Max Gilbert

by Simon Clark

  The water in the fishbowl had gone green. The color of water in toilets when you wee in it. Inside there were pebbles covering the bottom. Once they had been white and pink; now they had gone a slippery green color. The little wrecked pirate ship and then the-

  He started back. He'd not noticed what it had been doing.

  The eye...

  He'd not liked that... the eye had shocked him.

  The goldfish had been staring at him with that big around eye. No ... He didn't like his fish at all now. It had changed.

  When they had won Clark Kent on the hook-a-duck at the fair it had been little and cute (his mum had said). Now it wasn't cute at all.

  In the last few days it had changed.

  It had become a big, lumpy thing now. So long it couldn't straighten its body in the bowl. Mostly it moved in fast jerks around and around the bowl.

  And it reminded him of one of those cartoon snakes that had swallowed lots of bugs, their long bodies going all bumpy from the big lumps inside pushing against the skin as if wanting to burst out. Maybe that would-

  "David!"

  "Mum?"

  "What on earth are you doing in here?"

  "I was just-"

  "You know it's dangerous with those things in here." She nodded at the soldier gas bottles in their blue uniforms. "Come on." She wasn't smiling. "Let's see if we can find anything to eat."

  Without looking back at the staring goldfish, he went to his mum as she stood in the dark doorway, her hand outstretched.

  On the coast road he rode the bike into a fog that rolled in a swollen white cloud down from the dunes.

  Easy, Mark. He throttled down to thirty.

  He had still not seen a single Saf Dar.

  He had covered a mile along the road, the scenery unchanging. Dunes rising to the left of him. Swamp to the right.

  The mist thickened. He dropped the speed to twenty.

  The engine ticked smoothly, the vibration making his feet, buttocks and hands tremble.

  Then something took shape out of the fog in front of him.

  A dark line.

  They had replaced the barrier of rocks and pebbles in the road. He had gambled that they had left the road clear when they had created a gap to allow poor dead Wainwright through in his car to drive at the sea-fort gates.

  But the Saf Dar had been too smart for that. They had probably directed their corpse-slaves to replace the stones.

  He braked, slowing the bike to a walking pace. Not wanting to stop, just in case. ...

  He shook away the mental pictures coming into his mind.

  You've got three options, Mark, old son. Up into the dunes. Risky. One of those things might be lurking in one of the hollows.

  Next option: ride around the causeway the other way. That means going into the marsh. Risky again. Too easy to get bogged down and drown the motor in marsh slime.

  Option three: straight over the top of the mound. The temptation burned simply to charge the mounded barrier and hope that like a ramp it carried him over in a mighty leap. He chose caution. He would ride up to it, then simply lug the bike over.

  The barrier was little higher than his waist. He should be able to do it.

  The edges of the barrier became more defined as he neared it. Fifty yards away he saw a large rock rising up from its middle.

  Ten yards later he realized that the big rock was in fact one of the Saf Dar, squatting Red Indian-like on the mound. It faced Mark, watching him approach through the mist, those large eyes lasering through the fog as if it wasn't there. It had watched him approach. It knew.

  Half turning in the road, front tire pointing to the marsh, he stopped. What now?

  The red thing on the stones could as easily hammer the life out of him as he could that of a fly. Feet planted on the road on either side of the bike, the big man raised himself from the saddle. In the fog beyond the barrier he could make out another shadow shape rising out of the mist. Up on the dunes, another. Like ghost statues. Waiting.

  No way out that way.

  He revved the bike gently.

  This couldn't be the end of the road-literally. He bit his lip. He had to go on. The people in the sea-fort, hungry and exhausted now, clung desperately to the idea that he was going to get help. They needed him to do it.

  Mark turned his head in jerks, looking ahead along the road to where the barrier and the Saf Dar blocked his route; he looked up at the dunes, across at the marsh, then back along the road the way he came.

  And he wondered in God's name what he should do.

  "Not long now." Chris, Ruth and David had the caravan to themselves as they ate their small helpings of chips, tinned tomatoes and one beefburger. The rest of the villagers ate the same meal in the gundeck room.

  "How long, do you think?" asked Ruth, half anxious, half excited.

  "A couple of hours-not much more. As soon as Mark gets through he'll tell them--"

  "The truth?"

  "Some plausible cock-and-bull story ... half true anyway."

  "What's Mark telling who?" asked David, confused but sounding happy because his parents were.

  "Listen, kidda," said Chris, "Mark's going to arrange a surprise. We'll be going for a little trip somewhere and guess how we'll be going?"

  "By boat?"

  "Nope."

  "By car?"

  "Nope ... Give in? By helicopter."

  "Helicopter?"

  "Chris ..." Ruth signalled to him with her eyebrows- Cool it, Chris. "We don't know for sure yet."

  "It's a good bet, though." Chris felt good. "That way they can get us out safely. We can leave all this for someone else to clear up."

  Ruth's smile paled. "Just hope he can get through."

  "Don't worry, love. He'll get through. This time I'm optimistic."

  Mark was far from optimistic.

  There was no way he could continue with the bike. Although the red man on the barrier of stones had not moved so much as a millimeter, he knew it would pounce the moment he got near.

  Still astride the bike, he walked it backwards until the back tire left the road and hit the first slope up to the dunes.

  "Hell..."

  He hissed the word through clenched teeth.

  Slipping the bike into first gear, he revved the engine until it roared with a fury that matched his own. He let out the clutch.

  The rear wheel buzzed like a chainsaw on the rough grass and sand, sliding the bike sideways; then the tire bit into the tarmac, rocketing the bike forward across the road and out onto the swamp.

  More through wild, shot-in-the-dark luck than anything else, the bike ran out across a long spit of tussocks which penetrated deep into the marsh in a long bumpy pier. Behind him the road, dunes and the Saf Dar on the barrier disappeared into the fog.

  He slowed the bike to a crawl, thinking fast.

  For Christsakes, the marsh might not be the impassable stretch of mud and shitty water he had first thought it. Working from tussock to tussock (they were firm enough to support the bike) he might be able to cross this miserable swamp.

  The marsh was some two miles wide. Then it began to rise imperceptibly to form a rather soggy pasture populated by a few wet-foot cows. Beyond that it became cultivated fields. His hopes rose. Fields wouldn't present much of a barrier. Another four miles or so and he would hit another road into Munby. With even more luck there might be an isolated farmhouse, maybe even a pay phone. Then a single telephone call and all this shit would be at an end.

  He pushed the bike on across the lumpy turf. At little more than walking pace, he steered carefully, avoiding the pools of water-most no larger than table-tops. Worst were the expanses of near-liquid mud, punctuated here and there by tussocks that looked like the flattened heads of drowned men partly breaking the surface.

  He nailed his attention on the wall of fog that seemed as solid as concrete.

  He had moved perhaps a quarter of a mile along the narrow ridge of tussocks, little wider than a footpath
, mudflats to his left and right, when he saw the shape solidify out of the mist.

  There was no way back. Only on. He rode toward the shape that reared out of the marshy ground like a rotten tree stump.

  It was a human figure.

  Or at least it had been.

  Once.

  Tony said, "You know, Chris, I think when they invented electric light it killed off all the ghosts. Now we've lost the electricity the bloody ghosts are coming back again." He glanced up the gloomy stairwell. "There's a lot more shadows lately. ... You noticed?" He said it with a smile, but Chris realized that the man wasn't joking.

  Chris leaned against the corridor wall drinking a pale yellow liquid he'd told everyone was tea (two teabags between twenty-five people). At least it was hot.

  Tony sat on the stone steps. A cigar he'd half-heartedly crushed under his muddy shoes sent out a trail of blue smoke.

  "I never used to believe in ghosts," said Tony. "When people used to tell you a real ghost story. ... Laugh? I used to piss myself. ... Rubbish. Now ... a bloody old cynic like me... Over the last three years everything I believed in turned upside down."

  Chris nodded in a way he intended to be reassuring. Tony was exhausted. He could be allowed his halfcoherent ramble.

  "Tony, remember the night we met in the pub? Me, you and Mark?"

  "Jesus ... Do I... Seems like half a bloody lifetime ago now."

  "Afterwards, when I walked home along the top of the dunes ... To put it simply-I met something."

  "Something? What? One of the Saf Dar? Or one of the poor bastards they've got dangling on the end of their strings?"

  "Neither. It's hard to put into... No, to be honest I can't put it into words. Only I met something. I thought I was hallucinating. Later. But it had an enormously powerful effect on me. The equivalent of some kind of psychic locomotive slamming into your mind."

  Tony sat up straight now. "Tell me about it."

  Chris did. Or at least as much as he could remember. Even in the retelling his hands began to sweat; the saliva in his mouth bled away, leaving his tongue paper-dry.

  He fumbled for words, trying to say how even though the white-faced thing looked disgusting and repelled him he had felt it exert a kind of magnetic pull on him. He had wanted actually to go forward, closer and closer ... to embrace it. The idea revolted him again as the memory suddenly squeezed up into his mind as warm and as fresh as the night it happened.

  The tea in his mouth burned his tongue. Sweating, he looked down into the cup, not realising he'd even taken a drink.

  "Even telling you now, Tony, makes me ... Shit... It brings it all back. It's actually hard for me to describe it."

  "You know, Chris, what you are describing is a numinous experience."

  Chris's bewilderment must have shown.

  "Numinous. Rudolf Otto, a nineteenth-century theologian, identified the primal religious experience: the numinous experience. This is religion in the raw, stripped of all rituals, prayers, hymns, words, even rational thought." As Tony's talk became more and more animated, Chris understood less and less. "What you felt, Chris, when you encountered that apparition, is fundamental to all religions, the mysterium tremendum."

  "The what?"

  "Mysterium Tremendum. Translated, the tremendous mystery. Such an encounter provokes this response." Tony flicked his fingers, ticking off the words:

  "Shuddering revulsion ... irresistible attraction. That's the creature feeling people experience in such an encounter."

  "What are you talking about, Tony? What did I encounter?"

  Tony looked at Chris with an expression that seemed like awe. "Chris ... What I'm trying to say is that on that night you came face to face with the old god."

  The figure that he approached across the rough grass, the bike's motor ticking lightly, had died a long time ago.

  Drowned.

  Perhaps a sailor washed overboard, hauling up lobster pots from the North Sea.

  It stood upright, rags of clothes wrapped in bands around its distorted body, almost like the bandages around an Egyptian mummy. Barnacles rashed across its face and one eye like a hard white leprosy; seaweed sprouted from a vertical crack in its bare chest in a horse's mane gone green.

  Mark rode a little closer. It did not move. Its arms hung by its side; its remaining eye was shut.

  Fifteen yards away. The thing twitched. The mouth dropped open. It was full of sea anemones.

  Ten yards away. Mark walked the bike forward.

  Eight yards.

  Its remaining eye snapped open.

  It bulged out, an inflamed red, like a hard-boiled egg filled with blood.

  The expression also altered with a snap. To one of shocked pain.

  It tilted its head abruptly to fix the blood-red eye on Mark.

  Without thinking, he twisted the hand throttle; the motor revved with a sound like metal sheets being torn in two. The bike lurched, almost throwing him like a bucking stallion.

  Then the bike was screaming across the tussock grass, the front wheel barely kissing the turf.

  The agonized face with its crust of barnacles flicked by a yard from his shoulder as he hurtled by.

  The buffeting of the bike became a smooth rushing motion. He glanced down. He'd ridden the bike off the raised tussocks and onto the mudflat.

  For what seemed an impossibly long time the momentum carried him forward. As if he were driving a powerboat, the mud sprayed up ten feet into the air on either side of him in a great black V.

  Then the momentum went. The bike slowed, to settle into the deep black soup of mud. The engine choked and cut instantly. Hot metal hissed against wet sludge; white steam boiled around his legs.

  Managing to keep upright, he clumsily climbed off the useless bike, leaving it to gurgle in the mud. He made for the nearest raised tussock of grass. The mud made walking as difficult as wading through treacle. He reached the tussock, dropped forward onto his hands, and began to pull himself out. One leg came easily. The next stuck. It seemed as if his foot had become stuck on some-

  Christ!

  Suddenly panicky, he wrenched forward, hands winding around the marsh grass. For all the world it felt as if a hand had gripped his toes beneath the mud's surface. With a tremendous wrench he pulled it free.

  He pulled himself to his feet, panting. As he straightened, a pain speared up his calf where he had yanked the muscle.

  An ancient timber fence-post leaned at an angle in the middle of the tussock. A hole had been bored near the top for a non-existent rail. He stretched out his hand, using the post as support as he checked his ragged breathing. God, his leg hurt. He felt for the iron bar that he'd tucked through his belt. It had vanished somewhere into the swamp.