by Alan Hyder
‘There isn’t any milk, and the biscuits are all the bread I can find,’ Janet said smilingly. ‘There’s some porridge that I didn’t cook. I will if you like.’
‘No. Of course not,’ I answered, pulling a chair to the table. ‘This will be all we’ll want tonight. More than I expected to get, I can tell you. The porridge will do famously for breakfast, and you don’t feel like cooking tonight, I’ll be bound. You must be tired out.’
‘Oh, I’m all right, mister.’
‘Anyway, you’ll have to get a good night’s sleep in tonight. And, by the way, my dear, I wish you wouldn’t call me mister.’
‘What you want her to call you? Darling?’ Bingen said, with his mouth full. He grinned at my scowl. ‘You notice she’s even swept the floor? That’s the kind of girl I’m asking to marry me when I feel like marrying. One who can cook a meal out of nothing, and cook it in a place that’s swept clean.’
‘Kind of girl you’d marry. Why, you old swab, you’re past the marrying age,’ I laughed at him. ‘If you are set on it, you’ll have to wait a few years until Janet grows up. Wouldn’t mind waiting for her myself, if I didn’t know I was too old to think about getting married.’
‘Wait for her to grow up!’ Bingen grinned at Janet, and passed his cup for more tea. She refilled it, and I saw that she had flushed scarlet. Bingen gulped noisily and laughed. ‘Wait until she grows up. Ha! That’s a good one. How old d’you think a girl has to be before she’s grown up, Garry?’
‘A good deal older than that child,’ I answered shortly. ‘What’s the joke?’
‘You’re not to tease any more,’ Janet called to Bingen, and turned to me. ‘Don’t take any notice of him, mister.’
‘Don’t call me mister. but what is the joke?’
‘The joke is, my long-legged numskull,’ Bingen grinned spitefully, ‘the joke is, that you’ve been treating this young lady as though she was a baby, and all the time she’s a young woman. That’s the joke. She’s eighteen . . . not thirteen!’
I stared at the girl, and my face grew red thinking of the things I had said to her, some of the things I had done to her, and as I stared at her she flushed with me. Eighteen! Honestly, I hadn’t thought her more than twelve or thirteen. Had treated her as a schoolgirl. And Bingen, the swab, had known it all along, been laughing at me. I remembered particularly helping her over a fence, and she had bothered about her skirts. I had slapped a portion of her anatomy where one emphatically does not smack young ladies. I grew crimson as I remembered, and then she laughed at me and cleared the tension.
‘I . . . I . . . Eh . . . I’m really sorry,’ I stammered. ‘Honestly, I thought you were only a kid. Anyway, that’s all you are to me, and, perhaps if I’d known how old you were, I wouldn’t have been able to manage you, stopped you crying. I hope you’ll forgive me.’
‘There isn’t anything to forgive. It is silly to think anything about it at all. Bingen was stupid to mention it,’ Janet answered shyly. ‘You have been so sweet to me, and I knew from the way you spoke that you thought me younger than I am. You won’t stop looking after me because I’m not a baby?’
‘Of course I won’t.’
‘Make him want to look after you all the more,’ Bingen grinned.
‘You’ll get what’s coming to you in a minute,’ I said, and stared at him thoughtfully. He had been very attentive to the girl, and the reputation he had in the old days was not good. Bingen was a lady-killer. I hoped he would not cut any capers with Janet. ‘Bingen, no one in his senses would think about anything now, except getting safely away. Understand?’
‘Oh, it’s only a joke, Garry. Don’t get hot under the collar.’
‘Let’s forget that you’re a young woman again, then,’ I smiled at Janet. ‘And we’ll treat you as a baby in arms until we’ve found a place where there’s someone to look after you. Shall we? We’ll try to get some sleep now, and then be off early in the morning to see what comes along. We’ll fix you up some kind of bed in the corner by the fire, and Bingen and I’ll stand guard turn and turn about during the night.’
Throughout the night Bingen and I kept watch. Staring through a crack in the barricaded window at some flames which lit the night away to the south, while soundly, under a covering thin enough to line her form, Janet slept by the fire, tired out by her ordeal. Before she slept I had seen her lips moving soundlessly, and knew that she thought of her mother and father. How good she was not to speak of them. I knew that she did not, solely to save us embarrassment.
During the night I watched her and Bingen sleeping, and hoped that there would be no trouble between us in the event of having to spend a few days together. Then I shrugged shoulders and sipped at the jug of tea Janet had left for the guard. After all, there could be no trouble, even were we three the only three in the world, for it seemed that she definitely preferred Bingen. There would be no squabbling over her, but in the event of Bingen . . . But it was foolish to cross bridges before coming to them, even though, somehow, I knew I was rapidly approaching one. It had been I, not Bingen, who had saved her, and, foolishly, I felt a little twinge of what almost must have been . . . Anyway, I felt foolish.
VI
The Flight Across the Marshes
GARRY! Garry! Time to turn out. Be daylight in half an hour.’
‘Righto, Bingen. You can turn in for a little while until we’re ready to start off if you want to.’
Bingen shook my arm until I was thoroughly awake, and then made himself comfortable on the blankets I vacated. With the two of them sleeping soundly I pulled the furniture from the door as quietly as I could and went out into the morning.
A heat mist lay deep over the earth, and the sky was unbroken with promise of another fine day. It is curious how, since the appearance of Khaenealler’s Comet, the weather has developed from the rain, winds, and snow of an English spring, into the unbroken hot sunshine of a tropical clime. Baking heat, blazing sun, and brassy blue skies. From the time we escaped from the tunnel we saw no rain for nearly three months.
Behind the lodge lay the bodies I had dragged there last night. I covered them with corrugated iron from the outhouse, went back to the yard, and doused myself with cold water. It freshened me, and with the roaring hiss of flames no longer in my ears, and the acquired knowledge that I could cope with Vampires were they in small numbers to hearten me, I faced the coming day with cheery optimism.
Some distance along the road were houses. I walked slowly towards them, intending to explore, preparatory to making tea and calling Janet and Bingen. I felt slightly ashamed of my thoughts last night regarding those two, and determined to carry on, treating the girl as though she were a child. Bingen, I felt sure, at a time like this, would not harm her. He was good at heart.
The first three houses I entered held no bodies, and I wondered, until, in the yard of the end house, I found them. Apparently, the isolated little community had crowded together in a vain effort to escape their fate of fire and Vampires. Piled by the low stone walls lay about two dozen people, and among them, shielded in the middle, were children. Curiously like discarded exhibits from some ghastly waxwork museum, they lay in distorted postures, limply like half-filled sawdust figures. Upon the finger of one woman, who in life must have been fleshily stout and now was so shrunken, glittered a cluster of rings. Seven there were, and even as I counted them they fell startlingly, sliding with a tiny jingle to the flagstones. In the silence the unexpected little sound and movement was so eerie that I jumped. I suppose the rings had attracted my attention unwittingly by an indiscernible movement as they began to slide from that shrunken finger. I stooped to pick them up. They were trashy, and I stared at them compassionately, letting them move upon my palm to reflect the sun’s rays, when my fingers curled over them tensely, while I stood, incapable of movement, for a voice spoke quietly, casually, behind me.
‘God’s wrath! God’s wrath, my son.’
My startled jump faced me to the speaker and I nearly sho
t him, for the gun in my waist-band leapt to my fingers as I dropped the rings. A little middle-aged man with a prominently paunchy stomach stood peering over the wall without surprise or emotion. He indicated the rings rolling at my feet.
‘The eighth commandment. Thou shalt not steal!’
‘For God’s sake, d’you think I’d . . .’
‘Take not the name of the Lord thy God in vain,’ the little man interjected sadly. ‘Witness the result of His wrath.’
‘How did you get here? What are you doing?’ I asked foolishly, not really knowing what to say.
‘Ah! I am a clerk, and even the wrath of the All-Highest must not be allowed to interfere with the routine of my work,’ here he doffed his bowler hat and turned to go. ‘I am a clerk, sir, in a stock-broker’s office, and I must be off to my work. I wish you good morning, sir.’
I understood. The little man was as mad as a hatter. I watched him speechlessly, too astounded to call after him. Away down the road I saw him raise hands in an attitude of prayer, and heard again his voice call with resignation.
‘God’s wrath! God’s wrath! It has descended unto us. God’s wrath!’
Running to the wall to stare after him, I saw he hurried over the hill with quick little steps, his bowler hat set squarely on his round head, and I saw that he carried a small attaché case in one hand and an umbrella and gloves in the other.
‘Hi! Hi! Come back!’ I called after him, and before he disappeared he turned to raise that ridiculous bowler hat in grave farewell. But he did not come back.
What was his story? Often I wondered about that little man on his way to a non-existent office. How did he fare?
I went back to the lodge where Janet and Bingen were, with most of the cheeriness of the morning chilled from me, and in the yard I saw that I had not covered the bodies carefully with the corrugated iron. Janet would need to use the outhouse for water, and I did not want her to see them. I pulled them to where I could lift them over a wall into a pig-sty, and in the sty were the carcasses of three sows and, to my amazement, in the far corner, one of the Vampires lay. It did not move when I clambered over the wall to ascertain whether it lived or was dead, and I found it impossible to see whether the eyes, staring unwinkingly from the black head, were devoid of life or not. I left the bodies in different corners. The men and the child; the pigs; and, apart, the beastly thing whose like was responsible, and went into the house.
Janet and Bingen slept, and did not waken while I moved about lighting a fire, boiling a kettle. The covering had fallen from Janet, and I replaced it carefully before waking her. Queer, how thinking her a child I had spoken to her carelessly, without embarrassment, and now, knowing her for a woman, hesitated before waking her! Yesterday, there would have been no scruples in pulling her tumbling from the bed in play.
‘Janet! Bingen! Breakfast ready.’
She wakened with a little cry of fear which died as consciousness dawned in eyes misty from her long sleep. I watched her bashfully, and it was some time before I gradually managed to achieve the old comradeship with her, and that, really, never came back. I wished in a way, Bingen had not told me how old she was. It would have saved, I thought at that time, such a lot of complications, and yet, I suppose, with Bingen’s attention to what I would have thought a child, provided many others.
‘Tea is ready. Here’s a cup,’ I told her. ‘Then, if you want to run out in the yard and have a wash before breakfast, the tap’s in the outhouse and everything’s all right. Don’t be too long, because I want to get away as soon as possible to where we can settle down and feel safe. Where we can decide what’s to be done.’
Janet went into the yard after drinking her tea, and I told Bingen about the stranger I had seen.
‘That’s promising anyhow, even if he was batty,’ Bingen said. ‘If a dafty like that managed to get away, there’ll be plenty of others about.’
‘I’d like to know how he managed to get away, though,’ I mused.
‘From what you’ve told me about him,’ Bingen grinned, ‘God exempted him from His wrath because his work in the office was too valuable to be stopped.’
During breakfast I am afraid that I scowled at Bingen when he sat gulping porridge, eying the girl with such blatant admiration. She certainly looked nice, for she had brushed her tangled curls, her cheeks shone pinkily from cold water, and she had recovered her spirits, for she joked, making much of Bingen ostensibly when I tried to treat her deferentially. And yet I thought she liked me. Then, I thought, she did not, and it worried me foolishly. That breakfast was almost hilarious, and we enjoyed it, setting off later almost in the fashion of children upon a picnic, but this time I did not intend to venture forth without food.
‘Aw! What’s the idea of carrying all this?’ Bingen grumbled when I thrust a bundle of food tied in a tablecloth upon him. ‘A rifle, pistol, bundle of grub, a bottle of water. What about the bed? Ought to take that, didn’t we?’
‘You just hunk that along and behave yourself. We aren’t risking going without food today. I seem to remember your grumbling yesterday because you were hungry.’ Because Janet stared at me curiously, I snapped at him curtly. ‘And the reason for you carrying everything is, because I want to be free in case anything happens. If you get another attack of wind-up it won’t matter if you’re too burdened to do anything.’
‘Oh, mister,’ Janet said reproachfully.
‘And don’t mister me. Let’s make a start.’
I led the way out of the gates on to the road, and before we had gone very far in silence, apologized to them.
‘I’m sorry, Janet. Didn’t mind, did you, Bingen? Sorry.’
And then I walked on swiftly, while they followed slowly behind, for it was better, I thought, for us to have a sort of advance guard that we might be the less likely to run unexpectedly into danger. Intermittently, I glanced back at them, and they waved. They seemed to get on well together.
The sun beat down hotly, even though so early, and it seemed almost as though the Vampires had brought with them from their habitat the tropical warmth they desired. The sky was brassy, void of clouds, Vampires, but fixed into my mind was the fact that tonight ought to see us ensconced in some place which would be a permanent shelter, a place from where we could look forth and see approaching peril, plan to the future, with food and water close to hand. If the place we made for sufficed our needs, all was well, but, if it did not, then I’d have to leave Janet and Bingen there, while I searched around for another which did. And the idea of leaving Bingen alone with the girl was not pleasing to me.
Heat made the going hard, and I turned to see how Janet was making it. She was all right apparently, for she had relieved Bingen of some of his luggage and smiled cheerily at me, waving me on. The brown baked earth with its covering of ash crumbled beneath my feet, and between the houses I was glad to get on the smooth road surface again. Where the roads were asphalted we could not use them, for they were hot, melting with a haze of blue smoke hanging about, smelling of tar, and as I walked I wondered what nourishment the Vampires could have gained from the tarry roads. I had hoped that isolated houses would have stood to give us shelter and food, but one after another we passed them, razed to the ground, with gables standing precariously about heaped bricks in little plots of ground that one were gay with flowers and now were grey with ashes. From inspecting one of these, I returned to the road to receive a startled cry from Bingen.
‘Look out, Garry! Garry! There’s one! Up there!’ he pointed.
He ran, with Janet, hastily towards me, and close together we waited, staring into the sky, watching it drop down towards us. Diagonally from the east it came, silently, on spiralling wings, noiselessly, like a great black owl. One solitary Vampire!
Fluttering down to a height of perhaps twenty feet above our heads, it ceased descending to hang practically motionless in the air with tentacled wings beating so slowly one could barely discern any movement. Vertically, it hung there, seeming to scan
the horizon, and then slowly turned until it lay horizontally, staring down at us.
‘Oh, Garry. Drive it away.’
With that little cry Janet slumped to the road in a faint, and Bingen knelt over her, his eyes fixed upwards.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ I told them, and while I spoke my eyes were glancing about, not on the thing hovering above, but watching for others. Not one could I see. Not another one. ‘I’ll have a pot at it.’
Six cartridges I shot, and the Vampire ignored them, even though four of the bullets tore its wings, for through the leathery ligament I could see four jagged pieces of blue sky.
‘Only waste of ammunition,’ I said. ‘Wait a bit. I’ll have another go at it.’
Some yards away, by the roadside, was a pile of flints. I went towards it, and the thing appeared, in some weird manner, to divide its attention impersonally between myself walking backwards to the stones, and Bingen bending over the crouching girl, but it did not move.
Flint after flint I flung, hitting and missing alternately, but it was so unconscious of the stones thudding against its body, despite my efforts, that I almost laughed. It was so futile. Moved jerkily in the air, by force of the jagged flints striking, it made no attempt to evade them.
‘Oh, we’ll leave it alone. It can’t hurt us,’ I said at last. ‘Is Janet better, Bingen?’
‘She’s better. Be all right in a minute. Can’t you drive that thing away?’
‘Have a try yourself.’
‘Perhaps you won’t be quite so cocky about them after you’ve had a few of them fastened on to you,’ Bingen remonstrated.
‘Sorry, Bingen, but it can’t hurt. Let it stay there. If it comes down, we’ll deal with it. Dab some water out of the bottle on her face.’
But as I bent, with Bingen, over the girl, her eyes opened, and she smiled up at us, shuddering when she saw the Vampire above, until I interposed my body between them.
