by Simon Clark
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 sea-fort."
"The sea-fort 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."
"What good will that do us if we're like Wainwright, Fox and the rest? Zombies?"
Tony began to walk toward the steps. "We need to make preparations. All the villagers know what they have to do."
Chris hissed, "We're back to sacrifice again-that primitive crap."
"Primitive yes, crap no. These people know what they have to do. Yes, sacrifice. No, Chris, not because I told them, but because they know instinctively what to do. It's born inside of us. Like a baby's born with the inbred ability to mimic its parents, so it can learn to talk and hold a spoon. We're born knowing about the need to sacrifice. Don't fight it, Chris. Allow it to flow up from your unconscious. Ask David. He'll know. Children do. Ask him if he's destroyed any of his favorite toys lately and not known why. Ask him, Chris. Ask him, Ruth."
Chris remembered David leaving his favorite comics and toys on a rock for the sea.
"You're talking crap, Tony. Look, we need to keep this place safe." He turned to the elder Hodgson men. They were farmers. Down to earth. Pigs and muck were their lives. Chris appealed to them.
"You'll help keep guard, won't you?"
Their eyes shied away. He realized they had swallowed Tony Gateman's get-ready-for-the-coming-of-the-olde-worlde-pagan-god sales talk.
"You'll help, won't you?"
"Oh, aye." John Hodgson glanced at his brother. "Aye, we'll help."
Chris turned back to Tony to ask him again, but the little Londoner was walking down the steps as quickly as he could.
But Tony was right about the growing tension.
Chris heard raised voices coming from one of the seafort rooms. Arguments were springing up among the villagers like fires spontaneously igniting on a dry moor.
He passed the Major pacing restlessly about the courtyard with Mac. The dog turned in circles, pawed the cobbles, its claws scratching noisily, coughing out highpitched yelps.
One of the Hodgson boys sat astride his motorbike. Chris watched him start it, then sit there pointlessly revving it. The dog yelped louder. The sound of the revving motor would provoke more arguments.
Chris, tense, tapped the long shaft of the hammer against his leg.
The pressure was building. There was no safety valve. Something would have to burst soon.
That night the dead who should have stayed dead came back. Chris watched them emerge from the dense blanket of mist, to stalk the sands. Wainwright looked crooked now. Fox was beginning to swell like his brother. The little drowned boy ran ahead of them.
Dotted here and there, kneeling on the beach, the Saf Dar stared at the sea-fort, milk-white eyes gleaming unnaturally bright in the dark.
He had told himself over and over that the Saf Dar were stupid, animal-like things, following some residual craving for death and mutilation.
Now he wasn't so sure.
Yes, they still hated. But their eyes seemed to glint with a sinister intelligence.
Yes, they had stood and allowed themselves to be burnt and blasted by shotguns. But it hadn't hurt them. No, they were not stupid; just confident.
All they needed to do was sit there patiently on the sands.
When the time was ready to kill. ...
Then they would kill.
And no fucker on earth would get in their way.
He walked around the top of the sea-fort walls. John Hodgson, shotgun in hand, nodded a greeting, then turned back to watch the figures walking through the mist.
This time Wainwright, the Foxes and their kind did not stop and cry in agonized voices; they walked right up to the gates.
Then they battered at them with their bare hands. Close up he could see the tumorous growths that erupted from their flesh.
He ran down to the courtyard, to watch as the gates rattled and shook as they were battered and shoved by more than twenty dead/alive men from the other side.
Bolts and padlock shivered as the gates swung inward an inch then sprang back. If the gates should give way, thought Chris, there's nothing between those things and my wife and son but me.
Just what the hell could I do?
I wouldn't even be able to die a martyr. I would end up like Wainwright or one of those raw bastard things that were a mess of human flesh and shellfish.
He walked toward the trembling gates. If he reached out to push them back it would be a futile gesture. But anything was better than this morbid impotence.
He stood there, feeling the shocks transmitted through the wood shiver up his arms like a series of rapid electric shocks. He pictured the bare fists, palms, swollen knuckles cracking against the thick timbers. Did they feel anything? Did they want to turn and run for a home that might no longer even exist? They were held there only by the will of the Saf Dar. Forced to do things they did not want to do.
Once more Chris felt his mind slipping.
Was he inside, an ordinary man, with a wife, and one son, holding the doors, knowing he had no chance of keeping them shut if the bolts should snap?
Or was he outside, bare feet on cold stone, beating with his bare hands (look, look, they are changing every day now, bigger and bigger, tighter and tighter, veins bulging out like knotted ropes through the backs), beating the gates with bare hands, wanting to get in, to drag out those soft-bodied people, with their cool, cool skins; throw them at the red men on the beach who rule. ...
Making our minds turn and turn faster and faster so we don't know where to run. One minute wanting to run home; the next to grab and beat and kill the men and women in the stone house on the beach. ...
Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill. ... We want to force our fingers inside your bodies Kill... kill...
Home ... go home. ... want to go home. ...
Chris blinked the sweat from his eyes. Why was he pushing the sea-fort gates? There was nothing there.
Then he remembered. The dead had been there trying to force their way in.
He dropped his aching arms and shook his head. It felt as if he had woken from a dream.
Flexin
g his stiff fingers, he went back to the caravan and to bed, beside his sleeping wife and son.
Even though Chris was not sure whether he was fully awake or not, a vivid dream streamed through his head.
"They're in ... they're in ... they're in. ..."
Someone shouted, their voice echoing off the walls of the sea-fort.
The Saf Dar moved as smoothly and silently as panthers through the open gates.
For what seemed hours he ran around the sea-fort looking for David and Ruth. Anger burned into him like splashes of molten metal on bare skin. Why hadn't he planned a hiding place in the sea-fort?
The Saf Dar breaking in... It was inevitable. He should have known. He should have made some kind of bolt-hole in the cellar. David would have shown him where.
But why had David gone down there?
"David ... David, where are you?"
David knew all about what lay in the mysterious cellar beneath the sea-fort. For some reason Chris had never been able to go down there. He should have.
He was running in his pajamas through the labyrinth of passages. Then he was out in the open air, mist rolling like surf through the open gates.
The car. In the car sat David and Ruth. Just as they would when they were going to the shops. David in the back reading a comic, Ruth patiently wearing the seatbelt.
He tried to shout but he couldn't.
He ran to the car, started the engine.
The tide was out as he drove the car furiously out through the gates and along the causeway. No. The coast road is blocked.
All he could do was drive up and down the beach, skidding the car into tight turns before he reached the boulders that blocked the northern end of the beach. Then south toward Out-Butterwick where the stream cut through the sand. Too deep for the car to cross. He would drive back.
While he drove, they were safe. The Saf Dar would not catch them. He glanced back at David, still reading the comic; then across to Ruth at his side, combing her hair.
Chris ached inside. He wanted to tell them how much danger they were in; and how much he loved them. But he had to focus all his concentration on the expanse of sand in front of him-avoid the rocks, avoid the deep pools of sea water; avoid the men standing on the beach.
The needle on the gauge dropped lower and lower into the red. The engine choked away, leaving the car to coast, its tyres rumbling across hard ridges of sand. Slower, slower. ...
Slower...
Stop.
Lock the doors. ... close the windows. ... They're coming. ...
No escape now.
They're crowding around the car. Red, bulging faces pressed to the windows, pressing harder. Harder until stars appear in the glass as it cracks beneath their pushing faces. Those thick red hands reaching into where. ...
"Chris. ... Wake up."
Chris jerked up, his heart cracking into his ribs like a power hammer.
"You all right?"
"He saw his wife's silhouette in the gloom, dark hair falling forward; her fingers stroked his forehead.
"Yes ... Just a dream. I'll be all right. Lie down and get some sleep."
Chris lay back, the sweat turning chilly on his face.
Only a dream...
It seemed more like a premonition.
Chapter Forty-two
"Now ... Listen to me. Every one of you. There's no reason for anyone to get hurt, if we're all careful; don't do anything stupid. We will all get out of here safely."
The Major held up his finger to emphasize the point. Then he continued with a story of some jungle campaign in Asia.
They were standing on the walkway that ran around the seawall.
Tom and John Hodgson were there, with Tony Gateman (he was a reluctant participant) and Ruth. Chris had been explaining how they would lower buckets on lines to fill them with sea water. Then the Major had ambled up, holster belt still around his thin waist, the dog bringing up the rear. The old man looked tired and more confused than ever. You could hardly blame the poor sod, thought Chris, sleeping on stone floors, and with dwindling rations of food, some of which he must have shared with the dog.
"We need to mount the machine-guns. Here and here." The old soldier pointed. "I'll see that the quartermaster issues each man with hand grenades."
This was largely a replay of what the Major had said to Chris a couple of days before.
Chris wanted to say there were no machine-guns, no hand grenades, no flame-throwers, no platoon of highly trained commandos. There were three shotguns, the Major's old revolver, which might not even work, three ancient cannon that had been used for fence-posts for a hundred years, and twenty frightened villagers. Most over fifty. Some sick. And certainly one senile old soldier.
"Now what you civilians have got to do is keep your heads down. Those beggars are damn good with a rifle. They'll be sniping at us from the dunes yonder. Now if I can find Corporal White, I'll have him whistle up the artillery and they can put down a pattern of twenty-pounders. That'll spoil their aim a bit, eh?"
Chris noticed the Reverend Reed waiting conspicuously at the end of the walkway. Odd, because he rarely made it up onto the wall. Usually too pissed.
Even more unusually the man carried a large black book that could only have been the Bible.
Chris wondered if the man was working up to a sermon against the villagers' pagan leanings.
As the Major talked, Chris watched the Vicar sliding along the wall toward them.
The old priest looked ill. From his face flared two red-rimmed eyes; the man's lips were cracked and dry, covered with flaking pieces of skin.
"Padre," acknowledged the Major with a nod, and walked away to rally his imaginary troops.
The Reverend Reed hugged the Bible to his chest and glared at them. His voice was a dry-throat whisper:
"Why have you ignored me?"
Chris, Ruth and Tony exchanged puzzled glances.
"We haven't," said Ruth gently.
"Oh. ... You have, you know, my dear. The times I've watched you all. Huddled away as thick as thieves, whispering away."
The Vicar caught Chris's expression. "No, I'm not mad. Or even drunk this time ... wish I was. No. Listen to me." Tony had begun to turn away. "Listen to me, Mr. Gateman. I've had to be content to stand by and allow you to treat me like some innocent virgin while you gossiped about sex. ... Now isn't that true, Mr. Gateman? Mr and Mrs Stainforth? You've not once asked me to contribute to your secret little meetings. Why? Because I am what they call a man of the cloth? Because I would be shocked by what you had to say about the nature of this place? About that man's beliefs." He used the Bible to point at Tony.
Chris spoke. "Look, Reverend. ... We haven't questioned your beliefs. All I'm interested in is keeping us alive. You know we are low on food and fresh water. What I'm-"
