom of it, James boy. That’s showbiz.’
‘Split up,’ James said. ‘It can’t go
for both of us at once.’
Martin looked at him hard. ‘Good plan,’ he said bitterly. ‘One of us gets torn to bits.’
Over on the doorstep, the back end of the lion was already formed and struggling to pull away from the stream of gold. The back legs were pacing like a wild animal behind bars.
‘It’s a male,’ Martin observed, hobbling away from James. ‘If you can get behind it, whack it one in the bollocks.’
Martin went about twenty feet across the gravel, adopted the pose of a baseball batsman ready to strike, the pickaxe handle over his shoulder.
James stooped beside Billy-Joe’s dead body, put down his damaged crowbar and picked up the fire-axe. It was new and had a keen edge. He would do better than whack the were-lion thing in the bollocks, he decided. If it came near him, he would take its genitals right off. Instant sex change, he told himself and managed a grin which must have looked similar to the one he’d seen on Martin. A smile of hopelessness.
The lion now existed from its tail to its throat. As soon as there was enough of its neck for it to roar, it started. The noise was terrifying. Beneath James’ feet, the ground shook with the sound.
‘It sounds pretty pissed off,’ Martin said in the silence that followed.
‘Empty vessels,’ James called back amidst the following bellow.
Martin turned to him, grinning. ‘Do you realize we’re going to have to fight a door knob? Have we gone fucking crazy?’
‘Not as crazy as some,’ James returned, nodding towards the house. Suddenly he began to feel a little better. He didn’t know if it was the interplay between two doomed men, or what. All he knew was that he’d do his best and that he wasn’t going to be beaten by a door knob, for God’s sake. How would that look as an epitaph: Here lie the remains of]ames Green who was torn to pieces by a door-knob gargoyle. He fought and lost.
