Max Gilbert

by Simon Clark

  Chris approached them, his eyes frozen into an ominous stare, the face set, a rigid mask of tensed muscle.

  Mark Faust put himself between Chris and Ruth.

  "Ruth."

  Mark heard the icy calm in Chris's voice.

  "Ruth. Bring David."

  Chris held the hammer with two hands across his chest as if he were holding an executioner's sword.

  "Chris ..." Ruth began, but Chris turned and walked purposefully to the gates. With the hammer he knocked away all but two of the timber props.

  Then he turned and said:

  "Come on. Bring David. We're leaving."

  Chapter Fifty

  "Come on. Bring David. We're leaving."

  It felt as if the words that spilt from his lips had been spoken by another person.

  He hammered away the two remaining props. Even though the force of the hammer blows was enough to explode yellow wood splinters from the timber, he felt in control. No. More than that. He felt over-controlled; the kind of deadly calm before the volcano erupts.

  He slid back the gate bolts.

  Then he turned and spoke to everyone in the courtyard. Not a shout. His voice was calm, even, amplified by the explosive force growing inside him.

  "Everybody out."

  "What!" Mark stared at him.

  "Get out. You. Everyone. Move."

  "Chris ..." Holding David wrapped in the towel, Ruth grabbed his arm.

  "Chris! You can't send everyone out there."

  "You're mad," cracked Reed, limping forward. "Those things out there will kill us."

  "He's right," said Ruth. "It's murder, Chris."

  "You can't ..." Reed took another step forward.

  Chris raised the hammer to head height. "Get any closer, Reed, and I'll crack your skull." He heaved open the gate. "Now ... Walk. That goes for everyone," he called. "Everyone out. No ..."

  "Chris," pleaded Ruth, "you can't do this. You can't!"

  He smiled grimly. "If they don't run, then they will burn."

  "Chris, what have you done? What-"

  A muffled roar rolled from the direction of the sea-fort building. Smoke spurted from a broken window on an upper floor.

  "Oh, God, Chris ... Don't tell me you've done this."

  He turned to the crowd. "Get out. Now. There are six gas bottles in there. They're full. When they go this place will be blown to kingdom come."

  "Chris, you're out of your mind. ..." Mark's eyes bulged. "Where will we go?"

  "Up to the dunes."

  "Why? They can still reach us."

  "Why?" Chris looked up at the bulk of the sea-fort, smoke bleeding from the windows in white streamers. "Why? ... Because I want to see this place burn. I want to see everything I've worked for, everything I've sweated over, cut my hands to shreds for, I want to see it go up in smoke and turn to rubble and shit."

  A violent hissing was followed by a sharp crack and a yellow glow that shone through the windows.

  Feeling that unnatural calm freeze him inside, he said, "Move."

  He stood by the gate, the hammer in his hands, watching the villagers file by; the Hodgsons led the way without protest.

  There were no Saf Dar on the causeway now, but six formed a line to the beach in the sea, their heads above the water like blood-red islands set with two glittering eyes that watched the ragged procession of frightened villagers. There were more Saf Dar in the dunes. Four stood across the coast road.

  They were massing. The hunted were walking as meekly as lambs to the hunters.

  Mr and Mrs Smith pushed Mrs Jarvis in her wheelchair.

  The rest followed.

  No one looked him in the eye. They all stared zombielike in front of them. Not running, just walking. They crossed the causeway, the sea swirling around their feet, while on either side of them the bigger breakers rumbled shorewards, splashing over the watchful heads of the things in the ocean.

  The Reverend Horace Reed passed out through the gates, dog-collar splayed outward. The man was afraid.

  Chris looked up at the sky. The mist glowed a hot red.

  It was nearly here.

  Soon man and god would meet. On this spur of sand and rock. It had been six hundred years since the last encounter. A long time for flesh and bone to wait. How long for the thing that lived before the existence of life itself?

  It didn't have a name now. Chris breathed deeply. It just was. It was everything. Everything you could see, feel, breathe, taste, hear. It was everything you could be and do. Chris knew it had always been there. It was part of him. It was merely stepping from shadow to light.

  A mental image flowed into Chris's mind. Two dancers. Dancing close. So close you think they are one person, moving in a perfect synchronised rhythm. Now they begin to separate. ...

  Two dancers ... moving slowly apart. Now you can see their faces.

  One has your face.

  The other's face-you see it clearly for the first time. You feel the cold points of spider legs running down your back.

  The other dancer has a face that is shockingly familiar.

  It has your face. But your face is altered somehow.

  Mark helped Tony past Chris.

  The big man's face expressed reproach. Tony's eyes belonged to the mind of a man that was lost and mad somewhere inside his head.

  They passed by.

  Then came the idiot girl with her mother. Then the Major carrying Mac. He patted its head, his eyes staring straight ahead. He went outside.

  Last of all, Ruth, still carrying David. She'd hooded the blue-striped towel over his head as if it would protect him from what waited patiently outside.

  "Why, Chris?"

  He looked into her eyes. Even though they were frightened they were strong. She would fight for her son's survival until her heart beat no more.

  He wanted to answer her, but a barrier formed between his mind and his voice. He looked back at the sea-fort.

  The scene left a photographic image in his mind as he turned and walked out through the gates one last time.

  Even as he followed his wife and child across the causeway, oblivious to the cold water sucking at his ankles, he held that image. The car they had bought just the month before; the caravan they had moved into as happy as children going on holiday; the cannon he had bought from Reverend Reed", which would have formed an impressive entrance to the sea-fort; the sea-fort itself, built from butter-colored stone. In its two-hundred-year history, it had never had to weather a siege. Until last week. Its builders would have been proud that it had fulfilled its purpose.

  Now its destruction would come from inside-not outside.

  Chris's feet were sure across the causeway stones. He followed Ruth and the others by the rusting mass of metal that had been Wainwright's car. Waves rocked it back and forth.

  He passed the Saf Dar. Five yards away in the sea, their heads turned smoothly to watch him pass.

  The Stainforths joined the rest of the villagers on the beach above the high-tide mark. They clustered there looking like an Old Testament tribe waiting for the end of the world.

  Ahead stood a line of Saf Dar, like statues. No hurry for them now. The villagers were helpless. It would be as easy as harvesting plums from a tree.

  Between them they had three shotguns with barely a dozen shells, the Major his revolver with two rounds.

  There were now fifteen Saf Dar either in the dunes, on the beach, or in the sea.

  Ruth sat on the beach with David in her arms. Other villagers sat down too. They were waiting for this cold, cold dream to finish.

  "What now, Chris?" hissed Mark. "We can't get any further. In God's name what do you propose we do?"

  "I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to watch my property burn."

  He walked to the edge of the group as the Saf Dar slowly formed a widely spaced ring around them. From the dunes walked another procession. Wainwright, the Fox twins, the drowned little boy. The dead fisherman. The pilot. They were moving i
n for the kill, their minds cruelly dominated by the Saf Dar.

  The sea-fort stood in the surf. From it smoke streamed up, making the thing look like the cooling tower of a power station.

  Sacrifice.

  This was Chris's sacrifice.

  After entering the sea-fort building, he had first collected his hammer; then he found the jerry can of petrol. A petrol bomb remained from the earlier attack on the Saf Dar. He took that too. With the jerry can slowly swinging in one hand, the bottle of petrol in the other, and the hammer tucked beneath one arm, he moved purposefully to the room in which were stored the liquid petroleum gas bottles, standing there in a line like blue soldiers. Against one side of the room was a stack of wooden boards. On the window David's goldfish continued its manic circling of the bowl.

  With alien calm, he removed the top from the jerry can and tipped petrol over the wooden boards, then the gas bottles. Above, the ceiling was timber. Two hundred years old and dry as a wafer.

  The stench of petrol bit into his nostrils. He retraced his steps to the corridor; rested the hammer against the wall; lit the rag wick around the neck of the bottle then tossed it into the room with the gas bottles. The flare of heat scorched his face.

  Still calm, he had picked up the hammer and walked outside. The gas bottles would have to heat up inside the inferno for a good five to ten minutes before they burst. Then they would go up like a bomb.

  Now he watched the sea-fort from the beach. The villagers watched too.

  This was his sacrifice; his dream about to erupt into flame. He had loved the place. Nothing in his life had ever been so important to him. Now he was giving it up. He was sacrificing his most precious possession.

  Tony and Reed had been right. The ancient god had a contract with everyone who came to live on this stretch of coast. Even though the inhabitants might not know it, that contract was still valid.

  This old god expected it to be fulfilled. It demanded the sacrifice. In return it would trade something of its own.

  And this was no gentle god, meek and mild, it was a god of muscle, sinew, blood, life and death. If the deal wasn't fulfilled, then there would be only the full force of its fury. He knew the Saf Dar would become the vehicle of that fury. The human race would have more than just its fingers burned.

  In the sea-fort he had realized that their survival depended on him now. No one else could help. He had to act.

  This was his trade, then. The grief he would feel at the destruction of the sea-fort. His dream for the future.

  He knew that in a few hours the Saf Dar would have been inside the sea-fort. They would hound the villagers through the building, breaking them apart with their bare hands. He saw himself frantically trying to barricade Ruth, David and himself into a room; the red things swelling through the passages to rip down the flimsy doors. Then what would those monsters subject them to? He imagined them snatching David, crying, from his mother's hands and dragging him away to the beach ... playing with him for a while first.

  What would they do to Ruth? Those things had been men once. Now they were inflated with a supernatural life force that might have inflated their other appetites too.

  Then later they would be like Wainwright and Fox. They would become the Saf Dar's puppets, marching across the countryside to the next town, their bodies driven on by the sheer power of the life force that would bloat them with its cancerous vitality.

  He watched the sea-fort.

  Concentrated everything on it. This was his dream. All the stomach-twisting endeavour to buy the place. The work; all the money they had poured into it. This place was going to be his future. His family would grow up there.

  Then, as he watched, the white smoke streaming from the building turned yellow. A flash swelled up from the well of the courtyard in a burst of flame.

  Later came the thunder rumble. Fire poured upward through the rising smoke.

  He waited.

  This was it. His home, his business, his future had just become a bonfire.

  What did he feel?

  Come on, Chris, what do you feel?

  Everything you've worked for is burning.

  Where's the bitter grief at losing it all?

  What do you feel?

  I feel nothing.

  The realisation thudded home.

  Nothing. I feel nothing.

  He rocked on his feet.

  The sacrifice had not worked. He was supposed to feel the pain of the loss. He didn't. The sea-fort had been just a pile of stone. The loss just wasn't that important. He had no outburst of emotion to give to the god. He would receive nothing in return. Now there was nothing he could do to save his family or neighbors.

  Above, the sky was turning a brighter red; the sand beneath his feet began to steam.

  In the sea-fort the bottled gas must have burned itself out. The building, still intact, was just pouring out smoke to that living red sky.

  Feeling a cold emptiness, Chris turned to the villagers who were watching him.

  "Sorry ... I thought..." The emptiness inside robbed him of speech.

  Mark and the Hodgson brothers had raised their shotguns. They turned to face the red men as they took another step toward the villagers.

  Confused, the Major took a shaking step away from the group. "I want to go home," he muttered, bewildered. One of the red men moved toward him, its long arms swinging by its side in a way that seemed so relaxed it was sinister. Like a professional mugger strolling toward another victim.

  Snarling, the old man's dog leapt at the man-shaped monster. It tore at the thing's shins with its small teeth. For a second the thing did not react. Then one of its long arms swept down.

  Mac screamed like a child.

  His spine broken, the dog dragged itself frantically along the beach by its forelegs, its back legs dragging a moist furrow through the sand.

  "Mac, come here, boy. Come back, boy. Come back..." From somewhere in the mist came a sudden crack. The dog stopped squealing.

  The Saf Dar took another slow step forward. The circle tightened around the villagers.

  David opened his eyes and pulled the towel from his head. The graze above his forehead tingled. For a while he had been frightened. He had closed his eyes. Everything had seemed dark and cloudy inside his head. Then in his mind he had seen two people dancing. Very, very, very, close. In fact he thought at first it had been one person. A boy, like him. Then they had moved apart. There were two people.

  Then the dark clouds inside his head had broken apart and a brightness like sunshine had come flooding down. The other dancer spoke to him.

  David looked around at the people on the beach: Tony Gateman sitting down, looking sad; Mark with the gun to his shoulder. The nasty red men were there. His mum was looking at his dad in a funny way, her eyes watery and silvery.